This article was downloaded by: [Monash University Library]On: 08 December 2014, At: 10:41Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Click for updates

Social Movement Studies: Journal ofSocial, Cultural and Political ProtestPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csms20

Social Movement Studies, SocialMovement Studies, and the Challengesof Parochialism: A Rejoinder toPoulson, Caswell and GrayGraeme Hayesa

a School of Languages & Social Sciences, Aston University,Birmingham, UKPublished online: 19 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Graeme Hayes (2014) Social Movement Studies, Social Movement Studies, andthe Challenges of Parochialism: A Rejoinder to Poulson, Caswell and Gray, Social Movement Studies:Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 13:2, 243-247, DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2014.883965

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2014.883965

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 tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand 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 Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial 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/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

0:41

08

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Social Movement Studies, Social MovementStudies, and the Challenges of Parochialism:A Rejoinder to Poulson, Caswell and Gray

GRAEME HAYES

School of Languages & Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK

ABSTRACT In this short rejoinder, I briefly contextualise and discuss the implications of Poulson,Caswell and Gray’s article for Social Movement Studies.

KEY WORDS: Social movements, journals, publishing, parochialism, isomorphism

In her recent discussion of African participants at the 2007 Nairobi World Social Form,

Johanna Simeant noted a lack of attention in the social movement literature to the

‘concrete and practical conditions for the internationalisation of activism’, and especially

to the ‘paths that reshape the ways of making Southern voices heard’ (2013, pp. 247, 261).

Thus, she argued, we tend as scholars to privilege transnationalisation and fluidity, the

overcoming of borders, over what she terms the ‘sociology of the plane ticket’: the

material, linguistic and social constraints which regulate access to knowledge and its

exchange.

This is a good starting point to consider the implications of Stephen Poulson, Cory

Caswell and Latasha Gray’s timely and thought-provoking analysis of the scholarship

published inMobilization and Social Movement Studies (SMS) from 2002 to 2010. In this

short rejoinder, I do not wish to critique the conceptual validity of the argument, and still

less contest the picture they paint: the article speaks for itself. My feeling is that this is

exactly the kind of paper the discipline needs, and should start a conversation about what

we are doing, how we are doing it and what it is that we are not seeing; to borrow the terms

that Simeant uses, a conversation about the ‘concrete and practical conditions’ in which

knowledge is produced and published in our journals, and to the ‘paths that reshape the

ways of making Southern voices heard’: what we might even call a ‘sociology of the

ASTA’ (accept-subject-to-amendments).

Poulson and his collaborators make three main arguments: first, that non-Western

movements are under-represented in social movement journals;1 second, that conservative

movements are under-represented in social movement journals and third, that these twin

under-representations can in large measure be explained by institutional parochialism, or

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

Correspondence Address: Graeme Hayes, School of Languages & Social Sciences, Aston University, Aston

Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK. Email: g.a.hayes@aston.ac.uk

Social Movement Studies, 2014

Vol. 13, No. 2, 243–247, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2014.883965

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

0:41

08

Dec

embe

r 20

14

to put it another way, our tendency as scholars to write about what we know, what we are

most familiar with. As a consequence, they argue, given that the pressures to parochialism

are likely to be universal, the clearest course of action available to editors seeking to make

their journals more diverse and inclusive is, for the first problem, to ‘actively forge

connections with scholars who maintain an association with communities in the global

south’, whilst for the second problem, they offer few solutions based on the (entirely

reasonable) assumption that most social movement scholars are likely to have progressive

sympathies.

If disciplinary boundary-setting and maintenance can be expected to privilege certain

types of knowledge and approaches to it over others, as Poulson and his collaborators note,

one might equally expect a relatively young, interdisciplinary journal with an explicitly

international outlook, originating from a UK-based academic culture in which the study of

social movements has traditionally had little purchase within the mainstreams of either

sociology or political science (Bagguley, 1997), to be a little less vulnerable to these

pressures. As we have recently discussed (Doherty, Hayes & Rootes, 2014), SMS was

founded to provide a distinctive forum for work on social movements; indeed, the research

interests of the founding editors (Tim Jordan, Adam Lent and George McKay) reflected

not just a generalized British tradition of context-rich, qualitative scholarship with a

special focus on movement-generated ideas, but also a disciplinary breadth locating the

journal outside the mainstreams of the sociology of social movements and contentious

politics. This has doubtless contributed to the journal’s inclusive, catholic editorial policy,

an approach maintained by its subsequent editorial teams.

