‘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.     

Crisis collective memory making on social media: A case study of three Chinese crises on Weibo

Social media users collectively (re)construct narratives to create memories surrounding past crises. In this study, we connect the concept of collective memory with a public-oriented approach to crisis communication to examine how crisis response frames and collective memory narratives were displayed by different social actors (government, organizations, and publics) on one of China’s social media platforms, Weibo. Findings from a content analysis of 9238 unique posts on three national crises (the 2010 Yushu Earthquake, the 2015 Tianjin Explosions, and the 2018 Vaccine Scandal) reveal that Chinese publics tended to adopt social issue and blaming frames, while the government and organizations were more prone to using informing and corrective action frames. When recalling and reconstructing crisis memories, Chinese publics used more power and contestation narrative, while the government frequently adopted the nationalism narrative; with trauma being the predominant narrative displayed across the three crises and social actors. Crisis response frames of blaming, crediting, and corrective action were significantly associated with narratives of power and contestation, heroism, and nationalism, respectively. Theoretical implications for future research on crisis collective memory making on social media and suggestions for governmental crisis communication are discussed.     

Olfactive frames of remembering: theorizing self,senses and society

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta‐narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial‐bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis‐à‐vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self‐identity and social relations.     

Hashtagging girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and gendering representations of global politics

This article explores how gendered, racial and youth-ed concepts of girlhood shape the way conflict, violence and the lived experiences of girls in conflict-affected environments are understood globally. In particular, it examines the broader context and effect of social media campaigns that specifically invoke a concept of “girlhood” in their responses to crisis or tragedy. It focuses on two hashtags and their associated social media campaigns: #IAmMalala, started in response to the attempted killing of Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012 by Taliban gunmen, and #BringBackOurGirls, started by Nigerians and adopted globally in response to the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by terrorist group Boko Haram. In both instances, understandings of the broader political context are shaped by the focus on girls. Both hashtags also appropriate an experience: claiming to be Malala and claiming the Nigerian girls as ours. Through this exploration, I argue that particular ideals of girlhood are coded within these campaigns, and that these girls’ experiences are appropriated. I critique the limited representations of girlhood that circulate in these discussions, and how these limited representations demonstrate the problematic narrowness of dominant conceptions of girlhood.     

Historically contested concepts: A conceptual history of philanthropy in France, 1712-1914

Since W. B. Gallie introduced the notion of essentially contested concepts (ECCs) in 1956, social science scholars have increasingly used his framework to analyze key concepts drawing “endless disputes” from contestant users. Despite its merits, the ECC framework has been limited by a neglect of social, cultural, and political contexts, the invisibility of actors, and its ahistorical character. To understand how ECCs evolve and change over time, I use a conceptual history approach to study the concept of philanthropy, recently labeled as an ECC. Using France during classical modernity as a case study, I analyze key events and actors from the concept’s inception in 1712 as a virtue of the Enlightenment to its triumph after 1789 as a secular alternative to Catholic charity, until its decline at the end of the nineteenth century as a new consensus emerged around the concept of solidarity. By introducing the notion of historically contested concepts, I make several contributions to research on ECCs, conceptual contestation, and conceptual change.

     

Facing up to Facebook: how digital activism,independent regulation,and mass media foiled a neoliberal threat to net neutrality

This study traces how Facebook-promoted internet.org/Free Basics, despite initial acclaim, was eventually rejected in India – and how net neutrality came to be codified in the process. Topic modeling of articles (N?=?1752) published over two-and-a-half years in 100 media outlets pinpoints the critical junctures in time at which the public discourse changed its trajectory. Critical discourse analysis of different phases of the discourse then identifies the causal factors and contingent conditions that produced the new policy. The study advances an understanding of technologies as social constructs and technological change as a social process, shaped by the dynamic interaction of a complex array of social actors coming together at critical junctures. It also draws attention to how discourse, produced by social actors in contingent conditions, recursively shapes the dominant ideology and structures these interactions. In addition, the study demonstrates how algorithmic and interpretive research techniques can be combined for longitudinal analysis of textual data sets.     

Corporate corruption of the environment: sustainability as a process of compromise

A key response to environmental degradation, climate change and declining biodiversity has been the growing adoption of market principles in an effort to better value the social good of nature. Through concepts such as ‘natural capitalism’ and ‘corporate environmentalism’, nature is increasingly viewed as a domain of capitalist endeavour. In this article, we use convention theory and a pluralist understanding of social goods to investigate how the social good of the environment is usurped by the alternate social good of the market. Through analysis of interviews with sustainability managers and corporate documentation, we highlight how organizational actors employ compromise to temporally settle disputes between competing claims about environmental activities. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the processes of empirically grounded critique and the under‐theorized concept of compromise between social goods. Rather than protecting the environment, the corporate promotion of sustainability facilitates the corruption of the social good of the environment and its conversion into a market commodity.     

