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The study of technology and societal challenges is a growing area in information systems research. This paper explores how social movements can use virtual worlds to raise awareness or create safe spaces for their members. As social movements move into virtual worlds, the technical environment becomes more important. This paper presents an interpretive field study using netnographic research and empirical data from a study of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movement in World of Warcraft. This paper takes the position that an understanding of affordances is required for users to be able to create convivial outcomes to shape the use of virtual worlds for their own goals and intentions. The paper presents the concept of convivial affordances, which brings together the theories of affordances and conviviality, and suggests that social users can shape IT artefacts through a creative combination of affordances for their specific goals, and with community involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the buy local movement using social interactions. Social interaction arises if some consumers have preferences for local economic output due to altruism toward local producers and/or because of local amenities that benefit the community. This introduces an incentive for some consumers to advocate for localism and convert other consumers to buy locally. However, when there are competing communities, global efforts to buy more local products leads to lower utility from consumption and, under some scenarios, no increases in local production. This paper analyzes the benefits and costs of buying locally under various types of localism and market structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper proposes the thesis that it is unethical to plan an action for social change without excavating the knowledge and wisdom of the people who are responsible for implementing the plans of action and the people whose lives will be affected. But the people, being immersed in contemporary complexity, do not know what they know until they know it as a consensus emerging from structured dialogue among a group which represents all stakeholders. We argue that the science of dialogic design may be used to achieve such an emergence. As a consequence, it satisfies the Özbekhan Axiom of Engagement and the Laouris Law of Requisite Action. The paper elaborates for the first time on the ethics of the ‘Tree of Action’, which some stakeholders participating in co-laboratories have called the ‘Tree of Life’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of collective intelligence flowing in and across systems communities of various disciplines, and the fragmentation or connectedness of their mental models of the world, shape their capacity to assist decision-makers and social movements in defining, mapping, and addressing the world problematique, by identifying policy options and anticipating their outcomes. In their current state of fragmentation, the systems sciences' epistemic communities cannot provide that assistance. Upgrading their collective intelligence is a vital imperative. This paper is suggest the prototyping of a Collective Intelligence Enhancement Lab and describes its core idea as a platform with an innovation architecture that integrates social, electronic, cognitive, and inner technologies and processes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The concept of "therapeutic citizenship" has drawn attention to ways in which public testimony, the "story-telling in the public sphere" undertaken by people living with HIV (PLHIV), has shaped the global response to the epidemic. This paper presents qualitative findings from two large studies in eastern Africa that reveal how the advent of population-based HIV testing campaigns and efforts to accelerate antiretroviral "treatment for all" has precipitated a rapidly expanding therapeutic citizenship "project," or social movement. The title of this paper refers to Goffman's original conceptualization of stigma as a social process through which a person's identity is rendered "spoiled.". Methods: Data were derived from qualitative studies embedded within two clinical trials, Sustainable East African Research in Community Health (SEARCH) (NCT# 01864603) in Kenya and Uganda, and START-ART (NCT# 01810289) in Uganda, which aimed to offer insights into the pathways through which outcomes across the HIV care continuum can be achieved by interventions deployed in the studies, any unanticipated consequences, and factors that influenced implementation. Qualitative indepth semi-structured interviews were conducted among cohorts of adults in 2014 through 2015; across both studies and time periods, 217 interviews were conducted with 166 individuals. Theoretically informed, team-based analytic approaches were used for the analyses. Results: Narratives from PLHIV, who have not always been conceptualized as actors but rather usually as targets of HIV interventions, revealed strongly emergent themes related to these individuals' use of HIV biomedical resources and discourses to fashion a new, empowered subjecthood. Experiencing the benefits of antiretroviral therapy (ART) emboldens many individuals to transform their "spoiled" identities to attain new, valorized identities as "advocates for ART" in their communities. We propose that the personal revelation of what some refer to as the "gospel of ARVs," the telling of personal stories about HIV in the public sphere and actions to accompany other PLHIV on their journey into care, is driven by its power to redeem the "spoiled identity:" it permits PLHIV to overcome self-stigma and regain full personhood within their communities. Conclusions: PLHIV are playing an unanticipated but vital role in the successful implementation of HIV care cascade interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline in the scope and power of American unions has led to a search for new strategies and new organizational forms to better succeed in representing the interests of employees in the labour market. This paper examines the role of community-based organizations of the sort that proved so powerful during the Civil Rights Movement. The subject of the paper is a strong national network of community organizations that is neighbourhood-based and draws heavily on churches and other community institutions. The organizations are put together in neighbourhoods, yet they also wield power at the city and state levels. The paper describes the organizations and examines and assesses their labour market policies. The second part of the paper takes up organizational issues and, in particular, describes how the structure and culture of these organizations enable them to avoid some of the organizational perils that have befallen unions and other social movement organizations. The paper concludes by comparing these organizations with traditional unions and by discussing their prospects for growth as well as their limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States environmental justice movement has grown in the last 20 years from tactical cooperation between civil rights