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Presents a case for a reorientation of social movement theory and research along network lines. While looking at networks as a powerful precondition of collective action has proved a fruitful exercise in its own right, one could also take the network idea further and make it the core of a distinctive research program. Adopting a concept of social movement as a distinctive type of social networks may reorient social movement analysis and help better specifying the relation between movements and related phenomena such as coalitions, solidarity campaigns, and political organizations. The chapter briefly sketches the basic traits of a research programme for the analysis of network social mechanisms within social movements, looking first at different network patterns, and then identifying some analytical principles, which also draw upon existing paradigms.

This chapter locates U.S. health institutions in the context of American society and culture, exploring “American Exceptionalism” and its implications for the particular structure and culture of health institutions. This context limits and shapes the forms and processes of social movements and collective action that occur. The chapter then uses the earlier chapters, as well as the broader literature, to argue how U.S. health institutions shape, and are shaped by, social movements. The range is broad and includes research that deals with movements aimed at shaping the overall financing and governance of U.S. health institutions, the internal workings of organizations, professions, and occupations, self‐help movements, and movements about particular disease and disability entities. One of main questions raised is the relevance of contemporary social movement theory, largely dealing with political movements, for the analysis of movements oriented towards specific institutions. Key concepts of institutional theory are also discussed. The key concepts of contemporary theory, with modifications, can be usefully employed in examining institutional movements. These key concepts include fields, framing processes, political opportunities, resources, collective identity, and mobilization processes.

This chapter sets up the theoretical context of the book. It begins by establishing the key relevant debates in Social Movement Theory (SMT), including that of new versus old social movements, the influence of new media technologies on social movements and the role of emotions within social movement studies. This chapter identifies the theoretical perspective for studying activist culture, drawing on Bourdieu’s (1992) theory of practice. This will serve as the basis for developing an analysis of the affective and cultural dimensions of social movement activism. It is contended that this approach enables the development of in-depth ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) and an understanding of the interactions between activists as well as between the activist field and the wider social and political context, which is a theme threaded throughout the book. The chapter highlights feminist critiques of mainstream (or ‘malestream’) SMT’s failure to recognise the importance of gender to theorising social movements. This is contextualised by a wider discussion about the gendered exclusions that exist within the public sphere.

This chapter focuses on the movement's message. Many of the social movements often embraced a unifying message that sought ways to attract a wide and diverse group of supporters. For an understanding of some of the additional components of social movement success, particularly in social innovation moments, the chapter turns to contemporary social movement theory to try to identify the connection between one's network, the messages that network might send, and the extent to which the identities of the members of that network are tied up in both. It discusses the evolution of social movement theory, beginning with what can be called the rational actor model of community organizing. What this discussion shows is that messages matter for community organizing and social mobilization. Personalizing, humanizing, and optimistic messages can help movements expand and grow, creating the network effects described in the previous chapter. At the same time, when those messages are encoded onto face-to-face relationships, those relationships serve as a channel through which a movement can expand its network.

In the early 1920s, a powerful Ku Klux Klan movement burst forth in many American cities, targeting immigrant Jews and Catholics and people of color and attracting an estimated four to six million members. This book uses an explanatory framework built on three basic analytic dimensions: socioeconomic structure, institutional politics, and urban civil society. It introduces concepts drawn from three corresponding, well-known paradigms in sociology and political science: traditional political sociology; the “new institutionalism”; and social movement theory. Furthermore, it provides a case study of three social movements in Oakland, from the point of view of urban political development in twentieth-century America. The focus is on the struggles of groups and actors to forge a political solidarity and community in an urban context. An overview of the chapters included in this book is finally presented.

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 chapter discusses the means by which concerns about the management and government of public services have intersected with concerns about a decline in political participation. It describes the move to more inclusive forms of politics and decision-making that has derived from autonomous action among community, identity, and user groups. From a governance perspective, opening up decision-making about public policies and services to wider influence is seen as a means both of improving the legitimacy of decisions and enhancing the responsiveness of the services that are provided. Finally, it explores the significance of social movement theory in understanding such action, and relates this to conceptualisations of social justice as requiring recognition as well as redistribution. It is argued that it is not sufficient to look at new forms of public participation solely from the perspective of the official discourses and aspirations evident within the ever increasing initiatives coming from both national and local levels of government.

This chapter presents an overview of the book's argument and narrative. It argues that social movements theory and standard legal civil rights history have failed to fully account for the work of the generation of national racial justice activists whose efforts preceded the founding of the NAACP and the National Urban League. Despite the extremely adverse political and social conditions this generation of activists encountered, they persisted in developing and improving strategies for racial justice activism that provided the founding platforms for the NAACP and the National Urban League at their beginnings in the early twentieth century.

