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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]

What drives the news coverage of social movements in the professional news media? We address this question by elaborating an institutional mediation model arguing that the news values, routines, and characteristics of the news media induce them to pay attention to movements depending on their characteristics and the political contexts in which they engage. The news-making characteristics of movements include their disruptive capacities and organizational strength, and the political contexts include a partisan regime in power, benefitting from national policies, and congressional investigations. To appraise these arguments, we analyze approximately 1 million news articles mentioning 29 social movements over the twentieth century, published in four national newspapers. We use negative binomial regression analyses and separate time-series analyses of the labor movement to assess the model's robustness across different movements, time periods, and news sources. In each analysis, the results support the hypotheses based on the institutional mediation model. More generally, we argue that the influence of social movements on institutions depends on the structure and operating procedures of those institutions. This insight has implications for future studies of the influence of movements on major social institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary social movement researchers claim that legitimizing elements of social movements can counteract collective action problems and increase the likelihood that self-interested individuals take collective rather than individual action. Their work is insightful and informative, but it rarely uses general theory to describe the processes through which movement elements acquire legitimacy. Nor does it apply general theory to describe the mechanisms or processes through which legitimized elements influence collective action. The laboratory experiments reported in this article test hypotheses derived from a general theory—the multiple-sources, multiple-objects theory of legitimacy. The experiments examine the effects that legitimacy (measured as peer endorsement) and network size have on coalition formation, a form of collective action, and the countervailing of power. The research finds support for the legitimacy arguments. Low-power actors form coalitions more often in networks that highly endorse coalition formation and in smaller networks. Coalitions countervail power, and coalitions in the smallest networks reverse power. [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]

The article discusses whether or not status-based social movements encourage narrow-mindedness and self-interest or if they create instances of mutual recognition across differences. A comparative and an ethnographic study of the social movements pro-black abolitionism and hip hop are used to explore this question. The researchers suggest that status-based social movements enable collective identity and the personal identities of their participants. The challenges that anti-racist whites posed to each movement are discussed.

A theoretical model was tested in which general parenting and parental smoking predicted anti-smoking socialization, which in turn predicted adolescent smoking onset. Participants were 4351 Dutch adolescents between 13 and 15 years of age. In the model, strictness and psychological autonomy granting were related to lower likelihood of smoking onset, and parental smoking was positively related to smoking onset. Involvement and strictness were positively related to anti-smoking socialization, whereas parents who smoke where less likely to be engaged in anti-smoking socialization. In turn, anti-smoking socialization was negatively related to adolescent smoking. To test mediation, an asymptotic resampling method was used (bootstrapping); anti-smoking socialization appeared to mediate the links between involvement and smoking onset, strictness and smoking onset and parental smoking and smoking onset. In addition, parental smoking appeared to moderate the link between anti-smoking socialization and smoking onset. Implications for prevention were addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an evaluation on key theories of social movement and alternative media developed in sociology and political science. The author mentions that increase in the studies of social movement and small-scale alternative media represents the attention given to social media movement. However, according to the author, this demonstrates how weakly social movement phenomena have registered in mass media analysis. The author also identifies certain conceptual assumptions found in current research on alternative uses of both the conventional media and the Internet.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has its origins in legal analysis but increasingly has been used by educational researchers to analyse the continued salience of institutional racism in educational settings. After providing a brief overview of the history of CRT and the educational issues addressed by critical race theorists, I review two books that explicitly engage critical race theory (CRT). Delgado and Stefancic's (2001) primer on the CRT literature provides an important backdrop for situating Guinier and Torres' (2002) ambitious argument for building grassroots social movements around the concept of political race. [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]

During the 1980s, homeless people formed social movement organizations and mobilized collective action events in cities across the U.S. From the vantage point of social movement theories and scholarship on homelessness, it is surprising that homeless protest was so prevalent in the 1980s. Yet we find evidence of homeless protest events across no fewer than 50 U.S. cities in the 1980--90 period. Drawing on social movement theories about the precipitants of mobilization, we examine the extent to which city-level contextual factors, and their change over time, affect variation in the frequency of homeless mobilization across 17 of these cities. Our findings reveal that a mix of factors congruent with strain and resource mobilization theories helps to account for variation in the frequency of homeless protest across U.S. cities in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on women's social organizations' involvement in the debate regarding prostitution. Context in which the debates arose and the widely diverging positions developed by women activists and feminists in the course of those debates; Ways by which these debates have become operative in the political arenas of Western democratic states.

