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Although several studies have examined American evangelicalism as a social movement at the grassroots level, none have attended to the role of public leaders in legitimating the movement to a wider audience. Data gathered from 65 elite informants who self-identify as evangelical suggest that the movement's leaders are employing new modes of organization to achieve collective goals. While these goals remain largely unchanged from those reviewed in earlier research, the mean to achieve them are indeed novel within the evangelical movement. These findings have implications for studies of other groups that originate in the social periphery but move to more mainstream positions within a given social field. Results suggest that three key elements accompany the development of new modes of organization: institutional arrangements, legitimation strategies, and confirmatory, narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fossil fuel companies hold enormous political, economic, and knowledge production power. Recently, industry operators have pivoted from pushing climate denialism to campaigns aimed at individualizing responsibility for climate crisis. In this paper, we focus on one related outcome of such efforts – people's experiences of complicity – here in the context of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) production. We ask: How do mobilized activists experience fossil fuel scapegoating, and what does it mean for their goals as they organize against UOG production? We show that even activists fighting UOG production feel complicit in fossil fuel production, and these feelings of complicity diminish their demands for UOG accountability. We argue that these outcomes have been especially pernicious in cultural contexts like that of the United States, where neoliberal ideologies are normalized, centering personal responsibility, individualization, and identification as consumers rather than citizens. We marshal an extensive qualitative dataset and advance a theory of complicity as a way to understand: a) how social movements intersect with neoliberalized patterns of life; b) how experiences of complicity affect activism; and c) how this may contribute to fossil fuel firms' goals of undercutting organizing. We end by examining how a sub-set of activists works to dismantle this complicity narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews, some field research, and an analysis of online material, this paper focuses on the rights struggles of diasporic Indian caste groups formerly considered "Untouchable" whose self-chosen descriptor is "Dalit." It examines Dalit activism in the United States around caste discrimination in both India and the U.S. The goal of this study is to demonstrate how Dalit American leaders use racial analogies in their international activism, and why race is a contested frame within the community. It makes clear that "universalistic" frames can obscure crucial particularities, making it harder to address the issue at hand. But it also reveals that dogmatic, particularistic frames can compromise the unity and mission of transnational movements. A 2020 lawsuit against Cisco Systems alleging caste discrimination toward a Dalit employee by Brahmin supervisors has opened the opportunity for anti-caste activists to develop a global norm specifically around how to address caste-based discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context-sensitive expressions appear ill suited to the purpose of sharing content across contexts. Yet we regularly use them to that end (in regulations, textbooks, memos, guidelines, laws, minutes, etc.). This paper describes the utility of the concept of a metacontext for understanding cross-contextual content-sharing with context-sensitive expressions. A metacontext is the context of a group of contexts: an infrastructure that can channel non-linguistic incentives on content ascription so as to homogenize the content ascribed to context-sensitive expressions in each context in the group. Documents composed of context-sensitive expressions can share content across contexts when supported by an appropriate metacontext. The bible has its church, the textbook its education system, the form its bureaucracy, and the manifesto its social movement. Some metacontexts support cross-contextual content-sharing. Some don't. A promising research programme (one with practical importance) would take metacontexts as its unit of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an ecological model of the behavior of social entities in a property space defined by sociodemographic dimensions. The model departs from the standard population ecology model in that it measures dimensions of the niche space, and assembles populations into a community. In this model, the time and energy of human individuals are the resources consumed by the social entities. While the model was originally developed for voluntary organizations, the paper argues that this model can be applied to a very wide variety of social phenomena, including firms, groups, associations, events, cultural artifacts, markets, social circles, collectivities, occupations, social movements, roles, identities, attitudes, beliefs, lifestyles, institutions, meanings, human cognitive structure, disease and other socially transmissible quantities. The paper concludes with some speculations based loosely on the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the power of language to shape and confirm social work's identity and to control its essential direction and task. Social work has perennially concerned itself with communication but paid surprisingly little attention to the more abstract concept of language. The authors trace the changing language used throughout social work's UK history, placing this into sociopolitical and socio-economic context and analysing the discourses thus created and promoted. We identify three broad periods in the development of social work, characterized as the moral enterprise, the therapeutic enterprise and the managerial enterprise. We conclude by connecting this discussion with some key challenges, issues and dilemmas currently facing social work in the criminal justice and community care arenas, highlighting the language and discourse of punishment, risk management, consumerism and the market economy. The article concludes by arguing that social work must reclaim the language of its activity as it engages with the challenges to its identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Greta