From the point of view of the journal’s current editorial team therefore, one of the

questions we need to ask is how the pressures to isomorphism highlighted in Poulson,

Caswell and Gray’s article are structured. We should not expect parochialism to be located

in publication data alone; logically, there should be a correspondence between the

institutional affiliations of our published authors, the broad geographical locations of those

academic colleagues who give up their time freely to carry out double blind peer review

for the journal and the institutional location of our readership. Yes, given our aims and

interests, we might expect to be – as confirmed – a little more ‘worldly’ than the norm,

even for sociology; but SMS does not operate on a tabula rasa, but rather within the

resource frameworks and cultural orientations of the subject disciplines and education

sectors from which it emerged. What does our data show?

The data show, first of all, that our readership base is essentially located in North

America and the UK. Our core subscription statistics have been fairly constant over the

last five years or so, though the picture is difficult to read because so many of our

subscriptions are packaged in multi-journal online sales agreements. Article downloads

are perhaps a better proxy for us to get a sense of who is reading us and where. Over the

five-year period 2008–2012, our download statistics increased fourfold. There are

numerous reasons for this: the general trend amongst scholars to work with electronic

rather than paper copy; some particularly successful issues, such as the special issue on

Occupy! (Krinsky & Pickerill, 2012); in the wake of the Arab spring and Occupy itself, an

increased visibility and salience amongst students and scholars of social movement themes

and problematics; successful targeted marketing, and so on. In the light of this discussion,

what is interesting is that the principal countries in which our readership is based (by

number of article downloads, for the 2012 calendar year) are the UK and the USA

(between them, making up just under half our readership, in roughly even proportions),

244 G. Hayes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

0:41

08

Dec

embe

r 20

14

followed by Canada (9%), Australia (7.5%), the Netherlands (5%) and Germany (3.5%).

India, New Zealand, Italy and Sweden are next on the list, grouped closely together around

the 2% mark. We can be confident that our readership is primarily Western, (globally)

Northern and Anglophone, and located in North America, Australasia and western Europe.

Beyond, there is a clear concordance between our readership data and the data for our

submitting authors, by geographical location of institution. Of the manuscripts submitted

to us in 2012, a third had single or lead authors based in the USA, and a fifth in the UK;

the next most frequent countries were Canada (5%), followed by Australia, France and

the Netherlands (3.5% each).2 If one looks at the geographical location of authors citing

work that has appeared in SMS, a similar picture emerges: authors are based

predominantly in the USA and the UK, followed by Australia, Canada, Sweden and the

Netherlands. Anecdotally: for a submission investigating local protest in West Africa,

we issued 13 invitations before securing two referees. We may simply have approached

the wrong people in this instance; perhaps more likely, our database of referees was a

poor fit for the subject matter, whilst our disciplinary locations meant that we had few

active contacts in an analytical field usually constructed in western academic institutions

as ‘development’. Note that in her discussion of the sociology of participants in the

Nairobi WSF, one of the few we have published on African activists, Simeant constructs

her approach by drawing on the ‘paradoxes often observed in development studies’

(2013, p. 261).

Language, equally, is a problem. The journal’s editorial team is strongly

characterised by multilingual ability, by personal research networks which stretch

outside the transatlantic channels of Anglophone academia, and by a conscious

desire to promote the work of scholars for whom English is not their first language.

Yet, we are also an English-language journal, and are often in the position of

requiring potential contributors to have their work checked by an English native

speaker before we can publish or even send it out for review (we generally have

neither the time nor the resources to do this ourselves at SMS). In their article,

Poulson et al. identify a lack of linguistic expertise as a barrier to Anglophone

scholars working on non-Anglophone contexts (and more so, to Northern scholars

working on the South), and thus a pressure to parochialism in subject selection. But

by the same token, the reverse is true, and perhaps more significant: for non-

Anglophone scholars, particularly those working outside well resourced university

departments in western Europe, linguistic constraints can be a serious barrier to

publication. Moreover, linguistic constraints frequently operate at the level of our

choices of referees: the tendency for double blind peer review to be conducted by

fluent speakers of English perhaps has an even stronger bias effect on the work that

we publish, both because it reinforces the norms and approaches of Anglophone

scholarship (including perceptions of what does and does not constitute high quality,

groundbreaking research) and because referee choice, and with it the interaction that

oils its wheels, activates potential publication and readership networks.

