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The movement against democratic backsliding in Israel was perhaps the most powerful social movement that Israel has seen, spanning over 3 months. It is credited with halting the right‐wing coalition's anti‐democratic constitutional and judicial reforms. The paper analyzes and highlights key factors in the origins, protest, and outcome stages of the movement. The movement is interesting in how experiences and personal challenges of negative emotions were addressed and overcome by protesting. The movement is also marked by a strategy that helped separate local protest initiatives to coalesce into national disruption events. The most effective forms of pressure are analyzed: resistance headquarters, direct pressures on politicians, pressures by army veteran volunteers, the public involvement of experts, favorable media coverage, and pressures from international players. The movement's impact on stopping the legislation and turning public opinion against the government coalition is finally observed, alongside suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the changing nationalist narratives of golden age in the Balkans. By zooming in on the case studies of the late nineteenth‐ and early twenty‐first‐century South‐East European societies, I explain how and why the images of the mythical past are articulated differently in the two historical periods. I argue that in the nineteenth century golden age rhetoric was mostly a top‐down phenomenon centered on transforming Balkan peasantry into the loyal members of their new nation‐states. By the early twenty‐first century, this process has reached its institutional limits and the golden age narratives have become a bottom‐up phenomenon: the key agents of their creation and dissemination are members of civil society, social movements, and ordinary people. I focus on the structural processes that underpin this change to explain the historical dynamics of nationalisms. The paper is based on the qualitative text analysis using nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century archival materials and the documents from the contemporary mass media, official records, educational materials, and popular culture in the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right‐wing Hindu nationalist "Hindutva" movement in India has political control of the world's most populous democracy. To gain insight into the tools of the movement, this paper examines Hindutva framing rhetoric. Social movement framing entails the crafting of movement messages to motivate collective identity and collective action. This paper takes a new approach to studying social movement framing by using the social psychological principle of metacontrast as an organizing theoretical framework. Metacontrast involves minimizing differences within the group (intragroup homogenization) and maximizing differences between groups (intergroup polarization). We argue dual homogenizing‐polarizing frames work in concert to construct a unified collective identity and mobilize concerted collective action. Using qualitative content analysis of two Hindutva organization websites, we find Hindutva framing rhetoric simultaneously homogenizes and polarizes through two framing strategies: a threat‐counter threat frame that portrays an antagonistic outgroup that must be countered with a unified ingroup, and a striking positive‐negative intergroup contrast that paints the ingroup as a moral protector and the outgroup as a vilified adversary. Notably, key to these efforts is the minimization of deeply entrenched, rigid caste differences. Our findings have implications for the study of social movements, nationalism, collective identity, collective action, and intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States across the Global South have witnessed historic privatization of their migration systems over the last few decades. This article explores the cultural and cognitive processes through which migrants make sense of and navigate a broker‐centric migration system. Based on 224 interviews and 15 months of fieldwork across Vietnam—a country whose migration system is reliant on migrant brokers—this article examines how migrants develop and deploy broker wisdom, a unique cultural schema, where migrants refashion migrant brokerage activity to be more legible and subsequently manipulable. I first show how migrants mobilize distinct forms of everyday resistance to make sense of and navigate migrant brokerage. I then explore how the development and deployment of broker wisdom have implications for migrant brokerage and Vietnam's broader migration project. This article contributes to international migration, economic sociology, social movements, cultural sociology, and labor scholarships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blauner (1995, Racism and Antiracism in World Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), Winant (1998, Ethnic and Racial Studies 24(4): 755-766) and Bonnett (1997, New Communities 22(1): 97-110) all express concern over the construction of "racism" as a white-only phenomenon and the corresponding degree to which whiteness is essentialized as a negative identity. This paper explores how white antiracism activists mediate between a static construction of "white racism" and a more contextual understanding of racism and possibilities for white activism. While whiteness is clearly hegemonic in the larger social world, within movements for racial justice, whiteness is often seen as suspect. Given this; white antiracism activists spend a fair amount of their activist hours negotiating a problematic identity. This paper explores the mechanisms by which such an identity is negotiated. I conclude that while white activism is complicated by a definition of racism that tends to essentialize whiteness, the activists have found ways to empower themselves and to conceptualize their relationship to racism and antiracism activism in a less rigid way. All of this contributes to our understanding of the complexity of white identity and efforts to demonstrate how it is an identity that, like other identities, is always in formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1920s, millions