Social Movement Scholarship Research Articles

Immigrant rights and social movements

AbstractThe disciplinary fields of immigration and social movements have largely developed as two distinct subareas of sociology. Scholars contend that immigrant rights, compared to other movements, have been given less attention in social movement research. Studies of immigrant‐based movements in recent decades have reached a stage whereby we can now assess how immigrant movement scholarship informs the general social movement literature in several areas. In this article, we show the contributions of empirical studies of immigrant movements in four primary arenas of social movement scholarship: (a) emergence; (b) participation; (c) framing; and (d) outcomes. Contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship opportunities to incorporate these campaigns and enhance current theories and concepts as earlier protest waves advanced studies of collective action.

Governance monitors or market rebels? Heterogeneity in shareholder activism

Agency theory is the dominant theory of shareholder activism and argues that activist investors function as external governance monitors. Agency theory predicts that activist investors will tend to target firms who exhibit governance and performance problems. However, given limited resources and time, activist investors must often decide between selecting targets with particularly strong agency and performance problems and those where their activism efforts are most likely to succeed. Social movement scholars point out that, in social movement contexts, the corporate opportunity structure affects when and where activism is likely to arise. We draw on insights from social movement scholarship and agency theory to advance a theory of heterogeneity in shareholder activism. We argue that an activist’s access to power and resources shapes its target selection, particularly the activist’s preference for targeting firms with greater agency problems or where contextual factors favor chances of success. Whereas more powerful activists are able to wield their power as effective governance monitors against firms with substantial agency problems, less powerful activists must strategically select targets of opportunity by choosing firms where contextual factors improve their odds of success. We test these propositions using an innovative relational approach that can simultaneously incorporate firm traits, activist identities, and endogenous dynamics.

Patterns of engagement: identities and social movement organizations in Finland and Malawi

Based on interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this article reconsiders the ways in which the coordination of identity projects and action is approached in social movement scholarship. Rather than beginning with personal and collective identities, we take our cue from recent work by Laurent Thevenot and trace actors’ forms of engagement—the various ways actors produce commonality. As we show, doing so in vastly different social contexts allows us to see permutations in such forms afforded by participation in a transnational social movement and to identify patterns of collective action that we would otherwise be apt to miss. Finnish activists narrated their activities by way of engaging in the forms of the common good driving the climate movement, but coordinated various situations also through engagement in familiarity, comfort, and ease. Malawian activists and NGO employees also spoke of the common good the movements worked to achieve, but principally created common ground by engaging in shared individual choices and projects, which were jointly consecrated by fellow NGO participants. Ultimately, we argue that tracing forms of engagement enables more in-depth understanding of what is at stake when people act together in social movement organizations: moving away from collective and personal identity to patterns of engagement allows a vantage point into the processes through which commonality is created and generates new hypotheses regarding the coordination of action in social movement organizations.

SOLIDARITY OR SCHISM: IDEOLOGICAL CONGRUENCE AND THE TWITTER NETWORKS OF EGYPTIAN ACTIVISTS*

Social movement scholarship on the role of coalitions in advancing social change claims that communication across ideological boundaries can foster a collective identity among diverse groups of activists. New communications technology, especially activists' widespread adoption of social media, calls into question whether these claims apply equally to online social media-based coalitions. Using the case of the Egyptian revolution in the Arab Spring, we conduct a series of social network analyses of the Twitter networks of activists. We find that social movement coalitions theory accurately predicts the conditions under which coalitions form and dissolve for online activists, as it does for on-the-ground activists. Among activists of diverse ideologies, we identify a pattern of solidarity in the early days of the revolutionary period, followed by a period of schism after a military crackdown on protestors. This research extends social movement theory to the sphere of digital activism.