Quite probably, none of this will surprise anyone, but it should give us pause for

thought. Readers will notice that I have conflated two issues here: how SMS as a journal

opens itself up more effectively to scholars from the global South in particular, and

how we as a community of scholars based in the global North (I think it is fair to say)

deal with the selection bias inherent in how we are drawn to familiarity. Obviously,

both of these issues are crucial: but I probably rate the former as more important, and

Social movement studies 245

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

0:41

08

Dec

embe

r 20

14

more of a challenge for us as a journal. To put it another way, if all scholars are equally

affected by the urge to parochialism through a combination of resources, access,

affinity and cultural reproduction, how do we ‘spread the isomorphism’ across our

pages?

This is an important question for us not just on broad ideological grounds, but on

academic grounds. Poulson et al. argue that there is no reason why we should see parochial

impulses as a threat to the quality of work produced in the discipline, arguing (surely

correctly) that familiarity often brings a level of understanding and insight denied to those

operating from a distance. Yet, the discipline as a whole would undoubtedly also benefit

from the wider discussion of approaches to collective action generated by Southern (and

Eastern) scholars, as it would from the sustained, rigorous testing in non-Western contexts

and of its dominant theoretical and conceptual frameworks of contentious politics,

networks, framing, and, latterly, emotions, which have been largely developed over the

past half century through the study of Western progressive movements, and which are

undoubtedly narrow (see for discussion, Cox & Flesher Fominaya, 2013). There is in our

pages a lack of focus not just on non-Western movements and contexts, but also little in

the way of small and comparative analysis, applying the kind of inter-disciplinary,

context-rich, qualitative scholarship which SMS has long championed to broadly similar

movements and ideas across Western/non-Western lines. Equally, we could say much the

same for work on conservative movements. For the record, we would broadly disagree

with Poulson, Caswell and Gray that studies of repression equate to studies of conservative

movements, but nonetheless broadly agree with the tenor of their argument: they

concentrate in their concluding discussion on far right movements, but in truth there is

relatively little discussion in SMS of right-wing collective action, whether on economic or

social or cultural issues.

What paths, then, can contribute to achieving a greater plurality of voices and subjects

in our pages? A Profiles section – shorter articles than the norm, predominantly providing

thick description and concise, theoretically informed analysis – was introduced by the

journal in 2009, and has developed, without it necessarily being our intention, into

something of a platform for accounts and discussions of conservative and (especially) non-

Western movements. We hope that a forthcoming special issue, on global repertoires of

protest, will further develop such scholarship. The danger, of course, is that this section of

the journal, whilst providing a forum, might become something of a ghetto: we hope not,

hoping it will serve rather to increase its prominence and visibility, and that it will lead to

more submissions from scholars working from and on the South in particular, and perhaps

challenging the paradigms that we work with. The challenge for us, as a journal and more

broadly as a discipline, is to encourage scholarship which develops unfamiliar approaches

to familiar themes, tests familiar approaches on unfamiliar movements and enables

unfamiliar voices access to familiar networks of scholars. There is much to be gained from

such an agenda – and much work to be done.

Notes

1. There are, of course, other social movement journals than the ones featured here – one could start with the

excellent Interface and the newly launchedContention – but here I mirror the argument made by Poulson et al.

2. Note that these are submissions, and do not correspond therefore to published articles. There was an unusually

large number of Profiles in 2012, because of the Occupy! special issue.

246 G. Hayes

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

0:41

08

Dec

embe

r 20

14

References

Bagguley, P. (1997). Beyond political sociology? Developments in the sociology of social movements.

Sociological Review, 45, 147–161.

Cox, L., & Flesher Fominaya, C. (2013). European social movements and social theory: A richer narrative? In L.

Cox & C. Flesher Fominaya (Eds.), Understanding European movements: New social movements, global

justice struggles, anti-austerity protests (pp. 7–29). Routledge: London.

Doherty, B., Hayes, G., & Rootes, C. (2014). Social movement studies in Britain: No longer the poor relation? In

G. Accornero & O. Fillieule (Eds.), Social movement studies in Europe: A state of the art. Oxford: Berghahn,

forthcoming.

Krinsky, J., & Pickerill, J. (2012). Occupy! Social Movement Studies, 11, 279–287.

Simeant, J. (2013). Committing to internationalisation: Careers of African participants at the world social forum.

Social Movement Studies, 12, 245–263.

Graeme Hayes is Editor in Chief of Social Movement Studies.

Social movement studies 247

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 1

0:41

08

Dec

embe

r 20

14