Showing papers in "Social Movement Studies in 2007"

‘I'm not an activist, though I've done a lot of it’: Doing Activism, Being Activist and the ‘Perfect Standard’ in a Contemporary Movement

Abstract: This paper, based on in-depth interviews with thirty-three individuals involved in the burgeoning Menstrual Activism movement, explores why the identity ‘activist’ is resisted among some social movement actors. Drawing on a ‘perfect standard’ of politics and activism grounded in the core values of rigor and humility, an activist must ‘live the issue’, demonstrate relentless dedication, and contribute a sustained effort to duly merit the label. This conception of activist effectively places the label ‘out of reach’ for many social movement actors. This analysis raises questions regarding the assumption that collective action necessarily depends on the alignment between personal identity and collective identity and calls for a more nuanced and complex conceptualization of collective identity in the context of social movement action.

Using Social Network Analysis to Explore Social Movements: A Relational Approach

Abstract: This paper uses a ‘relational’ approach to network analysis to demonstrate the linkages between different types of environmental organizations in London. A ‘relational’ approach was used to avoid problems associated with ‘positional’ approaches such as structural determinism, subjectively defined and misleadingly labelled blocks of ‘approximately’ equivalent actors, and reification of the action/issue basis of networks. The paper also explores definitions of social/environmental movements. Whilst broadly agreeing with Diani's consensual definition of a social movement, it argues that we need to be much more precise about the type and intensity of networking required; it must be more than informal or cursory, and should bind individuals and organizations into collaborative networks. Evidence from a survey of 149 environmental organizations and qualitative interviews with key campaigners suggests that whilst many organizations might share information, it is often stockpiled or ignored, hardly creating the k...

Limiting Dissent: The Mechanisms of State Repression in the USA

Abstract: Despite longstanding traditions of tolerance, inclusion, and democracy in the USA, dissident citizens and social movements have experienced significant and sustained – although often subtle and difficult-to-observe – repression. Using mechanism-based social movement theory, I explore a range of twentieth-century episodes of contention, involving such groups as mid-century communists, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the modern-day Global Justice Movement. Cracking open the black box of state repression, I demonstrate how four interactive social mechanisms – Resource Depletion, Stigmatization, Divisive Disruption, and Intimidation – animate state repression. A fifth mechanism – Emulation – diffuses the effects of these four Mechanisms of Repression. First I delineate a typology of state actions that suppress dissent. Then I shift analytically from these ten actions to the Mechanisms of Repression, explaining how these mechanisms work. Drawing on scholarship from an array of fields...

From Seattle 1999 to New York 2004: A Longitudinal Analysis of Journalistic Framing of the Movement for Democratic Globalization

Abstract: This article examines how journalistic framing of the democratic globalization movement evolved in the five years after its 1999 emergence in Seattle. It takes a longitudinal approach to analyzing social movement coverage by looking for changes in news reporting over time. Protests against the World Trade Organization put this movement on The New York Times’ map, with ‘Seattle’ enduring as a symbolic reference connoting the threat of civic disorder. We found signs of both resilience and change in the newspaper's coverage, which demonstrates complex interactions between reporters, activist groups and real-world events. Delegitimizing language was constant over time, evoking the protest paradigm and riot, confrontation and circus frames as templates. However, this analysis also found evidence of frame dynamism, suggestive of a possible evolving sympathy through which movement members improve access to reporters and get their issues across to the public. Journalists increasingly used movement members as sour...

Wearing your Politics on your Sleeve: The Role of Political Colours in Social Movements

Abstract: This article provides evidence of the significance of political colours and associated emblems in the repertoires of social movements and related political parties. It argues that political colours play an important role not only as visual symbols of the cause but also in the emotional life of social movements. Political colours help to create and sustain collective identities and illustrate the role of affect in political life. The article includes a case study of the role of colours in the women's movement, showing how one set of first-wave organizational colours took on much broader symbolic meanings during the second wave of the women's movement. It provides evidence from both the first and second waves of the women's movement of the emotional meaning of the colours for activists. The case study also illustrates the contestation over public memory that occurs in relation to powerful symbols.

