Social movements as schooling for careers: career consequences of the Nashville civil rights movement.

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]