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Emerging from a confluence of events – including Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) – racial consciousness has intensified in recent years. In the wake of a long declining labor movement, there has also been a surprising upsurge in labor militancy. Are these two currents systematically related? Situating our analysis in the sociological literature on social movement spillover, we ask if there is evidence of racial justice spillover into and stimulating workplace militancy. Employing all known strikes and worker protests during 2021 and 2022, we find: (a) racial justice demands did, indeed, appear as part of workplace militancy during this period; (b) racial justice demands were voiced in both worker protests and strikes launched most heavily by unions but also by alt-labor/SMOs and by unorganized workers; (c) weekly time-series regression models indicate that BLM demonstrations stimulated the frequency of workplace protests and strikes with racial justice demands which, in turn, stimulated wider worker militancy over other issues; and (d) interdependency analysis of worker actions reveals that unionized worker protests served as a key catalyst driving other forms of worker militancy with racial justice demands. We discuss the implications of our findings for social movement spillover theory and for moving racial justice and labor movements forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on social movement schools shows that movements often facilitate the schooling of their participants, while scholarship on the biographical consequences of social movements demonstrates that movements influence their participants' subsequent careers. To date, however, few studies consider whether and how the schooling functions of social movements shape participants' later careers. In this article, through a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of the careers of 23 student participants in the Nashville civil rights movement of 1958–1961, we show that participants who enrolled in James Lawson's workshops in nonviolence and who served in the core cadre of the movement's Student Central Committee – two important forms of social movement schooling – pursued careers in organizing and electoral politics. In contrast, participants who did not enroll in Lawson's workshops and who were not part of the core cadre of the Student Central Committee tended to pursue careers as social service workers or businesspeople. The article extends our knowledge of the impacts of social movement schools and suggests directions for future research on the biographical consequences of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the changes in the private/public relations in the labor history in the U.S., particularly the role of private strike in the public sphere. Other topics include the industrial capitalism strikes during the Gilded Age, the role of the public sphere and civil society in said strike, and the major struggle between capital and labor during the first Gilded Age.

This papers makes three points and offers one demonstration. First, the selection of cases in comparative research ideally should capture all of the variation that exists in a theorized population of interest, and not be based merely on data convenience, the presence or absence of the instance under analysis, or assumptions about causal invariance or the representativeness of cases. Second, partly due to flawed case-selection criteria and partly due to overly generous or overly restrictive logic used in determining causality, neither traditional 'small-N' qualitative designs nor conventional 'large-N' quantitative research designs are optimal for many comparative problems. Third, a relatively new causal comparative methodology based on a data reduction logic rooted in Boolean algebra--Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)--appears of substantial utility in those research sites with relatively large number of cases, causal heterogeneity, and the expectation of delimited theoretical generalizations. These points are then demonstrated through a QCA analysis of comparative patterns of growth and decline of trade union membership across the 18 largest, politically stable capitalist democracies in the 1970s and 1980s.

We develop the concept of "social movement school' (SMS), showing how these organizational spaces are deliberately designed for purposes of educating, mentoring, training, and coordinating individuals as effective, committed movement agents. SMSs can also be important sites of prefigurative design and practice for future societal development consistent with movement goals. We motivate the theoretical significance of SMSs based on five perspectives in social movement scholarship: (1) resource mobilization; (2) cultural approaches to repertoires of contention; (3) cognitive perspective; (4) micro-mobilization; and (5) biographical consequences of participation. We then offer a typology to capture primary purposes, and spatial reach within the broad field of SMSs. Within-movement variation is illustrated by focusing on a variety of SMSs in the U.S. civil rights movement; and the cross-movement breadth of the concept is illustrated by highlighting contemporary SMS forms drawn from three very different movements–labor, radical feminism, and mindfulness meditation movements. In the interest of launching a research agenda on SMSs, we end with several key questions that could serve to guide future research. Important theoretical, empirical, and practical considerations suggest that SMSs deserve the attention of scholars and activists alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, U.S.A. Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, U.S.A. Department of Sociology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, U.S.A. International Journal [...]

In recent years, and especially with the war in Iraq, the U.S. military's reliance oh private contractors as forces in the theater of war has grown and become increasingly clear. We critically evaluate some of the best literature on the emergence of this phenomenon — especially Ken Silverstein's Private Warriors and P. W. Singer's Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry — and find a neglect of the historical path-dependent character of the rise of the new corporate armed forces. In particular, we concentrate on American experience and two silences that are integral to understanding the path-dependent character of this process: (1) earlier historical reliance on private armed force to suppress the labor movement in America, the template for this new form of irregular armed force and (2) the ghost of Vietnam as a continuing political liability in the mobilization of sufficient troop levels under neo-imperialist aspirations and ‘the global war on terror,’ as the main condition for the rise of the new private military form. Both elements suggest the theoretical importance of state strength/weakness in any explanation of private armed force. We discuss several important political implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most time-ordered analyses of historical processes are rendered "ahistorical" because the premises that direct quantitative inquiry obscure changing historical relations through time. These conventional practices stem from three problematic presuppositions: (1) the separation of theory and history, (2) ahistorical conceptions of time, and (3) methodological autonomy and the primacy of the theory of statistical technique. We illustrate how these premises shape sociological-historical investigation by examining several quantitative historical analyses of labor organization and conflict. Reanalysis of the same historical series with "temporally moving covariance" analysis demonstrates theoretically important historical contingency as well as the error of presupposing temporal homogeneity in historical relationships. Our critique of conventional practice and our reanalysis enable us to pose alternative premises to ground quantitative historical research in the interdependence of history and theory, in historical conceptions of time, and in the historicization of quantitative methodology. Our redirection aims at moving us closer to historical "actuality" that is, to historical relations and processes, when we use time-series data and analytic procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illustrates the theoretical, methodological and aesthetic aspects of the research taking place on contemporary historical sociology. Sociohistorical process as the central metaphor; Effects of localizing time and place in the study of historical sociology; Distinguishes factor of historical sociology from other sociologies; Transforming causality in the study of historical sociology; More information.

Discusses a technical innovation that assesses the temporal stability of time-series regression results and demonstrates the importance of the concept of temporality in history. Approaches to recursive regression; Ahistorical perceptions of time.