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Mental health advocacy and activism have been highlighted as important in the effort towards creating environments for better mental health. However, relevant research in low- and middle-income country settings remains limited and lacks critical exploration. We seek to contribute to filling this gap by exploring driving factors behind mental health advocacy and activism efforts in low- and middle-income country settings. This review uses a critically informed thematic analysis employing conceptual frameworks of productive power to analyse peer-reviewed articles on mental health advocacy or activism over the last 20 years. We suggest that the current body of research is marred by superficial explorations of activism and advocacy, partly due to a lack of cohesion around definitions. Based on our findings, we suggest a conceptual framework to guide deeper explorations of mental health advocacy and activism. This framework identifies 'legitimacy', 'context' and 'timing' as the main dimensions to consider in understanding activism and advocacy efforts. The fact that they remain misunderstood and underappreciated creates missed opportunities for meaningful inclusion of lived experience in policy decisions and limits our understanding of how communities envision and enact change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global health agenda—a high stakes process in which problems are defined and compete for the kind of serious attention that promises to help alleviate inequities in the burden of disease—is comprised of priorities set within and among a host of interacting stakeholder arenas. This study informs crucial and unanswered conceptual and measurement questions with respect to civil society priorities in global health. The exploratory two-stage inquiry probes insights from experts based in four world regions and pilots a new measurement approach, analysing nearly 20 000 Tweets straddling the COVID-19 pandemic onset from a set of civil society organizations (CSOs) engaged in global health. Expert informants discerned civil society priorities principally on the basis of observed trends in CSO and social movement action, including advocacy, programme, and monitoring and accountability activities—all of which are widely documented by CSOs active on Twitter. Systematic analysis of a subset of CSO Tweets shows how their attention to COVID-19 soared amidst mostly small shifts in attention to a wide range of other issues between 2019 and 2020, reflecting the impacts of a focusing event and other dynamics. The approach holds promise for advancing measurement of emergent, sustained and evolving civil society priorities in global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social activism is a burgeoning human response to pressing problems around the world, and nowhere is this response more apparent than in the ongoing global push back against environmental externalities. In this article, we explore—for the first time—whether there are degrees of activism that relate to degrees of regulatory stringency. Using data on environmental conflicts resulting from fossil fuel production across 68 countries over the period 1995–2014, we find that, for a given tax rate, a move from a lax to more stringent regime lowers the rate of environmental conflicts. These findings underscore the contingent role of policy stringency as a trigger for intense social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a sociotechnical framework to study digital media and social movements and uses it to analyze the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Informed by actor-network theory, this framework examines media technology as infrastructure, practice, and text, and discusses its relation to other actors/actants in the network of social movements. Based on qualitative analysis of live streaming sessions and in-depth interviews with journalists and audiences, I identify and explicate the major actors/actants related to mobile live streaming and argue that mobile live streaming became an obligatory passage point through which actors/actants reached other parts of the network and realized their goals. The assemblage of heterogeneous actors/actants not only contributed to the solidarity and longevity of the movement but also brought risks. This study extends the line of research on media technology and social movements by proposing a framework that examines one specific media technology while maintaining an ecological lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The run-up to the 2020 election in the United States was marked by an unprecedented health pandemic and a social movement to challenge structural racism and advance social justice. Record numbers of Americans risked their health by protesting and voting in 2020. We analyze the relationship between a desire to advance social justice and Native American political behavior and political accountability utilizing data from the 2020 American Election Eve Survey's large sample of Native American voters. We find that in 2020, both perceptions of racial discrimination and the COVID-19 health pandemic had a significant effect on Native American mobilization and political accountability. We also advance the limited research on the Native American electorate by finding that living on or very near tribal lands is a consequential factor for Native American political behavior and their pursuits for justice through political participation. [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]

Since the 2016 US presidential campaign and the rise of the #MeToo movement, issues of sexual assault and harassment have risen to prominence. At the same time, these issues have also been understood and evaluated through the lens of partisanship. The US Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh exemplified these dynamics by providing clear partisan and emotion-laden cues to citizens. Given these events' temporal proximity to the midterms, we argue that the confirmation hearings not only amplified an ongoing conversation, but also heightened the effect of sexist predispositions on turnout. Using a unique online survey with validated voter turnout in the 2018 midterms, we find that higher levels of modern sexism increased turnout among Republicans while lower levels of modern sexism increased turnout among Democrats. In 2018, sexist predispositions triggered turnout in opposing ways across the aisle. [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]