and environmental activists on hazardous waste issues into a broad-based movement for social change. As dozens of organizations invest resources in an environmental justice agenda, it is important to examine how such organizations portray their stance toward the goals of the larger movement in order to better understand tensions within the movement between social justice and environmental protection, diversity and commonality, and localized and broader movement agendas. This paper explores what contemporary environmental justice imagery tells us about this social movement through a critical discourse analysis of environmental justice organizations’ logos. The conceptual approach used here links a tradition of critical discourse analysis of textual materials with elements of a critical visual methodology. The paper examines how the social grievance of environmental injustice is constructed in relation to the social and natural world, and considers what these images tell us about the identities, relationships and modes of authority that constitute the contemporary environmental justice movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges associated with climate change will require governments, citizens, and firms to work collaboratively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a task that requires information on companies' carbon risks, opportunities, strategies, and emission levels. This paper explores the conditions under which firms participate in this endeavor. Building on theories of how social activists inspire changes in organizational norms, beliefs, and practices, we hypothesize that shareholder actions and regulatory threats are likely to prime firms to adopt practices consistent with the aims of a broader social movement. We find empirical evidence of direct and spillover effects. In the domain of private politics, shareholder resolutions filed against a firm and others in its industry increase a firm's propensity to engage in practices consistent with the aims of the related social movement. Similarly, in the realm of public politics, threats of state regulations targeted at a firm's industry as well as regulations targeted at other industries increase the likelihood that the firm will engage in such practices. These findings extend existing theory by showing that both activist groups and government actors can spur changes in organizational practices, and that challenges mounted against a single firm or a single industry can inspire both firm and field-level changes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical review of some recent research on sex roles; suggestions are made for an alternative approach. Much research is found to be misleading and seriously biased to minimize indications of strains and changes in American sex roles. Most research is limited to women's roles, not men's, and to the internal processes of the middle class family without consideration of functional, historical, or political aspects. American sex roles are explained in this paper as serving historical and psychological needs which are no longer appropriate. Differential, sex roles are maladapted to contemporary conditions of rapid social change and temporary associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on flexible work practices has focused primarily on social relationships, individual identity, work/work-life balance experience and performance. This paper aims to add another dimension by focusing on space and, specifically, the performance of space by professional flexworkers as they reorder their home and work lives through the process of becoming flexworkers. Drawing on Law's 'modes of ordering' and Latourian actor network theory, as well as on Beyes and Steyaert's recent contribution on 'performing space', the paper considers how flexworkers themselves reorganize space(s) as an ongoing accomplishment. The purpose and contribution is to offer an alternative to the view that the home and work are rigid containers fixed in social structure, to one that views them as self-referential space(s), reordered by flexworkers as they seek to 'keep the social moving'. The paper is based on an empirical study of employees in a Canadian subsidiary of a large hi-tech multinational corporation. It examines organizational policy documents and interviews with managerial and non-managerial flexworkers to identify how social and spatial relations are reordered and performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how geography affects the different types of networks underlying social movements. The principal argument of the paper is that networks forged in particular places and at great distances play distinctive yet complementary functions in broad-based social movements. Not only does the articulation of these different types of networks result in complementary roles, but it also introduces key relational dynamics affecting the stability of the entire social movement. The purpose of the paper is therefore threefold: to provide a conceptual framework for interpreting the complex geographies of contemporary social movement networks, to stress the contributions of place-based relations in social movements and to assess how activist places connect to form ‘social movement space’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographies of activism draw on many traditions but few have charted social movements over time. This paper suggests that the consideration of action over time not only enhances our understanding of the degree of social change that occurs, but also the way activists’ interests are acknowledged, or contained, by those they seek to influence. The paper reviews existing literature and proposes the adoption of a particular conceptualization of time–space geometries. The case is made for attending to kairological and topological notions of time–space while recognizing these involve complex geometries of power relations, meanings, resources and social actions. The variability of these patterns in different time–spaces can stimulate multi-dimensional studies and the example of women's agricultural activism in Australia is employed to explore the usefulness of these ideas for geographies of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of feminism in Spain within the context of political transformations. It focuses on one particular strand of feminist thinking: ‘equality feminism’. The paper traces the evolution of equality feminism and its institutionalization, supported by the production and dissemination of a feminist history of the Franquista dictatorship (1936–1939). Yet, under scrutiny such narratives maintain a silence on the social, political and geographical diversity of women's experiences prior to, during and beyond the Franquista dictatorship. Drawing on women's oral testimonies (recorded in the city of Málaga, Andalucía) the paper animates the silences of this feminist history in Spain and the limits of state feminist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey's notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People's Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People's Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

