Women Lawyers for Social Causes: Professional Careers and Legal Development in Thailand

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-132
Author(s):  
Frank W. Munger ◽  
Peerawich Thoviriyavej ◽  
Vorapitchaya Rabiablok

Women lawyers are increasing seen among the leading legal defenders of human rights and social movements in Thailand. Increasing visibility is partly a result of news coverage and social media, but women lawyers activism has far older roots. In this article, we examine two related processes of change that contribute to women’s emergence as leading social cause practitioners. First, we discuss the relationship between Thailand’s legal system and its social and political development since the end of the nineteenth century. Second, we employ career narratives of three women lawyers with innovative practices for social causes as a lens through which to examine how lawyers transform available resources into an identity, law practice, and law. We discuss not only the role of prior generations of women lawyers, connections between influential elites and social cause lawyers, and the founding of a few key organizations within the NGO community, but also the role of the women as architects of their own careers. We conclude that they have become successful by aligning their practices with emerging social movements and progressive bureaucrats, unexpectedly creating professional identities with somewhat different relationships to the rule of law.

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Hammond

This article examines the problem of how to interpret competing, clashing or contradictory news frames in coverage of war and conflict, focusing on the reporting of the 1992–1995 Bosnian war. ‘Ethnic war’ and ‘genocide’ featured as competing news frames in news coverage of Bosnia and several subsequent conflicts, and are often understood to be contradictory in terms of their implied explanations, moral evaluations and policy prescriptions. The author questions the assumptions that many journalists and academics have made about these frames and the relationship between them. He asks how we can make sense of clashing or contradictory scholarly analyses of these competing frames and considers a number of broader issues for framing analysis: the significance of historical context for understanding the meaning of particular framing devices, the importance of quantification in framing analysis and the role of influential sources in prompting journalists to adopt particular frames.


Author(s):  
Cristiano Gianolla

Representative democracy is currenty facing strong social criticism for its incapacity to envolve people in a way that makes them part of the decision-making process. An existing gap between the representatives and the represented is hereby emphasized. In this space, the role of political parties is central in order to bridge society with institutions. How much are parties concerned about this issue? How and in which context do they interact more with their electorate and the wider society? Participatory democracy is emerging throughout the world in different forms and with different results, but the dominant pattern of democracy remains the liberal western democratic paradigm in which people can contribute barely through electing candidates. In order to achieve what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘democratisation of democracy’ the role of political parties is therefore fundamental in particular to achieve a more participative democracy within the representative model. This article approaches this theme through a bibliographic review comparing social movements and political parties with a focus on the innovation of the Five Star Movement in Italy. Finally, it provides a reading of the relationship between political parties andparticipation, including good practice and perspectives.KEYWORDS: Participation, political parties, social movements, political movements, representative democracy, participatory democracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 376-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xenia Chiaramonte

The relationship between social movements and the legal field is controversial and complex. This paper begins by recognizing that the concept of social movement does not belong to legal doctrine and then synthetically reconstruct the relevance of it for a legal understanding. In fact, even if this concept is not formally taken into account by constitutions or by legal codes, a socio-legal approach underscores the need for the comprehension and inclusion of collective phenomena into legal theory. First, the paper explores the way in which ‘social movement’ has been taken up and translated in the legal field through the concept of social change and constitutional change. Second, this research goes through various cases in which social movements use law strategically, from the phenomenon of cause lawyering to the litigation strategy. Finally, it stands for a theoretical understanding of the role of social movements in legal theory as a lively expression of ‘becoming-constituent’.


2019 ◽  
pp. 205-225
Author(s):  
Matt Guardino

This chapter summarizes the book’s conclusions and suggests directions for future research. It also explores the book’s broader implications for democracy and the dynamics of political-economic power. The chapter stresses the need for interdisciplinary analyses that employ multiple methods and sources of evidence to better understand the role of media and public opinion in American political development. It also discusses how news coverage may contribute to the durability of key aspects of the broader neoliberal policy regime. It ends by situating the book’s analyses within scholarship on inequalities in political and economic power, arguing that political scientists should recognize the news media’s central institutional role at the intersection of American politics and American capitalism.


Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs

This paper provides critical reflections on Manuel Castells’ (2012) book Networks of Outrage and Hope. Social Movements in the Internet Age that analyses the “nature and perspectives of networked social movements” (p. 4) and gives special focus to the role of “social media” in movements that emerged in 2011 in Tunisia, Iceland, Egypt, Spain and the United States. I situate Castells’ book in an intellectual discourse that focuses on the political implications of social media and that has involved Clay Shirky, Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov. The article also discusses the role of social theory and empirical research in Castells’ book, presents as an alternative a theoretical model of the relationship between social movements and the media, discusses the implications that some empirical data that focus on social media in the Egyptian revolution and the Occupy Wall Street movement have for Castells’ approach, discusses how Castells positions himself towards capitalism and compares his explanation of the crisis and his political views to David Harvey’s approach. Section overview: 1. Introduction 2. Social Media and Politics: A Controversy between Clay Shirky, Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov 3. Castells on Social Media in the Context of Protests and Revolutions: The Dimension of Social Theory 4. Social Theory Recovered: A Model of the Relationship between Social Movements and the Media 5. Castells on Social Media in the Context of Protests and Revolutions: The Dimension of Empirical Research 6. Manuel Castells and David Harvey: The Question of Political Struggle - For or against Capitalism? 7. Conclusion


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panayiotis (Panikos) Georgallis ◽  
Brandon Lee

A growing body of research on moral markets—sectors whose raison d’être is to create social value by offering market solutions to social and environmental issues—has offered critical insights into the emergence and growth of these sectors. Less is known, however, about why some firms enter moral markets while others do not. Drawing from research on market entry, organizational identity, and social movements, we develop a theory that highlights the potential of organizational identity to explain variation in entry into moral markets. We then expand our framework by theorizing about contingencies that alter the shape of the relationship between organizational identity and market entry: the flexibility of the organizations’ identity, the type, and orientation of the social movement supporting the moral market, and the mode of market entry (de novo vs de alio). Finally, we discuss the contributions of our framework and opportunities for its extension.


Soundings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (72) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Gabriel Bristow

A discussion of the recent gilets jaunes revolt in France, reflecting on the dynamics of contemporary populist social movements. Starting with the causes of the uprising - underlying and immediate - the article goes on to explore the democratic demands of the movement, the role of the historical imaginary of the French Revolution, the relationship between the gilets jaunes and France's banlieues, and the predominance of police violence.


2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank D. Durham

The Southern labor and desegregation movements were organized at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee between 1932–40 and 1953–61, respectively. This historical sociology examines the role of journalism within the process of social reform by focusing on the labor and desegregation movements as racial “hot spots” of ideological tension and pragmatic transformation. A comparison of the relationship in news coverage in each movement period between the rhetoric of anti-Communism and the newspapers' normative fight against desegregation provides a point of critical analysis. In the interpretation of the resulting process of reforms, Anthony Giddens' (1984) theory of structuration supports the analysis of interactions between movement activists and their normative counterparts at the state's newspapers that ultimately produced social and institutional reforms.


2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Jahn ◽  
Melanie Eichhorn ◽  
Rolf Brühl

This experimental study examines individuals’ legitimacy judgments. We develop a model that demonstrates the role of attributed motives and corporate credibility for the evaluation of organizational legitimacy and test this model with an experimental vignette study. Our results show that when a corporate activity creates benefits for the firm—in addition to social benefits—individuals attribute more extrinsic motives. Extrinsic motives are ascribed when a corporation is perceived as being driven by external rewards as opposed to an altruistic commitment to a social cause. Extrinsic motives negatively affect corporate credibility and organizational legitimacy judgments. This article contributes to a better understanding of the complex process of organizational legitimacy judgment by shedding light on the individual’s perspective and expounding the relationship between attributed motives, corporate credibility, and organizational legitimacy.


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