Capitalism as a social movement: the corporate and neoliberal reconstructions of the American political economy in the twentieth century

This paper examines the ways in which social movements based among leading capitalists have remade the US political economy. In the first part we examine the period from the late 1880s through the 1920s, sketching the emergence of a hegemonic movement that accomplished the re-embedding of capitalist social relations during the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism. In the second, we examine the disembedding of capitalist relations during the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper makes three major arguments. First, capitalists not just subaltern groups resort to collective action outside of institutional channels of authority and power. Second, during organic crises the movements of capitalists will join with movements of subaltern groups to create hegemonic projects, whose disparate supporters are articulated by discourses. Third, the concept of ‘social movement’ itself should be understood as a constituent part of a larger social formation and not sealed off from features of capitalism and the state. Indeed, hegemonic social movements have reconstructed the larger landscape that social movement theory normally takes for granted as a background. In applying this approach to the contested topic of neoliberalism, we argue that it was not primarily a class-based coup, a policy, ideology, or culture shift but a discourse that united elements of the left and the right as well as a ‘historic bloc’ with homes in both major parties. During both periods subaltern groups played an important role in the hegemonic movements that created corporate capitalism and later neoliberalism.     

Bourdieu and Social Movements: Considering Identity Movements in Terms of Field,Capital and Habitus

This article examines the explanatory capacity of Pierre Bourdieu's work in relation to social movements and, in particular, identity movements. It aims to provide a theoretical framework drawing on Bourdieu's central concepts of field, capital and habitus. These concepts are viewed as providing a theoretical toolkit that can be applied to convincingly explain aspects of social movements that social movement theories, such as political process theory, resource mobilization theory and framing, acknowledge, but are not able to explain within a single theoretical framework. Identity movements are approached here in a way that relates them to the position agents/movements occupy in social spaces, resources and cultural competence. This enables us to consider identity movements from a new perspective that explains, for instance, the interrelatedness of class and identity movements.     

Understanding Meaning in Movements: A Hermeneutic Approach to Frames and Ideologies

Social movements contain structures of beliefs and values that guide critical action and aid activists' understandings. These are worthy of interrogation, not least because they contain points of articulation with ideational formations found in both mainstream politics and academia. They offer an alternative view of society, economy and polity that is grounded in protagonists' experience and struggle. However, the ideational content of social movements is often obscured by a focus on particular, immediate goals; by their orientation to certain forms of action; and by the mediated, simplified nature of their communication. Additionally, recent social movements display a tendency to coalition action, bringing a diverse set of political understandings in concert on highly specific campaigns. This conceptual article seeks an approach to identifying the messages within social movements that remains sensitive to their complexity, dynamism and heterogeneity. Through a critique of the concept of ‘interpretative frames’ as developed in social movement studies, I describe the novel concept ‘orientational frame’. In contrast to social movement scholars' tendency to focus on instrumental claim-making by movement organizations, I emphasize deeply held, relatively stable sets of ideas that allow activists to justify contentious political action. Through an engagement with Michael Freeden's morphological approach to understanding ideologies I attempt to draw frame analysis away from the positivistic attempt to delineate general processes into a hermeneutic endeavour more suitable to understanding the richly detailed, context dependent ideas of particular social movements.     

Social movement studies in India,within and beyond sociology: Proposing postcolonial political sociology as an evolving framework

The social movement theories, particularly emerged since the late 1960s and the empirical studies informed by these theories occupy a decisive space in the current sociological studies of social movements. Often, the theories that emerged in the American and European contexts overlooked the significance of ‘political sociology’ as a theoretical terrain while conceptualizing contemporary social movements. Thus, this paper attempted to reinvent the significance of political sociology in two-ways: a) it critically engaging with the classical tradition of political sociology; b) critical scrutiny of the major trends appeared in the sub-field of social movements within the disciplinary domain of sociology in India since the 1980s has been undertaken. Given this, the paper recognizes the theoretical urge for a new framework to understand social movements in reference to the specificities of the non-Western societies like India, and thereby proposes an approach termed as the postcolonial political sociology of social movements.     

