The power of place, the significance of scale: The geographic structuring of collective action in the Boston area peace movement

Social movement mobilization is characterized by tremendous geographic and temporal variability. The existing social movements literature attributes differences in social movement activism to a variety of factors such as the ability of organizations to mobilize the financial and temporal resources of individuals, changing structures of political opportunity, values and interests associated with social and economic position, and the construction of collective identities. Virtually none of the literature examines the geographic scales at which these processes operate and how they interact. The research reported here examines the mobilization of the anti-nuclear weapons branch of the peace movement in Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham, Massachusetts from the beginning of the most recent cycle of activism in the late 1970s through its decline in the mid 1980s. Evidence strongly suggests that none of the causes of waves of activism identified by the existing schools of social movement research are in themselves sufficient. Rather, the mobilization of social movements is best understood as the articulation of several processes operating at a variety of geographical scales. Unfavorable conditions in any of the commonly identified causal processes can squelch social movement mobilization.