Showing papers on "Social movement published in 2009"

The political economy of communication

Abstract: Overview of the Political Economy of Communication What is Political Economy? Definitions and Characteristics What is Political Economy? Schools of Thought The Development of a Political Economy of Communication The Political Economy of Communication: Building a Foundation The Political Economy of Communication Today Commodification: Content, Audiences, Labour Spatialization: Space, Time, and Communication Structuration: Class, Gender, Race, Social Movements, Hegemony Challenges on the Borders ... and Beyond

Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East

Abstract: Prior to 2011, popular imagination perceived the Muslim Middle East as unchanging and unchangeable, frozen in its own traditions and history. In Life as Politics, Asef Bayat argues that such presumptions fail to recognise the routine, yet important, ways in which ordinary people make meaningful change through everyday actions. First published just months before the Arab Spring swept across the region, this timely and prophetic book sheds light on the ongoing acts of protest, practice, and direct daily action. The second edition includes three new chapters on the Arab Spring and Iran's Green Movement and is fully updated to reflect recent events. At heart, the book remains a study of agency in times of constraint. In addition to ongoing protests, millions of people across the Middle East are effecting transformation through the discovery and creation of new social spaces within which to make their claims heard. This eye-opening book makes an important contribution to global debates over the meaning of social movements and the dynamics of social change.

Tilting at Windmills? The Environmental Movement and the Emergence of the U.S. Wind Energy Sector

Abstract: Through a study of the emergent U.S. wind energy sector, 1978–1992, this paper examines how large-scale social movements external to an industry can influence the creation of new market opportunities and hence encourage entrepreneurship. We theorize that through the construction and propagation of cognitive frameworks, norms, values, and regulatory structures, and by offering a preexisting social structure, social movement organizations influence whether entrepreneurs attempt to start ventures in emerging sectors. We find that the direct and indirect effects of social resources (e.g., environmental groups) had a larger impact on entrepreneurial activity in this sector than the availability of natural resources such as land with high-quality wind. Greater numbers of environmental movement organization members increased nascent entrepreneurial activity, and this effect was mediated by favorable state regulatory policy. Greater membership numbers also enhanced the effects of important natural resources, mark...

Action research as a practice‐based practice

Abstract: Action research changes people’s practices, their understandings of their practices, and the conditions under which they practice. It changes people’s patterns of ‘saying’, ‘doing’ and ‘relating’ to form new patterns – new ways of life. It is a meta‐practice: a practice that changes other practices. It transforms the sayings, doings and relating that compose those other practices. Action research is also a practice, composed of sayings, doing and relating. Different kinds of action research – technical, practical and critical – are composed in different patterns of saying, doing and relating, as different ways of life. This paper suggests that ‘Education for Sustainability’, as an educational movement within the worldwide social movement responding to global warming, may be a paradigm example of critical action research.