Understanding how key parameters (e.g. density, range-size, and configuration) can affect animal movement remains a major goal of population ecology. This is particularly important for wildlife disease hosts, such as the European badger Meles meles , a reservoir of Mycobacterium bovis. Here we show how movements of 463 individuals among 223 inferred group territories across 755 km2 in Ireland were affected by sex, age, past-movement history, group composition, and group size index from 2009 to 2012. Females exhibited a greater probability of moving into groups with a male-biased composition, but male movements into groups were not associated with group composition. Male badgers were, however, more likely to make visits into territories than females. Animals that had immigrated into a territory previously were more likely to emigrate in the future. Animals exhibiting such "itinerant" movement patterns were more likely to belong to younger age classes. Inter-territorial movement propensity was negatively associated with group size, indicating that larger groups were more stable and less attractive (or permeable) to immigrants. Across the landscape, there was substantial variation in inferred territory-size and movement dynamics, which was related to group size. This represents behavioral plasticity previously only reported at the scale of the species' biogeographical range. Our results highlight how a "one-size-fits-all" explanation of badger movement is likely to fail under varying ecological contexts and scales, with implications for bovine tuberculosis management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on consumer movements that seek ideological and cultural change. Building from a basis in New Social Movement (NSM) theory, we study these movements among anti-advertising, anti-Nike, and anti-GE food activists. We find activists' collective identity linked to an evangelical identity related to U.S. activism's religious roots. Our findings elucidate the value of spiritual and religious identities to gaining commitment, warn of the perils of preaching to the unconverted, and highlight movements that seek to transform the ideology and culture of consumerism. Conceiving mainstream consumers as ideological opponents inverts conventional NSM theories that view them as activists' clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of African-American consumers living in a large racially segregated midwestern city adds to extant theory on ideology in consumer behavior by considering the role of normative political ideology in provisioning. The specific roles of traditional black liberal and black nationalist political ideologies are discussed. We conclude that normative political ideology is central to understanding shopping as an expression of social and political relations between households confronting attenuated access to goods and services, ranging from housing to food, in a setting stratified by gender, race, and class. Beyond the specifics of this demographic group and setting, we suggest that contemporary consumption in the United States is a primary arena in which political ideology is expressed and constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post-postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnography explores the emancipatory dynamics of the Burning Man project, a one-week-long antimarket event. Practices used at Burning Man to distance consumers from the market include discourses supporting communality and disparaging market logics, alternative exchange practices, and positioning consumption as self-expressive art. Findings reveal several communal practices that distance consumption from broader rhetorics of efficiency and rationality. Although Burning Man's participants materially support the market, they successfully construct a temporary hypercommunity from which to practice divergent social logics. Escape from the market, if possible at all, must be conceived of as similarly temporary and local. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual's participation a function of their beliefs about others' turnout. We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates individuals' beliefs about others' protest participation, in the context of Hong Kong's ongoing antiauthoritarian movement. We elicit subjects' planned participation in an upcoming protest and their prior beliefs about others' participation, in an incentivized manner. One day before the protest, we randomly provide a subset of subjects with truthful information about others' protest plans and elicit posterior beliefs about protest turnout, again in an incentivized manner. After the protest, we elicit subjects' actual participation. This allows us to identify the causal effects of positively and negatively updated beliefs about others' protest participation on subjects' own turnout. In contrast with the assumptions of many recent models of protest participation, we consistently find evidence of strategic substitutability. We provide guidance regarding plausible sources of strategic substitutability that can be incorporated into theoretical models of protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legacy media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement often highlighted charismatic male leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while scores of Black women worked quietly in the background. Today's leaders of the modern Black Lives Matter movement have turned this paradigm on its face. This case study explores the revamped communication styles of four Black feminist organizers who led the early Black Lives Matter Movement of 2014: Brittany Ferrell, Alicia Garza, Brittany Packnett, and Marissa Johnson. Additionally, the study includes Ieshia Evans: a high-profile, independent, anti–police brutality activist. In a series of semi-structured interviews, the women shared that their keen textual and visual dismantling of Black respectability politics led to a mediated hyper-visibility that their forebearers never experienced. The women share the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, and weigh in on the sustainability of their communication methods for future Black social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

