This article was downloaded by: [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] On: 11 November 2013, At: 02:55 Publisher: Routledge

Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csms20

Interventions: Dynamics of Contention

Published online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: (2003) Interventions: Dynamics of Contention, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 2:1, 85-96, DOI: 10.1080/1474283032000062576 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1474283032000062576

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Social Movement Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2003

Interventions: Dynamics of Contention Conversation with Charles Tilly about his Recently Published Book, Dynamics of Contention, Co-authored with Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)
This interview took place on 5 September 2002 at Columbia University in New York City. The questions were developed jointly by SMS editor Ann Mische and SMS book reviews editor Chad Goldberg (who were both former students of Tilly at the New School for Social Research). The interview was conducted by Ann Mische.

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

Ann Mische (A): Youre one of the few groups of authors that has painstakingly built up a paradigm over many years of hard work and then decided that it needed to be overturned. What brought you to the realization of the problems with that paradigm? Charles Tilly (C): Well, theres a short-term version and a long-term version. Let me start with the long-term version, which was noticing what kind of work people actually did, using the ideas that Doug McAdam or Sid Tarrow or I had laid out in earlier years. A good test of this, a good test of whats going on the eld, is what happens in the articles that come to journals. And what I discoveredand I think all three of us discovered was that the application people made of what we called in the book the standard classical model was one that reied the elements of it and squeezed out explanation, or, to be more precise, located explanation at the margins of the enterprise. So that a great deal of what happened was that people would match a set of events to the elements of a conceptual model, most obviously in the case of social movements, but also in the case of strike waves, in the case of revolutions, and so on. So as a practical matter, teaching, reviewing, taking part in symposia over the long run, we say, this isnt whats supposed to be happening. Were supposed to be explaining these phenomena. In the short-run, what happened was we all got together and as we nished other enterprises, for me it was particularly writing European Revolutions1 that got me ready to think, wait a minute, why is it that this discussion is so inferior? For Doug it was rethinking some of his stuff on social movements. For Sid it was coming out of his work
ISSN 1474-2837 print/ISSN 1474-2829 online/03/010085-12 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1474283032000062576

86 Social Movement Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 on Italy and trying to write a general synthesis. All of us were at a stage where we had some very similar complaints about the state of the eld and we got together and said, Look, were partly responsible for this. The only responsible thing to do right now is to provide a coherent criticism of this way of thinking and its misuses. A: What do you see as being the main innovations of the Dynamics project,2 and what are the main differences from the classic model? C: Now were talking about the model, were not necessarily talking about, for example, the work that Doug actually did on the civil rights movement, which was better than his model and our model. The innovations, rst of all, are that instead of talking about a single actor at a timeThe Movement, The Revolution, The Polity, or something like thatwe explicitly put the interaction among actors into the center of the screen. The second thing follows pretty much from the rst and that is we talked about processes. We tried to specify the processes that in the classic model appear as arrows, unlabeled arrows, and so forth. And that led us into the mechanism-process way of thinking about it. Now, in writing European Revolutions, I had come to a much clearer awareness of what I wanted to do with mechanisms and processes. I have to take the blame for the extent to which thats an organizing principle in Dynamics. But I think that Doug and Sid did come on board once they saw that this was a way of giving substance to a process-orientation that all three of us had wanted to get into our revision. A: Could you explain the main features of what youre calling a mechanism-based approach? What do we gain by talking about mechanisms as opposed to covering laws or the specic local contexts? C: Well, rst of all, the main alternatives in social science are not just local context and covering laws. Theres a third one, and that is the explanation of social processes as accumulation of individual propensities. And, in fact, in political science more so than sociology, the main explanations available are individual propensity explanations. So that is not yet a gain, but its a difference. The difference is that youre moving away from saying weve got an explanation once we have a plausible reconstruction of the propensity of an actor, individual or collective. Instead, what we have to do is specify the components of the process by which change occurs. You gain rst of all the statement of the problem. What is it youre trying to do? Are you trying to arrive at a plausible description of a state of mind or a set of motivations or something like that? Or are you trying to reconstruct the causal sequence and combination by which a state of affairs changed? Now, in addition to that problem-setting advantage, the mechanism-process approach buys you a means of getting from one kind of contentious politics to another. If the line of reasoning were pursuing is correct, in fact, such mechanisms as boundary activation occur over an enormous range of contentious politics, and indeed, widely outside of contentious politics. So that there are two kinds of expertise that you can build simultaneously, one of which has been occulted in the last 20 years work. The kind thats been obscured is the knowledge of how a particular mechanism or a bundle of mechanisms operates. Activation would be one example; scale-shift would be another, and so on.

