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Repertoires. frames and cycles
Making sense of social movements
national in foclls, with ordinary citizens acting on their own behalf in the national arena. Again this was reflected at the level of repertoires, which had become more modular: i.e. the same type of protest served many differ ent agents, in different localities, pursuing different interests and concerns. Thus, in modern societies, Tilly argues, there is a general repertoire: a repertoire belonging to those societies qua modern societies. Perhaps more importantly, however, what emerges out of this discussion is a sense in which social movements themselves are modern and arc aspects of a specific ally modern repertoire of contention. Although agents have pursued their interests by contentious means for as long as we care to look back, it is only more recently that they have tended to do so hy handing into the relatively durable networks of agents that we recognize today as social movements (sec also Tarrow 1 9 98: 29-70). The concept of repertoires clearly involves linguistic or discursive forms of behaviour. The act of petitioning is a form of discourse, for example, as is the chanting which often occurs on marches. Steinberg ( 1 995, 1 999) has extended this further by focusing on the various forms of rhetoric and argumentative strategy which seem to become institLltionalized i n varioLls types of struggle. One can identify acqui red rhetorical forms of argument within and across struggle as surely as one can identify acquired beha vioural forms of protest, he argues. Similarly one can trace the history of contention that has shaped these 'fighting words'. Thus the concept of repertoires must be expanded to incorporate these forrns of talk. We must be alert to the phenomena of 'discursive repertoires'.
Repertoires assessed The concept of repertoires is both interesting and important. rt enables us to take a step back from the protest activities we study as social move ment analysts and to reflect upon their social form. Tilly looks behind the apparent spontaneity and transgression of protest to reveal a stable social structure within it. Moreover, he poses questions and raises problems which have prompted movement analysts into a range of fruitful lines of empirical enquiry. Notwithstanding this, however, there are problems with the con cept which we need to be mindful of. I will briefly outline two of them. The first is not so much a problem with the repertoires concept as an observation on its relationship to the broader concepts and concerns of Tilly's work. There have been few movement analysts more critical of Durkheim than Tilly, and few who have so aggressively pursued a rational choice alternative. Indeed, in the book which offers the first extended discussion of the repertoires concept, From Mobilisation to R evolutioll, Tilly ( 1 978) both rejects Durkheim out of hand, suggesting thot rhere is little of value in his work, and engages enthusiastically with both d)t: G l rl y
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Utilitarian forerunners of rational choice theory and its most recent apo logists and advocates i n game theory. This is odd since the concept of repertoires confirms much that Durkheim sought to argue and to juxtapose to the naiveties of the Utilitarian position (see Durkheim [1 893J 1 964, [ 1 9241 1974). The Utilitarian and rational choice theorist alike are methodo logical individualists. Like Margaret Thatcher, and for the same reasons, they believe that there is no such thing as society, only individuals - she added families to this inventory but they do not. Durkheim soughr to challenge this idea by identifying a realm of 'social facts', irreducible to individuals qua individuals, among which he numbered such emergent social forms as rituals and collective representations, that is, ways of acting which prc�cxist individual actors, will outlive them, and whose meaning and logic are collectively constituted (Durkheim 1' 1 895] "] 965). Repertoires of contention fall into this category. They are socially inherited ways of acting in specific sorts of situations. Furthermore, in referring to repertoires as 'constraining" TiUy uses the exact same language as Durkheim uses in relation to social facts ( [ 18 95 1 1 965). In addition, it is clear that prOtest action, when described in terms of repertoires, is not 'utilitarian' in any normal sense. Agents do not chouse the most efficient means for pursuing their ends. At best they choose the most efficient means from a learned cultural repertoire, but more particularly they participate in a 'game' in a sense quite removed from that of game theory. They orient to shared mean ings, expectations, understandings and, what amounts to the same thing, norms. In this respect, again, Tilly inadvertently sides with Durkheim, whom he professes ro be critical of, against the Utilitarians, whom he professes to admire. One of the key themes of Durkheim's sociology was the insuffi ciency of utilitarian conceptions of the social world to account for its order, because they lacked any notion of shared social norms (Durkheim 1 1 893 1 L 964). These interpretative/theoretical matters are important because they contribute to both the critique of RAT that I have attempted to develop in this book and to my attempt to rescue a Durkheimian element in movement theory. Tilly's efforts to make sense of protest force him, in spite of himself :1nd without acknowledgement, to put a lot of distance between himself and RAT and tacitly to take up a Durkheimian position. Or rather, I con rend that Tilly's position and the concept of repertoires more specifically is rorn between the two mutually incompatible alternatives of Utilitarianism ;'\I1d a Durkheimian position. This leads to ambiguities in the concept itself. For example, Tilly describes repertoires as 'learned' ('people learn to break windows in protest'), suggesting that they are internalized and become second nature to LIS, and yet that they are 'chosen', which would imply that t hey remain 'external' objects of choice for us, akin to tools we may select ( 1'011 1.
My second criticism concerns the issue of repertoire selection. Wh<lt Tilly ldc l l t" i f il'S widl the concept" ( I f repertoires is a very broad range of methods of