Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Tactics and Strategy

The Current Literature

In analyzing the tactics and strategy of the anti-sweatshop movement, the obvious starting point in the current literature is the concept of tactical repertoires, the collection of actions with which a movement is familiar and will use. What makes is possible for a movement to have a repertoire of tactics which they can deploy in similar ways in different circumstances is that each particular tactic takes a certain modular, standardized form. This means that not only can the same tactics be used in different situations, but that they can be passed from one movement to another, sometimes even io a movement’s adversaries, since the standardized form eases the process of learning (McAdam et al.

1996b; Tarrow 1998; Tilly 1978). One classic example of a tactic being learned and adopted by one’s enemies is the use by the anti-abortion movement of civil disobedience, long a tactic exclusively of the left, in order to blockade clinics where abortions are performed.
In addition to learning elements of other movement ’s repertoires, movements may also innovate and create new tactics for their own repertoire. McAdam (1983) documents this at work in the civil rights movement. Each lime activists would deploy a new tactic-- the bus boycotts, the sir-ins at lunch counters, the Freedom Rides, the city-wide


campaigns of the sort held in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma--they would temporarily baffle authorities, frustrating their attempts to maintain their social control. Eventually, however, the police and government officials would find effective ways io defuse the power of the tactic in question, leading to a downturn in civil rights activism until activists came up with a new tactic that the authorities were once again unfamiliar with. Part of the reason for the civil rights movement’s eventual long-term decline was that its leaders were eventually unable to come up with new, innovative ways to frustrate the authorities. It seems likely that every movement will reach such a point at some time, if for no other reason that the authorities have far more in the way of resources and the entire weight of the social structure and normal social routines to bring to bear against activists. Over the longer rim as well, according to Tarrow (1998), movements’ tactical repertoires can change dramatically as they adapt to larger social conditions. The rise of the modern nation-state is the most important example, radically changing the nature of collective action, leading from a situation where brief, isolated local uprisings were the norm to the contemporary social movement, with is long-term goals and national--or increasingly transnational--orientation. As with the sharing of tactical repertoires, this involves a gradual, historical learning process as activists try new tactics under new conditions and one movement learns from the successes and failures of another.
Implicit in much of the political process theorists’ analysis of tactical repertoires is that the development and deployment of tactics is largely an instrumental matter.
Jasper (1997), however, emphasizes that movements do not use purely instrumental grounds to evaluate which tactics they use in any specific case from among the range
they are familiar with. Different groups have distinct “tastes” in tactics--what tactics a group uses is in part determined by the culture of the group. Tactics have a symbolic as well as strategic value, saying something about the collective identity of the group.
Within the same broad movement, some individual groups may gravitate towards direct action and away from lobbying or vice versa; doing so helps define them respectively as radicals and moderates. Jasper doesn’t deny that the effectiveness of any given tactic does play a role in determining whether a group will adopt it, but insists that the group’s
values and collective identity are equally if not more important.

Some theorists (e.g., Downey 1986; Ferree 1992) have tried io rake into account both the more instrumentalist approach of political process theorists and the cultural approach emphasizing collective identity by arguing that when movements strategize, they take into account both instrumental and ideological or value-rational concerns, engaging in a trade-off between the two. Polletta (2005), however, argues that this is a false dichotomy. Rather, what activists see as instrumentally effective involves a value- laden process of cultural interpretation. Rather than there being a trade-off between ideological and instrumental concerns, they are two sides of one and the same process, as activists use their beliefs io make sense of what impact their tactics will have on the world--and therefore what will be effective.

Among social movement theorists, there is a fair amount of consensus about what makes a movement’s choice of tactics effective--that they generate large-scale social disruption, which puts pressure on authorities to resolve the crisis in order to restore business as usual. The risk is that these authorities may respond with repression, but in
the right circumstances (that is, given the right political opportunities), they may instead make concessions to activists in order to restore social peace (Flacks 1988; Gamson 1990; McAdam 1983; Piven and Cloward 1977; Tarrow 1998). Jasper (1997), however, argues that social movements have their primary impact not through the pressure they put on authorities by means of the disruption they generate, but through the changes they bring about in the wider public discourse, putting on to the agenda previously neglected issues, such as animal rights.
As already noted, it is only recently that some scholars have begun io shift away from the exclusive focus on tactics to broader questions of strategy. Eitan Alimi (2007) has shown that some Palestinian nationalist groups actively analyze their political environment, particularly the political alignments in the occupying power of Israel, looking at the opportunities and constraints, to decide when it is appropriate to mobilize and which tactics they should use. In their study of groups advocating women’s inclusion in juries during the early twentieth century, Holly McCammon and her colleagues (2008) found those SMOs that were most successful were those that took the time to stop and reflect on their strategy, assessing the causes of their failures and reading “signals" from their social environment, then modifying their tactics and framing in light of this. In other words, both emphasize that a movement that is strategically savvy does not just deploy tactics from a repertoire in a rote manner, but analyzes what tactics will have the greatest impact, given the political opportunity structure.
While both Alimi and McCammon et al. emphasize the importance of the decisions movements make about strategy, they do not analyze the process of making
decisions. In his study of the United Farm Workers, Marshall Ganz (2000, 2009J sheds some light on this, specifically what types of organization and leadership give rise to good strategy. He emphasizes the importance of an organization that promotes deliberative decision-making and in which the leadership is accountable to the members; and leadership drawn from a range of backgrounds, thus bringing a range of social networks and activist knowledge to the process of strategizing.