Analyzing Social Movements: A Conceptual Framework

This assignment presents a conceptual framework for analyzing social movements, focusing on the factors influencing their emergence and development. The framework emphasizes the importance of structural factors, including socioeconomic, political, and technological contexts, as well as the role of traditional and social media. It utilizes resource mobilization theory, highlighting how media platforms facilitate the mobilization of social movements. The framework outlines the antecedents, instrumental factors, and agenda of social movements, as well as international responses. The student's work provides a visual representation of the framework, demonstrating the relationships between these elements. The framework is designed to be a tool for analyzing the traits, characteristics, or development of many different social movements, not just a single movement. The assignment draws on relevant literature to support the framework's components.

Running head: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Conceptual Framework for Analyzing Social Movements
Student’s name
University
Author’s note

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
A conceptual framework refers to the process of synthesizing relevant literature and
subsequently developing an informed strategy to explain a given phenomenon. To be more
specific, a conceptual framework provides a researchers with pertinent ideas to correlate the
different variables of the research and connect them together to develop the structure if the
investigation. Conceptual framework emerges out of the broader perspective of the research, i.e.
the theoretical framework. The latter is constructed by the empirically tested theories extracted
from the literature review. Hence, in order to develop a conceptual framework for a particular
research topic, one must identify the theoretical framework relevant to the issue (Kumar, 2019).
The purpose of the present essay is to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing
social movements. To this end, the research has to define and theorize the concept of social
movement first. Then, analyzing the systematic approach to social movements, a conceptual
framework can be developed.
According to Deric Shannon, social movements are “organizational structures and
strategies that may empower oppressed populations to mount effective challenges and resist the
more powerful and advantaged elites" (as cited by Staggenborg, 2015). In this sense, social
movements always contain a class conflict, mobilizing the mass to achieve a social or political
goal. In this regard, resource mobilization theory is one of the most relevant theoretical
framework to analyze social movements. The theory emphasizes the importance of resources in
the context of social movements. Media, labor, economy, legitimacy, knowledge, as well as
support from the power-holding elites—all constitute the necessary resources for such
movements (John & Mayer, 2017). Moreover, this form of social theory is highly effective in

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
explaining the recent social movements that have been mobilized with the help of social media
and networking platforms in the contemporary timeframe.
Since the beginning of 2000s, there have been a number of social movements such as
WikiLeaks protest, Israel-Gaza, Iran Green Revolution, Egyptian Revolution, Arab Springs,
Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia, and even the most recent Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong,
which mobilized an unorganized, unled mass of protesters through social networking sites
(Carty, 2018). All these movements could be analyzed with the help of resource mobilization
theory, considering social media as a major resource.
To analyze these social movements facilitated by social media, the context, instrumental
factors, feedbacks and the end goal of the respective movements have to be understood. Hence,
all these aspects constitute the necessary element of the conceptual framework of the analysis of
social movements. To this end, the conceptual framework will first analyze the structural factors,
indicating the context of the issue. In this regard, it has to explore the socioeconomic, political
and technological contexts. These contexts also serve to identify the causes or antecedents of the
movements. Further, the relation between these contexts and social media will be identified, i.e.
how they are reflected in the social media. Thereafter, it will try to determine how this reflections
culminates to the social movements, establishing the role of social media as a resource. The
diagram of the conceptual framework is presented below.

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Technological
Context
Socio-economic
Context
Social Media
Social
Movement
s
A
N
T
E
C
E
D
E
N
T
S
Institutional
Repression
Traditional Media
Structural Factors Instrumental Factors

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
References
Carty, V. (2018). Social movements and new technology. Routledge.
John, D. M., & Mayer, N. Z. (2017). Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial
theory. In Social movements in an organizational society (pp. 15-42). Routledge.
Kumar, R. (2019). Research methodology: A step-by-step guide for beginners. Sage Publications
Limited.
Staggenborg, S. (2015). Social movements. Oxford University Press, USA.
Political
Context AgendaInternational
Response