of American men and women joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. As the movement expanded, it became heavily involved in local, state, and national politics. The Klan became the center of controversy at the Democratic National Convention of 1924. An anti-Klan faction proposed a plank to the party platform that, if accepted, would have condemned the Ku Klux Klan by name. After a raucous debate, the plank was defeated by a narrow margin. in this paper I analyze state-level variation in support for the Klan at the convention. Klan support is predicted by delegates' support for prohibition, by party competitiveness in non-Southern states, and by a three-way interaction between increasing numbers of voters, increasing numbers of manufacturing workers, and decreasing farm population with in the states. The findings support predictions generated by the status politics model and political mediation theory, and the power devaluation model. I conclude the paper by discussing ways in which the central insights of the status politics model and of political mediation theory can be incorporated into the genera framework of the power devaluation model [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on social movements considers collective action frames and collective identities to be resources or achievements of social movement activity because they symbolicly link individuals to a collective cause. This paper maintains that a collective action frame operates at a sociocultural level and can be redefined by groups external to a movement. Nuclear power proponents worked to suppress the first cycle of protest against nuclear plants by redefining the movements' collective identity, such that individuals were unable to recognize movement organizations as representative of their interests. Citizens within the Ten Mile Radius, a group opposed to the licensing of the Seabrook nuclear power plant, initiated a second cycle of protest by overcoming the collective action frame imposed on the movement This case suggests that the articulation and the representation of dissent is constrained due to the inability of social movement groups to retain control over their own collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Articles in sociological journals on physical and sexual assault within the family show that research on "family violence" has grown exponentially since 1970, despite the fact that evidence indicates no increase in family violence. The paper suggests that this extraordinary growth in research is explained by changes in American society and in sociology as a discipline. The experience of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire is used to examine the interrelation of family violence research with social movements, and some pervasive and difficult aspects of these interrelationships, including the role of values in research, the selective use of research findings, and the involvement of the mass media in efforts to promote application of sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent contributions of sociologists and others have brought a new awareness and new theoretical under standing of the extent to which human aging and life-course patterns are shaped by social conditions and influenced by social change. Yet the potential of many social processes to account for individual aging patterns remains untapped, because research and theory have focused heavily upon comparisons between cohorts rather than the internal differentiation of cohorts, This paper shows that focusing upon intracohort differentiation over the life course leads to a mobilization of sociological findings whose age-related implications have not been exploited. Using the phenomenon of "aged heterogeneity" as an illustrative case, it is suggested that intracohort differentiation- operating through macro-level, organizational, and micro-level processes-can explain significant phenomena of aging previously neglected by theory, or else assumed to be psychological in origin. These processes specify Men on's "Matthew effect." Implications for biological aging and for research are briefly discussed˙. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of “boundary movements” to characterize the distinctive growth and strategies of movements involving citizen/science alliances to contend with environmentally related illnesses. This concept is applied to a case study of the environmental breast cancer movement, which has induced changes in treatment options and public perception of breast cancer. Since the early 1990s, a segment of this movement has consistently criticized the traditional paradigms governing research, the epistemology of breast cancer, and popular understandings. Against the traditional focus on genetics, lifestyles, and personal responsibility, this segment's broader messages stress environmental causation and women's participation in science and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares six NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) movement organizations to explain why some of these social movement organizations expanded their goals while others did not. Analysis of interview and survey (N = 113) data reveals that friendship networks within the movement foster goal expansion (in part because people want to preserve the context for these friendships). External local political networks promoting their own rhetorical and resource agendas will inhibit goal expansion if they establish trusted links to the NIMBY organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the papers discussed in the September 2004 issue of Sociological Forum. In the paper "Victory and Beyond: A Historical Comparative Analysis of the Outcomes of the Abortion Movements in Sweden and the U.S.," the paper argues that the historical social movements that once nourished a movement subsequently shape the initial policies representing movement success. In another paper, "Speaking Together, Thinking Together?," the author considers the problem of cultural coherence while Theresa Morris in the paper "Bank Mergers Under a Changing Regulatory Environment," examines why the banking industry experienced dramatic concentration through mergers.

