cfp for a new SASE sub-track “Emergent Organizations: Creating More Participatory, Inclusive, and Caring Civil Societies and Social Economies” in network A’s Communitarian Ideals and Civil Society – deadline extended to Feb. 10, 2021

Want to connect with other researchers studying transformative organizations?  Consider submitting to a new sub-track “Emergent Organizations: Creating More Participatory, Inclusive, and Caring Civil Societies and Social Economies” at Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)! Due to the pandemic, the 2021 conference will be virtual, spanning July 2-5, 2021.

Joyce Rothschild, Victor Tan Chen, and I are co-organizing this effort, along with SASE network A Communitarian Ideals and Civil Society co-organizers José A. Ruiz San Román and Jieren Hu. This is a new community for presenting research on, for example, mutual aid, decentralized organizing, liberation and abolition efforts, democratic practices, etc.

Here’s a description for the sub-track and network:

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Network A: Communitarian Ideals and Civil Society

This network focuses on the moral or values-based underpinnings of human thought, practices, and institutions that comprise civil societies. This network examines how communities and societies are organized around communalistic values and interactions with governmental systems, organizations, and other collectivities, not merely calculative self-interest or instrumental relations. 

Our network has an experimental sub-track called “Emergent Organizations: Creating More Participatory, Inclusive, and Caring Civil Societies and Social Economies.” This sub-track welcomes studies of activities coordinated through formal organizations, informal groups, decentralized projects, or participatory decision-making.  For example, individual and panel submissions could examine how organizational or group values, practices, or relations can promote more inclusive, liberatory, democratic, equitable, or caring communities; how such forms can impact economies and polities and shape the nature of work, family, and community life; and how state policies and market pressures affect these collectivities.

Examples of relevant phenomena include, but are not limited to: affinity groups, anti-oppressive human services, artistic or cultural collectives, collectively governed commons, community land trusts, community real estate investment cooperatives, community-based economic exchanges, community-run marketplaces, free schools, giving circles, limited equity housing cooperatives and co-housing, mutual aid networks, open and commons-based (inclusive) innovation and valuation frameworks, participatory budgeting, public-private partnerships, social enterprises, and worker or consumer cooperatives. 

If you have questions about submitting to the sub-track within Network A, please contact the sub-track co-organizers:

• Katherine K. Chen, The City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, US, kchen [at] ccny [dot] cuny [dot] edu 
• Joyce Rothschild, Virginia Tech (emeritus), Virginia, US, joycevt [at] aol [dot] com
• Victor Tan Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia, US, vchen [at] vcu [dot] edu

If you have other questions about Network A that are not about the sub-track, please contact the other Network A co-organizers:

• José A. Ruiz San Román, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain, jars [at] ucm [dot] es
• Jieren Hu, Tongji University, Shanghai, China, besthujieren [at] tongji [dot] edu [dot] cn

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Please see the general call for papers for the SASE conference, July 2-5, 2021:

• https://sase.org/event/2021-sase-conference/
• The deadline for submissions is Jan. 16, 2021, though it’s likely that the deadline will be extended. Update: the deadline has been extended to Feb. 10, 2021.

Submission guidelines, as well as information for emerging scholars awards which cover workshop and conference fees for graduate students and recent graduates, are here: https://sase.org/events/conference-submission-and-award-guidelines/

• A quick summary of the submission guidelines: SASE submissions can either consist of a 500-word abstracts for an individual paper or panels of 3-5 papers.  SASE rules limit co-authorships to two presented papers.

Interested in exploring all the SASE networks and mini-conferences?  

• Info about networks is here: https://sase.org/about/networks/
• See mini-conferences here: https://sase.org/event/2021-sase-conference/#mini

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watercooler democracy: how rumors can democratize information at work – guest post by Katie Sobering

I’m posting this guest post about rumors and workplace democracy on behalf of UNT organizational ethnographer Katie Sobering.  Sobering recently virtually visited my “Organizations, Markets, and the State” grad course to answer questions about her ethnographic research on Hotel BAUEN, a worker recuperated cooperative located in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In response to student questions about her published research, Sobering explained how she decided to focus on Hotel BAUEN over other collectivist-democratic forms.  By studying Hotel BAUEN’s trainings, meetings, everyday activities, and involvement in social movement activities, Sobering shows how we can use this case to understand how organizations pursue equality through practices such as job rotation and decision-making by consensus.  Sobering also depicted the challenges confronting the cooperative: securing ownership of the hotel, expensive, specialized maintenance of the facilities, and recruitment and retention of members. During the Q&A, Sobering traced her intellectual lineage and inspirations back to Joyce Rothschild’s seminal work on collectivist-democratic organizations and Rachel Sherman’s research on service work in hotels.  She currently is revising a book manuscript on her research.

Here’s Sobering’s take on rumors’ roles in workplace transparency, based on her research published in Work and Occupations:

“We’ve all heard rumors. Odds are, most of us have spread rumors every now and again. From the family dinner table to anonymous corners of the internet, people share unverified pieces of information to make sense of their social worlds. Rumors are especially common in the workplace, spurring the now well-known idea of the “watercooler effect.”

Managers, consultants, and academics alike have paid close attention to the role and repercussions of such informal communication at work. Much of this assumes that firms keep secrets. Thus, in lieu of access to information, workers pass rumors among themselves.

In the 21^st century, transparency has become a buzzword, as work organizations like tech firms and startups flatten hierarchies, embrace informality, and remove barriers that traditionally limited access to information. Some organizations are experimenting with “radical transparency” while others warn that too much transparency can be counterproductive. Worker cooperatives and other participatory organizations often practice democratic transparency, recognizing that information-sharing is key to democratizing power. All this begs the question: in contexts of increased transparency, what is the role of rumors?

In my recent article published in Work and Occupations, I draw on long term ethnographic research in a worker-run hotel in Argentina to go behind the scenes in an organization in which workers enjoy a far more egalitarian environment than most U.S. employees experience on the job: extensive access to information, voice in the organization, and power over their jobs. I find that transparency does not quell the rumor mill. But rumors do have an important impact on the culture and practice of information-sharing.

Democratic transparency in Hotel Bauen

I conducted my research in Hotel Bauen, a twenty-story conference hotel located in the bustling center of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Built in the 1970s, the private owners declared bankruptcy in 2001 and shut down the property, leaving longtime employees out of work. In 2003, thirty former employees joined the growing movement of worker-recuperated businesses by occupying the abandoned hotel and forming a worker cooperative. Since 2004, Hotel Bauen has been open around-the-clock, hosting events, lodging overnight guests, and offering a meeting place and street-side café for passersby. Despite workers’ ongoing efforts to legalize their use of the hotel, the BAUEN Cooperative has grown from thirty founding members to 130 members in 2015. Today, it is one of the most iconic worker-recuperated business in Argentina.

Hotel Bauen is run by a worker cooperative: an organization in which all members are equal owners and govern through direct and representative forms of democracy. Since its inception, the cooperative has adopted formal policies and practices designed to make information widely available to the group. They have sought to create what Archeon Fung calls “democratic transparency,” an informational environment that allows people to collectively control the organizations that affect their lives.

First, in the BAUEN Cooperative, information is formally accessible to all members. Organizational records are kept in open book system that is available not only for managers or decision-makers, but also for members.

Second, the cooperative makes information proportional by sharing details about that which directly impacts the business and its members. While cooperatives in Argentina must hold as least one assembly each year by law, the BAUEN Cooperative organizes quarterly meetings to provide regular financial snapshots and open forums for discussion.

Finally, information is actionable through formal mechanisms that allow members to question and even overturn managerial decisions. With signatures of ten percent of the membership, members can convene an assembly of all workers to address and evaluate any decision or scenario in the cooperative.

Despite the transparency that the workers enjoyed in Hotel Bauen, rumors were part and parcel of daily working life. These whispers were often interpersonal in nature, passing hearsay about coworkers’ personal lives. But other rumors ventured into the inner workings of the organization itself.

I found that these rumors democratized information in two interrelated ways. First, rumors encouraged workers to participate in decisions, moving decision-making out of formal spaces and into the hallways where members of the cooperative could informally deliberate on the issue at hand. Second, rumors allowed members to oversee the managerial authority and empowered them to exercise their ability to hold the organization accountable.