A personality-related study was made of individuals exhibiting socially conscious consumer behavior. It was found that these individuals may be characterized as "self-actualizing" as Maslow uses the term. The findings expand previous findings by Webster, and they are evidence that a holistic approach to personality measurement is possible in consumer research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networked content flows that focus or fragment public attention are key communication processes in multimedia ecologies. Understandings of events may differ widely, as networked attention and framing processes move from core participants to more distant spectator publics. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street protests, peripheral social media networks of public figures and media organizations focused public attention on economic inequality. Although inequality was among many issues discussed by the activists, it was far less central to the protest core than problems with banks or democracy. Results showed how public attention to inequality was constructed through pulling and pushing interpretive frames between the core and periphery of dense communication networks. Various indicators of public attention--such as search trends, Wikipedia article edits, and legacy media coverage--all credited the protests with raising public awareness of inequality, even as attention to problems with banks grew at the protest core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw on ethnographic research to examine some key communication activism practices of Spain's indignados (15M) movement. The 15M radically transformed communication activism in Spain through its strong political-pedagogical orientation. Here lies the greatest 15M lesson for Communication for Social Change: Ordinary citizens in countries like Spain are rejecting traditional roles as 'beneficiaries' of institutional communication campaigns. Instead, they have become active political actors who are able to generate their own processes of political pedagogy and communication. We conceptualize this lesson by positing the existence of three principles of 15M communication activism as a school of politics: the principles of pedagogical sovereignty, action, and networking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following essay, I offer and explain the concept of wild public networks as a tool for social movement scholars interested in taking a network approach to contemporary protests via poststructuralism. Wild public networks offer scholars a means of approaching social movements that moves past binaries to productively incorporate affect. In so doing, the concept of wild public networks advances an ontological shift for social movement scholars that also alters what we examine and how. Wild public networks consider how the movement of the social can be witnessed in changes to relationships between actants and the configurations of networks. To explicate this new concept, I turn to contemporary environmental protests in Maoming, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing emphasis on collective action raises new questions for research and practice in communication for development and social change. What actors drive processes of collective action? What are the communication features of their interventions? What type of social change processes do they enhance? What evidence demonstrates the impact of collective action processes? What theoretical frameworks inform our understanding of collective action and social change? What is the role of communication scholarship in this context? In this article, we address these questions, review the contexts of contemporary transformation and key debates in communication for development and social change, and propose a research agenda for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between 'contentious actions' and communication processes in communication for social change (CSC) theory. Beginning with an analysis of the contributions made by Charles Tilly to the understanding of the methods and repertoires of popular protest and E. P. Thompson's interpretation of the moral economy of protests, it explores the history of contentious action in India, before focusing on the empowerment potential of the 'Public Hearing' as contentious action, specifically in the context of the Right to Information Movement in India. It argues that contentious actions such as public hearings need to become a focus for study in CSC theory precisely because it contributes to the validation of Voice, and to individual and collective empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a regime change model in which people are uncertain about both the quality of a specific regime and governance in general. The poor perceive the current regime as bad, rationally infer that all governments are bad, and therefore believe mass movements are futile. The middle class are more sanguine about the prospect of good government, and believe that collective action is effective because they expect many fellow citizens to share the same view. This coordination game with incomplete information does not admit monotone equilibrium but exhibits multiple interval equilibria, where middle class people are more likely to attack the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with leaders of the effort to promote the 2016 Bernie Sanders U.S. presidential candidacy on social media, this study contrasts the structure and content of various organizational networks to map the hybrid ecosystem of the contemporary digital campaign. While the 'official' Sanders organization built applications to transform supporters into a tightly controlled distribution network for its social media messaging, this was complemented by 'unofficial' grassroots networks that circulated more informal and culturally oriented appeals. The latter are classified according to the models of organizationally enabled and self-organized connective action in digital social movements, with structural differences in oversight and moderation that suggest varying levels of creative autonomy for citizens and reputational risk for the associated campaigns. [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]