Practicing Gender and Race in Online Activism to Improve Safe Public Space in Sweden

This article aims to locate the social practices of activist groups online and clarify how they collectively practice gender and race. It draws upon a qualitative study of two locale‐oriented groups that sought to improve safe public space in their respective cities in Sweden. Using Grounded Theory method, I observed and analyzed each group's public Facebook site from initiation until decline or maintenance. The findings captured five routine behaviors done by the groups in a tacit manner: responding to a concrete incident, creating meaningful participation, fostering substantive debate, formulating a long‐term vision, and questioning social hierarchies. Working with theories of social, gendered, and racialized practices, I analyze these behaviors as practices available to the activist groups to do, yet open for social change through their performance. Although all five practices were detected among both groups, the two groups performed them differently and this had consequences for their maintenance as well as their ability to challenge gender and racial hierarchies. The analysis makes an important contribution to social movement scholarship by showing how tacit and routine behavior forms the backbone of any collective action and is a crucial site for the (re)construction of social hierarchies.

The Anti-oppressive Value of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality in Social Movement Study

Social movements can be important mechanisms of social change for vulnerable populations as the formal mechanisms of policy and legislation tend to be in the hands of the powerful in society. Academic scholarship can play an important role in challenging or reinforcing social power dynamics. This reality makes it important to critically interrogate social movement knowledge production and use anti-oppressive frameworks for social movement scholarship. Sociology has contributed greatly to social movement literature, and the American Sociological Association (ASA), especially the section of Collective Behavior and Social Movements (CBSM), is a central site of academic credibility and scholarship. This examination draws on critical race theory and intersectionality to analyze 10 years of award-winning books from the CBSM, specifically recipients of the Charles Tilly Award for Best Book. These books are prominently positioned with respect to the production of knowledge, as well as the study of social movements. This analysis shows the absence of critical race theory and intersectionality in core of social movement scholarship and identifies a pattern of erasure and marginalization of vulnerable populations in the award-winning books.

Mining and subaltern politics: political struggle against neoliberal development in Bangladesh

ABSTRACTDrawing on social movement scholarship, this paper analyses subaltern struggles against a multinational mining company. The Phulbari coal mine is the centre of contention between the mining company and local/national activists. Local concerns about the dispossession of lands and livelihoods and environmental destruction have been merged with a Leftist political agenda on the growing vulnerability of the state and national sovereignty in the Global South. A close examination of the movement's discourses suggests that a broader political struggle against resource plunder and energy imperialism has been strengthened by local community resistance to an environmentally destructive coal mine. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, I analyse how activists have created new meanings of the conflict to confront and delegitimize hegemonic discourses of capitalist development and modernity.

Relationship networks as strategic issues management: An issue-stage framework of social movement organization network strategies

Social movement organizations (SMO) are important actors in affecting issue-related policy changes. To successfully manage an issue to achieve favorable policy resolutions, SMOs, like many kinds of organizations, not only use traditional public relations techniques, but also build networks to accomplish their objectives. Yet, an examination of the relationship between issue development and SMO networks is absent from the literature. This article therefore concentrates on the question: what types of networks should SMOs seek to build at different stages of an issue’s development? Informed by public relations research on issues management as well as contemporary social movement scholarship and organizational network theories, the article proposes a framework of SMO network strategies that examines the kinds of relationship networks SMOs should maintain as they attempt to manage an issue through the stages of its life cycle.

“Social Movement Theory” as a Baseline Legitimizing Narrative: Corporate Exploitation, Anti-Hegemonic Opposition and the Contested Academy