Thunberg's school strike in Stockholm in August 2018 and the October 2018 'declaration of rebellion' by activists in the UK, 2019 saw several climate protest movements rise to public attention, including Fridays for Future (FFF), Extinction Rebellion (XR), and the US Sunrise Movement. What is striking about them is that they rather bluntly refer to science in their campaigns. In this paper, we present an in-depth and comparative study of how the new climate protest movements relate to scientific evidence. Employing a narrative analysis of different types of data (websites, press releases, and media coverage), we study the movements' understandings of 'the science' as well as of science's role in policy processes. We find that the movements in their initial phase predominantly rely on science for their legitimation and adopt a scientific worldview with very little 'green ambivalence'. Notably, FFF and XR hold a deficit model of existing climate communication and enact roles as science communicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have argued that anti-racialist ideologies – which deem racial categorization dangerous and racist – are an obstacle to antiracism, because they make race and its effects invisible, and obscure institutional and structural racism. This paper reexamines this argument empirically, by analyzing how activists resist "racial ignorance" and produce knowledge about race in anti-racialist contexts. Drawing on race scholarship, social movement theory, and sociology of knowledge, I ask: How do social movements produce knowledge about the role of race in policing in France? What are the implications of different epistemic practices for activists' racial conceptualizations and political practice? The article is based on an ethnography of three mobilizations contesting policing in France. The comparative methodology reveals that epistemic practices play a role in shaping how mobilizations reach a shared understanding of race and racism. Specifically, how knowledge projects determine racial difference, the methodologies used to capture racial inequality/oppression, and the level of analysis, all matter for the understanding of racism that activists are able to substantiate. Mobilization's epistemic approaches provide some activists with additional resources to promote their preferred racial conceptualizations and can produce the evidence needed to change the mobilization's dominant discourse, from individualistic to structural and systemic conceptualizations of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Failure of governments across the world to address climate change has fuelled social movements focused on climate-related policy and action. Research analysing these movements has focused mainly on the types of strategies employed including blockades and occupations, marches and petitions, divestment, boycotts and litigation as well as how groups are framing climate change as a problem. What has been largely missed are the ways these groups are framing the change they want to see, that is their demands to governments. Not all demands and actions have the same potential to create the changes needed to mitigate climate change. Used in public health and health promotion, the systems science Intervention Level Framework (ILF) is a tool that can help analyse to what extent different demands have the leverage to create change in a system. We use the ILF to analyse 131 demands from 35 different climate-related advocacy groups in Australia. Results show demands are more focused on lower system leverage points, such as stopping particular projects, rather than on more impactful leverage points, such as the governance structures that determine climate-related policy and decision-making mechanisms. Further, the results highlight the lack of attention on public health related topics of transport and food systems. This paper shows how a systems science framework used in health promotion, the ILF, could enable climate advocacy groups to more effectively target demands to achieve more impactful outcomes from governments, corporations and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, striking racial disparities in COVID-19 infection and mortality rates were one of the core patterns of the virus. These racial disproportionalities were a result of structural factors--laws, rules, and practices embedded in economic, social, and political systems. Public policy is central among such structural features. Policies distribute advantages, disadvantages, benefits, and burdens in ways that generate, reinforce, or redress racial inequities. Crucially, public policy is a function of power relations, so understanding policy decisions requires attentiveness to power. This paper asseses statistical associations between racial power and state anti-eviction policies. Charting the timing of state policy responses between March 2020 and June 2021, I examine correlations between response times and racial power as reflected in state populations, voting constituencies, legislatures, and social movement activities. Ultimately, I do not find any significant associations. The null results underscore the complexities and difficulties of studying race, power, and public policy with theoretical nuance and empirical care. While the findings leave us with much to learn about how racial power operates, the conceptualization and theorizing offered in the paper, instructively underscore the value of centering racial power in analyses of public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper probes alternative meanings and processes for decolonizing English that arise from the particular geopolitical histories and identities of Hong Kong and engagement with political and translingual activism. I illustrate the positioning and tension between English, 'Kongish' (a mix of English and localized linguistic resources in Hong Kong), and Chinese in 1,355 comments from four live-streamed videos of clashes between the police and protesters. Despite the default language of the news page being Chinese (standard written Chinese and written Cantonese), a vast majority of the comments are written in English and Kongish. I analyse the commenters' metalinguistic discourse that represents their alignment and non-alignment stances towards the various linguistic practices in the comment threads. I draw on 'translingual activism' (Pennycook 2019) to understand the linguistic resourcefulness of the commenters who support the protests and the indexing of an us–them relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. Rather than decolonizing English, I argue that the Hong Kong commenters recolonize English for new subversive purposes to maintain an ideological 'separation' between their Hong Kong and Chinese identities in times of political transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 1990s, international organizations (IOs) have created various opportunities of access for civil society to voice criticism. While international relations (IR) scholarship has increasingly addressed the resulting interaction between IOs and civil society with a focus on NGOs, we know little about the particular reactions to IOs' opening up by social movements. This paper analyzes reactions to opening up by a transnational social movement centrally addressing IOs: the Global Justice Movement (GJM). Examining reactions by different groups of the GJM in Europe and Southeast Asia to IOs' opening up, we demonstrate that reactions differ considerably depending on activists' assessments of the nature of opening up. In particular, we identify four pathways of reactions on a continuum from (1) strong cooperation with IOs as a reaction to opening up, (2) temporally limited cooperation with different IOs, (3) a hybrid reaction that combines cooperation with specific IOs with a strong opposition to other IOs in reaction to their opening up, to (4) a continuous rejection of all cooperation with IOs. We show how these different reactions are shaped by activists' perceptions of the quality of the international opening up in conjunction with national and local context factors. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that such perceptions can significantly change over time depending on experiences of interactions. Reactions to opening up are therefore not predictable on the basis of a movement's shape and resources only, but rather depend on a variety of factors such as the movement's perception of the IO's sincerity in a strategic and consequential interaction, as well as the movement's ideological framework and its history of interaction with institutions at other levels, especially in the domestic realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the individual-level building blocks of getting out the vote (GOTV) for electoral parties that represent subaltern sectors in resource scarce environments. Drawing on theories of protest waves, social movement fields, and threat-induced collective action, we examine the likelihood of campaigning in left party electoral mobilization and party identification. The study implements a modified version of the Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC) survey protocol and respondent selection design. We use a sympathy pool sample of over 1,200 May Day participants in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras to explain the micro-foundations of electoral proselytizing of political parties advocating for disadvantaged populations. We found that involvement in left party electoral campaigning was largely driven by resources deposited during anti-neoliberal protest waves, including prior movement-type protest, civic organizational activity, and economic threat perceptions. Campaigning for the anti-neoliberal party was also associated with a higher level of post-election party identification. The findings suggest that left parties may at times partially overcome economic and political resource deficits by mobilizing individuals deeply embedded in the social movement field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective altruism is a growing philosophical and social movement, whose members design their lives in ways aligned with doing the most good that they can do. The main focus of this paper is to explore what effective altruism has to say about the moral obligations people have to do good with their organs, in the face of an organ-shortage problem. It is argued that an effective altruism framework offers a number of valuable theoretical and practical insights relevant to ongoing debate about how to resolve the organ-shortage problem. Its recommendations constitute a plausible and promising strategy for increasing the supply of, and decreasing the demand for, human organs, in a way that protects (rather than ignores, or preys upon) the global poor. And, many of its recommendations can be implemented into policy without requiring that citizens actually become effective altruists themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Shirin Rai's essay on the good life and solidarity. The paper takes up many questions about solidarity and the good life raised by Rai, and discusses issues such as strategic essentialism and intersectionality in contemporary social movements. I raise up my voice . . . so that those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights: Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated. . . . Dear sisters and brothers, we realise the importance of light when we see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are silenced Malala Yousafzai (July 12, 2013) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reinterprets Marx’s theory of the form of value in the context of his theory of the commodity. Building on the unresolved tension between Marx’s concept of value and the specific character of the labour constituting itself as value in his theory of commodity production, it is argued that Marx’s is actually a theory of the mercantile form of value. Thus, it becomes evident that the process of realisation of material production in commodity production and the process giving rise to money are the same, and that they are only the material manifestation of the process of realisation of private and independent work as social labour. This characterises commodity production as the unity-in-difference of a material and a social moment, showing that Marx’s mercantile form of value is the conceptualisation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The paper also argues that Marx’s is not the theory of a money commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is based on recent research conducted in Brazil on young people's understanding and practices of public action. The research examines some of the initiatives in which young people today participate: community organizations, cultural groups and social movements, and asks what this engagement means in their day-to-day lives. The paper also examines the historical processes that have come to shape this present field of public action and identifies the emergence of new forms of political