We present a two-stage coordination game in which early choices of experts with special interests are observed by followers who move in the second stage. We show that the equilibrium outcome is biased towards the experts' interests even though followers know the distribution of expert interests. Expert influence is fully decentralised in the sense that each individual expert has a negligible impact. The bias in favour of experts results from a social learning effect that is multiplied through a coordination motive. We apply our results to the onset of social movements and to the diffusion of products with network externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of collective identity formation within an organization that is part of the new atheist movement to illuminate how a nascent social movement organization successfully builds collective identity through the construction of permeable boundaries. The organization delineates clear boundaries from outsiders so that it can foster collective identity among its members: Group processes that take place within the social movement organization facilitate collective identity formation through contrast to an abstracted and maligned other and through inclusion of former outsiders, namely the formerly religious. In fact, those who cross the boundary between atheists and religious believers make core contributions to supporting boundary maintenance within the organization. The analysis evidences the importance of boundary permeability for understanding collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model minority stereotype has been widely criticized for creating distinctions between racial groups by depicting some as more deserving than others. Immigration scholars have begun exploring similar distinctions among immigrant groups, with most research highlighting the role of anti-immigrant forces, the media, and policymakers in constructing divisions. Ethnographic research on the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of interfaith immigrant rights organizations, reveals that pro-immigrant activists also construct distinctions between "deserving" and "undeserving" immigrants. Building on frame alignment theory, which often focuses on movement discourse, I use a dramaturgical approach to highlight the nonrhetorical framing practices involved in creating these distinctions: in particular, the casting of select members of stigmatized groups and their public and visual association with more powerful actors. Through a type of frame transformation I call the model movement strategy--the use of model cases to challenge negative stereotypes of members of disadvantaged groups--New Sanctuary activists drew distinctions between model immigrants and those who did not share their dominant-friendly characteristics, implicitly portraying certain undocumented immigrants as less deserving of legal residency and citizenship. These findings suggest that the model movement strategy, an approach used by a variety of contemporary social movements, may have insidious consequences for the most vulnerable movement constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, WikiLeaks is embedded within broader debates relevant to both social movement and mediation theory. First, the nature of the ties between a variety of relevant actors are assessed. Second, the networked opportunities and constraints at a discursive and material level of analysis are highlighted and finally the resistance strategies they employ towards mainstream culture are addressed. It is concluded that at the heart of information and communication resistance a dynamic dialectic can be observed between mediated opportunities for disruptions and attempts of the powers that be to close down these opportunities. Furthermore, it has to be acknowledged that reliance on mainstream actors and structures for exposure, funding or hosting contentious content comes with risks for radical activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the notion of a modular repertoire of contention within a political context. The work of sociologist Charles Tilly regarding such social movement actions is addressed. Other topics include the history of resistance by Great Britain, the notion of transferability of various forms of demonstrations, and the role of British members of Parliament in public meetings and petitions. Also noted is the role of Methodist movement activists in public activism, while the relation of war and taxation to society is addressed.

The article reflects on the impact of the article "Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay, and Change" by Mayer N. Zald and Roberta Ash in volume 44 of the periodical "Social Forces." Topics include the history of protest movements since 1966, the transformation of social movement organizations (SMOs), and the work of sociologists including Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly.