Scholars and administrators created “Social Movement Theory” (SMT) and associated institutions in order to establish a field of “contested politics” buttressed by “scholarly synthesis.” In this article, I place SMT as an object of study itself within the contested space of the corporate academy. SMT is a baseline legitimizing narrative that the domesticated academy produces and that corporate entities then use as preemptive inoculation against anti-hegemonic opposition by geographically separating governmentalities of often brutal and arbitrary material exploitation from depoliticized, dehistoricized and scientistic spectacles of consumerist legitimization. I summarize key ways that administrators govern the corporate academy and remove historical and social specificity, followed by analysis of exemplary cases demonstrating how SMT is placed within “peer-reviewed” scholarship. In contrast to SMT's over-riding goal of “synthesis,” I argue that effective social movement scholarship is contingent, situated and explicitly engaged with power (willing to “reveal a stand”), including difficult questions about who exercises power, how, and especially under what guises of corporate authority. Done well, such intellectual-activism must be conducted independent of current corporate academic strictures, and indeed will likely involve direct anti-hegemonic challenges to the corporate academy. Intellectual-activists that choose to do so can face significant negative impacts ranging from “double-shift” marginalization through loss of academic privileges, total career destruction, banishment from the academic canon and even physical endangerment. Therefore, effective transformation of social movement scholarship requires transformation of the contested academy, both projects very difficult for embedded academics absent external pressure from intellectual-activists.

Economic Breakdown and Collective Action

While social movement scholarship has emphasized the role of activists in socially constructing grievances, we contend that material adversity is a reoccurring precondition of anti-state mobilization. We test the effect of economic decline on the count of large-scale, anti-government demonstrations and riots. Using multiple sources of newspaper reports of contentious events across 145 countries during the period 1960-2006, we find a statistically significant negative relationship between economic growth and the number of contentious events, controlling for a variety of state-governance, demographic, and media characteristics. We find that the effect is strongest under conditions of extreme economic decline and in non-democracies. These findings highlight the need for social movement scholars to take seriously the role of economic performance as an important factor that enables mobilization.

Mechanisms of Social Movement Success: Conversation, Displacement and Disruption

A great deal of social movement scholarship tends to assume – and in some cases explicitly argues – that disruption is the primary mechanism through which protest movements win major concessions from the holders of power. Nonetheless, some studies and much empirical evidence provide a strong basis to argue that other paths to social movement success also exist. The importance of discourse and framing has also been highlighted in a number of studies but we argue that the full contribution of talk itself to movement success is best captured through the concept of “conversation” and an examination of the preconditions for its viability. The successful displacement of power-holders by protest movements, although a less common pathway to success than disruption and conversation, also deserves conceptual and empirical attention. In this paper we make this set of distinctions conceptually explicit, differentiating analytically between these three mechanisms of movement success and delineating the conditions required for each mechanism to prove viable and ‘useful’. We rely on extensive examples drawn from movements and protest events in the United States, Spain and Portugal, using this empirical material, as well as the existing theoretical literature, as our basis for constructing a conceptual argument on the ideal typical distinction between these three mechanisms and the conditions that allow them to operate. We also take up the questions of whether, and when, movement actors can successfully combine these mechanisms or – alternatively – find themselves pressed to pursue one or another of these pathways to success in a relatively ‘pure’ form.

Populist Social Movements of the Great Recession*

Social movement scholars have thus far failed to give populism its deserved attention and to incorporate it into their field of study. Although sociologists, political scientists, and historians have explored diverse facets of the intersection of populism and social dissent, there has been no concerted effort towards building a comprehensive framework for the study of populist mobilization, despite its growing significance in the past decades. In this article I combine insights from populism studies, social movement scholarship, and social psychology to build a unified framework of analysis for populist social movements. I suggest populism is best understood as a collective action frame employed by movement entrepreneurs to construct a resonant collective identity of “the People” and to challenge elites. I argue that populism depends on the politicization of citizenship, and I apply this framework to the movements of the Great Recession to classify Occupy Wall Street and the European indignados as instances of a populist wave of mobilization, using data from archival material and a set of semistructured interviews with Greek activists.

