Dru`boslovne razprave, XIX (2003), 44: 13-34 13
Hajdeja Igli~ UDK 316.334.3:316.472.4
Networks and political mobilization:
Beyond structural argument
ABSTRACT: The article reviews major findings in the studies of social networks and con-
tentious politics within the structural approach. By discussing the contribution of struc-
turally oriented research over the previous emphases on personal pathology and social
disorganization, it also points to the limitations of such approach. The focus on political
opportunities, resources and social networks should be supplemented with the analysis
of social processes and interactive dynamics that account for the structural (or network
based) effects. The problem of the interaction between structural and cultural aspects of
the process of political mobilization is discussed in relation with the following topics:
repertoire of action, movement emergence, scale shift, and recruitment.
KEY WORDS: social networks, mobilization structures, political mobilization, contentious
action, recruitment
1. Introduction – conceptualizing social networks
The informal social networks of everyday life have been widely linked with the
process of mobilization for collective action. This is what scholars have called “micro-
mobilization contexts” (McAdam 1986, 1988). These are social sites within people’s
daily routines where informal ties among people serve as conduits for solidarity and
communication. A well known concept of “netness” proposed by Charles Tilly (1978)
was one of the first to express precisely this notion that the denseness of social relations
among movement constituencies arise from daily associations and involvement in the
communal life.
The article discusses major theoretical questions that have been raised in the studies
of the relationship between social networks and contentious politics within the struc-
tural approach. At the time when it emerged the structural analysis provided a com-
pletely new framework for the understanding of contentious action, and its contribution
should be endorsed when compared with previous explanations of movements in terms
of personal pathology (Rothman and Lichter 1978, Klapp 1969, Kornhauser 1959,
Adorno et al. 1950) or social disorganization (Kornhauser 1959, Smelser 1962). Yet,
after the twenty years of structurally oriented research it became clear that the focus on
political opportunities, resources and social networks alone does not suffice and that it
should be supplemented with the analysis of social processes and interactive dynamics
that account for the structural (or network based) affects (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994,
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Hajdeja Igli~
Goodwin and Jasper 1999).  In this review I discuss the most important findings within
the structural argument that deal with the role of social networks in political mobiliza-
tion, and indicate what kind of questions are left open for further research that would
focus on social mechanisms instead of structures.
I start by reviewing the arguments in the tradition of historical sociology about the
major changes in the form of collective action and the role of social structures and
cultural changes in this process. The focus is on the body of literature that includes
historical studies of collective violence (Tilly 1968, 1986, 1995; Hanagan 1980, 1989;
Sewell 1980; Margadant 1979). These studies build on the assumption that informal
social networks are important as relational underpinnings of collective action providing
the necessary solidary incentives for overcoming the “free rider” problem, and as a
social basis constraining a range of possible mobilizing structures available to activists
in a given situation.
The first question discussed in the article is what kinds of groups, associations and
organizations are most likely candidates to turn into the units of contention. The an-
swers provided by the literature suggest that social boundaries and identity of conten-
tious actors depend, first, on the networks in which people are embedded at a given
time, and second, on the cultural images and tools of what kinds of collective loyalties
and identities are meaningful. The dualism between structure and culture, and the role
of structural versus cultural processes in explaning the boundaries of contentious actors
is at the center of the polemics between authors such as Charles Tilly and William
Sewell (Section 2). Although they depart significantly in their understanding of the
historical process, they agree that which of the networks and collective identities in
which people are embedded will become a locus of collective action doesn’t depend
solely on political opportunities or the manipulative skills of political entrepreneurs and
elites, but also on the ways these networks are structured and imagined through every-
day sociability. In addition, they argue that there is an identity of collective actors, claims
and claim-making behavior, which can be observed by studying major changes in the
historical forms of contentious action.
The second problem relates to the question of the emergence and strength of collec-
tive action. Here the focus is on the question why do certain social groups revolt and
others don’t. The problem closely related to this one is also why is contentious action
among certain groups stronger, better organized and more succesfull than in others (Sec-
tion 3). The literature on differences between the artisans’ and workers’ resistance in the
early-nineteenth century is especially telling in this respect. These two groups – artisans
and workers - have been widely studied and compared, and the contentious action among
them explained in terms of social ties and networks in which they were embedded (Th-
ompson 1964, Hobsbawn 1984, Sewell 1980, Shorter and Tilly 1974, Perrot 1986,
Cottereau 1986, Gould 1993a, 1993b).
Most instances of collective action spread beyond the communities and networks in
which they first emerged. This shift in the scale (McAdam et al. 2001) follows the pre-
existing social ties and networks, and is usually achieved through two different pro-
cesses: diffusion and brokerage (McAdam 2003). In section 4 we discuss two historical
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
cases, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Nazi mobilization of the public sphere in
Weimar years, which both raise the problem of the spread of the mobilization and the
role of political organization as a broker. From these two cases we can learn that the
relationship between local networks and organization can be symbiotic in a sense that
informal networks provide the social infrastructure for recruitment and mobilization,
but it can also give rise to tensions when identities involved in networks and organiza-
tion start to contradict each other over time.
The literature on contemporary social movements builds on the above ideas about
the strong relationship between contentious action and social networks. One vein of it
presents a so called “new social movements” approach which argues that social move-
ments are the backbone of a strong and healthy civil society (Cohen and Arato 1992).
The argument says that close relationship between social movements and the underly-
ing social microstructure creates a reciprocal relationship: on the one hand, the move-
ments are indicators of the existence of vigorous society. On the other hand, their occur-
rence further strengthens the society from which they arose in the first place. The view
that social movements are instruments of the civil society in the system of rigid, unre-
sponsive, and increasingly alienated state institutions has important implications for
research (Touraine 1981). In his programmatic statement, Melluci (1980, 1981) argued
that we should not focus on single occurrences of protest because they are just manifes-
tations of the ongoing underlying mobilization of the civil society. Instead we should
turn away from the study of the particular instances of mobilization and focus research
attention to the role social movements play in the creation of social networks, vigorous
institutions of civil society and collective well being.
