Neil Stammers has recently argued that social movements are not only central to the process of social change, but are key to understanding the origin and development of human rights; that social movements, in challenging extant power, generate human rights demands. Thus theorists such as Cohen viewed subcultures and social movements as points along a continuum, not as totally separate concepts; individuals with ‘similar problems of adjustment’ interact, creating new cultural forms by developing new group standards or shared frame of reference. If subcultures and social movements were originally conceived as being different extremes of the same phenomena, why are they currently thought of as being analytically distinct?

There have been two main approaches to the study of social movements; the ‘psychological’ and the ‘sociological’, or the how and why of social movement participation. Placing social movements as a reflection of social relations - and making no distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘industrial’ or ‘post-industrial’, action theorists ask what barriers restrict individual involvement.