Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Robert Michels And The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, Pamela S. Tolbert

Pamela S Tolbert

[Excerpt] Resource mobilization, a dominant theoretical approach to the study of social movements for many decades, points to social movement organizations (SMOs) as a focal point for efforts to understand the variations in both the impact and fate of social movements. SMOs, like other types of political organizations, are expected to represent members’ common preferences for some specified social change, acting to bring about such change through influence on formal political decision-making, or on general behaviors of the members of a polity, or on both. In this context, the classic analysis offered by Robert Michels ([1911] 1962) of typical evolutionary …