Resource Mobilization and Citizen Protest in Communities around Three Mile Island

The rapid growth and development of social movement organizations around Three Mile Island after the 1979 nuclear accident provide data for assessing and refining theories on social movements. This paper summarizes an intense first year of grass roots mobilization and documents the importance of grievances in precipitating and sustaining protest. The resource mobilization perspective regards discontent as a constant rather than a variable, and ignores cases where suddenly imposed major grievances generate organized protest. Grievances, existing structures and the mobilization process itself should all be treated as variables in the search for more inclusive theory, and three hypotheses involving these variables are included in the final section of the paper.