Processual Perspectives

LORENZO BOSI1 AND STEFAN MALTHANER2

1 Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
2 Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Germany

Collective action is an inherently dynamic phenomenon. Social movements, protest cam-

paigns, or episodes of political violence, as well as the trajectories of movement leaders and
grassroot activists unfold over time, in sequences of events, which not only entail changes in
the forms of action, but also the transformation of identities, goals, and the political setting in
which they take place.
Arguing that “temporal objects should be subjected to processual analysis” (Bidart, Longo,
and Mendez 2013, 743), processual perspectives seek to reconstruct the dynamics and inter-
twined trajectories of episodes of collective action or of activists’ lives, how they unfold in
interactions shaped by strategy, conjuncture, and contingency, and as situated in their partic-
ular historic context, in social time and space. Processual perspectives, then, stand in contrast
to static or a-temporal variable-based approaches, which presume fixed entities, unambiguous
meanings, the absence of sequence effects, and independence of context.
As Nick Crossley (2016, 157) has importantly pointed out, processual ontologies are closely
linked to relational ontologies, which means that collective actors, such as social movement
organizations, armed groups, grassroot associations, political parties, or trade unions, are not
seen as stable entities punctuated by episodes of change, but as fluid, perpetually becoming,
interactively produced, and defined by shifting relationships within specific contexts. More-
over, the sequence and timing of events matter, since “what happens, how it happens, why it
happens, what results it brings about is dependent on when it happens, the location in the pro-
cessual sequence, the place in the rhythm of events characteristic for a given process” (Pettigrew
1997, 339). By emphasizing complex temporal- and interaction-effects as well as contingency,
processual perspectives also stand in contrast to perspectives based on teleological or linear
conceptions of change over time, as evolving in fixed, invariant sequences of steps (e.g. “mod-
ernization”). Instead, the underlying conception of processes is that they possess “autonomous
causal efficacy” (Bosi, Demetriou, and Malthaner 2014, 3–4); that is, that processes of collective
action are shaped by dynamics that they themselves generate. While recognizing the relevance
of structural conditions, processual approaches emphasize their less-than-determining char-
acter and the need to look at the relational processes put in motion by the strategic choices of
multiple collective actors in dynamic configurations. They attribute an important role to agency
and to the creativity of collective actors, who can start new processes and take unexpected deci-
sions, with a capacity to transform social structures, while also recognizing the limits of this
creativity.
Processual perspectives do not aim to test hypotheses or seek determinant external and
internal factors, nor do they search for single grand theories, but they rather aim to provide
plausible analytical explanations of how the interactions of multiple actors shift, unfold, and
change over time, producing particular outcomes or patterns of transformation.

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Second Edition. Edited by David A. Snow,
Donatella della Porta, Doug McAdam, and Bert Klandermans.
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9780470674871.wbespm613
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2 P R O CE S S U A L P E R S P E CT I V E S

Processual perspectives and collective action research

Processual perspectives are certainly not new to historians. Moreover, many classic sociologi-
cal works examined, at their heart, historical processes of social change (K. Marx, M. Weber) or
dynamic patterns of interaction (G. Simmel), conceived of social reality as fluid and constantly
changing (G.H. Mead, R. Park, H. Blumer), and/or developed explicitly processual social theo-
ries (N. Elias). The Chicago School of sociology, in particular, founded a tradition of empirical
research focusing on dynamic social processes, and built on the premise that “one cannot
understand social life without understanding the arrangements of particular social actors in
particular social times and places” (Abbott 1997, 1152). Yet, from the 1940s onwards, these per-
spectives became increasingly overshadowed by the hegemony of Parsonian functionalism and
of variable-based empiricism, which transferred social explanation into the ahistorical realm
of “causal time” (Abbott 1988, 170).
Processual perspectives prominent today in research on collective action trace their roots
back to political process theories and earlier resource mobilization approaches. The latter
emerged in the 1970s in parallel to – and influenced by – works from political-economy and, in
particular, a new wave of historical sociology that emphasized generative processes of, among
other things, revolutions and state formation, albeit with an often structuralist-comparative
focus. By introducing a shift in perspective toward a view of protest as “politics by other
means,” and of social movements as equally rational as other political actors, resource mobi-
lization approaches, crucially, prepared the ground for the analysis of contention as a process
of interaction between activists and authorities. Yet, as this shift formed in intense opposition
to collective behavior approaches and (what was seen as) their portrayal of protest as irrational
“unrest,” it also, and paradoxically, seems to have prevented social movement scholars at the
time from connecting to the Chicago School’s processual tradition, thus reinforcing for a
while the field’s initial structuralism and delaying the adoption of more explicitly processual
analytical perspectives.
The political-process model focuses, in particular, on strategic interactions and adaptations
between challengers and the state, as well as their wider political context (McAdam 1982). This
interaction implies a process that, as Ruud Koopmans has suggested, “consist[s] of chains of
many such sequences of innovation, selection (or not), and diffusion (or not), the end of one
being at the same time the beginning of another” (2004, 41). Building on these approaches,
research on social movements and episodes of collective action applied then forms of proces-
sual analysis to study a range of phenomena at different levels of analysis. Scholars focusing
on how individuals engage in – or disengage from – collective action sought to understand
the trajectories of individuals in their social and relational context over time (McAdam 1986;
Snow, Zucher, Ekland-Olson 1980). Another strand of research investigated (at the “meso
level”) how collective actors and their forms of action were transformed as a result of com-
plex interactions and in response to shifting sociopolitical contexts, adopting concepts such
as “protest-cycles” (Tarrow 1989, 1994) and “protest-waves” (Koopmans 1993) to look at con-
tention as “a multi-actor process that cannot be adequately understood by focusing attention
on one actor and reducing the others to the role of context variables” (Koopmans 2004, 40).
Finally, processual perspectives have been adopted by scholars, Charles Tilly first of all, who
have placed phenomena of collective action within broader historical processes of social change
to explain the relevance of structural conditions and the emergence and transformation of
actors and repertoires of collective action. So, Tilly, for example, traced the transformation of
patterns and actors in protest-episodes from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth century
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P R O CE S S U A L P E R S P E CT I V E S 3