[Check out more about worker influence after the jump]

state-of-the-field article “School choice’s idealized premises and unfulfilled promises” now available

Just before 2019 ends and we enter 2020, I’ve finally broken the superstition that whatever you do on New Years will be what you will do for the following New Years.  This year, a R&R converted into an accept and page proofs before New Years hit!

My co-authored paper with Megan Moskop is now available under the Organizations & Work section of Sociology Compass!  In this paper, using critical sociology and education research, we overview the variants of school choice systems in the US and their impacts on students, schools, and society.

Here’s the abstract:

School choice’s idealized premises and unfulfilled promises: How school markets simulate options, encourage decoupling and deception, and deepen disadvantages

Abstract

In school choice systems, families choose among publicly funded schools, and schools compete for students and resources. Using neoinstitutionalist and relational inequality theories, our article reinterprets recent critical sociological and education research to show how such markets involve actors’ enacting myths; these beliefs and their associated practices normalized white, privileged consumption as a basis for revamping public education as market exchanges between schools and families. Proponents argue that choice empowers individuals, focuses organizations on improving quality, and benefits society more broadly by reducing inequality and segregation. We argue that such school choice myths’ excessive emphases on individual decision‐making and provider performance obscure the actual impacts of school choice systems upon people, organizations, and society. First, rather than enlarging alternatives that families can easily research, select, and (if needed) exit, school choice systems often simulate options, especially for disadvantaged populations. Second, rather than focusing schools’ efforts on performance, innovation, and accountability, they can encourage organizational decoupling, homogeneity, and deception. Third, rather than reducing societal harms, they can deepen inequalities and alienation. Future research should examine both how markets are animated by bounded relationality—routines that enable them to form, maintain, and complete exchanges with organizations—and how activism can challenge marketization.

Please consider assigning this state-of-the-field article in your sociology of education, inequality, economic sociology, and/or organizations courses!  (If your institution doesn’t have access to Sociology Compass, please contact me directly for a copy.)

This paper began when Megan approached me during a March 2018  Future Initiatives “Publics, Politics, and Pedagogy: Remaking Higher Education for Turbulent Times” event at the Graduate Center.  After hearing me talk on a faculty panel about my research interests, Megan asked whether we could do an informal reading group on school choice readings.  We exchanged emails and agreed to meet in person to discuss readings.

At the time, Megan was working on her masters classes and thesis in urban education at the CUNY MALS program.  She was looking for a way to manage her growing collection of citations as she analyzed her past experiences with teaching 8th graders and their families about how to participate in the mandatory school choice market in NYC .

As a new entrant to research on learning and schools through my on-going ethnography of a democratic school, I had the sense that whatever was happening in the insurance market for older adults seemed to exist in other emerging markets for other age groups.  To understand the education options in NYC, I had attended a few NYC Dept. of Education and other orientations for families on how to select pre-K and higher program.  I found these experiences comparable to my observations of orientations for professionals and older adults about enrolling in Medicare: palpable waves of anxiety and disorientation were evident in the reactions and questions from these two differently aged audiences to workshops about how they were supposed to act as consumers felt similar.  I thus became interested in learning about research on the comparable school choice market for my ethnographic research on how intermediary organizations try to orient consumers to the health insurance market.  (Indeed, a side benefit of this collaboration was that the school choice readings helped amplify my development of the bounded relationality concept that ultimately appeared in Socio-Economic Review.)

Megan and I met regularly discuss readings that Megan had suggested and I had found through literature searches in sociology.  After several of these meetings, I raised the possibility of writing a state-of-the-field overview article.  Working on this draft helped us keep track of what we had learned.  It also helped us understand how to map existing research and to identify a void that our respective expertises and writing could address: synthesizing critical studies emerging from organizations and education.   For Megan, I hoped that this experience would give her a behind-the-scenes look at the academic production of research, so that she could decide whether to head this direction.

As we read more about school choice, I realized that we hadn’t come across a chart mapping the types of school choice systems currently in operation.  Megan thus worked hard at developing a table that describes and compares different types of school choice systems.  (In my opinion, this paper’s table is a handy first step for those trying to understand the school choice landscape.)

Meanwhile, I focused on applying an organizational framework to categorize research from the sociology of education and education fields.  As we worked on the drafts in response to writing group and reviewers’ and Sociology Compass section editor Eric Dahlin’s comments, we also realized that no one had systemically broken down the impacts of using market practices to distribute public goods across levels of individual persons, organizations, and society at large.

Along the way, thanks to Megan’s connections to education and activism, we got to learn directly from people about on-going activism and research.  For instance, youth organization IntegrateNYC sent representative Iman Abdul to talk to my “Future of NYC” honors college students about efforts to racially integrate NYC public schools.  Megan and I also attended Kate Phillippo’s talk about her research on school choice in Chicago from her latest book, A Contest Without Winners: How Students Experience Competitive School Choice (2019, University of Minnesota Press).

In all, writing this paper has been a great journey with a fun and insightful collaborator.  Had you asked me back in spring 2018 what the outcome of presenting at a CUNY event would have been, I could not have predicted this.  I am forever grateful that Megan came to talk with me!

Happy New Years, readers!  May the new year bring you joy, happiness, and health.

 

book cover exploration #2: party in the street

In this installment of book cover exploration, I wanted to explain the background behind this image. Like I did for “From Black Power,” I spent a fair amount of time searching for the right image. I looked at quite a few artists who painted pictures of protest. Interestingly, few people did antiwar related art. Then, I went to Getty Images and lo and behold, the perfect image appeared.

This was taken by William B. Plowman, a professional photographer. The image is from July 28, 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. I think it is perfect in that it is an “everyday” photo and it combines the theme of antiwar activism and the Democratic party.

The book has many incredible images. This one is a picture of Obama giving “the speech” in 2002 that cemented his reputation as an opponent of the Iraq War.  We were lucky to track down people who were present at the speech. Sociologically, we find this image gripping because Obama is a connection between the world of activists and the world of partisan politics.

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BUY THESE BOOKS!!
50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)
A theory book you can understand!!! Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)
The rise of Black Studies:  From Black Power to Black Studies 
Did Obama tank the antiwar movement? Party in the Street
Read Contexts Magazine– It’s Awesome!

student walkouts against gun violence: notes and commentary

I have been asked by a few news sources on my views about today’s student walkouts, which are protests in favor of stricter gun control legislation. In no particular order:

1. There is a long tradition of student protest, which includes walk outs by K-12 students. These include various student protests during the Civil Rights era, walk outs for other issues like immigration, and walk outs to protest school administrators and teachers (e.g., see Grant’s history of Hamilton High School).
2. By themselves, walkouts will not directly lead to change unless they are connected to a larger political strategy.
3. If this turns out to be an effective tactic, it will not be enough by itself. It will likely be part of a larger serious of contentious events around this issue.
4. Gun control is a highly constrained space in American policy. Voters know what they like, elected officials know what they want. There isn’t a lot of wiggle room for movements.
5. It would be interesting to see which schools issued statements for or against a protest and what correlates with that (e.g., Democratic district, district SES, etc.)
6. My bet is that the biggest effect of these protests will be on students themselves. As suggested by some social movement research, participation acculturates people in new ways.

Add your own comments and predictions below.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street / Read Contexts Magazine– It’s Awesome! 

party in the street: huffington post coverage

The protests against the Iraq War were some of the largest in American history. What happened? Why did they collapse? The Huffington Post ran an article on this topic and spoke to my friend and co-author Michael Heaney and myself. A few clips:

One explanation is that the anti-war push of 2003-2007 was successful — not in ending the war, but in knocking out the political party that started it.

The anti-war movement was not purely an anti-war movement, as Indiana University professor Fabio Rojas pointed out. He described the anti-war protest movement as “two groups coming together”: the core peace movement and the larger group of people who were registered Democrats and opposed to the Iraq war and then-Republican President George W. Bush, in general. “Once the Democrats win the White House,” he said, “the two groups start moving apart.”