The other vein of research emerged around precisely those questions that the social
movement literature explicitly ignores. McAdam (1986) argues that we need to “shift
the focus of analysis from these unwieldy abstractions known as movements to specific
demonstrations, actions, campaigns, or other bundled forms of activism.” The most
relevant question from this perspective is how instances of activism emerge and what
are the mechanisms of recruitment of participants into a movement. The research focus
is exactly the opposite from the one taken above: social networks are seen as micro-
structure bases of social movement recruitment. This part of the literature deals with the
question of what exactly are the mechanism through which informal networks contrib-
ute to the movement recruitment (Section 5).
The article aims to contribute to the discussion how to conceptualize social net-
works. The analysis of social networks has been in recent years recognized as very
promising tool for the analysis in social sciences in Slovenia, which raises a need to
rethink our understanding of social networks and our use of network methodology. The
present review of the historical studies on different cases of contentious action shows
that the analysis of social networks is most productive when it considers social net-
works in their structural and cultural dimension. As Harrison White pointed out: “A
social network is a network of meanings” (1992, p.67). The expectations people hold
about one another, and their understanding of social relationships in a sense of what is
constitutive, permissible and/or desirable in these relationships should be considered
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Hajdeja Igli~
along with the structural properties of social ties, in order to better understand the dy-
namics of social networks and their role in explaining social processes. Recently pub-
lished book on Social Movements and Networks (Diani and McAdam 2003) acknowl-
edges that there is a growing consensus among authors writing in the network tradition
that both networks and culture matter for our understanding of nonroutine, or conten-
tious, politics. The field is moving beyond structural analysis in a sense of trying to
complement it with the insights from more culturally (and rationally) oriented approaches.
The article is also relevant more generally for the development of political sociology
in Slovenia: with the rise of the concept of social capital to its present prominence
within the field of social sciences also its potential applications spread to a variety of
social phenomena, among them being political mobilization and political participation.
But the use of the concept of social capital in political sociology in Slovenia today is
still in the stage of a “metaphor”: it is claimed that it matters but it is not very clear how
it matters. For this reason the concept of social capital can only gain by turning back to
the existing models developed within the field of historical sociology and social move-
ments literature, which study political mobilization and the role of social ties and net-
works in this process.
2. Repertoire of action
Major changes in the history of contentious action and the impact of everyday socia-
bility on the form of collective action have been studied in connection with the concept
of “repertoire of action”. This notion of the repertoire of collective action is one of the
most important theoretical contributions by Charles Tilly (1978:143-171). Tilly sug-
gests that “repertoire of action” at any point in time consists of all the ways in which
people deploy their resources in the pursuit of common ends. It is what people do when
they engage in contentious action. The repertoire of action is constrained by limits in
people’s knowledge and resources, as well as by enduring cultural expectations and
collective identities. This is why the repertoire of collective actions available to popula-
tion is surprisingly limited given the many ways real groups have pursued their own
collective goals at one time or another. Different authors have argued that collective
actors most often adopt mobilizing structural forms, tactics and strategies that are known
to them from direct experience, i.e. from previous engagements in the collective action,
especially if the chosen form of contention had proved successful, or from the situations
which have nothing to do with the contentious action but which nevertheless offer some
collective practices which can be put in use in the situation of conflict. While the inven-
tion of totally new forms of contention is rather rare, the innovation usually consists of
putting the familiar forms into new or newly recombined uses (McCarthy 1996).
Tilly’s primary interest is in the major historic changes in the collective action. His
articles and books are all driven by the questions when, how and why was a new reper-
toire of action invented. Competitive1 , reactive2 , and proactive3  (C.Tilly, L.Tilly and
R.Tilly 1975) forms of repertoire of action are defined in close connection to the type of
claims people make, the kind of collectivities that engage in contentious action, and the
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
form of claim-making behaviour. All three elements of repertoire of action are con-
ceived as highly interdependent: the nature of claims depends on the kind of actors
involved in the conflict, and the form of claim-making behaviour corresponds to the
kind of claims raised by the parties. Thus, different historical forms of contentious ac-
tion and the kind of claims made by the actors are deeply related to the nature of the
collectivities that are revolting.
In his recent work on France (1986) and England (1995), Tilly slightly changes his
typology of contentious action. He does it in order to make clear that the same elements
of action repertoire can be used to make different claims, thus to show the relative
independence of the actors, claims and claim-making behavior (how people act). For
example, a strike is not a proactive form of collective action by definition. Strikes of
urban artisans in France in the early and mid-nineteenth century had all the characteris-
tics of the new repertoire of action, if we look at claim-making behavior, but the claims
the participants made were cast in the defensive language. The “rebellious craftsmen”
of the big French cities resisted industrialization because it entailed dispossession of the
means of production, loss of autonomy and control over the production process - a
defense of the status quo. For this reason, Tilly now defines a dichotomy; he distin-
guishes a parochial, particular, and bifurcated collective action from the cosmopolitan,
modular, and autonomous one.4
The chief determinant of changes in the repertoire of contentious action is the rise of
centralized and bureaucratic state and the advance of capitalism. The expanding states
of the seventeenth and eighteenth century needed far more resources from the society
than the surplus they used to extract from the peasantry. In addition to ever greater
financial extractions, state’s penetration into society also meant that state took on a
function of maintaining order, providing a legal framework which regulated the rela-
tionships between the citizens, and standardized the relations between the citizens and
the state (Tarrow 1993). In the course of this process the targets and arena of collective
action shifted from private and local actors to national centers of policy-making and
nation-wide networks. In this shift state figured not only as object of contention due to
the political centralization which in the long run weakened local actors, but also due to
its becoming a mediator between the conflicting groups in the society. While the pro-
cesses of state development - such as increasing scale, complexity and bureaucratiza-
tion – first provoked a reactive type of violence, the final victory of the state over local
resistance caused this reactive violence to be replaced by the proactive one.
