Bringing the Outside In: Field Interaction and Transformation from Below in Political Struggles

This article applies field theory in order to build an understanding of aspects of social movements practice. It argues that the way social movements are positioned within their various fields of practice and the way these fields inter-relate with each other can help explain how movements arrive at their strategies and ideologies. The relationship between the fields within which social movements operate also provides a means to explain how movement participants can become agents for change.

The article discusses the case of British Jewish Israel-critical groups, an example of a movement suspended between several different fields of practice – both local and distant. The internal movement debate around boycotting Israel illustrates how movement activities are channelled by the local fields within which they contend. Their relationship with the distant Palestinian field demonstrates the importance of the influence of external fields in forming social movement ideology. This model views social movement actors – especially those within distant issue movements – as translators between various fields of practice. This provides a mechanism to explain how challengers within a field can overcome the limitations of internal field habitus and become agents for field transformation.     

"Are You an African?" The Politics of Self-Construction in Status-Based Social Movements

Current debates over identity politics hinge on the question of whether status-based social movements encourage parochialism and self-interest or create possibilities for mutual recognition across lines of difference. Our article explores this question through comparative, ethnographic study of two racially progressive social movements, "pro-black" abolitionism and "conscious" hip hop. We argue that status-based social movements not only enable collective identity, but also the personal identities or selves of their participants. Beliefs about the self create openings and obstacles to mutual recognition and progressive social action. Our analysis centers on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to each movement. We examine first how each movement configured movement participation and racial identity and then how whites crafted strategic narratives of the self to account for their participation in a status-based movement they were not directly implicated in. We conclude with an analysis of the implications of these narratives for a critical politics of recognition. Keywords: identity politics, social movements, race, self, hip hop.     

The Rise and Fall of the Reds: The Reiterated Dilemma-Solving Process and the Life Course of Social Movements

This article explores the diachronic relationship between strategy choice and the life course of social movements. By proposing a model of reiterated strategy-making, the article articulates a path-dependent logic of dilemma-solving in social movements: Earlier strategic choices shape future strategic choices. Moreover, I distinguish contingent dilemmas from recurring dilemmas. Contingent dilemmas are those that only exist at particular points in time and recurring dilemmas are those that entangle the movement across time. In this model, I argue that a strategic choice not only produces future contingent dilemmas but also brings the recurring dilemma back to revisit the social movement. Using the Reds movement – an anticorruption movement in Taiwan – as the case, I illustrate the intertwined relationship between contingent and recurring dilemmas and how this relationship accounts for the life course of social movements.     

From “dot.org” to “dot.gov”: Professional Crossings in the Brazilian National Policy on HIV/AIDS

This article reflects on the importance of the relations between state and society in policy-making in the area of public health. Several studies in various sectors such as health, education, and social services have made similar observations on organizational dynamics and the institutionalization of different models of partnerships or contracts, often based on the analytical model of three sectors. Individuals and their networks of relationships, however, remain an almost unexplored dimension in these types of research. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to analyze the movement of HIV/AIDS activists to governmental organizations working in this same field. The analysis raises questions concerning the forms of individual and institutional learning that help to maintain the distinct character of innovation of the Brazilian policy. Professionals who cross the borders hold a different profile once they have accumulated experience working with grassroots and local NGOs, and have also had the chance to be trained and enhance their technical and managerial capacities, since the government has supported NGOs for a long period. When combined, these experiences allow them to maintain relationships with social movements and give them the ability to navigate through the government bureaucracy and handle technical information about fighting AIDS epidemics, making it possible for them to negotiate strategic collaborations reflecting the interests of different groups. Hence, they constantly reflect on the differences between government and social spaces, and keep questioning and modifying their roles in the light of potential and existing complementarities.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

Technology and Counter-hegemonic Movements: The case of Nike Corporation

This paper examines ways in which the Internet and alternative forms of media have been employed to enhance political struggle in contemporary society, and are in fact redefining political struggle. It uses a case study of Nike Corporation to highlight that although the power and autonomy of transnational corporations operating within the global economy has been enhanced over the past few decades, there are accompanying modes of grassroots organizing which foster globalized resistance to such hegemonic tendencies. The analysis argues that the Internet provides the resources and environment necessary for cohesive organized resistance to corporate culture across the domains of production (labor issues) and consumption issues (marketing). The Internet and independent media have facilitated organizing strategies among emerging new social movements, such as the anti-sweatshop movement and the Culture Jammers movement. This paper draws on both modern and postmodern theory to explore ways in which marginal groups can utilize the new modes of technology for their own ends, and use micro-level forms of resistance to challenge macro-level trends.     

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.     