Discourses and Differences: Situating Pro-Palestine Activism in Discursive Context

Activism on behalf of Palestinians, carried out by diaspora Arabs and non-Arab residents of the United States and other Western countries, has gone almost unstudied in the literature on social movements, despite the fact that the question of Palestine and Palestinians is key in the lived experience of the well-studied contemporary peace and anti-war movements. The best explanation for this omission probably rests in the narrow range of acceptable positions in American political discourse on Israel, Palestine, and Palestinians: academics who are not personally engaged in activism around the issue avoid studying it, out of a worry that their work will become tainted with the political positions of those they study, while those who engage with pro-Palestinian movements choose instead to focus their intellectual work on substantiating Palestinian claims to justice. Documentation of the dynamics of this movement drop to the wayside under these conditions.This is unfortunate, because activism on behalf of Palestinians is both interesting for the amount of attention it takes up in the lives of Arab community organizers and peace and social justice activists of all ethnic backgrounds, and because the structure of pro-Palestinian movements has implications for the study of social movements more broadly. In particular, the experience of the highly ideologically divided proPalestine movement sheds new light on the work done by ideas and language within social movements. Most social movement scholarship understands the ideational element of social movements and individual social movement organizations through the lens of in which individuals and organizations use conceptual frameworks, built within the movement, to explain and motivate action. But when applied to the experiences of pro-Palestine activism, this conception falls short. Some organizations share substantial elements of their frames, and consider themselves a part of the same movement. But the ways in which they use language and ideas can be wildly divergent, and can have substantial impacts on how groups collaborate (or don't), how they are understood by others, and what the effects of their actions will be. Using a framing approach will end up rendering a great deal of the variation between activist groups and political actors invisible, in ways that constrain our ability to understand the antecedents of social change.In contrast to the narrow, positivist concept of framing, the dialogicaldiscursive understanding of how language is used by social movement organizations takes into account the ways words work between people, as opposed to assuming that their meaning is unproblematically legible from their bare meanings. By understanding how different social movement organizations, or factions of a social movement, deploy their language and ideas in different discursive contexts, we can explain why movements putting forth very similar arguments about a given social or political issue can be heard differently, which affects the extent to which they will be able to effect the transformations they desire. The broader context in which they deploy their words and actions will change the interpretation that others give to the them, which will change the likelihood of a movement organization gaining traction or being able to win victories.This article uses the example of two pro-Palestinian activist groups in New York City, Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel, and Al-Awda New York: The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition to demonstrate the utility of a discursive approach to language and ideas within social movements, particularly highly divided or divisive movements. In the specific examples of Adalah-NY and AlAwda, the ways that the two groups are oriented towards different groups of Arab and non-Arab interlocutors shapes the discursive fields in which they orient themselves.I begin by introducing both organizations and discussing the literature on framing, particularly the notion of diagnostic, prognostic, and mobilization frames. …

Who Framed Climate Change? Identifying the How and Why of Iowa Corn Farmers’ Framing of Climate Change

AbstractAgricultural production systems both contribute to and are threatened by climate change. Farmers could reduce agriculture's contributions and vulnerability to climate change by adopting mitigation and adaption practices. A growing number of studies have begun to examine developed countries farmers’ beliefs related to climate change and how they affect farmers’ support for adopting these practices. To build on this work, this analysis uses qualitative data from 53 Iowa corn farmers to offer a nuanced depiction of the farmers’ perception of non‐anthropogenic climate change. Goffman's concept of framing, with contributions from more recent social movement scholarship, is used to reveal how farmers are constructing climate change as largely a result of inevitable ‘natural cycles’, the effect this has on their support for mitigation and adaptation and to explore why this particular framing resonates with them.

Constructing alternatives: Envisioning a critical psychology of prefigurative politics

Psychological contributions to social movement scholarship have disproportionately concentrated on a "politics of demand", rather than on a "politics of the act", or prefigurative politics. Prefigurative actors, rather than making demands of power-holders, take direct action aimed at creating change in the ‘here and now’ by constructing alternative modes of being and interacting that reflect a given movement’s desired social transformations. Given that the prefigurative process takes place within and between individuals—with aims of changing the macrostructure by altering micro-relations—psychological perspectives are imperative to their understanding. Despite relevant theories and concepts, a psychology of prefiguration has yet to emerge. This theoretical discussion explores several reasons why prefigurative practices have been largely overlooked and at times misunderstood within mainstream social movement scholarship, traces the distinctive dimensions of prefiguration deserving of further (especially psychological) inquiry, and calls for methodological techniques both responsive to the context-driven nature of prefigurative praxis and consistent with the ‘bottom-up’ approach embodied within these unique spaces of resistance. After highlighting important points of disjuncture and possibility within the study of prefiguration, this discussion offers critical questions and methods aimed to envision and invigorate a critical psychology of prefigurative politics.