Most important critique of Tilly’s understanding of the historical change in conten-
tious action was formulated by William Sewell (1990). He argues that although Tilly
locates different types of collective action in different kinds of collective loyalties (cor-
porate groups and local communities versus associations, social networks, and move-
ments), his focus on the long-term processes of state centralization and the advent of
capitalism prevents him to see the impact the autonomous changes in collective loyal-
ties had on collective action. For Tilly, the shift from one kinds of revolting groups to
another is a structural one. It results from the changes in the object of contention. Thus,
when the focus of contention changes from local to national level the nationally orga-
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Hajdeja Igli~
nized groups and movements had an advantage compared to local groups. For Sewell,
on the contrary, it was the autonomous changes in the collective loyalties, i.e. in the
patterns of sociability and in the content of collective loyalties, which had a tremendous
impact on the way people mobilized. The ways claims could be formulated and the
kinds of groups that could be mobilized on behalf of these claims are constrained by
culturally available means of forming collective loyalties (Sewell 1990:532-534).
The changes in collective loyalties are not only a result of long-term political pro-
cesses, but also of political events, which cause major breaks in the cultural images of
collective loyalties. If Tilly focuses on the processes of state development which hold
more or less irrespective of the regime in power, Sewell argues instead that regime
changes are as crucial for collective action as trends described by Tilly, mainly because
they effect changes not only in state institutions of coercion and control, but also in its
cultural foundation. Regime changes significantly reconstitute the bases of collective
loyalties and thereby create new possibilities for collective action.
Sewell’s favourite case to support his argument is French revolution of 1978. In the
society of the Old regime, which was organized according to corporate principle the
only claims that were legitimate were claims to traditional privileges.5  This is why the
claims of collective actors in the Old regime were backward looking; when the effective
legal redress was denied, corporate groups resorted to collective violence. The scope of
such collective action rarely extended beyond the local communities, because corporate
loyalties were defined by specific privileges of a particular community. For Sewell then,
the most important features of the collective action in the time of Old regime are that
claims are made in terms of preexisting privileges, and as a consequence that the scope
of action remains limited to a particular community.
The French Revolution of 1789 is important in this respect because it launched new
associational idiom in the society by redefining the state itself. The associational nature of
the modern state was expressed in the notion that the state was formed on the basis of
social contract among independent individuals, an act of voluntary agreement of indepen-
dent individuals to associate with one another. French revolution effectively created the
voluntary association as a basis for collective action. The new associations differed from
the corporate bodies of the Old regime in a sense that they claimed no privileges and their
members were bound to one another only by their voluntary adherence to the association.
While the public sphere emerged in France, like in England, already in the second half of
the 18th century, all new forms of sociability at that time were either informal (salons) or
secret (freemasons).6  It was for the first time during the French Revolution that formally
organized special-purpose organizations, which claimed a public role, rather than just
having defended their particular interests, appeared on the French political scene.7
For Sewell, French revolution was important for the development of the new reper-
toire of action because it both launched new associational idiom in the society and made
citizens and their associations legitimate public actors capable of influencing public
policy. As a result the claims made by the new type of collective action were forward-
looking instead of defensive, and the action was not any more limited to a particular
community. The nature of collective actors is thus crucial in understanding the character
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
of contentious action, although the emphasis can be placed in different aspects of social
organization, in the structure of social networks in Tilly, and in the cultural understand-
ing of social ties and collective loyalties in Sewell.
3. The emergence and strength of contentious action
So far we have discussed how pre-existing social structures affect the kind of actors
engaging in contentious action and the form of this action. In this section we turn to the
problem how social networks and collective identities contribute to the emergence and
strength of contentious action. This is one of the most intriguing questions in the analy-
sis of political mobilization. It asks what kind of social structure is especially conducive
for collective action. The answer has been sought in social networks and organizations
in which people are embedded prior to their mobilization. The argument runs as fol-
lows: most instances of contentious action develop within established social settings,
because these settings provide insurgents with the various resources such as leadership,
communication channels, networks of trust, etc. (McCarthy 1996). Political mobiliza-
tion is thus conceived as “en bloc” politicization of existing social groups and networks.
We can find this emphasize on the importance of pre-existing social settings for the
movement emergence in both the resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977)
and political process school (Gamson 1975, Tilly 1978, McAdam 1999). This approach
has been taken also in studying very different kinds of political mobilization, from civil
rights movements in the USA (Obershall 1973, Morris 1984, McAdam 1999), to mobi-
lization of black communities in South Africa (Marx 1992), to democratic transitions in
countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Opp and Gern 1993, Zhao 2001, Osa 2001,
Igli~ 2003).
The well-known historical example that illustrates the above argument is artisans
reaction to early-nineteenth-century industrialization. Thompson (1964), Hobsbawm
(1964, 1984) and Shorter and Tilly (1974) were among the first to reopen the problem
of working class movement. Their studies showed that the role of artisans in the revolu-
tions of the early-nineteenth-century France and in the rise of working class conscious-
ness and organization was crucial. At that time, their argument went against the conven-
tional wisdom that the class-conscious workers movement was a product of factory.
They pointed to the fact that artisans in France and Britain outnumbered factory work-
ers past the middle of the nineteenth century8 , that textile workers in cotton, woolen
and linen industry remained at the margins of the workers movement in the France of
1830s9 , and that artisans’ mutual-aid societies and other forms of associations were
crucial for organizing the resistance.
Artisans represented a group that was very able to put up a resistance.10  From the
middle of the nineteenth century on they also provided leadership for the unskilled and
semi-skilled workers. This argument is developed in Hanagan’s (1980, 1989) studies of
trade militancy in three French towns for the period 1871-1914, which show that skilled
workers engaged in collective action together with unskilled and semi-skilled workers
whom they found as valuable political allies. The artisans even played a vanguard role
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Hajdeja Igli~
in the rise of more general workers’ movement, but at the same time retained their
identity as skilled workers. Similarly, Victoria Bonnel (1983) in her study of the work-
ers politics in Saint Petersburg between 1900 and 1914 provides the evidence about the
“trade unionism” acting as a vital block in the larger workers’ movement. She con-
cludes that the images of class and craft clearly coexisted among Petersburg workers in
the first decade of the twentieth century.