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

Mische: Conversation with Charles Tilly

87

A: Now your idea of a mechanism, from what I understand, does not necessarily involve the Stinchcombe claim that it has to be at either a higher or lower level. C: No, I disagree with Arthur Stinchcombe. Art is one of the social scientists that I most admire. But I disagree with Art as well as with Richard Swedberg and Peter Hedstro m in two regards at least. One is that a mechanism can only operate at another level. It consists typically of going to a lower level of abstraction or of organization and then explaining something like an emergent. I dont think so. I think brokerage is the easiest example that operates, and we can see it operating, at the level of action were trying to explain. And the severing of the ties between two clusters, for example, is a mechanism. And it is a mechanism whose consequences for the overall conguration we can recognize without going to a lower level. The second break, although Stinchcombe is less adamant on this than Hedstro m and Swedberg, is that I dont think that cognitive mechanisms, in particular mental eventsif thats what you mean by a cognitive mechanismare the only crucial mechanisms. In fact in Dynamics, what we try to emphasize are relational mechanisms rather than environmental or cognitive mechanisms. A: Now can something that serves as a mechanism in one instance, say if youre trying to explain social movements, actually be the object of explanation in another? C: Absolutely. Must be, I mean A: Like brokerage, or identity shift C: Of course, of course. There are no prime movers in this way of thinking, any more than there are in most of science. A: So its more of a component of a theory. It depends on what you have as your thing to be explained. C: Sure. A: So there are little pieces, little patterns. C: Sure, and sometimes theyre big. But its like saying this: Im thinking of one of my daughters, who is a molecular geneticist. In the earlier stages of her career she studied heat shock, in other words, what happens when there is a rapid rise in temperature in the environment of E. coli and so forth and what happens to the mutations in E. coli at that point. Now heat shock itself was a crucial mechanismit actually did alter the character and pace of mutations within these genesbut it was not a prime mover. It was a crucial mechanism. And understanding how it worked claried a wide range of biological phenomena in a number of different organisms. I mean, thats not where my idea came from; it was after the fact that I realized it was pretty similar to the reasoning that biologists carry on. A: At the Author Meets Critics session at the 2002 American Sociological Association

