Fields,Logics, and Social Movements: Prison Abolition and the Social Justice Field*

This essay argues that field analyses of social movements can be improved by incorporating more insights from Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of logic, symbolic capital, illusio, and doxa can enrich social movement scholarship by enabling scholars to identify new objects of study, connect organizational‐ and individual‐level effects, and shed new light on a variety of familiar features of social movements. I demonstrate this claim by delineating the contours of one such field, the “social justice field” (SJF). I argue that the SJF is a delimited, trans‐movement arena of contentious politics united by the logic of the pursuit of radical social justice. Drawing upon existing scholarship, as well as my own research on the prison abolition movement, I argue that the competitive demands of the field produce characteristic effects on organizations and individual activists within the field. I conclude by considering how a Bourdieuian approach can provide fresh insights into familiar problematics within the social movements literature.     

Independent inventors,social capital,and knowledge transfer – the case of Slovenia

This paper explores the role and significance of independent inventors within the national innovation system. By using a case study based on interviews with 22 independent inventors, it examines the types of social capital facilitating independent inventors' access to relevant knowledge and information. The findings show that, in line with their marginalization in the national innovation system, independent inventors have very limited access to the services and assistance of supportive organizations of the national innovation system. They primarily rely on the social capital residing in civil society organizations as well as the social capital of their family and friends. Professional and interdisciplinary linkages can thus be regarded as their weak point hindering their access to relevant knowledge and information.     

Project Time in Silicon Valley

This article explores the pace of work for highly skilled workers who are employed in the high-tech industry of Silicon Valley. I link the temporal experiences of these workers to systems of domination at work, and to the particular characteristics of flexible specialization in the region. I ask four questions: How can the temporal rhythms of work be described? What factors shape these rhythms? Why do workers comply? How does this pace of work impact on other aspects of individuals' lives? I focus on the organization of work through project cycles, the de-linking of workers and organizations, and the ideology of individualism that constructs workers as entrepreneurs of their own careers as key factors that shape the erratic and quickened pace of work in Silicon Valley. I also show how this pace of work negatively affects other temporal spheres that individuals negotiate, most notably “bodily time” and the “interaction time” of social relationships.

     

Online collective identity: The case of the environmental movement

Social movements are making extensive communicative and organizational use of the Internet in order to identify social problems and bring about change. We present a model of an online social movement, where actors exchange practical and symbolic resources through hyperlink and online frame networks. Our positioning of these exchanges within a continuum of conscious and unconscious expressive behavior informs our framework for the empirical analysis of online collectives. An application using data collected from the websites of over 160 environmental activist organizations reveals significant fragmentation in this field of contentious activity, which we suggest reflects offline social divisions.     

Environmental conversions and muslim activists: constructing knowledge at the intersection of religion and politics

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the production of knowledge by Muslim environmental activists in the United States and Great Britain, applying Eyerman and Jamison’s theory of cognitive praxis to demonstrate how religious and political knowledge and practices are synthesised by the activists. The paper emerges from research conducted with Islamic environmental organizations in the United States and Great Britain in 2012–2013 and utilises data gathered from interviews conducted with Muslim environmental activists working in those organizations and from the publicly available newsletters, websites, and articles produced by the activists and organizations. I argue that through the integration of environmental and religious knowledge, Muslim environmentalists construct a ‘critical community’ within Islam that seeks to transform orthodox Islamic knowledge and practice. In the process, Muslim environmentalists demonstrate that religiously-grounded social movements may simultaneously pursue religious and political change.     

What makes a big demonstration? Exploring the impact of mobilization strategies on the size of demonstrations

ABSTRACT

Massive demonstrations are the staple of powerful social movements, but research on the factors affecting the size of demonstrations (in terms of number of attendants) is almost nonexistent. Why do some demonstrations pack long avenues with masses of people while other ones barely fill a street corner? Combining resource mobilization, political opportunity, and framing theories, we argue that mobilization strategies – the sequence of decisions and actions taken by protest organizers before staging a protest – shape demonstration size. Multivariate models with 937 Chilean demonstrations between 2000 and 2012 show that demonstrations are larger when they display more demands (especially universalistic demands), target the national government, attract more organizations (especially umbrella organizations), and mobilize cohesive groups with broad public support. We reinforce the internal validity of our argument using interviews with movement leaders and secondary research on Chilean society.     

