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The post-civil rights era was a transformative period for Black organizations. In this period, organizations had to contend with the changing cultural and political terrain of the United States. Typically social movement scholars have examined movements at the level of the state, paying minimal attention to the relationship between movements and organizations. This paper examines Black Greek-letter organization sororities' interactions with the Black feminist movement from 1968-1980 as a case of how mainstream voluntary associations interact with radical movements. Through a comparative historical analysis of two Black sororities, I find that while one sorority engages in racial uplift and respectability politics - frames that the organizations had historically engaged with - the other sorority begins to incorporate Black feminist frames and language into their organization. I conclude the paper by discussing the way that examining the incorporation of Black feminist frames can help to extend upon the concept of interstitial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of social movement organizations is considered one indicator of the development of a social movement. In the case of the U.S. women?s movement, new formal and informal organizations became the basis for a burgeoning activism on the national and local level focusing both on policy change and altering societal norms. Traditional social movement theory views social movement activism and the creation of social movement organizations as occurring outside of the formal boundaries of government. In this paper I argue that such a view is incomplete. Feminists within the state played an important role in the initial mobilization and organization of the movement that far exceeded their numbers within the growing movement. Moreover, their mobilizing activism was not limited to organizations within the state, professional organizations that focused only on their occupational interests or bureaucratic organizations (that is, formal organizations with division of labor, hierarchies and professional staff). Rather, feminist activists who worked within government bureaucracies emphasized the importance of organizing outside of government and some encouraged collectivist, nonhierarchical organizational structures focused on a wide range of feminist issues. The paper relies on interview and archival data to examine the role played by feminist bureaucrats in creating feminist organizations during the first phase of the women?s movement (1964-1975). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger project designed to explore components of identity along the lines of race, gender and class in the process of mobilization and maintenance of social movements through the lens of the contemporary welfare rights movement. Welfare is a central organizing image of American political discourse around issues of race, class and gender. The most popular frame of this program is the ubiquitous stereotype of the "welfare queen" has generated a great deal of scholarly attention to the reaction of public and elites to these images and the policy consequences of such reactions. While research has been devoted to the efficiency of the welfare system, the construction of the stereotypes behind this program and how both public and elites respond, there is little scholarship related to how recipients and their allies have reacted to these images at a grassroots level. The welfare rights movement first emerged in the early 1960s with the rise in demands for expansion of poverty relief. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), composed of mostly African American women, reached its peak in 1969 with 22,000 members. Although the NWRO disbanded in the early 1970s, the movement has endured despite challenges to the concept of welfare since that time and has continued through the current reauthorization process in 2004 of the 1996 act. This paper will focus on how the welfare rights movement has or has not developed strategies to respond to these images of welfare recipients through a comparison of two welfare rights organizations in Washington. The primary hypothesis asserts that identity-based social movements organized around a single, marginalized identity will fail to mobilize around a potentially negative frame that issue targets both the primary marginalized identity as well as other multiple marginalized identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the development of the right to strike during the New Deal era. Policy makers considered three models for constructing the right to strike--the right to strike as a civil liberty, the right to strike as a right protected by compulsory arbitration, and the right to strike as a commercial right. The right to strike as a commercial right prevailed because it best managed the conflict between the state's interest in fostering economic recovery, versus constitutional, institutional and social restrictions upon state activism. Any new strike policy would have involved a reordering of authority relationships within the American political system, but the right to strike as a commercial right was the least disruptive. Moreover, constructing the right to strike as a commercial right proved to be more compatible with the values of modern American liberalism. Modern American liberal support for the right to strike, however, remained ambivalent and conditional, and lacked a stalwart commitment to the right to strike. This paper discusses these three approaches to constituting the right to strike and the impact of the new federal strike policy upon American political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper counters