Sociological Perspectives On Social Psychology

Abstract: I. THE PERSON AND SOCIAL INTERACTION. 1. Building Blocks and the Quadrant of Action, Gary Alan Fine. 2. Biology and Social Psychology: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture, Jane A. Pillavin and Paul C. LePore. 3. Self and Identity, Viktor Gecas & Peter J. Burke. 4. Attitudes, Beliefs and Behaviors, Howard Schuman. 5. Social Cognition, Judith A. Howard. 6. The Sociology of Affect and Emotion, Lynn Smith-Lovin. 7. Language, Action, and Social Interaction, Douglas W. Maynard & Marilyn R. Whalen. 8. Social Interaction: Continuities and Complexities in the Study of Non-Intimate Sociality, Lyn H. Lofland. II. SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND GROUP PROCESSES. 1. Introduction to Section II: Social Interaction and Social Structure, Karen S. Cook. 2. Social Exchange and Exchange Networks, Linda D. Molm & Karen S. Cook. 3. Bargaining and Influence in Conflict, Edward J. Lawler & Rebecca Ford. 4. Justice and Injustice, Karen A. Hegtvedt & Barry Markovsky. 5. Status Structures, Cecilia L. Ridgeway & Henry A. Walker. 6. Social Dilemmas, Toshio Yamagishi. 7. Group Decision Making, H. Andrew Michener & Michelle P. Wasserman. 8. Sex Category and Gender in Social Psychology, Mary Glenn Wiley. III. SOCIAL STRUCTURES, SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS, AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 1. Introduction to Part III: Social Structure and Personality: Past, Present, and Future, James S. House. 2. Comparative Social Psychology: Cross-Cultural and Cross-National, Karen Miller-Loessi. 3. The Development and Socialization of Children and Adolescents, William A. Corsaro & Donna Eder. 4. Adult Lives in a Changing Society, Glen H. Elder, Jr., & Angela M. O'Rand. 5. Social Stratification and Mobility Processes: The Interaction between Individuals and Social Structures, Alan C. Kerckhoff. 6. The Social Psychology of Work, Jeylan T. Mortimer & John Lorence. 7. The Social Psychology of Deviance and Law, V. Lee Hamilton & David Rauma. 8. Social Psychology and Health, Ronald C. Kessler, James S. House, Renee Anspach, & David R. Williams. 9. Social Movements and Collective Behavior: Social Psychological Dimensions and Considerations, David A. Snow and Pamela E. Oliver. IV. METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES. 1. Introduction to Part IV: Invitation to Methodology, Gary Alan Fine. 2. Dimensions of Qualitative Research, Spencer Cahill, Gary Alan Fine, & Linda Grant. 3. Experimentation in Sociological Social Psychology, Barbara Foley Meeker & Robert K. Leik. 4. Theoretical Quantitative Analysis in Social Psychology, Duane Alwin.

Vernacularization on the ground: local uses of global women's rights in Peru, China, India and the United States

Abstract: The articles published in this special journal issue examine how global ideas about women's rights actually get used in four contexts - China, India, Peru and the United States. Our findings result from collaborative research conducted by teams in each country. We call the process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and strategies vernacularization. In each country, vernacularization differed depending on the contents of the global women's rights packages at play, the work of vernacularizers and the different social positions they occupy, how human rights ideas are framed, the channels and technologies of trans- mission, and the local geographies of history and culture within which circulation and vernacularization take place. We find that vernacularization is a widespread practice that takes different forms in different kinds of organizations and in different cultural and historical contexts. Ongoing tensions between global and national rights ideas are quite common. Finally, our work brings to light two dilemmas in the way human rights are appropriated and used - a resonance dilemma and an advocacy dilemma - both arising from the disparity between human rights as law and human rights as a social movement.

From Pabst to Pepsi: The Deinstitutionalization of Social Practices and the Creation of Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the dual role that social movement organizations can play in altering organizational landscapes by undermining existing organizations and creating opportunities for the growth of new types of organizations. Empirically, we investigate the impact of a variety of tactics employed by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the leading organizational representative of the American temperance movement, on two sets of organizations: breweries and soft drink producers. By delegitimating alcohol consumption, altering attitudes and beliefs about drinking, and promoting temperance legislation, the WCTU contributed to brewery failures. These social changes, in turn, created opportunities for entrepreneurs to found organizations producing new kinds of beverages by creating demand for alternative beverages, providing rationales for entrepreneurial action, and increasing the availability of necessary resources.

Resisting Neoliberalization: Communicative Planning or Counter-Hegemonic Movements?:

Abstract: This article argues that existing critiques of communicative planning become more salient when we consider the challenges posed by neoliberalization, which is understood here to mean the ongoing pr...

The rise of the Global Reporting Initiative: a case of institutional entrepreneurship

Abstract: Since its conception in 1999, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has become a leading template for voluntary sustainability reporting by companies. Emerging on the crest of the debate about corporate social responsibility, appropriate roles for business, government, and civil society in the sustainability transition, and private forms of global governance, it is also a descendant of 1970s social movements. Drawing on extensive empirical data collected through interviews and documentary analysis in four countries, the institutional entrepreneurship framework is used to analyse three types of tactics deployed by GRI champions: discursive, material and charismatic. Central to GRI entrepreneurs' success was maintaining balance between the individual and collective interests of their diverse constituencies, between inclusiveness and efficient pursuit of technical objectives, and between building a new institution and not challenging existing institutions and power relations. This strategy, though perhaps ap...