This research examines trends in coverage of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in five prestigious medical journals during a period of intense reorganization within medicine (1965-1999). Content analysis of a sample of documents (N = 102) shows the medical profession responded to the growth of CAM in three distinct phases. During each phase, changes in the medical marketplace -- such as relaxed medical licensing, the development of managed care, rising consumerism, and the establishment of the Office of Alternative Medicine -- influenced the type of response in the journals. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, during the condemnation phase, authors ridiculed, exaggerated the risks, and petitioned the state to contain CAM. In the reassessment phase (mid-1970s through early 1990s), increased consumer utilization of CAM prompted concern, and authors pondered whether patient dissatisfaction and shortcomings in conventional care contributed to this trend. Throughout the 1990s, in the integration phase, struggles to outlaw CAM were abandoned, physicians began learning to work around or administer CAM, and the subjugation of CAM to scientific scrutiny became the primary means of control. This analysis demonstrates the evolutionary process of professionalization, a process in which dominance is sustained through adaptation to structural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter has four sections: 1. Women's Writing and Reading 2. Women and War 3. Introductions to Feminism and 4. Feminism and Visual Culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Organizational resources and group solidarity are central foci in literature on social movements generally and worker insurgency specifically. Research, however, seldom deals with both simultaneously and their potential interrelations. In this article, we examine the complex relationships between union organization and worker solidarity relative to strike action. We draw on a data set of 133 content-coded workplace ethnographies and use a combination of qualitative comparative analysis and more standard statistical techniques. Consistent with expectations, results suggest union presence and worker solidarity, in and of themselves, have little meaningful association with strikes. Rather, it is their co-presence that bolsters strike likelihood. Conversely, a lack of union presence in combination with a lack of collective mobilization history diminishes overall strike potential. We conclude by discussing the implications of our argument and findings for more general social movement perspectives as well as prior work dealing specifically with unions, solidarity, and collective resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the case for the opening up of new spaces for citizen voice in local governance, through synergy between political party leaders and social movement leaders. Through case study evidence from two municipalities in Nicaragua, it is found that where the relationship between political party and social movement leaders has been very close, the potential for disadvantaged citizens to have voice in local governance is diminished. A key factor that emerges is that citizens should have unmediated access to such new arrangements for local governance, with social movements and political parties playing a facilitative role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critique of recent developments in research examining media frames and their influence. We contend that a number of trends in framing research have neglected the relationship between media frames and broader issues of political and social power. This neglect is a product of a number of factors, including conceptual problems in the definition offrames, the inattention to frames sponsorship, the failure to examine framing contests within wider political and social contexts, and the reduction of framing to a form of media effects. We conclude that framing research needs to be linked to the political and social questions regarding power central to the media hegemony thesis, and illustrate this focus by exploring how framing research can contribute to an understanding of the interaction between social movements and the news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine how interpersonal emotion work in a transgender support group and motivational framing of transgender social movement organizations together constructed favorable conditions for emotional resonance. We define emotional resonance as the emotional harmony and/or disjuncture between collective action frames and the emotional lives of potential recruits. Data derive from fieldwork, interviews, online e-mail lists and forums, community publications, activist speeches, and social movement organizations' recruitment appeals. Transgendered people joined support groups hoping to find relief from shame, fear, powerlessness, alienation, and inauthenticity. Although group members' emotion work partly accomplished such relief, it was hindered by identity conflicts and the temporal bounds of the meetings. Transgender activists and nascent social movement organizations, however, used motivational framing to promise targeted recruits a more permanent emotional resolution—one which could draw them into the movement. Our analysis moves transgender scholarship beyond issues of identity and moves framing theory beyond an almost exclusive concern with cognitive processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although we know much about social movement recruitment, very little research focuses on member retention over time. Using the Plowshares movement as a case study, this article addresses the question of how longterm activist commitment is cultivated and sustained in a high-risk movement. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews and survey data, I conclude that this movement has survived because leaders formed communities that function as plausibility structures. Through various rituals and cultural practices, these Catholic Left communities reinforce activist identity and strengthen members' normative, affective, and continuance commitment. Moreover, leaders implement strategies for countering the factors that foster movement exiting— namely, biographical unavailability, burnout, and weakening of ties to activist networks. By offering material and emotional support, and assistance with family responsibilities, these communities help activists overcome the barriers to long-term movement participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the relationship between social movements, social justice and social work and examines the role of social movements in promoting social justice and considers the influences of such movements in the development of emancipatory forms of social work practice. Investigation on how various social movements have contributed to the challenging of social oppression; Consideration of the relationship between social movements and social work, taking account of the ways in which such movements have influenced social work thinking and practice; Discussion on whether social work can be seen as a form of social movement.