American exceptionalist arguments about the weakness of the labor movement in the United States based on cultural and economic explanations and instead argues that American political institutions have constrained labor’s political power. Political institutions that protect political minorities such as the Senate which over-represents rural populations and under-represents urban populations, the Senate filibuster which requires a super-majority to pass controversial legislation, the presidential veto which also requires a super-majority for Congress to override, and rules and procedures in the House favoring conservative interests have historically restricted the ability of organized labor to pass its legislative agenda to expand the size and protections of the welfare state. Although American labor has shared the social democratic agenda of many European labor movements in the post-WWII period, the fragmentation and institutional bias towards the status quo in the American political system have limited organized labor’s legislative successes to incremental change. As union density has declined, many scholars have argued that labor has become increasingly irrelevant in the public policy process. Yet the same institutional protections for political minorities that once benefited labor’s political opponents now benefit organized labor. In addition labor had benefited from institutional changes it pushed for such as the enfranchisement of African-Americans and congressional reforms that reduced the power of conservative, Southern Democrats in the policy-making process over the last two decades. As a result organized labor continues to exercise a level of political influence very similar to that exercised in the forties when organized labor represented a much larger percentage of the workforce. Labor has been able to protect the legislative gains it made in the past and continues to put initiatives for incremental expansion of the welfare and regulatory state on the political agenda. The paper focuses particularly on the areas of employment policy, labor law, and health care reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the American social movements of the 1960s and 1970s talked about the technology of their time. Through an analysis of a sample of underground newspapers, it highlights how the American counterculture thought of technology in a prevalently negative way. It identifies three negative discourses: technology of war, technology of capitalism, technology of repression. These three views are effectively condensed into the famous expression attributed to Huey P. Newton: "the spirit of the people is greater than the Man's technology", whose meaning and diffusion is traced throughout the sample. Two, more marginal, views - technology for abundance and technology for revolution - are also analyzed. I then argue that these diverging visions of technology are also different visions of social change. The paper thus contributes to the debate on the relationship between social movements and technologies by historicizing it and emphasizing the symbolic role that technology is invested with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper on the analysis and comparison of scholar Mildred Schwartz on the party and social movement interaction for the presidential nomination process in 1912 and 2012 is presented. It mentions the interactions between social movements and the U.S. political parties such as Republican Party, Tea Party movement. It presents an overview on the election of the U.S. Presidential election of William McKinley in 1896.

This paper argues that the Tea Party is the latest in a long line of populist social movements - of both right and left - that emerge periodically in American politics - and particularly in times of economic hardship. These movements tend to be ephemeral but they frequently leave a lasting impact on American politics and public policy. The paper discusses the rise of the Tea Party, the nature of the movement, its popular base of support, its tense relationship with the "Republican Establishment", its impact on the 2010 midterm election campaign, its future prospects, and how closely its development to date fits the historical pattern of American populist social and political movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper identifies the puzzle of the contemporary revival and diffusion of sovereignty discourse in U.S. federal Indian policy. After a century of primarily being treated as wards of the state, racial and ethnic minorities, and holders of anachronistic rights, American Indians tribes have in the last thirty years once again become treated as sovereign nations by federal policymakers. The paper disputes the common understanding that this represents a fundamental continuity with preceding policies. Instead, the paper asserts that a discourse of sovereignty was maintained by tribal communities through decades when the idea of tribes as sovereign nations was nonsensical to non-Indians. Furthermore, it argues that the contemporary policies and discourse of sovereignty was not explicitly intended by federal policymakers at the beginning of the current "self-determination" policy era. Rather, entrepreneurial tribal leaders both aggressively circulated sovereignty discourse and engaged in nation-building to instantiate the concept. Through a contingent process, both discourse and practices became increasingly plausible, reinforcing, and are now institutionalized in federal policy and language. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars have long been interested in the role of students and college campuses in social movement recruitment and activity. For the most part, however, their attention has focused almost exclusively on liberal activism. This paper brings attention to the extensive conservative organizing that has long been present on American college campuses. It identifies several important processes by which conservative social movement mobilization is taking place on campuses today. It also clarifies the specific ways in which biographical availability and social networks-two of the key underlying mechanisms for social movement recruitment-- operate among today's students. The empirical data for the paper come from a national study of the pro-life movement in the U.S. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a broad recognition that styles and context of leadership are important factors in affecting the emergence, development, and ultimate impact of a social movement, the literature on leadership is underdeveloped (but see Morris and Staggenborg 2004; Robnett 1996). In this paper, we mean to contribute to an emerging literature by outlining an ideal type of a distinct model of leadership within movements, that of a platform leader who builds an organization with the primary purpose of supporting and amplifying her voice. The platform leader speaks on behalf of a position or a constituency, but beyond this, the actual relationship to that position or constituency is unclear.In this paper, we first discuss the ways scholars have dealt with the conflicting demands placed on leadership, including distinguishing between types of relationships leaders have with their followers, distinguishing between the kinds of audiences with whom leaders must communicate, and distinguishing between the types of activities in which leaders must be competent. We also discuss the broader trend in American associational life: the reduction of rank-and-file member participation within their organization combined with the rising importance of professional leaders. Next, we present two case studies of platform leadership within opposing organizations, comparing the development and maintenance of platform leadership. Finally, we discuss the implications for future research on the platform leadership model, including how it fits with the existing models of leadership, and what kinds of organizations and what kinds of movements are most likely to develop platform leaders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study of recent challenges to welfare-work programs in New York City reveals the complex dynamics of social movements with institutional politics, and reveals continuities and discontinuities between the two. Drawing on Gramscian state theory, political process theory, and recent relational extensions of political process theory, the paper shows the ways in which five mechanisms-path-dependency, institutional spillover, certification/decertification, scale-shift, and time-shift-combine within and across instititutional settings to enable or stymie workfare workers' and their allies' efforts to gain rights under a workfare program that denied them clear rights-bearing status. In showing the operation of these mechanisms-which lie between structure and strategy-in worksite-based organizing, courts, legislatures, and in mass-mediated moral protest, the paper shows the ways in which challengers to workfare were at a structural disadvantage. It argues further that revealing structural disadvantage is the main justification for the study of social movements as distinct from (though embedded in) institutional politics, and is preferable to an analytic strategy that begins with pluralism, and treats movements and interest groups as the same type of entity. Finally, assessments of social movement outcomes should focus on the reconfiguration of policy options and the coalitions that underlie them. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement organizational studies have primarily relied on the analysis of one source. Recently study showed the use of one source was inadequate to study the population of environmental groups at the state level. This raises questions regarding the use of single sources for the study of national and international social movement organizations. A single source that has become a standard for social movement organization research is the Encyclopedia of Associations, however, we know of only one paper assessing the adequacy of the EofA's coverage of movement organizations. Overall, an important component in the analysis of social movements is the adequacy and reliability of the data utilized. We need to know if multiple sources will result in a significant difference from the analyses based on a single source. To accomplish this, we used 155 sources (IRS data, directories, books, reports, proceedings, and web sources) to gather a comprehensive population data set of national and regional U.S. environmental organizations over a 100-year time-series. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methods used in this analysis. Our research and methods revealed that the use of a single source, such as the EofA, is significantly insufficient for studying the U.S. environmental movement population. Multiple sources are needed, including the web and IRS data files, in order to capture a representative population. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political policy outcomes are frequently understood in terms of rational actor or organizational decision-making models, but these often fail to analyze institutional effects that cut across organizations. Taken-for-granted cultural institutions are frequently overlooked as causal agents of urban conflict. Analysts are instead inclined to rely on parsimonious economic or class explanations, even though clashing cultural institutions might be an important part of the story. Urban environments push diverse cultural perspectives up against each other, occasionally inciting social movements. Many contentious issues call for official municipal involvement, for example, parade/festival management, public art selection/location, or park use allocation. To operationalize institutionalized cultural attitudes in cities, this paper examines how city policies attempt to resolve conflicts caused by cultural diversity in human-canine relationships in three US cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Cities are simultaneously pressured by small social movements for more dog parks and by large international movements for stronger animal rights. Two opposing urban dog cultures - dog worship and dog fighting - involve assorted actors and garner the attention of city officials in unexpected ways. Relying on ethnographic research of dog worship in Chicago, this paper discusses one component of the larger, three-city, comparative study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological conversations about cultural products like books have a long history, to which this paper contributes. In addition, sociologists have long been interested in questions about how social norms and ideas are sometimes reproduced and sometimes resisted. This paper is rooted in a tradition of sociologists who study the novel as a source of data. Like these sociologists, I look to the American novel for information about social ideologies and structured representations; like them, I look to the history of American book publishing for information about how texts come to exist and circulate. Unlike them, though, I focus on the cultural content and publishing history of American children's novels, and on each text's willingness to resist the reproduction of dominant social arrangements which are based upon inequality. Further, literary scholars argue that modern feminist fiction emerged during the 1970s, as a component of second wave feminist political activity. This sociological study also critiques and transforms definitions of 'the feminist novel,' and suggests that feminist, or subversive, children's novels existed well before the late-twentieth-century eruption of second wave feminism. By using a less-individualistic theory of social stratification and resistance than previous research, the paper uncovers a range of narrative strategies that explicate and resist overlapping forms of oppression. This paper conceptualizes children's novels as (potentially) containing narratives of resistance, which permits a connection to feminist theories of narratives, since they offer the best models for these types of questions and goals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosion of prison unrest in many advanced industrialized countries from the 1960s to the 1980s belies just how distinctive the U.S. prisoners' rights movement was. The movement's roots, leadership, relationship with state institutions, and the broader political environment in which it operated distinguished it from prison activism in other countries. The most significant historical and institutional factors that shaped the U.S. movement and made it distinctive are the deep and longstanding racial cleavages in the United States; the origins and development of the black nationalist, civil rights, and black power movements; and the central role of the courts and a discourse on rights in American political development. These factors help to explain an ironic outcome. The United States gave birth to a prisoners' rights movement that was initially more powerful and significant than prison reform movements that emerged elsewhere at roughly the same time. But that movement developed in ways that helped create conditions conducive to launching the "race to incarcerate" in the United States. This helps explain why the United States, a forerunner in the rights revolution, ended up being a forerunner in the development of public policies that built the carceral state. This paper situates the U.S. prison movement and the rights discourse concerning prisoners within a wider political context. It shows how the dense network of interest groups and organizations that initially gave the prisoners' rights issue such political traction developed in complicated ways that hastened the rise of the carceral state in the United States. This paper focuses on four developments specifically related to race that help explain the exceptional development of the U.S. prisoners' rights movement: the rapid transformation of the inmatepopulation beginning in the 1930s; the efforts by the federal Bureau of Prisons to desegregate federal penitentiaries from the 1940s onward; the mobilization of black Muslims, officially known as the Nation of Islam, behind bars that started in earnest in the 1950s; and the growth of the black nationalist, civil rights, and black power movements. It concludes with a brief comparison of the U.S. prisoners rights' movement to prison activism elsewhere, notably in Britain and Scandinavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary environmental struggles have centered around the problem of "bureaucratic slippage" in the implementation of environmental laws. Various theories account for that slippage by focusing on how the specific characteristics of a regulatory agency shape its implementation of environmental policy. In this paper, I review the major theories used to explain the logging policies of the Forest Service. I then evaluate these models by applying them to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). In each case, the FWS appears to have already "solved" the problems highlighted in these analyses of the Forest Service. The FWS should therefore be an ideal vehicle for implementation