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these authors also emphasizes the agent’s phe-nomenological frame of meaning and the atten-dant role played by the agent’s situational ‘‘horizon of relevance’’in affecting how she draws upon stocks of knowledge.

A final way that contemporary theorists acknowledge the separate treatment of struc-tures and agents is methodological.Here struc-tures are not thought to subsume agents.Rather, agents are treated as important components of the very makeup of structures(thus complicat-ing and moderating the analogies made with skeletons or the walls of a building),and as having much to contribute to the reproduction or transformation of structures and to the unfolding of events.It is just that the theorist may want to focus temporarily on the concep-tualization,mapping,and analysis of specific characteristics of social structures(e.g.,on norms,rules,regulations,and on the nature of networked and patterned relations and interde-pendencies)without attending to the specific characteristics and contribution of agents. Recent contributions to the development of structure and agency have been made by Nicos Mouzelis,who has elucidated the range and variety of types of interconnection between structure and agency,and Mustafa Emirbayer and Anne Mische,and also Margaret Archer,on different dimensions of relations between tem-porality,structure,and agency.All have called for more links between the conceptual apparatus of structure and agency and the empirical,in-situ level.This will necessarily require that greater attention be paid to methodological issues than hitherto.An accompanying call to further refine the concepts themselves has been prompted by a related desire to increase their practical utility.

SEE ALSO:Agency(amd Intention);Bourdieu, Pierre;Durkheim,E′mile;Ethnomethodology; Marxism and Sociology;Parsons,Talcott;Phe-nomenology;Schu¨tz,Alfred;Structuralism; Structuration Theory;Weber,Max REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Bourdieu,P.(1990)The Logic of Practice.Polity Press,Cambridge.Dawe,A.(1978)Theories of Social Action.In:T. Bottomore&R.Nisvet(Eds.),A History of Socio-logical Analysis.Basic Books,New York. Durkheim,E.(1984[1893])The Division of Labour in Society.Macmillan,London.

Emirbayer,M.&Mische,A.(1998)What is Agency? American Journal of Sociology104:962–1023. Giddens,A.(1984)The Constitution of Society.Polity Press,Cambridge.

Lopez,J.&Scott,J.(2000)Social Structure.Open University Press,Philadelphia.

Mouzelis,N.(1991)Back to Sociological Theory. Macmillan,London.

Parsons,T.(1945)The Present Position and Pro-spects of Systematic Theory in Sociology.In:T. Parsons,Essays in Sociological Theory,2nd edn. Free Press,New York.

Stones,R.(2004)Structuration Theory.Palgrave Macmillan,London.

Weber,M.(1968)Economy and Society.Ed.G.Roth& C.Wittich.Bedminster Press,New York.

student movements Christopher Rootes

Although students have been prominent among the actors in many revolutions and revolutionary movements,as well as other forms of contentious politics,student movements–social movements comprised wholly or mainly of students,espe-cially university or college students–are a distinctively modern phenomenon.Their emer-gence is predicated upon the existence in a society of a critical mass of students.

Student movements have emerged in all manner of modern and modernizing societies, often as agents of change,sometimes in reaction against change,but usually as challengers of regimes perceived to lack legitimacy or moral authority.They have appeared in authoritarian states in Europe,Asia,Africa,and Latin Amer-ica,as well as in the liberal democratic states of the industrialized world.

Student movements have an important place in the development of social movement theory.In the US,it was dissatisfaction with the psychosocial and reductionist explana-tions of student protest(see,e.g.,Feuer1969) that stimulated explanations that took social

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movements seriously as forms of political action.In Europe,theories of‘‘post-industrial’’society and‘‘new social movements’’were developed by Touraine(1971)and others as explanations of the student protest that con-founded orthodox Marxist theories. Sociological interest in student movements was excited principally by the eruption during the1960s of student protest in the US and in many states in Europe and the Pacific.Protests against the US’s prosecution of the war in Viet-nam were central to the student movements of the1960s,but they also had other and deeper causes.

