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Social Movement Studies
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Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social
Movements: Illustrated by Protests and
Contentions in Modern China
Dingxin Zhao
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Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, USA
Available online: 13 Jan 2010
To cite this article: Dingxin Zhao (2010): Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements:
Illustrated by Protests and Contentions in Modern China, Social Movement Studies, 9:1, 33-50
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Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social
Movements: Illustrated by Protests and
Contentions in Modern China
DINGXIN ZHAO
Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, USA
ABSTRACT This article provides an initial step toward an explanatory analysis of the role of
culture in social movements. It argues that culture shapes collective actions through three idealtypical
mechanisms: as problem-solving tool-kits, as scripts, and as instincts and taken-forgranted
routines. While any concrete collective actions may involve the working of all three
mechanisms, the relative importance of the three mechanisms in a social movement varies with
the structural conditions of a society. In particular, actors in poorly organized social movements
are more likely to follow certain cultural scripts or even their culturally embedded emotions and
instincts, while actors in a well-organized movement are more able to take the cultural repertoire
as a tool-kit to pursue the targeted benefits. This distinction sets social movements under Western
democracies apart from many collective actions under more repressive regimes with poorly
organized society.
KEY WORDS: Culture, social structure, social action, mechanism, ideal types, China
Culture is important in almost every aspect of social movements. The activity of
movement participants is shaped by cultural conditions, a movement develops its
subculture and brings cultural changes to the society, and the rise of a new culture will
lead to the rise of new kinds of social movements. To limit the scope, however, this
article focuses only on one issue, that is, how the patterns of social movement
activities are shaped by the existing cultural conditions in a society. To illustrate the
argument presented in this article, I draw examples from contemporary Chinese social
movements, particularly the 1989 pro-democracy movement. I do so for two reasons.
First, I know cases of modern Chinese social movements well enough so that I might
more successfully avoid providing examples carrying serious biases or out of historical
context. Second, twentieth-century China was an exceptional mosaic of deep-seated,
persistent traditional cultures and Western ideologies introduced amidst its
revolutionary turmoil. Therefore it has provided especially interesting cases for the
observation of the role of cultural forces in social movement in their fullest
complexity.
1474-2837 Print/1474-2829 Online/10/010033-18 q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14742830903442493
Correspondence Address: Dingxin Zhao, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 5801 South Ellis
Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. Email: dzhao@uchicago.edu
Social Movement Studies,
Vol. 9, No. 1, 33–50, January 2010
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The importance of culture in China’s social movements does not need much arguing.
During the 1989 pro-democracy movement, for example, the Beijing students took Hu
Yaobang’s sudden death and his memorial service as occasions for political action,1
knelt
in front of the People’s Congress to hand in a petition, and frequently adopted slogans
centered on loyalty, filial piety, images of extended family and other traditional Chinese
virtues in order to mobilize supporters (Zhao, 2001, Ch. 9). These cultural behaviors
played a crucial role during the movement (e.g. Esherick & Wasserstrom, 1990; Pye,
1990; Perry, 1992). What this article intends to do is to explore the mechanisms that link
the cultural codes and patterns of collective actions and illustrate the working of these
mechanisms by the episodes of social movements in modern China.
Studying the mechanisms that shape cultural behaviors has at least two advantages.
First, ‘all real cultures contain diverse, often conflicting symbols, rituals, stories, and
guides to action . . . A culture is not a unified system that pushes action in a consistent
direction’ (Swidler, 1986, p. 277). Any civilization, including China, has inherited such
a diverse cultural tradition that any social movement can understandably perform only
part of it. Therefore, for any given collective action, we can always point out the
operation of some cultural elements in it. Such an approach, therefore, tends to produce
tautological argument. What is more fundamental to social movement researche is to
address questions such as why certain cultural elements dominated in a particular
movement, or why similar cultural elements are repeated in different kinds of social
movements, and so on.
Second, movement activities are not monolithic either. The activities of the 1989
movement, for example, were not only informed by traditional Chinese culture but also
showed a strong imprint of more recently incorporated Western culture and the communist
political culture. Yet, in the end, among the panoply of culturally embedded activities that
the movement had displayed, it was the traditional culture that caught the hearts of
millions of Chinese and shaped the movement’s dynamics (Zhao, 2000, 2001). Instead of
interpreting certain movement activities in cultural terms or merely pointing out affinities
between certain forms of movement activities and some cultural elements, a more fruitful
starting point is to treat social actors as embedded in a set of cultural scripts containing
conflicting and even contradictory messages, and to explore the mechanisms that
facilitated the domination of some culture codes over others in shaping the actors’
behavior.
Culture and Social Action
Before discussing the role of culture in social action, we first briefly define culture.
As noted by Brownstein (1995, p. 313) and Steinmetz (1999, p. 4), culture has acquired
more than 160 different definitions in history. Although the definitions differ in all sorts of
ways, an important difference lies in what is included in the definition. Many scholars
include in the concept of culture not only those that exist in people’s heads and in social
relations but also in almost every other aspect of social life, including what we
traditionally see as social structures (Sahlins, 1976; Foucault, 1977, 1978; Sewell, 1985;
Bourdieu, 1990; Meyer, 1999; Polletta, 2004). They believe that culture constitutes both
social experience and social structure, and that culture should be seen as socially organized
practices rather than what exists in people’s minds. Social structures are just ‘cultural
schemas invested with and sustaining resources’ (Sewell, 1992, p. 21).
