Alberto Melucci reoriented the study of social movements away from the question of why people protest towards the prior question of how a group capable of protesting comes into being at all. Most theories, he argued, take the collective actor for granted — a class, a community, an aggrieved category — and then explain its behaviour. His counter-proposal was that collective identity is not given in advance but produced: it is the outcome of a continuous process of interaction, negotiation and emotional investment among participants, and it has to be maintained or it dissolves.
From this followed a second reorientation. If identity is the movement's ongoing achievement, then a movement exists even when nothing visible is happening. Melucci located movements in submerged networks of everyday relations that persist through long phases of latency, and treated public mobilisation as the occasional visible surfacing of something continuously present. Together with the claim that contemporary movements contest the symbolic codes by which societies define reality, these ideas make up the identity-oriented approach to collective action.
Life and intellectual formation
Melucci was born in 1943 and spent his academic career largely at the University of Milan, where he taught sociology and also trained and practised as a clinical psychologist. That double formation is visible in his work, which moves between organisational analysis and the psychology of meaning, need and personal identity in a way unusual among movement scholars.
His intellectual setting was the European movement wave of the late 1960s and 1970s — student, feminist, ecological, peace and youth-cultural mobilisations — which the dominant American approaches described poorly. He studied with Alain Touraine in Paris, and inherited from him the premise that movements are the means by which a society acts on itself and that the central stake in post-industrial society is control over the production of meaning rather than over the distribution of goods. Melucci departed from Touraine by refusing to identify a single central conflict or historical subject, and by insisting on close empirical study of how groups actually construct themselves. His Milan research on youth, feminist and ecological groups informed Nomads of the Present (1989); the theoretical synthesis appeared in Challenging Codes (1996). He died in 2001.
Collective identity as process
Melucci's central methodological point is that we should stop treating a movement as a thing and treat it as a process. Collective identity, in his account, is an interactive and shared definition produced by several individuals concerning the orientations of their action and the field of opportunities and constraints in which it takes place. Three components are involved: cognitive definitions of ends, means and environment; an active network of relationships through which members communicate and take decisions; and an emotional investment that allows people to recognise themselves in one another.
The consequences are substantial. Because identity must be continually reconstructed, unity is always precarious, and internal negotiation and conflict are normal rather than symptoms of failure. Because identity precedes strategy, a group cannot calculate costs and benefits until it has defined who the actor is and what counts as a benefit — which is where he thought rational-choice accounts of collective action begin too late. And because identity is itself a stake, prefiguration — the attempt to live now according to the norms the movement advocates — is part of the point rather than a distraction from it.
Submerged networks and latency
Melucci's most distinctive contribution is the distinction between two phases in which a movement exists simultaneously. Latency is the condition in which a movement lives in small dispersed groups, friendship circles, cooperatives, journals, self-help and consciousness-raising groups and informal everyday relations, producing alternative meanings, experimenting with forms of life and reproducing its identity and its cadre. Visibility is the phase of public mobilisation — demonstrations, campaigns, media attention, confrontation with authorities — in which the movement addresses the political system.
The two phases are interdependent. Latency provides the solidarity that visible action consumes; visibility supplies the recognition and the recruits that renew the networks. Research examining only visible episodes therefore mistakes the movement's rhythm for its existence, and concludes that a movement has died when it has returned to latency. This is why women's, ecological and youth mobilisations appear as sudden eruptions from nowhere: the network was there all along, in what Melucci called the movement areas of the society.
Much of a movement's most consequential work is therefore invisible and cultural — the change in how people speak about their bodies, their work or their environment — rather than legislative.
Challenging codes in complex societies
Melucci argued that in what he termed complex or information societies, power operates increasingly through the capacity to define reality: to set the categories of normality and deviance, health and illness, competence and incapacity, and to allocate identities to individuals. Since the production of meaning becomes the central resource, conflict migrates to that terrain.
Contemporary movements are consequently not only, and sometimes not primarily, demands for redistribution or for inclusion in the political system. Their principal effect is symbolic: they render visible a power that presents itself as neutral or technical, and they announce that things could be named and lived otherwise. A feminist group contesting how womanhood is defined, an ecological group contesting what counts as progress, or a health movement contesting a medical classification is challenging a code rather than bargaining over a share. The message lies partly in the form of the action itself, and is directed as much at the culture as at the state. Such movements also answer individual needs for identity and self-realisation, which is why participation is often partial, temporary and multiple — the nomadism of his title.
The contrast with resource mobilisation and political process
The identity-oriented approach was formulated against the two dominant American paradigms. Resource mobilisation — associated with McCarthy and Zald — treats grievance as constant and asks how organisations accumulate money, members, leadership and networks; political process theory — associated with Tilly, McAdam and Tarrow — adds political opportunity structures and cycles of contention. Both are strong on organisation, timing and outcomes.
Melucci's objection was that both bracket the question of meaning. They assume an actor whose interests are known and then study the efficiency with which it pursues them, which imports the instrumental rationality of the market into the analysis and cannot explain how a category of people becomes a we. Where the American tradition asks how movements mobilise resources to win concessions, Melucci asks how they construct the identity that makes the demand thinkable, and measures success partly in cultural rather than political currency. The traditions have since converged, with framing analysis and the study of movement culture representing the accommodation.
Criticisms
The concept of collective identity has been criticised as elastic to the point of imprecision: it covers cognition, network structure and emotion at once, and is difficult to operationalise. The latency–visibility distinction invites unfalsifiable inference, since any absence of activity can be described as latency and a movement can never be shown to have ended. Critics in the political-process tradition argue that Melucci underestimates the state, parties, repression and institutional opportunity, so that his movements appear to float free of the political system in which they in fact act. Marxist scholars object that emphasising symbolic challenge displaces class and material inequality, and that the distinction between old material and new symbolic movements does not hold — labour movements also fought over dignity, and identity movements also make redistributive demands.
The framework has also been read as parochially Western European, since its picture of post-material, identity-seeking participants fits affluent societies better than contexts where survival, land and livelihood remain the stakes. In India, movements over displacement, forest rights, wages and caste dignity combine material and symbolic claims inseparably — though the notion of submerged networks describes the long pre-history and dispersed local base of the women's, environmental and Dalit movements well.
Legacy
Melucci is one of the principal architects of the identity-oriented or European tradition in movement studies, alongside Touraine and Claus Offe, and the concept of collective identity is now standard in the field, including among scholars whose starting point is resource mobilisation. His insistence that movements be studied in their quiet periods redirected research towards movement culture, informal networks and prefigurative politics.
For the UPSC answer
Use Melucci in questions on new social movements, collective action and identity, and lead with his distinctive move: collective identity is constructed and maintained through interaction, not given by structural location. Add the latency–visibility distinction, which is the highest-value point available, because it explains why movements seem to vanish and reappear and shows that their cultural work continues offstage. State the symbolic-challenge argument in the form that contemporary movements contest the codes by which reality is defined rather than only the distribution of resources. Position him explicitly against resource mobilisation and political process theory to show command of the debate, then evaluate — vagueness of the identity concept, neglect of the state and of class, and the limited fit of a post-material framework to Indian movements over land, livelihood and dignity.
References & further reading
- Melucci, A. (1980). The New Social Movements: A Theoretical Approach. Social Science Information, 19(2), 199–226.
- Melucci, A. (1985). The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements. Social Research, 52(4), 789–816.
- Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. London: Hutchinson Radius.
- Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Touraine, A. (1981). The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Tarrow, S. (1994). Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.