Showing papers on "Social movement published in 1979"

Poor people's movements : why they succeed, how they fail

Abstract: "Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: -- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America -- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO -- The Southern Civil Rights Movement -- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization."

Political Participation and the Neighborhood Social Context

Abstract: This study combines sample survey data with aggregate census tract data to show that the neighborhood social context has an important effect upon the extent of individual political activity and the degree to which participation is structured by individual status. Higher status contexts often encourage participation among higher status individuals at the same time that they discourage participation among lower status individuals. As a result, political activity is more highly structured by individual status in higher status contexts than in lower status contexts. The effect of the social context seems most pronounced upon political activities which require social interaction, and alternative explanations based upon individual attributes do not satisfactorily account for the social context's effect.

Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American States, 1870-1930.

Abstract: Current discussions of the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the bureaucratization of American public education in the later 19th century do not offer effective explanations of the expansion of the educational system in the first place. Enrollments were high much earlier than these explanations suggest and were probably higher in rural than in urban settings. We argue that the spread of public education, especially in the North and West, took place through a series of nation-building social movements having partly religious and partly political forms. We see these movements as reflecting the involvement and success of American society in the world exchange economy and the dominance of parallel religious ideologies. State-level data are used to show both the absence of positive effects of urban industrialism on enrollments and some suggestive effects of evangelical Protestantism and 19th-century Republicanism.

Strategic, Tactical and Organizational Dilemmas of the Protest Movement Against Nuclear Power

Abstract: Recent research has recognized that social movements face several dilemmas in simultaneously mobilizing the many resources that are necessary for their success. This study examines some of the problems that have confronted the contemporary protest movement against the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Its emphasis is on differences within the antinuclear movement over four strategic, tactical, or organizational matters: (1) the single-issue focus; (2) the definition of nonviolence; (3) the intent of the civil disobedience committed by protesters; and (4) the use of affinity groups and a consensus style of decisionmaking. Some of the tactical problems that antinuclear protesters have encountered in the criminal courts are also identified, and implications for the resource mobilization perspective discussed. Social movements face many tough questions of strategy and tactics. A particular course of action may help achieve one goal but make it more difficult to achieve another. The organizational pattern of movement groups also matters, as a lack of effective organization may frustrate their efforts to change existing conditions. Movements throughout American history have had to resolve these ongoing dilemmas of protest group activity. The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century, for example, was divided by differences over tactics. In the women's suffrage movement a few decades later, the wisdom of extending the movement's focus beyond the suffrage issue was debated at length. More recently, the southern civil rights movement was often beset by arguments over the possible benefits and disadvantages of various marches and rallies. And several Vietnam antiwar groups developed centralized structures of authority that permitted quick decisionmaking but also led to frustration among those denied any real influence on courses of action. In this paper I examine a number of strategic, tactical, and organizational dilemmas that have characterized the contemporary protest movement against nuclear power. These difficulties derive from the number of issues the movement has chosen to emphasize, its commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience as a primary method of protest, and its novel consensus style of decisionmaking using affinity groups. I also discuss the legal and political dilemmas confronting antinuclear protesters who have faced criminal prosecution for committing civil disobedience. In concentrating on some of the problems of this particular movement, I hope to contribute to

Can organizations change?: Environmental protection, citizen participation, and the Corps of Engineers