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I accept the above definition at the level of ontology. Indeed, culture shapes every
possible aspect of human life, be it individual, collective, or social institutional. Not only
those elements that we traditionally consider as structural forces (such as forms of
government or a society’s class structure) are part of culture, even our biological
behaviors – those behaviors we share with other mammals such as eating, mating and
sleeping – are deeply modified by cultures and become largely cultural behaviors. Yet, as
Swidler (1995, p. 31) has keenly commented, the above ‘global approaches to the study of
culture can also be difficult to grasp firmly, either theoretically of empirically’.
Differentiation and categorization are the beginning of a scientific inquiry. It is only after
conceptual categorizations of some related entities are made that we are able to examine
their relationships. Once we adopt a broader cultural definition, all social phenomena
become cultural phenomena, and social sciences become ‘cultural studies’ in its British
sense (Smith, 1998, p. 9). Under the broader cultural definition, researchers have two
methodological choices. The first is to take interpretation, rather than explanation, as the
goal of research. This kind of approach has its merits, and sometimes generates insightful
results. Yet, overall, as the writings of postmodernist scholars have shown, such
approaches at their best tend to produce work that is stronger at deconstruction, but very
weak at producing theories which deserve serious attention. The second is to recreate
concepts/categories under a general culture paradigm. The problem is that many concepts
that they have created are interpretative. Most new concepts only paraphrase a certain
meaning of cultural practice in a biased manner. They lack a clear ontological base, and no
such things have ever existed in society, even in impure and ideal forms (similar to the
concept of ether in physics). Bourdieu, for instance, is a genius in creating such concepts.
Just in a short article (Bourdieu, 1999) he coins five different kinds of capital concepts: the
capital of physical force, economic capital, information capital, symbolic capital, and
juridical capital. It is easy to imagine that such conceptualization of various social capitals
can be extended almost infinitely to make the whole social sciences an enterprise of
capitalology. Nevertheless, not only are the capital concepts highly value-laden (they
implicitly hold an instrumental assumption of human behavior and an objective view of
social structural forces) but they are also even less clear than traditional structural concepts
such as network, class, state, nation, gender, etc. In short, I see too much limitation in the
research associated with the broader cultural definition.
Many empirically minded sociologists tend to follow Weberian and Durkheimian
traditions and designate the epistemological location of culture in people’s minds and in
social relations.2
Goodenough (1956) argues that all that a researcher needs to know about
culture, in so far as it affects behavior, is that it is located in the minds of social actors.
Alexander (1998, p. 30) defines culture as ‘an organized set of meaningfully understood
symbolic patters’. Swidler (1986) conceives culture as a ‘tool-kit’ of rituals, symbols,
stories, and worldviews that people use to construct strategies of action.
The narrow definitions more or less exclude other structural elements of society from
the realm of culture. Such definitions allow us to explore the patterns of relationships
among culture, other structural forces and social actions and to explain their relationships.
Traditionally, the narrow definition has a tendency to locate culture only in people’s minds
(Geertz, 1973; Polletta, 2004). Tilly (1999, p. 410) argues that such definitions pack
culture into ‘particular human brains as preferences, cognitive filters, memories, or
something of the sort, but they then lack any plausible account of culture’s collective
character, much less of its interdependence and systematic change’. He thus emphasizes
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements 35
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that culture is ‘shared understandings and their representations’ of a given population
(1999, p. 412), and advocates a relational approach in the study of culture. I completely
agree with this view. Indeed, even for those scholars who believe that culture is located in
people’s minds, they tend to capture the functioning of culture by concepts such as
customs, values, norms, symbols, rituals and beliefs. These concepts all imply that culture
is collective and shared.
On the other hand, although culture exists in social relations, in terms of its impact on
social action, its epistemological location has to be inside human brains. At issue is that the
culture of a population is always much more extensive in its contents than what an
individual or a collectivity can perform at a particular time/place. It thus needs some
mental process or process of collective deliberation (when it is organizational-based
decision making) that allows the people to choose or simply to perform some cultural
elements rather than others. Our task as sociologists is, therefore, as Tilly (1999, p. 411)
argues, to treat culture ‘as changing phenomena to be explained rather than as ultimate
explanations of all other social phenomena’.
A good starting point to study culture’s role in social movements by taking into
consideration culture’s mental, stable, changeable and relational properties is Tilly’s idea
of the contention repertoire. Tilly (1995, p. 41) defines a contention repertoire as ‘the ways
that people act together in pursuit of shared interests’. The concept is both mental and
relational because the ‘elements of the repertoire are . . . simultaneously the skills of the
population members and the cultural forms of the population’ (Stinchcombe, 1987).
However, in his original formulation, Tilly limited the concept to a stock of collective
action forms such as machine breaking, terrorism, sit-ins, hunger strikers, petitions and
demonstrations that are available to a particular population at a given time and place
(Tilly, 1978, p. 151). This article extends Tilly’s concept of the contention repertoire to the
cultural repertoire, including in it not only the forms of contentious collective action but
also the linguistic and other resources available to a population. This cultural repertoire
does not contain a coherent text, but has conflicting symbols, values, ideologies and
traditions that are there to be appropriated by the movement participants, and it exists
mainly in social relations rather than in people’s minds. Nevertheless, in order to function
normally in a society – that is, to allow their actions to be seen as meaningful by others –
the mind of an individual has to be equipped with many scripts in the cultural repertoire.
Social actors appropriate cultural repertoire in different ways: by following the cultural
codes they are familiar with or by innovatively using or modifying the existing cultural
script.
