Linking Beliefs to Collective Action: Politicized Religious Beliefs and the Civil Rights Movement

Sociological Forum - Are religious ideological antecedents factors in the emergence of African American social protest? If so, how do these factors translate African American discontent into...     

Workers' Protest in Egypt: Neo-liberalism and Class Struggle in 21st Century

From 1998 to 2008 some 2 million Egyptian workers participated in 2,623 factory occupations, strikes, demonstrations, or other collective actions. This social movement does not have a national leadership or program and has not been supported by the Egyptian Trade Union Federation. It is propelled by locally generated grievances that have been produced by the acceleration of the neo-liberal transformation of Egypt since 2004. This workers movement has not changed the existing structures of power that constrain Egyptian working people because the informal, local networks that have sustained the movement are, by their nature, unable to organize a national-scale political movement on their own.     

Masses,Crowds, Communities,Movements: Collective Action in the Internet Age

This article investigates two questions: One, how might the very differently structured social collectives on the Internet – masses, crowds, communities and movements – be classified and distinguished? And two, what influence do the technological infrastructures in which they operate have on their formation, structure, and activities? For this, we differentiate between two main types of social collectives: non-organized collectives, which exhibit loosely coupled collective behavior, and collective actors with a separate identity and strategic capability. Further, we examine the newness, or distinctive traits, of online-based collectives, which we identify as being the strong and hitherto non-existent interplay between the technological infrastructures that these collectives are embedded in and the social processes of coordination and institutionalization they must engage in, in order to maintain their viability over time. Conventional patterns of social dynamics in the development and stabilization of collective action are now systematically intertwined with technology-induced processes of structuration.     

Producing Space in Action. The Protest Campaign against the Construction of the Dal Molin Military Base

Although the importance of space is increasingly recognized, its conceptualization with reference to social movements varies. For a long time, critical geographers have considered space as socially constructed. Following Lefebvre’s influential distinction, the relevance of three types of socially produced space for social movements have been pointed out: (a) perceived space (or spatial practices), as a material space where everyday life is produced; (b) conceived space, as the representation of space as socially constructed through (dominant and alternative) discourses, meanings and signs; (c) lived space, or representational space, where (a) and (b) interact. This essay maps the various ways through which space structures protest while at the same time being structured by it. We shall address this task by revisiting the contributions of geographers and ethnographers, with the help of empirical research we developed on a case of local opposition to a large-scale infrastructure project: the Dal Molin military base in Italy.     

Art in Social Movements: Shantytown Women's Protest in Pinochet's Chile

How social movements use art is an understudied question in the social movements literature. Ethnographic research on the use of art by the prodemocracy movement in Pinochet's Chile suggests that art plays a very important role in social movements, which use it for framing, to attract resources, to communicate information about themselves, to foster useful emotions, and as a symbol (for communicating a coherent identity, marking membership, and cementing commitment to the movement).     

Protest in an Information Society: a review of literature on social movements and new ICTs

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing the ways in which activists communicate, collaborate and demonstrate. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them sociology, political science and communication, are working to understand these changes. The diversity of perspectives represented enriches the literature, providing an abundant repertoire of tools for examining these phenomena, but it is also an obstacle to understanding. Few works are commonly cited across the field, and most are known only within the confines of their discipline. The absence of a common set of organizing theoretical principles can make it difficult to find connections between these disparate works beyond their common subject matter. This paper responds by locating existing scholarship within a common framework for explaining the emergence, development and outcomes of social movement activity. This provides a logical structure that facilitates conversations across the field around common issues of concern, highlighting connections between scholars and research agendas that might otherwise be difficult to discern.     

Collective and Elective Ethnicity: Caste Among Urban Muslims in India

This article explores how the significance of ethnic identity can vary within a stable population, using caste among Muslims in Hyderabad, India as a case study. While some Hyderabadi Muslims are still embedded in ethnic networks, most now experience ethnicity as elective and do not rely on a corporate caste group for their social connections. This reflects a decline in the value of caste identities, which no longer provide economic or political resources. Increasingly, Muslims seek status through education, profession, or income. Thus, most Muslims in Hyderabad experience caste membership, identity, and networks in a weakened or attenuated way.     

Tracing Protest Motives: The Link Between Newspaper Coverage,Movement Messages,and Demonstrators’ Reasons to Protest

Within the social movement literature, it is mostly assumed that the reasons why people join a protest demonstration are in line with the collective action frames of the organizations staging the protest. Some recent studies suggest, however, that protesters’ motives are only partly aligned with the messages that are broadcasted by social movements. This study argues that activists’ motives are for an important part shaped by mass media coverage on the protest issue. It investigates the link between people's reasons to protest, the campaign messages of the protest organizers, and newspaper coverage prior to the demonstration. Data cover 14 anti‐austerity demonstrations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Results show that social movements depend a lot on other political actors to gain media visibility for their messages. Furthermore, the relationship between social movement frames and protest participant motives is mediated by newspaper coverage. Protest organizers’ are able to reach demonstrators via their own communication channels to some extent, but for many of their messages, they also rely on journalists’ reporting about the protest issue.     

Protest Movements and Citizen Discontent: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

Why do citizens indicate support for protest movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street? There have been two general sets of explanations. One set emphasizes that support comes from those for whom the existing party system, and the ideological differentiation that corresponds to party divisions, are irrelevant. The second set takes the opposite tack, and emphasizes that the only thing that supporters of protests movements find lacking in the party system is extremity. Using some underexplored data, we present evidence that both accounts are incorrect for the case of these recent movements (Occupy and the Tea Party): what provokes support for protest movements is not ideology itself but a fundamental rejection of the current state of the party system, which we call disgruntlement. What ideology does for supporters is provide a sense of political friends and enemies (or near and far), which then can channel the direction that this disgruntlement takes. Further, ideologues with more education are more resistant to the appeal of the protest movement associated with the other political camp.     