Framed Encounters with Conservation and Mining Development: Indigenous Peoples' use of Strategic Framing in Suriname

While studies on the use of framing as a strategy for social movements have proliferated in the past 20 years, little is still known about how and why the frames vary across social movement actors and/or events. This article addresses this knowledge lacuna by comparing and contrasting Indigenous peoples' use of rights and identity frames in response to conservation and development events in Suriname. The variation in frames, and possible reasons for these variations, was compared across actors and events by considering (1) alignments of the global Indigenous rights movement with different movements and organizations over time, and (2) participants' level of involvement with national and global Indigenous rights movements. Evidence of strategic frame variation in this study demonstrated Indigenous peoples' ability to creatively and strategically pursue their interests by asserting their collective identity and rights in encounters with conservation and development projects. They accomplished this through the presentation of frames that called into question the logic and fairness of protected areas, their innate capacity to protect the environment, as well as their rights to land, and economic interests in mining. The greater use of rights frames by participants reflected networks generated with human rights organizations. Frame inconsistencies were apparent across conservation and development events that indicated uneven levels of involvement with Indigenous rights movements, which may yet produce unintended consequences for Indigenous communities. However, this case could also signal new possibilities for Indigenous peoples in terms of greater maneuverability in being able to assert their rights and negotiate their identities in relation to conservation and development, and ultimately to gain more power and autonomy over their own affairs.     

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.     

Ideological Primary Groups in Contemporary Cultural Movements

Abstract

This paper argues that “post-modern” societies generate movements for cultural change in models “of” and “for” identity and consciousness, rather than traditional kinds of social movements aiming at structural changes in institutional arrangements. The distinctive and crucial unit in comtemporary cultural movements is what we have termed the “ideological group.” These groups are similar to the “ideological informal groups” which recruited members of traditional social movements on the basis of personal contacts and confidence, and which rested on shared “inner convictions.” Like other, earlier, ideological groups, they focus on the construction and legitimation of a shared symbolic interpretation, and ideology of a dissatisfying reality as well as their own personal and collective identity in relation to it. However, contemporary movement groups have been influenced considerably by the sensitivity training-encounter-group dynamics techniques associated with the intensive group movement. The result is a new interest in artificial primary relations among sociologically homogeneous peers for joining socio-cultural analyses with psychological interpretations of common personal experiences. The processes generated in these ideological primary groups lead to the collective construction of new or modified ideological interpretations of reality which contain different, more satisfying, models “of” and “for” personal and group identity, and “consciousness.”     

Citing history

ABSTRACT

Although rarely considered within the existing scholarship on social movements, even a cursory analysis of protest activity suggests that movements regularly invoke historical citations (whether consciously or not) while working to clarify aims and mobilize constituencies. In order to make sense of this process, and to account for the variations that arise among the different citation modalities favored by movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I draw upon the theoretical contributions of Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin and, in particular, on his exploration of ‘wish images’ and ‘dialectical images,’ their attributes, and their interrelationship. According to Benjamin, such images summoned the past either to project visions of future happiness (as with the wish image) or to deposit the witness before a moment of decisive, present-tense reckoning. After outlining the role of historical citation in social movements and in the broader cultural field through which these movements find expression, I analyze two recent protest events – the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which wish images were actively deployed, and the 2017 Women’s Strike in New York City, where a dialectical image arose from the constellated nodes of the march’s route – to consider the relationship between citation modality and protest outcome. Following from this analysis, and in keeping with the unapologetically partisan nature of my investigation, I conclude by advancing some strategic recommendations for movements seeking – as Benjamin once enjoined – to ‘improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.’     

Toward an integrated analysis of social movements and new religious movements research

Despite calls from researchers for intersectional studies between religion and social movements over the past few decades, scholars have not engaged in fruitful conversation about integrating the two disciplines. This article aims to facilitate such discussion by examining the topic of new religious movements (NRMs). I first review the existing literature on NRMs and discuss why NRM research has been neglected in social movement studies. Then, I explore a few research areas where both NRM studies and social movement research could intersect and benefit from a synthetic approach. Specifically, I suggest that social movement studies could advance through the examination of some relatively ignored subjects of research, such as persistent participation and disengagement, by drawing on empirical cases of NRMs. I also propose ways in which the application of social movement theories would enhance our understanding of different aspects of NRMs, such as their leadership and coalition practices. In making these arguments, I refer to one of the prominent, long-term NRMs, the Unification Church or Movement, to help illustrate my ideas.     