Steven Lucas (1974) argues that power exercises its impact on social actions at three
levels: the ability to gain the upper hand in conflict decision making, to set selfpromoting
values, rituals and institutional procedures in conflict decision making, and to
make social conflict latent in a sense that the subordinated groups are so indoctrinated
that they are no longer conscious of their real interests. Although culture and power have
been conceptualized differently, it is easy to imagine that culture and power are
functionally equivalent in the sense that culture also has the capacity to modify the social
actor’s environment and even orient an actor toward doing things that the actor otherwise
would not do. Like power, culture also exercises its impact on social actors’ behavior
through three similar mechanisms (all in ideal forms): interest and strategy, value
and ideology, and instinct and habit. Let’s name these three mechanisms tool-kit, script
and instinct.
36 D. Zhao
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On the level of interest and strategy, culture functions as what Swidler (1986) calls the
‘tool-kit’ from which actors select different pieces for constructing lines of action. At this
level, actors are able to strategize their activities in the existing cultural repertoire for
intended effects. Early during the 1989 movement, when the Chinese government published
the 26 April People’s Daily editorial that labeled the movement as a turmoil agitated by a
small number of black hands, the students initiated a demonstration to defy the
government’s attack. However, during the demonstration, the students dropped their earlier
demands such as free media, free association and democracy, and limited their slogans to the
existing social problems (e.g. corruption and inflation). Regarding this behavior, some
scholars argue that the 1989 movement was more like a traditional remonstration of
Chinese intellectuals than a modern pro-democracy movement (Esherick & Wasserstrom,
1990; Pye, 1990). Another study, however, showed that the students did so mainly out of
strategic considerations. By defying the People’s Daily editorial with a large-scale
demonstration, the students had already made their intention very clear. Yet, by shouting
slogans centered on the social problems of common concern, the demonstration won the
hearts of tens of millions of urban Chinese, and avoided giving the government excuses for
an immediate repression (Zhao, 2001, Ch. 6).
The ‘tool-kit’ mechanism captures humans’ capacity to appropriate culture. Social
actors’ learning capacity allows them not only to adopt strategies from an existing
repertoire but also to improvise and innovate. Strategies and learning are, therefore, the
major sources of cultural changes.3
On the other hand, cultural repertoire changes slowly
and most only at the margins, which gives culture a stability even during the most
unsettled times. Tilly’s (1986) study on the change of contention repertoire in France after
the sixteenth-century and the social conditions behind such changes is a classic example in
this regard.
The second mechanism through which the cultural repertoire exercises its impact on
social action is at the level of value and ideology. Under this mechanism, culture functions
as ‘scripts’ or ‘texts’ that shape social actions (Hunt, 1984; Geertz, 1973, 1983). Some
scholars also try to differentiate culture scripts and ideologies, but here I treat both as
cultural ‘texts’. When people are committed to certain cultural scripts or ideologies, they
tend to follow them. Swidler (1995, p. 36) puts this nicely:
When activists demand ideological purity to undermine their enemies and
consolidate their alliances, they make ideas powerful from the outside in. When a
political meeting decides that individual leadership violates its principles, or that
fetal tissue research threatens the right to life, ideas can acquire a power to affect
action.
Under this mechanism, the criterion for actors’ decision is no longer gain or loss but right
or wrong. The actors follow certain cultural ‘scripts’ because they are emotionally
attached to certain values or believe that this is the right thing to do even at the expense of
their instrumental benefit as judged by others. The Clamshell Alliance was once a quite
successful anti-nuclear movement in the USA. Yet, because the organization was
committed to the value of anti-domination and consensual decision making, it became less
and less able to reach consensus after its membership swelled. It greatly contributed to the
movement’s decline (Downey, 1986). Pye’s (1990) analysis of the 1989 movement
follows similar logic. He argues, for example, that the movement arose after the death of
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements 37
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Hu Yaobang because a funeral is one of the few occasions when the Chinese are allowed to
express their grievances publicly. He also argues that the 1989 movement was initiated out
of students’ personal grievances to problems such as high inflation and the declining status
of intellectuals, not democracy. However, democracy became a surrogate for personal
grievances because the collective-oriented Chinese culture regards any interest-based
grievances as selfish. Also, according to Pye, the movement escalated because Chinese
political conflict tends to take the form of a moral game. The students and the government
had continuously tried to shame and out-moralize each other, which had no solution other
than escalating confrontation.
Under this mechanism, actors may not be able to actively appropriate different elements
in a cultural repertoire or expand the cultural repertoire to their benefit. Value (or custom,
ideology and ritual) has almost total power over actors. In an extreme form, scholars of this
tradition (e.g., Pye 1990) will analyze the semiotic structure of certain values and
ideologies of a society and then demonstrate how the development of a historical event
embodies that semiotic structure. Social actions become no more than a script-driven
theatrical performance and historical analysis becomes an analysis of the cultural text. Yet,
while cultural texts do exercise great impact on social actions, the cultural repertoire
contains multiple and often conflicting texts, and different actors have different beliefs and
values. Therefore, when we find, in a particular time/place, that the majority of a
population follows a certain value or ideology, we need first to explain what contributes to
the domination of this particular cultural text in the first place, rather than too quickly
claim that ‘history is a semiotic discursive process’ (Sewell, 2005).
