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Linking capitalist transformations to citizens’ agency is a main theoretical challenge for social movement studies. In the social sciences, the effects of socioeconomic characteristics upon social and political conflicts have often been addressed by looking at political cleavages; that is, at the main politicized conflict lines (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Political cleavages have traditionally been associated with a model of collective action in which actors: (1) fought against each other in order to protect material or political interests; and (2) defined themselves (as members of a class, a faction, or a national group) in relation to these interests. As well known, the concept of cleavages was used by Stein Rokkan to describe the main conflict lines in the development of European societies and politics. As he stated:

Two of these cleavages are direct products of what we might call the National Revolution: the conflicts between the central nation‐building culture and the increasing resistance of the ethnically, linguistically or religiously distinct subject populations in the province and the periphery; the conflict between the centralizing, standardizing and mobilizing Nation‐State and the historically established corporate privilege of the Church. Two of them are products of Industrial Revolution: the conflict between the landed interests and the rising class of industrial entrepreneurs; the conflict between owners and employers on the one side and tenants, laborers and workers on the other.

(Rokkan 1999, p. 284)

In general, social movements have played a very important role in the formation, structuration and politicization of conflicts: the labor movement helped in “freezing” the class cleavage, while new social movements have been said to emerge from new cleavages. Both trends help to explain why there has been – with few valuable exceptions – a strange silence from social movement studies on the social bases of conflicts as “cleavage theory occupies a central place in literature on conventional political participation, but is remarkably absent in literature on unconventional political participation” (Damen 2013, p. 944).

Social movement studies developed, as mentioned, in a period of rejection of conceptions of the dominance of the economic sphere, pointing at the autonomy of the political or the social domains. Considering grievances, strains, cleavages, and the like as always present, social movement studies concentrated on explaining the passage from structure to action (Klandermans, Kriesi and Tarrow 1988). When cleavages are referred to in social movement studies, it is to highlight their pacification. On the other side, research on cleavages focused on their effects on electoral and party politics, disregarding the role of social movements. In fact, focusing on the environmental or women’s movements, research noted that these ‘new social movements’ arose especially when and where the old cleavages had faded away, leaving spaces for new ones to emerge (e.g. Kriesi et al. 1995).

While Rokkan singled out the social groups on which the structuration of political conflicts developed, looking at the class cleavage in particular, Stefano Bartolini and Mair 1990 (see also Bartolini 2000) contributed to a conceptualization of cleavage as composed of three elements: (1) a sociostructural reference as empirical element; (2) a collective identity, as informed by “the set of values and beliefs that provide a sense of identity and role to the empirical elements and reflects a self‐awareness of the social group(s) involved”; and (3) an organizational/behavioural element, linked to a set of individual interactions, institutions, and organizations, such as political parties, that structures the cleavage (Bartolini 2000, p. 17).

The development of cleavages as a politicized divide is therefore a process composed of various steps such as the generation of oppositions due to different interests or visions, the crystallization of opposition lines into a conflict, the emergence of alliances of political entrepreneurs engaged in mobilizing support for some policies, then the choice of mobilization strategy (community versus purpose specific) and conflict arena (electoral versus protest). The cleavage itself emerges through processes of politicization, mobilization, and democratization in the nation‐state: it is, that is, translated into politics (rather than repressed or depoliticized) by the action of party translators. The work of these translators is all the more important in keeping emotional feelings of solidarity alive, as they tend to be reduced by social heterogeneity and differentiation, the separation of workplace from residence, the reduction of direct contacts with members of the group, and the development of impersonal contacts in the party (Bartolini 2000, p. 17).

Similarly, social movement studies have stressed the importance of group characteristics for their capacity to mobilize by the presence of both specific categorical traits and networks between those sharing such traits (Tilly 1978). In synthesis, collective action on the part of particular social groups is in fact facilitated when these groups are: (1) easily identifiable and differentiated in relation to other social groups; (2) endowed, thanks to social networks among their members, with a high level of internal cohesion and with a specific identity. While the past strength of the class cleavage contributed to the development of a so‐called mid‐century compromise between labor and capital, with the growth of welfare states and citizens’ rights, new cleavages seemed to emerge.

From the perspective of social movement studies, the link between social structure, norms, and organizations can be seen as characterized by continuous feedback between those elements. As social groups are formed through processes of identification, they tend to structure themselves into various organizational formats. Organizational entrepreneurs develop new codes, often politicizing the conflict, and their framing contributes to mobilizing the social groups.

The concept of cleavage has entered the analysis of social movements, with reference to the pacification of the old class cleavage and the emergence of new ones. Research on the class bases for new social movements singled out the new middle class, in particular the highly qualified workers in the sociocultural sector as the empirical base of a new cleavage, endowed with post‐materialist values and structured into sort of archipelagos (Kriesi 1993; Inglehardt 1977). As the new middle classes (especially the sociocultural profession) were considered as the ‘empirical element’ of the cleavage, post‐materialist values were singled out as its cultural element. As Habermas observed long ago (1987, p. 392):

[New conflicts] no longer flare up in domains of material reproduction; they are no longer channeled through parties and associations; and they can no longer be allayed through compensations. Rather, these new conflicts arise in domains of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization; they are carried out in subinstitutional – or at least extraparliamentary – forms of protest; and the underlying deficit reflects reification of communicatively structured domains of action that will not respond to the media of money or power.