Are religious ideological antecedents factors in the emergence of African American social protest? If so, how do these factors translate African American discontent into political action? Rather than proceed from standard renditions of social movement analysis that argue structural opportunities motivate people to act, this paper contends that culture motivates many people to become and remain involved in collective action. The civil rights movement in Arkansas is examined to explain how religious ideas enable movements to emerge and endure in the face of tremendous opposition and uncertain prospects for movement success. Findings suggest that in the context of oppression ideas can help motivate, guide, and give meaning to protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. It does so by attempting to bridge structural-level and individual-level explanations. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both perspectives find empirical support: the intensity of participation depends both on the embeddedness in social networks and on the individual perceptions of participation, that is, the evaluation of a number of cognitive parameters related to engagement. In particular, to be recruited by an activist and the perceived effectiveness of one's own potential contribution are the best predictors of differential participation. We specify the role of networks for social movements by looking at the nature and content of networks and by distinguishing between three basic functions of networks: structurally connecting prospective participants to an opportunity to participate, socializing them to a protest issute, and shaping their decision to become involved. The latter Junction implies that the embeddedness in social networks significantly affects the individual perceptions of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of social movements and collective action typically present social protest as one of three alternatives available to the individual: inaction, institutionalized political action, or protest. These political alternatives are rarely considered simultaneously nor are they modeled explicitly. In this paper we make use of survey data from a representative sample of the United States population. We employ multinomial logistic regression to determine what differentiates those who protest from those who engage only in institutionalized politics and from those who engage in no political action. We find that those who engage in social protest are similar in many respects to those who engage actively in institutionalized politics, yet education on social and political issues, participation in community organizations, and frequent church attendance increases the likelihood that individuals will engage in protest relative to institutionalized politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demography as a field has made limited progress in its work on understanding the role of gender in demographic change for several reasons. This paper explores theoretical, methodological, and political influences on this understanding. For example, demography can be seen as a field that because of its stability and resources, has not been forced into the "crises" that might force it to question its assumptions and methodologies, it has not developed a tradition of reflexivity, one which might address alternative approaches to this and other issues, such as the political nature of population work. In addition, partly because of a reliance on certain kinds of methodological approaches, demographers tend to use measures of gender that reflect individual characteristics rather than those that allow understanding of gender at a larger level, or provide information beyond the individual. The result is a particular approach to gender within demographic studies. Feminist theoretical approaches to gender could contribute to the field and the study of population change in general in several key ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between social class and social mobilization through reviewing the case of new social movements. The middle-class membership of new social movements is well documented but poorly explained by current New Class, New Social Movement, and Cultural Shift theories. These theories fail to recognize the interdependence between interests, values, and expressed ideas. Class culture provides an alternative framework for interpreting the complex relationships between class interests and consciousness in these movements. Through a comparison of working- and middle-class cultures, it is proposed that social class orders consciousness and shapes the interpretation of interests. Class cultures produce distinct class forms of political and organizational behavior while not defining any particular content of movement issues or politics. In particular, the middle-class membership of new social movements is explained by the cultural form of these movements which is distinctly middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between traditions of social action and patterns of organizational development, using data on the formation of national African American protest, advocacy, and service organizations between 1955 and 1985. Following research in organizational ecology, Poisson regression is used to examine the association between organizational density and organizational formation across strategic farms. The results provide some support for the idea that interorganizational influences are important in shaping the contours of the African American social movement industry. Outside funding, internal organizational capacities and protest levels also play a significant role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the effect of the new international division of labor on urbanization in developing countries. Previous histories, particularly of insertion into the world economy, affect responses to the new order. Also, previous phases in the organization of the world economy, particularly those associated with import-substitution industrialization, have shaped the urban systems and urban social organization of developing countries in particular ways. By comparing the tendencies of the