There is also a third mechanism through which culture can exercise an impact on social
actions – it shapes social actions at the level of instinct, habit and taken-for-granted
routines. The second and third mechanisms have a crucial difference. Under the second
mechanism, when actors follow certain values and ideologies, they do so because they
believe in them. The actors are still consciously aware what they are doing and why they
are doing it. However, it is easy to understand that, similar to Lucas’s (1974) discussion
on the third dimension of power, for some cultural codes the actors can be so indoctrinated
that they are able to act out the cultural codes instinctively without even invoking
much thinking. Currently, most of the analysis of the impact of culture on social actions
involves the first two mechanisms. However, many classic studies that emphasize the
emotional or non-rational (it was often mistakenly treated as irrational at that time) aspects
of the movement actually hinted at the existence of this mechanism (e.g. Blumer, 1946;
Killian, 1984; Turner & Killian, 1987). Although Pye (1990) does not formalize the
mechanisms behind his analysis, Chinese culture had such total power over the
development of the 1989 movement that culture under his analysis must have exercised its
impact on social actions at both conscious and subconscious levels.
One of the best-known episodes of the 1989 movement was the kneeling of three
students in front of the Chinese People’s Congress. This happened on 22 April when, after
Hu Yaobang’s state funeral, four student representatives were allowed to pass the police
line and deliver a petition to the government. As the students approached the People’s
Congress, one of them suddenly knelt down and another two followed, with only one
student remaining standing. During the imperial China era, kneeling in front of a
government compound to present a petition was routine behavior. When this happened,
the official in charge was expected to come out and receive the petition in public.
This patterned behavior has frequently appeared in traditional Chinese novels and dramas,
38 D. Zhao
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and the three students were no doubt influenced by the cultural code. In my interviews and
in other documents, I see no indication that this action was pre-planned. What happened on
the spot also suggests spontaneity because not all four students followed this unexpected
action, and it was perhaps no accident that the one who refused to kneel was Wu’er Kaixi.
As a Uigur student, he was apparently less influenced by traditional Chinese culture.
The example does not suggest that no cognition had been involved in the kneeling
incident. In real life, instinct and cognition are intimately connected and an action even
when started with instinct would trigger justifications in the process and afterward. The
highly confounded relationship between instinct and cognition makes it difficult for us to
provide a perfect real-life example for the functioning of instinctive routines in social
action. However, the example does suggest that instinct, habits and taken-for-granted
routines weigh importantly in activities that involve great emotions and spontaneity, and
that when individuals act spontaneously they tend to act out what they are most familiar
with, those cultural codes that have already been socialized as part of their taken-forgranted
routine or instinct.
Social Structure, Culture and Collective Action
Humans employ strategies, tend to follow what they believe, and act on instinct. Culture
plays different roles in each of the three ideal situations: as a tool-kit in the first instance, a
script in the second, and reveals itself through instinctive behaviors in the last. When we
treat these three cultural dimensions of social actions as basic mechanisms or ideal types,
few scholars have strong objections. However, once we intend to identify empirically what
mechanisms are behind any real-life social action, it will always run into problems because
the three mechanisms may all play a role in that action, and even the simplest social action
can be interpreted in more than one way. A typical case is panic running in a burning
theater. Traditionally, it was considered a non-rational instinctive behavior. However,
rational choice theorists conclude that panic running is a rational action because in an
emergency situation with no proper communication among individuals the most rational
reaction for each individual in a burning theater is to run ahead of the others in trying to
escape, even though it creates chaos and slows the pace of evacuation. Such an analysis is
certainly logical. However, if we imagine a situation where it is not humans but a large
herd of cows that are in a burning barn, the cows would perhaps escape in a similar way to
humans. Since cows are certainly not capable of rational calculation, but still behave in the
same way as humans in the same situation, a logical conclusion has to be that instinct may
also figure importantly for humans in the same situation.
The highly confounded nature of human behaviors – that is, even the simplest form of
behavior such as panic running may involve a mix of both cognition and instinct and can
be interpreted perfectly in more than one way – creates a huge hurdle in directly applying
the above three ideal typical mechanisms to empirical analysis. Fortunately, although at
the micro level we may never be able to pin down the functioning of exact mechanism(s)
in real-life social action, we should be able to analyze the relative importance of the above
three mechanisms under different situations. In the following, I propose several
propositions depicting the role of culture in social movements under different structural
conditions. The propositions are intended only as initial steps to capture some of the
important relationships between culture and collective actions under different
organizational and political conditions, but by no means exhaust all the possible
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements 39
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relationships between culture and social action. These propositions should also be
understood with the condition ‘all other factors being equal’ firmly in mind. (To highlight
this, I repeat this phrase in the first of the following propositions.) I start with the most
important one:
1. All other factors being equal, the bigger the role that SMOs (social movement
organizations) have played in a social movement, the more likely that the movement
actors are able to treat the cultural repertoire as a tool-kit and use it creatively for
their perceived benefit.
The activities of social movement always ramify certain cultural patterns of a society.
However, whether social movement actors are able to actively appropriate different
elements inside the cultural repertoire or even innovate on the existing culture depends on
how well that social movement is organized. The better organized a movement the more
the movement actors are able to appropriate the culture and form strategies to advance
their interests.4
When the movement strategies concern rhetoric, the process of this
cultural appropriation has been widely examined in social movement studies under the
framework of frame analysis (Snow et al., 1986; Snow & Benford, 1988, 1992; Benford,
1993, 1997; Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993; Hank, 1995; Diani, 1996; Zald, 1996; Evans,
1997; Tarrow, 1994). As McAdam (1994, p. 38) argues, ‘framing efforts can be thought of
as acts of cultural appropriation, with movement leaders seeking to tap highly resonant
ideational strains in mainstream society (or in a particular target subculture) as a way of
galvanizing activism’.
