Analysis Of Social Movement Continuity: The Women's Movement In Abeyance

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Social Movements are complex organizations. They are born, growing from the roots of social injustice and inequality. They continue to grow as their leaves get blown around in the wind of society, landing here and there and creating supporters for their cause. Different chapters of supporters stem in different places, growing their own branches on the tree of social movements. At some point in time, organizations and their chapters go dormant. The organization may begin to slowly become inactive because of many reasons, but regardless of the reason, social movement organizations grow into a state of abeyance at some point. Abeyance is looked at as a form of temporary inactivity for a social movement organization. Verta Taylor defines it as …show more content…

On page 765, Taylor defines temporality as referring “to the length of time that a movement organization is able to hold personnel.” Breaking down that definition, temporality helps provide an enduring effect for the social movement. It does this by bringing in constant numbers regardless of how large or small those numbers may be, and in turn enhances the likelihood that the movement will endure. No matter if the social movement has a hundred supporters or a thousand - the social movement organization needs to be able to hold those supporters and keep them within the movement. With constant support, the social movement organization has a higher chance of persevering through the ever changing times. As a leader for the Student Leaders for University Recycling Programs, or SLURP, temporality comes into effect when SLURP sustains itself for a few years after its beginning. To build this for SLURP, the organization itself would have to target an environmental science classes and environmental science majors at their college or university, and attempt to recruit supporters from those classes. By picking environmental science majors, it’s almost guaranteed that preserving the environment is something they are passionate about and would be a cause they’ll want to get involved with. Also, SLURP would need to constantly be …show more content…

Commitment is used on behalf of the social movement organization to maintain commitment to their ideas insuring people will do whatever is necessary to maintain the group. Taylor is quoted on page 765 of “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance” saying “…groups characterized by high commitment are more likely to retain participants and to endure.” By an organization having a high level of commitment, especially when that level of commitment is shown to the other supporters of the organization by the leaders of the organization, it shows the world how much the supporters of the organization care about the social issue in question. However, there seems to be a fine line between getting the idea amount of purposive commitment and driving supporters away. “Organizations that insist upon high levels of purposive commitment and make stringent demands of time and financial resources cannot absorb large numbers of people. They are, however, good at holding constant those members that they have.” The quotation outlines the idea that how when an organization has high level of demand and requests high levels of commitment financially and timewise, the organization will not obtain and maintain high numbers of supporters. These organizations are good at keeping constant the supporters they have, but are unable to attract larger numbers of supporters

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