engagement through cultural forms which provide a key entry point for young people's participation. The paper provides an analysis of the ways in which young people often come to be engaged in forms of public action through cultural forms, such as music, dance, cinema, theatre, photography, which are used by a number of groups as tools for critical reflection, or conscientização, and as a means for personal and community development. The paper explores these processes and goes on to identify a genealogy in the non-governmental sector of an alternative pedagogy that was much influenced by Paulo Freire but which gains new forms through the use of various elements of contemporary popular culture and different types of information and communication technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although criminal-legal interventions became accepted as the best response to domestic violence early in the battered women's movement, recent literature suggests that such interventions are often ineffective in reducing rates of violence. Despite this evidence, domestic violence advocates still emphasize criminal-legal interventions over alternatives when working with victims of violence. The author spent thirteen months observing domestic violence advocates in a feminist nonprofit organization to learn how the paradoxical reliance on criminal-legal interventions is reproduced. The paper identifies three mechanisms. First, information on criminal-legal interventions is emphasized more than other interventions in advocate training. Second, nonprofit staff present extreme examples of abuse and their associated criminal-legal interventions while training advocates rather than describing the types of abuse more typically brought to the organization. Finally, staff establish protocols for handling advocates' discontent with criminal-legal interventions which makes further collaboration between volunteers and the police possible. Together, these mechanisms reproduce criminal-legal interventions by limiting advocates' knowledge of the variety of alternative interventions. Practically, this work suggests several ways for advocates to destabilize ineffective organizational practices. Theoretically, the author shows that normative institutions are reproduced not just through socialization and coercion, but also through a lack of alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the video-sharing platform YouTube was utilized by networks of anti-immigration activists that began emerging in Finland during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. By combining network analysis with qualitative analysis, we identified three central strategies of video activism: movement building through documentation, discursive controversy generation, and personal branding practices. These strategies are firmly supported by the affordances of YouTube and by the way in which the platform enables the building of varying scales of media presence. Consequently, our findings highlight the increasingly common practice of microcelebrity branding in online political communication. This notion demonstrates the affinities between fragmented and contingently mobilized anti-immigration movements and the personalizing and performance-oriented logics of social media presence, in particular when explored from a post-movement perspective. In the algorithmic environment of YouTube, microcelebrity is a political and a platform-specific genre that occupies the post-movement political space by generating sustainable algorithmic visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the concept of gender mainstreaming has gained acceptance among many national and international development organizations, many obstacles are faced in translating the concept into tangible improvements in the health and well-being of women and men. This paper presents two qualitative case studies, one from Kenya and one from Uganda, of experiences of mainstreaming gender at district level; experiences which are set against the context of decentralization and sector-wide approaches (SWAPs). The conceptual framework of social movement theory, as used by Hafner-Burton and Pollack, is drawn upon to analyze the findings of both case studies. This paper has been written in conjunction with a paper by Theobald et al. which explores gender mainstreaming at national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements are manifestations of and facilitate human 'agency' (LaClau and Mouffe, 1987; Touraine, 1998). The past 20 years reveal a burgeoning number of service and advocacy organizations which focus on the specific needs, interests and issues of minority members of our society. In some cases these minorities represent a significant sector of the population yet continue to be regarded as minorities, as others, as less than full citizens. Full citizenship appears to be conferred differentially. Conceptually, citizenship reflects the idea that citizens act in the public sphere, they contribute to, and shape the discourses which, in turn, and in part, structure our society. All of the members of the society are, conceptually and theoretically, entitled to this participation. Practically, however, citizenship appears to be increasingly exclusively conferred. This paper explores these issues theoretically and conceptually, first examining the relationship between civil society and social movements and the public sphere; how these realms might be understood to intersect and interrelate. In short, the paper explores the question of whether the actions and agency of citizens in civil society effects the public sphere. Whether these persons and their activities contribute an alternative discourse which is a discourse of the public, or only of a marginal realm, is a question critical to understanding the relationship between community development, civil society and social change. While this paper can not claim to answer this question, it explores these ideas and our contemporary experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This section comments on the article "Fear of Crime, Urban Fortunes and Suburban Social Movements: Some Reflections on Manchester," by I. Taylor, published in 1996. According to the author, the article focuses on understanding the character of suburban social movements. Taylor, in his article, asserted that the issue of crime in suburban south Manchester is real based on statistics. The author also mentioned that Taylor talked about several issues including personal safety and aspects of the quality of life.