This proposition recognizes ‘the fluidity and flexibility of cultural practice’ as well as
‘the possibility of innovation and originality’ (Perry, 1992, pp. 1-13). Moreover, it also lays
out the structural conditions that allow actors to relatively free themselves from cultural
bounds and make ‘innovation and originality’ possible in the first place. Following this
logic, we are also able to reach the conclusion that, in comparison with social movements,
the activities of the people in a riot tend to be more bounded by certain cultural scripts even
though some individuals in a rioting crowd may have a very strong sense of freedom.
China scholars all agree that the languages and activities that the students employed
during the 1989 movement closely followed traditional Chinese culture. Some scholars
have attributed this traditionalism simply to the strong imprint of Chinese political culture
(Esherick & Wasserstrom, 1990; Pye, 1990). To understand what was behind this
traditionalism, Zhao (2000) compared the 1989 movement with the May 4th movement in
1919 and the December 9th movement in 1935/36 – the two largest student movements in
republican China’s history – and found that the rhetoric and activities used in the two
earlier movements were much less traditional than those used during the 1989 movement.
This is surprising because if movement activities are a simple reflection of cultural
imprints, the rhetoric and activities of the two earlier movements would be more
traditional because of the great cultural changes that China had experienced during the
twentieth century. On this puzzle, Zhao (2000) argues that the less traditional forms of the
two earlier student movements had much to do, among other factors, with a higher level of
organizational involvement in the two movements. During the December 9th movement,
for instance, after a student named Guo Qing was beaten and later died in jail, the students
organized a memorial service at Peking University. During the service, a student suddenly
jumped onto the stage and suggested carrying the coffin and demonstrating outside the
40 D. Zhao
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university (funeral protest is a typical protest script in Chinese culture). Most students
followed. However, the demonstrations met with head-on repression. Over a hundred
students were wounded and fifty-three were arrested. If we follow the standard Chinese
cultural scripts discussed by Pye (1990) in his analysis of the 1989 movement, we would
expect the students to have staged activities to shame and out-moralize the authorities after
this setback, and for the confrontation to have escalated. This did not happen, however,
because by the time of this demonstration, the CCP North China Bureau headed by Liu
Shaoqi had started to take control of the movement in Beijing, and the failure of this
demonstration was taken as an opportunity to redirect the movement.5
Liu Shaoqi
criticized the funeral protest as ultra-leftist and reorganized the CCP Beijing Committee.
The CCP North China Bureau also asked students to differentiate between the Nanjing
government and that of the local military strongman Song Zheyuan, and raised slogans
such as: ‘Support the Chief of the Committee Song to lead the anti-Japanese resistance!’
and ‘Support the 29th Armed Forces to fight against the Japanese!’ After the policy
changes, the local government became more sympathetic to the students’ cause and the
movement ended in relative success.
This example shows that Chinese students indeed have had a tendency to follow
culturally embedded forms of collective action during such movements. Yet it also
shows the extent to which a well-organized movement was able to appropriate and
change the cultural scripts for perceived benefits. The December 9th students were able
to drastically change its orientation because the student movement was then controlled
either by the CCP or the left-wing students who unconditionally followed the
CCP’s lead.
The above proposition can be stated in similar other ways when a social movement is
poorly organized. Thus, we have the following corollaries:
1a. The less the roles that SMOs have played in a social movement, the more likely
that the movement actors will adopt movement rhetoric and activities that follow
closely the traditional cultural scripts.
1b. When a movement is very poorly organized and spontaneous activities dominate
in the movement, culture will sometimes play its role in the movement in a way that
shapes the behavior of the movement activists through their habits and taken-forgranted
routines.
Here, the first corollary states another side of the same logic presented in the first
proposition, and the second one can be seen as an extreme case derived from the first
corollary. Both corollaries are based on an assumption that when a movement is poorly
organized and spontaneous activities figure importantly in that movement, time,
coordination and information for strategy making are all lacking and emotions tend run
high. What the movement activists are more likely to do under this kind of situation is to
follow what they are most familiar with or even to act on their instincts. The deep-seated
cultural scripts in the minds of the actors and the taken-for-granted aspect of cultural life
thus figure importantly. My reasoning here follows a well-established principle in social
psychology, that is, when individuals act spontaneously in an emotional situation they tend
to act out what they are most familiar with, to act according to those behavioral codes that
have already been imprinted in their minds and to which they have become habituated
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements 41
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(Triandis, 1989; Kitayama & Markus, 1994). Although the advocators of the political
process models have overlooked the importance of emotions and spontaneity in social
movements, they have reached a similar conclusion from another angle. As Tilly (1978,
p. 155) puts it: ‘flexible repertoire is the most general case for organized groups. The less
organized the group, the more likely that the advantage-of-familiarity’ types of behavior
will dominate in a movement.
