Theoretical frameworks can be enabling, or they can be straitjackets. If I seek to fit the facts to suit my chosen theoretical frameworks, then both my theory and my research outputs are impoverished. In the philosophy of science, it is well known that it is quite normal for theoretical paradigms to persist even when reality shows them wanting. We should, instead, be flexible about our theoretical frameworks and not try to impose them on recalcitrant facts. I am mindful, of course, that these “facts” are constructed by our theoretical frames and our methodologies. The research terrain is fluid, and we need to be prepared to say when something is not working. Finally, I think we should bear in mind Foucault's challenge to normative understandings of what makes critique legitimate: “Critique doesn't have to be the promise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and those who refuse what is.” There has been a tendency in engaged research on social movements to conflate the role of analysis with what Foucault refers to as preaching “this is what needs to be done”.

The theoretical frameworks considered here are the largely dominant North American social and political science perspectives developed since the 1950s, the European post-1968 “new social movement” (NSM) approach and, finally, the various Latin American options developed to overcome the shortcomings of both these external perspectives.

North American

Orthodox Marxist and socialist theorists had long occupied themselves with social movements in their own particular way, but in the academic milieu they were somewhat under-studied until the 1970s. The socialist tradition was, on the whole, quite instrumental in its approach and it largely looked at why the working class had not fulfilled its allotted historical role. In the first half of the twentieth century the main academic frame related to what we would now call social movements studies, focused on “collective behaviour”, whereby individuals were seen to react emotionally to situations outside their control.