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

88 Social Movement Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 meeting in Chicago, Ruud Koopmans complained about the proliferation of mechanisms in Dynamics. He said that there seemed to be too many mechanisms, and he asked why these mechanisms and not others. Doesnt everything seem to come to be a mechanism in this framework? C: Ruud was right and wrong on this. Were going to get a chance to reply to him in another symposium. But he was right to say that from the point of view of clarity and neatness there are too many mechanisms in the book Dynamics of Contention. It would have been much better to have a very small number that we worked out with greater care, if we talked about measurement and so forth. But hes wrong in thinking that that in itself is a condemnation. First of all, he was imagining that we were proposing this as a kind of closure, as a kind of synthesis of everything anybody ever knew about this subject, when what we were trying to do was lay out a program and illustrate how that program operated. The proliferation of the forty-four mechanisms he counts in the book is a result of the fact that we wrote the book as an exploration, and there were three of us exploring in somewhat different directions. And by the time we had spent 3 or 4 years writing this part, we didnt think it made sense for us then to go back and try to rewrite the whole thing as a synthesis, especially since the next stage is not so much to put all these mechanisms together in a single theory but to nd out which ones are really robust. A: The other reservation that Ive heard about the idea of mechanisms is that it sounds too mechanistic. Why not just talk about patterns or processes? Why do we actually need to talk about mechanisms? Lots of people talk about the sorts of things that you point to as mechanisms without using that terminology. C: Well, the point is taken, that if you take one of the dictionary denitions of mechanismthat it has to do with something that happens inside a machinethe overtones are unfortunate. But I think theres a little bit of shock value to the term that patterns or congurations or regularities doesnt get you, especially because social scientists are so likely to take any one of these other terms and map it into one of the previously prevalent forms of explanation. What Ive seen happening repeatedly, even with people who are more or less sympathetic to the program, is that theyve said, Yes, youve done a good job of showing how, but you havent shown why. And you puzzle about what that means. Then you say, well, most often what it says is that why is the agents orientation. The why is the fundamental cause, and what it says, is, Ah, yes, youve done a pretty good specication of what happens between an agents intention and the outcome of that intention. And were trying to incorporate intentions into what is to be explained by a mechanism-process approach. A: So is there a third level then? Is there a level from which mechanisms may be seen as building blocks of processes, which are building blocks of theories? Is there a third level that caps that off? C: Theories are statements about the coherent relationsI choose the word carefully coherent relations among mechanisms and processes. Yes, yes there is a third level.

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

Mische: Conversation with Charles Tilly

89

A: So a theory would be another way of thinking about what people call an explanation? C: Sure. There are several levels of explanation. That is, if we want to nd out why a boiler burst, you can call the account we give a theory. But its a small t theory. You know, we want to know how come this one worked in this particular way. And we may invoke a general theory about the behavior of gases under pressure to provide that explanation, but we may also draw on ad hoc knowledge of particular mechanisms, how safety valves operate, and so forth, so that we need something like a distinction between capital T theory and small t theory here. You could aggregate your accounts of mechanisms into small t theories. You can say okay, Heres my theory about the Russian Revolution, to show you something about what happened between 1905 and 1917 and how the loss of World War I crushed the central power, blah, blah, blah. This is my theory about the Russian Revolution and its testable in the sense that it has a set of causal statements in it that you can look at either internally or that you can compare with other settings. But then theres Heres my Theory of Revolution. Now were very suspicious about theories that refer to aggregates in this sense. One of the things we warn againstalthough the way the book came out, it had less prominence than it did in our discussionsis the notion that the object is to take whole classes of episodes and provide general statements about those classes of episodes. This goes back to my European Revolutions, where I said, you know, these are coherent events, but they are not coherent events in the sense that there is a generalization that you can make about all revolutions. Theyre coherent events in that the mechanisms and processes that compose them are very regular ones that appear in different combinations. A: One of the things youre saying is that youre going beyond the classic social movements agenda, but arent many of the mechanisms that you identifysuch as collective attribution of threat and opportunity, opportunity spirals, social appropriation of mobilizing structuresarent these simply reformulations, although more dynamic and relational, of the classic social movements agendas key concepts? C: Of course they are. But notice two things about them. The rst is that they actually reformulate them in the form of statements about cause and effect and concatenation of these causes and effects with each other, which is something that rarely happened in the classic social movement agenda and typically happened off the screen. Then some people told their stories about what was going on, but they werent part of the general account and therefore there is no accumulation. That is the rst difference. The second difference is that we see these as not peculiar to social movements but as occurring in a very wide range of contentious politics. We think its something of a contribution to start breaking down the barriers among these different types of contentious politics. A: One of the main contributions of Dynamics is in fact to bridge these barriers among different forms of contentionrevolutions, nationalism, democratization, strike waves, social movementsand show how that these different forms of contention result from similar mechanisms and processes. Now do you think that the dynamic and relational perspective you adopt helps us to shed light on why scholars so rarely breach those