The above proposition and corollaries are all based on the conviction that leaders of an
organization are more able to shelter themselves from the influence and pressure of the
crowd mass, and that organizations have also more information and resources and are
more able to coordinate to make meaningful decision making possible. These properties
allow movement organizations to actively and creatively appropriate the existing cultural
elements of a society for perceived benefits. Yet, it does not mean that individuals in a
poorly organized social movement are unable to appropriate the cultural repertoire in a
strategic manner. The problem is that when a movement is poorly organized, what we will
see in that movement will not be a few coordinated actions initiated by movement
organizers but most likely numerous spontaneous activities competing for the attention of
the potential movement participants. Once a movement acquires such a mobilization
structure, any kind of ‘psychological engineering’ of the potential movement participants
by movement organizers, which is very well documented in Perry’s (2002) analysis of the
Chinese communist movement, becomes impossible. What determines the domination of
certain rhetoric and activity patterns in a movement under such structural conditions is less
the intention of the movement activists than the audiences’ perception, which in turn is
shaped by the shared interpretation schemes located in the brains of the audiences. The
‘schemata of interpretations’ here are no more than some kind of time-tested cultural
values or scripts that the people in a society share. Therefore, even when some individuals
act in highly strategic ways in a poorly organized movement, the outcome of the
movement will still be driven by the dominant cultural scripts in the society. We have the
following proposition:
2. When a movement is poorly organized, what determines the development of the
social movement is not the nature of strategies or frames of the movement but the
dominant ‘schemata of interpretations’ shared by the public.
The three mechanisms that link the cultural repertoire with patterns of social actions
operate at different levels. Social actors are more able to appropriate the culture
actively and creatively under the first mechanism, closely follow a certain cultural
script they believe under the second mechanism, but can only act out a cultural script in
a taken-for-granted fashion through instinct and habit under the third mechanism. Put
differently, the role of culture in social actions becomes deeper and deeper from the
first to the third mechanism. Since ‘culture has more powerful effects where it is
deeper – deeply internalized in individual psyches, deeply integrated into bodies and
habits of action, or deeply embedded in taken-for-granted “mentalities”’ (Swidler,
1995, p. 31), we thus state the mechanism embedded in the second proposition more
explicitly as follows:
3. The impact of a society’s dominant culture will be more pervasive and
deterministic in a poorly organized than a well-organized movement.
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This proposition explains why many China specialists emphasize the importance of
Chinese cultural traditions in the 1989 movement. They do so because China’s traditional
culture cut deeper in the 1989 movement than in many other social movements in China.
The above propositions and corollaries do not suggest that organizations always
facilitate creative strategy making for the benefit of participants and the goals of a
movement. Once well organized, movement organizers are also able to use the cultural
tool-kits strategically for their own benefit and to foster hierarchical and oligarchic
tendencies within the movement (Michels, 1962; Piven & Cloward, 1977). But, for better
or for worse, better organized movements are more able to appropriate the existing culture
in a strategic way. Some individuals in a poorly organized movement may act very
innovatively in appropriating the existing culture, but their calculations tends to be poorly
grounded and go in different directions, their efforts will be cancelled out by more scriptdriven
and instinct-based activities, and the popular interpretation scheme in society will
further act as a powerful selection mechanism that favors those activities congenial to the
dominant cultural scripts. It seems to be for this reason that some American social
movement scholars have advocated a new, less hierarchical style of movement
organization for the purpose of avoiding the organization’s oligarchic tendency and, in the
meantime, maintaining the strategic efficiency that is characteristic of well-organized
social movements (Polletta, 2002).
In her classic article on the relationship between culture and social action, Swidler
(1986) discusses the mode of cultural influence under two kinds of structural conditions –
unsettled and settled lives. Unsettled lives are understood as a social condition when the
members of a society are inspired by new ideologies and ways of doing things, and settled
lives as a condition when existing ideologies and cultural patterns dominate society.
Swidler concludes that people tend to stick to and maintain the existing culture under
settled lives and to follow new ideologies at the expense of the existing culture under
unsettled lives even though they will still ‘draw on many tacit assumptions from the
existing culture’ in their decision making (p. 177). Swidler’s argument can be expanded by
including in the concept of unsettled lives not only the prevailing of new ideologies but
also other quick social changes brought by demographic crisis, industrialization,
globalization, state-initiated reforms, etc. Nevertheless, the empirical logic that Swidler
developed still holds after the conceptual extension. We thus have:
4. Under unsettled lives, movement actors are more able to actively and creatively
appropriate the existing culture or even introduce new cultural elements in a
strategic manner, while under settled lives the movement actors tend to follow
familiar cultural scripts and the taken-for-granted assumptions to fight for their
goals.
For social movements in the developing world, the mechanism revealed in this
proposition works in the opposite direction to the organization mechanisms discussed
above. That is, in most developing countries, social movements tend to be poorly
organized as a result of the repressive political environment, but, at the same time, the
lives in the developing world are highly unsettled because these countries are all
compelled to get rid of many parts of their traditional culture to achieve a quick change
toward modernity. Here, the movement may become ‘script driven’ or ritualistic owing to
the movement’s poorly organized nature, but the same environment also encourages
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements 43
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strategic thinking or even radicalism in an unsettled environment. This is why the
coexistence of radicalism and conservatism, and rationalism and traditionalism, has been a
major feature of social movements in China as well as in other developing countries.
Another structural force that has a great impact on culture’s role in social movements is
the nature of the state. If we treat totalitarianism and democracy as two opposite ideal
types of modern regimes, a totalitarian regime is naturally much more repressive than a
democratic state toward independent organizational lives. Under a totalitarian regime,
when a social movement is formed it is in general the result of serious political crises, and
the movement tends to be more spontaneous and poorly organized. We can thus expand
our first proposition to:
5. Movement actors are more able to treat the cultural repertoire as a tool-kit and to
use culture scripts in a creative manner under a democratic state than a totalitarian
regime.
This proposition is important for us to understand social movements in states that
seriously restrict associational lives. Based on this proposition, we can conclude that, other
factors being equal, a movement happening in a totalitarian regime tends to adopt rhetoric
and activities that follow the traditional cultural scripts closely, the impact on the
movement dynamics of the traditional culture of a society will be more pervasive and
deterministic in a totalitarian regime (proposition 3), and the movement dynamics under a
totalitarian regime are also determined more by the existing ‘schemata of interpretations’
in the minds of the people than by the strategies and intentions of the movement actors
(proposition 2).
