Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits

Given their tendency to splinter over tactics and goals, social movements are rarely unified. While most scholars agree factionalism can be a major hurdle for successful mobilization, existing research is limited. Following the modern Western animal rights movement over thirty years, Piecemeal Protest applies the sociological theory of Bourdieu, Goffman, Weber, and contemporary social movement researchers to examine structural conditions facilitating factionalism in today’s era of professionalized advocacy.

Modern social movements are dominated by bureaucratically-oriented nonprofits, a special arrangement which creates significant tension between activists and movement elites who compete for success in a corporate political arena. Piecemeal Protest examines the impact of nonprofitization on factionalism and a movement’s ability to mobilize, resonate, and succeed. Corey Lee Wrenn’s exhaustive content analysis of archival movement literature and exclusive interviews with movement leaders illustrate how entities with greater symbolic capital are positioned to monopolize claimsmaking, disempower competitors, and replicate hegemonic power, eroding democratic access to dialogue and decision-making essential for movement health.

Piecemeal Protest examines social movement behavior shaped by capitalist ideologies and state interests. Heavy factional boundary maintenance may prevent critical discourse within the movement, and may provoke the symbolic appropriation of radical claimsmaking for bureaucratic ends and radical suppression. As power concentrates to the disadvantage of marginalized factions in the modern social movement arena, Piecemeal Protest shines light on processes of factionalism and considers how, in the age of nonprofits, intra-movement inequality could stifle social progress.