This chapter is concerned with the ‘political process’ approach to social movements which concentrates explicitly on the ‘external environment’ in which social movements operate, and gives this environment explanatory weight when it comes to accounting for why social movements emerge in certain places at certain times, and whether or not they have successful outcomes.

The approach is labelled ‘political’ process because the main writers have suggested that the most important aspects of the environment that movements face are political ones. In fact, the state and political institutions play a central role, it is argued, in the emergence and fortunes of social movements; a claim that we will critically evaluate in later chapters. In looking at how political process theory has studied the external environment of movements, we will encounter some central debates – not least the debate surrounding how to relate political structures and culture to social movement mobilization – that will require us to put our ‘relational’ thinking to work once again.

One of the series of mosaics, probably of the fourth century ad, discovered in the early 1960s in the so-called House of the Menander at Mytilene on Lesbos (Charitonides et al. 1970: 38–41 and pl. 4.1) declares itself to be a representation of Act III of Samia (Σαμίας μέ(ρος) Γ) and labels the characters, from left to right, as Μάγειρος‚ Δημέας and Χρυσίς. The scene illustrated is that of the expulsion of Chrysis from Demeas’ house (369–83). Demeas (white-haired, white-bearded, and wearing a long, belted, sleeved robe), is advancing towards Chrysis, with his right arm outstretched and his stick raised threateningly in the other hand; his mouth is open. Chrysis, who is holding the baby, is very richly dressed: both her long inner garment, and her shorter outer one, are multi-coloured, her hair is elaborately styled, and she appears to be wearing a tiara and a necklace. She looks slightly towards Demeas as he speaks to her. The Cook, who is a black man (283–390n.) and has something of a pot belly, wears a brown outer garment cut very short and, it would appear, trousers; he is watching and listening intently, and perhaps thinking of intervening (his left foot is turned towards Demeas and Chrysis), but has not yet done so. If one particular moment is represented, it may be 382–3, when Demeas for the third time orders Chrysis to go away (ἐκ τῆς οἰκίας ἄπιθι) and the Cook is on the point of resolving to go up to him (προσιτέον) and protest.

We began the book with a consideration of ‘collective behaviour’ (CB), and in this penultimate chapter, we embark upon a consideration of ‘misbehaviour’. ‘Misbehaviour’ literally means not behaving in the way in which you are required to behave. ‘Good behaviour’ (compliant behaviour) is the basis of the social order. We learnt from Blumerin Chapter 2 that behaviour that subverts the ‘cultural pattern’ (society's rules, norms, and expectations) rather than conforming to it, is the secret to changing the social order. In this chapter, we employ the concept of ‘misbehaviour’, taken from organizational studies, to consider not only organized forms of resistance, but ‘every impulse to dissent’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999, 39).

We have come across a number of indications in the book as to why looking at protest outside social movement organizations (SMOs) could be important. Sometimes, social movements do not engage in direct confrontations with the state, but focus upon symbolic struggles instead (see Chapter 5). This means that, excepting for a few visible moments of public protest, social movement activity can be ‘submerged’ (Melucci, 1980, 1989), and can involve individuals in constructing cultural alternatives, which, while not divorced from collective efforts at change, can involve them in carrying out collective action ‘on their own’.

What follows is not a complete account of the Homeric dialect. Its aim is to give the reader a sense of the salient aspects of the dialect and an indication of where historically its range and variety came from. It does not therefore cover every aspect of the language, nor for the most part does it consider features which are familiar from Attic, nor rarer exceptions or unusual forms. Where these occur in books 13–14, they are dealt with in the commentary. Many of the points here are controversial, but detailed discussion has been avoided for the sake of comprehensibility.

The dialect mixture

As we have it, the language of epic is principally the Ionic dialect spoken (with local variations) in Euboea, the islands of the eastern Aegean and Asia Minor,107 with an admixture of forms from the Aeolic dialect spoken (with local variations) in Thessaly, Boeotia and northern islands like Lesbos.