Needless to say, the above discussion assumes an ideal typical totalitarian regime. In the
real world, we have post-totalitarian regimes with certain economic and political
pluralism, authoritarian regimes with extensive socioeconomic pluralism and a space for
organizations independent of the state, and cases where an authoritarian state is so weak
that de facto pluralism exists in society (Linz & Stepan, 1996). The impact of the nature of
the state on the patterns of social movements is not as simple and deterministic as the
above proposition suggests. Therefore, when a movement in a post-totalitarian or
authoritarian regime is able to base its mobilization on the available organizational
frameworks, that movement is more likely to be less deterministically influenced by the
traditional culture and is able to make strategic choices.
Since the mid-1990s, social movements organized by China’s emergent NGOs and
resourceful middle class have appeared on the political scene. These movements have
stable resources and organizations, innovative frames initiated by movement organizers
and savvy media strategies. They are also able to adopt both institutional and extrainstitutional
means to stage actions. They behave more like the movements present in the
Western democratic regime than the more spontaneously initiated 1989 movement, thus
showing the limitation of a kind of deterministic cultural analysis popular in the social
sciences. Let me take two recent environmental movement cases to illustrate this point
(Sun & Zhao, 2008).
In the last 20 years, the interests of China’s central and local government have become
differentiated. On environment issues, the central government tends to be more attuned to
the issue, while local governments are more likely to sacrifice the environment for
immediate economic benefits. Also during the same period, the Chinese government’s
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control over the media was loosened. News items that expose the ‘dark side’ of Chinese
society, provided they do not pose an immediate challenge to the authoritarian role, are
now allowed to publish in the media. Beijing environmental NGOs explored these
structured opportunities to the benefit of the movement.
Early in 1996, to stop the Deqin county government of Yunnan Province from logging
the forest in the natural habitat of the endangered Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys,
environmental NGOs in Beijing initiated a campaign later claimed to be the herald of
China’s green movement. They organized a student expedition team to Deqin to put
pressure on the local government and to attract media attention. Meanwhile, they also
appealed directly to the central government for support. Facing pressure from the media
and the central government, the local government was forced to abort its logging scheme.
After the success, Beijing environmental NGOs adopted similar strategies in other similar
actions. In a more widely known campaign for saving the Tibetan antelope from
commercially motivated poaching, the environmental NGOs allied with the media to gain
societal attention, successfully petitioned the then Vice Premier Wen Jiabao to intervene
in the issue in their favor, and gained enormous international support. In the end, the
Chinese government not only recognized the environmental NGOs’ efforts but also took
their suggestion to foster multi-province coordination in fighting against the poaching of
the antelope.
Here, I have no intention of denying that the activity patterns of Beijing environmental
movements still inevitably inform Chinese culture and the environmentalists still draw
from the Chinese cultural repertoire in making their decisions. Nevertheless, the
organization-based learning processes and the creative use of the media and even the
Chinese central government by the environmentalists contrasts sharply with the highly
emotional, script-driven and taken-for-granted activities popular during the 1989
movement.
Movements acting in an authoritarian regime are also likely to copy the culture of
authoritarianism even though the movement is fighting for democracy or other lofty goals.
This is so for two reasons. The first is simply cultural imprint. An authoritarian regime,
provided it is strong enough to affect people’s daily lives through various socialization
efforts, will make the authoritarian social routines the habit of the people. The second is a
more active learning process. An authoritarian regime, when it is very repressive, will
foster the rise of clandestine organizations and activities. Such an opposition movement
tends to copy the authoritarian structure of the old regime and to follow and develop their
strategies along the lines of an authoritarian culture that is at the core of the old regime’s
political scripts. This leads to the following proposition:
6. In a repressive authoritarian regime, even if a movement is well organized, the
political culture of the old regime will lead a movement to develop strategies that
follow the cultural scripts of the old regime.
After 1927, China’s nationalist government started to purge the communists. To survive
the ‘white terror’, the CCP went underground and remodeled itself into a highly
authoritarian Leninist Party. The CCP was so tightly organized in the nationalistcontrolled
cities that it resembled a secret society (Byron & Pack, 1992). The leftist
authoritarian culture that the CCP acquired in these earlier years had a huge impact that
has lasted to this day. During the 1989 movement, for example, indoctrinated by the
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements 45
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regime’s authoritarian culture, Beijing students, having started a hunger strike in
Tiananmen Square, managed the square in a highly authoritarian manner (Zhao, 2001,
Ch. 6). They smoked good cigarettes, drank good wines, and used the donated money to
acquire various privileges. They also set up hierarchical organizations with each leader
followed by multiple bodyguards. Finally, they established a very complicated picket line
system to limit the free movement of the people around the square. The spirit of the
regime’s authoritarian culture haunted a protest that supposedly fought for democracy.
Discussion
This article argues that culture shapes social movement activities via three ideal-typical
mechanisms: as tool-kits that protesters can employ strategically, as a script that inculcates
protesters with shared values that guide their actions, and as instinct that molds protesters’
action inadvertently. It then goes on to argue that although any concrete movement activity
is likely to involve the working of all three mechanisms, with the relative importance of
the three mechanisms in social movement changing with the structural conditions of a
society. Finally, it proceeds to develop several propositions linking structural conditions
and culture’s different roles in social movements. At the center of the propositions is the
argument that actors in a poorly organized social movement are more likely to follow
certain cultural scripts or even their culturally embedded emotions and instincts, while
actors in a well-organized movement are more able to take the cultural repertoire as a toolkit
to pursue the perceived benefits.