Abstract: As the title suggests, this work concerns itself with our assessment of the environmental movement's impact upon the procedures, organizational structure, and objectives of the Corps of Engineers. The authors have selected four measures of organizational change-setting new goals, reorganization, changes in output, and open decisionmaking-as important factors in the assessment of bureaucratic change in the 1970s. With these factors in mind, the authors provide five case studies of the Corps of Engineers project planning process, and a survey data analysis of the attitudes of citizens who took part in Corps public involvement activities. The methodology is innovative and sophisticated. The reader is allowed the richness of detail and insight that only case studies provide, and empirical generalizations derived from survey data analysis, upon which conclusions about the overall effectiveness of Corps planning strategies on citizen attitudes can be based. The conclusion? Not much change, either in citizen attitudes about the Corps, or the Agency's organizational accommodation to citizen demands through citizen participation. The book, therefore, represents a missed opportunity. Instead of considering a wide scope of decision making in order to define the changing constellation of political support, opposition, and the Corps' organizational responses, the authors chose to focus on a rather minor component of decision making and public relations, the public involvement process. Thus, the work stands primarily as a technical analysis of citizen participation strategies, rather than a political study of the Corps of Engineers. However, the book may be testimony enough to this agency's political strength. The environmental movement of the last decade gave us sweeping anti-pollution legislation, unprecedented federal authority to regulate many sectors of society, wholesale governmental reorganization, and billions for anti-pollution control technology. The authors admit that this social movement led only to what amounted to organizational fine tuning within the Corps: brief experimentation with open planning and decision making, a small increase in environmentally-oriented personnel, and the creation of environmental units in District Planning and Engineering Divisions. These modifications

A Dramaturgical Analysis Of Movement Accommodation: Building Idiosyncrasy Credit As A Movement Mobilization Strategy*

Abstract: Addressed in this paper are two problems that have received little empirical attention in the social movement literature: the problem of outward-reaching strategies and tactics and the problem of movement adaptation and accommodation to its environment of operation. The paper sheds some empirical and theoretical light on these two problems by examining how a contemporary religious movement in America has strategically sought to establish a viable, accommodative relationship with the larger society by attempting to render itself respectable and legitimate in the public eye. The findings suggest that movement accommodation might be best understood as an outward-reaching strategy aimed at securing “idiosyncrasy credit”—which is conceptualized as a movement-related resource that has the property of allowing a certain amount of idiosyncratic behavior or nonconformity.

"Moonies" in America: Cult, Church, and Crusade

Abstract: 'Moonies in America' advances our understanding of social movements, using the particular data provided by a study of the Unification Church -- one of the most widely known and least understood of the cults which blossomed in the 1970. The organizational structure, historical developments, and society's response to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's movement are examined in detail. 'Shupe and Bromley have written an important book with an analysis which is based on sound empirical study, and which is genuinely original at the theoretical level. It is a book which can, without reservation, be recommended to anyone with the slightest interest in the dynamics of resource mobilization in the case of a world-transforming movement.' -- Sociological Analysis, Vol 42, No 1, Spring 1981

The Limits of Agronomic Determinism: A Critique of Paige's Agrarian Revolution

Abstract: Social scientists left and right have long engaged in the project of identifying the conditions under which revolutionary, class-conscious social movements emerge. This project aims at prediction, in the hope of either promoting social revolutions or preventing them. Until quite recently both Marxist and liberal social scientists have focussed on “modern” urban social classes as the generators of revolution: the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the industrial proletarlat. But paradoxically, though Marx summarily dismissed the peasantry as so many “potatoes in a sack,” and despite the generality of working-class social movements, the major revolutions of our time have been made largely by country people, to the extent that they were made by social movements at all. Thus two major issues take shape in the study of revolutions. One, how and why do peasants—allegedly “premodern” and conservative—defy the laws of social science and becomerevolutionary agents? What is it about rural social conditions that enabled them to dynamite the old order? Two, what is the relationship between revolutionary social movements on the one hand, and revolutionary outcomes on the other? A movement entails the collective action of a class whose ideology may be described as more or less radical; a revolution entails the overhauling of a social structure. In this context, no matter how ideologically “revolutionary” a social movement may be, it is but one of the causal elements that converge to produce social revolution.