Rojas studied the protest movement and its decline with University of Michigan political science professor Michael Heaney. After attending dozens of protests where they conducted more than 10,000 surveys of anti-war protest participants over the course of a decade, the two professors wrote a book, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party After 9/11, to explain it.

Check it out!

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street / Read Contexts Magazine– It’s Awesome! 

after charlottesville: the conversation continues

Contexts magazine is proud to bring you the second part of our Charlottesville symposium:

1. “Setting the Record Straight on Confederate Statues,” Wanda Rushing
2. “Defining Disorder Down,” Chris Uggen
3. “The ‘Many Sides’ Implicated in Charlottesville,” Dawn M. Dow
4. “Charlottesville Yields Few Sociological Surprises,” David Brunsma
5. “Charlottesville and Our Racial Fault Lines,” Rodney D. Coates
6. “What Are Our Universities’ Obligations?” James M. (JT) Thomas

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street / Read Contexts Magazine– It’s Awesome!

party in the street: theory is put to the test

The main argument of Party in the Street is that the nature of partisanship affects the level of protest. If your movement thinks it is part of/opposed to a party, then protest will track who is in power (e.g., if your side wins an election, you mellow out). If the movement rejects the party system, then mobilization will be independent of election outcomes.

Well, we have a new data point. The Trump administration has declared a buildup of troops in Afghanistan. The party in power is Republican and the antiwar movement is tied to the Democratic party. The prediction: we should see an increase in antiwar protest.

Now, there is a mediating factor. The Afghanistan war has been the more popular part of the War on Terror. While hard core antiwar groups opposed interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the public (and the Democratic party) has been more supportive of armed intervention in Afghanistan. This suggests an increase relative to the baseline of almost no protest (which we’ve seen since about 2010), we should a modest increase. Definitely not 2003 levels, but we should see more if the build up continues.

Am I right? Tell me what you think.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street / Read Contexts Magazine– It’s Awesome! 

catholicism and black lives matter

More from the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies – Kevin C. Winstead provides a fascinating ethnography of how religion and social movements come together in Black Lives Matter:

This ethnographic study examines how Black Catholics identify with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. The study follows several national Black Catholic gatherings since the death of Mike Brown. Using an adaptation of Scott Hunt, Robert D. Benford, and David Snow’s social movement frame analysis, I explore how Black Catholics define and construct the ongoing political issues within the Black Lives Matter movement. I discuss the conditions which contribute to Black Catholic’s participation, or lack thereof, in this social movement through the processes of diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, and motivational framing. I position the larger Black Catholic belief system within frame analysis, examine the relevance of the frames with the Black Catholic community, and analyse the frames’ timing with the Black Lives Matter cycle of protest. This research has implications for intragroup meaning making as Black Catholics start the process towards identifying with the Black Lives Matter social movement.

Recommended.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street  

“distributed framing” in social movements

In the special issue on Ethnic and Racial Studies on Black Lives Matters, BGS* Jelani Ince, Clay Davis and myslef break down hashtag networks:

This paper focuses on the social media presence of Black Lives Matter (BLM). Specifically, we examine how social media users interact with BLM by using hashtags and thus modify the framing of the movement. We call this decentralized interaction with the movement “distributed framing”. Empirically, we illustrate this idea with an analysis of 66,159 tweets that mention #BlackLivesMatter in 2014, when #BlackLivesMatter becomes prominent on social media. We also tally the other hashtags that appear with #BlackLivesMatter in order to measure how online communities influence the framing of the movement. We find that #BlackLivesMatter is associated with five types of hashtags. These hashtags mention solidarity or approval of the movement, refer to police violence, mention movement tactics, mention Ferguson, or express counter-movement sentiments. The paper concludes with hypotheses about the development of movement framings that can be addressed in future research.

Check it out.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street  

ethnic and racial studies covers black lives matter

Ethnic and Racial Studies has a special issue on Black Lives Matter. From the lead article, an analysis of counter-protest and collective identity:

Recent events related to police brutality and the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter provides an empirical case to explore the vitality of social media data for social movements and the evolution of collective identities. Social media data provide a portal into how organizing and communicating generate narratives that survive over time. We analyse 31.65 million tweets about Ferguson across four meaningful time periods: the death of Michael Brown, the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson, the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, and the one year aftermath of Brown’s death. Our analysis shows that #BlackLivesMatter evolved in concert with protests opposing police brutality occurring on the ground. We also show how #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) has operated as the primary counter narrative to #BlackLivesMatter. We conclude by discussing the implications our research has for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and increased political polarization following the election of Donald Trump.

From “Ferguson and the death of Michael Brown on Twitter: #BlackLivesMatter, #TCOT, and the evolution of collective identities” by Rashawn Ray, Melissa Brown, Neil Fraistat and Edward Summers.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street  

student protest photos at maryland-college park

Last week, I was visiting the University of Marlyand to meet with the current Contexts editors, Syed Ali and Phillip Cohen, and my editorial partner, Rashawn Ray. While I was taking a stroll with Syed, I saw a student protest. Over the weekend, a noose was found at a fraternity house and it triggered a backlash. I took these photos of the students who were arguing with administrators.  The photo series begins with me being across the street, then moving into the crowd, then the administrator and the administration’s photographer and a final shot of the students.

brayden king on the ivanka trump boycott

Our good friend Brayden King has a column in Fortune discussing the Ivanka Trump boycott in light of research on boycotts. Key passages:

As research has shown, boycotts typically do little to hurt companies’ revenues, in part because the activists are not typical consumers of their target companies’ goods. For example, animal rights activists who belong to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would not frequent the fast-food restaurants they often urge consumers to avoid. In addition, consumers tend to be fickle and unwilling to part from their favorite products and services to support a boycott, even when they are ideologically aligned with its goals.

Investors, too, tend to shrug off these actions, unless the boycott receives sustained media attention. New boycotts start every week, so media attention has become a limited resource. And, as a result, few boycotts manifest any long-lasting investor reaction. For example, last November, food manufacturer Kellogg (K, +0.07%) suffered only a three-day drop in its stock price after it faced a boycott from Trump supporters for pulling its advertising from the right-wing website Breitbart News; then the share price quickly recovered.

The biggest impact from boycotts is a company’s reputation. Companies want to avoid sustained negative attention that comes from a boycott. For that reason, when a boycott captures national media coverage, about 25% of the time this unwanted glare of attention results in some kind of concession from the company.

And:

If there is any bright spot for boycotted companies, it’s the fact that media and consumer attention is diluted by the sheer number of boycotts and actions being taken by both sides. For example, #GrabYourWallet lists more than 80 companies that it recommends people boycott to avoid doing business with companies that have business ties to the Trump family. With so many companies on the pro- and anti-Trump watch lists, consumers may have difficulty paying attention to them all.

But given Trump’s lightning-rod-like ability to attract both supporters and repel critics and his notoriety for lashing out against his critics, more companies may end up on the politically neutral sidelines rather than create unwanted attention from activists and the consumers they target.

Recommended!!!

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($5 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist/From Black Power/Party in the Street 

cfp: “Seeking a More Just and Egalitarian Economy: Realizing the Future via Co-operatives, Communes, and Other Collectives” at SASE in Lyon, France- cfp deadline extended to Feb. 17, 2017!

The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) has extended the abstract submission deadline for all the mini-conferences and networks to Feb. 17, 2017!*

Just as a reminder: Joyce Rothschild and I are co-organizing a mini-conference at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) in Lyon, France.  Please consider submitting an abstract, due to the SASE submission site by Feb. 17, 2017 (updated deadline!).  Accepted presenters will need to provide a full paper by June 1, 2017 for discussion.  Please circulate to this cfp to interested persons!

Seeking a More Just and Egalitarian Economy: Realizing the Future via Co-operatives, Communes, and Other Collectives

Forty years ago, as the most recent wave of economic collectives and cooperatives emerged, they advocated a model of egalitarian organization so contrary to bureaucracy that they were widely called “alternative institutions” (Rothschild 1979). Today, the practices of cooperative organizations appear in many movement organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even “sharing” firms. Cooperative practices are more relevant than ever, especially as recent political changes in the US and Europe threaten to crush rather than cultivate economic opportunities.