Legislating for Filial Piety: An Indirect Approach to Promoting Family Support and Responsibility for Older People in Korea

Although every culture follows its own indigenous elder care practices, Korea has retained a unique way of supporting elder parents, specifically, and older people in general. When the care of older people in Korea became significantly challenging, it was determined to launch a controversial law to promote the tradition of filial piety. The main content of the law consists of requiring the government to take action to encourage filial piety and to support those adult children who care for their parents. Although this legislation has the potential to promote the practice of filial piety, the nature of the law is largely rhetorical and symbolic rather than practical, and as a result, its workability and efficiency are limited.     

Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age

This starts out by distinguishing between communication and communication mediums when examining social movement-powered formations of collective identity and collective action. We then focus on communication mediums to examine the different ways that old and new media are utilized in urban social movements under neoliberal capitalism. Based on shifts in the political economy and correspondingly in the contemporary composition of the working class, we focus on the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia to argue that contemporary urban social movements and networks utilize a multi-media platform to further class-based politics. The respective use of old or new media depends on important contextual questions, regarding technology access and geographic aspects of movement building work.     

Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.     

Comparing Protest and Conflict: A Time-Series Analysis of Peasant Unrest in Japan, 1800-1877

Abstract  The objective of this study is to explore the mechanisms of peasant political protest and social conflict in nineteenth-century Japan. While political protest and social conflict have often been referred to as constituting two major categories of peasant unrest throughout feudal Japan, past studies on nineteenth-century peasant uprisings, based mainly on a class conflict paradigm, did not treat them as such. This study aims at examining differential mechanisms between protest and conflict, and at assessing the applicability of the class conflict paradigm.
A time-series analysis is performed using the annual data of peasant uprisings and antecedent socioeconomic and political conditions during the period 1800-1877. The study results strongly suggest that differential mechanisms between political protest and social conflict existed in the nineteenth-century, and that the applicability of a class conflict paradigm is, at the very least, dubious. Based on the results, combined with historical-contextual knowledge, an alternative explanation is also suggested.     

The Leverage of Protest: Market,Media, and Reputational Disruption in Social Movement Success

How do social movements gain concessions from large corporations? The ability of protests to attain leverage by imposing disruption costs on their targets is widely assumed but less often tested. In this article, we assess the ability of protests to attain concessions by disrupting three broad sources of interest to firm officials: maximizing shareholder value, gaining positive media, and fostering a well-reputed image. In contrast to the body of research on the benefits to movements from shaping media discourses and damaging the reputations of their targets, we find that only market disruption provides protests with leverage. We show this through statistical analyses of an original database of protests against large corporations in the United States over five years, 2005–2009. This study advances social movement and organizational research by demonstrating the ways in which the interests of large corporations provide insurgents with means of attaining leverage over their targets. It also speaks to the broad debate over the importance of disrupting the material versus symbolic interests of movement targets. Our results suggest that when it comes to obtaining concessions from large corporations, it is material disruption and not symbolic disruption that provides movements with leverage.     

Anatomy of Protest in the Digital Era: A Network Analysis of Twitter and Occupy Wall Street

Two months before the first Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest in September 2011, activists were using Twitter to organize and spread the movement. In this study, the earliest Twitter messages regarding #OccupyWallStreet were subjected to network analysis to answer these questions: What were the central hubs in the OWS discourse on Twitter in the summer of 2011? How did OWS emerge from among several social movement organizations to lead a nationwide series of demonstrations? What were the key points in the Twitter dialogue that aided the process of scale shift? By addressing these questions, this research connects social movement concepts with network centrality measures to provide a clearer picture of movements in the digital era.     

It Takes a Tragedy to Arouse Them: Collective Memory and Collective Action during the Civil Rights Movement

This paper examines the impact that collective memories of key events related to the civil rights movement had on black political activism during the 1960s. It proposes a theory that examines the effects of collective memory on collective action by considering how events and collective memories are appropriated by political entrepreneurs for collective action. Examining four events through a rare opinion survey of blacks taken in 1966, the analysis specifies a framework that illustrates how events evolve into collective memories and how collective memories are appropriated for collective action as time passes from the original event. Qualitative materials from historical accounts, including autobiographies, biographies, and oral histories, are used to make inferences about the meaning of events to political actors. The analysis shows that one event among the four, the murder of Emmett Till, had a stronger residual effect on black activism than the other events. The findings suggest that scholarship on the movement may have underestimated the impact of Till's murder on the generation of black insurgency in the 1950s.     

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.     

The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions In and Around Social Movements

The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals. Social movements are affected by transitory, context-specific emotions, usually reactions to information and events, as well as by more stable affective bonds and loyalties. Some emotions exist or arise in individuals before they join protest groups; others are formed or reinforced in collective action itself. The latter type can be further divided into shared and reciprocal emotions, the latter being feelings that protestors have toward each other.     

Social Movement,Action and Change: The Influence of Women's Movements on City Government in Mumbai and London

This article reports on a research investigation into gender and local government in Mumbai in India and London in England. In both these cities female representation at the political level stands at around one third, achieved in London slowly in recent years and in Mumbai more rapidly through the adoption of a quota, or seat reservation system, implemented in 1992. In considering the experience of the women concerned it is argued that their presence and aspirations have been influenced through the networks of their respective women's movements, operating through civil society and the local state. In considering the ways in which they organize and manage the duties of office and their gendered identities, as well as in their focus on the most disadvantaged in their communities and in their dealings with others, the part played by social movements in influencing change is examined.