import-substituting period with those of the new international division of labor, contrasts are brought out in the patterns of migration, the shape of the urban system, labor markets, and in urban social organization. The overall change is likely to be an increasing divergence, both within developing countries and between them, in their urban organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the usefulness of several theoretical perspectives for understanding the popular appeal of the Moral Majority. The perspectives used were cultural fundamentalism, diffusion, resource mobilization, status loss, and alienation. Data came from a series of surveys between 1981 and 1984 carried out in Middletown, Indiana. Overall, diffusion theory was useful in understanding who knew about the Moral Majority, and cultural fundamentalism was most helpful in understanding support for the Moral Majority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social construction of conflict over environmental health and safety issues (i.e., environmental risk). Four explanations for such conflict are commonly offered in the environmental policy literature. We examine the interests served by each. We hypothesize that environmental policy professionals hold definitions of conflict consistent with the values and interests of the organizations for which they work and the professions of which they are members. These definitions enhance the legitimacy of the resources those groups possess in relative abundance. Data from a survey of risk professionals are generally consistent with these hypotheses. We conclude by generalizing beyond environmental conflict to identify ways in which disputes about the nature of a social problem or conflict are often at the same time struggles to determine the value of the resources available to social movements and their opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the widespread, irreversible, and catastrophic potentials associated with some contemporary genres of grievances make derivative social movements novel in respects different from those emphasized by French, Italian, and German analysts using the concept "new social movements." This European concept distinguishes between "new" and "old" protests to emphasize significant changes in the nature of the contemporary state or the value systems of its citizens, a distinction that has not been accentuated in the United States. The argument here is that only certain contemporary "technology movements" are really novel- and for reasons other than those alleged by advocates of the "new social movements." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of the collective actions that led to the Iranian revolution rest upon one of two classical models: social breakdown or social movement. These explanations emphasize such factors as the politicization of recently uprooted migrants, the growth of a new middle class opposing autocracy, the authority of the clergy, and specific aspects of Shiite Islam. Conflicts of interest, capacity for mobilization, coalition formation, and the structure of opportunities that shaped the collective actions of various groups and classes are ignored or downplayed. This paper argues that mobilization and collective action against the monarchy resulted from the adverse effects of state development policies on bazaaris, industrial workers, white-collar employees, and professionals. Bazaaris' mobilization provided an opportunity for other social groups and classes to oppose the government. A coalition of disparate interests, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, brought down the monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of choice among available tactics is a key to understanding the roles of individuals and organizations within a social movement. This paper proposes a method for operationalizing the notion of repertoires of collective action. Using data from a case study of a recent disarmament campaign, it models the tactical field faced by activists. An analysis of the dimensions of this field and the clusters of tactics within it suggests how individuals organized their options and how they understood the distinctive features of an innovative course of action. Such field models can illuminate ideological and organizational differentiation, as well as cooperation and competition within movements [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guerrilla governments arise where landlord or central government authority has decayed. In such situations, the guerrillas often establish a new "implicit social contract" with the peasantry, replacing the previous social contract, the abrogation of which has reduced the traditional authorities from legitimate to predatory powers in their relationships with peasants. Guerrillas build up their authority by carrying out three "contractual obligations" of authority: (1) defense of the people from external enemies; (2) maintenance of internal peace and order; and (3) contributions to the material security of the populace, the last by increasing peasant incomes and by providing health services, literacy training, and sometimes land to rural cultivators. As a result of such activities, peasants often come to perceive guerrillas as the new legitimate authorities in the region. Such authority has decayed, however, where the guerrillas in turn fail to fulfill the obligations of the social contract. Loss of authority can appear when guerrillas fail to defend the peasantry against military attackers, or when guerrillas themselves come to employ terror against the rural populace, thus violating the social contract uniting legitimate authorities and their subjects. This paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the study of guerrillas to social movement theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of behaviour, choice, and action have long presented an "act" as a kind of bottleneck of meaning‐making, where the action is either a cocktail of partial preferences or the survival of one over the rest. I argue that action is often something very (if subtly) different and propose "ambivalent action" as a category of moral action defined by the actor's conflicting intentions, in