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.

Latin america at a crossroads

Abstract: This paper examines the socio-economic, political, and cultural transformations that have been taking place in South America during the past ten years, particularly in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia. Whereas at the level of the states the transformations do not seem to venture beyond alternative forms of modernization, the discourses and strategies of some social movements suggest radical possibilities towards post-liberal, post-developmentalist, and post-capitalist social forms. To entertain such a possibility requires that the transformations in question be seen in terms of a double conjuncture: the crisis of the neoliberal project of the past three decades; and the crisis of the project of bringing about modernity to the continent since the Conquest. At stake in many cultural-political mobilizations in Latin America, it is further argued, is the political activation of relational ontologies, such as those of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendents, which differ from the dualist ontologies of liberal m...

Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring

Abstract: This article examines the role of the new media in the ‘Arab Spring’ in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that although the new media is one of the factors in the social revolution among others such as social and political factors in the region, it nevertheless played a critical role especially in light of the absence of an open media and a civil society. The significance of the globalization of the new media is highlighted as it presents an interesting case of horizontal connectivity in social mobilization as well signaling a new trend in the intersection of new media and conventional media such as television, radio, and mobile phone. One of the contradictions of the present phase of globalization is that the state in many contexts facilitated the promotion of new media due to economic compulsion, inadvertently facing the social and political consequences of the new media. Este articulo examina el papel de los nuevos medios en ‘la primavera arabe’ en la region del Medio Oriente y ...

Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception:

Abstract: In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions as determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us to see Fordism as exception and precarity as the norm. The political concept and practice of translation enables us to frame the precarity of creative labour in a broader historical and geographical perspective, shedding light on its contestation and relation to the concept of the common. Our interest is in the potential for novel forms of connection, subjectivization and political organization. Such processes of translation are themselves inherently precarious, transborder undertakings.

Organizations and Movements

Abstract: Introduction There is little question that two of the most active and creative arenas of scholarly activity in the social sciences during the past four decades have been organizational studies (OS) and social movement analysis (SM). Both have been intellectually lively and vigorous in spite of the fact that scholars in both camps began their projects during the early 1960s on relatively barren soil. Students of OS took up their labors alongside the remnants of scientific management, their human relations critics, and scattered studies of bureaucratic behavior. SM scholars were surrounded by earlier empirical work on rumors, panics, crowds, and mobs together with a “smorgasbord” of theoretical perspectives, including the collective behavior, mass society, and relative deprivation approaches (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1988: 695). In both situations, prior work provided scant theoretical coherence and little basis for optimism. Moreover, in this early period no connection existed or, indeed, seemed possible between the two fields since the former concentrated on instrumental, organized behavior while the latter's focus was on “spontaneous, unorganized, and unstructured phenomena” (Morris 2000: 445). OS began to gain traction with the recognition of the importance of the wider environment, first material resource and technical features, then political, and, more recently, institutional and cultural forces. Open systems conceptions breathed new life into a field too long wedded to concerns of internal administrative design, leadership, and work group cohesion.

Nationalism and ethnicity

Abstract: Neither nationalism nor ethnicity is vanishing as part of an obsolete traditional order. Both are part of a modern set of categorical identities invoked by elites and other participants in political and social struggles. These categorical identities also shape everyday life, offering both tools for grasping pre-existing homogeneity and difference and for constructing specific versions of such identities. While it is impossible to dissociate nationalism entirely from ethnicity, it is equally impossible to explain it simply as a continuation of ethnicity or a simple reflection of common history or language. Numerous dimensions of modern social and cultural change, notably state building (along with war and colonialism), individualism, and the integration of large-scale webs of indirect relationships also serve to make both nationalism and ethnicity salient. Nationalism, in particular, remains the pre-eminent rhetoric for attempts to demarcate political communities, claim rights of self-determination and leg...