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

90 Social Movement Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 barriers? Any thoughts on how the social organization of the academic eld discourages these social breaches and how we can encourage more breaching of this type? C: Thats interesting. Yes, the problems that we were addressing resulted in part from the convenience of an empirical generalization approach, that is, of saying, Okay, now weve got the model of this phenomenon, now well catch a case. Im studying Nicaragua. We already have a model of revolution. What Ill do is catch the case of Nicaragua for the sociology or political science of revolution, and I will modify the empirical generalizations that people are making about this phenomenon. Theres a lot of convenience in that and it allows you to organize specialty schools of thought and so forth. And there is a point to it, to the extent that local knowledgeI dont just mean academic knowledge, but local knowledgesomehow clusters around forms of revolutionary activity, organizations that generate revolutionary activity, or the same thing in union organization, or in social movement organization, or in nationalism, and so on. The accumulation of that local knowledge is part of your professional development, just as your knowledge of Brazil is crucial to and an important part of your analysis, even though youre not working primarily as an explicator of Brazil, and so forth, so that there is an advantage to local knowledge.3 And again I make the biological analogy: people have to know the organism. People who dont care at all about mice still have to know exactly how that model organism operates and so forth. Theres a lot of local knowledge about how mice work that goes into becoming a good laboratory person in a wide range of biology. So there is something about the academic discipline, here complicated by the fact that some of these phenomena became primarily the property of economists, of geographers, of sociologists, of political scientists, or somebody else, and so forth. So they are not only embedded in communities of local knowledge about types of episodes but also in disciplines that take somewhat different ways of organizing the enterprise, and thats an obstacle, although it provides a tremendous opportunity to young people to somehow rebel against their elders in a creative way. A: Now, from the other point of view, if one side of the book is that youre breaking all of those boundaries between elds, the other question that has been raised is that in focusing on politics, state-based politics in particular, youre limiting the scope as well, so that you dont look at movements targeting corporations, cultural producers, lifestyle, media, churches, etc. So the question is, why did you choose to limit the book to exclusively political contention involving at least one state actor, as you say in the opening chapter of Dynamics of Contention? And do you think that your model is directly transferable to other types of movements? You say in the end that you have a hunch that it is, but do you think that it would need some modication in order to explain less explicitly political movements? C: See, youre asking two different kinds of questions. Or youre asking three different kinds of questions. Why did we do it this way? And we did it that way because we thought the exposition itself, not the analysis, but the exposition would become unmanageable if we said were looking at every form of contention everywhere. So we thought, what would be a convenient way of delimiting it? Thats why we arrived at that. I dont know why critics have so much difculty understanding that reply, which Ive

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

Mische: Conversation with Charles Tilly

91

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

now had to give half a dozen times. You know, lets keep the conversation going where we have some kind of knowledge of what the limits of the conversation are. Second, I think, and Doug and Sid think as well, as far as I know, that most of what we found here, for example, the identity transformations weve looked at, operate much more widely than in the zone of contentious politics as we dene the eld on page 5 of Dynamics of Contention. Third, nevertheless, the presence of governments does make some difference. One fact about governments is that they typically have armed forces at their disposal. And the presence or absence of armed force makes some difference as to how these contentious processes play out. Thats one reason why Ive written a book in between called The Politics of Collective Violence,4 because the presence of arms, militias, thugs, maas, and so forth alters the stakes and processes of contentious politics. So that when you start saying, well, really were excluding whole ranges of politics, what we would like to do is challenge people and ourselves to think more systematically about what difference the presence or absence of force-wielding governments and government agents makes to the character of these processes. A: Another question was raised at a recent conference at the London School of Economics at which Social Movement Studies was launched. Alain Touraine commented that he felt that actors were missing from Dynamics. There are lots of actors in your book, but perhaps not in terms of his denition of actors as real-life thinking, feeling, human beings with hopes and dreams. Now do you agree with Touraine that this is a gap or blindness in the book? Does it pose any problems for the model? What do you gain or lose from not focusing on real, live human beings? C: Well, rst of all, its not an omission. Its a deliberate alteration of the argument. That is what we were trying specically to counter: the notion that the nal explanations or the deep explanations of social processes are the intentions, awareness, phenomenology, consciousness, motives, urges, of individual actors or, for that matter, even collective actors. And its probably true that we were so concerned about that feature of competing analyses that we backed off further from the discussion of how people experience contentious politics than we would have in a time where it was already clear that this program was available and viable. A: To build on that point a little more, recently there has been a burgeoning interest in the relations between emotions and social movements, to which you and your co-authors have to some extent contributed. But there is very little about emotions in this book. How would you incorporate the study of emotions within the relational and mechanismoriented framework of the book? C: I dont think its so hard, as a matter of fact. Because, if you follow people like, say, Jonathan Turner, Tom Scheff, other people who have really tried to think pretty hard and systematicallyJack Katz would be perhaps even a better exampleif you look at those peoples work and say, what is it thats compelling about their work?, its that they actually insert emotions, human emotions, visceral emotions, emotions felt in the body, into sequences of social interaction. The Thomas Spence Smith book on social