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

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

The article presents a reply of gratitude for the criticisms offered by sociologist Laura Sanchez on the works which appeared in the "Journal of Marriage and the Family." The authors are indebted to Laura Sanchez for taking their work (1995) seriously and raising some nontrivial questions for discussion. She has motivated them to reread their own paper closely and critically, and a close reading of many of the works she cites has broadened their familiarity with the feminist literatures. They know that there is no true reading of the paper. They know what they intended to say and what the paper says to them as they reread it. The authors also recognize that any text is only one part of a reading; what a reader sees in a text is also a function of what she brings to her encounter with the text. Some of Sanchez's critique reflects deficiencies in the text--things they did not say as well as they might have--and they are grateful for a chance to clarify ambiguities. Other feminist writers seem to corroborate their view of the central concerns of feminist scholarship.

Transformations within religious institutions and traditions often occur via conflict and internal social movements. Yet previous research on such phenomena has missed some important sociological insights because it has not incorporated methodological and theoretical resources from other sociological literatures dealing with social movements and organizational change and conflict. This paper presents a comprehensive critical review of extant research on intradenominational conflict and identifies and describes five shortcomings in this literature. As a corrective, we suggest that analysts focus on organizations and conflict events as units of analysis, pay more attention to ideal factors in conflict, examine relationships between internal and external variables, and compare conflicts across organizations and across time. These alternative methodological recommendations are related to three new theoretical directions in other sociological subfields: resource mobilization theory's focus on intermediate levels of social life, the "new institutionalist" emphasis on how organizational actors respond to their environments, and the recent work on the interplay of "schema? and "resources" in social structure. Such new directions address questions that were not accessible via earlier approaches. They also begin to build important bridges between the sociology of religion and other sociological subfields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of papers related to economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in different journals. Some of the papers are: "Sixteenth-Century Probate Documents From Manchester," by M.J. Alexander; "The Buckinghamshire Posse Comitatus," by I.F.W. Beckett; "The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies, 1862-82," by P. Clarke; "Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England," by K.D.M. Snell; "Systems of Land Holding Between Landowners and Farmers," by R. Stratton; "The Timing and Pattern of Technological Development in English Agriculture," by R.J. Sullivan; "Dearth and Marketing of Agricultural Produce," by W. Thwaites; "Rural Rebels in Southern England in the 1830s," by R. Wells; "The Union of 1707 and Scottish Development " by T.M. Devine and others. Some other papers are: "Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon Settlement," by M.L. Faull; "Comparative National Balance Sheets," by R.W. Goldsmiths; "The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland," by C. Haigh and the like.

The object of this paper is to deal with only two important uses. First, the material throws considerable light on the processes of acculturation and the first part of this paper discusses such processes with two basic objectives in view. One is a critical assessment of the main body of hypotheses and generalizations which have so far been made in this field and the presentation of a more useful theoretical framework within which the subject may be discussed; the other will be an application of this new framework to the available historical data relating to one of the islands, Jamaica, on which the author has recently done extensive research. For what is most striking about the West Indies is that they present one of the few cases in world history where groups of peoples were deliberately thrown together, forcefully deculturated or detribalized as the case may be and new societies consciously created for the achievement of specifically defined goals. Thus, there emerged in the post-emancipation period a dual culture, or two Jamaica's: one was the Afro-Jamaican cultural system, which was largely a consolidation and revitalization of patterns developed during slavery; the other was the European-oriented cultural system which was the revival of British civilization in the island after its disintegration during slavery.