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS

Abstract: In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more - even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, "Moving Politics" is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, "Moving Politics" is the definitive account of ACT UP's origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.

The ‘Right to the City’ in the context of shifting mottos of urban social movements

Abstract: In order to explain the traction, which the right to the city slogan currently enjoys within urban resistance movements and beyond, this paper contextualizes its emergence in the shifting framework of postwar political–economic regimes and then traces and compares the different versions of this motto, which has become a defining feature of urban struggles not just in the Euro‐American core, but around the world—though with different meanings. It distinguishes a radical Lefebvrian version from more depoliticized versions as widely used in the global NGO context, problematizing the latter for limiting the participatory demand to inclusion within the existing system. The conclusion opens up the question of the implications of the current crisis for the right to the city movement.

Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Critique, and Synthesis

Abstract: Political protest and social movements are ubiquitous phenomena. This book focuses on the current theoretical approaches that aim at explaining them: the theory of collective action, the resource mobilization perspective, political opportunity structure theory, the identity approach, the framing perspective, and the dynamics of contention approach. The book has three objectives: (1) Many basic concepts like political opportunities or identity are not clearly defined. It is further often a matter of interpretation what factors are supposed to affect which phenomena. The first aim is therefore to provide a detailed introduction to and a clear restatement of the theories. Only then is it possible to assess and improve them. (2) For each theory the major strengths and weaknesses are discussed, and various modifications and extensions are suggested. (3) Building on these analyses, it is shown how the theories can be integrated into a single theoretical paradigm: the structural-cognitive model.

Cities for people, not for profit

Abstract: The rapidly unfolding global economic recession is dramatically intensifying the contradictions around which urban social movements have been rallying, suddenly validating their claims regarding th...

Place, networks, space: theorising the geographies of social movements

Abstract: This essay examines how geography affects the different types of networks underlying social movements. The principal argument of the paper is that networks forged in particular places and at great distances play distinctive yet complementary functions in broad-based social movements. Not only does the articulation of these different types of networks result in complementary roles, but it also introduces key relational dynamics affecting the stability of the entire social movement. The purpose of the paper is therefore threefold: to provide a conceptual framework for interpreting the complex geographies of contemporary social movement networks, to stress the contributions of place-based relations in social movements and to assess how activist places connect to form ‘social movement space’.

Political Ecologies of Gentrification

Abstract: This article explores the possibilities for a political ecology of gentrification. Gentrification research, while firmly rooted in materialist social science, has not yet broadened its interests to consider ecological aspects of, or the role in gentrification of, discourses, social movements, and state policies of the environment. Understanding the political ecologies of gentrification involves recognizing the ways in which material relations and uneven resource consumption, concepts of nature, and the politics of urban environmental management affect gentrification processes. By synthesizing diverse literatures in urban studies, political ecology, urban environmental governance, consumption studies, and gentrification, this study argues that Vancouver, British Columbia represents a well-developed urban crucible for the new political ecologies of gentrification in North America. New developments in Vancouver increasingly contribute to gentrification using languages of sustainability and green consumption ...

Contention and Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract: This book examines anti-corporate activism in the United States, including analysis of anti-corporate challenges associated with social movements as diverse as the Civil Rights Movement and the Dolphin-safe Tuna Movement. Using a unique dataset of protest events in the United States, the book shows that anti-corporate activism is primarily about corporate policies, products, and negligence. Although activists have always been distrustful of corporations and sought to change them, until the 1970s and 1980s, this was primarily accomplished via seeking government regulation of corporations or via organized labor. Sarah A. Soule traces the shift brought about by deregulation and the decline in organized labor, which prompted activists to target corporations directly, often in combination with targeting the state. Using the literatures on contentious and private politics, which are both essential for understanding anti-corporate activism, the book provides a nuanced understanding of the changing focal points of activism directed at corporations.