Self-description, Self-deception, Simulation: A Systems-theoretical Perspective on Contemporary Discourses of Radical Change

Abstract: In advanced modern societies ecological integrity, democratic renewal, social inclusion and global justice are non-controversial collective concerns. The ecological, economic, social and political unsustainability of the present arrangements is largely uncontested. Demands for radical societal change as they have once been articulated by the counter-cultural new social movements seem to have been fully mainstreamed. At the same time, however, there is an unprecedented consensus of defence reinforcing the established system of liberal consumer capitalism. What is required in order to make sense of these evident contradictions is a theory of late-modern society's discourses of radical change. New social movement theory (NSMT) can neither explain the mainstreaming of the supposedly subversive discourses of radical change nor their relationship towards the firmly established consensus of defence. A critical review of Niklas Luhmann's systems theoretical analysis of protest communication paves the way towards ...

Translators and Transformers: International Inspiration and Exchange in Social Movements

Abstract: Cross-national traffic of ideas and practices contribute to the spread of collective action across borders. These processes have only recently become the subject of study and theoretical discussion. The theoretical models that have been developed so far fail to take into account the complex nature of intercultural communication. No attention is paid to problems of interpretation and translation that may occur and how potential adopters adapt foreign ideas and practices to a new context. Moreover, the central role of networks and existing (power) relations within these networks in this process is often neglected. Instead, I propose an empirically grounded, alternative model of the process, based on the cases of women's organizations against sexual violence in the Netherlands and Spain. My approach focuses on the processes of reception, recontextualization and the relations within the diffusion network. The reception of innovative repertoires was different for organizations that came across the example of p...

Culture and Ritual in the Montreal Women's Movement

Abstract: This paper focuses on how culture and ritual in social movements can be forms of protest or conduits to contentious politics. Based on the Montreal cases of the anglophone women's performance scene in the 1990s and the 2000 World March of Women campaign, we argue that the context in which culture is produced and consumed affects its political character and potential. Networks among activists and organizations in social movement communities affect the extent to which participants interpret and use cultural productions and rituals to support political change. Movement campaigns play an important role in giving political meaning to cultural rituals and providing opportunities for participants in cultural activities to become involved in contentious political action.

From Transnational Protest to Domestic Political Opportunities: Insights from the Debt Cancellation Campaign

Abstract: In recent years, a rapidly expanding literature has pointed to the emergence of cross-border activism, only rarely focusing on the mechanisms whereby a transnational agenda might lead to actual mobilization. By comparing national campaigns, one can gain a greater feel for domestic political settings and how congenial these are to the birth or spread of transnational protest. Drawing from the political opportunity approach, this article assesses the relative merit of explanations based on institutional access, changing political environments, past or concomitant social movement activity and multilevel political opportunities in accounting for differences in the scope, timing and dynamics of the Jubilee 2000 campaign in three creditor countries. While all four aspects of the political opportunity structure contributed to the scope of the domestic mobilizations, we find that only a combination of shifting domestic political environment and international events can explain their timing. The imprint of past or...

Bringing the Local Back In: Trajectory of Contention and the Union Struggle at Kukdong/Mexmode

Abstract: The conflict in 2001 at the Kukdong (now Mexmode) maquila garment factory is one of the rare cases of success in the wider struggle for independent unionism in Mexico. The success of the struggle, which has attracted scholars interested in the campaigns against sweatshop labour conditions and on behalf of labour internationalism, has been attributed chiefly to the role played by transnational advocacy networks in mobilizing pressure on the global sportswear giant Nike, whose brand-name, collegiate apparel was being produced in the plant. In this paper we seek not to explain why the struggle was successful, but to examine the trajectory it took over a protracted period of about nine months. We draw on McAdam et al.'s reformulation of the analysis of contentious, transgressive politics to identify three mechanisms that were particularly salient in shaping the course taken by the conflict: scale shift, actor decomposition, and brokerage. Scale shift occurred as the workers quickly escalated the conflict by b...

Organizational Elaboration as Social Movement Tactic: A Case Study of Strategic Leadership in the first US School-sponsored Program for Gay and Lesbian Youth

Abstract: This research contributes to our understanding of two central and related problems in the study of social movements: tactical innovation and strategic leadership. Focusing on the leadership history (1984–2003) of the founder and director of the first US public school program for gay and lesbian youth, called Project 10 and located in the Los Angeles, California public school system, this case study illustrates the importance of leadership agency on the part of those ‘organizing from within’. Analyses herein indicate the significance of both institutional constraints and life course circumstances in determining leadership choices. This paper maps organizational obstacles and the tactical dilemmas they produced to explain how successful strategic choices get made. The case of Project 10 indicates that institutional constraints can be overcome tactically with organizational elaboration. Additionally, hybridity, assumed in the literature to produce organizational precariousness, is shown here to be a mechanis...