This article illustrates each ideal-typical cultural mechanism and proposition by one or
two empirical examples drawn from Chinese experiences. Several readers of an earlier
version of this article have questioned whether a few examples really prove my argument.
This is a highly legitimate question that deserves special attention. Here, I would like to
make it clear that the empirical examples in this article are not used for the purpose of
proving my argument. In fact, for the following two reasons, empirical examples never
prove anything in social sciences. First, such examples in social sciences are not supported
by any logic similar to mathematical induction. That is to say, regardless of how many
examples one has provided, they only strengthen but do not prove an argument in social
sciences. Therefore, deduction as used by Olson (1965) to develop his free-rider problem
is the only way in which one can really prove an argument. Second, even if we accept that
a large number of empirical examples serve to strengthen an argument, there is another
problem. For example, we may all agree that Olson’s deductively derived free-rider
problem has depicted an important mechanism. However, once we use any kind of
empirical examples to show the working of this Olsonian mechanism, skeptical readers
can always discredit the examples by asking whether the absence of collective action in the
examples we have provided is indeed a result of the free-rider problem or whether it
actually manifests other mechanisms such as the existence of strong repression, the lack of
shared values in a group, and so on. This is exactly the reason why Olson’s theory
of collective action has been frequently challenged by empirically minded scholars
(e.g. Fireman & Gamson, 1979; Ostrom, 1990). This example shows that while we can
deduce the working of a specific social mechanism analytically, once we apply it to
explain the dynamism of a particular empirical case, the application is very much prone to
error. It is in part for this second reason that I decide to support this article’s argument only
by empirical cases that I am most familiar with, in order to make sure my examples are not
46 D. Zhao
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going to be too far off the mark. In short, the empirical examples in this article are only
intended to give readers a feel of the working of the ideal-type mechanisms and the
propositions, not to provide proof for my argument.
In fact, to establish my argument, this article relies more on well-established research
findings in sociology and social psychology. For example, when I made my core
argument that the tool-kits aspect of culture is more important in a better organized
social movement while the script and taken-for-granted routine aspect of culture is more
important in a poorly organized social movement, I actually relied on three very welldeveloped
research traditions – frame analysis, collective behavior studies and social
psychological studies. Studying well-organized social movements under a democratic
setting, frame analysis scholars all agree that social movement activities are the result of
the ‘strategic framing’ of movement organizers. On the other hand, largely focused on
the riots and spontaneously emerging protest activities popular in the USA before the
1960s, collective behavior scholars see shared understandings and emotional activities
as the key in shaping the dynamics of riots or poorly organized social movements
(Turner & Killian, 1987). Finally, it is an established principle in social psychology that
individuals tend to act out what they are most familiar with – their habits – when they
act spontaneously in an emotional situation. It might be easy to provide counterempirical
cases to oppose my argument (even though I suspect that the empirical cases
that one has provided operate under very different structural conditions), but it is much
more difficult to challenge the mechanisms that are well established in other research
areas that support my argument.
That said, I must stress that this article is just a very preliminary step toward an explanatory
cultural analysis. The propositions do not exhaust the patterns of relationships among social
structure, culture and social actions, and the analysis of the article is elementary. I do hope,
however, that the argument made in this article might inspire great works and real
breakthroughs in the study of the relationships between culture and social action.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers of the journal for their very helpful criticisms
and suggestions in the process of revising the paper.
Notes
1. Hu was the general secretary of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party) in the 1980s. He was forced to
resign in 1987 after being criticized in the party for his light-handed treatment of the student movement in
1986.
2. It is widely believed that Weber’s concept of culture focuses on ideas and their impact on the action of
individual actors, and Durkheim’s culture concept locates culture in representations, rituals and symbols
(Swidler, 1995, pp. 25–26). To me, they just emphasize different sides of the same coin. Being interested in
social change, Weber needs to bring human agency into the analysis, but Durkheim’s focus is on what makes
society possible, and so he directs his attention to culture’s collective and relational aspects.
3. Although cultural repertoire changes as the result of the improvisation, innovation and learning of the
conscious actors, a society and its culture often develop not as the actors intended. Mistakes and unintended
consequences weigh heavily in most social processes.
4. The existence of well-organized SMOs is only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition that facilitates
movement activists to treat the cultural repertoire as a tool-kit for their perceived benefits. As shown by the
example of the early Chinese communist movement in the last section, once committed to a certain
Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements 47
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ideology/culture, leaders of a well-organized movement will behave more or less according to the
ideological/cultural script, which greatly narrows their strategy choice.
5. Liu was the president of China before the Cultural Revolution, and died during the Cultural Revolution after
being purged from the CCP.
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Dingxin Zhao is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is interested in
political sociology, broadly defined. His research covers the areas of social movements,
nationalism, historical sociology, social change and economic development. His interests
also extend to sociological theory and methodology. Zhao has published articles in
journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social
Forces, Sociology, Problems of Post-Communism and China Quarterly. He has published
an award-winning book entitled Power of Tiananmen (2001), which studies the 1989 prodemocracy
movement in Beijing. He has also published two books in Chinese, namely
Social and Political Movements (2006) and Eastern Zhou Warfare and the Rise of the
Confucian-legalistic State (2006).
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