Cooperative groups engage in more “just” economic relations, defined as relations that are more equal, communalistic, or mutually supportive.  The oldest collectives – utopian communes, worker co-operatives, free schools, and feminist groups – sought authentic relations otherwise suppressed in a hierarchical, capitalist system.  Similar practices shape newer forms: co-housing, communities and companies promoting the “sharing economy,” giving circles, self-help groups, and artistic and social movement groups including Burning Man and OCCUPY. While some cooperatives enact transformative values such as ethically responsible consumerism and collective ownership, other groups’ practices reproduce an increasingly stratified society marked by precarity. Submitted papers might analyze the reasons for such differences, or they might examine conditions that encourage the development of more egalitarian forms of organization.

Submitted papers could also cover, but are not limited, to exploring:

• What is the nature of “relational work” (cf. Zelizer 2012) conducted in these groups, and how it differs – or is similar to – from relational work undertaken in conventional capitalist systems?
• How do collectivities that engage in alternative economic relations confront challenges that threaten – or buttress – their existence? These challenges include recruiting and retaining members, making decisions, and managing relations with the state and other organizations. Moreover, how do these groups construct distinct identities and practices, beyond defining what they are not?
• How are various firms attempting to incorporate alternative values without fully applying them? For instance, how are companies that claim to advance the sharing economy – Uber, airbnb, and the like – borrowing the ideology and practices of alternative economic relations for profit rather than authentic empowerment? What are the implications of this co-optation for people, organizations, and society at large?
• How do new organizations, especially high tech firms, address or elide inequality issues? How do organizing practices and values affect recognition and action on such issues?
• What can we learn from 19^th century historical examples of communes and cooperatives that can shed insight on their keys to successful operation today? Similarly, how might new cooperatives emerge as egalitarian and collective responses to on-going immigration issues or economic crisis generated by policies favoring the already wealthy?
• Are collectives, cooperatives and/or firms that require creativity, such as artists’ cooperatives or high tech firms, most effective when they are organized along more egalitarian principles? How do aspects of these new modes of economic organization make them more supportive of individual and group creativity?

Bibliography

Graeber, David.   2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography.   Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Rothschild, Joyce. 1979. “The Collectivist Organization: An Alternative to Rational-Bureaucratic Models.” American Sociological Review 44(4): 509-527.

Rothschild, Joyce and J. Allen Whitt. 1986. The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Zelizer, Vivianna A. 2012. “How I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean?” Politics & Society 40(2): 145-174.

Questions about the above cfp may be directed to Joyce and myself.

Here is info about the mini-conference format:

Each mini-conference will consist of 3 to 6 panels, which will be featured as a separate stream in the program. Each panel will have a discussant, meaning that selected participants must submit a completed paper in advance, by 1 June 2017. Submissions for panels will be open to all scholars on the basis of an extended abstract. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within a mini-conference, organizers will forward it to the most appropriate research network as a regular submission.

More info about mini-conferences here.

The 2017 SASE conference in Lyon, France, hosted by the University of Lyon I from 29 June to 1 July 2017, will welcome contributions that explore new forms of economy, their particularities, their impact, their potential development, and their regulation.

More info about the SASE conference theme, a critical perspective on the sharing economy, is available at “What’s Next? Disruptive/Collaborative Economy or Business as Usual?”

Joyce and I look forward to reading your submissions!

*Note: If you have problems with submitting your abstract for our mini-conference, please let us and the SASE/Confex staff know.

Bonus: Curious about how contemporary worker cooperatives operate?  This website has video and other resources that profiles several cooperatives.

 

 

 

 

echoes of espeland: competing rationalities in the dakota access pipeline

Yesterday, the Army Corps of Engineers announced a temporary halt to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project. It stated that it would explore alternative routes for the pipeline that would, presumably, avoid the areas of deep concern to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The DAPL story has been in the news on and off since September, when journalist Amy Goodman captured a clash in which guards used dogs and pepper spray to drive back protesters. I had only been paying superficial attention to it, but started thinking more yesterday with the Corps’ decision to hit pause on the project.

Specifically, I was thinking about the echoes between this battle and the one chronicled by Wendy Espeland in her classic book, Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest.

jesse singal discusses effective protest

At Science of Us, New York Magazine’s blog about behavioral science, Jesse Singal has a lengthy feature on the topic of how to be effective at protest, especially in the Trump era (I still cringe when writing that):

Which raises some obvious questions: What is the best, most efficient way to channel this energy? What makes protests work, and what makes them backfire and solidify opinion against the protesters? The answers to these questions, drawn from the research of scholars who have dedicated their careers to in-depth interviews with activists, protesters, and organizers, can both offer guidance to those spearheading the movement against Trump, and offer some interesting glimpses into the surprising political psychology of resistance.

The article interviews a lot of sociologists who study protest such as Dana Fisher, Ziad Munson, Michael T. Heaney and myself. From the conclusion:

Taken together, then, all this research points to three general rules for the organizers of the D.C. protests, as well as the other protests that are likely to crop up in the days ahead:

1. Trump can be useful as a galvanizing force, but keep things focused on whatever your particular issue is. That issue will be around long after Trump is gone, and will, in many cases, require forms of activism and advocacy that have little to do with the man himself. The goal should be to give people ways to make progress on the specific issue threatened by Trump, not to protest the man himself endlessly.

2. Make everyone who is interested in your cause, or who exhibits curiosity about it, feel welcome. Other than wanting to help, there should be almost zero prerequisites. If someone doesn’t speak the lingo, or doesn’t know what intersectionality is, or anything else — it doesn’t matter — they can still contribute. And the more you can make activism part of their social life, the more of a meaningful role you can give them, the more likely they will be to stick around and to spread the word. Education on specific ideological issues can always come later.

3. Stay nonviolent. At a time when passions are high there is a real potential for backlash. There are times when disruptive protests can be strategically deployed, but nonviolence is key.

For those who are unhappy that Trump was elected, the easy part — the donations, the Facebook and Twitter posts, the initial broadcasting of outrage and solidarity — is over. Actual resistance, actual organizing, is harder. “I think that the evidence across the political spectrum is that you need to get people involved beyond just their computers and beyond just sending in money to have any impact,” said Fisher. And that takes difficult, careful, on-the-ground-work. Luckily, activists aren’t starting from square one. Anyone who does their homework will know which tactics are likely to work, and which are more likely to flame out.

It’s a nice article. Read the whole thing.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street

 

just in time for Nov. 8, election day in the US

Hot off the press, a study about how interactions with law enforcement and prison impact political participation in the US:

“RACE, JUSTICE, POLICING, AND THE 2016 AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION”

by Kevin Drakulich, John Hagan, Devon Johnson^, and Kevin H. Wozniak

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X1600031X

• Abstract

  Scholars have long been interested in the intersection of race, crime, justice, and presidential politics, focusing particularly on the “southern strategy” and the “war on crime.” A recent string of highly-publicized citizen deaths at the hands of police and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement have brought renewed visibility to this racially-driven intersection, and in particular to issues involving contact with and attitudes toward the police. Using data from the 2016 Pilot Study of the American National Election Studies, this study explores how contact with the criminal justice system and perceptions of police injustice shape political behavior in the modern era, with a specific emphasis on prospective participation and candidate choice in the 2016 presidential election. The results indicate that being stopped by the police—an experience that can feel invasive and unjust—may motivate political participation, while spending time in jail or prison—an experience associated with a marginalization from mainstream civic life—appears to discourage political participation. Perceiving the police as discriminatory also seems to motivate political engagement and participation, though in opposite directions for conservative versus liberal voters. In addition, perceptions of police injustice were related to candidate choice, driving voters away from Donald Trump. Affective feelings about the police were not associated with candidate choice. Perceptions of the police appear to act in part as a proxy for racial resentments, at least among potential voters in the Republican primary. In sum, the intersection of race, justice, and policing remains highly relevant in U.S. politics.

new ways to measure movements via hyper network sampling

Rory, from the home office in South Bend, sends me links to new social movement research. A major question in social movement research is how you measure contentious politics. A lot of our sources are notoriously incomplete, such as media accounts. Kriage Bayerln, Peter Barwis, Bryant Crubaugh, and Cole Carnesecca use hypernetwork sampling (asking a random sample of people to list their social ties) to attack this issue. From Sociological Methods and Research:

The National Study of Protest Events (NSPE) employed hypernetwork sampling to generate the first-ever nationally representative sample of protest events. Nearly complete information about various event characteristics was collected from participants in 1,037 unique protests across the United States in 2010 to 2011. The first part of this article reviews extant methodologies in protest-event research and discusses how the NSPE overcomes their recognized limitations. Next, we detail how the NSPE was conducted and present descriptive statistics for a number of important event characteristics. The hypernetwork sample is then compared to newspaper reports of protests. As expected, we find many differences in the types of events these sources capture. At the same time, the overall number and magnitude of the differences are likely to be surprising. By contrast, little variation is observed in how protesters and journalists described features of the same events. NSPE data have many potential applications in the field of contentious politics and social movements, and several possibilities for future research are outlined.

