Resource mobilisation is the approach which holds that social movements are best understood as rational, purposive and organised political activity — continuous with ordinary interest-group politics rather than a departure from it — and that their rise and fall depends less on the depth of grievance than on the resources available to those who would organise it. Announced by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald in 1977, it broke with the earlier collective behaviour tradition, which treated protest as an eruption of strain, anomie or crowd suggestibility among the uprooted.
Its founding move is a reversal of the explanatory question. Grievance, the theory argues, is more or less always present and fairly constant; discontent can even be manufactured or defined into existence by movement leaders. What varies is the capacity to act. So the question ceases to be why are people aggrieved? and becomes how does existing discontent get converted into sustained collective action? — a question about money, time, skills, networks, legitimacy and organisation.
Organisations, industries and sectors
McCarthy and Zald supplied a vocabulary borrowed from the study of firms. A social movement organisation is a formal body that identifies its goals with a movement's preferences and works to realise them. All the organisations pursuing broadly the same set of preferences constitute a social movement industry — the several bodies of a women's movement, say, competing and cooperating at once. All industries together form the social movement sector, whose size depends on the discretionary resources — surplus income, leisure, professional skill — available in the wider society. The analogy is deliberate: organisations compete for funds and attention, differentiate their products, form coalitions, and can be studied by the tools of organisational sociology.
The theory further distinguishes adherents, who believe in the goals, from constituents, who actually supply resources, and beneficiaries, who would gain, from conscience constituents, who supply support though they gain nothing. The last category matters greatly: middle-class donors, church bodies, foundations and sympathetic professionals often bankroll movements of the poor, which makes those movements dependent on outsiders whose commitment may be withdrawn. Movement entrepreneurs — leaders who invest their own skill and reputation in building organisations — and the drift towards professionalisation, in which paid staff, direct-mail fundraising and legal expertise replace mass participation, follow from the same logic.
The five kinds of resource
Bob Edwards and McCarthy later sorted resources into five types, and the typology is the most examinable part of the theory. Material resources are money, premises, equipment and supplies. Human resources are labour, experience, skill and leadership — the time volunteers give and the expertise professionals bring. Social-organisational resources are infrastructure and networks: existing associations, membership lists, and the appropriable social organisation of churches, unions and neighbourhoods. Cultural resources are the tacit know-how of protest — repertoires, tactical knowledge, the ability to run a meeting, produce a press release or frame a demand. Moral resources are legitimacy, solidary support, sympathetic celebrity endorsement and the authority conferred by external certification. Resources are acquired in four ways: through self-production by the aggrieved themselves, aggregation of members' contributions, co-optation or appropriation of another organisation's infrastructure, and patronage by an outside sponsor. Each route carries a different price in autonomy.
The critique
The approach has been attacked from almost every direction. Treating grievance as constant makes it impossible to explain why a movement erupts here and now, and empirically grievance is not constant — it is created by events, framed by activists and felt with varying intensity. The economistic vocabulary strips out identity, emotion, meaning and culture: as Alberto Melucci argued, movements are also the process by which a collective identity is constructed, and a theory of costs and benefits cannot say why anyone would risk death for a cause. The theory's stress on formal organisation was contested by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who argued that the poor's only real resource is disruption, and that building durable organisations tends to blunt it. Others noted that the model was built on the American case, where foundations, mailing lists and professional advocacy are abundant, and that it underplays the state, repression and political opportunity — the gap that political process theory was devised to fill.
Fit and misfit in India
The approach illuminates parts of the Indian record. Organisations manifestly matter: the Narmada Bachao Andolan's use of litigation, international campaigning and documentation, SEWA's combination of union, cooperative and bank, and the Right to Information campaign's alliance of activists with retired officials and journalists all show resources being assembled and deployed. Conscience constituents are conspicuous — urban intellectuals, lawyers, the press and foreign funders have repeatedly sustained movements of tribals, Dalits and displaced people.
The misfit is equally instructive. Indian movements rarely rest on professional staff, direct-mail money or foundation grants. Their resources are overwhelmingly human and social-organisational: volunteer labour, the padyatra, the fast, sanghatan built on caste, jati or village networks, and the moral capital of Gandhian idiom and religious symbolism. Ghanshyam Shah's survey of the literature notes how little of the Indian material is explicable without attention to ideology, caste identity and leadership charisma. Where movements have professionalised — the NGO-isation of the 1990s — critics have argued that donor accountability displaced constituency accountability, which is exactly the autonomy cost that the patronage route to resources predicts.
For the UPSC answer
State the theory's core reversal in one line: grievance is treated as ubiquitous, so the explanandum becomes organisation. Name McCarthy and Zald, the organisation–industry–sector schema, and the distinction between beneficiary and conscience constituents, then list the five resource types, which few candidates do. Balance the answer with the standard criticisms — neglect of grievance formation, identity and emotion, and Piven and Cloward on the costs of organisation. Conclude on India: resource mobilisation explains the machinery of movements such as NBA or SEWA, but volunteer labour, caste networks and moral idiom, not professional resources, are what actually get mobilised.
References & further reading
- McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1977). Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory. American Journal of Sociology, 82(6).
- Zald, M. N., & McCarthy, J. D. (1987). Social Movements in an Organizational Society. Transaction Books.
- Jenkins, J. C. (1983). Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 9.
- Edwards, B., & McCarthy, J. D. (2004). Resources and Social Movement Mobilization. In Snow, Soule & Kriesi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements.
- Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1977). Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Vintage.
- Shah, G. (2004). Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature. Sage.