Abeyance
individual commitment to movement goals
VERTA TAYLOR and ALISON DAHL CROSSLEY
Abeyance depicts a holding pattern in which
a social movement manages to sustain itself
and mount a challenge to authorities in a hos-
tile political and cultural environment, thereby
providing continuity from one stage of mobi-
lization to another. Abeyance carries with it the
connotation of movement decline, failure, and
demobilization relative to peaks of mobiliza-
tion. When a movement declines, it does not
necessary disappear. Rather, pockets of move-
ment activity may continue to exist and can
serve as starting points of a new cycle of the
same or a new movement at a later point in
time. During periods of abeyance, movements
sustain themselves but develop distinct reper-
toires of contention that are different from the
mobilizing structures and tactical repertoires
of movements in a stage of mass mobilization.
A social movement in abeyance may provide
linkages to new rounds of mobilization through
activist networks, an established repertoire of
goals and tactics, and by constructing a col-
lective identity that can serve as a symbolic
resource for subsequent mobilization.
Verta Taylor (1989) introduced the abeyance
formulation to understand the persistence of
the American womens movement. The con-
cept of abeyance questioned the orthodoxy
that the US womens movement mobilized
through two intense waves of protest and died
in the interim, calling into question the pre-
vailing view that movements have births and
deaths. Factors that contribute to abeyance
are both structural and cultural, as well as
external and internal to a movement. Shifting
political, cultural, and institutionalized envi-
ronments lead social movement organizations
and activist networks to change their reper-
toires of contention when a movement is
in abeyance. Internal factors that promote
movement abeyance are longevity of attachment
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements,
Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm001
to movement organizations, intense levels of
and tactics, exclusiveness in terms of member-
ship, centralization that ensures organizational
stability and sustained action among a small
cadre of highly committed activists, and a rich
political culture that promotes solidarity, oppo-
sitional consciousness, and continued involve-
ment in the movement. Externally, a lack of
status opportunities for integrating intensely
committed activists into the mainstream once
a movement recedes creates conditions for
abeyance. Abeyance structures, in turn, pro-
mote movement continuity by sustaining orga-
nizational remnants or holdovers of a protest
wave that provide a resource infrastructure
from which a new protest wave may emerge in
a different political environment.
Rupp and Taylors initial work on abeyance
focused on a scaled-down period of womens
movement activity in the United States in the
1950s and the 1960s when feminist organiza-
tions and activists retreated from protest and
political engagement. Taylor and her collabo-
rators (Taylor & Whittier 1992; Taylor & Rupp
1993; Taylor & Whittier 1997) subsequently
examined the abeyance structures that sus-
tained the womens movement since the 1980s,
arguing that the movement had become more
decentralized, polycentric, and reticulate than
ever before in order to survive a decline in
recruitment and a political environment unre-
ceptive to feminist claims. Sawyers and Meyer
(1999) contend that abeyance brought about
the absence of the womens movement from
policy domains, the polarization of its insti-
tutionalized and radical branches, and a shift
toward cultural activities and alternative insti-
tutions away from political activities. Others
argue that the culture of a social movement,
including its collective emotions, beliefs, and
rituals sustains organizational membership and
enhances the abeyance function (Staggenborg
& Taylor 2005).
2 a b eya n ce
The abeyance formulation has been used to
examine the state of womens movements in a
wide range of developed democracies, includ-
ing Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the
United Kingdom, South Korea, and the United
States (Bagguley 2002; Grey & Sawyer 2008). In
most countries, womens movements peaked
in two cycles of protest but have persisted in a
different form since the second wave of femi-
nist protest ended in the 1970s. Cross-national
and comparative research has led to a more
developed model of abeyance by illuminating
the variety of abeyance structures in addition
to formal organizations through which move-
ments sustain themselves during periods of
quiescence.
The concept of abeyance has been influential
in reorienting scholars away from a preoccu-
pation with the emergence of movements to
an understanding of movements as developing
in cycles or waves of mobilization. Abeyance
has been used to examine the survival and
continuity of a wide variety of movements
(Kendrick 2000; Holland & Cable 2002; Isaac
& Christiansen 2002; Almeida 2003; Rojas
2007). The abeyance formulation challenges
social movement scholars not only to consider
the organizational, network, and ideological
bridges that connect different phases of mobi-
lization, but also to expand analyses of social
movement outcomes beyond a narrow focus
on short-term gains.
SEE ALSO: Collective identity; Commitment;
Culture and social movements; Fascist move-
ments; Protest cycles and waves; Womens move-
ments.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
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