of environmental laws. However, for all of their differences, the FWS and Forest Service display remarkably similar patterns in terms of citizen enforcement litigation. This litigation is associated with a dramatic reduction in logging levels and a dramatic increase endangered species protection in the 1990s. Accordingly, successful implementation of environmental laws appears to depend less on the characteristics of the implementing agency than on the presence of mechanisms of public enforcement of those laws from outside of the agency. This paper concludes with an evaluation of the implications of citizen enforcement for environmental policy and scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of Gay-Straight Alliance clubs [GSAs] in high schools across the United States, has grown from two in 1989 to over 2,000 by the year 2004. One important factor in the spread of these clubs has been the coordinating and networking of information and local efforts by several, state, regional and national organizations. Since the early 1990s, organizations like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network [GLSEN], Project 10, The Safe Schools Coalition, and the GSA Network in California have established themselves as groups that both assist lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender [LGBT] students starting GSA clubs and that educate educators, parents, policy makers, and the general public about the needs and rights of these students. These efforts, combined with the work of LGBT and straight ally students, have coalesced into a social movement. This paper examines effectiveness of the newly emerging GSA movement in establishing themselves as experts on LGBT issues in education, getting their framing of the issues out through the media, and influencing public opinion. The paper also examines the effectiveness of countermovement organizations from the religious right in influencing these same things with their frames of the issues. The assessment is based on a content analysis of over three hundred new stories, editorials, and letters to the editor about GSAs that appeared in newspapers around the country from 1984 to 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the past three decades American Indian tribes have gone from being extremely marginal social groups largely dominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to wielding advantageous ? and distinctively governmental ? rights and powers. They are now legitimate and functional members of the American intergovernmental structure, and enjoy unique access to federal actors and decision-making processes. These striking outcomes present a puzzle to students of social movements, racial politics, and political institutions, as well as to those studying American political development and federalism in particular. In this paper I explain these distinctive outcomes and offer an innovative account by extending the synthesis of cultural institutional and social movement theory. I focus on tribal institutional entrepreneurship. To gain acceptance as legitimate governments rather than as minority groups or wards of the state, tribes newly adopted conventional territorial organizational forms and functions. These actions were accompanied by discursive advocacy providing justifying accounts for this status. Entrepreneurs opportunistically exploited contradictions and ambiguities in federal policy statements to promote this shift in the accepted status of tribes. The paper provides a detailed analysis of the contingent and iterative process through which this institutionalization of tribal status occurred, as well as analytically accounting for the pivotal events and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores two oppositional binaries for Latino immigrants in the U.S.; first, in terms of religiosity, where Latin Americans are assumed Catholics, while "Americans" are most often understood as Protestants, and second, through sexuality, where Latin American sexual behavior is often contrasted to identity based U.S. gay and lesbian social movements. This paper engages in the intersectionality of religion, migration, ethno-racial politics, and sexuality with Latin Americans in the U.S., and attempts to respond to the foundation of those oppositional practices. Much literature on migration, Latinos, and religion is used in order to discuss these points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement theorists belonging to both the resource mobilization school and the framings school tend to define social movements as phenomenon that actively pursue political goals, despite disagreements over whether cognitive conceptions or resources are more important in the successful attainment of these goals. The following paper seeks to enter into a dialogue with these two traditions by examining the possibility that social movements may contain features that are not overtly political, or themselves be entirely unconcerned with political goals, and yet still produce politically relevant consequences. Borrowing loosely from mechanisms for the generation of discourse developed by Foucault, the paper conceptualizes social movements as unique loci of discourse interaction, which both generate and are sustained by an incipient new discourse. The discourse created therein, furthermore, is important due to its cognitive aspect, which constrains the thinking of individuals within the movement, and due to its communicative aspect, which allows it to be spread outside of the movement through the simple act of communication (thus breaking free of the initial locus). This new discourse is further relevant, because it effects which aspects of reality are communicated in inter-personal interaction, thus