Showing papers on "Social movement published in 1975"

The environmental movement and its critics

Abstract: The history and nature of the new environmental movement in the United States are reviewed. Since understanding of a social movement is enhanced by learning the views and perceptions of outsiders, the continuing debate between the environmental movement and its critics is examined. First, disagreements over the nature and the severity of the so-called environmental crisis are described. Second, the ideological differences between environmentalists and their critics are reviewed, particularly their contrasting views of man, society, nature, and economic growth. Finally, the political critique of the movement is examined, with attention given to the composition of the membership, the alleged superficiality of its proposed solutions to environmental problems, and the alleged discrimination against both poor people in the United States and the poor nations.

Women in the draft resistance movement

Abstract: Why has the position of the sexes become an issue in some social movements and not in others? Under what conditions has feminism emerged out of movements devoted to other causes? Starting with these general questions, this case study, based on participant observation, explores the factors which led women in the draft resistance movement in Boston in the late 1960s to turn toward, and help found, a Women's Liberation group. The strategies and tactics of the Resistance (more explicitly than other New Left movements) differentiated male from female participants. The segregation and subordination of women within the Resistance drew them into awareness of themselves as a distinct group; the Resistance ideology, which had strong egalitarian themes, contradicted their subordination and could be extended to define sexual inequality as a political issue. Contact with outside feminists helped precipitate the shift from draft resistance to Women's Liberation.

The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism

Abstract: The major theoretical contribution of contemporary feminism has been the identification of the family as a central institution of women's oppression.1 On the basis of this understanding we are seeing the beginnings of a revisionist history of American feminism which challenges the significance that has traditionally been attributed to the woman suffrage movement. Aileen Kraditor and William O'Neill have suggested that the woman suffrage movement did not lead to female emancipation because it accepted women's traditional position within the home.2 While attacking this "whatwent-wrong" approach, Daniel Scott Smith has contended that suffragism should yield its claim to the central place in the history of nineteenth-century feminism to a phenomenon he calls "domestic feminism."4 Similarly, in her study of the female moral reform movement of the 1830s, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that "it can hardly be assumed that the demand for votes for women was more radical than" the moral reform movement's attack on the sexual double standard.4 These revisionist efforts are commendable in that they expand our sense of nineteenth-century feminism to include a much larger and more diverse group of women's activities than merely suffrage. On the other hand, I think they do an historical disservice to the woman suffrage movement. Nineteenth-century feminists and antifeminists alike perceived the demand for the vote as the most radical element in women's protest against their oppression and we are obligated to honor the perceptions of the historical actors in question. When considering nineteenth-century feminism, not as an intellectual tradition but as a social movement, as a politics that motivated people to action, twentieth-century historians are in no position to redefine what was its most radical aspect. What we can do is analyze the position of nineteenth-century women and the nature of suffragism in order to understand why the demand for the vote was the most radical program for women's emancipation possible in the nineteenth century. I would like to suggest an interpretation of nineteenth-century suffragism that reconciles the perceived radicalism of the woman suffrage movement with the historical centrality of the family to women's condition. My hypothesis is that the significance of the woman suffrage movement rested precisely on the fact that it bypassed women's oppression within the family, or private sphere, and demanded instead her admission to citizenship, and through it admission to the public arena. By focusing

On the study of urban social movements

Abstract: The article makes a critical assessment of the approach to urban protest developed by Manuel Castells and colleagues. Problems are identified in the definition of the term urban social movement, the identifation of their effects and the theoretical assumptions made about the central and local state. The approach is shown to neglect the mobilization process, and to ignore effects obtained by conventional institutional methods of demand-making. The advantages of a social network approach to mobilization are shown.

Organizational Intellectuals and the Criticism of Society

Abstract: Joseph Schumpeter saw the intellectuals as a major source of change in Western society. But he did not examine in detail their institutional support. C. Wright Mills perceived their increasing organizational employment, but believed that such employment meant the death of dissent. Macroprocesses leading to a larger stratum of intellectual critics are traced. Focus is on changes in education, the labor force, and social movements. The opportunities and constraints of different organizations, social movements, government agencies, and private organizations for the careers of organizational intellectuals are analyzed.

A Reconceptualization of the Dynamics of Social Movement Development

Abstract: Theoretical specifications of the stages of social movement development have usually been conceptualized around the tendency for movements to routinize and institutionalize over time. Therefore, emphasis on an expanding and stabilizing organization has rechanneled emphasis away from the volatility and dynamic inherent in social movements. This paper proposes a new framework which acknowledges the routinization tendency, but focuses on changes in the nature and type of participation in the movement at varying moments of its existence. Using data obtained while studying the social credit movement in England and the religious fundamentalist movement in the Canadian province of Alberta commencing in the 1920s, we would like to suggest how participation changes within a movement in three phases which we have labeled interest,

An Exchange Theory of Incentives of Urban Political Party Organization

Abstract: a core of activists who will engage in the activities necessary for achieving the organization’s collective goal. Furthermore, the way in which an organization or its leadership goes about resolving the problem of recruiting and retaining organizational activists has considerable impact upon its internal dynamics (i.e., its structures and procedures, distribution of power, hierarchical relationships, etc.) In the case of the political party, the way in which party leaders recruit and retain activists and voters also has profound consequences on the political process, for the party occupies a strategic place in the vertical relationship between citizen and government. In fact, it probably would be accurate to say that the way party leaders go about attracting and retaining organizational activists will be similar to the way they go about appealing for electoral support (Sorauf, 1964 and 1966; Eldersveld, 1964). While many students of organization theory and political parties have recognized the significance of organizational survival, few have made an explicit attempt to develop and test a theoretical framework on the problem (Gluck, 1970; Wilson, 1962; Eldersveld, 1964). Representative of the importance of attracting and retaining grass-roots activists is the statement made by Banfield and Wilson (1963, p. 27) in reference to the groups which participate in big-city politics:

Modern Science and Anarchism

Abstract: Anarchism like socialism is general, and like every other social movement, has not of course developed out of science or out of some philosophical school. The social sciences are still very far removed from the time when they shall be as exact as are physics and chemistry. Even in meteorology we cannot yet predict the weather a month or even one week in advance. It would be unreasonable, therefore, to expect of the young social sciences, which are concerned with phenomena much more complex than winds and rain, that they should foretell social events with any approach to certainty. Besides, it must not be forgotten that men of science, too, are but human, and that most of them either belong by descent to the possessing classes and are steeped in the prejudices of their class, or else are in the actual service of the government. Not out of the universities therefore does anarchism come.