which the conflict is reified (not resolved) by the act. Situated in past and contemporary context, the term is an interdisciplinary bridge, with links from classical (if vague) theoretic treatments of "ambivalence" to new sociological analogies in the realm of quantum physics. I explore this duality through the case study of #BlackoutTuesday, a social media movement connected with global protests against police brutality and racism. The black square that characterized the movement is best understood as ambivalent action, as an act of two‐fold narrative‐making: "both" silence and speech. The "success" of an ambivalent action in remaining in two narratives at once is determined by the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How prevalent are Republican and Democratic student groups, and why are some schools home to Republican and Democratic student groups while other schools are not? Some commentators and scholars suggest that Republican student groups may be less prevalent than Democratic student groups and, when present, will likely be found at "red schools" (rather than "blue schools") in Republican‐leaning areas of the country. However, other scholars argue that both Republican and Democratic student groups should be similar in their overall prevalence and located at a similar set of "engaged schools" (as opposed to "unengaged schools"). Analyzing our original database of Republican and Democratic student organizations across 1,953 four‐year, not‐for‐profit U.S. colleges and universities, we first show that Republican student groups are nearly as common as Democratic student groups: Republican student groups can be found at 39% of campuses, while Democratic student groups are present on 40% of campuses. Employing binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then show that Republican and Democratic student groups tend to be located at the same types of schools, that is, larger, wealthier, public schools that offer political science majors. Our article holds significant implications for theorizing on student organization presence more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement studies have addressed the issue of nostalgia within two perspectives, focusing, respectively, on emotions and on memory. Our contribution looks at nostalgia in social movements by building upon the combination of these two streams in social movement studies. Going beyond a stereotypical vision of reactionary movements as backward looking and progressive ones as forward looking, we will suggest that while both types of movements look at some aspects of the past with nostalgia, they do it in a very different combination of emotions and memory. To compare how different movements perform their emotional and memory work, we focused on the recent uprising in Lebanon as a critical case in which mobilizations and counter‐mobilizations have been carried out by different actors at the same time. In both cases, nostalgia was strategically developed for different moments of Lebanon's history through the movements' choices of the very spaces for the performance of contentious acts, but also the symbolic meaning attributed to them and the emotional work performed around the protest events. By developing a "tick description" of some main contentious moments where nostalgia emerged in the Lebanon uprisings, we aim to understand the ways in which nostalgia intervenes in the social construction of memories and counter‐memories, in an emotionally dense environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call "counter‐clinical spaces." Counter‐clinical spaces are medicalized sites of knowledge production and practice that are produced through social movements' contestations with biomedicine. Other examples include sexual assault nurse examiner programs, LGBT health centers, and sexual health clinics. Counter‐clinical spaces are "counter" and "clinical" in several ways. First, these spaces are distinctly clinical in that they intervene in the health of the body. Second, these spaces are counter‐clinical in that they are organized in critique of dominant medical practices. Crucially, counter‐clinical spaces engage the clinical encounter as a site of transformation: social movement actors target clinicians' deployment of medical power, especially in their interactions with marginalized persons. We thus attend to the scale upon which social movements make a change in and against medicine, and we highlight how social movement logics can and do change practices even when they are unable to shift structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies a social movement organization framing analysis to conflicts between gay-rights and Christian Right groups over issues of lesbian, gay, and bisexual inclusions in public education. As groups representing each side entered this new arena of debate over gay rights, they applied strategies they had used in other arenas. Both sides have pursued inflexible, polarizing strategies that target their constituencies and have relinquished the opportunity to offer new and creative understanding of their positions and to reach a potential new audience. This shows how opposing frames can become mutually reinforcing constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Duane F. Alwin b is the Tracy Winfree and Ted H. McCourtney Professor Emeritus in the College of the Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University, and Emeritus Research Professor at the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research and Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She holds a B.A. (sociology, University of Puerto Rico), M.S. (sociology, Mississippi State University), and a Ph.D. (sociology, University of Connecticut). She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Pennsylvania State University (2007) and MA degrees in sociology from the Pennsylvania State University (2003) and Central European University (2001). B Alejandro Portes b is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle S. Beck Professor of Sociology (Emeritus) at Princeton University and Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. [Extracted from the article]