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]

We propose a political reform theory, a political and historical institutionalist argument that holds that shifts in political structures, partisan regimes and policy greatly influence movements. We appraise this argument, along with resource mobilization, political opportunity and media alternatives, by analyzing 600,000 articles in the New York Times and Washington Post that mention national U.S. social movement organizations (SMOs) in the largest 34 SMO industries across the twentieth century. We provide multivariate analyses of industry-level article mentions of SMOs and detailed analyses of the historical trajectories of coverage across the century. Although we find some support for major theories of movements and media influences, the political reform theory is strongly supported and outperforms standard political opportunity models. We conclude with suggestions to synthesize theories and for research on movement and media outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To deepen our understanding of the relationship between social media and political change during the Egyptian uprising of early 2011, events in Tahrir Square must be situated in a larger context of media use and recent history of online activism. For several years, the most successful social movements in Egypt, including Kefaya, the April 6th Youth, and We are all Khaled Said, were those using social media to expand networks of disaffected Egyptians, broker relations between activists, and globalize the resources and reach of opposition leaders. Social media afforded these opposition leaders the means to shape repertoires of contention, frame the issues, propagate unifying symbols, and transform online activism into offline protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the framing of Egypt's January 2011 uprising in the country's state-run, independent and social media using a unique dataset of Arabic language content from newspapers and key social media posts collected during the peak of protests. Semiofficial (governmental) newspapers framed the event as 'a conspiracy on the Egyptian state,' warning of economic consequence and attributing blame and responsibility for the chaos on others. Social media posts used a human interest frame defining protests as 'a revolution for freedom and social justice' and independent newspapers used a combination of these frames. Findings point toward the potential roles that news media will play in shaping public opinion and demonstrate why social media have wide appeal in times of political crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere have been credited in part to the creative use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet the information policies of the firms behind social media can inhibit activists and empower authoritarian regimes. Analysis of Facebook's response to Egypt's 'We Are All Khaled Said' group, YouTube's policy exemption for videos coming from Syria, Moroccan loyalist response to the online presence of atheists, and the activities of the Syrian Electronic Army illustrate how prohibitions on anonymity, community policing practices, campaigns from regime loyalists, and counterinsurgency tactics work against democracy advocates. These problems arise from the design and governance challenges facing large-scale, revenue-seeking social media enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the consequences of social movements typically aims to identify determinants of success or to draw attention to ways that social movements are able to secure new benefits for constituents by gaining concessions from political authorities. Yet social movements, even those that are ultimately defeated, may have an enduring impact on the communities in which they were once active. This impact may be far removed from the movement's stated goals and may be detrimental to constituents and to society at large. We identify an empirical relationship between Ku Klux Klan activism in the 1960s and increased numbers of homicides in southern U.S. counties in subsequent decades. We explain this finding by drawing attention to ways in which right-wing extremism can disrupt community cohesion, generate mistrust in legal authorities, and promote interpretations of conflict and conflict resolution that weaken constraints on violent behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at corporate participation in the international fair trade movement, with a particular focus on the multinational coffee firms Starbucks and Nestlé. It is suggested that corporate actors have co-opted the fair trade movement, limiting its progress in placing market exchange within a system social and moral relationships. According to the author, the movement's focus on certification and labeling has allowed corporations to weaken these standards. Details on the sociological study of social movement organizations (SMOs) are presented. Other topics include market embeddedness, private regulation, and global commodity chains.

The article looks at variations in the framing of arguments among 20th-century U.S. women's jury movements. According to the author, jury activists used both a traditional frame highlighting women's differences from men, and a radical frame highlighting their intellectual equality. It is suggested that frame variation among these activists was driven by their organizational identities and processes of counterframing and political and cultural resonance. Other topics include women lawmakers, political strategy, and political rhetoric.