This paper presents an analysis of environmental movements in two Eastern European societies: Hungary and Russia, based on a recently completed research project.' The analysis of the movements will also give us an opportunity to examine the extent of the development of democratic institutions in two post- socialist societies. The comparison of these two cases will also reveal the extent of diversity within the so called former `Soviet bloc' and demonstrate that generalizing about them is misleading. After a brief review of nine different movements they are compared in terms of their structure and goals, the characteristics of their participants and leaders, the extent of internal and external conflicts, and the role of the media. The different degrees of public resonance and success of the movements in both countries are a focus of the paper. The paper has several aims: apart from analysing and comparing Russian and Hungarian environmental movements and examining the extent of development of democratic institutions in these two recently `democratized' societies, it will also consider the relevance of existing western literature in the Eastern European context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop an institutional movement logics approach to analyze the structure and dynamics of the US social movement field from 1960 to 1995. Using protest event data taken from the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset, we elicit the most salient combinations of issues, tactics, and targets reported to co-occur at protest events in four periods: 1960–1965, 1966–1972, 1973–1987, and 1988–1995. The analysis reveals the existence of six movement logics of varying breadth, flexibility, and stability. We also detect two important shifts in the overall structure of the field, one toward a broad and flexible form of state-centric politics and one toward several differentiated and narrowly defined forms of nonpolitical contention. We find support for two key premises of the institutional movement logics framework, limited diversity, and relative stability within and between logics while showing that a longer time frame offers a window on field dynamics not visible with shorter study time frames. We close by providing suggestions for further research seeking to build on the institutional movement logics approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores an overarching question that informs our understanding of political intersectionality in movement coalition building work: How do limited material resources affect the intersectional consciousness of social movements and the nature of their coalition building work? To answer this question, I conducted an expert survey to assess the intersectional consciousness of the European lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex movement during times of financial crisis. I argue, somewhat paradoxically, that intersectional consciousness is most present at the transnational level, where the potential for brokering cross-movement relationships is high, and that the financial crisis has heightened that consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the formation and subsequent securitization of the digital protest movement Anonymous, highlighting the emergence of social antagonists from communication itself. In contrast to existing approaches that implicitly or explicitly conceptualize Othering (and securitization) as unidirectional process between (active) sender and (passive) receiver, an approach that is based on communication gives the 'threat' a voice of its own. The concept proposed in this paper focuses on 'designations' as communicating rules and attributes with regard to a government object. It delineates how designations give rise to the visibility of political entities and agency in the first place. Applying this framework, we can better understand the movement's path from a bunch of anonymous individuals to the collectivity 'Anonymous,' posing a threat to certain bases of the state's ontological existence, its prerogative to secrecy, and challenging its claim to unrestrained surveillance. At the same time, the state's bases are implicated and reproduced in the way this conflict is constructed. The conflict not only (re)produces and makes visible 'the state' as a social entity, but also changes or at least challenges the self-same entity's agency and legitimacy. Such a relational approach allows insights into conflict formation as dynamic social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature examines the dynamics of social movement contention within and across "social fields." While fields tend toward stability, events and processes elsewhere in a broader system of fields can provide opportunities for movement mobilization. Most accounts see these cross-field dynamics as exogenous events, granting movements little control over when and how these opportunities might emerge. In contrast, this article argues that activists can and do purposely create cross-field effects. Examining changes in contentious practice in the American labor movement--which in recent decades, has reoriented contention over workplace issues away from workplaces themselves, and toward political arenas more traditionally dominated by community concerns--this article advances the concept of cross-field manipulation, purposive strategic action that accounts for the positioning of actors across social fields, triggering events in one field so as to reorder the dynamics of another. Using a historical study of evolving organizing practices in a Southern California hotel workers' union, including interviews and archival sources, the paper identifies three mechanisms--power analysis, alliance building, and actor-triggered crises--whereby labor activists purposely generate cross-field effects. Through repeated interactions with employers and polities, activists learned a unique campaign model that politicized workplace conflict in communities and markets, generating opportunities for workplace gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Notwithstanding recent interest in the politics of housing, squatting in the formative contexts of post‐Restoration rural England remains little understood and studied. Drawing upon a diverse archive of central government papers and those of the local officers of the New Forest – the largest Crown forest in England and Wales – this article argues that the resort to squatting was a function of the uneven contours of forest governance. Moreover, while squatting led to the formation of new communities, it was neither exclusively a plebeian act nor, against official discourses, necessarily an abuse of the assets of the forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past few years have seen renewed interest in the radical social work tradition both in Britain and internationally in response to the highly negative impact of neo-liberal policies on people's lives and on the profession itself. While these perspectives are now beginning to