The populist movement was the most important and radical third party ever established in this country. It was the last substantial effort at structural alteration of hierarchical economic forms in modern America. It was, in fact, America's greatest mass-democratic movement. Hence these analyses of the success and failure of populism can teach everyone much about the nature of contemporary America and the prospects for reform or radical institutional change. Michael Schwartz focuses on the precursor to populism, the Southern Farmers' Alliance, a radical protest organization that developed out of tile contradictions and conflicts inherent in postbellum cotton production. This system of labor exploitation embodied three distinctive class-based conflicts. First, planter and merchant struggled to control commercial credit. Second, planter-merchant and textile manufacturer struggled to create indentured vs. free labor. Finally, planter-merchant and farmer struggled as wealthy lien holders prospered from the accumulation of agricultural debt, while farmers moved through the stage of yeoman, tenant, and then peon.

Dire warnings about the imminence of World War III were common in the 1950s, as the world adjusted to the introduction of nuclear weapons. C. Wright Mills and other critical writers exaggerated the power of the military in American society and the weakness of civilian social forces. In the thirty years since Mills published The Causes of World War III, the mass society has asserted itself and nonnuclear conflicts have been the major threats to world peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political mobilizations in small towns have come to play a disproportionate role in today's national politics. This article examines the conditions giving rise to small‐town mobilizations through an in‐depth case study of Tonganoxie, Kansas. Residents of this town mounted a massive campaign to block the opening of a Tyson chicken processing plant in 2017. The article draws on interviews, observations, a newspaper claims database, and extractions from the "No Tyson in Tongie" Facebook group page. The article maintains that a racialized cultural framework ("rural idyll") among White middle‐class residents helped them perceive the plant as an existential threat. Social networks, sustained through social media, enabled the same residents to mobilize in a fast and forceful manner. We suggest that in "hybrid" towns (partially rural and suburban), the "rural idyll" is politically decisive. It unites recently settled and established residents in battles to defend a particularly racialized and classed way of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive cultural practices such as songs and storytelling are key to contemporary social movement organizing because they can attenuate the challenges of social difference by expanding participants' understandings of self and community. Yet the precise cultural dynamics through which such practices become effective are not well understood. Using the case of a large faith‐based community organizing coalition, I show that practices focused on personal moral authenticity are especially effective in fostering alignment between social movement goals and individuals' pre‐existing moral commitments. I define personal moral authenticity as the ambition to develop, enact, and perform a moral identity that is "true" to an enduring internal self, and validate that identity through interactions with others. This is an effective basis for organizing practices because it spans the various cultures of commitment that prevail in different racial and religious subgroups and gives individuals a personal stake in social change projects. In highlighting how it animates practices in faith‐based community organizing, one of the most robust fields of grassroots civic activity in the United States, this article illuminates an important part of the cultural dynamics underlying much contemporary social change work, and specifies how religion contributes to progressive social change efforts amid ongoing religious disaffiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been 100 years since the death of Max Weber and 102 years since the publication of his classic essay "Science as a Vocation." I review here several of the main ideas advanced in the essay. I then seek to apply a Weberian perspective to the analysis of the rise of national populism by considering first the historical‐structural origins of the present situation and second the meaning that it has for supporters of this movement. The evolution of world capitalism has had consequences that bear directly on the situation of the middle and working‐classes in the advanced countries and in their subsequent political reactions. Applying interpretive perspectives and using recent sociological field studies of the populist grass roots, I seek to understand the meaning that the situation has for supporters of the movement and its political implications. This understanding has direct consequences for current attempts to reverse a movement that has changed the course of recent history in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on unlikely movement actors whose civic engagement has been understudied: people with criminal records ("returning citizens"). We present findings from 18 months of ethnographic research with members (leaders) of Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality (FORCE), a civic group led by returning citizens. FORCE leaders received institutional support from Community Renewal Society (CRS), a larger faith and community‐based organization, to lead a rights reform movement in Chicago. Findings suggest that FORCE leaders constructed notions of kinship, recognition, and power through civic capacity‐building efforts—and that social belonging was core to such capacity‐building efforts. While bonding social belonging occurred as FORCE leaders formed kinship with people facing similar social and economic marginality, bridging social belonging emerged as leaders felt recognized by CRS staff organizers, affiliates, and elected officials. Bonding and bridging social belonging enabled FORCE leaders, who faced constant social exclusion in society, to experience much needed kinship, recognition, and