In the US,the student movement emerged in the early1960s out of the campaign for civil rights for African Americans in the South as well as the socialist Student League for Indus-trial Democracy,which became Students for a Democratic Society(SDS)in1960.It came to prominence with the student revolt,in the name of freedom of speech,at the University of Cali-fornia,Berkeley,in1964,the Berkeley events inspiring new scholarly interest in student movements as well as student mobilizations on other campuses across the US and beyond.The US student movement,fueled by increasing opposition to the Vietnam War,spread nation-wide before reaching a crescendo in the spring of 1970.In Western Europe,student movements developed in most countries and,most specta-cularly,brought normal life to a halt in much of France in May1968when students appeared to put revolution back on the political agenda of liberal democratic states.However,student movements also challenged regimes and/or con-tested government policies in Australia,Asia, and communist-ruled Eastern Europe. Student movements emerged in the advanced industrialized societies toward the end of a per-iod of doubling,even trebling,of enrollments in higher education.As a result,students were everywhere unprecedentedly numerous,both relatively and absolutely.The expansion of higher education had various sources.One was demographic pressure–the swelling,conse-quent upon the post-war‘‘baby boom,’’of the age cohorts from which most students were drawn.But everywhere the main pressures for expansion were political–from governments influenced by human capital theorists to invest in more highly qualified workforces in the hope of improving economic competitiveness,and from newly affluent parents concerned to ensure the career prospects of their offspring.As socio-technical change sketched in the outlines of the ‘‘knowledge economy’’and began to transform occupational structures,so demand for and the supply of higher education grew dramatically. At the same time,increasing affluence made it possible for unprecedentedly large numbers of young people to enjoy a moratorium upon adult obligation.Youth as a distinct stage of life was born,and the university was its ideal locus. The numbers of students expanded just at the time that demographic and socioeconomic changes combined to enhance the status and visibility of youth.The entry of this generation produced strains within universities which,in many countries,were elitist and traditionalist. Inadequate facilities,unreformed curricula,and antiquated rules generated conflicts between students who considered themselves adults and authorities who regarded themselves as acting in loco parentis.These local conflicts with univer-sity authorities were,however,symptomatic of wider strains in society.

Yet these were not simply the self-interested complaints of the materially deprived.Every-where,students were drawn disproportionately from the relatively privileged strata of societies. Actual or anticipated graduate unemployment, sometimes proffered as an explanation of the rise of student radicalism,played little or no part.This was before the peak of the long post-war economic boom and,even in Italy,where the mismatch between output and labor market was legendary,the peak years of the student revolt coincided with historic lows in the fre-quency of graduate unemployment.If there were grievances about employment prospects, they were less about the lack of jobs than about demands for‘‘jobs worth doing.’’

Social,demographic,and educational changes provided the actors for student movements,and local difficulties that raised civil libertarian issues often generated the first sparks,but it was events in the wider political arena that accounted for the spread of protest and cross-and intranational variation in its incidence.Stu-dents’local grievances generally highlighted political rigidities at state level as university authorities found themselves powerless to respond in ways that might defuse protest,as

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in France where university rectors had no power even to modify dormitory regulations.However, the general political condition that stimulated the development of student movements was an effective vacuum of political opposition to government policies within the mainstream political arena.

In the US,where only a few legislators voiced opposition to the Vietnam War,the draft com-pelled students to think seriously about the issues,and student opposition expanded to fill the space available.In Western Europe,the sclerotic politics of states frozen by the com-munist/anti-communist divide were similarly conducive.In West Germany,the absence of opposition was almost literal,as student socia-lists had been expelled from the Social Demo-cratic Party and a‘‘grand coalition’’government of Social and Christian Democrats overwhel-mingly dominated the parliament.The vacuum of opposition was often reproduced at local levels.In Europe,the student movements of the1960s usually began not at campuses such as the Sorbonne,Heidelberg,Munich,or Rome where the institutionalized left was strong,but at those,such as Nanterre,Berlin,Frankfurt, Trento,and Turin,where the left was weak or absent.The most propitious condition for the development of the utopian student movements that so captured the imagination of observers was their political and social isolation(Statera 1975:119).

