Educating for Practice in the Chicano Community

This paper conveys one perspective on the development and implementation of a training curriculum designed within a framework of knowledge, values, and skills essential for compatible and complementary social work practice in the Chicano community. It reflects the theoretical foundations upon which the Chicano Training Center is constructing a continuing education program for social service and mental health personnel. Curriculum content areas and emphases, as well as training modalities, are discussed and suggested as possible means for educating practitioners to better understand and serve Mexican Americans. The development of bicultural practice models in service delivery systems is also stressed.     

Complex contention: analyzing power dynamics within Anonymous

Abstract

Anonymous is notoriously elusive as the movement takes on radically different guises, constantly mutates, and traverses national borders and ideological divides. Since Anonymous is difficult to grasp with conventional social movement theory, this paper uses insights from complexity theory to analyze the movement’s evolution in general and its dynamics of power in particular. While participants in Anonymous radically reject hierarchy and leadership, dominant groups emerged at various points in the movement’s evolution. This paper aims to explain how such dominant groups emerge and concentrate power and how they subsequently dissolve and lose power. Drawing on ethnographic research as well as secondary sources, it identifies mechanisms of power concentration and diffusion within nominally horizontalist movements.     

The Mobilization Against the 2005 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe: A French Mobilization for Another Europe

ABSTRACT

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in ‘personal’ identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future.     

I never had a mentor: Reflections of a chicano sociologist

By tracing the career path of a senior Chicano sociologist, this article attempts to gain insights into the problems and dilemmas faced by minority scholars in earlier stages of their careers. Tensions between the demands of a professional identity as a sociologist, on the one hand, and a personal identity as a Chicano, on the other, are isolated and discussed. It is suggested that this dynamic tension between professional and personal demands, coupled with expanding career opportunities and the emergence of Chicano Studies as an academic discipline, gave impetus to the development of an indigenous Chicano sociology that challenged traditional sociological paradigms and was grounded in Chicano culture and world view. His publications includeThe Age of Crisis (Harper & Row, 1975),La Chicana: The Mexican-American Woman (University of Chicago Press, 1980),The Chicano Experience (Notre dame University Press, 1985),Gringo Justice (Notre Dame University Press, 1987), and many journal articles dealing with race and ethnicity.     

Youth politics as multiple processes: how teenagers construct political action in Sweden

Alternative approaches to power in youth politics are needed to overcome the conceptual dichotomy between youth political action that is either linked to – or delinked from – state institutions. This paper offers an alternative drawn from a study that sought to empirically explore, and build theory upon, how teenagers construct their political action. Our qualitative study among 10 activists aged between 17 and 19 in a medium-size city in Northern Sweden found that youth constructed their political action as four different processes: moving from consciousness to action, moving from personal experience to shared goals, moving from social activities to political activities, and moving from single to multiple arenas. We integrated these processes in the concept Youth Politics as Multiple Processes. Youth efforts to bring about these processes were not always fruitful because, as their political action gained complexity, youth faced greater constraints for recognizing, addressing and challenging power from age-based exclusion, state-centered definitions of politics, and adult disinterest in youth demands. According to our findings, youth constructed political action based in an approach to power that was not state-centered. We linked our findings to youth politics research and social movement theory that similarly proposed alternative approaches to power.     

Constructing “Social Change” through Philanthropy: Boundary Framing and the Articulation of Vocabularies of Motives for Social Movement Participation*

I embrace Mills's (1940) conception of motives to offer new insight into an old question: why do people join social movements? I draw upon ethnographic research at the Crossroads Fund, a “social change” foundation, to illustrate that actors simultaneously articulate two vocabularies of motives for movement participation: an instrumental vocabulary about dire, yet solvable, problems and an expressive vocabulary about collective identity. This interpretive work is done during boundary framing, which refers to efforts by movements to create in-group/out-group distinctions. I argue that the goal-directed actions movements take to advance social change are shaped by participants' identity claims. Moreover, it is significant that Crossroads constructs its actions and identity as social movement activism, rather than philanthropy. This definitional work suggests that analyzing the category social movements is problematic unless researchers study how activists attempt to situate themselves within this category. Hence, methodologically attending to organizations' constructions of movement status can theoretically inform research which essentially takes social movements as a given, in exploring their structural components.     

