Strategic interventions in sociology’s resource mobilization theory: Reimagining the #MeToo movement as critical public relations
Introduction
In correcting mainstream public relations’ myopic focus on corporate and organizational interests, the emerging field of critical public relations (see e.g. L’Etang, McKie, Snow, & Xifra, 2016) has provided a much broader vision for public relations (PR) scholars and practitioners. Indeed, critical scholars have called for public relations to be situated “in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it and the attitudes and behaviours that characterize it” (Munshi & Kurian, 2016, p. 405) and to facilitate advocacy for activist-led social causes (e.g., Dutta, 2011; L’Etang, 2016a).
Making the case for public relations to be a vehicle for social change, we argue that critical PR scholarship can intervene in and reframe the Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), one of the most important sociological theories for the study of social movements. In recent years, some PR scholars (e.g., Bentele & Wehmeier, 2007; Edwards, 2018; Edwards & Hodges, 2012; Waymer, 2012), have engaged deeply with sociology. We extend this engagement by exploring how critical PR can refine RMT as a framework for analyzing activist publics in social movements. In particular, we assess the relevance of RMT in understanding contemporary digital movements and how it can be significantly re-theorized to deal with some of the most critical issues of our time.
RMT has been deployed previously to study social movements that have used social media as a tool for communicating with geographically spread out and politically constrained publics as, for example, in the case of the Arab Spring and the Tunisian Revolution (Breuer, Landman, & Farquhar, 2015; Eltantawy & Wiest, 2011). In such instances, digital technologies facilitated street protests and actual physical gathering of participants. In a study of the use of social media by community and voluntary organizations in New Zealand, Zorn, Grant, and Henderson (2013) refer to “resource mobilization chains” to show how processes of mobilizing a resource, whether tangible or intangible, are never unitary; rather “the ability to mobilize one resource directly influences the capacity to mobilize other resources” (p. 669). However, there has been little scholarly attempt thus far to evaluate RMT as an analytical framework to study movements that function primarily in the virtual world. We address this issue by focusing on the worldwide #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment to illustrate the potential for reimagining RMT by infusing it with critical PR scholarship.
Section snippets
RMT and the #MeToo movement
As a much-cited framework for the study of social movements, first used in the 1970s, RMT highlights the various resources utilized by a movement to sustain itself. Such resources can range from human resources, such as labor and skills, and material resources, such as money and equipment, to the more abstract resources of cultural knowledge, experience and moral commitment (McCarthy & Zald, 1977; Oberschall, 1973; Edwards & McCarthy, 2004). While the ability to gain a positive image through
Critical evaluation of the #MeToo movement
From an RMT perspective, the #MeToo movement has had some remarkable successes in deploying emotional resources via digital platforms, particularly in making audible long-suppressed marginalized voices. Consequently, the ‘popular feminism’ narrative, a term used to describe the increasing acceptability of feminist messages within mainstream discourse, has found pathways to spread and incorporate the stories and experiences of women. The discourse of hashtags creates a critical standpoint that
Theoretical inadequacies of RMT in assessing #MeToo
Although RMT is the preeminent sociological theory to assess social movements for their ability to bring together both tangible and intangible resources, it has been inadequate in assessing the #MeToo movement. The limitations of RMT lie primarily in its overarching emphasis on the structured nature of social movements. Indeed, #MeToo lacks a well-defined organizational structure, clear goals and a definite plan of action. Contrary to social theorist J. Craig Jenkins (1983) assertion that
Reframing RMT through the lens of critical PR
As a framework to make sense of contemporary social movements, RMT comes across as functional and organization/organizing-centric, much like mainstream PR theory. Indeed, as Martin (2015) says, for RMT theorists such as McCarthy and Zald (1977), for example, “social and political problems are analogous to economic problems, which are solved by entrepreneurs prepared to exploit a gap in the market” (p. 37). An uncritical definition of the term ‘resource’ in the framework consequently means that
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