be included within social work academic curricula, less consideration has been given within the international literature as to how they might also inform practice placements and field education. This paper outlines the findings of a small piece of qualitative research that explored the experience of one South African social work programme of placing a small group of students within campaigning organisations and social movements concerned with addressing structural issues. Based on interviews with the students, their practice teachers and agency representatives, the research addressed the extent to which students were able to draw on their teaching to make sense of these agencies and their role within them, as well as the particular challenges to which these placements gave rise. The paper concludes by suggesting that, while students undertaking such placements may require additional support and teaching in areas such as the understanding of trauma and critical political analysis, these findings suggest that this is an initiative worth repeating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Islamic activism is manifested in heterogeneous and overlapping forms. This paper aims at furthering the understanding of Islamic activism by developing a two-dimensional typology that accounts for the nature of Islamic activism discourse and the outlook of its programmatic action. Specifically, the terrain of Islamic activism is mapped out by intersecting two orientations: the approach toward understanding sharia (Islam's socio-religious teachings) and the form of activism. As for sharia approaches, three modes of thinking occupy Islamic activism: a didactic mode, a literalist mode, and an eclectic mode. On the other hand, three forms of activism divide the field of action: a local social movement of a limited scope of concerns, a global social movement of expansive social and political themes, and an individualistic type of activism. The interaction of these types of activism with the modes of sharia understanding produces the ecology of contemporary Islamic activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A steady rise in what is called 'non-regular employment' is the most notable change in Japanese working life since at least the 1980s. Such workers accounted for nearly 40% of all employees by 2015. This paper focuses on the results of the turn to non-regular employment and identifies its distinctive aspects in the context of a long history of various forms of precarious employment. A historical perspective shows that newer forms of second-tier status, including some that can be termed 'non-regular regular' employment, have come to overlay continuing older ones. Important new elements include not only a far greater absolute and relative number of non-regular workers but also their far greater presence in the service sector. In addition, today's nonregular workers differ in social characteristics such as age, education, and gender. The relative decline of social movements is a notable impediment in seeking reform, while the move away from seeing gender as a natural axis of differentiation offers some potential for addressing the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are growing calls within public health for researchers and practitioners working to improve and protect the public's health to become more involved in politics and advocacy. Such a move takes practitioners and researchers beyond the traditional, evidence-based public health paradigm, raising potential dilemmas and risks for those who undertake such work. Drawing on the example of the People's Health Movement, this short paper argues that advocacy and social movements are an essential component of public health's efforts to achieve great health equity. It outlines how the Scottish branch of the People's Health Movement sought to overcome potential tensions between public health evidence and advocacy by developing a regional manifesto for health via transparent and democratic processes which combine empirical and experiential evidence. We suggest that this is an illustrative example of how potential tensions between public health research and advocacy can be overcome, through bottom--up movements of solidarity and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social-movement organizations compete with each other as do other organizations. Competition affects their success, and when facing competition, organizations must adjust. Thus, the evolution of social-movement organizations is influenced by other organizations in their environment. To study the dynamics of competition, this paper suggests that organizations compete for members. By using the analogy of the ecological niche, competition between social-movement organizations can be modelled with regard to the degree to which organizational niches overlap, with niche defined by characteristics of the organizations' members. Competition for members is studied in terms of growth and decline in membership. The niche dynamics of competition are investigated in terms of whether the size and location of organizational niches are interdependent over time. Some of the predictions are tested using data on the evolution of two Swedish social-movement organizations during the period 1915-34. The results are in line with the theoretical predictions of the paper: competition affects the ability of organizations to attract members, and competitive situations produce adjustments in the size and location of the niche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a commentary by James R. Beniger to Charles Tilly's paper, Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys or Social Movements. In considering the tittle of the paper, an obvious question comes to mind. Elections, surveys, social movements--are these three types of organized events in any way comparable with respect to speaking one's mind? I want to argue that the historical significance of surveys does not enable us to speak our minds unlike elections and social movements. Rather, surveys enable those who commission the survey to find out what is in our minds--whether we want to tell them or not. Speaking one's mind implies an act of communication, communication from an individual to another. However, Tilly's paper fails to pay much attention to the receivers of all the communicating that he has studied. This lack of sustained attention to the complete act of communicating--of both speaking one's mind and having one's mind monitored--has a special irony: it is precisely the same subject of communication and social control that I belive Tilly makes his most important contribution. I refer to his idea of popular collective action as a selection from a limited repertoire, especially a symbolic one, and one which shifted abruptly in the mid-19th century. This is what we would expect-- a limited set of easily recognizable acts, the meaning of which is clearly understood by both sender and receiver--if popular collective action is indeed an act of communication.