power. Future studies should continue to uncover how local capacity‐building processes have life‐changing relational effects on movement participants from socially and economically marginalized groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acting in solidarity with deprived others has become a central topic in social movement research. The explanations of solidarity activism or political altruism are few. However, social movement researchers have claimed that solidarity with out‐of‐group others is a by‐product of in‐group interaction. In contrast, we argue that out‐group interaction with the deprived other and the formation of a solidary relationship is central to the ebb and flow of solidarity activism. We investigate the Danish refugee solidarity movement and show that the meeting with the deprived other 1) brings about an interaction order which makes an ethical demand on the activists to care for the other both within the bounds of the situations and in the future; 2) enacts and amplifies activists' values and beliefs because the deprived other becomes an exemplar of the injustice and the need to help the broader group of people in the same fragile situation. We develop and test this theory drawing on 42 life‐history interviews and a social media dataset containing a panel of 87,455 activists participating in refugee solidarity groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Yellow Vests movement in France was the most widespread and violent protest movement France has seen since 1968. This research highlights the resemblances and dissimilarities between the Yellow Vests and other Occupy movements. We find similarities in movement origins around suddenly revealed economic issues and relative deprivation. We also find that the Yellow Vests resemble other Occupy movements in terms of a combined strategy of a diffused and countrywide occupation of public spaces alongside weekly mass protest, and a lack of central organization and rejection of leadership. The Yellow Vests, however, differ from other Occupy movements in the extreme violence of the weekly demonstrations. Despite its rejection by the media, violence did not affect widespread public approval. In addition, the Yellow Vests achieved most movement objectives in spite of the lack of effective leadership with whom politicians could negotiate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement research has long examined why activists persist. Little attention has been paid, however, to how persistent environmental activists use personalized strategies to cope with challenges. This article draws on data from 30 in‐depth interviews with long‐term environmental activists to shed light on this understudied phenomenon. The interviewees point to a number of strategies they use to mitigate the challenges they experience in their activism:(1) they have a self‐care practice, primarily in the form of spending time in nature; (2) they adopt various personalized orientations, such as bracketing or ignoring structural environmental challenges, focusing on what they can control, deciding that they have no choice but to persist, focusing on long‐term outcomes, and being realistic about the possibilities of change; and (3) they integrate work, activism, and life balance by shaping their careers and sense of life purpose around the environment. The article concludes with a discussion of whether these strategies are generalizable beyond the environmental movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Donald Trump's inauguration, large‐scale protest events have taken place around the United States, with many of the biggest events being held in Washington, DC. The streets of the nation's capital have been flooded with people marching about a diversity of progressive issues, including women's rights, climate change, and gun violence. Although research has found that these events have mobilized a high proportion of repeat participants who come out again and again, limited research has focused on understanding differential participation in protest, especially during one cycle of contention. This article, accordingly, explores the patterns among the protest participants to understand differential participation and what we refer to as "persistence in the Resistance." In it, we analyze a unique data set collected from surveys conducted with a field approximation of a random sample of protest participants at the largest protest events in Washington, DC, since the Resistance began at the 2017 Women's March. Our findings provide insights into repeat protesters during this cycle of contention. The article concludes by discussing how our findings contribute to the research on differential participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The January 2017 Women's March was an example of the paradigmatic March on Washington, part of the repertoire of collective action used by social movements in the United States for decades. Similar marches were held on its first and second anniversary, in January 2018 and January 2019, respectively. One did not need to travel to the nation's capital to participate in these marches, however; activists also organized hundreds of "sister marches" across the United States and internationally. Yet, a sole focus on these one‐day, physical events misses a great deal of activity. In this article, we examine social media activity related to the Women's March on the platform Instagram that was posted well after the 2017 march was over but before the 2018 march was fully planned. We do so to gain purchase on how individuals and organizations use social media to maintain movements between large events. We analyze a systematic sample of Instagram posts from two sources: (1) individual Instagram users' public posts with the hashtag #womensmarch and (2) posts from the official Instagram account of the Women's March. Conceptualizing these posts as political performances, we use our findings to draw implications for the study of contemporary protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally ignoring firearm‐deaths by suicide, "common sense" divides gun violence into two distinct types of phenomena: urban gun violence and mass shootings. At a