Much of the scholarship on contentious politics consists of time-bound examinations of particular historical episodes. In The Language of Contention, Sidney Tarrow steps back to explain historical changes and continuities in the language that inspires and encapsulates those contentious episodes. Words like “strike” or “boycott” shift meanings across extended periods of time. Other terms such as “male chauvinist” live in more restricted time capsules. Tarrow applies an inventive mix of methods to trace the life histories of contentious words associated with revolutions, race and gender relations, citizenship, and the politics of love (e.g., same-sex marriage) and hate (e.g., anti-Semitism). The book concludes with a reflection on the rise of large-scale contemporary protests such as Occupy Wall Street, with their reliance on personal communication technologies that, in the author’s view, diminish the power of language to stir common sentiments and create enduring solidarity.

While Tarrow’s approach to language analysis makes an important contribution to the study of contentious politics, there are several points that invite more development. In particular, his assertion about the diminished language of loosely organized crowds such as Occupy seems to miss how these mobilizations differ from traditional movements—differences that both explain the diminished poetry of words and suggest looking beyond language to address other aspects of communication at play. In addition to this main point of contention, I also point to a couple of places where key arguments could be better clarified.

Throughout the book, Tarrow addresses the intriguing analytical question: What is the link between repertoires of action and discourse repertoires? We know that words matter, but how? He shows how shifts in usage and the introduction of new terms reveal changes in political practices and the issues that give rise to political contention. Tracing the diffusion of familiar terms, such as boycott, strike, or sabotage, reveals how common repertoires of action spread across time, languages, and cultures, often while adding or subtracting repertoires of action in the process. Among the many puzzles examined in these case studies is how such simple vocabularies can motivate large numbers of people to take often-risky actions to improve their life conditions. Tarrow draws upon the traditions of linguistics, anthropology, and social movement studies to develop a typology of language use and political practice to address these questions. One dimension of the typology is the symbolic resonance of political words—the mix of familiarity, emotion, and historical depth that enables people in conflict to sort through their options and join together, knowing something about how those categories of action turned out in the past. The other dimension of language choice and practical guidance is strategic modularity—the knowledge about the ways in which various terms have been adapted to new conditions, and how those adaptations have worked. Tarrow uses this framework to show how words variously decline or become enriched by new practices. The rich examples nicely illustrate the important idea of polysemy, or the multiplicity of meanings that keep political discourses in continuous play and negotiation.

One question that seemed to go begging in this often exhilarating historical tour is: How does one decide among arguments when operating at such high levels of historical abstraction? For example, the engaging chapter on class politics documents a decline in references to class language in U.S. and British books published in the last decades of the twentieth century (p. 76). This seems paradoxical in light of the dramatic increases in inequality in those nations over the same period. Tarrow attributes this linguistic shift to declining subjective perceptions of class in polls and popular culture, accompanied by populism on the right and strategic decisions not to overplay old ideological appeals on the left. This account seems a bit piecemeal in its neglect of a rising global neoliberal political economy during that period, displacing unions and moving labor parties in many nations toward neoliberal market reforms. Bringing this neoliberal turn into the explanation might also have offered a better account for the reason that Occupy had to invent a new, more individualized language (“We are the 99%) to frame its protests.

Beyond its refreshing historical scope, Tarrow’s framework may help to reconcile a paradigm split within social movement studies, where the long-dominant school takes an instrumentalist approach to organizational strategies and outcomes, while more recent challengers have argued that movements are more centrally about the spread of ideas and cultural change. The author discusses language as both a simplifying organizational bridge and a deeper cultural change mechanism. However, the brief examples in this book may not offer scholars sufficient guidance to work through these tricky differences of perspective. Any elaboration that he can offer in his response would be of help here.

Given his predominant focus on how language forges collective identity and solidary in action, Tarrow seems a bit perplexed by forms of mobilization that explicitly aim for ideational diversity and inclusiveness, resulting in the celebration of individual agency through broad frames that are highly personalized in form. The rich language of class conflict expressed in the history of strikes and socialist revolutions have long cultural and historical trails encoded in language. However, as noted, frames such as “We are the 99%” can seem somehow more diminished despite enabling large numbers of highly personalized stories to be channeled into sustained collective protest.

Many observers of the large-scale protests that have swept the globe in places as different as Egypt, Spain, the United States, and China have dismissed them as unfocused, low-impact “clictivism.” Tarrow is more thoughtful than that, and holds open the door to other kinds of longer-term outcomes stemming from such mobilizations, noting, for example, that Occupy terms such as “We are the 99%” remained in circulation long after the protests died out. However, he is still concerned about the relatively short-lived and chaotic nature of those crowds, and points to communication spread through social media that seems diminished and uninspiring.

The final chapter opens with a pair of anecdotes: the inspiring “These are the times that try men’s souls” passage from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, that best-seller from the American Revolution, and a banal text message in typically choppy SMS code from an uprising in the Philippines in 2001. I will refrain from discussing whether this is an unfair comparison of a best case/worst case N of 2. Nor will I delve into whether much of the language of strikes or boycotts is really all that deep when taken out of context. I prefer to engage with the merits of Tarrow’s thoughtful critique about the ways in which personalized communication technologies may have altered the role of language in contentious politics.

What seems missing from Tarrow’s friendly criticism of social-media-speak is recognition of the possibility that the underlying structural conditions for such mobilizations are different from those for more conventional movement formations where social solidarity is more easily established through common institutional and organizational memberships and oppositional relationships. In our book The Logic of Connective Action, Alexandra Segerberg and I argue that for various reasons, many contemporary populations are fragmented or individuated and, while they may suffer common grievances, they lack and sometimes actively reject the social memberships in unions, parties, churches, or political groups that promote collective identifications and formal organization. These fragmented populations tend to be more responsive to the kinds of communication that enables them to share personalized accounts via social media, which are more conducive to easily appropriated and shared language such as “the 99%.”

It is not so much a question of whether those personalized action frames are weaker or less likely to inspire enduring movements, but of the kind of coordinated communication that is likely to arise in conditions that are unlike those from the great movements of modern history. In cases such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street, or in labor and environmental protests in contemporary China, the richness of language exists at a different level of agency (the individual), and is then scaled up across dense face-to-face and social media networks. These densely mediated networks produce a different form of organization than that found in conventional collective action, resulting in mobilizations based on a different organizational logic that we term the logic of connective action. In this view, communication is not just a matter of presence or absence of inspiring language that guides the choice and conduct of action. Rather, communication is more importantly about organization itself: the creation of dense and often redundant social networks that construct physical and virtual association in ways that mimic such organizational processes as resource allocation, responsiveness to external events, and longer-term adaptation or decline.

In these networks, the volume and richness of multimedia content is greater than Tarrow’s spare text-message example implies, but he may be right that the iconic condensational rhetoric that forges collective identities is also less prominent—–because the structural conditions that support such language are often missing. The difference is between many people sharing a common story and many individual stories being shared in ways that establish a common protest network.