This paper compares the social-exploration literature of radical, mostly Owenite and Chartist, and liberal journalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, though the focus is on the less known 'portraits of the poor' in radical papers. In the paper I argue that against the developing liberal practice of intricately mapping poverty and categorizing the poor, radical papers under-represented particular cases of poverty, using an obfuscating syntax to document the poor. In doing so, radicals differentiated themselves from their middle-class counterparts, primarily as a way to challenge the assumption that poverty was a function of individual error and to turn the public's gaze onto the social causes of poverty. Highlighting the political dimensions of poverty and minimizing the language of 'personal responsibility', radicals demonstrated that the activist agenda concerned itself with the economic and social as much as with the political, even while offering political solutions to economic and social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious social justice activist groups strive to develop cultural commitments for sustained activism within congregations. Existing research explains the political and organizational challenges they encounter and hints at corresponding struggles over church culture, but these cultural conflicts have not been fully explained. This paper shows that in attempts to build cultural commitments to activism, faith-based community organizing (FBCO) leaders consciously contest congregational cultures rooted in individualistic orientations to religious commitment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that clergy and lay leaders in FBCO coalitions seek to problematize and displace a comfortable church culture, which extends individualistic religious commitments and individualistic orientations to social problems and thus hinders the cultural appeal of social justice activism in many religious communities. I analyze efforts to replace this comfortable church culture with a culture that encourages activism, and I argue that this struggle reveals a discursive conflict between competing visions of religious life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the controversy surrounding the 1990 ‘Bristol Study’ as an indicator of developments in health activism and medical research in the United Kingdom in the subsequent decade, and as a case study of the motivations prompting people to become activists. Researchers investigating complementary therapies at the Bristol Cancer Help Centre found the therapies were associated with poorer survival prospects. However, the study was later shown to be seriously flawed. Stung by researchers' insensitivity, participants formed the Bristol Study Support Group (BSSG) to lobby for new funding and journal review procedures, and for participants to be co-investigators. Their agenda was symptomatic of activists increasingly seeking to become integral to research processes. Groups like the BSSG were helped by the New Labour party's interest in increasing civic involvement. However, activist participation was limited to research planning and administration, not results interpretation, suggesting that, while activists could influence the politics of 1990s medical research, research practice was immune. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Transition Town (TT) movement has grown to become a global phenomenon aimed at assisting towns and communities to envision sustainable and self-reliant futures post peak oil. Arguably, this movement offers an exciting alternative to traditional notions of growth and development. This paper explores the rise of the TT movement focusing particularly on the processes involved in establishing a ‘TT’ raising questions pertaining to governance and to notions of participatory democracy within the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a profile of the consumerist and tests for significant differences between the consumerist and the average consumer. The findings suggest that the consumerist differs significantly on socioeconomic, life style, attitudinal, readership, and listenership variables, while constituting a sizeable segment (15 percent) of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for integrating technology with youth advocacy efforts to affect social change and influence social determinants of health, particularly in 1) recruiting people to join the cause, 2) organizing collective action, 3) raising awareness and shaping attitudes, 4) raising funds to support the cause, and 5) communicating with decision makers. Making strategic decisions to combine technology and youth advocacy will give youth a voice, arm them with advocacy skills, and increase their self-efficacy. These youth may become adults who are involved in larger policy-based decisions that will address the social determinants of health that affect the health status of people in their communities and throughout the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the development of socialism in Kenya in the 1960s. The author explores the socioeconomic change that occurred during this time and discusses factors that proved to be influential in the country's development of African Socialism. Sessional Paper No. 10 from 1965, produced by Kenya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, coined this phrase and outlined the economic and social change the country envisioned. The author also explores the impact that political and economic freedom had on Kenya and the role that Cold War politics had on Kenya's development process.