Shifting Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of the Animal Rights Movement1

How do activists create cultural change? Scholars have investigated the development and maintenance of collective identities as one avenue for cultural change, but to understand how activists foster change beyond their own movements, we need to look at activists’ strategies for changing their targets’ mindsets and actions. Sociologists need to look at activists’ boundary work to understand both the wide‐sweeping goals and strategies that activists enact to generate broad‐based cultural changes. Using data from participant observation and interviews with animal rights activists in France and the United States, and drawing on research on ethnic boundary shifting, I show how activists used two main strategies to shift symbolic boundaries between humans and animals, as well as between companion and farm animals—(1) they blur boundaries through focusing and universalizing strategies and (2) they cross boundaries physically, discursively, and iconographically. This study contributes a new theoretical and empirical example to the cultural changes studied by scholars of social movements, and it also provides a useful counterpoint to studies of symbolic boundary construction and maintenance in the sociology of culture.     

Science,technology, and sexuality: New directions in the study of sexual knowledge

The sociology of sexualities and the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology share many areas of theoretical and empirical interest, yet engagements between the fields have been limited. Work that has spanned both fields has tended to focus on sexuality from a biomedical perspective, neglecting other forms of knowledge production. This paper critically reviews existing areas of convergence between the fields, including measurement and classification, medicalization and risk, reproduction and families, politics and the state, and social movements. I offer suggestions for new avenues of research in these areas in addition to considering how greater theoretical exchange between the two fields could enrich both. I ultimately contend that analyzing forms of social knowledge making—such as law, religion, and the humanities and social sciences—and adopting a broader understanding of STS as method can provide a fresh direction in studying the production and circulation of sexual knowledge.     

Intersectionality and coalitions in social movement research—A survey and outlook

Over the last 30 years, intersectionality has become a prominent concept, but in social movement scholarship, its adoption has yet been limited. So far, the concept is primarily employed to analyze the mobilization of women of color and other gendered mobilizations. In this article, I argue that intersectionality matters for all social movements—both as an analytic and as a political strategy. It is important to understand that all social movements and movement organizations are shaped by multiple axes of privilege and discrimination, which influence who participates in these movements and how, what demands are pursued and which are neglected, and how the issues of the movements and movement organizations are framed. My review starts out with defining and distinguishing between structural intersectionality and political intersectionality. Then, I survey a range of social movements from an intersectional perspective. This is followed by a discussion of coalitions and other strategies to achieve political intersectionality. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions for intersectional analyses in social movement scholarship.     

Identity Isomorphism: Role Schemas and White Masculinity Formation

This article explores a counterintuitive intersection of class, gender, and race within two politically antagonistic white movements—white nationalists and white antiracists. Ethnographic field‐notes, in‐depth interviews, and content analysis provide comprehensive data and triangulation for how implicit perceptions of class and gender are intertwined with the social construction of an ideal white, male, middle‐class identity. While both organizations express antithetical political goals, they together reinforce broader discourses about whiteness and white supremacy. In so doing, these two organizations present an empirical and theoretical puzzle: How and why do two supposedly antithetical and divergent white male organizations simultaneously rationalize the inclusion and exclusion of women and the lower class from their ranks? Findings gesture toward tempering conceptual models of white male identity formation to further explore how cultural schemas are utilized toward the construction of both identity formation and interest protection.     

Towards an Insurrectionary Power/Knowledge: Movement-Relevance,Anti-Oppression,Prefiguration

Despite ongoing efforts to articulate radical methods and theoretical frameworks for social movement research, the field remains embedded in exploitative, oppressive, and hierarchical modes of knowledge production. Following Foucault, I argue that this is because societies like ours, founded through racial and patriarchal violence, are invested in a regime of truth supportive of that violence. In light of this, I argue that social movements scholars need to adopt a radically different form of knowledge practice. Building on anarchist, anti-racist feminist, and anti-colonial scholarship, this paper begins by analysing how liberalism constrains social justice organizing and how academic norms foreclose accountable social movements scholarship. I then introduce three unique ethics emerging in resistance to this situation: movement-relevant, anti-oppressive, and prefigurative. The first confronts the extractive imperatives of enlightenment truth-making; the second resists its neutral and disinterested tendencies; and the third models a rejection of its hierarchical and exclusive mode of authority. I argue that together they provide scholars with a strategy for re-/orienting their research towards what Foucault theorizes as an insurrection of knowledges. These three ethical frameworks combine to facilitate an insurrectionary power/knowledge that fosters collective struggle as it progressively dismantles the regime of truth underlying social movements research.     

