It is deeply ironic that the social movement perspective has so far scarcely been utilised to analyse local protests against establishments of human service enterprises, as the perspective was originally formulated in just such a context. The social movement approach could inject new vitality into a field of research that has become increasingly marginalised and enable human geographers and other social scientists to reconnect to the key issues of socio-spatial exclusion that were raised 30–40 years ago, but now with theoretically informed perspectives. At the same time, social movement research has much to gain from returning to the study of protest movements opposing the establishment of human service enterprises: they are local and thus typical of most social movements, and their success or failure, which lacks the ambiguity so often noted in social movement research, can be studied from a lifecycle perspective.