Contesting Contingency

Inland Shift ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan D. De Lara
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Port Development ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Global Logistics ◽  
Warehouse Workers ◽  
Movement Organizations

Chapter 6 provides an overview and critical analysis of the Warehouse Workers United organizing campaign to show how labor and immigrant social-movement organizations crafted spatial narratives that connected global logistics to regional struggles for racial and economic justice. The ensuing struggle over port development illustrates the important role that competing cognitive mappings can play in actively shaping how space is contested, defined, and produced. Logistics and warehouse work give us a chance to see how workers challenged the dehumanizing nature of capitalist space by producing regional counter-narratives. These counter-narratives illustrate one way that social movements organize against hegemonic development norms. Struggles over the production of space often involve multiple spatial layers. Recounting everyday moments and learning to frame them within an economy of power was a key part of the organizing process. These alternative mappings challenged the dehumanizing relationships of warehouse work, because they created spaces for workers to imagine that another world was possible.

scholarly journals Building Bridges or Building Walls? Explaining Regionalization Among Transnational Social Movement Organizations

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
The North ◽  
Human Rights Organizations ◽  
Global North ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
Building Walls

Before the mid-1980s, most transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) organized across the North-South divide. However, since the mid-1980s data show that more TSMOs are organized exclusively within either the global North or South. To explain this pattern, I analyze ties between regionally organized TSMOs and other nongovernmental organizations. Groups in the global South were more likely than their Northern counterparts to maintain cross-regional ties. At the same time, Northern groups were significantly more likely to report only regional ties. Environmental and women's organizations were the most likely to maintain only regional ties while economic justice and human rights organizations were the most likely to report cross-regional ties. These findings suggest that the regionalization of TSMOs is best explained as a response to the institutional environment rather than a consequence of intramovement conflict and polarization.

scholarly journals Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110265
Author(s):  
Jörg Haßler ◽  
Anna-Katharina Wurst ◽  
Marc Jungblut ◽  
Katharina Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
German Language ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Twitter Activity ◽  
Movement Organizations

Social movement organizations (SMOs) increasingly rely on Twitter to create new and viral communication spaces alongside newsworthy protest events and communicate their grievance directly to the public. When the COVID-19 pandemic impeded street protests in spring 2020, SMOs had to adapt their strategies to online-only formats. We analyze the German-language Twitter communication of the climate movement Fridays for Future (FFF) before and during the lockdown to explain how SMOs adapted their strategy under online-only conditions. We collected (re-)tweets containing the hashtag #fridaysforfuture ( N = 46,881 tweets, N = 225,562 retweets) and analyzed Twitter activity, use of hashtags, and predominant topics. Results show that although the number of tweets was already steadily declining before, it sharply dropped during the lockdown. Moreover, the use of hashtags changed substantially and tweets focused increasingly on thematic discourses and debates around the legitimacy of FFF, while tweets about protests and calls for mobilization decreased.

Exploiting a Crisis: Abortion Activism and the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kate Hunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Medical Procedure ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Global Crisis ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Organizations

How do social movement organizations involved in abortion debates leverage a global crisis to pursue their goals? In recent months there has been media coverage of how anti-abortion actors in the United States attempted to use the COVID-19 pandemic to restrict access to abortion by classifying abortion as a non-essential medical procedure. Was the crisis “exploited” by social movement organizations (SMOs) in other countries? I bring together Crisis Exploitation Theory and the concept of discursive opportunity structures to test whether social movement organizations exploit crisis in ways similar to elites, with those seeking change being more likely to capitalize on the opportunities provided by the crisis. Because Twitter tends to be on the frontlines of political debate—especially during a pandemic—a dataset is compiled of over 12,000 Tweets from the accounts of SMOs involved in abortion debates across four countries to analyze the patterns in how they responded to the pandemic. The results suggest that crisis may disrupt expectations about SMO behavior and that anti- and pro-abortion rights organizations at times framed the crisis as both a “threat” and as an “opportunity.”

scholarly journals The Organizational Trace of an Insurgent Moment

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 237802311770065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam D. Reich
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
York City ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Formal Organizations ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between social movements and formal organizations has long been a concern to scholars of collective action. Many have argued that social movement organizations (SMOs) provide resources that facilitate movement emergence, while others have highlighted the ways in which SMOs institutionalize or coopt movement goals. Through an examination of the relationship between Occupy Wall Street and the field of SMOs in New York City, this article illustrates a third possibility: that a moment of insurgency becomes a more enduring movement in part through the changes it induces in the relations among the SMOs in its orbit.

Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Religious Associations ◽  
Movement Organizations

This article proposes a new and better concept of civic culture and shows how it can benefit sociology. It argues that a better concept of civic culture gives us a stronger, comparative, and contextual perspective on voluntary associations—the conventional American empirical referent for “civic”—while also improving our sociologies of religion and social movements. The article first considers the classic perspective on civic culture and its current incarnations in order to show why we need better conceptual groundwork than they have offered. It then introduces the alternative approach, which is rooted in a pragmatist understanding of collective action and both builds on and departs in some ways from newly prominent understandings of culture in sociology. This approach’s virtues are illustrated with ethnographic examples from a variety of volunteer groups, social movement organizations, and religious associations.

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