The subsequent development of student movements was the product of interaction between the movements,their environments, and their internal social and political dynamics. Mass media coverage generalized student move-ments,but raised the stakes and contributed to internal dynamics that were divisive and ulti-mately destructive(Gitlin1981).Media atten-tion amplified recruitment but,once the movement had peaked,a‘‘reverse bandwagon’’effect exaggerated its decline.By focusing upon the outspoken and the outrageous,media cov-erage created‘‘leaders’’without authority or political acumen,encouraged spectacular and provocative actions,and amplified the incidence of violence.This deepened the movement’s political isolation and encouraged political adventurism,with the result that in several countries,including Italy,Germany,and the US,small minorities of student activists drifted into terrorism.More generally,frustrated by the limitations of their student constituencies,they rediscovered Marxism and embarked upon mostly fruitless missions to revolutionize the proletariat.Secular processes may have dictated the inevitable demobilization of student move-ments,but the turn to sectarian theorizing and Leninist organization everywhere hastened the process,antithetical as they were to the civil libertarian and moral protests that had inspired student mobilization in the first place(Rootes 1980).

Although encounters with apparently unjust authority were crucial to the mobilization of student movements,it was crucial to their sur-vival that official repression should remain moderate and unsystematic.Nowhere in the West did the level of repression of student pro-test reach the levels usual in Eastern Europe, Asia,or Latin America.Student movements were thus able to develop in the free spaces of liberal democracies aided by the intermittent stimuli of erratic police action.On those few occasions where repression was extreme–as with the1970shooting of four students at Kent State University–the immediate reaction was indignant protest,but the longer-term effect was demoralizing and demobilizing.Generally, however,the repression of student movements was mild compared with that of striking work-ers.State responses were more generally refor-mist than simply repressive.

In most countries student movements simply declined,but in the US and France they col-lapsed suddenly.In the US,the invasion of Cambodia demonstrated the impotence of the movement,and the shootings at Kent State raised the stakes.Most students returned to their books,but the most radicalized minor-ity,as the Weather Underground,resorted to clandestine political violence.In France,the student movement was overwhelmed by the political crisis it unleashed,and outmaneuvered by General de Gaulle’s appeal to the electorate. Thus disconcerted,the libertarians in the move-ment were no match for the Marxist sects who, emboldened by the crisis,sought to hegemonize a chimerical worker–student alliance.The stu-dent movement’s rediscovery of the proletariat occurred almost everywhere and guaranteed the extinction of student movements as activists’mobilizing efforts were directed off-campus.

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Only in Germany was the student movement so completely isolated from the working class that, in forming an extra-parliamentary opposition,it looked to broader sections of society,thereby intimating the coalition of forces that eventually coalesced into the Greens.

By1971,student movements had burned themselves out almost everywhere.The turn to Marxism meant that,in the rare cases where issues stimulated renewed protests by students,they did not generally produce student movements.In1976,the longest and most wide-spread student strike in French history paral-yzed the universities,but it found little wider resonance,both because the political context had changed and because the prominence of leftist groups determined to portray the pro-tests as anti-capitalist obscured the elements of cultural critique that had made the1968revolt so iconic.Because most protesting students rejected leadership of any kind,the presence of the sectarian left was less an aid to more effective mobilization than an obstacle to it,and the col-lapse of the protests left no significant legacy. The direct impact of the1960s student move-ments upon political structure was extremely limited.Their one nearly universal legacy–the extension of the franchise to18-year-olds–has made little impact.Nowhere in the West did student movements succeed in overthrow-ing elected governments.Even in France,the demise of de Gaulle in1969was less a delayed result of the student revolt than of his own political miscalculation.Nor did student pro-tests influence elections in the ways they hoped. The election that ended the French student revolt produced a decisive shift to the right.If student protest persuaded Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection,the outcome was the election not of a liberal anti-war candidate but of Richard Nixon.Student movements’impacts upon pol-icy were probably more positive.Student pro-test certainly raised the salience of the Vietnam War and probably hastened US withdrawal. But the greatest impacts were in higher educa-tion where both curricula and governance underwent reform.