What was a difference between the collective action of artisans and workers? The
collective protests among factory workers were in general rare in the early nineteenth
century, and when they did revolt, their strikes were poorly organized, of short duration,
spontaneous and with no clearly articulated claims. They looked very much like grain
riots or village festivals characteristic for the rural population. Although in such protests
factory workers expressed anger and solidarity in the face of some perceived injustice,
they were most of the time unable to put a sustained pressure on the employers. In
contrast, the strikes in artisans trades were well organized, planned in advance, disci-
plined and much less expressive. The goals were usually well articulated: the strikes
attempted to induce the employers to accept certain regulations over the trade (for ex-
ample, higher wage rates, changes in hiring practices, and similar). Although the claims
of artisans and factory workers were all defensive (or “reactive” in Tilly’s typology), the
differences in the form of collective action were such that one can consider artisans and
factory workers as living in two distinct worlds until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century (Stearns 1964, Reddy 1984, Sewell 1986).11
 Why was the mobilization of factory workers so weak despite the fact that they
gathered together under one roof and cooperated with each other in much more com-
plex system of division of labor than artisans who worked in small workshops? In the
line with the above argument of the “en bloc” mobilization it is the ordinary relation-
ships that are considered a key to the problem of what bound artisans together with such
particular strength. The life of urban artisans was in the nineteenth century still per-
vaded with the legacies of corporate values and organizational forms from the Old re-
gime, which contributed to their frequent and well-organized contentious action. Arti-
sans’ understanding of work was deeply social as it derived from the corporate or guild
system of the medieval and early modern cities. Corporation was a moral as well as
regulatory social unit. While most of the authors who studied the impact of pre-existing
social structures on collective action focused on moral (or solidarity) aspects of social
groups, and on their capacity to make people engage in cooperative rather than “free
riding” behavior, Sewell (1980) notes that one should not disregard the “regulatory”
legacies of social groups and the endurance of organizational forms. Artisans didn’t act
collectively only because of the high solidarity with their community, which was coex-
istent with the trade, but also out of conviction that corporate organization is a basic unit
of self-regulation and resource mobilization, a conviction based on their past experi-
ence.12  In fact, social relationships within trades were often ridden with conflicts and
competition that made trades but harmonious communities.
Very differently, the textile workers of the early-nineteenth century descended from
semi-peasant weavers and spinners whose production used to be organized around the
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
independent rural families, linked together in commercial networks called “collective
works” (Cottereau 1986:115). This system of production had been know in France
since the early seventeenth century when merchant capitalists, in order to avoid guild’s
high labor cost and restrictions, began to put out spinning and weaving operations to
rural families working in their cottages. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century
the collective works included over nine-tenths of French industrial activity. The basic
units of social organization for rural spinners and weavers were thus families linked to
other textile producing families as members of common communities of residence. In
contrast to urban trades, there was little sense of identity and loyalty pertaining to work
community transcending the family and residential ties.
The introduction of spinning and weaving factories in the first half of nineteenth-
century took place in the same districts. Only later it came to the re-urbanization of the
textile industry. But the studies of the internal organization of textile factories show that
the work was still organized in family units. This means that formerly independent
weaver now operated a machine in the factory, but still as a “pere de famille”, assisted
by his children, brothers and their children, and sometimes also wives. Because the
“family remained the basic center of decision making,” the place of residence, and more
broadly the local community,  - the village or neighborhood - presented the basis of
collective action. And when the conflicts between employers and workers broke out
they usually involved the whole village community.13
While for artisans the important networks of social relations - family, friends, ac-
quaintanceship - all took place within the framework of trade, for early nineteenth-
century textile workers such framework was neighborhood and village. Because of the
lack of strong corporate legacies among the factory workers their capacity for collective
mobilization was much weaker than among the artisans – weaker in a sense of being
rather rare as well as less strong and organized.
How has the role of the craft in the workers’ mobilization changed by the second
half of the nineteenth century? It changed tremendously, argues Gould (1993a) who
shows that in the Paris Commune of 1871 the most organized and solidary crafts, which
conducted the strongest acts of resistance half a century earlier, were now systemati-
cally underrepresented in the ranks of insurgents. The most active participants in the
insurrection were artisanal workers from weakly organized crafts. The participation in
Paris Commune depended on the balance between the embeddedness in neighborhood
and trade networks. While members of old and strong urban trades were only weakly
tied to neighborhood networks, the urban neighborhood was important source of socia-
bility for members of occupational groups with only weak craft traditions. One of the
consequences of this partial shift from trade to neighborhood as the social framework
for the mobilization of protest was that workers participating in the Commune came
from a broad range of trades. The disappearance of trade boundaries during the insur-
rection was, according to Gould, not a result of increasing “class unity” but rather of the
change in mobilizational framework. The artisanal activism is an accurate analysis of
shop-floor protest, but it can not explain the participation in big insurrections such as
Paris Commune in 1871, which required considerable cooperation between trades. Trades
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Hajdeja Igli~
with weaker legacies were in better position to carry out such large-scale mobilization,
compared to either older trades or unskilled and semiskilled workers. Their “medium”
level of internal integration enabled them to achieve a sufficient level of organization
and purposefulness, on the one hand, while being open enough for establishing ties of
cooperation with other trades, on the other hand.
Gould’s study calls attention to the fact that pre-existent networks and social ties can
act as “mobilizing structures” that enable collective action, as well as as constraining
factors that prevent mobilization to occur. The reason is that existing networks and prior
social ties can not by themselves facilitate the protest. They should rather be conceived
as structural sites within which the communication and social interactions take place. It
is in this interactions that shared meanings and identities are created that legitimate
emergent collective action. The above discussed Gould’s studies of the French Com-
mune of 1871 (1993a, 1995), which pointed to the lack of activism among old trades,
showed that despite the strong corporate legacies these trades were not able to transform
their strong inward looking identities and loyalties into more open ones. The same prob-
lem was noticed by authors studying the role of black church in civil rights movement
(Obershall 1973, Morris 1984, McAdam 1999). Although the role of the church was
crucial in providing the resources and organizational framework for movement, the
conservative local black clergy presented serious obstacle to mobilization. Their initial
conservativism had to be overcome and collective identity redefined in order to turn
black congregations into vehicles of collective protest (Payne 1996). As McAdam
(2003:290) puts it: “Prior organization and all the resources in the world matter little if
their use is not governed by shared meanings and identities legitimating contention.”