Poland's Contentious Elites Enter the Age of Revolution: Extending Social Movement Concepts

Scholars of social movements commonly call for the field to be broadened in various ways because movements are often intertwined with other forms of conflict and because the causes or consequences of movements may operate differently in different contexts. Important change processes that were unfolding in Poland at the time of the French Revolution provide an instructive case. Although the contemporaneous French Revolution, with its enormous quantity and variety of collective mobilizations has been a touchstone for social movement scholars, the work of Poland's reform parliament and the adoption of Poland's 1791 constitution have gotten much less attention. Poland's reform politics not only provides both instructive parallels to and differences from French revolutionary developments, but were also deeply intertwined with them and embedded with those French events in a larger, European field of contention. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the Polish reform movement is that it was largely driven by elites, something noted in Karl Marx's bemused praise. Although social movements played very much less of a role in Poland than in France, we try to show here that familiar tools of social movement analysis permit an account of those Polish events as well.     

Constructing Threat and Appropriating “Civil Rights”: Rhetorical Strategies of Gun Rights and English Only Leaders

Using a grounded theory method, we analyze the framing strategies of organizational leaders of the gun rights and English Only movements. Although we find greater variability in the framing strategies of English Only leaders, leaders of both movements mobilize fear by rhetorically constructing moral threats to American society in ways that draw on, and uphold, the ideals and practices of dominant social groups. In doing so, they appeal to their constituents' status anxieties. We also find that these movements engage in a particular form of frame transformation that we call “frame appropriation” to counter opponents' claims and broaden their support. Future research should examine when and how, and to what effect, other social movements similarly mobilize fear and engage in frame appropriation.     

Educating for Practice

Abstract

Few studies have profiled American Indian social workers or social work students in terms of their career objectives and practice interests. This article expands the current literature by reporting results from a secondary data analysis of a California statewide sample of 162 entering American Indian MSW students, from 1991 and 1998. Results are also helpful in understanding this unique racial/ethnic group with regard to their socio-demographic characteristics, views on poverty and the poor, career motivations, and future practice interests. Additionally, comparisons are made between American Indians and all MSW students regarding the above mentioned variables. Findings indicate that American Indian students demonstrate a noticeably stronger adherence toward supporting and maintaining social work's traditional mission in helping poor and dis-advantaged populations when compared to all MSW students. Implications for social work practice with American Indian populations are also discussed.     

Contemporary Research on Social Movements and Protest in Latin America: Promoting Democracy, Resisting Neoliberalism, and Many Themes in between

This essay outlines how research on Latin American social movements has evolved since the late 1980s. Emphasis is given to two topics. First, the essay examines how Latin American social movement research has historically been oriented toward social movement theories that emerged out of the study of European movements and, to a lesser extent, movements in the United States. At the same time, it discusses how the unique historical and contextual factors of Latin American societies have repeatedly been found to defy adequate explanation by these theories. Second, the essay outlines five major themes that characterize the Latin American social movement literature: the dynamics of movements in relation to transitions to democracy, and to neo-liberal economic reforms, as well as transnational movement dynamics, indigenous movements, and women's movements.     

Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

Subcultural Identity Work in Social Movements: Barriers to Collective Identity Changes and Overcoming Them

Over time, social movements must contend with a vast array of forces that can lead to changes in the movement's collective identity. As such changes may impact the alignment of movements and their membership, this study explores how changes are perceived by members and how they are interactively addressed. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered from two Native American social movement organizations, this study specifically asks why some changes suggested by movement members might be pursued and others are not. While movement members felt that there were a number of barriers to changes in their movements, the study revealed that it was the resonance of collective memories – presented during interactions as narrative commemorations – that encouraged the pursuit of suggested changes or the maintenance of a status quo.     

Structure,Temporality, and Theories of Revolution. Reading Alberto Melucci in Revolutionary Saint Domingue, 1791–1804

This article addresses the debate on structure, agency, and process in contemporary revolution theory, drawing on social movement theory and using the Haitian Revolution as an illustrative case. The article seeks to make three main contributions. Firstly, while accepting the critique against the failure of structuralist revolution theory to explain why revolutions can occur under difficult circumstances, the article proposes a structuralist solution instead of the focus on intentions and processes in contemporary revolution theory. Secondly, it brings a new angle to the emerging dialogue between the different fields that theorize social movements and revolutions, by combining Alberto Melucci's early and later approaches to social movements and temporality. Thirdly, the Meluccian approach is utilized in a case study that explores how independence from France can be understood in the Haitian Revolution, which serves to illustrate the strengths of the theoretical approach and to criticize the major accounts of independence in existing studies of the Haitian Revolution.     

