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Leisure and popular culture have long played an important role in all aspects of life throughout the African continent. It has been recognised that the analysis of leisure and popular culture can put social practices, as well as political issues into relief. For instance, in colonial Brazzaville, Gold Coast and urban Zanzibar, dress and fashion not only symbolised change, but they were also tools for affirming and 'crystallising' new generational, gender, status and ethnic identities (Martin 1991, 1995; Akyeampong 1998; Fair 1998, 2001). This paper argues that this was also the case in urban colonial Tanganyika. For instance, young city dwellers - both men and women, Christians and Muslims, elite and non-elite - creatively 'appropriated' Western clothes in order to express new identities and aspirations, foster social changes, and sometimes bring about political transformations. In order to perceive such broader dynamics, this paper makes use of local debates on the changing fashions which took place in the Swahili-language press. This paper demonstrates that educated Africans used letters to the editor and mashairi (poems) - as a forum mainly to make comments and complain about 'new' clothing styles. Chiefly based on evidence found in the monthly magazine Mambo Leo, and partly in archival documents and oral testimonies (as well as photographic support) collected during my Ph.D. fieldwork carried out in Tanzania between 2004 and 2005, this paper aims to illustrate the ways in which new personal and collective identities were constructed (and contested) through clothing practices in everyday life. To a lesser extent, this paper also focuses on the interactions between local fashions and global elements. The focus on dress contributes to grasp local strategies of resiliency and broader processes through which the so-called 'common' people forged their notions of the 'modern' and produced 'translocal' connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade-and-a-half, sex workers in Kolkata (India) red-light districts have involved themselves in a STD-HIV health project and, at the same time, formed an autonomous organization to protest against exploitation and to challenge social norms that ostracize them. This paper examines how this marginalized group, who previously saw themselves as socially alienated victims, came to reinvent themselves as social actors, endowed with a sense of collective rights and capacity. The analytical focus is on the transformation of the worldview and self-perception of sex workers, and on the specific aspects of the development intervention that facilitated this transition. The following elements were found to be most significant: (a) the establishment of an egalitarian organizational culture in the health project; (b) the introduction of a dialogic educational programme; and (c) the development of a culture of political activism among sex workers, animated by a notion of their right to protest against injustice and inequality. The study draws attention to the change of attitudes and identity as the key factor propelling the engagement of the socially excluded and the poor in development processes and public action. By analysing this largely neglected theme in development literature, this paper contributes to debates on the question of participation from a hitherto under-explored perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many religious and spiritual movements mobilize to establish sacred fields which influence everyday life in multiple social domains. Because these devout groups operate across many institutional fields, scholars of religiously motivated movements are uniquely poised to contribute to scholarship on multiinstitutional politics and on how institutional change can be initiated and influenced by external cultural movements. In this paper, I bring attention to how religious movements can mobilize through unobtrusive political tactics which build upon extant social structures in multiple institutional fields, rather than through contentious tactics which are the focus of most movement research. Based on prior scholarship on religious movements and my own research, I identify how religious movements can expand through unobtrusive, nonconfrontational tactics such as “discursive politics,” developing a “state within a state,” “burrowing into” targeted organizations, and “assimilating into” mainstream organizations. These mechanisms identified in religious movement scholarship contribute to underdeveloped areas of scholarship at the intersection of social movement mobilization, organizational change, and field development, and provide a platform upon which future research can build. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we address the free-rider problem from a network perspective. We suggest that individuals' groups of relevant others are considerably smaller than is usually assumed in the Olsonian tradition. Instead of focusing on the interest group as a whole, we argue that a group of relevant others consists of those to whom the individual is tied through various social bonds. Since these groups tend to be small, social selective incentives are likely to be efficient in inducing individual participation. In testing these ideas empirically, we use microdata on members of a Swedish temperance movement organization during the period of 1896-1937. We estimate how individuals' groups of relevant others are composed with respect to membership in the movement organization and how the composition of the groups affects individuals' decisions to join the movement organization. The results of the analysis support our thesis that additional movement members in the group of relevant others increase an individual's propensity to join a social movement organization. However, the results also lend support to Olson's free-rider thesis: When controlling for the composition of the group of relevant others, additional members in the movement as a whole decrease an individual's propensity to join the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional crowd theory decontextualizes crowd incidents and explains behaviour entirely in terms of processes internal to the crowd itself. This ignores the fact that such incidents are characteristically intergroup encounters and draws attention away from the role of groups such as the police in the development of events. This paper begins to rectify this omission through an analysis of interviews with 26 Public Order trained police concerning crowds in general and the Poll Tax ‘riot’ of 31 March 1990 in particular. The analysis shows that, despite a perception of crowd composition as heterogeneous, officers perceive crowd dynamics as involving an anti-social minority seeking to exploit the mindlessness of ordinary people in the mass. Consequently, all crowds are seen as potentially dangerous and, in situations of actual conflict, all crowd members are seen as equally dangerous. In addition, police tactics for dealing with disorder make it very difficult to distinguish between individuals or subgroups in the crowd. This convergence of ideological and practical factors leads to the police treating crowds in disorder as an homogeneous whole. It is argued that such action can often play an important role in escalating (if not initiating) collective conflict and is also a key component of social change in crowd contexts. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competitive information diffusion on large-scale social networks reveals fundamental characteristics of rumor contagions and has profound influence on public opinion formation. There has been growing interest in exploring dynamical mechanisms of the competing evolutions recently. Nevertheless, the impacts of homogeneity trend, which determines powerful collective human behaviors, remains unclear. In this paper, we incorporate homogeneity trend into a modified competitive ignorant-spreader-ignorant rumor diffusion model with generalized population preference. Using microscopic Markov chain approach, we first derive the phase diagram of competing diffusion results on Erdös–Rényi graph and examine how competitive information spreads and evolves on social networks. We then explore the detailed effects of homogeneity trend, which is modeled by a rewiring mechanism. Results show that larger homogeneity trend promotes the formation of polarized ‘echo chambers’ and protects the disadvantaged information from extinction, which further changes or even reverses the evolutionary advantage, namely, the difference of stable proportions of the competitive information. However, the reversals may happen only when the initially disadvantaged information has stronger transmission ability, owning diffusion advantage over the other one. Our framework provides profound insight into competing dynamics with homogeneity trend, which may pave ways for further controlling misinformation and guiding public belief systems. Moreover, the reversing condition sheds light on designing effective competing strategies in many real scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]