Readers in social network analysis and organization studies will recognize the importance of this technique. As long as you can sample people, you can sample social ties and the adjust the sample for repetition. Peter Marsden used this technique to sample organizational networks. In movements research, my hybrids paper used the technique to sample orgs that were involved in movement mobilization. It’s great to see this technique expand to sample large samples of events.See Bayerlin’s research project website for more. Recommended.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street 

bernie in the street: how occupy wall street fits in the democratic party

Mobilizing Ideas has a new forum where a scholars are discussing movements and elections. I’ll start with a few snippets from “Bernie Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street Wing of the Democratic Library,” written by my dear friend Michael T. Heaney:

While it is impossible to definitively establish what fraction of Occupy supporters also supported Sanders, it is possible to look to social media for clues of this support. To this end, I gathered a list of 374 Twitter handles and hashtags associated with the Occupy movement that were in operation between 2011 and 2013. From this list, I randomly selected 150 pages for the purpose of content analysis and coded Twitter feeds for these pages from April 2012 and April 2016. The purpose of this exercise was to understand the extent and nature of movement involvement in Democratic Party politics during two identical periods in the presidential election cycle.

The results of the content analysis reveal significant differences in the activities of the Occupy movement between the April 2012 and April 2016 periods. First, the sites examined became significantly less active over time. In April 2012, 59 percent of sites were active, while this fraction fell to 18 percent by 2016. Second, the level of engagement in electoral politics significantly increased from 2012 to 2016 on the Occupy sites that remained active. Third, the tweets shifted significantly from a more negative perspective on politics in 2012 to a more positive perspective in 2016. In 2012, each site had an average of 0.14 positive tweets about candidates/parties, in comparison to an average of 1.16 negative tweets. In 2016, however, tweets had become more balanced, with an average of 8.70 exhibiting positive valance and an average of 6.62 indicating negative valence.

Read the whole thing.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street

 

bias in social movement research

Earlier this week, we discussed the need to study failed movements, not just the successes. Here, I want to draw attention to the general issue of bias in social movement research. The way I see it is that movement research is shaped by the following biases:

• Survivor bias: We tend to focus only on movements that succeed in mobilizing.
• Success bias: We tend to focus only on movements that get what they want.
• Progressive bias: We tend to focus on movements that come from the left.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example, Rory McVeigh is a well known student of right wing populism and Kathleen Blee’s latest book looks at a random sample of Pittsburgh area movements.

But in general, the overall focus of movement scholarship reflects these tendencies. For every Ziad Munson who studies pro-life groups, we have five other scholars studying pro-choice groups. Collectively, movement scholars should supplement their individual case studies (including my own) with data sets like the NY Times/Doug McAdam/Stanford data set or Blee’s data that looks at larger samples.

Use the comments to discuss or praise research that works against these biases.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street

party in the street: why study failed movements?

This is the last post responding to Professor Amenta’s lengthy, supportive and critical take on Party in the Street. We earlier discussed whether it was wise to group Afghanistan and Iraq and if our explanation of the anti-Vietnam War movement was valid. In the review, he asks, if the antiwar movement of the 2000s failed, what is the point of studying it?

Short answer: Don’t select on the dependent variable.

Long answer: In the social sciences, we often exhibit a bias toward success. We like to talk about Apple and Google, but not Pets.com.But that’s a bad thing, especially if you want to study the outcomes of social processes. Failures are just as important as successes in the social sciences. You need a random sample of events or a sample where you can model the bias. So, in movements, we shouldn’t study only those that succeed. We need comparisons. And detailed case studies of a movement are way to start.

Peace movements are a class of movements that are notoriously unsuccessful, as we note in the book. By studying one in detail, and comparing with others, we can develop a sense of why that might be the case and then ask about other movements. Note: If you want a highly meritorious study of a study that uses a random sample of successful and non-successful movement groups, see Kathleen Blee’s award winning Democracy in the Making.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street

party in the street: response to amenta

In the most recent Contemporary Sociology, Irvine’s Edwin Amenta wrote an incredibly kind and generous review of Party in the Street (“Raising the Bar for Scholarship on Protest and Politics“). It’s really humbling to have such an accomplished researcher so deeply engage with our work and find so much value. Not only did Professor Amenta say nice things about the book, he also offered a number of carefully thought out critiques of the book. In this post, I’d like to summarize what Professor Amenta wrote and offer a few brief comments in response.

Amenta takes issue with a fundamental assumption of the book. Here is Amenta:

Specifically, I question the authors’ explanation for the contrast between the decline of the recent antiwar movement and the expansion of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the analytical conflation of antiwar protest and antiwar movements, and their empirical conflation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Let’s start with what I think is a more amenable issue – the issue of the connection between the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Once again, Professor Amenta:

The authors’ most puzzling decision—to combine analytically the war in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan—challenges their account of movement decline. This conflation of the two wars is central to their puzzle— why did the antiwar movement end while war kept going? But the contrast in opposition to the two wars answers this better than the rise to power of a Democratic president. The war in Afghanistan, beginning almost immediately after the September 11 attacks, drew the protest of only scattered anti-imperialist, anarchist, and other smallbore groups. That war was waged on a Taliban regime and its ward al Qaeda,  which had planned the attacks, and generated public support. By contrast, even before the war in Iraq began, it drew extensive opposition from a broad coalition of organizations and participants; it was clear during its lengthy run-up that Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks and that the Bush administration claims of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were questionable. Without this war of choice, or ‘‘dumb war,’’ as Illinois state senator Barack Obama referred to it in 2002, it seems unlikely there would have been much antiwar activity or an antiwar movement. As president, Obama quickly wound down the Iraq war, the one that the movement opposed. And so it is not surprising that antiwar activity slowed and did not return, even after the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, as there was never any real movement against that war. The origin of the mass antiwar movement in opposition to the Iraq war—in its  gratuitousness, deviousness in justification, and bungled execution—helps to explain the decline of this movement, as it ended as that war ended. The authors’ point is well taken that protest declined after partisan government changed, but the decline of movements is also typically related to their emergence and their influence; and thus any analysis of decline should address these influences.

A number of issues suggested to us that it would be useful to link the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the narrative. First, the “kernel” of the antiwar movement emerged in the days after 9/11. Amenta calls these early groups “smallbore.” I would agree, but all movements need to start somewhere. The Afghanistan war was the event that pulled a lot of hard core activists into peace activism and these activists often went on to leadership positions. For example, one the leading groups during the Iraq War era was International A.N.S.W.E.R. From one perspective, it is a “smallbore” group – allied with the socialist left and operates with a pretty small staff. However, it was one of the groups that got in “on the ground floor” right after 9/11 (the early Afghanistan war era) and became a highly influential player during the peak of the antiwar movement (the Iraq War era). Therefore, it makes a lot of sense (to us) that both of these conflicts were important events that shaped the trajectory of the movement. The Afghanistan war “jump started” a core of activists who were previously working on other issues while Iraq allowed that core to grow into a truly mass movement.

