The Social Order of Collective Action: The Wisconsin Uprising of 2011

Abstract

Reviewer: Amanda Pullum, California State University In early 2011, the Wisconsin State Capitol became the site of one of the largest—if not the largest—protests in United States history. For about three weeks, crowds of up to 100,000 people occupied the building nonstop and gathered outside, all in opposition to Act 10, a far-reaching union-busting bill. Matthew Kearney, then a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was one of those occupiers. This book, drawn from his own participant observation as well as extensive interviews and archival analysis, is both an insightful addition to the scholarship on social movements and a labor of love for the Wisconsin Uprising. Kearney’s analysis illustrates several protest dynamics that followed from the Uprising’s unplanned and decentralized origins, and he argues that a large, complex, and clearly ordered collective action arose despite—or perhaps because of—its lack of direction from formal organizations. Kearney situates his rich ethnographic data firmly within classical sociological theory, as well as scholarship on social movements and the sociology of religion. The book’s major theoretical and empirical contributions are presented in four pairs of chapters. In Chapters 1 and 2, Kearney describes the Wisconsin Uprising and its political context, demonstrating that the Uprising had minimal advance planning and no formal leadership structure. Instead, it grew organically from an unrelated protest, followed by efforts to stall the bill by recruiting numerous speakers for public hearings. Ultimately, the Uprising consisted of multiple actions, deployed simultaneously by separate groups with limited coordination.