ADOPTION:

In this article, we focus on how understandings of the past influence the process of integrating older special needs children into family life. We present the stories of two families who adopted older special needs children as they reconstructed the past, experinced the present, and projected the future. We draw upon social, pragmatic, and postmodern theories of the past to guide our interpretations and understandings of these families' adoption experiences. The dominant ideology of family influenced their story construction, and it was against this conception that their stories were evaluated. We followed the Litners and the Becks as they used the past to create stories that enabled and disabled their family life in the present and in the future. From the Litners' and the Becks' stories, we learned that when families are too limited by a cultural conception of an ideal adoptive family, their ability to use the past to create stories to help them live in the present and to project a shared future becomes restricted.
Our adoption failed because we understimated the past and overstimated our ability to create stories with happy endings. (Mrs. Beck)     

Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.     

Ideological Contention: Antonio Gramsci and the Connection Between Race and Social Movement Mobilization in Early Twentieth-Century Italy

This article introduces the concept “ideological contention” into the study of social movements and demonstrates the concept through an analysis of the relationship between race and mobilization in modern national contexts. The analysis links the emergence of scientific racism to the period of large nation state consolidation and the development of liberal political ideologies across Western nations. The paper demonstrates that movement struggles within the context of a national ideological framework impact the organization, process of ideological elaboration, and strategic choices a movement makes. I explore how ideology organizes, coordinates, and mobilizes movement members in political processes through a study of Sardinian worker, peasant, and communist struggles in the context of a modernized and industrialized Italy (1917–1920). I argue that reevaluating the theoretical and empirical relationship between ideology and the frame perspective could strengthen analyses of social movement struggles.     

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE IRISH QUESTION:

This article builds on theoretical work in the social movements literature that uses "master frames" (Snow and Benford 1992) to account for the cyclical clustering of social movement activity within certain historical periods. I identify "master frame alignment" as the dynamic process by which social movement actors rhetorically transform the master frames within a cycle of protest to make them resonate more clearly with a movement's unique social and historical situation. Just as frame alignment processes serve to link a movement organization's activities, goals, and ideology with those of a potential group of adherents, master frame alignment processes link the activities, goals, and ideology of a movement organization with those espoused within the broader symbolic atmosphere of the social movement. I present historical data from Irish newspapers and political documents to show how the Irish Sinn Féin movement, seeking self-determination during the early twentieth century, rhetorically reconstructed the master frames generated by the League of Nations in order to better exploit this particular window of political opportunity.     

Movements and media: Selection processes and evolutionary dynamics in the public sphere

This article argues that the decisive part of the interaction between social movements and political authorities is no longer the direct, physical confrontation between them in concrete locations, but the indirect, mediated encounters among contenders in the arena of the mass media public sphere. Authorities react to social movement activities if and as they are depicted in the mass media, and conversely movement activists become aware of political opportunities and constraints through the reactions (or non-reactions) that their actions provoke in the public sphere. The dynamics of this mediated interaction among political contenders can be analyzed as an evolutionary process. Of the great variety of attempts to mobilize public attention, only a few can be accommodated in the bounded media space. Three selection mechanisms–labelled here as “discursive opportunities”– can be identified that affect the diffusion chances of contentious messages: visibility (the extent to which a message is covered by the mass media), resonance (the extent to which others – allies, opponents, authorities, etc.–react to a message), and legitimacy (the degree to which such reactions are supportive). The argument is empirically illustrated by showing how the strategic repertoire of the German radical right evolved over the course of the 1990s as a result of the differential reactions that various strategies encountered in the mass media arena.     

Narrating political opportunities: explaining strategic adaptation in the climate movement

This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement’s past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement’s mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015. This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 shaped the strategizing process. While those who experienced Copenhagen as a success preferred strategic continuity, those who experienced defeat developed a “Copenhagen narrative” to advance strategic adaptation by projecting previously experienced threats and opportunities onto the Paris campaign. Yet by relying on a retrospective narrative, movement actors tended to overlook emerging political opportunities. We demonstrate that narrative analysis is a useful tool for understanding the link between structure and agency in social movements and other actors affected by (political) opportunity structures.

     

“White Men Are This Nation:” Right‐Wing Militias and the Restoration of Rural American Masculinity*

Abstract The appearance of right‐wing militias was a much‐discussed phenomenon during the past decade. Commentators rightly pointed out their rural origins, their lower‐middle‐class and middle‐class composition, and their ideology rooted in racism, sexism, anti‐Semitism, and homophobia, but few, if any, have commented on the most salient aspect of all: that these are movements of men, who use narratives about masculinity as an analytic prism through which to understand their own situation and to problematize the identities of “others,” and as a rhetorical strategy to recruit and sustain their own membership. In this paper we undertake this analysis, exploring the rural origins of the militia movement, its social composition, ideology, and organization, and its articulation with other white supremacist groups. We argue that their vision of masculinity, particularly a self‐reliant, self‐made masculinity endemic to American history, is the theme unifying both the ideology and the organization of rural militias with the militant right‐wing continuum of which they are only a part.