Regulating the new rural spaces: the uneven development of land

With the demise of agricultural productivism, that set of economic and political arrangements which made food production the overriding aim of rural policy, new forms of regulation have come into existence. These are linked to new patterns of development in rural areas which have arisen as economic actors seek to exploit the opportunities presented by the crisis in agriculture. Both development and its regulation have become localised — that is, detached from the national regime associated with productivism. This is leading to increased differentiation. We examine three land development sectors — minerals, farm building conversion and golf — to illustrate how the processes of differentiation are driven by a variety of economic, political and social actors. These are assessed using the notion of ‘arenas of representation’. Two arenas are identified — those of the market and regulation — showing how uneven development of the countryside can be understood as arising from action-in-context. Such differentiation, or the emergence of new rural spaces, is inevitable in the post-productivist era.     

New Rage,New Perspectives?

The Eurozone crisis has led to a long and remarkable protest wave. Civil society raised its voice against the ever-harsher austerity measures implemented to deal with the crisis. The article focuses on the role of civil society and its potential to contribute new perspectives to the debate. Such a contribution would depend on two preconditions: 1. Civil society actors need to mobilize successfully to make their voices heard. 2. Civil society actors contribute a perspective that differs to the perspectives of actors from institutionalized politics. Both preconditions are analyzed empirically for two countries that are in very different situations in the crisis scenario: Greece and Germany. Greece has been hit most severely by the crisis; Germany is the most prominent country defining the crisis management, and it provides the largest share of credit guarantees for “crisis countries.” Social movement theory is used to explain the differing evolution of protests in the two countries. In the early phase of the crisis, the established landscape of political parties in both countries offered few opportunities for their citizens to vote in opposition to the crisis management, which is conducive to extra-parliamentary protest. Differences in deprivation, discursive opportunities and the resource basis of mobilization structures can explain differences in protest frequency but also to some extent the evolution of protest over time. Taking up Habermas’ argument regarding the specific perspective of civil society actors in the public debate, we then analyze to which extent the arguments of civil society actors deviate from those of more institutionalized actors. A discursive actor attribution analysis unveils that civil society actors are more sensitive to social problems and grand systemic questions. Moreover, civil society actors are less hesitant to blame actors on the EU level and other EU Member States, even though their overall contribution to the crisis debate is rather marginal.     

What is Flint? Place,storytelling, and social media narrative reclamation during the Flint water crisis

ABSTRACT

The Flint Water Crisis became a national news story in January of 2016, when major publishers such as The New York Times began covering the story. In the same month, an influx of social media activism occurred in response to the crisis, with citizens developing hashtag campaigns such as #FlintFwd in order to disseminate news and stories from a citizen’s perspective; these campaigns often positioned Flint positively ? as a recovering community ? rather than a city in the middle of a public health crisis, and often addressed not a national public but a local audience. This paper considers Flint-based social media activity to investigate the emergence of place-based activism within the ostensibly global network of social media. In doing so, it identifies three key themes; 1) leveraging social media to forward a critique of deficient journalistic storytelling; 2) using the affective process of storytelling via social media to claim authority over their own material offline existence, and 3) using place-based storytelling to implicate others as witnesses via the global network of social media. These themes coalesce around a distinctly critical logic of connectivity. This logic extends the notion of connectivity articulated by Van Dijck and Poell [2013. Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14.] and the strategies of platform activism explored by Tufekci [2017. Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven: Yale University Press.] to explain how social media works to expose discrepancies between the public story of the water crisis and material, lived conditions of Flint, rendering visible a discursive identity of Flint thus far unrecognized.     

Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era

The increasing prevalence of digital social technologies in everyday life affects processes of self and identity in theoretically and empirically interesting ways. Based on face‐to‐face interviews (N = 17) and synchronous text‐based exchanges (N = 32) from a Facebook‐based population, I examine the conditions of identity negotiation in a networked era, and explore how social actors strike a presentational balance between ideal and authentic. I identify three key interaction conditions: fluidity between digital and physical, expectations of accuracy, and overlapping social networks. I argue that social actors accomplish the ideal‐authentic balance through self‐triangulation, presenting a coherent image in multiple arenas and through multiple media. I differentiate between two degrees of triangulation: networked logic and preemptive action.     

Organization Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Early Epistemological Function of the American Medical Association

This research explores how social actors adjudicate knowledge claims within intellectual environments where epistemic standards are contested. Through the case study of 19th century debates over cholera in the United States, I examine the strategies deployed by orthodox and homeopathic physicians in the struggle over medical knowledge during this “epistemic contest.” The 1832 cholera epidemic ushered in a crisis for orthodox medicine, as epistemological standards for adjudicating medical knowledge claims became challenged and ill-defined. Failing to muster an effective cultural response to homeopathy, orthodoxy adopted an organizational strategy, forming the American Medical Association and offering professional membership as a proxy indicator of legitimate knowledge. The AMA created an organizational/intellectual space insulated from homeopathy, which translated into a concerted campaign to exclude homeopaths from government institutions and affected the nature of orthodox knowledge on cholera. This case reveals that epistemic contests are not waged by cultural means only; organizational practices form an integral part of actors’ repertoires in adjudicating epistemological claims in practice.     

