Search Results

This chapter examines the role played by innovative opportunities in driving economic transformation through dependencies between actors. It explores the extent of experimentation and inertia when actors identify, act upon, and realize innovative opportunities. Innovative opportunities are used to capture dependencies between key processes in innovation, as well as understand the systemic effects present in complex innovation activities characterized by uncertainty. The dependencies are illustrated by case studies of the early stages of development of technology and business platforms in the telecom industry. Empirical observations demonstrate dependencies between different actors which result in ‘systemic’ effects. These take the form of dependencies across different types of opportunities (technological, entrepreneurial, and productive ones), as well as dependencies across different elements of these processes (value perception, resource mobilization, and value appropriation). Such interdependencies are the force helping to drive flexibility and stability in economic transformations.

Frickel describes how professionalization in environmental health and justice (EHJ) has been occurring under the radar through “shadow mobilizations”—semi‐formal networks of health scientists and medical professionals that flexibly intersect with activists. Using data from thirty‐two in‐depth interviews with scientists, medical professionals, and EHJ organizers, this paper defines and develops the concept of shadow mobilization as an alternative route to movement professionalization. Movements for environmental health and justice are commonly described as grassroots phenomena but are different from more mainstream environmental and health movements, in which professional advocacy has centered in large organizations staffed by legal, scientific, and public health experts. The paper considers the role that invisibility, secrecy, and temporality play in the formation of loosely coupled networks of expert activists. These networks span knowledge institutions and sectors (university, state, and industry) as well as the cultural and class divisions ostensibly separating experts and at‐risk communities.

This chapter examines the prospects for domestic resource mobilization in Africa. After summarizing ongoing debates about the post-2015 Financing for Development agenda and their implications for African economies, the chapter analyses the domestic resource mobilization – focusing on tax and non-tax revenues – performance for the region. In particular, the chapter estimates a tax effort index for 49 African countries over the period 1996 to 2010, and then discuss the implications of our findings for the international community as well as African governments that are increasingly looking to domestic resource mobilization as a source of financing ambitious post-2015 goals and targets. The chapter argues that domestic resource mobilization, rather than being reduced to goals and targets aimed at increasing the tax/GDP ratio, should be repurposed to investing in responsible and accountable governments.

This chapter provides advice on the practical application of the concepts relating to public action resources presented in the book. It proposes experience-based units for measuring each of the ten resources (and related indicators), a way of identifying the resource portfolios of public policy actors (mainly capable of demonstrating the differences between the resource portfolio at the disposal of each one of the three actors) and a standardized way of documenting resource exchanges. Finally, the chapter locates public action resource analysis within the context of comprehensive policy analysis studies based on a seven-point checklist.

Several important questions bear on the impact of military and defense-related research, development, and procurement on future technology development in the U.S. One is whether changes in the structure of the American economy and of the defense industrial base preclude military procurement from playing a role in the development of advanced technology comparable to that it played in the past. Another is whether the military and defense-related industries have become so small relative to the size of the U.S. industrial sector that they no longer exert significant leverage on the rate and direction of technical change. A more disturbing question is whether a war, or threat of war, will be necessary to induce the mobilization of the scientific, technical, and financial resources to generate new general-purpose technologies. It is argued that war or its threat will be a less powerful inducement to technical change in the first half of the 21st century than it was during the last half of the 20th century.

This chapter deals with mobilizations or, equivalently, mobilization processes. These are processes in which collective action originates. A major theme of this chapter is the effects of mobilizations on transformations. These are understood as relatively radical societal upheavals. Mobilizations from below, in contrast to mobilizations from above, played a major role in the transformations of communist states in 1989/90. Only mobilizations from below are dealt with in this chapter. It is first discussed under which conditions mobilization processes come about. Next the role of mobilizations in transformation processes is addressed. The answers to these questions are applied to the explanation of the collapse of former communist states. The chapter applies in particular the theory of collective action and outlines a micro-macro explanation of transformation processes.

The chapter provides an overview of local as well as transnational migrant organizations, exploring how they differ in terms of their nature, formation, and resource mobilization. The first section examines the socio-demographic characteristics of both types of migrant organizations, followed by the formation and resource mobilization of these organizations in India and abroad. The chapter is replete with examples from the study itself.

This chapter argues that increased mobilization of domestic financial resources is critical if Zambia is to achieve its development objective of becoming a prosperous middle income country by 2013. This is a significant challenge requiring that impediments to the development of the financial sector, particularly the existence of severe information costs in the financial sector, are addressed. In this regard, Chapter 7 demonstrates how the nature of Zambia’s financial sector can be explained through the existence of information costs. These information costs can be addressed by enhancing the legal and institutional framework; encouraging more effective competition that promotes financial intermediation and consumer welfare, and improving financial inclusion. Policies that support the secondary market for both public and private debt are also critical for improved domestic and external resource mobilization.

Domestic resource mobilization (DRM) has assumed increasing significance as a form of financing for sustainable development and economic growth in Africa. This chapter explores the present and future roles of international law concerning the regulation of this form of financing for sustainable development and economic growth in Africa, as well as the main obstacles and challenges of mobilising DRM in African developing and less developed countries. While there is a wide array of questions and issues related to this form of financing for development that international conferences and summits, in particular the Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Development and the Addis Ababa Agenda for Action, have addressed in various forms and with different emphasis and results, the chapter focuses exclusively on some substantial issues, such as the use of DRM for the financing of the new Sustainable Development Goals and the relationship between DRM and poverty alleviation actions and strategies.