Few studies examine whether the public agenda responds to different types of issue coverage in the same way. After outlining why such differences are likely, this study takes advantage of daily polling data and a rare sequence of news cycles surrounding the issue of gun control to compare how coverage of different political actors and events drives an issue’s placement on the public agenda. Coverage generated by the citizen activist group, the Million Mom March, is estimated to have a greater influence on public opinion compared to coverage of a string of school shootings or, finally, President Clinton’s campaign. Tests show that group or political biases do not drive these results but, along with evidence from the 2009 health care protests, coverage of citizen demonstrations consistently outperforms presidential news in its association with the mass public agenda. Although elected officials are granted greater access to news media coverage, the findings suggest that such access does not grant a corresponding influence on the public agenda. More generally, it demonstrates that news storyline content has measurable implications for news media agenda setting at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Polish farmers became politically contentious after democratization in 1989, despite their minimal involvement in the Solidarity movement. I test the effectiveness of social movement theories in explaining this phenomenon by examining frequency and intensity of protest from 1980-1995. I find that grievance models have little explanatory power, political opportunity accounts for the frequency of protest, and resource mobilization offers insight into both frequency and intensity of protests. Supplementing existing theories, I offer qualitative evidence that development programs designed to restructure agricultural cooperatives created mobilizing structures. The reforms were intended to help family farmers adapt to the new market economy, but because most protests targeted liberalization policies, I conclude that in their short-term success, development agencies inadvertently subsidized the cost of collection action against their long-term goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do social movements influence corporations? Recent work suggests that movements can inflict material damage on their targets and shape categories of evaluation in organizational fields. Extending these ideas, we examine the effects of anti-sweatshop campaigns on sales, stock performance, reputation and specialized ratings of U.S. firms, using fixed-effects regression models and event study methods. The analysis demonstrates that social movements can in some circumstances shape both the markets and fields that firms inhabit. Specifically, anti-sweatshop campaigns (1. had negative effects on sales (though only among certain types of firms), (2. influenced stock prices, and (3. shaped specialized ratings of corporate responsibility. They also diminished previously positive corporate reputations (to a modest degree) but did not radically alter reputational hierarchies in the business community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do some social movement leaders work harder than others? And, how does gender affect the patterns we uncover? Utilizing historical case study evidence of local chapters in the emerging movement opposing drinking and driving we are able to develop and test theoretical expectations about predictors of weekly effort among MADD and RID leaders. Taken together, our model explains 45 percent of the variation in leadership effort. We find bureaucratic complexity and victim support activities are more powerful predictors of effort than are individual leader characteristics, although all are important. Further analysis reveals that gender almost wholly conditions the strong effect of bureaucratic complexity on leadership effort so that increasingly complex chapter structures are associated with substantial increases in work hours for women but not men. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers an alternative interpretation of the relationship between two social movement organizations (SMOs) with roots in the Catholic Church of Chicago: Catholic Action (CA), specifically the form that began in the 1940s and expanded as the Christian Family Movement, and Call to Action (CTA), an SMO that emerged during the 1970s. Using social movement theories combined with the sociology of place, this article analyzes periodicals, archival data, and interviews arguing that (1) the SMOs are closely related, (2) that the relationship between them is an excellent example of movement-to-movement transmission, and (3) that the role of “place”—in this case, Chicago—is significant in the movement-to-movement transmission process. This article adds to our awareness of social movements within religious organizations, by demonstrating CA's continuing influence and its relationship to the mobilization of CTA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sylvester, Christine et al. (2011) The Forum: Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher. International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2011.01046.x [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at factors affecting the tactical disruptiveness of social movements seeking to change the behavior of corporate targets. Particular focus is given to market disruption, which diminishes' the target's acquisition and use of market resources, and mediated disruption, in which the social movement's grievances are communicated through third parties such as the media. According to the author, activists have more control over mediated disruption, while forms of market disruption such as boycotts depend on the selection of targets and the simultaneous use of mediated disruption. Details related to the effects of factors such as social movement organization (SMO) formality, public demonstrations, firm size, and target reputation on tactical disruptiveness are also presented.

The article presents an examination of the transnational homophile movement and the history of the International Committee for Sexual Equality (ICSE). It discusses the history of transnational activism and explores how the ICSE was able to connect homophile movements and groups around the world to form a cohesive group and promote the civil rights of homosexual minorities across the globe. It explores the inter-war period activism of the World League for Sexual Reform, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, it examines the 195 International Congress for Sexual Equality and discusses the passage of resolution endorsing gay rights by the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2011.

The article provides a comparative analysis of the health food movement of the 1830s in the U.S. led by William Sylvester Graham, and the organic foods movement in the U.S. of the 1960s and 1970s. The author contrasts the movements by focusing upon their differences in issue framing, the religious significance placed upon diet, and the relationship between personal growth and social change. The author asserts that many of the characteristics of the Grahamite movement were similar to the evangelical Christianity movement, while the organic foods movement's tactics resembled those of the New Left, environmentalism, and the counterculture of the era.