This chapter is concerned with ‘collective behaviour’ (CB), a subfield of American Sociology which claimed social movements and protest as its subject matter in the first half of the twentieth century and reflected, in particular, on the rise of anti-democratic movements like fascism. CB should not be thought of as one united approach, but instead a field of research interest that attracted sociologists of very different theoretical persuasions. The two sociologists that we will look at here are Herbert Blumer (a symbolic interactionist) and Neil Smelser (a structural functionalist). We will delve into what these theoretical labels mean in the course of the chapter, but only cursory sociological knowledge is needed to know that symbolic interactionism is heavily critical of structural functionalism (and vice versa), meaning that the leading figures of CB in no way propose the same approach to social movements and protest. Blumer and Smelser are united in their desire to understand ‘collective behaviour’, not in their perspective on it.

Having said this, the tendency of critics has been to lump together the different strands of CB in order to highlight the common thread in their thinking. CB theorists of whatever persuasion, argues Doug McAdam (1982), share the assumption that social problems are the root-cause of protest, that social problems ignite psychological grievances and strong emotions, and that these emotions push individuals over the edge and out on to the streets. This common thread leads to a conceptualization of CB as ‘irrational group behaviour’ caused by ‘strains’ in society, and the ‘grievances’ they create for people. Like a bottle of pop once shaken, society is just waiting for those ‘moments of madness’ when frustrated individuals duly explode.

Although only about half of the first two acts has survived, the essentials of the action can be reconstructed with very little uncertainty, not least because in the early part of the play the action appears to have been rather slow-moving.

Demeas, a wealthy, unmarried Athenian, adopted Moschion as his son when Moschion was a young child (cf. 7–9) and brought him up in affluence (13–16). After Moschion had grown up, Demeas, by then fairly advanced in years, fell in love with a hetaira from Samos named Chrysis, and Moschion encouraged him to take her into his house (19–28).

Moschion himself fell in love with Plangon, the daughter and only child of Nikeratos, Demeas’ much poorer neighbour. Apparently, however, he at first took no steps to seek her hand in marriage, possibly because he was afraid his father would object to his choosing a bride who would bring little or nothing by way of dowry. Then Demeas and Nikeratos went away together on a long business trip to the Black Sea region – which ruled out any possibility of marriage until such time as they returned. Plangon's mother and Chrysis struck up a friendship (35–8), which led to their holding an all-night women's party together at Demeas’ and Moschion's house for the festival of the Adonia (38–46) – during which Moschion raped Plangon (see ) with the result that she became pregnant (47–50). He immediately went to see Plangon's mother and made a sworn promise to marry her when her father returned (53n.).

Adoptive father and adopted son

As soon as the Bodmer papyrus made it possible to view and understand Samia more or less as a whole, it was quickly perceived (Treu 1969; Mette 1969; Jacques 1971: xxviii–xli; Lloyd-Jones 1972) that the relationship between Moschion and Demeas was a crucial feature, perhaps the crucial feature, of the play, even though it is rather rare for them to be on stage together. A major determinant of Moschion's actions, evident from the prologue on, is his awareness of how much he owes to his adoptive father, and his sense of shame at having acted in a way that would lower him in his father's estimation. An even stronger determinant of Demeas’ actions is his desire to believe the best of his son if at all possible, to avoid quarrelling with him, and to avoid doing anything that might injure his reputation. In Act II this leads Demeas to condone Chrysis’ apparent offence against him (in rearing ‘her’ baby instead of exposing it, 132n.), contrary to his original intentions, when Moschion urges him to, and then to put pressure on a reluctant Nikeratos to have Moschion and Plangon married that very day; in Act III it leads him to expel Chrysis from his house on the mere presumption that Moschion, being a person of good character, could not have committed a serious sexual wrong, and also to avoid telling her the real reason for her expulsion; in Act IV, and again in Act V, it leads him to apologize (537–8, 702–3) for an ‘injustice’ that was at least as much Moschion's fault as his own.