(Tilly 1995), and Shorter and Tilly (1974) showed how, over a similar period of time, French
strikes changed from being rare, small, and very long episodes to becoming rather frequent,
large, and comparably brief, as a result of the cumulative effects of interactions and adaptations
between movements, authorities, and other parties. Whereas these types of processual analy-
sis mainly focused on one particular level of analysis, Donatella della Porta employed a more
comprehensive processual framework, by unpacking the web of complex interactions between
individual trajectories, the transformation of political organizations, interactions within the
relational field of movements, authorities, and countermovements, as well as their political
environment (della Porta 1995; Bosi and della Porta 2012).
In the second half of the 1990s, criticism raised against the structuralist and rationalist bias
of the political process model, and what was seen as its reductionist manner of dealing with
culture (Goodwin and Jasper 1999), triggered a vibrant and productive debate which greatly
advanced processual perspectives in research on collective action. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly,
in a series of publications, developed a more radically dynamic and relational approach – the
contentious politics paradigm – which not only emphasized variation, contingency, and social
construction, but also advanced the concept of mechanism as the key to systematic processual
explanation (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly and Tarrow 2007). The contentious
politics paradigm has been applied in a broad array of empirical works on social movements,
political violence, civil wars or genocide, ethnic conflicts, revolutions, and democratization,
given that “small, well-chosen sets of causal mechanisms and processes explain problematic
features of dissimilar episodes” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 194). On the other hand,
cultural scholars, such as James Jasper (2006), challenging what they perceive as the structural
legacy of the contentious politics paradigm, have advanced a strategic interactionist approach,
in the path of symbolic interactionism, to decompose static variables of context into dynamic
interactions between different players responding to each other’s moves across time (Jasper
and Duyvendak 2015). Focusing on the microfoundations of social and political action, this
approach adopts a processual perspective with the aim of investigating agency, contingency,
strategic dilemmas, and complex interactions.

The logic of processual explanation

In the most general sense, a process can be defined as “a sequence of events that describes how
things change over time” (Pettigrew 1997, 338). The sequence of happenings that constitutes a
process can be conceived as bounded by the type of change it produces (e.g. “radicalization”) or
by a particular type of interaction (e.g. “competition”) (Bosi, Demetriou, and Malthaner 2014,
4). A processual explanation, then, is based on the notion that “we understand the occurrence
of events by learning the steps in the process by which they came to happen” (Becker 1998,
61). Thus, the focus is not on whether an outcome occurred, but rather on how it was brought
about.
Consequently, processual analysis seeks to reconstruct the temporal sequence of events, to
identify significant steps (turning points) and patterns in the process, and to analytically spec-
ify how events in a sequence are connected to each other. Chronology and the relational field of
a collective action episode become the preliminary organizing instruments for the analysis of a
process, in which the consequences of events are seen as dependent on their sequential order.
Processual perspectives are usually combined with an empirical commitment to single-case
or small-n in-depth longitudinal studies and a range of different techniques that foresee the
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4 P R O CE S S U A L P E R S P E CT I V E S

collection of multiple data to observe, identify, empirically examine, and finally explain how
processes unfold and how outcomes are produced, as well as accounting for the context in
which collective actors give sense to their actions and choices. It is an inductive-deductive
approach, which – while drawing on the existing body of knowledge in the formulation of
research questions and the clarification of concepts – is also data driven in that it allows for
new insights and re-conceptualizations that challenge existing theories. Thick, fine-grained
descriptions of how collective actors select a certain form of action or of how individuals par-
ticipate in collective action or disengage from this provide already pretty much the explanation
of the action.
In the contentious politics framework, recurring causal dynamics are theorized as mech-
anisms, consisting in a “delimited class of events that alter relations among specified sets of
elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations” (McAdam, Tarrow,
and Tilly 2001, 24), which concatenate to form processes, and may, themselves be composed
of sub-mechanisms (concatenating to form mechanisms) (Alimi, Demetriou, and Bosi 2015).
The idea is to examine how intersecting mechanisms and sub-mechanisms aggregate in dif-
ferent patterns, sequentially or in parallel, to produce particular processes, across a variety of
times, places, and circumstances.
Mechanisms-based explanations seek to go beyond “mere description” while, at the same
time, rejecting the notion of covering laws, aiming at selective explanation of relevant features
by means of limited causal similarities. More recently, process-tracing approaches have sought
to develop mechanisms-based explanations into a more rigorous tool for theory develop-
ment and testing (Bennett and Checkel 2015; Beach and Pedersen 2019). Yet, the debate
about mechanisms has highlighted the need to specify how mechanisms can be identified
empirically, and how mechanisms and processes can be distinguished conceptually, as well as
the limits of any trans-contextual transferability of causal regularities. Narrative approaches
propose a more indexical, context-dependent way of analyzing processes, but converge with
mechanism-based explanations in that they recognize the need to theorize “generic types of
links in causal chains” as “narrative links” (Abbott 1992, 76), “typical stories” (Becker 1998,
61), or “recurrent logics” (Bidart, Longo, and Mendez 2013, 746).

SEE ALSO: Contentious Politics; Mechanisms; Political Process Theory; Protest; Protest Cycles
and Waves; Radicalization; Repertoires of Contention; Repertoires of Strategies; Resource
Mobilization Theory; Strategy.

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