The most accepted explanation for gender differences is the sociocultural model that holds them to be results of socialization and/or occupancy of sex differentiated roles. There has been extensive social change in the past three decades, reducing sex typed role assignments and attitudes. However, examination of some 30 researchers shows that the social change has not been followed by change in sex typing. This present study of trends in stereotypic and self responses between 1974 and 1997 confirms the stability in sex typing, over seven surveys and 4,000 respondents. In addition, there is evidence of increase in the perceived femininity of females. These results are contrary to the predictions from the sociocultural model. They are, however, consistent with the alternate evolutionary model postulating constant gendered differences based on genetic patterns evolved from adaptations to differing reproductive challenges of early males and females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements often seek to draw attention to issues they deem important by organizing public demonstrations with the aim of attracting mass media coverage. But only a small proportion of all public demonstrations receives any media attention. This article asks whether even the minimal coverage that demonstrations receive reveal any influence of social movements in shaping how issues are framed by the mass media. Analyzing newspaper and television news stories on Washington, D.C. protests held during 1982 and 1991, we ask whether news reports on protests are framed in ways consistent with the aims of protesters. Do demonstrators receive media coverage that highlights the issues about which they are concerned, or does coverage focus on the protest event itself to the exclusion of the social issues that movements target? Our results support much of the surmising among media scholars, that even when movements succeed at obtaining the attention of mass media outlets, media reports portray protests in ways that may undermine social movement agendas. Despite this obstacle to communicating protest messages through demonstrations, movement engage in other forms of communication that can affect public interpretations of mass media frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociological literature on global environmental change emphasizes the processes by which the problem of global warming is socially constructed. However, the opposing efforts to construct the "non-problematicity" of global warming advanced by the conservative movement are largely ignored. Utilizing recent work on framing processes in the social movements literature and claims-making from the social problems literature this paper analyzes the counter-claims promoted by the conservative movement between 1990 and 1997 as it mobilized to challenge the legitimacy of global warming as a social problem. A thematic content analysis of publications arculated on the web sites of prominent conservative think tanks reveals three major counter-claims. First, the movement criticized the evidentiary basis of global warming as weak, it not entirely wrong. Second, the movement argued that global warming will have substantial benefits if it occurs. Third, the movement warned that proposed action to ameliorate global warming would do more claim than good in short, the conservative movement asserted that, while the silence of global warming appears to be growing more and more uncertain, the harmful effects of global warming policy are becoming increasingly certain in order to better understand the controversy over global warming, future research should pay attention to the influence ot the conservative movement by identifying the crucial roles of conservative foundations, conservative think tanks, and sympathetic "skeptic" scientists in undermining the growing scientific concensus over the reality of global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using qualitative comparative analysis, we examine why left-libertarian parties, associated with environmental and other "new social movements," have been relatively successful in some western democracies but not others. We conceptualize the parties as products of new citizen demands on the one hand, and of political opportunity structures, which govern party supply, on the other. We show that supply-side factors, such as a strong left and the existence of proportional representation, tend to work together to facilitate party innovation. A strong left appears more likely to downplay left-libertarian issues and push new-left activists to form separate parties, while proportional representation eases entry into the party system. Demand-side facto rs play a significant but lesser role. The theoretical and methodological strategies employed here have the potential to help political sociologists explain the variable success of other types of party innovators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some social movement challenges lead to revolution, others to reform, and others to repression? Current theory has overemphasized the impact of state breakdown on outcomes and has been limited by studies of single movements against the state. This article highlights multiple possible outcomes, explaining the eventual outcome by competition among challengers seeking to mobilize public support on their behalf To develop this claim, I compare successful challengers with real and potential competitors in the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989.I demonstrate that the democratic outcome was not given by the breakdown of the Leninist state; rather, it was the result of successful mobilization by the civic movements that linked their demands with striking theater networks, which enabled them to overcome their organizational deficiencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on resource mobilization strategies of the Church of Scientology. New religious movements with expressed goals of effecting change in society falls under social movements and as such the resource mobilization strategies of these groups becomes important. The article discusses Scientology's recruitment of medical professionals through medically based practice management companies (PMCs). The interaction generally follows a pattern of increasing commitment that can be divided into three distinct stages: initial contact, practice management consulting, and direct participation in Scientology. The first step is the introductory seminars, following which, PMC consultants arrange individual consultations with each medical professional, during which they discuss training programs appropriate to the doctor's medical practice. If the practitioners agree to purchase consulting services, then the next step in the process is a practice analysis. The practice management-training program generally consists of supervised reading, twelve hours daily for five to eight days and the identification of the doctors potential "problems" supposedly indicated by their Oxford Capacity Analysis personality profile.