92 Social Movement Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 interactions5 is another example of this. Its true that we dont have a big ag called emotions, although if you have a good McAdam detector you can run through Dynamics of Contention and you nd more attention to emotional processes each time McAdam is at the typewriter. Theres some difference in how much each of us regards these as crucial to our theoretical account. But I dont think that its difcult at all once you get away from the polemical. If your main way of approaching the emotions is saying, its missing and youve got to have it in there, then youre not going to insert emotional processes as a cause or effect in these sequences. But when you get to something like signaling spirals, for example, to get signaling spirals right, you are certainly going to have to look at how various emotions affect the processing of signals, and emitting of signals, and the interpretation of other peoples signals. A: In terms of links to some European work on social movements, one of the things youre striving for is a more comprehensive perspective that builds bridges between bodies of literatures that are often isolated. And you give a lot of attention to political identities, but you dont really engage the work of scholars like Alberto Melucci, Alessandro Pizzorno, and Alain Touraine, who focus on collective identity in the so-called new social movements. Why is that, and what are the main similarities or differences between your approach to political identities and theirs? C: I would say that I dont want to put all these people in the same box, because Pizzorno is much more of a process person in my sense of the word than either Touraine or Melucci. But on the whole they take a hermeneutic approach to identity. That is, regardless of how much they think of identity as a kind of construction that emerges from peoples aspirations and so forth, their idea of identity is that it is characteristic of consciousness. And what you have to get at is consciousness. The notion of identity that we have adopted in this book, its one that I forced on my collaborators, is that identity consists of collective, sustained answers to the questions: Who are you? Who are we? Who are they? And while the kinds of consciousness people have are a very important part of the explanation of both the causes and effects of identity work, it is not helpful to reduce that to an aspect of consciousness. And therefore the hermeneutic approach that Touraine and Melucci carry on so brilliantly doesnt have a place in this particular program. But I think, like your earlier question, we backed away from that more, probably, than would be helpful in another stage of this discussion, because we wanted to mark differences between this approach and one in which the conscious, intending agent was the center of the whole analysis. A: Somewhat taking this point in a slightly different direction, your view of identity and contentious politics in general comes out of a conversation-based model. Youre emphasizing the importance of social ties, interactions, communication, conversation, and various forms of continuous negotiation. C: Very much so. A: Now for some readers, this may sound like the theoretical approach in sociology known as symbolic interactionism, associated with Herbert Blumer, George Herbert