The wider political impacts of student move-ments were diffuse.Graduates of the‘‘gen-eration of’68’’contributed to the radicalization of Labour parties in Britain and Australia,and the secularization of communist parties in Italy and Spain,but their most important legacies were in the other social movements they inspired,the women’s and personal liberation movements chief among them.‘‘Movement entrepreneurs’’who learned their skills in the student movement moved on to organize work-ers and the poor as well as to the environmental and anti-nuclear movements that emerged in the1970s.By these means,student movements contributed to the legitimation of protest and the‘‘participatory revolution’’in liberal democ-racies whose effects continue,especially in Wes-tern Europe.

In and since the1980s,observers,especially in the US,have claimed to detect in various campus-based campaigns–from disinvestment in South Africa under the apartheid regime to that against sweatshop labor in developing coun-tries–the makings of a new student movement comparable to that of the late1960s.But although students have indeed been among the early activists in such campaigns and in the anti-globalization/global justice movement,none has developed as a fully fledged student movement. The principal reason is that,in all these cases, either students rapidly found allies in other, more powerful social or political actors,or the movements that developed quickly mobilized much broader cross-sections of society.

What is extraordinary about western student movements is not that they so quickly disap-peared but that anybody should have expected them to endure.The conditions of student life and the rapid turnover of student generations scarcely favor a politics of the long haul.The student movements of the1960s arose out of an extraordinary conjunction of demography and social change,sustained rises in living standards, the expansion of higher education in response to technological change and changes in occupa-tional structures,and an effective vacuum of political opposition.It is possible that some of these conditions will recur;it is improbable that they will again occur in such conjunction.The 1960s now appear as a transitional stage in the development of industrialized societies in two respects.First,they marked the point at which youth emerged as a distinct stage of life and was accorded the liberties and rights of adulthood. Second,the1960s was the crucial decade in the transformation of the university from an elite institution at one remove from society into a site

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of mass education increasingly integrated with the demands of the market for highly skilled labor.

The transformation of higher education amounts in many places to its dilution.Not only are studies increasingly vocational,but students themselves are less likely to be18-year-olds straight from school.Students are increasingly obliged to work at least part-time,and policies favoring late entry and recurrent education have encouraged universities to enroll greater num-bers of older students.The status of‘‘student’’has,in consequence,become less determinate as students are increasingly integrated into the social and economic mainstream.Cultural and moral concerns have not disappeared from stu-dent politics,but they have,with the prolifera-tion of the‘‘new’’social movements,become more widespread in non-student politics.Dis-tinctively student politics have,as a result,come more closely to resemble the politics of other sectional interest groups.

If student movements have all but disap-peared from the liberal democratic states of the advanced industrialized societies,they have con-tinued intermittently to play important roles in authoritarian states.In the1970s,student move-ments played critical roles in the democratiza-tion of Franco’s Spain and of Greece during years of military dictatorship,in Spain because the universities enjoyed a degree of political immunity and so provided space for political discussion and organization not enjoyed by other groups in society,and in Greece because students dared to challenge an increasingly unpopular regime.In Hungary,Poland,and Czecholovakia,student movements repeatedly challenged communist regimes from the1950s to the1980s.Sometimes their protests were bloodily repressed–as in Hungary in1956–but student movements kept alive democratic aspirations and so contributed to the eventual collapse of those regimes.

The role of student movements in the demo-cratization of Asian societies is even clearer.In Thailand,South Korea,Taiwan,and Indonesia, despite often savage repression,student move-ments provoked political crises in authoritarian regimes that ultimately issued in the expansion of civil liberties and democratic rights.Student protests against more closed and systematically repressive regimes have,however,had less fortunate results.The student movement in Burma/Myanmar has been aggressively repressed,but perhaps the best-known example, both for the hopes it raised and the brutal way in which they were dashed,was the Chinese move-ment that focused upon Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in1989.

What these and the many other instances of student movements in authoritarian states have in common is that it was generally students who first challenged oppressive regimes in the name of universalist principles of liberty,mor-ality,and democracy.The critical conditions for the emergence and development of student movements are a suitably moralistic political grievance,an absence of effective opposition within the polity from other,more powerful political actors,and a lack of powerful allies. Chief among the conditions of their success, however,is their ability to attract allies either from reformists within governing elites or from other sections of society,and upon the vigor of the state’s repressive response.Students, who are relatively unconstrained by the obliga-tions of adult life,may be the least inhibited partisans of anti-authoritarianism,but they are seldom able by themselves to achieve their objectives.

