The paper focuses on these dynamics that may help us to understand continuities and changes within protest groups. We define change here along three dimensions: Change in internal modes of organisation, strategic and tactical choices and formation and transformation of collective identities, i.e. the way individuals internalise a vision of the world, of the place of the group in this world and one’s place in this group, the way they incorporate or resist organisational modeling. All that contributing to help fix members' shared identities.
We argue one must carefully examine, at the micro-sociological level, the fractures generated by diverse structural characteristics in order to understand continuities and changes within protest groups. We argue that it is not only the historical and social movement context when individuals begin activism that defines lasting common political understandings, but also the duration and intensity of commitment as well as a complex mix of structural attributes and their ordering along time.
We propose a method that offers the means to build a model in which the actual profiles of activists we isolate can fully account for how interindividual distances and proximities combine in reality to produce complex and overlapping groups defined by multiple intersecting affinities. We draw on a case study of Aides, a French SMO mobilised against AIDS epidemic. First, we start by outlining a dynamic model of individual activism in which the heterogeneity of protest groups depends on the multisituated and processual structural attributes of its members. Secondly, we offer a new methodology to empirically describe internal heterogeneity by applying sequence analysis (SA) to our data. We build a typology of profiles characterised by distinctive structural attributes. Doing that, we show how the coexistence and succession of these profiles allow us to better understand the dynamic of continuity and change within the organisation.