severely constraining which action oriented frames can be constructed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibility of a division of labor within social movements, in which discourse is generated via discursive interaction in several loci, and subsequently woven together in other movements before becoming framed in a politically relevant manner. The paper ends with several implications of the importance of discourse in formulating a more complete understanding of social movements, as it relates to generating more nuanced theories of power. The case study of the 1960s in the United States is employed to highlight these phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiqued as being a-historical, current social movement theorists argue for the implementation of a more dynamic model for understanding social movements that focuses on processes within historical contexts (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, 2001). This paper seeks to apply existing social movement theory on framing to the historically, embedded case of the American abolitionist movement. Specifically, this paper analyzes the influence of the adopted religious masterframe of the abolitionist movement on the trajectory of the movement. Prior to the Civil War, the, good versus evil mindset purported by the religious masterframe mobilized movement followers against slavery. However, with Emancipation and the onset of the muddled political environment of Reconstruction, the religious masterframe could not muster the same degree of support. Attempts to alter the masterframe to a rights based masterframe compromised the internal integrity of the movement?s frame. Ultimately, the movement dissolved, unable to remedy their masterframe with the new political reality [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a budget of $2.25 million, and approximately 100 employees located at its central headquarters in Washington DC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) emerged in May of 1965 to oversee the implementation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Though the EEOC began with the charge of enforcing federal laws designed to end workforce discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion and national origin, the Commission has seen significant increases in size and scope. By 2002, the EEOC’s budget increased to $310.406 million and its workforce grew to 2,782 employees in over 50 field offices nationwide. In addition to Title VII, the scope of the EEOC has grown to include federal laws addressing discrimination against individuals over the age of 40 (1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act); discrimination on the basis of gender in compensation (1963 Equal Pay Act); and discrimination on the basis of disability (1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, 1973 Rehabilitation Act); in addition to the enforcement of the 1991 Civil Rights Act, which provides monetary damages in cases of intentional discrimination. Today, the EEOC is responsible for coordinating all federal equal employment opportunity (EEO) regulations, practices, and policies; interpreting employment discrimination laws and monitoring federal sector employment discrimination program; providing funding and support to state and local Fair Employment Practices Agencies (FEPAs); and sponsoring outreach and technical assistance programs (EEOC, www.eeoc.gov/welcome.html). Considering the growth in the size and scope of the EEOC from its inception in 1965, one would expect to uncover literature surrounding the institutionalization of the Commission. Instead, one finds research focused on the institutionalization of race in public administration theory and practice (Alexander, 1997) and the institutionalization of EEO policy (Skrentny, 1994). In addition, other EEOC literature has examined the establishment of diversity and organizational inclusion in the workforce (e.g. Bond & Pyle, 1998; Giscombe & Sims, 1998); the impact of representative bureaucracy on workforce diversification (e.g. Kerr & Mladenka, 1994; Lawton, 2000); the economics of workforce diversification (e.g. Cohn, 1996; Landes, 1968); the establishment of guidelines for the proper implementation of EEO laws (e.g. Dodge, 1997; Wheeler, 1999); and the impact of social movements on EEO policy (e.g. Burstein, 1991). Neglected in the literature is a discussion of the institutionalization of the EEOC itself and a broader understanding of how bureaucracies may transform from organizations that handle specific tasks for clients to institutions with size, stability, rules, and value beyond the tasks at hand. This project, then, offers the first attempt to address the transformation of the EEOC from the 1965 legislative-created organization to the fully entrenched institution seen today. To examine the process of EEOC institutionalization, this study relies on Huntington’s four dimensions of institutionalization (adaptability: chronology, generation age, institutional functions; complexity; autonomy; and coherence) and Squire’s professionalization model (which permits the examination of how bureaucrats provide services for their clients). The study examines multiple indicators of the development of the EEOC from 1965 to 2002, including budget changes; structural changes in the commission’s organization across the country, employee growth; changes in leadership; and fluctuations in charges filed and resolved. The paper also provides a multivariate analysis of the impact of congressional, presidential, and judicial decisions on the institutional development of the EEOC. The study concludes that the EEOC became a stable institution as early as the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]