Closure’ and transition

‘Books 13–14’ cover the transition between the end of the wanderings and the beginning of the long series of episodes on Ithaca. The division into books is almost certainly post-Homeric, and may even be the result of commercial considerations: it has therefore no especial authority. The most natural place for a pause in this part of the epic would be 13.93, where the sun rises on Ithaca: if the Odyssey was, as is possible, performed over two days, this would have made a good opening for the second morning. However, a notable technique employed in making the transition from the ‘fairy-tale’ world of the wanderings to the ‘real’ world of Ithaca is the use of a number of ‘closural’ techniques, which suggest at a number of points that we are coming to the close of the episode, but the actual end is constantly deferred in a variety of ways.

The end of book 12 closes Odysseus’ story, but not quite the context in which it stands, the evening meal in Alcinous’ palace: that closure comes very soon, as the Phaeacians all head for bed (13.17). A new day then sees the beginning of the inal preparations for Odysseus’ night-time departure. That day then rapidly passes in the text, but not for Odysseus who is impatient to depart. Night falls once again (13.35), at which point warm farewells are exchanged and the ship is packed with gifts. Odysseus is put to sleep in the boat (13.75–6), and his sleep is especially deep, being described as ‘unwaking, very like death’ (13.80). The conjunction of night, sleep, death and departure looks classically closural, and this sense is reinforced by the way in which 13.89–92 recall the very first lines of the epic, again suggesting that ‘part one’ is coming to its close.

The text of Samia depends mainly on the two sources mentioned in the previous section.

Samia was the first of the three plays contained in the Bodmer codex (B), known for this play as PBodm 25, a papyrus book of the late third or early fourth century ad (published with photographs by Kasser and Austin 1969). The codex is damaged at beginning and end, and it can be estimated (Arnott 1999) that up to line 253 (from which point onwards every line of B’s text of the play survives at least in part) something like 160 lines are missing from B and not supplied by C (not counting the space, equivalent to about five or six lines, that would have been occupied by the breaks at the end of Acts I and II, including the word χοροῦ); in other words, the complete text of the play was just under 900 lines in length – not much shorter than Dyskolos (969) once allowance is made for Samia’s higher proportion of tetrameters.

The Cairo codex (C; PCair J43227; republished photographically by Koenen et al. 1978) was written, again on papyrus, in the fifth century and taken apart in the sixth, its leaves being used by its then owner, Flavius Dioscorus, to cover important documents kept in an amphora. Those which survive contain portions of Epitrepontes, Heros, Perikeiromene, Samia, the Fabula Incerta, and Eupolis’ Demes; when the codex was intact, it almost certainly contained one or more other plays as well. From Samia C preserves most of Act III (216–416) and a section straddling Acts IV and V (547–686); in many passages the text is badly abraded and very hard to read.

If social movements cannot be thought of as the irrational expression of shared grievances, then how can they be conceptualized? In this chapter, we consider the answer given by resource mobilization theory (RMT), which emerged in the 1970s in the US in response to widespread dissatisfaction with collective behaviour (CB) theory. RMT remains a dominant and diverse approach to social movements. Here, we focus on one version first offered by J. D. McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1977), whilst in the next chapter we pursue the more structural and political version of mobilization theory known as the ‘political process’/‘contentious politics’ approach. It is fair to say, however, that they both grow out of the same set of core assumptions offered by ‘rational action theory’ (RAT), and both share the same set of problems because of it.

First, we will engage with RMT’s alternative to CB, including tracing their main concerns to RAT and Mancur Olson's (1965) ‘collective action problem’. We will look at the conceptual tools offered by McCarthy and Zald for understanding the process of resource mobilization, and consider what kind of resources are important to social movements. We will see that the idea of movements as ‘multi-organizational fields’ has led to a contemporary conceptualization of social movements as ‘networks’ rather than discrete ‘organizations’. We end by considering the implications of this shift, which, I suggest, requires us to adopt a ‘relational’ rather than ‘rational’ logic of collective action.