Marginal movements and minority struggles? The case of the Japanese minority social and labour movements

In Japan, some of the socially, economically and politically marginalised have developed robust social and labour movements that engage with mainstream society. These movements have developed strategies challenging the conditions of the excluded, while also highlighting pathways to establish, or enhance, individual and collective participation in the labour market and the wider society. Two distinct though related, social and organisational forms of these movements are elaborated – firm‐centred and community centred respectively. The former especially has a combative past in the labour struggles of the 1950s in what are known as sa'ha shōsū‐ha kumiai (left wing Minority union, or, Minority‐faction union). However, this does not mean Minorities are inherently leftist in orientation. In the 1940s and 1950s, during a period of radical union hegemony, a collaborative form of second unions developed assisting the purge of radical leaderships. Our focus here is on a contemporary radical democratic current. While articulating concerns of those in full time employment outside the political mainstream they may also represent ethnically and otherwise socially marginalised workers. The community unions, a form of what are known as ‘new‐type union’, shingata kumiai (this term will be used here to describe the community unions) articulate the concerns of those socially and economically marginalized in the community and the wider labour market. Controversially, the term ‘Minority union’ is used to depict the different forms of oppositional social movement union in a broader sense than is typically understood in the literature. This is because they share a common concern with the articulation of Minority social and political interests in the context of the employment relationship and the local community. In considering the character of these social movement unions the article seeks to add to what Price (1997 ) describes as ‘bottom up history’ which we term ‘sociology from below’.     

Network structures in cross-movement talk: Democracy Now!, 2003-2013

ABSTRACT

As organizers often remind us, we need to work across movements if we are to make substantive social change. Such talk is central to how we understand what social movements are and how we can work together. But how is that talk structured, and how might we theorize structural change over time as movements emerge and subside? This paper outlines several key considerations in the social construction of cross-movement relations between 2003 and 2013 on a daily independent broadcast news magazine program in the United States. Drawing on relational sociology and network studies, I offer a framework for understanding the changing structure of cross-movement talk as an interplay of a) the narrative clustering of movement labels, and b) the bridging of cross-cluster narrative divisions. Using positional network analysis, I first chart the movement canon – those movement labels that were used year after year for structuring the cross-movement field – and trace how key labels were used as bridging leaders during two periods of mass-mobilization. I then compare the narrative environment over time as it moved between more segmented and pluralistic structural characteristics, culminated in periods of narrative convergence in 2008 and 2011 around the Obama presidential election and the Occupy movement. By examining the overall structure of cross-movement talk in broadcast news programming, I illustrate how movement labels themselves are used by hosts and guests to facilitate the social construction of emergent movement clusters, and point to strategies for future application and analysis in cross-movement organizing.     

The Engaged Academic: Academic Intellectuals and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement

This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci. More specifically, it considers that role in relation to one political ‘field’ and one type of movement: a field which we refer to, following the work of Peter Sedgwick, as ‘psychopolitics’, and a movement which, since the mid- to late-1980s, has been known as the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement—psychiatric patients and their allies who campaign for the democratisation of the mental health system. In particular, through a comparison of two texts, Nick Crossley's Contesting Psychiatry and Kathryn Church's Forbidden Narratives, the paper contrasts different depths of engagement between academic intellectuals and the social movements which they research.     

‘Tourists go home’: anti-tourism industry protest in Barcelona

This profile looks at the wave of at times violent protests against the economic, social and environmental consequences of mass tourism in Barcelona, which came to international attention in the summer of 2017. It outlines the leading role played by left-wing nationalist activists linked to the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP, Popular Unity Candidacy) political party in the protests. I examine CUP’s direct-action methods, targeting local business interests and foreign tourists, as well as the largely critical response this prompted from the wider anti-tourism industry movement. This profile addresses the CUP’s justifications for the action and the echo effect it had in other parts of Spain. It argues that to understand the events requires a focus on aspects of both continuity and change in urban social movement mobilisation in Barcelona, against processes of neoliberal urbanisation, in which anti-tourism industry contestation is to the fore.     

Straight out the barrio: Ozomatli and the importance of place in the formation of Chicano/a popular culture in Los Angeles

Abstract

Ozomatli's history of formation, the multiplicity of its sounds, the role played by its music in enabling political activism and political coalitions illuminate the relations between identities and politics at the present moment. The group is grounded in Los Angeles contemporary Chicano/a culture and in the new social relations, new knowledges, and new sensibilities of an emerging global city in a transnational era. Speaking from the interstices between commercial culture and the new social movements, Ozomatli's music and political work offers us invaluable bottom‐up perspectives on the terrain of counter‐politics and cultural creation at the beginning of the twenty‐first century.     

‘We feel the responsibility that you shirk’: movement institutionalization,the politics of responsibility and the case of the Swedish environmental movement

This article provides directions for advancing the conceptualization of the relationship between social movements and institutionalization, based on a case study of the Swedish environmental movement strategies. We argue that the concepts of (de)responsibilization and (de)politicization provide tools for an improved analysis of the dynamics of how social movements interact both with established political institutions and corporations in a new context. The introduction of new regulatory frameworks in environmental politics has shaped interaction between social movements and the state in new ways, involving neoliberal responsibilization, meaning active involvement by civil society and business in political responsibilities previously associated with state agencies – a development involving an increasing emphasis on market mechanisms. We argue that this has involved a de-politicization of environmental issues in the sense that it engages political actors in a moral discourse and a technocratic practice that suppresses the (potential) articulation of social conflict through consensus building. However, we also show how movement actors resist the discourse that encourages them to take on certain responsibilities, thus engaging in a politics of responsibility. Empirically, we demonstrate how the changing strategies of the Swedish environmental movement in the 2000s need to be understood in relation to the following processes, indicating that the Swedish case has a general relevance for an understanding of the contemporary environmental movement globally: (1) the transformation of the Swedish model of welfare capitalism under the influence of neoliberal discourse; (2) international environmental policy developments, most importantly the emergence of climate change as a dominant issue globally.     

