Keeping the store in order: an ethnography of youth activism’s everyday work

This chapter focuses on strategies of “storekeep- ing” developed within social movement organisations (hereafter SMOs), and it is concerned with the internal work that ensures complex organisations’ functioning and adaptation to change. The chapter develops from the premise that the on-going complexification of social movements’ repertory and fields of actions – fostered, amongst other things, by younger generations’ specific political cultures (Kennelly, 2011; Milburn, 2019; Pickard and Bessant, 2018) – implies a closer look at the internal life of these collective actors. In this perspective, it analyses the story of an Italian youth SMO to discuss how a “differentiated yet integrated” strategy of action is elaborated by the involved activists to “keep their store in order” while engaging in multiple fields of action. Within the studied youth SMO, forms of institutionalised participation (e.g., involvement in the local elections, creation of an NGO) and initiatives aimed at directly providing a variety of services (e.g., self-managed shelter for migrants and a kindergarten) develop along with the classic practices of protest politics, such as demonstrations and riots. Discussing each of these forms of political engagement as different roles that activists needed to perform in the public arena, the chapter highlights the organisational challenges rising from the combination of these public identities and analyses how this complexity has been solved, identifying recurring micro-mechanisms of internal management.