Political Process and the Development of Labor Insurgency in Turkey, 1945- 80

Abstract: Much attention in recent political science and sociology has been given to the origins of social movements, revolutions, and other similar forms of contentious politics. Furthermore, unlike other areas of study in the social sciences, analysts of contentious politics have actively sought to draw insights from divergent theoretical approaches. Such an integrated approach to the study of social movements is offered by the political process model. This paper offers an empirical extension of the process model of social movement emergence to the case of the labor movement in Turkey. The predominant view of the labor movement in Turkey is one that sees the movement as relatively inconsequential to the development of state–society relations in that country. This conclusion is based on two lines of reasoning: first, the notion that the state granted labor rights and freedoms without a protracted struggle from below, and, second, the notion that the military coup of 1980 effectively crushed the Turkish labor movem...

Habermas, Activism, and Acquiescence: Reactions to ‘Colonization’ in UK Trade Unions

Abstract: Habermas's idea of a conflict shift from ‘old’ to ‘new’ social movements has been a point of ongoing contention in the field of sociology. The criticisms aimed at his idea of ‘newness’ are numerous and persuasive. Rather than reiterating these debates, this paper argues that the next logical step is to apply Habermas to an analysis of the contemporary labour movement. In order to do this, I develop the notion of the ‘colonization of the lifeworld at work’, and explore the relationship between colonization and union activism in two cases drawn from the current UK context: the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT). In exploring colonization empirically, I suggest that it is met by a range of responses, from activism to acquiescence.

Becoming Red Thread Women: Alternative Visions of Gendered Politics in Post-independence Guyana

Abstract: This essay argues that the rise of Guyana's Red Thread Women's Development Organisation in the mid-1980s was precipitated by the establishment of a hegemonic political culture through the regime of President Forbes Burnham. Utilizing both Aldon Morris's (1992, 2001) notion of 'opppositional consciousness' and Raka Ray's (1999) typology of 'political fields' the author finds that the founding members of Red Thread were engaged in a struggle to redefine the political culture in Guyana. Through its mobilization of women across the divides of race/ethnicity, class, religion, and geography, Red Thread was a key site for rethinking the nature of the political structure for women's politics and women's empowerment. The essay places the emergence of Red Thread within a critical review of Guyanese women's mobilization and organization in trade union movements and women's auxiliaries to established political parties through the Colonial and post-Colonial eras.

A New Alliance between Religion and Labor? The 2002 Graphic Communications International Union–San Diego Union-Tribune Newspaper Contract Negotiation

Abstract: Despite a largely successful, fifteen-year effort to get rid of its labor unions, in July 2002 the San Diego (California) Union-Tribune newspaper signed a contract with its pressroom workers that maintained the integrity of the Graphic Communications International Union as the legal bargaining agent. What was unusual was not simply that the company signed a contract after years of negotiations essentially designed to break the union, but that the contract was negotiated by a team of outsiders: three leaders of the San Diego religious community drawn from the executive board of the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, the Secretary-Treasurer of the San Diego–Imperial Counties Labor Council, and a prominent local businessman. The pressroom workers had dropped out of the negotiating and authorized these others to bargain on their behalf. With labor's decline in the USA, religion has become one of the few institutions with the legitimacy to raise social justice issues and employ a morality-based discourse...

Local Social Movements and Mesoamerican Cultural Resistance and Adaptation

Abstract: In this article I examine two locally based movements in Mexico that successfully challenged important neoliberal development projects by building on local identities, values and communication networks to confront their state and corporate opponents. In the process of articulating their demands, activists helped to create identities that encouraged community members to take risky political positions by resignifying commonly held scripts about community, mutual solidarity and historical unease with centralized projects. Although framing the conflict in terms of local community versus outside interference proved to be a successful strategy on the part of movement organizers, it also represented part of a larger cultural process of identity formation and affirmation of cultural difference. Social activists in these towns saw the conflicts with the development ideas of the state and multinational corporations not only as threats to their immediate material circumstances but also as profoundly incongruent with...

Understanding Islam in Politics

Abstract: In the last few years, an ever-expanding body of scholarship in a variety of disciplines has tried to explain Islamism,1 where it comes from, its contours and varieties, how it imbues and influence...

Author-Meets-Critic

Abstract: Freedom is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and its Legacy Kenneth T. Andrews, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004, ISBN 0-226-02040-1 (Hbk), ISBN 0-226-02043-6 (Pbk)