Protest on the Fly: Toward a Theory of Spontaneity in the Dynamics of Protest and Social Movements
Abstract
This article reexamines spontaneity as an important, albeit neglected, mechanism in collective action dynamics, and elaborates on its operation and effects in protest events and social movements. We do not presume that spontaneity is routinely at play in all collective actions. Rather, based on our grounded analysis of historical and ethnographic data, we contend that spontaneity is triggered by certain conditions: nonhierarchical organization; uncertain/ambiguous moments and events; behavioral/emotional priming; and certain ecological/spatial factors. We conclude by elaborating why the activation of spontaneous actions matters in shaping the course and character of protest events and movements, and we suggest that spontaneity be resuscitated in the study of collective action and everyday life more generally.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Contentious events are not planned, intended, prearranged, or organized in advance of their occurrence.
“contentious events are”
From Coordinated Dis-Coordination (2024) · cites this paper as Snow and Moss 2014
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 100 · Cited by 143
- Authors
- Snow, D. A., & Moss, D. M.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- ORCID
- Moss, Dana M.
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-10-24
- Volume
- 79
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1122-1143
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-8271
- OpenAlex
- W2140382808
- Cited by
- 143
- References
- 100
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 6
- FWCI
- 28.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Sociological Review (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social Movements and Cultural Identity
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Conflict and Governance
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
- Keywords
- spontaneity, collective action, protest events, social movements, affective priming, behavioral priming, spatial factors, everyday life, protest dynamics
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
