scholarly journals Introduction

Contention ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Dimitris Soudias ◽  
Tareq Sydiq
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
Scalar Analysis

Since the 1990s, there has been a raft of case studies inquiring into the relation between space and protest in the field that has come to be known as social movement studies or social movement theory, whether it be resource in protesters’ tactical repertoires, a terrain that sets policing strategies, or an actant that influences movement-building. So why produce a special section on “the spatiality of protest” now? The first reason lies in what William Sewell observed almost 20 years ago, which is that “most studies bring in spatial considerations only episodically, when they seem important either for adequate description of contentious political events or for explaining why particular events occurred or unfolded as they did” (2001: 51). Despite efforts from within the field to push social movement studies further around the spatial turn (e.g., Martin and Miller 2003; Wilton and Cranford 2002), it appears as though little theoretical work about the spatiality of protest has been generated in the past 15 years.1 Within the field of social movement studies, the core concepts of opportunity structures, resources, and frames are far from “spatialized.” Curiously, the seemingly marginal theoretical interest in space is set against the fact that recent methodological and conceptual advances in social movement studies call for what is essentially a scalar analysis of protest (Nulman and Schlembach 2018).

Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition. By Valerie Sperling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 303p. $59.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 506-507
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kay
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Model ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Economic

In the introduction, Valerie Sperling notes that "Russia's transition from communism toward capitalism and a more democratic political arrangement has been both good and bad for women, presenting both obstacles and opportunities for organizing" (p. 7). She goes on to produce an engaging and thought-provoking analysis aimed at broadening the scope and explanatory power of social movement theory, which, she argues, has been developed by scholars who focus primarily on social movements in the "contemporary core democracies" (pp. 52-3). In contrast Sperling develops "a cross-cultural model of social movement organizing and development that explores five interrelated opportunity structures: socio-cultural or attitudinal, political, economic, political-historical, and international" (p. 53). In each subse- quent chapter she tackles one of these opportunity structures and offers a number of fascinating insights into the world of post-Soviet social movements, based on the experience of her sample of women's organizations.

Collective Action across Borders: Opportunity Structures, Network Capacities, and Communicative Praxis in the Age of Advanced Globalization

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus S. Schulz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
The World ◽  
Informational Networks

This paper analyzes the dynamics of the Zapatista uprising with research tools inspired by recent social movement theory. It finds that the insurgent indigenous peasants of Chiapas rose up in arms under conditions of relative economic and political deprivation at a particularly opportune moment after developing a project of insurgency and acquiring significant organizational strength. Militarily, the Zapatistas would not have been able to hold out long against the overwhelming force of the federal army. But enormous media attention and massive national and international protest prevented the regime from military crackdowns. The Zapatistas' ability to link personal, organizational, and informational networks has helped to gain crucial support. Using globalized means of communication, they were able to disseminate their messages around the world where they touched a chord in the discourse of an incipient global civil society linked by non-governmental organizations, fax machines, and the internet.

scholarly journals Religious Conflicts: Opportunity Structures, Group Dynamics, and Framing

Al-Albab ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Tomas Lindgren
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Social Movement Theory ◽  
Collective Action Problem ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
Intergroup Conflicts

Explanations of violent religious conflicts usually focus on preconditions, facilitator causes or precipitating events at micro, meso or macro levels of analysis. As social psychology is the scientific study of the ways in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behaviors are influenced by interactions and transactions between groups and individuals, it can increase our understanding of the dynamics of religious conflicts at micro and meso levels. In this paper, I illustrate this point with a discussion of the utility of social movement theory for understanding the dynamics of religious conflicts. Social movement theory locates religious conflicts within broader contexts and complex processes by focusing on the interplay between micro and meso factors and the ways in which people perceive macro factors. Given certain conditions, religion can and often do contribute to collective violence. Religion is rarely, if ever, the main cause of intergroup conflicts, but is often used as an instrument for the mobilization of human and non-human resources. Appeal to religion may help conflicting parties overcome the collective action problem associated with intergroup conflicts. This does not necessarily mean that religious conflicts have unique characteristics or a logic of their own that sets them apart from other types of intergroup conflicts.

scholarly journals Building Rhizomatic Social Movements? Movement-Building Relays during the Current Epoch of Contention

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Nikolaus Funke
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Shared Understandings ◽  
Current Movement