But there is a deeper point. Much of the antiwar movement leadership said they were in the *peace* movement, not the anti-Iraq War movement. Also, it was the frame offered by the Bush 2 administration. They were both parts of the “War on Terror.” If you can accept this view, then a lot of public opinion makes sense. The public supported both Iraq and Afghanistan as responses to terrorism and only turned on Iraq once casualties mounted. Among activists, they were both wars to be opposed for similar reasons (e.g., pacifism or anti-imperialism). Only among the Democratic/liberal wing of the electorate do you see the split on Iraq and Afghanistan, which we attribute to the tension between partisan and movement identities. This overall pattern only makes sense if you consider Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a broader context, not completely independent events.

Later this week, we’ll delve more deeply into the comparison between peace activism in the Vietnam and Iraq War eras.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street

black lives matter moves to cultural nationalism: analysis and forecast

Let’s start with a quiz. Guess which policy demands are from the Black Lives Matter platform and which ones are from the original 10-point plan from the Black Panthers in 1966:

1. We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules.
2. An end to the privatization of education and real community control by parents, students and community members of schools including democratic school boards and community control of curriculum, hiring, firing and discipline policies.
3. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else
4. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality.
5. A reallocation of funds at the federal, state and local level from policing and incarceration [specific programs omitted] to long-term safety strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs.
6. Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.
7. Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Answer: BLM – 2, 5; BP – 1, 3, 4. Trick question: 6 & 7 are actually from a list of Occupy Wall Street demands. If you got some wrong, don’t worry. A lot of these demands are interchangeable and all three groups have promoted some version of most of them.

The purpose of the quiz is to illustrate how the recent Black Lives Matter platform draws heavily from Black cultural nationalism and progressivism. It also shows that the Black Lives Matter movement is now evolving in a direction very similar to these groups. Like the Panthers in 1966, Black Lives was founded specifically in response to police repression. But it framed itself in Marxist terms and soon expanded to offer social programs. Similarly, Black Lives Matter started in response to police shootings and has now offered a fairly comprehensive list of demands rooted in the Left.

There are differences of course, but I think we can now articulate a framework, or baseline, for thinking about BLM. It is a progressive, community oriented movement, not a movement that primarily focuses on police reform. It is also a movement that will have wide appeal on the Left, but less appeal to the middle and the Right.

Since we’ve had a number of movements like this, we can look at their history. We’ve had the Panthers in the 1960s, the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s, and the Occupy movement of 2010s. These movements tend to be brief, but intense. They have wide cultural impact, but limited policy or electoral impact. The impact of BLM will be very concentrated in a few places and otherwise widespread and diffuse. Time will tell if the comparison with BLMs ancestry is an adequate guide to their future.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street 

party in the street: feeling the bern!

Over at the Washington Post/Monkey Cage, Michael T. Heaney has an article about what he learned about DNC protesters. A few big points. First, Berners dominated the protest:

We went to demonstrations on many issues, including clean energy, police mistreatment of African Americans, immigration, poverty and peace. Our surveys on the first day of protests, July 24, found that 95 percent of the protesters who said they voted in the 2016 presidential primaries said they voted for Sanders, with only 4 percent voting for Clinton and 1 percent for other candidates. That’s quite a jump from what my collaborators (Seth Masket, Dara Strolovitch and Joanne Miller) and I found at the 2008 Democratic conventions, where protesters had supported then-Sen. Barack Obama (58 percent), Clinton (22 percent), Dennis Kucinich (6 percent), Mitt Romney (4 percent), Ron Paul (3 percent), Ralph Nader (3 percent) and others (4 percent).

Second, they feel Berned:

Of course, people who protest outside national party conventions are hardly representative of any candidate’s supporters; they’re a small, unusual group of highly motivated activists. But from this group, of those who voted for Sanders in the primary, only 9 percent said they were inclined to vote for Clinton in November. The vast majority (72 percent) said they would write in Sanders or vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Less than 1 percent planned to vote for Trump, about 5 percent were looking at other candidates, and 13 percent were undecided. By contrast, just over half (51 percent) of the 2008 Democratic convention protesters who hadn’t supported Obama in the primary planned to vote for him in the general election.

Third, they’re coming back:

There aren’t enough of these activists to make a dent in votes in the fall. Their discontent will probably influence events by how they channel their organizing energy.

Where will that be? Consider that 74 percent strongly agreed that the Sanders campaign had a positive effect on the Democratic Party, while another 16 percent agreed somewhat. These activists feel powerful. They may be frustrated that their candidate lost the nomination battle, but they still see their efforts paying off by, for instance, making the 2016 Democratic Party platform the “most progressive” in the party’s history. Such “small wins” keep people engaged and organized because they think their efforts were valuable.

Commentary: First, kudos to Michael for getting this data and digging deeper into the phenomena of convention protest. Second, this gives us some insight into the current state of the Democratic party. Tactically, the DNC convention was successful in presenting Clinton 2 in a strong light. However, these protesters show that there is a long term game that is unfolding. The Clinton network (Clinton 1 &2, Gore) has dominated at least five presidential contests. Clinton 2 is probably the last major politician from this network, which means that there will be a structural opening in the party. If they play their cards right, these fringe protesters may end up starting the upcoming progressive explosion in the Democratic party.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street 

the pull of nationalism and the drift from king

I just spent the last six weeks teaching the Telluride Association Sophomore Seminar. The topic was “The Black Struggle for Freedom: an Interdisciplinary Approach.” Along with my co-teacher, Maria Hamilton Abegunde, we spent a month and a half reviewing abolitionism, civil rights, black power and “post-racial” America from a number of perspectives. In this post, I want to summarize a few thoughts I had on on how people perceive black power and civil rights today.

So here is what we did. We had students work with various written, visual, and audio materials. For civil rights, we spent time reading famous court decisions (e.g., Plessy or Brown), read historical summaries, and watch videos. For Black power, we did the same. Read the Panther’s 10 point program,  watch videos on Black power activism, and read academic treatments of various Black power initiatives, such as Scot Brown’s book on the Us Organization or my book on Black studies.

We then had a discussion and got to the issue of what people took away from the readings. A few things jumped out at me. First, while most students clearly understood the importance of civil rights, the highly legalistic approach to social change meant that people didn’t appreciate much of what the movement was about. For example, a constant theme in civil rights activism is enforcement, which came up in Plessy, in Thurgood Marshall’s speech to the NAACP, in Brown and its aftermath, and in the text of the 1964 civil rights act. “Racism is bad” is something everyone can appreciate but “we are trying to create state and civil mechanisms for rights enforcement” is something that does not grab the attention of people. It is easily lost in collective memory.

Second, the SCLC/Kingian approach to social change is easily misinterpreted by modern readers, much as it was back then. Basically, a lot of people equate non-violence with passivity. This is clearly not the case as King’s actions were highly disruptive and extraordinarily confrontational. There is also the mistaken view that King did not believe in self-defense. Rather, King is very clear that non-violence is a tactic that makes sense in a specific context. Like most non-violence proponents of his era, he supported use of violence against exterminationist regimes such as the Third Reich.

Third, there is an aesthetic and interactional aspect of nationalism that has more appeal than civil rights activism. For starters, there is something sensational and breath taking about the best images from the Panthers. It’s really inspiring and uplifting to see people stand up for themselves. Second, as one student put it, King talks at you “from above” while Stokley talks “with you.” This isn’t to say that the Panthers, or other Black Power figures weren’t theoretical. Indeed, they could be, as the careers of Angela Davis and Huey Newton show, but the *average* person is more likely to be affected by the rhetoric and iconology of the Black power when it was direct.

So, to summarize, here are three reasons  that Black Power has an edge when appealing to people in the present:

• Civil rights was articulated as legalistic and process oriented form of social change, instead of direct intervention. Civil rights is presented as a fairly abstract argument about law, equality, and segregation. Black power is remembered as a dynamic movement that empowered people directly.
• Civil rights and non-violence is seen as passive strategies that do nothing when applied to instances of violence, such as police shooting.
• Black power is more enjoyable in that it depicts direct action, not non-violence. Black power writings are more direct and speak to experience.