While a great deal of work on England and Ireland in the seventeen-nineties has been published in recent decades, Scotland has attracted far less attention. This article uses a series of uniquely rich archival collections to reconstruct in detail currents of opinion and political developments in two Scottish counties, Perthshire and Angus, in this period. It presents new evidence on the scope, social depth and resilience of radicalism and loyalism, and examines the nature and limitations of political stability in this region. In doing so, it brings into question the notion of ‘massive political stability’ in Scotland in the seventeen-nineties and the sharp contrasts which are sometimes drawn between popular politics in England and Scotland in the age of the French Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a puzzle of how conflicts characterized by significant power asymmetries often play out much differently than dominant powers expect. We adapt the notions of institutionalized peace and riot systems from the literature on ethnic violence to identify ways in which social institutions attenuate collective action dilemmas, thereby increasing capability for a less-powerful group. Dominant groups often miscalculate the true nature of capability relationships by failing to account for these group-specific institutions that operate in the face of exogenous threats. We illustrate our model with two episodes of Chechen mobilization in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the reasons behind a historic shift in the language couching the wage demands of two North American labor movements during the last twenty years of the 19th century -- the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. We trace how the once dominant imagery of "wage slavery" lost its connection to producerist labor ideology and eventually was replaced by the more progmatic symbolism of "wage work." This linguistic shift is of particular scholarly importance because it occurred during a time when producerist labor politics, with its emphasis on a radical reorganization of work and private property, lost significant ground to a more consumerist/economistic version of labor politics. We show that this pivotal rhetorical shift was linked to changes in tire cultural opportunity structure. These were, in turn, shaped through movement sector dynamics and through changes in the empirical referents which add meaning and resonance to social movement claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze global dimensions of contemporary social movements and attempts to answer the empirical question: why did the social movement for former comfort women emerge in the late 1980s after more than 40 years of silence? The theoretical framework integrates the world polity approach into social movement theory to argue that global political and cultural transformations in recent years have expanded political opportunities at the global level and intensified international flows of mobilizational resources and discursive frames, increasing the potential for social movements on globally legitimated issues such as human rights. The empirical analysis on the rise and development of the comfort women movement shows that these global factors have been crucial in the emergence and success of the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on social movements has found that activists often deploy their identity strategically, putting forth certain images of themselves in order to best achieve their goals. However, such work has focused mostly on settings in which activists are relatively free to pursue different identity-based strategies. In contrast, less is known about the strategic use of identity in more repressive contexts, where the expression of certain identities may be curtailed. This paper addresses this issue by examining the "identity work" of Jewish resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Poland. While their resistance was fueled by a strong sense of collective identity, the heavy costs associated with public displays of Jewishness meant that identity also had to be kept hidden in order for the resistance to occur. Unlike the freely chosen, "harmonic" identity work that has been described by most research, these activists' work was forced and more dissonant, characterized by the simultaneous amplification and suppression of identity and emotion. The analysis points to the need for additional studies of activism in high-risk, repressive settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the question of mass participation in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in 1937. The author analyzes the proliferation of repressive measures both in and through unions by tracing party directives from the Central Committee down to union members. Moreover, the author contends that repression was a mass phenomenon. Repression was closely related in 1937 with a campaign for union democracy, a mass movement for secret ballots and worker participation. Furthermore, the paper also highlights Stalinism, social movements and comparative genocide.

The paper analyses the relations between civicness and economic performance at the macro level. It builds on R. D. Putnam's research on civicness in Italian regions and on the debate it started, and estimates LISREL models of structural equations with data for 95 Italian provinces from the 1980s to the 2000s. Firstly, the empirical analysis shows that civicness and economic performance are longitudinally correlated, that their reciprocal effects are not as strong as autocorrelations, and that these effects' magnitude (controlling for the medium-term correlation) is roughly the same. This finding is not in accord with Putnam's `socio-cultural' theory of social change. Secondly, the mechanisms underlying the relation are studied, distinguishing short- and medium-term effects, and it is shown that civicness has a medium-term (20 years) effect on the economy, while the economy has a short-term (10 years) one on civicness. This medium-term effect is attributed to cohort change. Thirdly, the difference between Northern and Southern provinces is studied, estimating separate models for the two parts of the country: while the relations between civicness and economic performance still hold in the North, in the South they are less coherent and systematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has a dual aim: first, to draw attention to a number of passages in which Marx explicitly extolled the cooperative movement and thereby confute the wrong but widely held assumption that Marx was inimical to the market and rejected cooperation as a production mode even for the transition period; second, to argue that the continuing neglect of Marxists both of the co- operative movement and of the passages from Man (and Engels) that present a system of producer cooperatives as a new production mode can be traced back in part to the late emergence of an economic theory of producer cooperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]