Racialized political shock: Arab American racial formation and the impact of political events

ABSTRACTThis article explores significant factors influencing the process of Arab American racial formation. I bring into conversation theories of racial formation and ‘political shock’ in social movement scholarship to develop the notion of ‘racialized political shock’ as an important factor in how racial and ethnic groups mobilize and organize. Many moments of political shock are highly racialized and have the potential to reorder the racial and ethnic landscape in ways that can open opportunities or introduce constraints to mobilizations around racial formation. Drawing on existing studies of Arab Americans, this paper highlights how Arab American racial formation has been galvanized during moments of racialized political shock. In the Arab American case, these moments have led to a call for recognition outside the category of white. I conclude by outlining ways forward in the study of Arab Americans, who have been overlooked in studies of race and ethnicity in the US.

Fields and Facebook: Ta’ayush’s Grassroots Activism and Archiving the Peace that Will Have Come in Israel/Palestine

Israeli peace activism has increasingly taken place on new media, as in the case of the grassroots anti-Occupation group, <em>Ta’ayush</em>. What is the significance of <em>Ta’ayush</em>’s work on the ground and online for peace? This article considers the former in the light of social movement scholarship on peacebuilding, and the latter in light of new media scholarship on social movements. Each of those approaches suggest that <em>Ta’ayush</em> has very limited success in achieving its strategic goals or generating outrage about the Occupation in the virtual/public sphere. Yet, <em>Ta’ayush’s </em>apparent “failure” according to standard criteria of success misses the significance of <em>Ta’ayush’</em>s work. Its combination of grassroots activism and online documentation of its work in confronting the Occupation in partnership with Palestinians has assembled an impressive archive. Through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, <em>Ta’ayush</em> can be seen to enact a “future perfect” peace that will have come.

Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts.

The Importance of Micro-level Effects on Social Movement Outcomes

Social movement scholarship has found that social movement organizations (SMOs) rarely have much effect on issues related to war and the military. This article examines how one Israeli women’s human rights organization, MachsomWatch (MW), succeeded at providing direct aid to Palestinians, intervening with the military and established media standing. This article explains that MW was most successful when it maintained a nonthreatening insider disposition that drew on distinctly particularistic cultural norms in interactions with the soldiers in ways that emphasized their commonality with the soldiers due to their shared ethnic, religious, and national origins. This analysis suggests that it is productive for movement scholars to think of movement targets as agentic actors who are networked together in ways that may sometimes be permeable to certain groups of activists. This article argues that thinking of both political opportunity structures and targets at the micro level may provide significant insight into understanding social movement outcomes.

Western solidarity with Pussy Riot and the Twittering of cosmopolitan selves

AbstractThis article aims to explain the widespread attention to contemporary protesting artists among Western audiences by focusing on the case of Pussy Riot. Social movement scholarship provides a first step into understanding how Pussy Riot legitimately protests Russian politics through its punk performances. It then turns to the concept of cosmopolitanism as a performance in everyday life to explain Pussy Riot's appeal among Western audiences. By collecting and analyzing 9001 tweets through a thematic hashtag analysis and topic modeling, this article analyzes how audiences talk about Pussy Riot and shows how Twitter affords users to perform cosmopolitan selves by sharing their ideas and experiences on Pussy Riot with others. Although we distinguish between four types of cosmopolitan selves, the results clearly show Pussy Riot is mainly reflected upon in a media context: Twitter users predominantly talk about Pussy Riot's media appearances rather than readily engage with its explicit political advocacy.