The article presents information about the 12th International Conference on the Sociology of Religion. The general theme of the conference "Contemporary Metamorphoses of Religion," was interpreted more as dealing with organizational change, including the emergence of "new" religious movements and attitude changes, than with any basic transformation in the current conceptions of the nature of religion or of religious faith. The plenary sessions were carefully planned and conducted in a very formal way marked by procedures of protocol, written requests for "interventions," like questions and comments by others than the announced participants. The only free wheeling spontaneous participation of the sort familiar to us occurred in the much smaller contributed papers sessions. Spontaneity was, unfortunately, limited even in these sessions by linguistic factors. There was one area, according to several European scholars, in which the conference may have presented a somewhat misleading picture of European academic life to the North American participants. Very little attention was paid to the debate between the Marxists and the non Marxists which is so much a part of daily European academicia.

In this paper we examine the process of incorporating gender equality into a higher education institution as it evolves into a managerial university. The case illustrates the ongoing processes between structure, activism and features of gender equality, and provides insights into how activists adapt to changes in governance and influence managerial responses to equality. Tracing the interaction of employee activism with new managerialism over nearly two decades, four phases of change are identified. These provide a basis for generating two concepts - managerial recalibration and individual activism - while challenging the social abeyance hypothesis of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a visceral take on the role of identity in social movement mobilisation. The authors emphasise how identity goes beyond cognitive labels to implicate the entire minded-body. It is suggested that political ideas, beliefs and self definitions require a bodily kind of resonance in order to activate various kinds of environmental and social activism. The authors refer to this bodily resonance as ‘visceral processes of identification’ and, through empirical investigation with the Slow Food (SF) movement, they reveal specific instances of such processes at work. Examining SF in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Berkeley, California, USA, the authors ask how SF comes to feel in the bodies of members and non-members and they interrogate the role that feelings play in the development of activism(s). Bodies are shown to both align with movements’ socio-political aims and (re)create them. The account provides a means for shifting recent social theoretical attention to bodied/material life to a broad application in political geography, political ecology and social movement theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of the material practices of photography and its archiving in interpretive approaches to the relationship between photographs and history. Drawing on work in material culture studies in anthropology and on the concept of “material hermeneutic,” it argues that photographs should not be understood only through forensic and semiotic analysis of content, but as objects that constitute material performances of a complex range of historiographical desires in the negotiation of the relations among past, present, and future. The analysis is grounded in an exploration of the material practices of the photographic survey movement in England between 1885 and 1918. This loosely cohered group of amateur photographers recorded a historical topography of ancient churches, cottages, passing events, and folk customs in order to create a photographic record for the benefit of future generations. As such it was a self-conscious statement of “popular historicism.” The members' concern for key values of permanence and accuracy, expressed through the detail of photographic and archival processes, reveals the ways in which cultural loss and photographic loss become mutually sustaining metaphors for each other, and in which the photographs themselves are material markers of both evidential value and of an affective historical imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing understandings of protest and cultures of resistance has been a central theme of the ‘new’ cultural geography of the 1990s and 2000s. But whilst geographers of the here and now have been highly sensitive to the importance of acts of protest which occur outside of the context of broader social movements, geographers concerned with past protests have tended to focus overwhelmingly upon either understanding the development of social movements or highly specific place-based studies. Through a focus upon the hitherto ignored practice of ‘tree maiming’, this paper demonstrates not only the value of examining specific protest practices in helping to better understand the complexity of conflict, but also how in periods of acute socio-economic change the evolving relationship between humans and the non-human – in this case trees – is a central discourse to the protest practices of the poor. Such attacks often involved complex cultural understandings about the ways in which trees should – and should not – be socially enrolled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African Constitution guarantees justiciable socio-economic rights such as the rights to access to housing; to sufficient food and water; to social security and health care services. This ‘transformative constitution’ is meant to help rid the country of legacies of apartheid such as huge economic inequalities and entrenched poverty. The government's embrace of neoliberalism has, however, meant that these legacies have not only remained largely untreated but have also become entrenched. Poor communities have started organizing themselves in order to challenge the government's neoliberal policies as well as marginalization from structures of governance. This paper evaluates the nature of these 'social movements’ as well as their impact on democracy and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to the paper "Learning From New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship," by George Lipsitz in this issue. The politics of dislocation and relocation and the politics of different mappings of the U.S. are examined. Rap music and murals are declared to be forms of an American cultural critique that employs symbolic-iconic registers and direct political consciousness.

