have been drawn as far as the relationship between structure, conflict, and movement is concerned.
In order to try to make sense of what is undoubtedly a highly diversified debate we must first of all keep in mind that those who investigate the relationship between structure, class, and collective action sometimes move from rather different points of departure, and use the same terms in quite different ways. To begin with, we must note the difference between a “historical” and a “structural” (Eder 1995) or “analytical” (Melucci 1995) concept of class. In the first meaning, class is a historical product of capitalist society (referring in other words to the working and the capitalist class, and to the specific structural processes that produced and reinforced their identity). In the second, a class is a group of people with similar “relationships within which social resources are produced and appropriated” (Melucci 1995, p. 117). The inequalities in power and status, peculiar to postindustrial society, might well not be conducive to the reproduction of industrial class conflict, but still provide the structural roots for the emergence of new collective actors. The tension between these two different approaches has affected recent debates on the persistence of class as a factor shaping conventional political behavior, and in particular, electoral participation (e.g. Dalton et al. 1984; Dalton 1988; 2015).
A second issue among those who still recognize the relevance of structural interpretations regards the existence of a hierarchical structure of different types of conflicts, and the possibility of identifying core conflicts comparable to those which according to dominant interpretations shaped the industrial society. The most coherent attempt to identify the core conflicts of postindustrial (or “programmed”) society is to be found in the work of Alain Touraine who has played an important role in the development of social movement studies. According to his path‐breaking work in the 1980s, the category of social movement fulfills a fundamental task, in both defining the rules by which society functions and in determining the specific goal of sociology: “The sociology of social movements,” wrote Touraine (1981, p. 30), “cannot be separated from a representation of society as a system of social forces competing for control of a cultural field.” That is, the way in which each society functions reflects the struggle between two antagonistic actors who fight for control of cultural concerns that, in turn, determine the type of transforming action which a society performs upon itself (Touraine 1977, pp. 95–96). It is in relation to the concept of historicity – defined by the interweaving of a system of knowledge, a type of accumulation, and a cultural model – that different types of society can be identified, along with the social classes which accompany them.
Touraine identified four types of society, each featuring a distinctive pair of central antagonistic actors: agrarian, mercantile, industrial, and “programmed” (a term that he prefers to “postindustrial” society). A particular trait of the programmed society is the “production of symbolic goods which model or transform our representation of human nature and the external world” (Touraine 1987, p. 127; 1985). It is the control of information that constitutes the principal source of social power.
In consequence, conflicts tend to shift from the workplace to areas such as research and development, the elaboration of information, biomedical and technical sciences, and the mass media. In his view, the central actors in social conflict are no longer classes linked to industrial production but groups with opposing visions concerning the use and allocation of cognitive and symbolic resources. In contrast with Marxism, classes are not defined only in relation to the system of production (see, for example, Miliband 1989), and class action is, in fact, the “behavior of an actor guided by cultural orientations and set within social relations defined by an unequal connection with the social control of these orientations” (Touraine 1981, p. 61). As for Pierre Bourdieu, the cultural sphere is considered as the main place for the exercise of social domination. However, Touraine differed from the deterministic approach of his French colleague in that he conceives social movements as struggling to influence the cultural sphere (Girling 2004).
Mobilizations by social movements addressed, therefore, the defense of the autonomy of civil society from the attempts of public and private technocratic groups to extend their control over ever‐widening areas of social life.11 If Touraine’s formulation places the analysis of conflicts and movements in the center of his general theoretical model, other scholars have still paid attention to the structural dimension, but without attempting to identify new dominant cleavages. Originally influenced by Touraine, Alberto Melucci held, however, improbable the emergence of new conflicts with a centrality comparable to that of the capital–labor conflict of the industrial society.12 Melucci never denied the persistent importance of traditional conflicts based on inequalities of power and wealth, and of the political actors, protagonists of these conflicts. However, he identified the peculiarity of contemporary conflicts in processes of individualization which still have their roots in structural dynamics, yet of a different kind – for example, the pervasive influence of caring institutions over the self, the globalization of communications and life experiences, the growth of media systems. And he denied the possibility of reducing responses to these differentiated structural tensions to any sort of unified paradigm of collective action. The latter – itself in a variety of forms – is, rather, just one of innumerable options open to individuals struggling for an autonomous definition of their self.
2.4.2 Which Class Base for Which Social Movements?
The relationship between structural change and new conflicts has also been viewed from another perspective. A number of scholars have stressed the fact that social change has produced a new social stratum – the so‐called new middle class. According to this point of view, this class is able, as a result of the resources it controls and of its position, to play a central role in new conflicts. For some time, analyses of postindustrial society have revealed, in parallel with the growth of the administrative/service sector in society, the emergence of social groups that stand out, because of their level of education, the roles they play, and their specific social location, from the traditional middle classes (Bell 1973; Gouldner 1979; Goldthorpe 1982; Lash and Urry 1987; Scott 1990). The new middle class, according to these analyses, is constituted from sectors of the population that tend to be employed in the service sector: they are highly educated, yet are not comparable with managers or traditional professionals. As a result of their technical and cultural competence and of their economic‐functional position, members of the new middle class have been considered as more likely to mobilize in conflicts of the new type we have just described: that is, to fight against technocrats, public and private agencies engaged in the dissemination of information and in the construction of consensus, the military and the apparatus responsible for social control. This argument has been presented on numerous occasions in recent years, and several investigations have confirmed the persistent presence of the new middle class among sympathizers and activists of the new movements.13
However, it is unclear whether the link between the new middle class, new movements, and new types of conflict effectively demonstrates the existence of a specific structural base for these types of conflict. The presence en masse of the new middle class in protest movements could, in fact, simply reflect the traditional inclination of the intellectual middle class to participate in any type of conflict (Bagguley 1995a) given their greater confidence in their own rights and capacity to speak up and participate in political life (Bourdieu 1984). From this perspective, the reference to specific structural contradictions at the base of new conflicts somewhat loses consistency. It is, rather, the case that belonging to the middle class, on the one hand, facilitates the taking up of concerns that are generically favorable to public involvement; and on the other, puts at one’s disposal individual resources and competences that can be spent in various types of political action.
In effect, comparative analysis of political participation has revealed on numerous occasions that variables of a sociodemographic type tend to explain with equal efficacy both unconventional participation (particularly widespread among movement sympathizers and activists) and conventional participation. There is, for example, a strong correlation between two factors that are usually regarded as indicators of the new middle class –