Ideological Primary Groups in Contemporary Cultural Movements

Abstract: This paper argues that “post-modern” societies generate movements for cultural change in models “of” and “for” identity and consciousness, rather than traditional kinds of social movements aiming at structural changes in institutional arrangements. The distinctive and crucial unit in comtemporary cultural movements is what we have termed the “ideological group.” These groups are similar to the “ideological informal groups” which recruited members of traditional social movements on the basis of personal contacts and confidence, and which rested on shared “inner convictions.” Like other, earlier, ideological groups, they focus on the construction and legitimation of a shared symbolic interpretation, and ideology of a dissatisfying reality as well as their own personal and collective identity in relation to it. However, contemporary movement groups have been influenced considerably by the sensitivity training-encounter-group dynamics techniques associated with the intensive group movement. The resul...

Labor and Politics in a Divided Movement: The Italian Case.

Abstract: Discusses changes in the Italian labor movement since 1950. Changes in the political goals and strategies of the country's labor movement; Political nature and characterization of the labor movements; Information on the political activities of the General Confederation of Italian Labor. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)

Political Ethics and Political Authority

Abstract: Any discussion of political ethics ought to rest upon some sense of what it is about the realm of politics that raises unique ethical concerns. Minimally, political ethics could refer to little more than the general ethical concerns of a society insofar as they come up in the political arena or touch upon the behavior of people in politics. On the other hand, such notions as "political crime" conjure up gross misdeeds peculiar to political life and in violation of some politically defined sense of right and wrong. These two attitudes represent, respectively, a concern for two different problems: "corruption" and "tyranny." Corruption suggests the exploitation of public office and its privileges for personal aggrandizement, personal moral deficiency, and the breaking of the official rules of government. Tyranny suggests an abuse of power against the prevailing norms of justice for the purposes of asserting political control with an indifference to means. Though it may be difficult to make a fine distinction between these two categories, I will argue that it is nevertheless worthwhile to try to do so-particularly when it comes to the question of what we do about dishonesty-and this may be made easier by conceiving of public offenses as running along a continuum and by examining the polar cases. Considering first what has been called corruption, we find a wide array of unethical and illegal conduct that occurs in officialdom but that need not be unique to people holding public trusts or in violation of anything other than general legal/moral strictures. The crooked policeman, the featherbedding civil servant, the commissioner "on the take" are the kinds of infractions, both minor and major, that come to mind when we talk of corruption in government. The fact of governmental position adds to this improbity a greater range of opportunity and a greater range of consequences, and both of these are greater because society entrusts government with certain powers beyond the range of private citizens and private institutions. In both ways, governmental power amplifies misconduct. Simple corruption in government involves an individu-

Redistribution of income

Abstract: P. Nelson Reid, MSW, is Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. A common observation, derived from De Tocqueville's remarkable vision of the United States and its future, is that the concept of equality is both America's moral and actual founda tion and its potential undoing.1 No concept has so shaped the literature of democracy as has the ideal of equality. Yet, in the sense that most people understand it, no concept of democratic thought has been put into effect so little. The history of America is in good part a history of the strug gle to put this elusive concept into operation, because no ideal has formed the basis of so many enduring social movements.

A view of MBO in today's management environment

Abstract: The evolution of management practice would appear to have been conditioned by the successive embraces of a whole range of management movements—starting with the scientific management movement of F W Taylor through to the social science movement which is prominent today. In the 1960's the one that caught the imagination of many managers was the management by objectives movement. A characteristic of all of these movements is that they rarely seem able to sustain the promise of their initial impact because they are essentially bosses' movements rather than popular movements. The ideology of MBO does however come close to that of a genuine social movement if only it is interpreted and applied correctly. The convergence of MBO and the Organisation Development movement gives promise that together they will be seen as an acceptable response to the changing expectations and values of the participants in today's large and complex businesses.

Religion, Social Change, and the Expansive Life Style

Abstract: A major question that has surfaced for sociologists of religion in the 1970’s is what constitutes ”religious experience”. The 1960’s saw a considerable revival of interest in Weber’s concept of ”disenchantment (cf. Baum 1970) and the issue of secularization. The most common projection being made was that modern man, exposed to science and bureaucratic structures on every side, is increasingly incapable of experiencing the mysterious and the sacred. Concurrent with this discussion of secularization, however, arose a number of social movements which had in no way given up on participation in the realm of ”enchantment“: the Jesus movement (Ellwood 1973a; Enroth et al., 1972), sorcery and witches’ covens (Freedland 1972; Castaneda 1972), spiritualism (Nelson 1969), and a whole host of other movements representing the longstanding tradition of an ”alternative reality“ (Ellwood 1973b). All of these various expressions emphasized the notion of self transcendence and the classical contrast between the profane realm and the sacred. In short, on one level there has recently been considerable discussion of secularization and disenchantment, on the other hand there has been a strong movement to counter the disenchanted character of modern society.