The roots of the modern social movement can be traced to Europe and America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the Great Awakening in the American colonies and religious mobilizations during the Protestant Reformation in Europe. By the early nineteenth century, the social movement was a form of collective action transposable across issues and populations to express grievances and desires. Theorists of “resource mobilization” focused on how people organize and marshal resources to pursue these grievances or desires. This chapter examines the limitations of the notion of a Left–Right political spectrum for understanding social movements that resisted prevailing ideas of progress and rooted in tradition. It looks at how the idea of social movement combined with democracy and republicanism to bring about a new notion of society. The chapter also discusses the “social question” raised by capitalist industrialization, along with poverty and class relations, as well as arguments that material necessity made social change inevitable.

Costs have always been considered a significant predictor of individual participation in collective action and social movement. This chapter sheds light on the role of costs in classic social movement theory and research. It also mentions that the innovative usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the Web and e-mail can motivate participation and reduce the costs of social movement. Costs are associated with resource mobilization and overall participation, and these will also be calculated and taken into consideration when the protesters face police or private action to control the protest. Cost calculations may also help account for participation in large-scale protests and different tactics. A supersized approach to participation means that the innovative uses of the Web cannot change the fundamental dynamics of participation; however, the Web may help increase and diversify the level of participation.

While academics are apt to seek the development of theoretical explanations for social movements, activists are more concerned with learning practical lessons about their movements in order to further their goals. Activist theorizing happens within all social movements, but academics have tended to focus exclusively on reformist, mainstream movements. There have been impressive contributions by sociological theorists of movements, but activists remain frustrated and indifferent to the poor attempts to theorize about revolutionary or anti-authoritarian movements, such as anarchism. Consequently, the established theoretical explanations for movements—including relative deprivation, resource mobilization, frame alignment, and dynamics of contention—are of mixed relevance to anarchist movements. This chapter briefly introduces these assorted theories and applies to anarchist movements. Some of these theories address crucial concerns, like strategy, timing, scale, and risks of movements. More importance will be placed upon other key interpretations to be introduced later in the text (i.e., political opportunity, new social movements, and social capital theories). An appropriate orientation is taken toward developing “better theories”: conserving and improving what exists (of both American and European scholarly origin) that is good, and building better theories from currently un-addressed concerns. This chapter also explores what is the utility of social movement theory for anarchist movements themselves.

Chapter 1 provides a critical account of the conscience constituent in social movement theory. It identifies the points at which conscience constituents are deployed in social movement theory: in resource mobilization theory, rational choice accounts of mobilization, political process theory, and framing theory. It considers the weaknesses of the conscience constituent theory both in terms of supply (why conscience constituents participate) and demand (why social movements make use of them). It introduces four puzzling empirical cases the existing theory struggles to explain: women’s movements and their male supporters, anticolonialism and its British friends, labor representation and its professional advocates, and Victorian socialists and middle-class fellowship. The chapter also provides a roadmap to the book as a whole and explains and justifies methodological and definitional choices.

This book has examined how referendums from below serve as opportunities that are particularly conducive to broadening participation as well as enhancing political engagement and understanding among the electorate. Using the campaigns in Scotland, Catalonia and Italy, the book has provided evidence that referendums offer social movements the chance to make a decisive contribution to issues of substantial political importance. By analyzing these movements' resource mobilisation, appropriation of opportunities, and capacity to develop resonant frames, the book has shown how movements have shaped political debates. This concluding chapter summarises the book's main ideas and contributions and considers how some of the traits and patterns identified in the Catalan, Scottish and Italian cases hold in two additional settings: the Icesave referendum in Iceland and the consultation on the Troika's ultimatum in Greece.

This chapter focuses on the Tea Party movement's mobilization of grassroots activism since 2009 to demonstrate how populist mobilization builds from public sentiments of inequality and democratic deficits in the political system. In particular, it highlights the tension between grassroots mobilizations animated by democratic rhetoric and their potentially less democratic claims on policy. The chapter first considers the history of social movements before situating the Tea Party and its right-wing populism within social movement theory, along with inconsistencies/disagreements within the Tea Party. It then explores political opportunity theory in order to elucidate how the Tea Party's claims, tactics, and trajectory are affected by the world outside the movement, with particular emphasis on formal politics. It also discusses the Tea Party's resource mobilization and concludes by explaining how inequality allowed for new mobilization opportunities in the movement's case despite their largely undemocratic nature.

This chapter examines the 2011 water referendum in Italy, focusing on the appropriation of opportunities, resource mobilisation, and the framing of the campaign by social movements and civil society organisations. It shows that some of the characteristics of the referendums from below that were observed in Scotland and Catalonia also fit the Italian case. In terms of appropriation of opportunities, the referendum against the privatisation of water supply was far from a single-issue campaign, instead emerging from long-lasting struggles that made use of a multiple and varied repertoire of contention, including institutional and unconventional forms of action. The chapter also discusses how the closing down of opportunities at the national level and the availability of political allies at the local level prompted the use of forms of direct democracy. Finally, it demonstrates how the provision of water became a symbol of resistance to neoliberalism and austerity policies in Italy.

This chapter explores the business dynamics of high-end, entrepreneurially-driven organised crime in its ruthless pursuit of profits and relentless desire to outsmart law enforcement. It first considers a case example involving three young Norwegian women who were caught at the airport in Cochabamba in Bolivia with more than twenty-two kilos of cocaine in their luggage, and have since been remanded in custody on drug smuggling charges. It then provides an overview of the business enterprise paradigm and the entrepreneurialism of organised crime, with particular emphasis on five essential capabilities that drive entrepreneurial behaviour: opportunity perspective, resources mobilisation, decision-making under uncertainty, people cooperation, and profit maximisation. The chapter concludes by presenting a case study of criminal entrepreneurship.