The social power of algorithms

ABSTRACT

This article explores the questions associated with what might be thought of as the social power of algorithms. The article, which introduces a special issue on the same topic, begins by reflecting on how we might approach algorithms from a social scientific perspective. The article is then split into two sections. The first deals with the issues that might be associated with an analysis of the power of the algorithms themselves. This section outlines a series of issues associated with the functionality of the algorithms and how these functions are powerfully deployed within social world. The second section then focuses upon the notion of the algorithm. In this section, the article argues that we need to look beyond the algorithms themselves, as a technical and material presence, to explore how the notion or concept of the algorithm is also an important feature of their potential power. In this section, it is suggested that we look at the way that notions of the algorithm are evoked as a part of broader rationalities and ways of seeing the world. Exploring the notion of the algorithm may enable us to see how algorithms also play a part in social ordering processes, both in terms of how the algorithm is used to promote certain visions of calculative objectivity and also in relation to the wider governmentalities that this concept might be used to open up.     

The Grillini in Italy: New Horizons for Internet-based Mobilization and Participation

This article looks at the case of the Grillini movement and its emergence on the Italian political scene, and discusses its contribution to the growing literature on the increasing opportunities offered by the Internet for social movement participation and mobilization. My findings are that the movement is successful in both mobilizing and promoting open debate and participation because of its policies and its use of multiple, and fairly open platforms for participation and horizontal decision-making. The Grillini have been able to conciliate the characteristics of newly emerging, Internet-based, ‘internetworked movements’ as well as the more conventional use of the Internet on behalf of well-established social and political movements. They have been able to do so by articulating issues and mobilizing on a national scale, with an increasingly large bureaucratic elite, while retaining a vibrant, partly online- and partly offline-based public sphere and decentralized organizational forms. My conclusion is that the Grillini movement, with its peculiar structure and commitment to participation and inclusion, is a crucial example of how the Internet can be used to aggregate new political issues and foster continuous debate while consolidating a growing electorally driven organization, which is still mostly held accountable by the movement's public sphere.     

Action research,science, and the co-optation of social research

This paper centers on our argument that action research (AR) produces “better” research than orthodox social research but that AR is marginalized in “Northern” universities because it connects social research to social reform. The key viewpoints informing our work are easily stated but elaborate arguments are required to justify them. We argue that AR is the most credible and methodologically coherent way to create and apply reliable knowledge in social research.

Existing power structures prefer orthodox social research, not because it produces better research but because it does not interfere with existing social arrangements. The demand for social distance and objectification separates the researcher from the subject and prevents social research from becoming an instrument of social change. The dominance of these frameworks in university environments reveals that universities, in addition to being centers of learning, play an important role in replicating existing social arrangements (Noam Chomsky et al., 1997). We believe that AR's social change agenda, not its inferiority as social research, causes its marginality.     

Piketty's Calibration Economics: Inequality and the Dissolution of Solutions?

Abstract

By popularising interest in inequality, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a significant contribution. It has helped to change the basic terms of debate regarding wealth and income. However, Capital exhibits several weaknesses. The overall statement of Piketty's 3 laws tends to confuse the reader by conflating capital with all forms of wealth, and capital with the current market valuation of wealth assets. The whole creates a form of empiricism by metrics or calibration. The aggregation also lends itself to data as history rather than as historically grounded explanation of evidence. Concomitantly, it lacks a theorisation of capitalism, of power, of the state, of social movements, and of social transformations. This affects the way in which possible solutions to inequality are conceived. However, it does provoke further grounds for ethical counterargument productive of more progressive solutions to the problems it highlights.     

All in the family: The role of family networks,collective action frames,and identity in Latino movement participation

The family is often described as the foundation of Latino immigrant communities. Scholars interested in the political activism of Latino immigrants in the United States have consequently sought to examine the relationship between the family and recruitment to social movement participation. Overall, this research focuses on how the family can promote Latinos' political activism. However, less is known about the conditions under which the family may hinder activism. Family dynamics may be particularly demobilizing for certain segments of the Latino population with liminal or undocumented status. This article reviews two groups of the recent literature on Latino political mobilization: (a) social networks; and (b) collective action frames. By drawing on insights from social movement theory, the article concludes by arguing for more research that theorizes on the family as a group identity, powerfully enabling, and constraining Latino movement participation.     

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.