Under Construction: Frames, Culture, and American Labor’s Postwar Embrace of “Free Enterprise”

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-387
Author(s):  
Kristina Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Defensive Strategy ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Social Movement Framing ◽  
Under Construction

The empirical literature on social movement framing has largely neglected the processes by which frames are made. This paper addresses this lacuna through a study of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) embrace of “free enterprise” in its postwar program in the 1940s. Conventional accounts present the CIO’s use of consensual language in this period as a reflection of the labor federation’s rightward ideological drift, but a close examination of the processes involved in the construction of the “free enterprise” frames reveals a more complicated story. Drawing from archival research, I show that free enterprise was viewed with suspicion and antipathy within the organization, which is reflected in early drafts of the program literature. I also demonstrate that the decision to ultimately embrace “free enterprise” was rooted in a defensive strategy, one that was shaped in part by the leadership’s perception of American political culture at the time.

The Bible Speaks to Labor

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf ◽  
Ken Fones-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Community Relations ◽  
Textile Workers ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Social Message ◽  
Local Minister

This chapter focuses on religious resources that the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) utilized to offer an alternative to Christian free enterprise and bring collective bargaining to the South. In the summer of 1946, the citizens of Danville, Virginia rallied behind a local minister and the local of the Textile Workers Union of America to create a Citizens' Committee to fight for economic justice and defy charges that they were led by outsiders “with Communistic leanings.” There were also allies in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, at Highlander Folk School, and in the industrial department of the YWCA who sought to fuse Protestantism's social message to the organization of southern workers. These pointed to a reservoir of prophetic Christianity upon which the CIO could draw when it mobilized for its crusade to organize Dixie. Perhaps most important, the CIO had a cadre of men and women with ties to Protestant churches whom it could send to build favorable community relations.

From Culture to Claimsmaking

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-262
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman ◽  
Kushan Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Movement Framing ◽  
Discursive Field ◽  
Archival Study

Conceptual approaches to claimsmaking often feature the overarching symbolic templates of political culture or else the strategic actor of the social movement framing approach. Both approaches have value, but neither shows adequately how cultural context influences claimsmaking in everyday situations. To better understand cultural context and situated claimsmaking together, we retheorize the concept of discursive field, showing how such a field is sustained through interaction. Claimsmakers craft claims from basic symbolic categories, in line with the appropriate style for a scene of interaction. Scene style induces external and internal boundaries to a discursive field, making some claims illegitimate and others inappropriate or else subordinate in a given scene. Conceptualizing how culture works in a discursive field helps us better understand what claimsmakers can say, how, and where. We illustrate the theoretical reconstruction with an ethnographic and archival study of different settings of a housing advocacy campaign.

scholarly journals Book Review: American Political Culture: An Encyclopedia

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Carla Wilson Buss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Reliable Information ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Israel Zangwill

Anyone seeking reliable information on American political life since the 1970s will be pleased with Michael Shally-Jensen’s work, American Political Culture. This three-volume set covers topics from abortion to Israel Zangwill, the nineteenth-century author who coined the phrase “melting pot” and who appears in the entry for “Cultural Pluralism.”

scholarly journals JUST REKINDLE HOPE? SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IMPACTS OF THE 15M MOVEMENT IN SPAIN

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
Miguel A. Martínez ◽  
Elena Domingo San Juan
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Institutional Effects ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Organisation

How to identify and assess the social and political impacts of a social movement such as the 15M/Indignados in Spain? A particular challenge comes up, first, when its limits and identity are blurred so here we distinguish three types of movement goals and explain how they emerged. Secondly, in order to evaluate their achievements we pay special attention to the usually neglected dimensions of movements’ impacts – their self-reproduction, the non-institutional effects and the ‘unintended consequences’. We argue that the 15M was able to challenge the authorities over the first three years of its existence by creating a counter-hegemonic political culture as well as a manifold set of practical initiatives of self-organisation. However, the institutional impacts were very limited, in spite of some significant successes and side-effects in the electoral arena. This is mainly explained by the resilient cohesion of the power elites and the continuation of the prevailing socio- economic structures.

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