Narrating democracy in Myanmar: The struggle between activists,democratic leaders and aid workers,Tamas Wells, 2021, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

In Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers, Tamas Wells explores how central political concepts like democracy and democratization can bear radically different meaning to different political actors. With the example of Myanmar...s reform period, prior to the 2021 military coup, Wells shows that diverging narratives of what democracy means have impact on how different national and international political actors understand each other, and in turn may threaten democratic reforms.     

Mental Illness,Social Construction,and Managed Care

Abstract

Managed care is creating a social reality that affects the lives of millions. Mental health coverage under health care plans is a function of how mental illness and its proper treatment are defined. These definitions are shaped by social actors competitively seeking to satisfy their particular interests. This paper examines the influence of privatized managed behavioral health care on these evolving social definitions, as evidenced in published works, written reports, and legal actions. It is written from the perspective of social workers as providers of services and advocates for social justice. Options for social work responses to managed behavioral health care are explored.     

Taken in by the numbers game: the globalization of a religious ‘illusio’ and ‘doxa’ in nineteenth-century evangelical missions to India

While the Bourdieusian concepts of capital and relational configurations of positions and position-takings have recently been fruitfully employed to theorize global fields, this paper argues that the concepts of illusio and doxa are especially conducive to analyzing the globalization of a field as an expansion into and transformation of formerly independent national arenas. In deploying the concept of illusio as a (quasi-libidinous) investment in the game, globalization is here first and foremost framed as a process in which more and more actors in various contexts ‘succumb’ to specific field logics that orient them to transnational structures. By emphasizing the concept of doxa as the taken-for-granted fundamentals of a field, the paper furthermore calls attention to the mechanisms that help forge and globalize the tacit presuppositions and shared ontologies on which such logics build. Focusing on a field of global Christian missions that emerged during the nineteenth century, the paper illustrates how its competitive logic of proselytization was introduced into the religious arena of India. It highlights how Western notions of religion gained ground among local traditions and pulled them into a game in which numerical relations of adherents mattered.     

Social Networks and Employment: Mechanisms (Part 1)

While substantial progress has recently been made in the literature on social networks and employment, this research has not been accompanied by a larger organizing framework. In this article, we attempt to provide such framework while reviewing the literature that addresses the context of work and employment from a social network perspective – that is, research based on the assumption that actors are embedded in networks of social relations and interactions. In particular, our review focuses on the primary mechanisms that help explain how networks may shape employment outcomes and processes, namely, by conveying resources and providing signals to others. Ties among social actors may transfer better or unique resources such as information, learning, influence, and support, which consequently may affect key employment outcomes. Ties may also provide signals concerning ability, legitimacy/trust, status, and relationship meaning. We conclude by presenting a number of alternative arguments in the literature and discussing future directions for the research on social networks and employment.     

Objects,Meanings, and Role Identities: The Practices that Establish Association in the Case of Home‐Based Employment1

Contemporary social theory suggests that the meaning of any object differs by how we, as social actors, respond and relate to it. The challenge for sociology lies in exploring the different strategies and practices recursively and productively embedded in these relationships. In this article, I present data from in‐depth interviews with 20 home‐based employees to illustrate how these individuals interact with familiar objects in their surroundings to form anchor points for diverse lines of conduct. Although I draw from a number of sociological theories in my analyses, I further utilize cognitive theory to outline three micro‐psychological practices (i.e., routinization, goal targeting, and emotional alignment) that respondents apply in their attempt to establish the desired association between objects and identities. In this way, the article both extends previous lines of inquiry into the relationship between objects and actors, and makes a new contribution to the growing literature on culture and cognition.     

Childhood studies,children's politics and participation: perspectives for processes of democratisation

ABSTRACT

From the early Frankfurt School through to the work of Manuel Castells, there has been a rich body of work on the cleavage between technological and social developments of the twentieth century in respect of the consequences for the constitution of subjectivity. However, little attention is paid to the role of children during their childhoods in attempts to bridge this gap beyond discussions about the democratic actors children will become when they are adults. This paper argues that only the full integration of children, during their childhoods, into democratic development of societies will prevent the deepening of the rift between technological and social progress. The paper traces the correspondence between the new childhood studies and those concepts of politics and politicisation which can support social progress towards an emancipatory social perspective undergirded by particular and democratisation of all areas of everyday life. Drawing on Bourdieu and ideas of participation as action, the paper critically examines the various mechanisms by which children are conventionally excluded from democratic participation and then explores how a deeper consideration of agency in childhood and social actorship opens up alternative mechanisms of inclusion and the concomitant expansion of the concept of democracy.     

Emotion Language and Social Power: Homosexuality and Narratives of Pain in Church

This paper examines the narratives of pain in two religious groups to explore how the everyday concept of emotional pain can work to obscure differences between opposing sides. It shows how these narratives can effectively help to reproduce social hierarchies, even as actors seek to challenge them. Specifically, by examining church debates about homosexuality, it shows how putatively heterosexual actors on both sides use languages of pain to justify welcoming gays into the church, albeit on very different terms, while creating particular feeling rules for gay men and lesbians (Hochschild 1979, 1983). By comparing these two sides we see how narratives of pain (and the shared assumptions behind them) effectively help to reproduce the sexual hierarchy some members seek to subvert.