In the coming weeks, I’ll use my teaching experience to delve more into Black social movement politics, American history, and teaching.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street

party in the street: not! michael heaney explains why we have small protests

My good friend and collaborator Michael T. Heaney has a nice article in the Monkey Cage, the political science blog of the Washington Post. He explains why we see small protests at the  2016 RNC:

In fact, the protests at this year’s RNC are considerably smaller than we’ve seen at recent conventions.

Why?

The answer is not a newfound love of Donald Trump among social activists. The story is about organization — or rather, the lack of it.

Here’s who was protesting in Cleveland

The groups interested in protest failed to forge a broad, unifying coalition that could bring together protesters in coordinated opposition. My survey research of activists on the ground at the convention (conducted with the assistance of students at the University of Michigan and Kent State University) shows that they were fragmented in a series of smaller coalitions that staged modestly sized events.

Earlier waves of protest were more organized:

By contrast, in 2004 and 2008, seasoned antiwar organizers brought together various elements of the left and staged impressive rallies outside the Republican conventions. As Fabio Rojas and I explain in our recent book, “Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11,” the antiwar movement was able to identify themes that unified various faction of the left, both locally and nationally. For example, hundreds of thousands of people marched past Madison Square Garden during the 2004 RNC with the theme of “the world says no to the Bush agenda.” Although this rally was planned byUnited for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) — an antiwar coalition founded in 2002 — it was able to work closely with leaders of many other left-leaning social movements.

Read the whole thing!

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street   

Call for papers: Social movements, economic innovation, and institutional change

To be hosted at the UCLA Meyer & Renee Luskin Conference Center

Date: November 3-5, 2016

We invite submissions for a workshop on the intersection of social movements and economic processes, to be held at the new UCLA Meyer & Renee Luskin Conference Center from Thursday November 3 to Saturday November 5, 2016.

This meeting extends the theme of “Social Movements and the Economy,” a workshop that was held last year at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. The goal of the earlier workshop was to bring scholarship on social movements and organizations into closer conversation with political economy scholarship focused on how economic forces and the dynamics of capitalism shape social movements.

For the present meeting, we hope to further develop this dialogue, continuing the focus on both movement effects on the economy as well as economic effects on movements and movement organizations. Although the conference will not at all be limited to these, welcome topics of investigation will include: links between social movements and financialization; changing or innovative organizational forms; the link between economic and technological change in contentious politics; labor organizing; connections between movements and political or economic elites; studies of relationships between movements and firms or trade associations including partnerships, funding, and/or cooptation; cross-national comparative or historical analyses of movements and economic forces.

We welcome scholars from sociology, management, political science, economics, communications, and related disciplines to submit abstracts for consideration as part of this call. As in the previous workshop, this meeting will seek to engage in a thorough reconsideration of both the economic sources and the economic outcomes of social movements, with careful attention to how states intermediate each of these processes.

The keynote speaker will be Neil Fligstein, Class of 1939 Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC-Berkeley.

The workshop is planned to start with a dinner in the evening on Thursday November 3, to conclude with morning sessions on Saturday November 5. Invited guests will be provided with domestic travel and accommodation support.

Submissions (PDF or DOC) should include:

– A cover sheet with title, name and affiliation, and email addresses for all authors

– An abstract of 200-300 words that describes the motivation, research questions, methods, and connection to the workshop theme

– Include the attachment in an email with the subject “Social Movements and the Economy”

Please send abstracts to walker@soc.ucla.edu and b-king@kellogg.northwestern.edu by August 21, 2016. Review and notification will occur shortly thereafter.

Contact Edward Walker (walker@soc.ucla.edu) or Brayden King (b-king@kellogg.northwestern.edu) for more information.

black lives matter, black power, and civil rights

In this post, I want to delve into a historical issue – how does Black Lives Matter compare with previous Black freedom movements? Aside from intrinsic interest, the question is important because it gives insights into what the future of BLM might be.

First, BLM openly uses a rhetoric and framing that is somewhat different than the classical civil rights organizations. For starters, the movement appears to be secular. This isn’t to say that BLM is completely separate from Black religious life, but it clearly doesn’t present itself in Christian terms. Rarely does one see BLM appeal to the Bible or forge strong ties to traditional Black churches, though obviously some religious people are involved. Instead, BLM uses an oppositional framing derived from the observation that Black citizens are more at risk in society and that there needs to be an affirmation and celebration of Blackness.

Second, BLM employs a lot of language associated with the Black power movement. As I noted last week, the official BLM website favorably quotes Huey Newton, among others. Also, the focus on the Black community is itself a legacy of Black power, which emphasized the need for respect, pride, and institutional autonomy. Thus, I think one might be justified in saying that the current manifestation of BLM is a revival of the ideals of Black Power, though not its organizational form or even its tactics.

Third, organizationally, BLM has adopted a fairly decentralized mode of operations that is more akin to Occupy Wall Street than the Black Panthers. This speaks to both a long term historical process and our own moment. Immediately, the issue is social media. BLM is a movement that literally spun out of social media discussions. One should not be surprised that a movement with these roots should operate in this manner. Historically, I sense a long term drift among progressives from the mass politics model of the classic civil rights movement. It could be the case that radical activists simply don’t want to deal with more mainstream constituencies of the Black community, such as the churches or the Democratic party.

To summarize, BLM is a movement that deals with long standing issues, ones that date to the civil rights era and before. It’s also a movement that employ many traditional protest tactics, like rallies and street protest. But the movement mixes in new elements. BLM presents as a modernized Black Power group instead of a sequel to civil rights groups. It combines Black autonomy and direction with use of social media and D.I.Y. ethos where each branch decides what it wants to be. Sociologists call identity based politics “new social movements,” but BLM might be described as the New Black Politics.

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technology in collective behavior: it’s about relative strength

The attempted coup and subsequent counter-coup in Turkey has raised questions about the role of technology in collective behavior. Notably, the coup leaders attempted to assert control by seizing the media, while the president of Turkey re-asserted control by using Facebook. At his blog, Kieran comments:

The irony was immediately apparent, as all of this was a rather large departure from Erdoğan’s previous attitudes to both social media and public protest. It also set off a little side-debate about the role of these technologies in preventing the coup. That’s encapsulated by Zeynep Tufekci (who is in Antalya at the moment) and her exasperated response to a satirical tweet mocking the idea that tech mattered in any decisive way.

Here’e my take on the issue of technology and collective action. Having access to a technology doesn’t give a movement any advantage by itself. Rather, it’s about relative access to technology. Here’s some selected examples from the recent history of politics:

• In 2008, fund raising through Facebook gave Obama a financial advantage, but now everyone does it.
• In the 2009 Green Movement in Iran, Facebook played a key role, but now the Iranian government now tries to disrupt Facebook.
• In the Arab Spring, Twitter and Facebook were crucial as a coordinating mechanism but now it, too, is blocked or disrupted by states.

My argument is that technology can only give a group or movement a short term relative advantage. Otherwise, the strength and vitality of movements and insurrections on “fundamentals” like public opinion, political opportunities, and the support of elites. In the case of Turkey, the coup approached things in a traditional way – by seizing television and radio – and overlooked (?) Facebook, which allowed Erdogan to communicate that he was alive and in control. Ultimately though, I’ll side with commentators who point out that the Turkish military had already been de-funded, purged, and otherwise enervated by Erdogan and his political party. Facetime is a small, and incidental detail, to a larger picture.

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understanding the next steps for black lives matter

As a scholarly observer of social movements and a person who thinks that African Americans are mistreated by the criminal justice system, I have been very interested in what Black Lives Matter will do in the days and months to follow. The shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling highlight multiple problems – police officers with bad records on the beat, racial violence, and the over policing of society. The consequent shooting at the Dallas rally, which resulted in five more victims, show us that people can exploit a genuine effort to reform society in order to inflict more violence on others.

These horrid events are part of a larger pattern that Black Lives Matters protests yet there is a rare window of opportunity here. Once the media has shifted attention away from the violence, Black Lives Matter has a chance to broaden its coalition and extend its impact. Some like, New York Times writers Michael Barbaro and Yamiche Alcindor, conclude that the Dallas shooting undermined the positive attention the movement received after the Sterling and Castile deaths.