Political Science, Part I: American Politics and Political Behavior

Abstract: If it seemed in 1974 that the women's movement had introduced "possibilities for profound changes both in the way in which the discipline studies women and the way in which it defines 'political' activity," five years later there is little evidence that these possibilities have been realized or, indeed, even pursued.1 The hopeful, if cautious, tone of earlier reviewers now seems largely premature, and their efforts to delineate the kinds of research and theoretical development needed appear to have fallen on deaf ears.2

Social Policy and the Family

Abstract: In America the family policy field is so new that there is no ready framework with which to organize recent developments and research prog­ ress. Had it not been for confluence of three powerful social movements­ civil rights, the war on poverty, and the women's movement-American concern with the impact of social policy on the family might have been even longer delayed. A decade ago in an insightful introduction to Alva Myrdal's Nation and Family, Daniel Moynihan (1968) suggested that Americans, in contrast to Europeans, have avoided policies directed toward the family because their religious and ethnic hete�ogeneity makes them unable to agree on any single family norm. Nevertheless, since the US Senate Subcommittee on Children and Youth (1973) held hearings that produced the "Mondale Report," there has been growing readiness in both political and scholarly circles to explore the relevance of social policy to the family. Research has progressed most rapidly on two fronts: first, in describing the negative impact of particular policies on special groups of individuals or families; and second, in elaborating and classifying the wide variety of policies thought to have relevance for the family. Much less is known about how to construct poliCies that will foster or enhance the quality of family life. One reason for this is the great variety of family forms; what is good for one type may not be the same for others. Progress therefore awaits advances in understanding both the variety of family forms and models of family process. An additional important issue is the relation of the individual's well being to that of the family.

The Deradicalisation of Feminism: Ideology and Utopia in Action

Abstract: The distinctive radical feminist movement, which appeared in the United States around 1967, provided the women's movement with much of its initial impetus as well as its theoretical framework. As the movement grew and became more widely accepted, radical ideas and demands were blocked out by the larger and more orthodox liberal feminist organizations, and ceased to play an important part in the theoretical development of the whole movement. It is argued that any modern social movement which makes transformative demands on society - as the feminist movement does - must, in forming its ideas and programmes, fulfil certain conceptual and intellectual tasks which are characteristic of utopian thought, and which can be systematically analysed. One such task is the development of a holistic alternative theory of society and social change. The suppression of feminism's radical wing had the unintended consequence of eliminating the movement's major resource for the development of such a theory, and may seriously ...

The Moonies and the Anti-Cultists: Movement and Countermovement in Conflict*

Abstract: This paper considers a relatively neglected topic in social movements research: the structural conditions under which counter-movements emerge and expand and the relation of the counter-movement's mobilization strategies and tactics to those of the movement(s) which it opposes. The primary movement analyzed is the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon (as the most prominent of the "new" religious movements in America), and its characteristics as a "world-transforming movement" (in particular its ideology, organizational style, economic resources, and recruitment/socialization practices) are examined in terms of their potentialfor generating societal conflict. The counter-movement examined is what has been labelled the American anti-cult movement. Drawing upon a wide variety ofpublished and unpublished sources gathered during the authors' three-year study of both movements, the anti-cult movement's institutional origins in the family and (secondarily) in organized religion, as well as the controversial tactics it adopted (including deprogramming), are considered relative to specific aspects of the "Moonies" and similar groups. The 1970's have witnessed a broadly based resurgence of religious interest and activity. While a number of mainline denominations have been losing members, fundamentalist Christian groups and a coterie of "new" religions and quasi-religions -such as the Children of God, Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, and the Unification Church-have experienced rapid growth. Although an expanding corpus of research on many of these "new" religions has recently appeared (e.g., Needleman and Baker, 1978; Glock and Bellah, 1976; Richardson, 1978; Danner, 1976; Zaretsky and Leone, 1974; Wallis, 1977), there has been considerably less research on the "anti-cult" movement (hereafter the ACM) which has emerged in response to these groups (for the major exceptions to this trend see Shupe and Bromley, 1980a, Bromley and Shupe, 1979a; Lofland, 1977: Epilogue; Enroth, 1977). Despite the fact that the ACM is a relatively small, loose national coalition of local groups, it has had a substantial impact on the development of many "new" religions. While the ACM has gained a great deal of visibility from its most sensational (although relatively infrequently employed) tactic, coercive deprogramming, there has been virtually no examination of the ACM's emergence, structure and operation from a social movements perspective. In this paper we shall examine how the characteristics of certain of these "new" religious movements-in particular the Unification Church (or, more correctly, the Unificationist Movement, hereafter the UM), which was the primary nemesis of the ACM-led to its formation as a counter-movement. This analysis of the ACM as a counter-movement will emphasize its institutional sources and composition and how the movement's strategies and tactics flowed from both the UM's style of resource mobiliza*This paper is the product of ajoint effort. The order of authorship is random and does not imply any difference in the importance of contributions. This is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Boston, August, 1979.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Experience in America