4. Interaction of informal networks
and organizational framework
The Paris Commune of 1871 provides a good illustration also for the problem of
scale shift (McAdam et al. 2001). By this is meant a spread of mobilization from local
communities to the city, regional and national level, along the lines of pre-existing net-
works and social ties.
In the above discussion on the Paris Commune we emphasized the fact that crafts
with weaker corporate legacies, which presented majority of collective actors in the
insurrection, were open to cooperation with one another primarily because for them
neighbourhood solidarity was just as important as craft solidarity. But this does not say
much about how this possibility for cooperation was actualized. Large-scale collective
action requires the formation of new social ties, and the way these ties were established
in the Paris Commune was through the organizational framework of the Paris National
Guard. Gould (1991, 1993a) provides the extensive evidence about the role of cross-
neighborhood enlistments that made the levels of commitment to contentious action
interdependent across residential areas: the degree to which each neighborhood was
successful in mounting resistance to the Versaille army depended on the levels of resis-
tance in the other neighborhoods to which it was linked. From Gould’s studies we can
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
learn the following: the studies of  contentious action should not limit their explanation
of mobilization to only one kind of social networks (informal or formal network), or
even treat multiple networks in additive way (in the »more of the same« manner), but
rather look at their interaction.
Large-scale mobilization typically requires organizational network which acts as a
broker and interacts with pre-existing social structures. This raises the problem of the
linkage mechanisms between multiple networks and the ways the basic units of conten-
tion are integrated into broader organizational framework. There are many historic cases
which show how political organizations used the traditional forms of sociability and
culture for their political purposes (see, for example, a well known study of diffusion of
republican ideas to the French countryside after the Revolution of 1848 by Agulhon,
1970; or the study of mass mobilization of peasantry and small-town workers in the
resistance to the coup d’etat in December 1851 by Margadant 1979). From these cases
we can see that interaction of multiple networks can lead to symbiotic relationship be-
tween them in a sense that informal networks provide social infrastructure for political
recruitment and mobilization. But this same interaction can also give rise to tensions
when the identities involved in informal networks and movement’s organization start to
contradict each other over time.
A good example of such symbiotic relationship which turned into conflictual one is
the rise of Nazism up to 1932. Koshar (1987) in his study on local public sphere in small
and medium-sized German towns, which were crucial to Nazi success, challenges the
prevalent views on the relationship between Nazism and local public sphere, which
regard voluntary associations and clubs as subjects of very extensive Nazi infiltration at
the local level. He shows, first, that Nazi joiners in the years up to 1932 indeed tended to
held multiple organizational affiliations, thus they were more exposed to the political
socialization and agitation, but that joining the NSDAP was less a result of Nazi infiltra-
tion by party agitators than “….relatively autonomous decisions by individuals who
wanted a local political anchor for political activities” (1987:21).
The second point is equally important: there was a contradiction between the local
public sphere and the NSDAP, which became more distinct after Hitler came to power.
The small towns’ public sphere evolved around ostensibly un-political sociability and
local Nazi joiners were interested primarily in defending grass-roots social life against
the politicizing attempts by national parties. For them, the NSDAP represented “no
radical break with the past; it seemed to be an un-political extension of the threatened
local public sphere.” (1987:22).  In this sense, entering the NSDAP was part of social
activity of joining rather than a revolutionary alternative to public life and the many
voluntary associations that shaped it. In contrast, Nazi agitators and mobilizers were
building a public sphere, which was activist and national. The tensions between the two
were considerable and Nazi joiners were aware of them. While at the beginning the Nazi
mobilization adapted or made use of local forms of sociability and activities, the contra-
dictions grew as NSDAP transformed into a strong mass party at the national level.
Koshar’s study helps us to see that the interaction between multiple networks is not
necessary productive for the movement. Actors involved in different networks can hold
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very different understandings of the political reality and their role in the public sphere.
Such conceptualization of the interaction between multiple networks, which takes into
account meanings attributed to networks and social ties, goes beyond purely structural
analysis. The existence of brokerage ties and overlapping memberhips does not by them-
selves guarantee the succesfull spread of mobilization.
5. Recruitment through networks
The research on movement recruitment is yet another vein of research that has dem-
onstrated the value of preexisting social ties and networks (for a review of early re-
search see Snow, Zurcher and Ekland-Olson, 1980). It is now taken for granted that
preexisting ties to activists help to pull potential participant into the movement. But the
research has not been very precise in stating the exact causal nature between the net-
works and recruitment. This criticisms has been voiced already by Marwell et. al.: “It is
widely agreed that participants in social movement organizations are usually recruited
through preexisting social ties and that mobilization is more likely when the members
of the beneficiary population are linked by social ties than when they are not... But
exactly how and why social ties are important is less well established.” (Marwell, Oliver
and Prahl 1988:502) The lack of systematic theory which would explain why social ties
play a role as facilitators of activism has had serious implications for research. In the
words of McAdam and Paulsen: “Having failed to establish the precise link between
social ties and activism, empirical researchers have been content to assess the basic
strength of relationship instead of testing the causal power of the various dimensions of
social ties, of the salience, centrality, or strength of a tie that determines its effectiveness
as a recruiting agent.” (McAdam and Paulsen 1993:641)
One of the first pieces of research which explored causal link between recruitment
and the role of social ties was the seminal article by Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson
(1980). They were interested how social networks lead to differences in structural avail-
ability of potential participants for movement activity. They enumerated three causal
mechanisms which directly link networks with differential participation. First, family
and friendship ties were important microstructure avenues of recruitment because those
who have such ties: “…will have a greater probability of being contacted and recruited
into that particular movement” (1980:792) than others without such ties. Second, the
ties to activist are not enough because of differential availability of potential recruits.