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

Mische: Conversation with Charles Tilly

93

Mead, Charles Cooley, Everett Hughes, Howard Becker, Erving Goffman, and others. Could you say more about how your relational perspective both draws from this tradition and also differs from it? C: I think it does draw on symbolic interaction, probably more in the Aaron Cicourel version than in any of the others that you mentioned, although theres certainly plenty of Goffman. The difcultyIll get to the positive partbut the difculty I see, lets take Goffman as an example, is that Goffman oddly avoided interaction itself as a process. So what he has is alternating actors, and he has splendid accounts of how a particular actor projects self. But he doesnt have a very compelling account of how conversation in itself transforms the experience or the interaction. Okay, so thats simultaneously a link with symbolic interaction and a challenge to get beyond symbolic interaction. You say, all right lets incorporate an explanation, a description and an explanation, of the interactive process into our story. The challenge comes equally from a wide variety of social construction, not all of which is symbolic interaction. I regard our discussion of identity as an attempt to take seriously the challenge of social construction, and say, yeah, youre right, these identities, these labels, these representations, theyre not solid realities, theyre social constructions of various kinds. Okay, lets see what causes them and how they work. And lets treat them as continuously negotiated outcomes of conversational processes. A: Speaking of conversation, the book itself was part of quite a large conversation not limited to the three co-authors. Can you talk a little bit about how the book was inuenced by this larger process and the wider range of participants in the Mellon Foundation project6 and beyond that? What particular debates or conversations in that process contributed to the elaboration of the book and the model? C: Well, here we have a group of seven scholars, not only McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, but Bill Sewell, Liz Perry, Jack Goldstone, and Ron Aminzade, all of whom are actively participating in the organization of a series of discussions over four years. Were getting challenges from all of these four others, who are interested in the projectthats why they joined itbut they also have their own theoretical points of views, as the names suggest. And were trying to build a set of arguments that will at least be recognizable to our colleagues. So thats one thing I would say. The second thing is that were recruiting fourteen graduate students and then later a summer ow of twenty-one more young scholars, bringing them together to talk about their own work but also to relate it to this programnot just the bookbut more generally to the program of analysis of contentious politics. And we nd ourselves in those cases, more so than with our four senior colleagues, trying to gure out how would you convert the ideas that were developing into a program of research that would actually have niches in it for young scholars who are trying to make careers and trying to make a scholarly contribution. So theres a double interplay here, one, with the senior scholars who have an investment in partially different orientations and, second, with a second group of scholars who are making careers. Weve selected them because theyre working on topics that are relevant. But theyre in different disciplines. The stakes are high for them. And in fact theres a third group, of which you were a member yourself, of scholars that we consulted at one

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

94 Social Movement Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 time or another, bringing them in to talk about their own work. And we wanted to see if we could both integrate ideas from that third group of scholars who somehow passed through the project at one time or another, and convey to them what the excitement of the project might be. So weve kept the conversation going on in at least three different directions that are helping us understand, for example, what the people who do analytic narratives in political science and economics are about and how we might or might not be able to relate their agenda to the agenda that were pursuing. A: How might the book have been different without these conversations?

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

C: I think that without these conversations, rst of all, the book would have been empirically much narrower than it was. We realized that if we didnt have a number of episodes across a fairly wide geographic range, and lets call it a cultural range, we would lose conversation with people we really wanted to talk to. So the empirical range probably would have been a lot narrower. We would have stayed closer to things we already knew. For example, one of the episodes we originally thought we would talk about was the Paris Commune. Gone. And there were some others that we already knew something about; they were closer to our areas of professional competence. So thats one thing that resulted from the conversations. The second thing, more subtle, was that we realized what some of the objections to the analysis that we were doing would be. And that had some negative and positive effects. The negative effect was that the discussions of the relevant literature disappeared entirely. In early drafts, we had all sorts of discussion of who said what and what the competing theories were and so forth, and we discovered that that was a double distraction. First of all, because people wanted to argue more or as much about the position that we were taking on this eld or that than on what we were trying to do that was new. And second, because we had the problem of the expanding circle. The more people you mention, the more people just adjacent to them youre not mentioning. So we discovered that every time we tried to include a little more in the discussion then there was someone who is saying you missed this work and so forth. And the result could have been an encyclopedia of contentious politics or something like that. So that was a negative result. The positive result is that we discovered we had to repeat points that originally we would have only made once or twice, the denitions of mechanisms and things like that. Because people forgot, and it wasnt enough to have it there somewhere in chapter one or two. You had to repeat, say, as we said before, and so forth. I dont mean just as a matter of recalcitrant students, but I mean to say that there were some things that were sufciently unfamiliar or counter-intuitive that we had to repeat them in order to make sure that they stuck in peoples minds. And it is clear from the discussion since the book that the process could have gone further and we would have had a more effective book. A: Are you sensing any resistance among the scholars that you, Doug, and Sid helped to train in the classic agenda about the attempt to transcend that agenda? C: Yeah, yeah. Were getting lots of complaints. Its not so much that we are. I mean, we have pretty good relations with our former students. But Ill give you an example.