This work addresses a central question in both social problems theory and sociolegal studies: how can we understand and account for the content of legal categories that define social problems and attendant victims? It offers an empirical analysis of the emergence and evolution of federal hate crime laws-the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and the Hate Crimes Penalty Enhancement Act-that determine who is and is not eligible for hate crime victim status. By examining the legislative histories of these laws as evidence of "critical discursive moments" (Gamson 1992), I show how the substantive character of the law was shaped over time: I first establish a historical context for federal hate crime law; then I analyze how an important element hate crime law-the adoption of select status provisions, such as race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and disabilities-unfolded such that some victims of discriminatory violence have been recognized as hate crime victims while others have gone unnoticed. In particular, people of color, Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and those with disabilities increasingly have been recognized as victims of hate crime, while union members, the elderly, children, and police officers, for example, have not. The findings suggest that the content of federal hate crime law was shaped by a series of temporally bound institutionally qualified processes whereby: 1) the empirical credibility of the scope of hate crime as a social problem was established by the claimsmaking of established social movement organizations; 2) a trio of core provisions for hate crime law-race, religion, and ethnicity-was cemented as the anchoring provisions of all hate crime law through discursive strategies that rendered particular types of violence empirically credible and worthy of federal attention; 3) the domain of the law expanded to include additional provisions, most notably sexual orientation and gender, in qualitatively distinct ways; and 4) the increased differentiation of legal subjects in subsequent law occurred in ways consistent with previously established and institutionalized policy pedigrees. Taken together, these findings reveal how microlevel processes of categorization work, mesolevel processes of social movement mobilization, and larger processes of institutionalization interface as political actors create and coalesce around legal meanings that define both "condition-categories" and "people-categories" (Loseke 1993). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we theorize the impact of democratic states on state-oriented challengers. We argue that aspects of states influence the overall mobilization of state-oriented challengers and the forms of their mobilization and collective action. we develop 12 hypotheses about the impact of state political institutions, democratic process, bureaucracies, and policies on mobilization and provide illustrative evidence for each from studies of social movements. We also discuss the implications of the hypotheses for U.S. social movements. One key implication is that the U.S. state, comparatively speaking, has discouraged and continues to discouraged social mobilization. Another is that the U.S. state has important systematic influences on forms of mobilization and collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special movements can continue in hostile political climates by adapting abeyance structures, that is, disengaging from active challenge to the state on policy matters to focus instead on preserving enduring values and [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the relevance of the political opportunity framework for soda! movements in non-democratic contexts by applying it to two people power movements that occurred in the Philippines and Burma during the 1980s. The movement in the Philippines culminated in the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship and a democratic transition. The movement in Burma was violently suppressed, and although multiparty elections were subsequently held as a result of the protest movement, the military regime refused to honor them and remained in power. The core dimensions of political opportunity are used to account for the mobilization of the two movements and their divergent outcomes. As expected by the political opportunity framework, influential allies and elite divisions influenced the mobilization and outcomes of the movements. The application of the political opportunity framework to non-democracies uncovers some limitations with the framework as well: the under-theorized role of the international context and the importance of press freedoms and information flows. A comparative approach uncovers limitations with the additive enumeration of political opportunities for single movements. Violent and indiscriminate repression was found to have a differential effect on mobilization depending on whether other opportunities were present or absent. More generally, a configuration approach to political opportunities is proposed that incorporates a multiple and conjunctural conception of causation. This approach assumes that political opportunities may not be independent of each other and that political opportunities may have differential effects on dissent depending on the larger configuration of opportunities in which they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its central role in the study of social movements, research on political and cultural opportunity is problematic. The vague definition and broad applicability of the concept of opportunity made it difficult to identify all the opportunities that exist in a given protest situation. Furthermore, most analyses take place at the broad levels of culture and the state, which can obscure additional, localized factors that create opportunity for protest to occur and succeed. A practice-oriented approach to studying political and cultural opportunity addresses some of these problems. Using data from a study of the outcomes of four animal rights campaigns, I examine opportunity across the companies by focusing on the practices targeted for change and the reasons why people engage in them. Viewing opportunity in this way highlights both structural and cultural elements of opportunity structures in national as wells local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodological work on the use of newspapers for data collection in social movement studies has been based mainly on theoretical postulates rather than empirical research. Using data on public demonstrations in Swiss cities, collected from press and police sources, this article examines how newspapers fare with regard to validity and reliability problems. Newspaper data are shown to result from a combination of news values shared by the journalistic profession and a cultural reproduction process. The first mechanism induces invalid but reliable bias. However, the second creates more problems of comparability across time and space. After having discussed the dominant strategies of data collection, the authors suggest several practical solutions aimed at minimizing and/or neutralizing the problem of bias in newspaper data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Frame extension" is an important frame-alignment strategy for increasing social movement membership. Little research has addressed how the institutional environment of a social movement organization constrains and compels the organization to extend its frame among potential adherents. Elaborating on the bargaining perspective and the concept of multiorganizational field, we develop market and political models of the impact of social movement dependence relations with movement antagonists and political opportunity on frame extensions. Our examination of these models with a multivariate time-series regression analysis of changes in the legislative agenda of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) over its complete history suggests that the AFL extended its frame among potential adherents in response to declining employer dependence on unions for labor-supply and increasing political opportunity. We conclude with implications of the findings for future research on contemporary union decline and institutional and environmental influences on social movement frame-alignment processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers attribute factionalism and schism in social movement organizations (SMOs) to organizational factors and overlook the influence of the environment on internal conflict This article explores the ways in which an SMO's external environment facilitates internal conflict leading to schism. I present a framework outlining influential environmental elements and examine their impacts on the conflict and schism in four SMOs: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Amen can Federation of Labor (ML), and Earth First! (ER). Applying the framework to the four cases provides a systematic analysis of the impact of the environment and suggests the elements that tire necessary for building a process theory explaining how conflict between factions develops and leads to schism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interdisciplinary review of the literature provides support for relating the structure of dominancy concept to social change and inequality in the race-caste system and the patriarchy. Race and gender inequality are viewed as intersecting in the concern for and the exercise of white male dominance. Four elements of the race-caste structure of dominancy are identified as being greatly impacted by technological change and social movements. Traditional myths supporting the belief system and the structure of dominancy have been shattered by changing statuses and roles of blacks and females. Status inconsistencies relative to expectations and behavior essential to the structure of dominancy produce tensions and anxieties that motivate some to use propaganda to restore elements of dominancy. An examination of trends in labor force participation rates provides evidence of the mythical nature of a notion currently devised to restore that dominancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Germany's unanticipated revolution in 1989 poses an interesting challenge to social movement research. The relatively spontaneous, peaceful revolution that toppled the communist regime cannot be fully explained by the prevailing theories, of revolution and collective action. While both structurally oriented and identity-oriented theory offers insight into the revolutionary process, neither are completely satisfactory. Most theories assume a relatively open field of political con testation and conditions of relative social freedom that were absent in East Germany. I suggest a synthetic, historically specific approach in which collective identities are situated with small-scale social networks. The crucial factors in making the revolution possible were shared grievances and the expectation of social solidarity. Though they were politically subordinated, ordinary East Germans expressed grievances and nurtured opposition m small circles of confidants. Reference to collective identities helped to mobilize and frame opposition in East Germany making a swift, unexpected revolution possible once the state began to founder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the role of social structure in the promotion of interest distributions, which refer to how political preferences on various issues are distributed within a given community. Relationship between party voting and voting on ballot initiatives concerning social and cultural issues in Colorado from 1980 through 1990; Concept of social liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the hypothesis that diffusion of information and values through social interaction shaped the timing and the pace of the transition from high to low levels of fertility in Costa Rica. It considers the contribution of social interaction diffusion to the fertility transition in Costa Rica, focusing on person-to-person contagion. A long-standing concern of sociologists is the contribution of diffusion processes to social change. Several prominent features of the Costa Rican transition suggest the existence of interaction diffusion effects, notably its pervasiveness toward all socioeconomic strata and the lack of evidence of a downward shift in family size preferences. Maps of the timing of fertility transition show an ordered spatial pattern suggestive of contagion between neighboring areas. A dynamic regression model estimated from pooled time series data for 100 countries reveals inter and within-county diffusion effects on birth control adoption net of socioeconomic and family-planning program effects.