Sociological contributions to the study of social innovation: A critical review

Sociology has long been interested in innovating solutions to social problems. However, this desire has also been a source of controversy as it can conflict with the discipline's ambition also to be recognized as a hard science. This paper critically reviews sociological contributions to the study of social innovation. It first contextualizes these contributions by discussing the origins of sociology's interest in transforming society, the growing tension between that interest and sociology's other aspiration to create objective knowledge about the social world, and how more sociologists have relocated to business schools where most research on social innovation is now being conducted. Next, it summarizes sociologists' contributions, which emphasize how social innovation is organized by institutions, networks, social movements, and organizations themselves. It then discusses criticisms of this work and responses to these critiques. It concludes by asking whether sociologists' research on social innovation has advanced their discipline's dual mission of reforming and explaining society and what additional studies are needed.     

Cooptation and non-cooptation: elite strategies in response to social protest

ABSTRACT

The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it demonstrates that cooptation appears rational only on the condition that cooperation is valued lower than political domination. But elite-movement interaction may result in mutually strategic relationships that are conditional on each side’s recognition of the other’s interest. Two empirical cases illustrate this possibility: the US Civil Rights Movement and Latin American participatory budgeting. In both cases, the actors involved chose a strategy of ‘mutually assured autonomy’ over cooptation.     

Connecting entrepreneurship with policy experimentation? The EU framework for social innovation

This article investigates how “social innovation” made its way onto the European Union (EU) agenda and how this notion has been creatively used to advance distinct policy goals. It does so by analysing the resources the EU provided to promote social innovation over the period 2006–2014. Three main conclusions arise. First, between 2006 and 2010 the label social innovation was rarely used, although several EU instruments and processes supported it. Second, throughout 2009–2010, the European Commission’s Bureau of European Policy Advisers played a key agenda setting role in flagging social innovation on the eve of the Europe 2020 Strategy. Consequently, and third, since 2010 social innovation has been explicitly mainstreamed into the EUs new growth strategy. This phase is characterized by a stronger emphasis on “social entrepreneurship” and “social experimentation”. As a result, social innovation has become an important tool in the European Semester’s focus on the reform of the welfare state.     

SCIENTOLOGY “ETHICS”: DEVIANCE,IDENTITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN A CULT-LIKE SOCIAL WORLD

Qualitative research at the macrosocial level can be facilitated by examining the more fully articulated social worlds existing within advanced societies. Based on the author's field research, Scientology's structure, culture, and comparability to American capitalist society are discussed and “Ethics,” its institution of social control, is shown to involve a paradigm in which conduct flows from social identity and deviance is defined in terms of a progression of stages of identity loss through reference group confusion. A hypothetical case shows how each stage is treated through specific intervention formula designed to reverse the process. “Ethics” is shown to closely parallel symbolic interactionist theories of deviance. Its differences from symbolic interactionism are ascribed to the inherent contradiction between the individualistic and system-centered orientations permeating American capitalist society.     

After the March: Using Instagram to Perform and Sustain the Women's March

The January 2017 Women's March was an example of the paradigmatic March on Washington, part of the repertoire of collective action used by social movements in the United States for decades. Similar marches were held on its first and second anniversary, in January 2018 and January 2019, respectively. One did not need to travel to the nation's capital to participate in these marches, however; activists also organized hundreds of “sister marches” across the United States and internationally. Yet, a sole focus on these one‐day, physical events misses a great deal of activity. In this article, we examine social media activity related to the Women's March on the platform Instagram that was posted well after the 2017 march was over but before the 2018 march was fully planned. We do so to gain purchase on how individuals and organizations use social media to maintain movements between large events. We analyze a systematic sample of Instagram posts from two sources: (1) individual Instagram users’ public posts with the hashtag #womensmarch and (2) posts from the official Instagram account of the Women's March. Conceptualizing these posts as political performances, we use our findings to draw implications for the study of contemporary protest.     

Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer,Bourdieu and reflexivity

Through a critique of Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, this paper explores the theoretical contribution of a Bourdieusian sociology of the subject for understanding social change. Archer's theory of reflexivity holds that conscious ‘internal conversations’ are the motor of society, central both to human subjectivity and to the ‘reflexive imperative’ of late modernity. This is established through critiques of Bourdieu, who is held to erase creativity and meaningful personal investments from subjectivity, and late modernity is depicted as a time when a ‘situational logic of opportunity’ renders embodied dispositions and the reproduction of symbolic advantages obsolete. Maintaining Archer's focus on ‘ultimate concerns’ in a context of social change, this paper argues that her theory of reflexivity is established through a narrow misreading and rejection of Bourdieu's work, which ultimately creates problems for her own approach. Archer's rejection of any pre‐reflexive dimensions to subjectivity and social action leaves her unable to sociologically explain the genesis of ‘ultimate concerns’, and creates an empirically dubious narrative of the consequences of social change. Through a focus on Archer's concept of ‘fractured reflexivity’, the paper explores the theoretical necessity of habitus and illusio for understanding the social changes that Archer is grappling with. In late modernity, reflexivity is valorized just as the conditions for its successful operation are increasingly foreclosed, creating ‘fractured reflexivity’ emblematic of the complex contemporary interaction between habitus, illusio, and accelerating social change.     

Agriculture,communities, and new social movements: East European ruralities in the process of restructuring

This paper examines the usefulness of the new social movements (NSMs) paradigm in the changing context of East European post-communist societies and their agricultural systems and rural communities. Starting with statements formulated in Western sociology in the context of Western democratic societies about NSMs as a protest against modernity, the paper analyses the role of such movements in the still modernizing Eastern European reality. The first part of the paper briefly examines some basic elements of the NSMs paradigm in European and American social science. The goal of this section is not only to identify the basic characteristics of NSMs, but also to identify the typical frames used by them. The second part of the paper focuses on the presence of NSMs in the communist era. Drawing on the idea of NSMs as indicators of a ‘post-materialist shift’ as well as of ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘pro-participatory democracy’, the paper examines the frames of democratic opposition in Eastern Europe before 1989. The final part of the paper considers several selected examples from Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to explore the role of NSMs in the process of shaping new ruralities during the post-communist transformation.     

Complicating Patriotism in the Elementary Grades: An Examination of Rugg and Krueger's Overlooked Textbooks

In the late 1930s several prominent self-described patriotic groups attacked social studies pioneer Harold Rugg as “un-American.” The largest instance of textbook censorship in American history unfolded. Yet little attention was given (and continues to be given by scholars) to Rugg's elementary textbooks that he wrote with Louise Krueger. This article examines Rugg and Krueger's complete “Elementary Series” in light of the un-American criticisms levied at Rugg. It documents how, despite critics’ claims, the books were immediately celebratory of the United States and its people, teaching a traditional patriotism that casts the nation as the supreme level of social analysis through an unquestioning, best-story approach. Furthermore, it shows how the books lack Rugg's justice-oriented philosophy of the “American Problem.” The article concludes by charging elementary social studies teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to consider critical questions related to the teaching of patriotism in the elementary grades.     

Envisioning European Solidarity between Welfare Ideologies and the European Social Agenda

This article uses the debates of the Working Group ‘Social Europe’ of the European Convention for the Future of the European Union that drafted the Constitutional Treaty to explore the views on the European social model among representatives of the European political class. The debates within the European Convention on basic social values, social objectives, the Union's competences, the open method of coordination, the coordination of social and economic policies as well as the role of social partners provide insight into the emerging visions of European solidarity at the crossroads between welfare regime ideologies and Europeanization. It is argued that, despite an overall consensus regarding a greater future role of the European Union in social policy, the contours of the European social model and the scope of the Union's competences remain contested. However, the observed cleavages are to be found mainly on the left–right political scale, and this suggests that we might gradually be observing a re-politicization of the social policy discourse at European level. Nevertheless, the holding on to arguments of subsidiarity and especially sovereignty represents a barrier to envisioning European solidarity and developing a stronger European social agenda.