The opposite is true. Black Lives Matter has a chance to emphasize that it is above violence and that justice is truly its major goal. In the social sciences, we call this the “radical flank effect” – a movement may gain prominence when contrasted with a radical or violent manifestation of the movement. At this moment, a lot of people will want a voice that can focus on the basic injustices in the criminal justice system and maintain a distance from the most virulent forms of nationalism.

As a movement firmly rooted in the left, Black Lives Matter has some challenges.It rightfully celebrates Blackness, but that same strength might pose problems if the movement needs a White majority to reform police policy. Another challenge is the focus of the message. Many, such as myself, see Black Lives as a reasonable response to violent police. Yet, that message is bundled with others such as being queer friendly and celebrating the global Black community. I affirm many of these values while noting that external audiences may not. Perhaps a decentralized structure may circumvent this issue. Each local chapter can develop its own indigenous solutions to police relations and thus not have to balance these different needs.

Maybe the most profound decision that Black Lives faces is whether it wants to be full fledged national movement aimed at political reform, like the NAACP in the 1950s or the SCLC in the 1960s, or whether it wants to be more of a community oriented organization like the Black Panthers of the late 1960s. The official Black Lives website quotes Huey Newton, among others, which suggests that the movement aspires to both functions. If that is a correct assessment, then police reform is an anchoring point for a more thorough discussion of Black lives in a larger White society. It may be the case that this is enough to resolve the proximate issue of deaths at the hands of police, but it may be the case that a more thorough effort to build community is not the most appropriate tool for policy change.

I suspect that ten or twenty years from now, observers will see this period as a pivot point for Black Lives. After three years of emergence, Black Lives has become the face of police reform, but one rooted in the Black community and one rooted in cultural politics. The question is whether this is enough to affect the policy problems that generated the movement or whether Black Lives Matter will be an intermediary phenomenon leading to a broader de-policing of sciety.

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lbgt students are more likely to be activists

From Zhara Vrangalova, a study examining if LBGT student are more active than others in politics:

Student protest is often an engine of social change for sexual minorities and other oppressed groups. Through an analysis of college students in the Add Health survey (n = 2,534), we found that sexual minorities attend more political marches than heterosexuals. To understand why this sexuality difference occurs, we performed a logistic regression analysis to decipher the importance of four explanations: essentialism, selection, embeddedness, and conversion. We discovered that participation in political groups is the best explanation of the sexuality gap in activism, but racial attitudes were also important. Type of college major was generally connected to student activism, but educational attainment and disciplinary curriculums did not explain the increased activism of sexual minorities.

By Eric Swank and Breanne Fahs, in Sexuality Research and Social Policy.

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racism at harvard and student protest

Jamile Lartey of the Guardian wrote an article addressing campus protest at Harvard and what students of social movements have to say current activists (see my post earlier this week):

For 80 years the family crest of the brutal slaveholder Isaac Royall Jr served as the official seal of the prestigious Harvard Law School.

Royall, whose endowment founded HLS in 1817, once instructed that 77 enslaved Africans be burned alive at the stake for an insurrection on his family’s Antigua sugar plantation.

In March, student protesters at Harvard notched a decisive victory in their fight to “decolonize” their campus, when administrators announced they would retire the Royall family seal, citing “the prospect that its imagery might evoke associations with slavery”.

Two months later, many of the students who pushed for the change say the decision is bittersweet. The removal of the seal sends a message, they say, but it doesn’t do enough to address the currents of racism on campus.

The article has a nice overview of current protest. Lartey also discusses From Black Power to Black Studies in some detail:

In his book From Black Power to Black Studies he chronicles how black activism and demands in the late 1960s led to the creation of new academic departments and disciplines like black studies, and later Chicano and women’s studies that exist to this day.

“Students are so into the adrenaline of protests and screaming at people but then you have to know when there’s an opening, when do we have a moment to actually get something reasonable in. You have to be prepared with something that will really work in the context of that institution,” Rojas said. “Social movements do not win by merely being expressive, they have to have a plan.” This, Rojas said, is different from simply having demands.

Rojas cited the protests at San Francisco State College in 1968 as an example of the tenacity and organization required to effect meaningful change. A coalition of students of color demanded the school open a black studies department along with more ambitions demands like free tuition for all students of color. Students forced the issue with a “guerrilla campaign”, which included mass rallies spawning hundreds of arrests, physical intimidation and even small-scale bombings. They also threatened a strike. Ultimately administrators and students arrived at a compromise.

These demands were considered radical in 1968, but compared with the standard of some of last autumn’s student protests, they are comparatively mild. Students at the University of North Carolina, for example, demanded the “elimination of tuition and fees for all students” and the defunding and disarming of campus police.

Will today’s student protesters marshal the same leverage, patience and intensity to force these kinds of concessions? “Students can make change to these institutions,” Clayborne said. “It comes from small groups of committed people coming together and building it.”

Interesting.

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advice for black student movements today

I recently had a long discussion with a journalist about the current state of black student activism and we spent a lot of time thinking about what can be learned from the past. I started with two major points:

• Have specific and achievable demands. One of the big lessons of movement research is that you need to present ideas that make sense within the institutional context of the protest. Hire more minority faculty? Achievable. End all micro-aggression? Not achievable.
• Clearly link protest tactics to outcomes. A lot of protest is highly expressive and it is not clear how it is linked to some concrete social change. One of the brilliant tactics employed by the students at Missouri was having football players boycott an NCAA game. The penalty was $1 million per game. The protest mattered.

Then, we got into more subtle issues:

• When possible, student activists should be deeply involved in activism off campus. In my study of the Third World Strike, I was deeply impressed with how much help campus activists got not only from “protest groups” (like the Oakland based Black Panthers) but also from religious leaders, attorneys, and politicians.
• Learn to cultivate alliances with institutional insiders. In my book on Black student protest and Black studies, I discuss numerous instances where students relied on deans, consultants, and lawyers to help push their case.
• Know when to fight and when to compromise. Assuming that one has a well planned protest, there may be a point when you can get something. Social change is not about eternal fighting, it’s also about knowing when to claim a victory and get something.

Feel free to use the comments to discuss more lessons from research for activists.

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theory of fields vs. dynamics of contention

I am currently working on a piece that closely reads the emerging theory of fields and the (non?) synthesis of movement research and organizations. At present, I am interested in the following theoretical questions.

1. Is the theory presented in Theory of Fields the current standard? Lots of people have taken aim at ToF (including myself) but few people have offered alternatives. Is that accurate?
2. What is the difference between Theory of Fields and Dynamics of Contention?
3. What are the distinctive predictions of ToF/DoC?

A few brief responses:

1. Even though ToF/DoC were thoroughly critiques, I think a lot of research can safely be described using the ToF/DoC framework. For example, if we look at recent issues of Mobilization, we see that many articles focus on “fields of organization” and topics that fit into the broad category of “state-challenger dynamics.” We also see some applications of the less appreciated parts of ToF, such as social skill theory, when we look at activist repertoires and political skill. In contrast, a lot of the critics of the ToF/DoC axis have yet to offer a systematic alternative.
2. After reading ToF and DoC very closely, it is clear that ToF is an expansion and generalization of DoC. The main piece of evidence is that each book presents a diagram illustrating the basic unit of analysis – the incumbent/challenger episode of contention. In each book, the conflict cycle is almost identical. In ToF, it is Fgure 1.1. on page 20. In DoC , it is Fure 2.1 on page 45. The main difference is that (a) ToF situates the incumbent-challenger conflict episode within any field, not just the state and (b) ToF has some additional theory about distinctive fields and organizations (e.g., the state and accreditors/regulators within fields).
3. On one level, ToF/DoC might be viewed more as a useful language than a theory with predictions – you can describe the anatomy of any conflict in ToF/DoC terms. On another level, ToF/DoC does make implicit predictions. The idea is that fields are structured patterns of relations, resources, and identities. Thus, any serious change should really focus on disruptions of that system, which, on the average, will be contentious.

Add your comments on field theory, ToF/DoC, and institutionalism in the comments.

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brayden king on boycotts at freakonomics

Bryaden recently appeared on the Freakonomics podcast to discuss the effectiveness of boycotts. Click here to listen.

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