Abstract: During his lifetime Martin Luther King, Jr. justifiably received numerous citations and recognition for his accomplishments to better the lot of oppressed people. Standing in the limelight of the Civil Rights struggle he became, during the 'fifties, one of the foremost Black leaders within America. Such acclaim, however, seems to overwhelm an equally deserving consideration, namely, the significance of King's written works. A mere handful of people bother to acknowledge that King wrote extensively during his lifetime; few dare to probe his writings seriously in terms of accuracy, perception, and prediction of the future with respect to the Black condition in a White America. Inasmuch as social scientists are inclined to cast leaders of a social movement into a "charismatic" mold, there is little likelihood of perceiving King other than as a maker of events and, upon death, a mere historical figure, for a certain moment of racial strife, who never gained, in spite of numerous publications, academic standing as a major interpreter of Black-White relations in America. This in spite of the fact that even revolutionaries, in articulating the realities of social oppression, often prove more perceptive than erstwhile

Symbolic Justice: The Status Politics of the American Probation Movement

Abstract: This paper addresses in substantive terms an emerging debate between Marxian and Weberian perspectives on crime and law. It is argued that the cooptive character of the American probation movement and its impact on juvenile and criminal law is an anomaly for orthodox Marxian theory and its preoccupation with coercive strategies of crime control. Revisionist Marxian perspectives similarly fail to account for the growth of this movement. An alternative Weberian approach is then articulated. It is found that probation legislation evolved at a federal level in juxtaposition to American temperance legislation, drawing its base of support from status groups reluctant to support the latter social movement, as well as from the leadership and rank and file organization of a voluntary association, the National Probation Association. The attention of a Weberian approach to such factors of organization and status helps to correct a one-sidedness in the Marxian class analysis of crime and law.

Social constraints in the political arena: A theoretical inquiry into their form and manner

Abstract: In the past three different paradigms or, more loosely, frames of reference, have been used by students of politics to interpret various dimensions of mass political participation. Each of these, which are referred to as the political socialization, the group interests and beliefs, and the political party/organization paradigms, has received empirical support for its scheme of interpretation; yet recent political events also suggest that these frames of reference may be inadequate, and may need to be complemented, if not replaced, by other schemes. The present paper outlines one such scheme, drawing upon recent writings on social networks and social influences on political participation. It relies on the metaphor of a political arena, and proposes two simple propositions to account both for conventional and unconventional participation in this arena.

The Economic Origins of the Kwilu Rebellion

Abstract: Early in 1964, the recently independent Belgian Congo (now Zaire) experienced a wave of unrest sparked by a rebellion in its Kwilu province. Under the leadership of Pierre Mulele, the movement established control over an entire region for a period of nearly two years. The initial success of Mulelism encouraged a series of further uprisings which brought the central government to the brink of collapse. Although the Kwilu rebellion was ultimately reduced by a combination of military force and regional economic stagnation and thus failed in its objectives, it has attracted considerable scholarly attention because it aptly illustrates the processes whereby social movements in the postwar Third World originate and evolve. A concise description of the movement's main features is provided in an informative article by Fox, de Craemer, and Ribeaucourt which appeared in this journal.' It identifies the rebellion as simultaneously nationalist and anti-elite, that is, opposed to constituted authorities, both foreign and domestic. It stresses the coexistence of traditionalist and millennial ele-