Social movement

About: Social movement is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 23103 publications have been published within this topic receiving 653076 citations. The topic is also known as: movement & syndical movement.

Social Protest and Policy Change: Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in Comparative Perspective

Abstract: While movement activists spend much of their time and energy trying to change the world, our theoretical and empirical knowledge in this field is still relatively poor. In Social Protest and Policy Change, Marco Giugni offers a systematic and empirically grounded analysis of the impact of three major contemporary movements on public policy. Using a comparative and historical perspective, Giugni argues that a social movement's policy impact is facilitated by the presence of favorable political opportunity structures, coupled with the presence of institutional allies among the elites, and a favorable public opinion. Furthermore, the very content of a movement's demands plays a role, insofar as the power holders are often more willing to make concessions on certain issues than on others. Within a unique body of original data the author incorporates a historical overview of the mobilization of the ecology, antinuclear, and peace movements in the United States, Italy, and Switzerland. He presents the results of time-series analyses and reveals the combined effects of protest, political alliances, and shifts in public opinion on movements which do not address issues posing too serious a threat to the power holders

The Economics of Movement Success: Business Responses to Civil Rights Mobilization1

Abstract: This article explores why movements are successful in obtaining concessions from economic actors. While social movement theorists have suggested that economic actors weigh the costliness of protests, the author considers the vulnerability of movement targets to both the cost of disruptions in routine transactions and the cost of conceding to movement demands. By addressing the magnitude of these costs and their interaction, the author derives an economic opportunity structure to predict the receptivity of economic actors to movement demands and the likely struggles among them over the decision to yield. Also, this cost‐assessment approach reveals patterns of vulnerability across economic sectors to the costs of disruptive mobilization. The author tests this analysis based on case studies of the responses of economic actors to civil rights mobilization in the 1960s in five Southern localities. These cases depict how the character of protest and variation in the configuration of business communities defined...

American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism

Abstract: Traces the history of eugenics ideology in the United States and its ongoing presence in contemporary life. The Nazis may have given eugenics its negative connotations, but the practice--and the "science" that supports it--is still disturbingly alive in America in anti-immigration initiatives, the quest for a "gay gene, " and theories of collective intelligence. Tracing the historical roots and persistence of eugenics in the United States, Nancy Ordover explores the political and cultural climate that has endowed these campaigns with mass appeal and scientific legitimacy. American Eugenics demonstrates how biological theories of race, gender, and sexuality are crucially linked through a concern with regulating the "unfit." These links emerge in Ordover's examination of three separate but ultimately related American eugenics campaigns: early twentieth-century anti-immigration crusades; medical models and interventions imposed on (and sometimes embraced by) lesbians, gays, transgendered people, and bisexuals; and the compulsory sterilization of poor women and women of color. Throughout, her work reveals how constructed notions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation are put to ideological uses and how "faith in science" can undermine progressive social movements, drawing liberals and conservatives alike into eugenics-based discourse and policies.

Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace

Abstract: production system and its effects on workers and labor-management relations begin to emerge. It becomes clear thatJapanese production methods indeed pose considerable challenges to the traditional basis of labor's strength. However, it also becomes apparent that there are important differences in the degree of labor's resistance to the imposition of this hegemonic system. In a number of essays, the authors argue that it is the strategies and actions of organized labor that can explain the often considerable differences in outcomes across sites. Specifically, the authors point to the differences in strategies formulated and implemented by the UAW as compared to its Canadian counterpart, the CAW. The authors highlight CAW Local 88's resistance toJapanese production methods at CAMI (the GM-Suzuki joint venture located in Ingersoll, Ontario) that galvanized worker resistance and culminated in a five-week-long work stoppage resulting in the moderation of the lean production system and an increase in labor rights. The authors attribute the Canadian auto union's success to aspects of the Canadian union movement derived from institutions and history "better" than those in the United States. Despite the power of the arguments about the differences between the strategic views of and the actions undertaken by the UAW in the United States and the CAW in Canada, the actual empirical evidence regarding the impact of the CAW's strategy on the nature of the labormanagement accommodation under JPM and the effects of JPM on workers comes only from this single case. Although the CAMI case stands in stark contrast to a number of U.S. lean production cases (especially Saturn and the nonunion transplants), it does not look terribly different from the case of AutoAlliance, where workers are represented by Local 3000 of the UAW. Rather than casting the debate at the level of national unions as the authors in this volume do, I would argue that the debate needs to be refocused at the level of the local union. In my own work looking at workplace restructuring in the steel industry in these two countries (where the same international union represents workers on both sides of the border), the critical variable in explaining differences in outcomes appears to be the capacities possessed by individual local unions. I would argue that the same may be said in the case of the auto industry. A much more compelling story could be told about differences in local union institutions, practices, ideologies, and histories by looking at the CAMI and AutoAlliance cases as compared to the cases of Saturn and NUMMI or other auto assembly plants in both countries where lean production is being imposed in whole or in part on an existing work force and facility. Perhaps the critical question to be asked, with important implications for union strategists, is: why were UAW Local 3000 and CAW Local 88 relatively successful in confronting management to moderate the effects of lean production on their members while other locals of the UAW (and perhaps of the CAW as well), faced with similar pressures, were not? Overall, this book makes a significant contribution to the debate over new forms of work organization in the auto industry. Not only does it provide a rich collection of varied types of evidence, but it also contains a wealth of critical thinking regarding the future of organized labor in this industry. In particular, the authors must be commended for taking seriously the challenge JPM raises for workers and their representatives and for exploring the implications of their possible responses.