cursory level, these phenomena seem distinct because of the difference in the number of victims killed during a particular shooting, rather than subtypes co‐creating a master category defined by gun violence. As a result, gunshot deaths of black and brown bodies in urban settings, which constitute the majority of deaths by gun violence after suicide, are viewed as routine whereas gunshot deaths in suburban settings are extraordinary and worthy of outrage. In this article, we draw on ethnographic observation to compare protest vigils in urban communities comprised predominantly of people of color, in suburban areas that are mostly white, and at the national level in order to uncover the racialized processes of symbolic classification by which this "commonsense" view is produced and how it is challenged by activists. We use the framework of cultural pragmatics to analyze these vigils, making visible the racialized forms of domination that structure activism and, we contend, ultimately divide gun violence into two distinct phenomena rather than constituting a master category. We argue that cultural pragmatics provides a way to understand what it means to challenge culture as emphasized by the multi‐institutional politics approach to social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mid‐twentieth century "collective behavior" school asserted that (1) collective behavior—the actions of crowds, movements, and other gatherings—had distinct dynamics; (2) such action was often "nonrational," or not governed by cost‐benefit calculation; and (3) collective behavior could pose a threat to liberal democracy because of these features. While this tradition fell out of scholarly favor, the 2016 election has given us empirical reasons to revisit some elements of collective behavior approaches. We argue for three key orienting concerns, drawn from this tradition, to understand the current political era. First is a focus on authoritarianism and populism, particularly among those who feel disaffected and isolated from political institutions, pared of psychologistic determinism and geared more sensitively to their manifestations as a political style. Second is a focus on racialized resentment, strain, and perceptions of status decline, especially in how such feelings are activated when people are confronted with disruptions to their lives. Third is an analysis of "emergent norms" and the extent to which political actors produce normative understandings of contextually appropriate action that are distinct from traditional political behavior. We elaborate on these themes, apply them to examples from current politics, and suggest ways to incorporate them into contemporary sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the long‐term influence of actors in fields of cultural production depends on the opportunities for resource mobilization offered by external conditions combined with intense interaction among actors. Using a unique data set of 1,143 architects active between 1890 and 1940, at a time of large‐scale socioeconomic transformations and political disruption, we find by multiple regression analysis that exposure to industrialization and political upheaval, and halo effects in an architect's network of collaborators predict greater ultimate impact, while urbanization and professional affiliations do not. Theory of social movements and theory of cultural production thus have important implications for each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. E. B. DuBois began his work as a scholar‐activist at the dawn of the twentieth century, and this article argues that his example has much to teach contemporary scholar‐activists in the twenty‐first century. In order to publish The Crisis, the magazine of the activist organization he cofounded, DuBois purchased a printing press. This meant he could own the means of his own knowledge production and foretold both the promise of what it means to be a scholar‐activist in the twenty‐first century and the limitations built into the current systems of knowledge production. DuBois was also prophetic when he identified the problem of the twentieth century as "the problem of the color line" as the focus of both his scholarship and his activism. The forms of systemic white supremacy we face today are both a continuation of a centuries‐old dimension of racism in the United States and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms. The article explores the challenges of being digital scholar‐activists within legacy institutions. It concludes with speculation about what DuBois might do now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I describe how I utilize my sociological imagination and training while building and organizing movement networks. First, I highlight the importance of fostering flexible, cross‐level intergroup ties when building movement networks. Second, I illustrate the role of emotions in the emergence and sustainability of movement networks. Third, I detail a theoretical framework for how stories of past resilience can be used in movement organizing to mobilize for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given hostility within segments of LGBT communities toward same‐sex marriage, how do Australian activists justify their efforts toward achieving marriage equality? In this article, we expand the social movement literature by examining how activists construct identity, meaning, and goals in contradistinction to others within the same movement. We draw on interviews with Australian lesbian and gay activists to examine what enables them to pursue the contested goal of same‐sex marriage in light of internal movement critiques that marriage equality will undermine the significance of lesbian and gay identity and impair activism on other issues as a result of the view that equality has been achieved. We expand debates over the post‐gay trajectory of lesbian and gay activism and identity by illustrating how activists attach different, what we term, mobilizing meanings, to the same movement goal which enables them to withstand internal movement critiques. We provide a typology of mobilizing meanings that can be applied more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]