Beyond NGO‐ization?: Reflections from Latin America

Abstract: Sonia Alvarez reconsiders what she had earlier labelled ‘the Latin American feminist NGO boom’ of the 1990s. She offers reflections on how and why, at least in that region of the world, we may be moving beyond it. Alvarez revisits the notion of NGO‐ization, then reviews the crucial ‘movement work’ performed by NGOs that was often obscured by that notion. She proposes that Latin American feminisms and other social movements may be moving away from the particular organizational forms and practices – actively promoted and officially sanctioned by national and global neo-liberalism – that characterized NGO‐ization in the past.

Making Sense of Social Movements

Abstract: Acknowlegements Introduction Social unrest, movement culture and identity the symbolic interactionists Smelser's value-added approach Rational actor theory Resources, networks and organizations Opportunities, cognition and biography Repertoires, frames and cycles New social movements Social movements and the theory of practice a new synthesis Bibliography Index.

From Streets to Suites: How the Anti- Biotech Movement Affected German Pharmaceutical Firms

Abstract: How do social movements affect decisions within corporations, such as the commercialization of new technologies? We suggest that the effect of movement activism is conditioned by the internal polity and therefore varies across organizations. This article examines how the anti-genetic movement in Germany during the 1980s affected six domestic pharmaceutical firms’ commercialization of biotechnology. We develop a process model of how movements penetrate the relatively closed polity of private organizations. External contestation weakened the position of internal champions of biotechnology, precipitated divisions among organizational elites, and undermined collective commitment to the technology. The movement also increased perceptions of investment uncertainty, but the consequences of this uncertainty depended on organizational logics of decision making. As a result, investments in some firms were tilted away from domestic biotechnology projects. The model also explains this variation in organization-level outcomes of movement contestation.

A Primer on Social Movements

Abstract: Award-winning sociologists David Snow and Sarah Soule draw from a broad range of theories including political sociology, theories of organizations, and the study of culture and social interaction to introduce the essential ideas for analyzing social movements

A Teoria Queer e a Sociologia: o desafio de uma analítica da normalização

Abstract: Originated from the American Cultural Studies, Queer Theory has gained a reputation as a critical counterpoint to the sociological studies on sexual minorities and the political identity of the social movements. Based on a creative implementation of post-structuralist philosophy for the understanding of how sexuality shapes the contemporary social order, for more than a decade its affinities and tensions, as related to the social sciences, and particularly to sociology, are in discussion. This article joins the debate, analyzes the similarities and distinctions between those two, and finally presents an overview of the current dialogue, pointing to a possible convergence in the queer project to enable an analysis of normalization.

Social movement web use in theory and practice: a content analysis of US movement websites

Abstract: While communication scholars suggest that the internet can serve as an important resource for social movement communication, few studies examine whether and how social movements actually use the internet. This article examines US-based social movement organization (SMO) internet use at one of its most visible points of access, the world wide web. Drawing on alternative media studies, the article develops a typology of communication functions central to social movements and surveys a random sample of SMO websites in order to determine whether and to what degree they exhibit features or attributes related to these types. The survey results suggest that the majority of US-based SMOs are not utilizing the web to its full potential, and posits a number of reasons why this might be the case, including organizational objectives, organizational resources and resource sharing.

Social Practice Theory and the Historical Production of Persons

Abstract: Working collaboratively, we and others have developed a historical, material theory of social practice that integrates the study of persons, local practice, and long-term historically institutionalized struggles. We have drawn on the work of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Mead to develop this approach to “history-in-person”. Social Practice Theory, like Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) takes activity as a central focus. But, in contrast to CHAT, social practice theory emphasizes the historical production of persons in practice, and pays particular attention to differences among participants, and to the ongoing struggles that develop across activities around those differences. Through Holland’s ethnographic work on environmental groups in the Southeastern United States, we show the integration of emotion, motivation, and agency into cultural-historical activity theory by means of Vygotskian and Bakhtinian inspired ideas concerning “history-in-person”. Lave’s research focuses on tension, conflict and difference in participation in cultural activities in an old port wine merchant community in Porto, and looks to both local and trans-local institutional arrangements and practices for explanations.