Mische: Conversation with Charles Tilly

95

Dingxin Zhao at the University of Chicago said to me, You know, my students hated the book, all except my two best students. He said, They hated it because they greatly preferred this model where you have mobilizing structures and framing, political opportunities, and so forth because its very straightforward to match cases with the model. And its not easy to match cases with your model and its not so easy to see what the practical implications are. And thats serious. I think we did what we had to do in the book, without writing a further instruction book. But its crucial that we and others then write further books that actually show how to use this. And Im doing my part and Sid is doing his part and Doug will do his part.

Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013

A: Certainly you must hope that the book will be inuential for graduate students and young scholars who are currently entering the eld. How do you think that they might feel liberated by the book and how might they feel constrained by the book? C: Certainly they ought to be liberated, because this provides a justication for someone who says, Ive got a great idea about how polarization operates. This provides a justication for doing a dissertation or an article or something like that on polarization using crazy comparative cases to do it. So theres a justication for a kind of work that some talented young analysts have been able to do, but they havent been able to nd a way to package it so that people would understand whats going on. Because were so much prejudiced in favor of closest case comparison and that sort of standard specication of what good social science looks like. Thats one form of liberation. The second form of liberation is that those who get it will have a bludgeon with which to beat their elders. I mean, this is a way of saying, Hey, really, Ive got something new. And this is a much more interesting something new than saying, Hey, Ive got a variable that the old fogies neglected. Instead, one can say: Ive got a different way of formulating an explanation. And Ill use this book as a ratication. So those are forms of liberation. The constraint is that if you take the book seriously you do have to identify mechanisms that operate in uniform fashion over a wide variety of circumstances. And while thats really an old ideaits a nineteenth-century ideait hasnt been the way people have done their work, especially in sociology and political science. The anthropologists have actually been a little bit better. Theyve been a little more nineteenth century. A: Now looking, say, ten years down the line, what will be the measure of the success of Dynamics of Contention? C: The measure would rst of all be that there are people writing outstanding books on particular processes, that this has become an effective way of doing social sciencethat would be the rst thing. The second thing would be that within the eld of contentious politics, we would have identied a relatively limited number of mechanisms. We would have an inventory, in fact, the beginnings at least of a theoryin the sense we were talking about beforeconnecting mechanisms and processes, showing how cause and effect operate, and what difference initial conditions make to their combination and sequence and the aggregate outcomes. Third, we would furthermore have a new series of studies of large-scale processes in which people regularly and effectively move from

96 Social Movement Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 episodes to processes to mechanisms, which is actually the composition that were recommending. Charles Tilly has two additional volumes forthcoming in 2003, both published in the new Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics series: Politics and Collective Violence and Contention and Democracy in Europe, 16502000.

Notes
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 02:55 11 November 2013
1 Charles Tilly, European Revolutions: 14921992 (Oxford: Blackwell 1993). 2 Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press 2001). 3 Ann Mische is currently working on a book on culture, networks, and youth activism in Brazil during the 1980s90s. 4 Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2003). 5 Thomas Spence Smith, Strong Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992). 6 The Special Project on Contentious Politics (199699) was sponsored jointly by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (see the Preface to Dynamics of Contention for a fuller description). In addition to Dynamics, a second volume was co-produced by the seven senior scholars in the project, entitled Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Aminzade et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001). A third volume with papers by the graduate fellows of the project is forthcoming in 2003 (States, Parties, and Social Movements, ed. Jack Goldstone, New York: Cambridge University Press).