This article investigates the movement building dynamics of contemporary social movement milieus (such as particular protests, social forums or occupations). It develops the concept of the “relay” to introduce four ideal-type movement building relays understood as distinct movement milieus: clustering relay, networking relay, organizing relay, and transforming relay. Each ideal-type captures different points on a continuum of increasing movement building and thus for generating commonalities, shared understandings and identities, mobilizations and strategies. Focusing on what I call the current “rhizomatic movement epoch,” which ranges from roughly the Zapatistas to the recent occupy-type protests, the relay framework can provide a larger conceptual umbrella or schemata for movement-to-movement transmissions. Moreover, focussing on “the situated” element of movements, the relay seeks to highlight the milieu of cooperation attempts, the physical, social and psychological space, the political-economic and socio-cultural setting, in which actors and groups interact. It focuses on those elements that are between the outside of the broader political economy and political opportunity structures (which arguably pre-structure the particular relay) and the “inside” of intra-group or movement behaviour (which in turn feeds back on the particular relay dynamics). While drawing on selected empirical examples from protests, social forums and networking attempts, this article has a conceptual focus, exploring possibilities by adoption of such a relay lens to further our understanding of movement building dynamics and the temporality of social movements, the current movement milieu and social movement theory more generally. As such, my hope is to raise questions and open further research avenues of interest to social movement organizers and scholars.

scholarly journals Public Participation and Collaborative Governance

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
JANET NEWMAN ◽  
MARIAN BARNES ◽  
HELEN SULLIVAN ◽  
ANDREW KNOPS
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Collaborative Governance ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures

This paper draws on the findings of a study within the ESRC's Democracy and Participation Programme. It explores the processes of participation within deliberative forums – such as user panels, youth forums, area based committees – developed as a means of encouraging a more active, participating mode of citizenship and of improving welfare services by making them more responsive to users. Our findings open up a number of issues about constraints on the development of ‘collaborative governance’. To understand these constraints, we suggest, there is need to locate participation initiatives in the context of government policy, to explore ways in which such policy is interpreted and enacted by strategic actors in local organisations and to examine the perceptions of members of deliberative forums themselves. Our findings highlight the constraints on the ‘political opportunity structures’ created by the enhanced policy focus on public participation, and the consequent limits to ‘collaborative governance’. We discuss how governance theory and social movement theory can each contribute to the analysis, but also suggest productive points of engagement through which each of these bodies of theory might enrich the other.

scholarly journals Union framing of gender equality and the elusive potential of equality bargaining in a difficult climate

2021 ◽  
pp. 002218562110036
Author(s):  
Gill Kirton
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Gender Mainstreaming ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Social Movement Theory ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
And Gender

This article explores why equality bargaining appears to remain underdeveloped despite its widely acknowledged potential for tackling workplace inequalities. The concept from social movement theory of ‘framing’ is utilised to assess the prospects of moving from ‘where we are’. Findings from a study of UK-based union equality actors discuss unceasing efforts on their part to shift equality from the margins to the centre of union bargaining activity. As regards ‘where to next’, Equality Officers’ strategic deployment of the longstanding union equality frames of ‘women’s issues’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’ challenges taken-for-granted social practices within unions, offering some optimism that creative strategies can help to inject equality frames into traditional union frames, thus producing an expanded and inclusive notion of union solidarity. However, this framing activity occurs within existing opportunity structures with all their facilitative and inhibitive factors, including resistant union officers and reps, which previous research has highlighted. Therefore, a less optimistic vision is that the weight of union tradition that has long privileged male interests, combined with contemporary hostile bargaining conditions, are just too great for equality bargaining to reach its full potential.

Backyards, NIMBYs, and Incinerator Sitings: Implications for Social Movement Theory

1993 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Walsh ◽  
Rex Warland ◽  
D. Clayton Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Movement Theory ◽  
Movement Theory

scholarly journals Conceptualising organisational cultural lag: Marriage equality and Australian sport

2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332199165
Author(s):  
Keith D Parry ◽  
Ryan Storr ◽  
Emma J Kavanagh ◽  
Eric Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Sexual Minority ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Marriage Equality ◽  
Institutional Diversity ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Cultural Lag

This article develops a theoretical framework to understand how sexuality can be institutionalised through debates about marriage equality. We first examine 13 Australian sporting organisations concerning their support for marriage equality and sexual minority inclusion before showing they drew cultural capital from supporting episodes of equality exogenous to their organisation, while failing to promote internal inclusion. We use online content analysis alongside the identification of institutional speech acts within policy to analyse results through three conceptual lenses: Ahmed’s institutional diversity work, Ogburn’s cultural lag, and Evan’s organisational lag, from which we propose a hybrid – organisational cultural lag – as a theoretical tool within social movement theory.

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.”

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