This chapter introduces the research question and definitions of the book. It also sets out a methodology to compare Islamic movements across countries and within the same country. Lastly, this chapter introduces the three central hypotheses of this study and sets out the book’s theoretical framework.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians, most with no prior experience of activism, took to the streets in 2011, joining hardened activists, and called for an end to police abuse, a higher minimum wage and political reform. How are we to make sense of these events? What conceptual frameworks can we use? Can we explain their timing, their focus, and who participated? Why did they attract so many who had hitherto been too afraid of police violence? How did people overcome their fear in the face of vicious violence, detention and death? How were they able to outmaneuver the police? Was this really a “leaderless revolution”? What role did Facebook, Twitter and the internet play? How did the protests affect the way that public space was perceived? This book addresses these questions based on a critical interpretation of social movement theory, first-hand interviews and a broader analysis of political and economic changes.

Translates some of the most decisive and influential discursive and performative moments that shaped the early drama of the unfolding text of Egypt's uprising. By drawing on analytical tools from the fields of translation, performance, and gender studies, as well as social movement theory, the authors translate at both the linguistic and semiotic levels selections from these transformative moments that impacted millions of Egyptians on social and conventional media networks by such diverse actors as activists Asmaa Mahfouz and Wael Ghoneim, former president Hosni Mubarak and General Mohsen al-Fangari. The authors read these discursive interventions as theatrical performances, the impact of which can only be understood through a thick translation that attends not just to the linguistic but to the affective, emotive, and semiotic levels of these transformative discourses.

This chapter considers whether acculturation processes leave a gap between formal commitments by states and actual practices on the ground. Although such gaps constitute important evidence of acculturation, the process of acculturation may, in other circumstances, foster complete internalization of a norm. The chapter analyzes studies that document just this sort of internalization. The remaining question is whether meaningful change might occur in circumstances in which acculturation does produce gaps between form and practice. On this question, the chapter details processes by which formal, even if shallow, commitments to global legal norms might be translated into meaningful change over time. These processes include shifts in domestic political opportunity structure, the “civilizing force of hypocrisy,” and state learning.

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 identifies the historical roots of union decline in a period of unparalleled labor strength—the 1950s. Like their contemporary counterparts, unions in the 1950s often struggled to secure influential political allies, to forge coalitions with groups outside of the labor movement, to push back against powerful business interests, and to make a compelling case for labor rights. These weaknesses came to a head at the end of the decade in conflicts over right-to-work laws and public-sector collective bargaining rights in the industrial Midwest. Social movement theory is presented to account for labor’s mixed showing across the heavily unionized states of the Midwest in the 1950s and to identify the political, organizational, and strategic factors critical to labor success then and now. The principal case studies and research design are introduced.

This chapter applies the BKAP model of action to a number of important theoretical and empirical puzzles that have been confronted by organization theorists in particular and by social scientists more generally. Specifically, the chapter explores the applicability of the BKAP model to central issues in artistic movements with a case study of the Ballets Russes in early twentieth-century France, entrepreneurship theory, and collective action. The chapter then turns to several other issues related to organizing and strategy and the individual and firm level, including dynamic capability, microfoundations of organizing, supply chain management, sensemaking, ambidexterity, transactive memory systems, emotional intelligence, and job crafting. From there the chapter turns to implications for mobilizing action across the analogue-digital divide, and for education, social inequality, and social mobility. The chapter concludes by relating the author’s approach to de Tocqueville’s “science of association.”

Chapter 2 presents the book’s theoretical argument, which goes beyond existing theories of social movement emergence. Drawing on work on threat assessment and framing in social movements, it argues that the armed resistance in the ghettos rested on critical conclusions and resonant responses. First, based on their assessments of the threats facing them, Jews in each ghetto reached conclusions about whether they were likely to survive. If survival was possible then taking up arms against the Nazis was foolhardy, but a firm belief in the inevitability of their deaths made armed resistance acceptable. Second, Jews in the ghettos had to fashion responses to that perceived threat that matched meaningfully, or resonated, with how they framed their circumstances. The three-case comparison demonstrates that framing and assessments of threat varied across the three ghettos and help explain why a sustained uprising happened in Warsaw but not in Vilna or Łódź.

This chapter examines the problems of labour weakness in post Communist transformation. Structural and agency factors are considered before presenting an account through social movement theory of labour as a movement in both Serbia and other Balkan states. The nature of political clientelism is described in relation to Serbia's main union federations. Key labour disputes are recorded and analysed.