This article traces the development of student activists among members of the high school class of 1965. We explore how political and religious socialization, social psychological orientations, and class origins affect the likelihood that an individual will become involved in the antiwar, student, and civil tights protests of the 1960s. We also systematically examine the interrelationships between social class, gender, social psychological orientations, and political and religious socialization to discern their effects on social movement participation. Using data from the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, 1965-73, we find that socialization processes and social psychological dispositions are strongly linked to participation in the protests and that social class spurs protest both directly and through its effects on these factors. We also find that gender differences in social movement participation are largely a function of socialization, social psychological differences, and women's lower rates of college attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secularization is most productively understood not as declining religion, but as the declining scope of religious authority. A focus on religious authority (1) is more consistent with recent developments in social theory than is a preoccupation with religion; (2) draws on and develops what is best in the secularization literature; and (3) reclaims a neglected Weberian insight concerning the sociological analysis of religion. Several descriptive and theoretical "pay-offs" of this conceptual innovation are discussed: new hypotheses concerning the relationship between religion and social movements; the enhanced capacity to conceptually apprehend and empirically investigate secularization among societies, organizations, and individuals; and clearer theoretical connections between secularization and other sociological literatures. Ironically, these connections may indeed spell the end of secularization theory as a distinct body of theory; but in a different way than previously appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The socialization and micromobilization approaches to participation in social movements lead to contrasting expectations about predictors of participation. The former position leads one to expect that attitudes, community memberships, and previous community memberships will predict participation. The latter leads one to expect effects of present community memberships, but calls into question the role of values and previous community memberships. In this paper, I study physician participation in a local anti-abortion campaign to trace the bases of such activity. While present community memberships appear to play a role, premedical college community plays no role. Further, while attitude variables appear to play some role, anti-abortion participants in the survey actually reject the Right-to-Life movement leadership's position on most of a series of movement-relevant issues. I interpret this finding in terms of Noelle-Neumann's concept of "the spiral of silence," which holds that the desire to avoid isolation leads to attitude incongruent activity, when such activity appears to have community sponsorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract While most studies concentrate on relatively high levels of commitment to social movements, pervasive weak support has received less attention. Ballot initiatives are one of a class of tactics which translate latent support into concrete influence. Because they are "low cost" mobilizations for individual supporters, such initiatives can minimize free riding, and are ideal for exploring weak support. A social psychological analysis complementary to resource mobilization theory reveals the impact and interactions of voters' social definitions, along with background factors. Levels of grievance, cost, and efficacy, along with demographic and political variables predict support for a recent nuclear free zone campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most sociological perspectives on globalization attribute the contemporary apprehended oneness of the world to the spread of rationalized economic, political, and cultural systems and the colonization and domination of life-worlds by these systems The reverse is argued here: Globalization is the penetration of globally extensive rationalized systems by life-worlds whose elementary units are selves and nations. Three types of selves -- Mead's classic self, the serial self, and the hyper-real self -- are analyzed with reference to global action and the question of the emergence of a global society. The analysis leads to the conclusion that there can be no society or society-like formation at the global level. Reactive localism, globalized social movements, networked primordialism, and ethno-religious conflict are and will remain the major forms of social action in the global system [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines theoretical issues about movement culture through an assessment of the recent cultural turn in social movement research Various strands of work are discussed: Fantasia's Cultures of Solidarity; efforts to revise resource mobilization theory, including the collection Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, and work on framing; and Ginsburg's Contested Lives. This work is helpful in focusing cultural analysis on practical, interactive contexts and the process of culture-making, but tends to use regrettably diffuse and excessively social-psychological conceptions of culture. It also usually views culture too voluntaristically, pays insufficient attention to the role of preexisting cultural codes and the connections between movement culture and other forms of public discourse, and neglects the role of religion in American political culture. The article ends with a suggested agenda for research on movement culture [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on how to strengthen and expand community practice and community building, as a result of a diminishing of the federal government's role in social programs. It also delineates proactive social work responses to strengthen families and communities through community practice at grassroots and interorganizational levels. The article presents ideas for strengthening and expanding community practice connects community practice and social development, describes the relationship between community practice and policy directions, and specifies needed research. Ironically, the increasing alienation of United States' citizens and the decline of democratic participation is occurring during a period of increasing efforts to establish democracies throughout the world. In global democratization, it is critical not only that ideas and the drive to create free markets be exported and adapted but also that infrastructures for community development and nongovernmental organizations to support democracy and participation be established or renewed. All parts of the nation are seeing effects of the globalization of the economy, largely through the shifting of jobs overseas to lower-cost labor markets. There is increasing disparity in income between workers who are technologically prepared and service industry workers who have few benefits, often work part-time and receive low wages.

