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