Social movements and advocacy groups: what lies beneath? Part 2
In part 1 of this article I discussed what motivates people to join social movements and how the psycho-social context shapes what goes on inside them.
In part 2 of this article, I discuss the following 3 questions:
What impact has neo-liberal political and economic ideology had on movements?
What are movements’ attitudes towards leadership and structure?
How can movements make sense of the emotional and social context they work in and make better choices?
Corporatisation of social movements
Movements are receiving more and more money from private philanthropy. Philanthropy sees social problems as opportunities to address through the market, rather than political questions to be addressed through democratic state apparatus.
Ironically, the markets through which philanthropy generates its funds, have tended to reproduce and increase the social and economic inequalities that movements are aiming to ameliorate. Funds are nevertheless distributed to movements and organisations on a charitable rather than reparative basis.
Driven by requirements by foundations but also ideas about organisations rooted in liberal orthodoxy, grant recipients are under pressure to be legally constituted and registered and to mirror formal businesses, with a board, a strategy, staffing systems and HR policies. In some cases, movements’ purpose has expanded to include the delivery of services, that were once the purview of the state.
To add to this, a significant onus is placed on accounting for, and reporting on how funds are spent, short term impact stories and the achievement of quantitative metrics, all of which absorbs a significant proportion of the money movements have been granted.
While some of this is helpful to e.g. help the movement to learn from and account for its resources, or to recruit a diversity of employees through competitive processes rather than through one’s personal social network, it often changes the way in which power is distributed across the movement, whose voice counts, the way decisions are made and the sorts of decisions that are made - not always for the better.
While the public might have a somewhat romantic notion that it is young people from the working classes who work for social movements, that is certainly not the case now. Movements now generally draw in well-educated, highly mobile people from the middle classes, who often received support from their parents to help them onto the career ladder.
Movements are often limited in the kind of strategies and tactics they can pursue with civil disobedience, confrontational tactics, associations with certain groups or political views generally off-limits.
For instance, movements such as the Mad Pride movement in North America, despite their more revolutionary roots have morphed into a classic NGO relying heavily on the systems it is trying to influence including governments and corporations, which are pushing for their grantees to deradicalize.
In an atmosphere of increased scarcity, movements compete with potential allies and collaborators, manifesting in limited sharing of information and pooling of resources.
Where movements lack the structures required by philanthropy, funds often flow to them via professionalised intermediaries, which have grown to accumulate significant power.
In a way, by funding social movements and advocacy organisations, philanthropy protects the system that is at the root of the problem they are trying to solve. Lankelly Chase, acknowledged the contradiction between making money and facilitating social change publicly recently, concluding that its existence was a continuation of colonial capitalism and decided to wind down its operations.
Ambivalence towards leadership and structure
History is littered with cases where institutions and those in authority have misused and abused their power with devastating consequences. Social movements have done a lot to highlight this and campaign for adequate checks and balances.
Not surprisingly then, the words authority and institution are often seen as dirty words amongst social justice activists where authority is equated with authoritarian, and institutions are assumed to be aimless and top heavy.
This has influenced the role of institutions and leaders internally. While clearly defined roles (including leadership roles), authority relationships, procedures and structures can help movements more effectively work towards their primary purpose, movements and activists are often deeply ambivalent.
Some New Social Movements (NSM) have tended towards leaderless and flat structures drawing on approaches such as holocracy and sociocracy, which emphasise equality in decision making based on, somewhat ironically, an elaborate bureaucracy of rules and procedures which can easily obscure informal hierarchies and centres of power.
In one example, the board of a network of social justice funders met its need to improve its bureaucracy with great reluctance. This manifested in deferring decision making, avoiding difficult conversations during important meetings and ultimately removing an effective ED.
One could argue that the reason this was happening was that the activists funded by the networked often worked to dismantle bureaucracies and could not see how a robust bureaucracy could support their organisation to grow and develop.
So what does it mean to use one’s authority to promote a healthy form of leadership across a movement and to develop structures that are in service to the movement’s purpose?
This might mean holding space for members to engage in dialogue, considering alternatives and being willing to influence and be influenced. This is counter to conventional leadership practices which ironically might create anxiety in both the leader and those who are being led.
All this is in contrast to a history where (old) social movements and trade unions were/are immensely proud of their leaders and tended to be highly structured. But in a way, given the stressful situations they find themselves in, activists continue to look for leaders and figureheads.
Greta Thunberg is a good example within the climate and environment movement. She started a school climate strike aged 16 and went on to acquire millions of social media followers, attracted mainstream media coverage across the world, become a de facto spokesperson for the climate movement and addressed heads of state at key global events.
She meets her supporters’ desire for a “transcendent force, a charismatic super-hero, a new prophet to lead them to the promised land” and given her identity, reverses the common idealised notion of a Messiah leader. Yet in achieving this status she reinforces her role as a Messiah.
Sense making and decision making
Emotions, ideas and interests of activists and those of their stakeholders, as well as the quality of relationships and power dynamics between them play an important role in the life of social movements and advocacy organisations.
The desire to compete, to control, to want power, are all part of the human condition. But many of us are socialised to see these characteristics as bad, especially in a movement which aims to ameliorate the effects of these urges at a societal level. So these issues tend to go undiscussed and are often buried, with activists falling into the same habitual and often unhelpful patterns of thinking and acting.
This can leave activists overwhelmed and forcing them to ‘act out’, pulling them away from their purpose. Without any intention to do so the ‘oppressed can end up being the oppressor’, while people outside the movement who are indifferent to one’s cause but have the potential to contribute to its purpose may be driven away.
How can the energy being generated by movements and their work be channelled into love and constructive action? Activists, like other people, tend to discharge difficult feelings and name awkward dynamics in private: the so-called hidden transcripts. While doing this helps people feel better temporarily, they rarely improve the situation.
Enabling activists to surface such feelings and perceptions together with colleagues in a safe enough space, can help them make sense of them and return to a state of mind where they can learn, face up to the dilemmas they are facing and make more conscious choices about how to go on together. Creating a reflexive space can also help members to consider who they are (becoming) and what it is they are doing together, what do they believe to be important and true and how might they take the next step together to address their current circumstances?
Some activists/movements have welcomed opportunities to discuss, reflect on, process and contain difficult experiences together. Others have drawn on traditional spiritual practices to provide grounding, care and healing.
However, sharing one’s feelings with fellow activists especially in a competitive environment, can be highly risky as one might be seen as weak and ‘not being up to it’.
Building up a practice of reflection therefore takes time and patience (to build up trust), a good degree of maturity and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty and not knowing (all of which may require some individual work such as meditation and therapy).
But living in a networked world as we do, where many of us are working online, have multiple often short term roles, developing a practice of reflection is challenging. Perhaps all activists can do is to find/create small islands of peace along with small groups of others amidst “these raging seas”.