(relating to the right to vote, for example), and social benefits (relating to access to minimum levels of well‐being and education) without any further qualifications (Marshall 1992). These rights, in fact, referred to the citizen as understood generically – usually male, adult, Western. Mobilization aimed at extending rights of citizenship entailed provision of the same set of entitlements to social groups that had been excluded: illiterate and nonaffluent people, but also women and ethnic minorities (Barbalet 1988).
Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, various factors have revealed the problematic nature of this notion of citizenship. Not only has it been pointed out how Marshall’s model was hardly applicable in countries other than Britain (Giddens 1983; Barbalet 1988), but also a series of structural processes have undermined previously taken‐for‐granted understandings. With the consolidation of the presence of women in the public sphere (in both professional and political terms), the contradiction has become clear between rights formally recognized as universal, and existing forms of organization of family and professional life that have restricted women’s enjoyment of those rights. Immigration waves to Western countries have made the problem more urgent of how to articulate citizens’ rights in such a way as to allow for the existence of different cultural groups. Particularly, the growing number of non‐national residents pushed for an adaptation of the very notion of citizenship rights, with the effects of various degrees of protection for different “shades” of citizenship (Soysal 1994; Isin and Turner 2002; della Porta 2018c).
All these examples suggest that, although the nation‐state and modern citizenship rights took their inspiration from universal identities, other possible sources of collective identity and of conflict have not disappeared. Other criteria based on traits such as gender, ethnic origin, or age regularly appear alongside those of a functionalist or universal type, to define collective actors. In consequence, citizenship appears to be less a set of endowments and more a process of a conflicting nature, where what is at stake are the criteria defining what a citizen is. The fact that the state has widened its scope for intervention only makes the political nature of those asymmetries and inequalities more obvious.
2.3.2 Cultures and Countercultures
Growing differentiation in lifestyles represents another source of problematization of social identities. In a world in which class allegiances seem fragmented and political ideologies are in crisis, cultural consumption, use of one’s free time, ways of organizing one’s emotional life, eating habits, or styles of clothes can all represent a powerful factor for diversification and, in the final analysis, of new stratification, among social groups (Bourdieu 1984; Eder 1993). In many cases, it is simply an issue of individual consumer behavior, no different from other fashion phenomena. In other cases, however, lifestyle becomes the stake in conflicts regarding the legitimacy of emerging cultural forms or the defense of traditional ones.
Youth movements and other oppositional countercultures provide examples of how individual lifestyle may take up an antagonistic character. The emergence of punk at the end of the 1970s had elements that could easily be reduced to fashion, but also a powerful symbolic antagonism, in the sense of breaking away from consolidated canons of decorum and good taste. In other words, it also had a distinctive countercultural flavor (Crossley 2015). Similar remarks may apply to other forms of youth cultural experience, from rap to rave. More recently, alternative cultures and lifestyles have been nurtured in the Italian and Spanish squatted youth centers, as well as in the radical wing of the antiroad movement in the United Kingdom (Doherty 1998; della Porta, Andretta, et al. 2006). In the late twentieth century, various sectors of social movements have indeed reserved considerable space to action concerning consumer goods and cultural elaboration. Women’s, squatters’, or youth movements have promoted the construction of alternative networks offering autonomous opportunities for support and social contacts to their participants (Melucci 1984; Taylor and Whittier 1992; see Chapter 7).
In other cases, collective action on lifestyles has been concerned with the defense of values and traditions which, it was held, were threatened. Movements such as the American Moral Majority or those against the introduction of divorce in Italy in the early years of the 1970s also chose the private sphere and the criteria by which one can define a particular lifestyle as ethically desirable as their favored terrain for political mobilization (Wood and Hughes 1984; Wallis and Bruce 1986; Oberschall 1993, Chapter 13).
The growing importance of lifestyle has also led to consumerism becoming a specific object of collective action. The consumer has been increasingly identified as a political, and not simply as an economic, actor. Consumer organizations have addressed their mobilization attempts to the public in general. Structures for the production and distribution of alternative goods, for example, in the food sector, have been created; campaigns and mobilizations in favor of consumers have also been launched. They have taken forms ranging from quasi‐countercultures (for example, in the alternative networks promoting and distributing organic food in the early stages of environmental movements) to classic public interest‐group action (for example, in the form of mass professional organizations like Common Cause) (Baek 2010; Boström, Micheletti, and Peter Oosterveer 2019; Earl, Copeland, and Bimber 2017; Forno and Graziano 2014). Fair trade and boycotts have grown enormously in recent years, with a particularly successful trend among young people (Micheletti 2003; see also Chapter 7).
Although not always connected with each other, all these activities, from different points of view, draw our attention once again to the new importance assumed by collective action concerned with the defense of certain models of behavior and moral codes, rather than with the conquest of political power or the protection of economic interests. Various transformations in the private sphere and in forms of cultural production appear to have increased potential for conflicts of a symbolic nature. The variety of life experiences to which the individual has access is a result of the multiplication of group allegiances. Each of these can provide relationship and identity resources essential in turning some of the possible sources of inequality into a public debate, defining them as social problems rather than individual difficulties. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, indeed, “Each society, at each moment, elaborates a body of social problems taken to be legitimate, worthy of being debated, of being made public and sometimes officialized and, in a sense, guaranteed by the state” (1992, p. 236).
In parallel, the map of adversaries against which collective energies can, from time to time, be mobilized is equally varied: mass media, technoscientific elites, educational and social welfare institutions, entrepreneurial classes that control mass consumption, and so on. In this situation of uncertainty, instead of representing the preconditions for action concerned with economic or political goals, the definition of collective identity tends to become an autonomous problem, an object of collective action as such (although this may also apply to class conflict: Pizzorno 1978; see also Chapter 4). The same thing can be said about the search for lifestyles and ways of acting that are ethically desirable and appropriate. These needs do not result inevitably in the development of social movements.
2.3.3 Between the Global and the Local
Identities are increasingly defined within a process of accelerated cultural globalization. Globalization has produced significant cultural changes in today’s world, a growing interdependence in which social actions in a given time and place are increasingly influenced by actions that occur in distant places. As Giddens suggested (1990, p. 64), globalization implies the creation and intensification of a “worldwide social relationship which links distinct localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring miles away and vice versa.” The shortening of space and time in communication processes affects the production and reproduction of goods, culture,