This paper reconceptualizes the political environment with in which a social movement organization operates by offering the concept of political fields, arguing that the actions, rhetoric, and effectiveness of organizations are best understood within the context of the fields within which they are situated. By examining the issue of violence against women in two different fields within the same country, India, it suggests that the structure of the field and an organization `s position within it I) shape the discourse and practice of SMOs; 2) mediate the effects of organization type (politically affiliated or autonomous); and 3) determine whether or not organizations within the same movement (and field) converge or differentiate. The data for this paper comes from fieldwork conducted between 1990 and 1994, as well as newspaper accounts, and movement archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to point toward procedures for the comparative analysis of social movement ideologies. The need for such procedures follows from the conviction that, to describe the outcomes of recent social movements, one need to understand their ideologies and the differential impact of those ideologies on subgroups within the general public. Authors had found, however, that adequate procedures for comparative study of social movement ideologies do not exist in the resource mobilization paradigm currently favored for the study of social movements. The technique, authors use to characterize social movement ideology are borrowed from the study of political belief systems in political science. In adopting these procedures, they identify a methodological flaw in them that is particularly troublesome when studying groups that exhibit a great deal of consensus in their beliefs. Authors believe that the study of social movement ideology would benefit from more precise methods, which permit comparison of belief structures between groups within movements and between movements.

This article presents information on the study of social movements. It is informed that the study of social movements has moved beyond the limitations of traditional, social-psychological perspectives on collective behavior that viewed social movements as generally irrational phenomena arising out of shared frustration and discontent with existing conditions. This article directs attention to the civil and criminal courts as additional, third party resources that. may be activated to achieve or impede the goals of social movement organizations. Since courts are reactive in that they must await decisions by citizens or groups to invoke the judicial process, litigation strategies aimed directly at mobilizing the law on behalf of social movements or their adversaries may have a significant impact on the struggle between the two. At the same time, social movements may take indirect advantage of litigation to mobilize important resources: they may capitalize on litigation efforts to rally their members, to solidify and extend their membership base, and to convince the public of the justness of their cause.

In an attempt to integrate the importance of culture into the resource mobilization perspective, sociologists have introduced the notion of frames as a way to understand how movement leaders and movement participants identify grievances, devise strategies, and enumerate demands. In the civil rights movement, for example. sociologists have argued that the "rights" frame emerged because it resonated with some dominant values of our political culture. This analysis couples the rights frame with the more movement-specific ideology of integration and explains the origins of the integrationist ideology using a materialist and a political perspective. I argue that the emergence of integration was not primarily the result of a battle about which ideas were culturally more appealing but about: who controlled important sources of financing; which organization was able to court favor with political elites; and which organizations were actively repressed fry those political elites. These conclusions challenge resource mobilization theorists to bring ideology into their analyses. not simply in terms of why people participate but more fundamentally in terms of how social movement organizations carve out their niches within a social movement industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on debates in lesbian and gay periodicals and writings from and about post-structuralist "queer theory" and politics, this paper clarifies the meanings and distinctive politics of "queerness," in order to trace its implications for social movement theory and research. The challenge of queer theory and politics, I argue, is primarily in its disruption of sex and gender identity boundaries and deconstruction of identity categories. The debates (over the use of the term "queer" and over bisexual and transgender inclusion) raise questions not only about the content of sexuality-based political identities, but over their viability and usefulness. This in turn challenges social movement theory to further articulate dynamics of collective identity formation and deployment While recent social movement theory has paid attention to the creation and negotiation of collective identity, it has not paid sufficient attention to the simultaneous impulse to destabilize identities from within. That tendency, while especially visible in lesbian and gay movements, is also visible in other social movements. it calls attention to a general dilemma of identity politics: Fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppression and the basis for political power. The insights of both sides of the dilemma highlighted here raise important new questions for social movement theory and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]