Gender perspectives in case studies across continents

necessarily implies a crisis situation and a redefinition of the collective action (Alonso, 1992, 1993, Jelín, 1987; Offe, 1992).

With respect to women’s collective action in Spanish society during the 80s and 90s, the panorama became even more complex given the emergence of a diversity of associative initiatives that apparently seemed self-isolated according to sectorial and thematic interests and aims. In this regard, the words “atomization” and “fragmentation” were repeated in very different fields in the course of the research. For example, a public administration’s civil servant, with responsibilities for the implementation of equality policies, expressed the importance of diversity among women and the diversity of active associations but, at the same time, pointed out the fear of atomization and dispersion with the resulting loss of collective power and transformative capacity: “I believe that it is a very new and interesting situation which is being worked very well, there are many associations and very varied. Something that was unthinkable a few years ago. But in my opinion, the problem is that they are dispersed, atomized and you wonder if all of this is effective“.

An outstanding activist of the 60s feminist movement expressed herself in similar terms: “There is no doubt that changes are being achieved, but they are temporary, local and also personal. I am not saying that personal changes aren’t important, but I wonder whether all that energy flowing, all this effort lead us to a bigger change or to the fragmentation of groups and associations that make those collective changes unviable”.

As we have just seen in these last statements, the phenomenon or perception of atomization is lived as a threat to the efficacy in the achievement of goals for larger and global changes. Many experts from urban social movements in Madrid and other cities were involved in this discussion in those years. Therefore, the difference, in addition to other things, between creating associations and social movement lies precisely in the distinction between atomization and coordination and communication system among groups. An association can find itself isolated in its social context by impotence or will. Whereas a social movement is such a movement because it is a communication system in action, that is, because it establishes a flow of messages through a network structure, where different formal groups in consonance serve, at the same time, as connection points of exit and entry of information which develop attitudes and practices expressed positively in crucial moments of mobilization and/or in processes of community development.

Thus, the concept of network appears as an improvement over isolation and atomization and as an organizational and strategic characteristic of social movements. When we talk about the network, we are referring to a horizontal way to organize aimed at achieving common goals through institutions, localities and territorial frontiers. As the history of social movements has pointed out, these have been more effective when they have been consciously organized on the basis of these horizontal networks without rejecting the practical need of an organizational hierarchy in the implementation of a particular operation (Wainwright, 1994; Beck, 2004).

The concept of social network has an assessed history in anthropology, and networks studies have revealed the importance of informal organizations in social life as channels that allow the flow of information and resources creating conditions of mutual help, of reciprocity and adaptation to different socio-cultural contexts. On large scale societies in urban situations of great heterogeneity, social networks can be an analytic instrument to show the way in which individuals are linked to institutions and these are produced through social actors (Bott, 1990; Lommitz, 1978; Mitchell, 1969; Wolf, 1980).

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