Differential recruitment “is a function of how tightly individuals are tied to alternative
networks and thus have commitments that hinder the recruitment efforts of social move-
ment organizations.” (1980:794) And third, since the “recruitment among acquaintan-
ces, friends, and kin is more successful than among strangers” (p.797) the spread of
movement depends on the secondary network of their members. The “extent to which
movements are linked to other groups and networks via members’ extra-movement in-
terpersonal ties” (1980:797) determines how many individuals are exposed to movement’s
recruitment efforts. All three propositions suggest that social ties and networks make
people differentially available to the recruitment efforts of movement organizations,
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
which in turn determines differential participation. One example of their structural ar-
gument is particularly compelling. They compared recruitment success of Nichiren
Shoshu of America (a Buddhist movement) and Hare Krishna movement by the method
of recruitment. A large majority (82%) of members of Nichiren Shoshu were recruited
through networks while 92% of Hare Krishna members were recruited in public places
and only 4% through interpersonal networks. The explanation for this differences in
recruitment mechanism is that in Hare Krishna movement core membership is contin-
gent upon the severance of extra-movement interpersonal ties. Not only that preexisting
social ties did not lead to recruitment, they had to be systematically avoided by move-
ments’ members.
Subsequent research abandoned this purely structural approach as enlightened but
insufficient because it was lacking in determinism. Explanations in terms of structural
opportunities assume that opportunities are structured but the process of recruitment is
random. Individual’s decision to participate is not seen as a result of influence process
but as a random event. Participants and non-participants are assumed to have the same
motivation. But due to a greater availability of participation opportunities through their
networks, they more often ended up among the activists. Structural approach had few
followers who found in their research that movements can be invested with strong ide-
ologies and normative contents. Empirically, structural approach seemed to be on the
wrong track. This was especially true for high risk as opposed to low risk activism. The
choice for participation in high-risk activism is consequential for an actor who therefore
needs to make a positive choice to participate.
McAdam proposed a model of recruitment to high-risk activism which closely looks
at the influence process ignored by structural theory. In his earlier article (1986) he finds
that recruitment to the Freedom Summer Project, an instance of high-risk activism, was
a function of strong ties to recruiting agent. Based on the literature, he distinguished
between two recruiting agents. Organizational membership in civil rights organizations,
church and religious organizations, student clubs, and political organizations was one
important conduit to participation in the freedom summer. The second one were prior
ties to other applicants. Not all ties proved to be important. Only strong ties to later
participants and activists served as a pull factor to the movement. Strong ties to those
applicants who did not participate were a strong and significant predictor of
nonparticipation. While the results offered strong support for the theory that strong
normative contexts such as strong interpersonal ties and exposure to multiple move-
ment organizations induce participation in the movement, the model was lacking in the
specification of the causal mechanism. In spite of the fact that the model made a step
forward by distinguishing between organizational and interpersonal recruiting agents
and between strong and weak ties, it basically reiterated the point of earlier theories that
“netness” of movement constituencies was conductive to solidarity and mobilization
(Obershall 1973, Tilly 1978).
In the later article McAdam and Paulsen (1993) tried to overcome these shortcom-
ings. In order to be able to asses the nature of the influence process and the role of the
networks in it they began by breaking down the recruitment process in four analytical
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Hajdeja Igli~
steps. First, there needs to be a recruiting attempt. Second, potential participant needs to
establish a tentative linkage between the movement and his or her “salient identity.” In
short, there needs to be a match with what movement does and what an individual
values, stands for, and strives to achieve. Third, there needs to be support for that link-
age by those people who normally sustain identity in question. And fourth, there should
be no opposition from significant others. This four-phase model shows that social net-
works can exert influence in the last two phases. They serve as reinforcement of actors
‘dispositions’ rather than their source as might have been assumed in the earlier theo-
ries.14
While reinforcement model has been useful in providing an explanation for the posi-
tive effect of personal ties, one needs to stretch this model to make the same argument
also for the role of organizations. Why would multiple organizational memberships
induce participation? There is, by all means, a link between organizations and personal
networks but organizational ties can not be simply reduced to informal ties because they
may have different status than personal ties and may therefore have different role in the
affirmation of ‘salient identities’. Alternative approach to the analysis of organizational
recruiting agent is to look at the organizational structure of ties surrounding the partici-
pant. Fernandez and McAdam (1988) examined the role of individual’s prominence in
multiorganizational fields in two campuses, Berkeley and Wisconsin. They found that
prominence in multiorganizational field (a measure derived from the relational matrix
of the number of organizational overlaps between applicants) was a strong predictor of
recruitment in Wisconsin. Here is an explanation why: “Sharing organizational mem-
berships with individuals who are linked to more centrally located individuals in the
network of overlaps is more important than sharing the same number of overlaps with
the people who are in the periphery of the network. Because they are linked to many
people, more central individuals are more likely to experience social influences ... on
their decisions to attend the program.” (Fernandez and McAdam 1988:365) Multiple
organizational memberships alone do not induce participation in a movement. Instead,
belonging to multiple organizations and being tied to others who hold multiple mem-
berships is what encourages involvement in a movement because that not only exposes
one to multiple influences but also provides immediate reinforcement for those influ-
ences.
This review of recruitment process attempted to peel out the argument about the
specific mechanisms through which networks influence recruitment. We showed that
there was enormous progress in the argument leading from purely structural arguments
to the argument which specified the role of networks as reinforcement agent. Actors
embedded in both organizational and interpersonal networks have their own disposi-
tions regarding participation. The role of informal networks is to reinforce those initial
positive dispositions and thus encourage actors to pursue them through involvement in
movement activity. This argument represents a tremendous improvement over earlier
theories, which argued that embeddedness, i.e. the existence of interpersonal ties and
dense social structures were conductive to recruitment and collective action without
specifying the mechanism.
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
Recent developments of the recruitment models go further in the specification of the
mechanisms and dynamics of recruitment. They show how the importance of different
recruitment mechanisms depends on the characteristics of contentious action, such as
its public visibility and action repertoire (Passy 2003). They also continue the work in
the direction of rational choice models dealing with the individuals’ decision to partici-
pate in the protest (Gould 1993b, 2003). These later studies contribute to our under-
standing of the process of  reinforcement by looking more closely at the motivations
and concerns of people who are recruiting and being recruited, in particular their con-
cerns with the issues of efficiency, justice, loyalties and personal affinities.
6. Discussion
The article discusses the contribution of network approach to the understanding of
the phenomenon of contentious action, which includes a variety of collective endeavors
to affect the political process: from insurrections to protests and movements, from non-
violent to violent and bloody encounters between state and societal actors. It shows that
network approach can be applied in very different lines of inquiry: in the study of the
role of social ties in individual recruitment to contentious action, in the explanation of
the emergence, strength and character of contentious action, and in the examination of
the linkages and interactions between different kinds of collective actors.