The development of student movements in modernizing societies under authoritarian regimes is common,but their development in fully democratic states in economically advanced societies is wholly exceptional.

SEE ALSO:Anti-War and Peace Movements; Global Justice as a Social Movement;Globali-zation and Global Justice;Modernization; New Left;New Social Movement Theory; Revolutions;Social Movements;Women’s Movements

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Boren,M.E.(2001)Student Resistance:A History of the Unruly Subject.Routledge,New York. Burg,D.E.(1998)Encyclopedia of Student and Youth Movements.Facts on File,New York.

Feuer,L.(1969)The Conflict of Generations:The Character and Significance of Student Movements. Basic Books,New York.

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Gitlin,T.(1981)The Whole World is Watching:The Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left.University of California Press,Berkeley. Miller,J.(1987)Democracy is in the Streets:From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.Simon& Schuster,New York.

Rootes, C.(1980)Student Radicalism:Politics of Moral Protest and Legitimation Problems of the Modern Capitalist State.Theory and Society9(3): 473–502.

Rootes,C.(1990)Student Movements in Advanced Western Societies.Associations Transnationales 4:207–https://www.wendangku.net/doc/e5871333.html,/sspssr/staff/ rootes.htm.

Statera,G.(1975)Death of a Utopia.Oxford Uni-versity Press,New York.

Touraine,A.(1971)The May Movement.Random House,New York.

subculture

David Muggleton

A subculture in general terms is a group with certain cultural features that enable it to be dis-tinguished from other groups and the wider society from which it has emerged.But before it is possible to attempt a more precise clarifica-tion of the concept of subculture,it is necessary to examine the wider and related term ‘‘culture.’’The definition of culture that under-pins the analysis of subculture is that which derives from the discipline of anthropology, and is concerned with the study of‘‘a whole way of life’’of a group or society.This widely encompassing and democratic definition does, however,raise the issue of what aspects of groups or societies are,or are not,‘‘cultural.’’Sociologists have always regarded both religious and secular systems of values and beliefs to be cultural,along with those‘‘styles of life’’that arise from patterned modes of consumption. More recently,the discipline of cultural studies has reserved the term culture for those‘‘sig-nifying practices’’–including cinema,fashion and design,cuisine,popular recreations,adver-tising,music,and so forth–through which people communicate their tastes and give expressive form to their emergent identities.

This does raise the issue of the level of gen-erality or specificity at which culture is shared. In an age of global communications,certain cultural forms clearly cross national boundaries; yet it is also possible to identify distinctive national cultures.Within nations,cultural pat-terns are also cross cut by region,religious affiliation,and other social characteristics such as class,gender,age,ethnicity,and sexuality.It might therefore be appreciated why early defini-tions of subculture proposed the term to refer to a unified subset or division of the wider,national culture,one that had an integrative function for the individual member.Other initial attempts at conceptualization preferred to employ the des-ignations subworld,population segment,or scene.But while precise agreement has never been reached over what constitutes subcultures, they can fundamentally be regarded as social groups whose specific,shared culture,lifestyle, or identity is distinctive enough to mark them off as different in some significant way from their‘‘parent culture’’(the immediate cultural milieu from which they arise).They can be organized around many kinds of shared interests and activities,including drug taking,fashion and music,or sport.Any particular social class, age span,gender,or ethnicity could conceivably dominate membership,although sociological studies of subcultures have often focused on those composed of white,male,working-class youths.

In a pluralistic and highly differentiated society,cultural identifications do not all wield the same influence or share equal status;rather, they are unevenly ranked in terms of power,so it is broadly possible to identify cultural clusters that stand in mutual relationships of domina-tion and subordination.While subcultures can emerge from relatively powerful parent cultures, such that they can be considered enclaves within the dominant culture,ultra-radical groups of this kind whose values and activities are too sharply opposed to those of the dominant culture,and/or that are perceived to have developed a potentially revolutionary political self-awareness,tend to be conceptualized as ‘‘contra-cultures’’or more often‘‘countercul-tures.’’On the other hand,the term subculture is rarely used to denote sets of practices that are too conservative,reactionary,or reflective of the dominant culture.The assumption is that

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