Community Connections: Social Capital and Community Success1

This article examines the impact of two types of community social capital—ties between civic organizations formed through shared members and ties between residents formed through socializing in local gathering places—on residents’ subjective appraisals of community success. Community social capital studies tend to focus on the first of these types of ties, networks of civic engagement, while the second, gathering place networks, has received relatively little scholarly attention. Studying both allows me to assess the formal and informal arenas of community sociability, providing a more thorough understanding of social capital and community life. I assess the effects of community‐level social capital networks on the individual‐level experience of residing in the community using survey data on 9,962 residents from 99 small towns in Iowa. This rich data set allows me to avoid two shortcomings common in social capital research: I construct genuine network measures of social capital (rather than infer network structure from community attributes) and conduct multi‐level analyses (rather than rely on disaggregation). My findings indicate both types of social capital are positively and significantly associated with resident ratings of community success, suggesting community networks—in both the formal and informal sectors—have important consequences for small towns and their residents.     

Heavy Genealogy: Mapping the Currents,Contraflows and Conflicts of the Emergent Field of Metal Studies, 1978-2010

What is metal studies? How can we define and characterize it? How has it emerged as a body of academic enquiry? What are its dominant disciplinary strands, theoretical concepts and preferred methodologies? Which studies have claimed most attention, defined the goals of scholarship, typical research strategies and values? How has the claim for the legitimacy or symbolic value of metal scholarship been achieved (if it has): over time and through gradual acceptance or through conflict and contestation? How can this process of formation, or strategy of legitimation, be mapped, examined and interrogated and which methods of historical, institutional and cultural analysis are best suited to this task? Working with the most complete bibliography to date of published research on heavy metal, music and culture (the MSBD), this article employs Foucault’s archaeological “method” to examine the institutional, cultural and political contexts and conflicts that inform the genealogy of this scholarship. Such analysis reveals a formative, largely negative account of heavy metal to be found in the “sociology of rock”; a large volume of psychology work, examining heavy metal music preference as an indicator of youth risk, deviance and delinquency; sociological work on youth and deviancy critical of the values of this research and its links to social policy and politics; culminating in the work of Weinstein and Walser, who advocate a perspective sympathetic to the values of heavy metal fans themselves. Following Bourdieu, I interpret such symbolic strategies as claims for expertise within the academic field that are high or low in symbolic capital to the extent they can attain disciplinary autonomy. I then go on to examine the most recent strands of research, within cultural studies and ethnomusicology, concerned with the global metal music diaspora, and consider to what extent such work is constitutive of a coherent subfield of metal studies that can be distinguished from earlier work and what the implications of this might be.     

Technology,social services and organizational innovation or how great expectations in London and Cardiff are dashed in Lowestoft and Cymtyrch

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate important aspects of the policy implementation process in UK welfare organizations. We draw on two evaluations in which we were each involved — those of the Integrated Children's System and the Children's Fund. Our interpretive frameworks share a concern to foreground the significance of the local, informal, and ground level, but do so in ways that acknowledge the encompassing governmental and policy contexts. We illustrate and assess the significance of multiple policy aspirations, the significance of local implementation contexts, the diverse ways in which practitioners gain and subsequently develop knowledge of how policy works, and how such knowledge moves about in organizations. We indicate the kinds of expertise that social service workers bring to and achieve as actors within policy innovations, and how they may manage and in some cases seek to control knowledge shifts between providers and users of services. We infer the inadequacy of conventional top-down models of implementing policy innovations.     

Relational sociology,pragmatism, transactions and social fields

Starting from the idea that relational sociology has been founded on various and incompatible social ontologies, I argue that it is at risk of losing its raison d'être if we do not answer two fundamental practical and ontological questions: (1) Why do we need relational sociology? and (2) What do we study in relational sociology? In this respect, I propose a deep, transactional sociology partly and freely inspired by the work of J. Dewey which clearly detaches relational sociology from social determinism and co-determinism.     