The concept of social networks is often considered as an alternative to explanations
cast in terms of macro variables of political opportunities and inequalities, and explana-
tions made in terms of micro variables of motivations, values and personal traits of
people. Very differently, social networks approach captures individuals as located in the
web of interpersonal exchanges, thus allowing for the formulation of “micro-macro”
link and the focus on the relationship between structure and agency (Alexander et al.
1987, Sewell 1992) Social networks act as meso-level social structures that are con-
straining social actors as well as facilitating their attempts to adapt to and modify exist-
ing patterns of relationships. But social networks can live up to this theoretical expecta-
tions only if their conceptualization changes from presenting yet another version of
resources and structural opportunities (Jasper 1997), to their understanding as sites of
social interaction and meaning attribution (White 1992).
The focus on social networks should thus be joined with more “open” approach to
the study of social phenomena. The examination of recent trends in the social sciences
analysis shows that the emphasis has gradually turned from the identification of general
and unvariable laws, and the formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions of vari-
ous large-scale political processes (for example, revolutions or political democratiza-
tion), to the examination of the differences and variation in the process. As Tilly
(1995:1601) pointed out: “…the test of a good theory is not so much to identify simi-
larities among instances as to account systematically and parsimoniously for their varia-
tion” (1995:1601). This variation stems from different combinations of factors, circum-
stances, and sequences.  What needs to come in the forefront of a research is question of
mechanisms that account for process dynamics (Hedstrom and Swedberg 1998), link-
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Hajdeja Igli~
ages between the sequences of the political process (Tilly 1995, McAdam et al. 2001),
and variable interactions between different kinds of factors and conditions (resources,
political opportunities, cultural understandings, social networks).
Yet another aspect of openness lies in the recognition that boundaries between phe-
nomena under study are not as clear as usually assumed, partly because the phenomena
themselves are variant rather than coherent. This problem of monadic thinking in social
sciences has been discussed a decade ago by authors such as White (1992), Somers
(1992), and Sewell (1992). Their critique of sharply bounded and coherent units in
social sciences opened the possibility of cross-disciplinary exchange among research-
ers who traditionally saw their social concepts as falling within the separate fields of
social sciences, defined either more broadly in terms of political sciences, sociology,
and organizational studies, or in more specific terms such as social movements, conten-
tious action, public interest groups, small democracy participation, political action, vol-
untary organizations, civil society, political democratization, etc.
Weakening of the boundaries of social science phenomena called for the cross-dis-
ciplinary exchange, and the concept of social capital was the one that fulfilled this task
since  it intuitively resonated in the ears of many authors working in their own fields of
expertise. We can actually say that there has been no better reason for the rise of the
social capital concept to its present prominence than its capacity to link the concerns of
scientists from different fields, for the concept by itself is notoriously too vague to
present a starting point for a serious research program. Social capital helped in its own
way to establish the communication among researchers and contributed to the increase
in interest for each other’s work where before they were absent. The work that has been
done in the field of social networks, movements and contentious action over the last
twenty years, can contribute greatly to this commonly renewed interest in social condi-
tions of political action  that is expressed through the notion of social capital.
Notes
1. The competitive type of collective action was most common sort before the late seventeenth
century, this is before the French state launched intensive efforts at administrative centraliza-
tion. This sort of violence expressed the constant conflicts within and between the local
communities and corporate groups over resources claimed by rivals. It included such differ-
ent phenomena as feuds, brawls between the youths of neighboring villages, battles between
the rival groups of artisans, charivaries or Rough Music, and pulling down of houses, all very
richly symbolic and expressive actions.
2. Reactive forms of collective action involve communal and corporate groups threatened by
the centralizing efforts of the French state. This form of violence was characteristic from the
late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It was a resistance to the state’s efforts to
extract ever greater tax resources from the population, draw local grain supplies into national
market, and promote capitalist development. Typical repertoire of action included tax rebel-
lions, grain seizures, and invasions of enclosed lands and forests by local people. The claims
made by communal groups were defensive. They insisted on the priority of traditional rights
and controls that were threatened by the modernizing state.
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
3. In proactive sort of collective violence people make offensive, instead of defensive claims.
They no longer resist the expansion of the state, but rather attempt to control it and assert
group claims to privileges and resources that are under state’s control. Typical repertoire of
proactive violence includes the political meeting, the petition, the strike, the barricades, the
insurrection, the petition, and the nationally-oriented electoral campaigns. The new reper-
toire of action was developed progressively between the late eighteenth and the first half of
the nineteenth century but it did not become a predominant form of collective action in France
before the Revolution of 1848. Also the typical social location of collective violence changed.
The groups that engage in such violence are special-purpose associations rather than corpo-
rate groups and local communities.
4. The older repertoire of action was parochial because the scope of action rarely transcended
local communities and corporate groups. The collective action most often grew out of routine
assemblies of communal groups, local markets and festivals. The action was bifurcated be-
cause it either acted directly on a local relationship or asked privileged intermediaries to
convey claims to more distant authorities, and particular because it adopted forms and sym-
bols peculiar to the relationship between claimants and the objects of their claims. The new
repertoire of action is called cosmopolitan because the scope of action spans multiple com-
munities, connected among themselves through various kinds of brokers, networks and orga-
nizations. It is autonomous because the organizers - political entrepreneurs - frequently sched-
ule the contentious events in advance at their own initiative rather than taking advantage of
authorized assemblies and routine gatherings. And it is modular because people employ very
similar kinds of actions in different situations. The shift from the old to the new repertoire of
contentious action also involves a step toward social-movement logic: toward sustained chal-
lenges to authorities by “a set of people who voluntarily and deliberately commit themselves
to a shared identity, a unifying belief, a common program”.(Tilly 1994:5-8)
5. For example, in tax rebellions villagers who assaulted tax collectors justified their action by
the claim that village was obliged to pay only the level of taxation it had customarily paid in
the past. Similarly, grain rioters often demanded that state officials carried out the traditional
regulations that locally produced grain to be put up for sale in the local markets. And, when
they invaded enclosed land and forests, villagers did so to enforce their traditional communal
rights to use this land when needed.
