Social Movement Research Paper

Social movement and protest usually occurs in society around the world nowadays. But what do they mean? How they occur? Define whether a social movement or protest succeed or fail.

In following part, the definition of social movement, protest will show briefly and making use of example to compare difference between successful and failing social movement and discover the key factor, which affects the final outcome.

Social movements are forms of collective action that emerge in response to situations of inequality, oppression, unmet social, political, economic or cultural demands. They comprise ‘an organized set of constituents pursuing a common political agenda of change over time’ (Batliwala 2012:3)

From the definition we can see that social

In this essay, if social movement can withdrawal the decision that make by government that mean this is a succeeded case, if not which mean it is a failed case.

Here are two examples of social movements that happened in Hong Kong during 2014.They are “Protest over Hong Kong moral and national education” and "Umbrella Movement", also called "Occupy Central".

Protest over Hong Kong moral and national education is a succeeded protest that happens on 29th July 2012. This was an alternative social movement, as the aim of this protest only wants to withdrawal the target policy on setting up the subject of moral and national subject and its target particular subgroups such as teachers, student and their parents, we can see that this did not affect much interest group on public so which only bring limited social change and this help to increases the success rate of this

The current protestors are self-motivated to join the movement; they belong to emergent-norm theory, a subtype of collective theory. They begins as collectives composed of people with mixed interests and motives; given norms are vague and changing, people follow the emergent norms.

(Turner and Killian, 1957)They come out because they see how police clear the protestor. They did not have well-organized plan, without a leader as mentioned that they are self-motivated, they are easily to separate into different zone which show this movement fail to mobilize people towards accomplishing the movement’s goal.

The political goal of umbrella movement, protestors want the right to nominate and directly elect the head of the Hong Kong government, known as the chief executive. They want to change the government structure of Hong Kong, this goal it seems that impossible because this will affect the setting of basic law and the Communist Party thinks this semi-autonomy should be enough for Hong Kong.

The Chinese government rejects on the umbrella movement request, as a result this social movement turn to