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

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

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

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

Although the social scientific study of religion has seen the accumulation of numerous case studies, comparative work involving substantial numbers of cases is rare. In the absence of an accepted agenda for field research, field studies contain information relevant to the study at hand, but do not add systematically to a cumulative database. By contrast, field studies in anthropology may contain idiosyncratic information relevant to the author's interests, but an existing research agenda defines information researchers are expected to include, which has produced an expanding cross-cultural database. In this paper, we propose elements of a research agenda for the study of religious movements, including information related to movements' organizational history and context, mobilization, organization, governance, and outcomes. While this preliminary agenda is subject to refinement by others, it provides a starting point for the accumulation of comparable cases, and a basis for the comparative study of religious movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the uneasy relationship between social movements and major political parties by considering the case of the Christian Right and the Republican Party in the 1994 elections. We look at four states where the movement was active in party politics and where Republican electoral fortunes varied from failure to success. We found that the degree of intraparty division generated by the Christian Right seemed to hurt Republicans at the polls, but the level of movement activity in itself apparently helped the Republicans. Most factors associated with support for the Christian Right did not help account for electoral outcomes across the states. Instead, the accessibility of the political party nomination processes to the movement best accounted for the election results: greater party openness was associated with poor results and more limited access with greater success for the GOP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the concept of identity to the white racialist or separatist movement, typically referred to as the white supremacist movement in many mainstream publications. While similar racial identity and shared perceptions of the meaning of racialism bind the movement together, there are other important concerns that potentially divide the movement but also have served to attract members to it. One of these potentially divisive areas, the differences in religious views, is explored here through an analysis of the white separatist literature and interviews with movement members. Three belief systems of movement members--Christian or Israel Identity, Church of the Creator, and Odinism--are examined. All three contribute to strengthening the racial identity of white racialists, but are at the same time potentially antagonistic to each other. It is suggested that this religious divide will be a key issue in influencing the future development of the movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper argues that much scholarly work on civil society and alternative development has three weaknesses: it understates the diversity among popular organizations and their ideas about development alternatives; it pays insufficient attention to the economic dimensions of alternatives; and it understates the potential importance of the local state. Drawing on experiences from highland Bolivia, we suggest that a closer engagement with the dilemmas encountered in practical attempts to pursue development alternatives can suggest ways forward in each of these areas. Linking scholarly and practical work is thus important for theoretical reasons as well as ones of relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, fern mists have been questioning patriarchal religions As a result, many find (hems elves ambivalent about their religious and spiritual identities This paper presents a model of identity formation that addresses the processes by which potentially conflicted identities are integrated This model is based on research about how women who identify themselves as both .Jewish and feminist create unconflicted Jewish feminist identities Through a process of sifting through their available options, they have chosen to identify with only those aspects of Judaism and feminism that satisfy their feminist, religious, and perhaps most important/i, their spiritual, needs. Because these needs vary, what it means to be a Jewish feminist is not static Three types of Jewish feminist identity - inclusionist, transformationist. and reinterpretationist - are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

This paper examines the financial activities, ideological foundations and goals of three new religious movements The movements are: 3HO Foundation, Divine Light Mission and Vajradhatu Research methods include participant observation, taped interviews, analysis of movement literature and examinations of group financial records. Results indicate that worldly success has become a religiously significant venture for at least two new religious movements Within these groups there is a high degree of successful entrepreneurial and professional activity There is also organizational and ideological support from the movements' leadership to the membership to become rich. Several interpretations are offered including historical precedent, sect-church transformation, institutionalization, a search for legitimacy and leadership influences Resource mobilization is argued to be the most effective theoretical approach Accordingly, movement direction is determined by rational leadership decisions in a practical attempt to realize projected goals and to promote group maintenance and survival.
In this paper we have demonstrated that a trend exists toward individual worldly success within at least two new religious movements. These two groups, 3HO Foundation and Vajradhatu, have developed an ideological orientation that supports worldly success as a religiously significant venture and thereby sees no contradiction between the spiritual and the earthly realm. The variety and the success of the money-making ventures undertaken by members of these two groups is especially noteworthy considering that the groups themselves only began 14 years ago.
We have argued that the turn to worldly success by the new religious movements did not result from a transition from a sect ideal-type to a church ideal-type nor did it result from institutionalization. Our evidence indicates that the transition was initiated by rational leadership decisions in response to changing social and... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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