6. See, for example, very vivid description of the French public life in the years just before the
Revolution by Till (1994, chapter 5): “In the Parisian catalog for 1780-1788, clandestine
workers’ guilds surely lay behind some of the workers’ strikes and attacks, but not one pub-
licly-visible association of any kind made claims or organized collective action. 18th century
France certainly has secret societies, lay religious confraternities, lodges, and underground
workers’ organizations, but in general French public authorities struck down as a danger to
public order any attempt to create political clubs or their equivalent. They also strongly dis-
couraged any associations they did tolerate from making public claims except through the
courts and/or the mouths of eminent patrons……..Very different from France, in England in
the same period of 1780s different sorts of clubs, committees, societies and associations
flourished, not only in London but also in other cities.”
7. The outburts of new forms of associations during the Revolution was so widespread that:
“With its Revolution, France temporarily reversed the cross-channel balance. In 1789 the
clubs of Paris and other French cities became major rallying-point for revolutionary
demands......By that time, popularly organized clubs, societies, and militias were doing much
of the revolutionary work in Paris and all the provinces. For four years — until the Terror, and
then Thermidor — special purpose-associations spearheaded popular participation in the
French revolution.” (Tilly 1994, chapter 5). But French revolution also had an effect on the
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English public sphere in a sense that it changed the discourse or intellectual means with
which political leaders presented their political alternatives in the direction of individual
rights and the priority of individual interests. Thus, for Tilly the main consequence of French
revolution was to made available new intellectual means for  rationalization of the claims
rather to produce a new form of collective action rooted in voluntary associations. If this kind
of collective action was absent in pre-revolutionary France this was so because of the politi-
cal repression of associations rather than the lack of cultural tools (i.e. collective identities).
8. The relationship between artisans and workers was even more in favor of artisans in the
countries that were on the periphery of industrial development in the early nineteenth cen-
tury; for example, around 1800 there was in Ljubljana  about eight times more artisans than
workers (Slokar 1977:27, Kramberger 1999:74-86).
9. The movement of the 1830s was concentrated in two cities, Lyon and Paris, which had over-
whelmingly artisan labor force while the bigger textile centers remained uninvolved (Bezucha
1974).
10.  The capacity of artisans for resistance is demonstrated by the fact that, in France the employ-
ers when setting up to organize a plant or factory even avoided cities “with their rebellious
craftsmen who know how to defend their wages, preferring the countryside or the rural pe-
riphery of great centers” (Perrot 1986).
11. Yet, one should never stop inquiry of collective action at “non-organization,” warns Cottereau
(1986).  Not only do different groups mobilize and act collectively in very different ways, but
most of them, even if they look “passive” in terms of the usual indicators of militancy, de-
velop a variety of control practices which are rather informal and exist independently of any
institutionalized organization, such as mutual aid societies, unions, and strike committees.
According to historical evidence, factory workers in the nineteenth-century France indeed
made extensive use of such practices. They included passive resistance that often verged on
sabotage, urban clientelism, and collective defense by mobility.
12. In corporations of the Old Regime, both master and workers were subjected to collective
discipline which regulated many aspects of one’s life and work and gave rise to the especially
strong sense of work as a very social practice. In addition, journeymen organized illegal
corporate brotherhoods, which put the pressure on the masters over various issues of the
trade. The legal prohibition of the French Revolution on the masters’ corporations had little
effect on journeymens’ brotherhoods. Skilled workers in the big urban centers passed on the
traditional journeymen system and its forms of struggle from one period into another.  While
masters were increasingly disunited in the early-nineteenth-century once they were freed of
collectively imposed constraint of the trades in the Old Regime, workers were in general
united. By the late 1820s, writes Sewell, virtually all skilled trades in major cities had some
kind of workers’ organization which was trying to impose controls over the working condi-
tions in their trades. Perrot  gives an example of  unruly papermakers, one of those groups of
artisans who defended their corporate structures even in the absence of corporations: “Sol-
idly organized under the Ancien Regime, they obeyed  neither the Le Chapelier Law against
“combinations in restraint of trade” nor the similar law of 6 Fructidor, Year IV, which was
aimed against at them more specifically. They continued to impose all sorts of obligations on
manufacturers, including local and familial recruitment, beds to be reserved for traveling
journeymen, and payment by the month (including holidays!). They obliged delinquents,
employers as well as workers, to pay fines into a common fund that they later ‘ate’ in the
course of joyous libations that shocked Restoration philanthropists, keener on saving than on
feasting. Deciding to keep the best of the day for themselves, in the Puy-de-Dome they went
to the workshops from midnight to noon, working by candlelight” (Perrot 1986:80).
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Networks and political mobilization: Beyond structural argument
13. Perrot provides a vivid description of this kind of conflict: “The following took place in
Houlme, near Rouen, in 1825: after Levasseur, owner of a spinning mill, reduced the pause
from one hour to half an hour…….the workers went on strike and brought into it the entire
village community, which engaged in  a three-day confrontation with the forces of law and
order. There were a number of victims, including a gendarme, and a hundred arrests. “ (Perrot
1986:84)
14. The authors conclude: “The conclusion is unmistakable: neither organizational embeddedness
nor strong ties to another volunteer are themselves predictive of high-risk activism. Instead,
it is a strong subjective identification with a particular identity, reinforced by organizational
and individual ties, that is especially likely to encourage participation.... Prior ties - either
through organizations or particular others - would seem to be necessary, but not sufficient,
for recruitment to high-risk activism. In the absence of (a) strong identification with the
identity sustained by the tie and (b) a link between that identity and the movement in ques-
tion, prior ties are no more productive of participation than the absence of ties.” (McAdam
and Paulsen 1993: 659)
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Author’s address:
dr. Hajdeja Igli~,
Faculty of Social Sciences
P.O. Box 2547
SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
email: hajdeja.iglic@guest.arnes.si
Prejeto oktobra in odobreno za objavo v angle{~ini decembra 2003.
Po mnenju uredni{tva je prispevek uvr{~en kot izvirni
znanstveni ~lanek (s kvalitativno argumentacijo).
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