Finally, from the organizational point of view, new social movements emerged as networks of networks. Although new parties, such as the Green ones, were founded to represent emerging claims on environment protection or gender rights, they never reached the structuring capacity of the socialist or the communist party families in the case of the class cleavage (Diani 1995).

From this perspective, the central question for the analysis of the relationship between structure and action is whether social changes have made it easier to develop such social relationships and feelings of solidarity and of collective belonging, to identify specific interests and to promote related mobilization. The move toward capitalism did not only create aggregates of individuals joined together by the fact that they possessed the means of production (the capitalists) or their own labor force (the proletariat); it also created systems of social relationships which facilitated the development of an internal solidarity in these aggregates and their transformation into collective actors.

The working class was a central actor in the conflicts of the industrial society not only because of its size or the relevance of its economic function, but also as a consequence of a wider range of structural factors. In the Fordist factory, a large number of workers performed similar tasks within large productive units, where labor mobility was limited. These factors certainly facilitated identification of a specific social actor and reinforced internal cohesion. The concentration of the proletariat in large productive units and in urban areas produced dense networks in which a specific class identity developed along with a capacity for collective mass action (Thompson 1963; Calhoun 1982; Fantasia 1989; Urry 1995).

The bases of the industrial conflict have been weakened by modifications affecting the conditions described above. Within industry, the ways in which work is organized have changed. Automated technologies and small work groups have replaced the Fordist conveyor‐belt approach and the related mass‐worker model. Collective solidarity derived from the carrying out of the same duties has been weakened as a result. Starting in the 1980s, production began to move from large factories to smaller ones as corporations shifted production offshore and began to rely on suppliers to produce component parts of their products, rather than producing them themselves. This brought about a significant decentralization of production processes within a geographical area and led to the growth of the hidden and informal economy. Also the physical closeness of the factory and the neighborhoods inhabited by the working classes, which once represented a source of solidarity, is now broken (Lash and Urry 1987).

The importance of some productive sectors changed as well, with a noticeable decline in industrial work in favor of administrative and service occupations. Highly qualified work in the tertiary sector has grown throughout the world, creating a professional new middle class, which is very different from traditional clerical workers in industry or public bureaucracies. The change has affected both the private sector, with a marked increase in “producer services,” and the public sector, with a strong expansion of “social services” related to education, health, and social care (Castells 1996, p. 208–220).

The new middle class is, however, far from a homogeneous group; indeed, there appear to be considerable differences in terms of social rewards within it. The status of the new professionals is not always comparable with that of the traditional middle‐class professionals (lawyers, doctors, and so on). In the new producer service sector (such as advertising, marketing, communications) precarious and low‐paid forms of work are fairly widespread and constitute marked discrepancies between the cultural capital which individuals have at their disposal, and the recognition – in terms of earnings as well as of social prestige – which is obtained from these.

Unemployment also increased in many countries, and came to be considered as a structural feature of capitalist economies. The relationship between the employed and the unemployed has also changed, in more general terms: entry into the labor market is delayed more and more, excessively prolonging a nonadult lifestyle; increasingly fewer sectors of the population can count on stable and protected forms of work. If it is difficult to determine effectively the level of unemployment, and its structural determinants, in developed countries, it is safe to state that the incidence of precarious and temporary work has risen enormously (della Porta, Andretta et al. 2016). Growing inequalities emerge not only between the North and the South (Franzini and Pianta 2017), but also within the North, even in the most modern global cities (see Sassen 2000).

Poverty is also more and more widespread. In general, socioeconomic indicators converge in pointing at the increasing misery. Research has stigmatized the extreme level of deprivation in recent times. In her book on Expulsions, Saskia Sassen has singled out an emergent systemic trend that allowed for extreme concentration of wealth and rapidly increasing inequalities, with the development of “predatory formations” as “a mix of elites and systemic capacities with finance a key enabler, that push toward acute concentration” (2014, p. 13). She points indeed at the exceptionally high profit‐making capacity of some service industries also through new technologies that facilitates hypermobility. The degrading of the welfare state project so brings about “a shrunken space with relatively fewer firms, fewer workers, and fewer consumer households, all indicators of a system gearing toward expelling what does not fit in its evolving logic” (Sassen 2014, p. 217). As Thomas Piketty (2014) recalled, today’s unequal distribution of wealth is similar to that of the end of the late nineteenth century, as the capital rate return is greater than the economic growth. This inequality in turns produces social and political instability with often dramatic existential effects of inequalities in terms of disruption of everyday life (Therborn 2013).