The Struggle for Symbolic Dominance in the British ‘Anti-Capitalist Movement Field’

This article provides a study of ideological conflict and competition between anarchist and socialists in the British anti-capitalist movement between 2001 and 2005. Using an ethnographic study, including 30 semi-structured interviews, observations of major mobilisations and documentary analysis, I argue that a symbolic struggle for ideological dominance over the anti-capitalist movement took place. To understand and explain the dynamics of this movement struggle I conceptualise the anti-capitalist movement as a field in the Bourdieusian sense of the term. Anarchist networks were the dominant players within this field for over a decade; however, the emergence and actions of newly formed socialist organisations challenged their dominance. Both sides attempted to accrue different forms of capital to further their ideological agenda which brought them into conflict with each other. This conceptualisation offers a new direction for understanding conflict, not just for anti-capitalist activists, but also for the study of social movements generally.     

Is County Level of Social,Creative, and Human Capital Associated with Winning Humanities Grants in Kansas?

This article examines patterns of Kansas Humanities Council grant distributions to organizations in the state's counties and then assesses social, creative, and human capital explanations for the observed patterns. Substantial numbers of counties have received no grants across a fifteen‐year period. Why is that? The analyses reveal that the presence of statistically significant relationships depends on the intersection of the type of capital in the county and the type of grant program: (1) the receipt of heritage grants is associated with county levels of network social capital, particularly those networks that are “non‐rent‐seeking”; (2) the receipt of “mini” Humanities grants and total grants are associated with levels of creative capital; and (3) the level of human capital makes little difference in grant patterns. These relationships persist under controls for racial/ethnic diversity, income inequality, and dominant political ideology. The implications of the results are assessed in terms of strategies for granting agencies to deal with building community life in low–social capital settings.     

Rethinking Activism and Expertise within Environmental Health Conflicts

This review presents the contributions of research on the intersection of science and social movements, its theoretical and methodological limitations, and potential solutions for its further development. Three different types of relationships between activism and knowledge have been identified within environmental health conflicts: (i) lay – activists requesting help from sympathetic scientists in order to conduct independent studies; (ii) expert – activists promoting new research agendas and sub‐fields within established scientific disciplines; and (iii) expert – activists acting beyond the limits of the academic community and partnering with social movements. In this review, I argue that much of the existing literature considers expertise as “something” possessed by individuals, and heavily emphasizes the difference between “lay” and “expert” activists. This entails two main theoretical reductionisms: (i) reification of knowledge; and (ii) overlooking the contribution of activism to expertise and vice versa. I propose considering expertise as the property of a network and focusing future research within environmental health conflicts on the co‐emergence and construction of a network of expertise (Eyal 2013) or ethno‐epistemic assemblage (Irwin & Michael 2003) and social movements. Through this symmetrical network approach, we will be able to develop a more consistent theory of the co‐production of activism and expertise, as well as its political implication to fight environmental health injustice.     

Inequality and 21-year-olds' negotiation of uncertain transitions to employment: a Bourdieusian approach

Faced with uncertainty, how do young people navigate the transition from school to work? Applying Bourdieu's concept of habitus to the ‘fields’ of education and employment, I argue that past experience, family background and unequal access to economic, social and symbolic forms of capital differentiate their transitions. Drawing on the tenth wave of the Australian longitudinal Life Chances Study, we found that all of the twenty-five 21-year-olds interviewed expressed uncertainty when discussing their futures. However, those from high-income backgrounds with access to strong social, economic and cultural resources were better able to manage the risks arising from uncertainty than their counterparts from low-income backgrounds. The following article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of young people's experiences at age 21 through the application of Bourdieu's conceptual framework. The interviewees’ habitus and cultivation of varying forms of capital tend towards social reproduction, yet also reveal opportunities for those considered ‘disadvantaged’ to mobilise their cultural resources. Bourdieu's model of the field, and its component conceptual tools, provide an explanatory frame to make sense of the seemingly incoherent paths that young people trace between education and employment.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION

Two questions are addressed in this paper. (A) Why do labor unions and certain employer organizations respectively promote and impede minimum wage legislation? (B) Do these groups have significant impacts on minimum wages? Question (A) is examined in the context of models that identify the economic self-interest of unionized skilled workers and capitalists in legal wage floors. Question (B) is approached by a median legislator utility maximization model that leads to Tobit estimation of the relationship between state minimum wage rates and measures of statewide organized labor and capital and average hourly earnings.