Political Sociology and Social Movements

Abstract: Until the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a diverse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explaining variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a breakaway tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the problem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political...

Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Ecological Debt, and Climate Justice: The History and Implications of Three Related Ideas for a New Social Movement

Abstract: Building on structuralist perspectives of the world economy, a small but growing group of researchers have forged a new literature on `ecologically unequal exchange' and documented that energy and ...

Culture and Mobilization: Tactical Repertoires, Same-Sex Weddings, and the Impact on Gay Activism:

Abstract: Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture's impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little empirical research explicitly addresses this question. This article fills the void by examining the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protest in San Francisco. We integrate insights of contentious politics approaches with social constructionist conceptions and identify three core features of cultural repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. Our analyses, which draw on rich qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with participants and movement leaders and a random survey of participants, highlight these dimensions of cultural repertoires as well as the impact that the same-sex wedding protest had on subsequent activism. Same-sex weddings, as our multimethod analyses show, were an intentional episode of claim-making, with participants arriving with a history of activism in a variety of other social movements. Moreo...

Social Movements and Europeanization

Abstract: Are social movement organizations euro-sceptical, euro-pragmatic, or euro-opportunist? Or do they accept the EU as a new level of governance to place pressure on? Do they provide a critical capital, necessary for the political structuring of the EU, or do they disrupt the process of EU integration? Social Movements and Europeanization includes surveys of activists at international protest events targeting the European Union (for a total of about 5000 interviews); a discourse analysis of documents and transcripts of debates on European politics and policies conducted during the four European social forums held between 2002 and 2006 and involving hundreds of social movement organizations and tens of thousands of activists from all European countries; about 320 interviews with representatives of civil society organizations in six EU countries (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy) and one non-member state (Switzerland), and a systematic claims analysis of the daily press in selected years between 1990 and 2003. The empirical research shows the different paths of Europeanization taken by social movements and civil society organizations. (author's abstract)

Context matters: Explaining how and why mobilizing context influences motivational dynamics

Abstract: The emphasis in the social-psychological collective action literature is on why individuals take part in collective action; however, it does not elaborate on how different mobilizing contexts may appeal to distinct motivational dynamics to participate. The present study connects the microlevel of motivational dynamics of individual protesters with the mesolevel of social movement characteristics. To do so a field study was conducted. Protesters were surveyed in the act of protesting in two different demonstrations in two different town squares simultaneously organized by two social movements at exactly the same time against the same budget cuts proposed by the same government. But with one fundamental difference, the movements emphasized different aspects of the policies proposed by the government. This most similar systems design created a unique natural experiment, which enabled the authors to examine whether the motivational dynamics of individual protesters are moderated by the social movement context. Previous research suggested an instrumental path to collective action, and the authors added an ideology path. The authors expected and found that power-oriented collective action appeals to instrumental motives and efficacy and that value-oriented collective action appeals to ideological motives, and, finally, that efficacy mediates on instrumental motives and motivational strength, but only so in power-oriented action. © 2009 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

Collective Action—and Then What?

Abstract: Two aspects of the social psychology of collective action are of particular interest to social movement organizers and activists: how to motivate people to engage in collective action, and how to use collective action to create social change. The second question remains almost untouched within social psychology. The present article delineates research from political science and sociology concerning variables that moderate the effectiveness of collective action and maps these variables against intergroup research. Within intergroup social psychology, there is a theoretical literature on what needs to be done to achieve change (e.g., changing identification, social norms, or perceptions of legitimacy, stability, permeability). The article considers possible testable hypotheses concerning the outcomes of collective action which can be derived from intergroup research and from the synthesis of the three disciplines. For theoreticians and practitioners alike, a program of research which addresses the social-psychological outcomes of collective action and links these to identities, norms, intentions, and support for social change in bystanders, protagonists, and opponents has a great deal of interest.