Together with wars and predation, demographic pressure have triggered significant migrations toward the stronger economies, promoting the expansion in Western societies but also in some area in the Global South of a subproletariat with a strong ethnic character (Castells 1996, Chapter 4, especially 233–234). While by no means a new phenomenon (Olzak 1992), the scale of migrations toward the end of the twentieth century has certainly increased the potential for racial conflicts within Western democracies and has been used for a resurgence of extreme right groups. Mobilization around migration have been influenced not only by sheer number but also by changing migrant groups, with growing concerns about the religious diversity:

These structural changes in the size and diversity of the immigrant population may have two consequences. On the one hand, they might increase the likelihood to observe the rise of migrants’ mobilizations, all other things being equal. On the other hand, they might also increase the likelihood that other actors—especially anti‐migrant ones—might mobilize, either verbally or physically.

(Eggert and Giugni 2015, p. 161)

Solidarity movements have in fact interacted with the collective mobilization of migrants themselves (della Porta 2018c).

Religion also assumes a public role. Challenging the vision of secularization as an unbroken trend, researcher pointed at de‐secularization (Berger 1999) or de‐privatization of religion (Casanova 2001) with the

reappearance of religion as a contentious issue in the public sphere and as a source of political protest and activism in many parts of the world in the last two decades of the twentieth century… … Empirically this religious revivalism has been associated with diverse phenomena ranging from the Iranian revolution to terrorism associated with al‐Qaeda, Pope John Paul II’s support to the Solidarity movement in Poland, Catholic liberation theology in Latin America, Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, and outbursts of violence within new religious movements.

(Lindekilde and Kuhle 2015, p. 173)

The influence of religious groups has increased face to the retrenchment of social services as “With the pressure on welfare states and the challenges posed by ethnic and religious diversity, states are likely to be more rather than less eager to engage religious communities in providing welfare and countering alleged threats to social cohesion caused by “radicalization” (Lindekilde and Kuhle 2015, p. 176). Face to globalization and migration, with experiences of loss of cultural identity, cultural religious views (such as Salafism or Christian Evangelicalism) have provided for oppositional identities (Kühle and Lindekilde 2009). Religious spaces have worked to protect opposition in authoritarian regimes, but also to nurture claims for recognition of specific religious needs.

Additionally, generations acquired new centrality with some changes in the age distribution of the population. As Goldstone (2015, pp. 149–150) noted, socialization of new cohorts

tends to work smoothly when the numbers of people in society are stable or changing slowly enough for growth in the economy and institutions to accommodate the change. However, rapid change in the size of cohorts, or of particular social groups, can easily disrupt this process and place great strains on institutions. Sudden increases in the number of young people, or of migrants, can place a burden on schools (and on government to finance them). Rapid urbanization and educational expansion can rapidly change outlooks and loyalties as people move out of familiar and traditional settings into more fluid ones, where they have a greater variety of choices to create and join voluntary organizations, including new religious and social movements.

Research pointed in particular to the emergence of a precarious generation characterized by a sum of insecurity on the labor market, on the job (as regulations on hiring and dismissals give little protection to workers), on the work (with weak provisions for accident and illness), on income (with very low pay), all these conditions having effects in terms of accumulation of anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation (Standing 2011, pp. 10 ff.). Guy Standing noted:

[The precariat] is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labor protection … it is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations of those who found themselves as belonging to the industrial proletariat or the salariat had come to expect as their due.

(Standing 2011, p. 24)

Another fundamental force of change has consisted of the massive entry of women into the paid labor force. Within Western societies, the phenomenon has been particularly pronounced in the service sector, which suggests a relationship between dematerialization of the economy and increased opportunities for women (Castells 1997, p. 163). This process has affected lines of differentiation and criteria for interest definition within social groups, which were previously perceived as homogeneous. Continuing wage differentials between men and women represent, for example, an obvious source of division and potential conflict within the salaried classes. At the same time, and not only in the Western world, the combined impact of women’s growing economic independence and professional commitments has shaken the base of patriarchy both at home and within the professions and created opportunities for the development of even deeper gender conflicts in the private sphere.

All these processes have weakened the structural preconditions that had facilitated the emergence of a class cleavage, particularly in the working‐class model of collective action. Overall, the size of social groups which lack full access to citizenship and its entitlements has grown, whether because they are migrants (legal or illegal), employed in the hidden economy, or engaged in low‐paid work. The sense of general insecurity has been further reinforced by the growth of individual mobility, principally horizontal, as more people tend to change jobs several times in the course of their life – whether out of choice or out of necessity (Castells 1996). The multiplication of roles and of professions and of the related stratifications, and the (re)emergence of ethnicity, generational or gender‐based lines of fragmentation within socioeconomic groups have made it more difficult to identify specific social categories. The greater frequency of job changes and the weaker links with territorial communities have also made relationships among those who once shared the same structural condition more unstable and fragmentary. As work seems to be gradually losing its collective nature, a process Manuel Castells has defined as “individualization of labor” (1996, p. 265), it is more difficult to deduct actors’ interests from their structural position, and to organize their protection on that basis (Dalton 1988, Chapter 8).