a warm welcome to guest blogger Ellen Berrey

Please join us in welcoming sociologist Ellen Berrey, who will be guest blogging about her hot-off-the-press book The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Diversity and the Limits of Racial Justice  (2015, University of Chicago Press).

Here’s the blurb for the book:

Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That’s a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era—but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it? 

Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (University of Chicago Press, May 2015). Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s, and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas—affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s admissions program, housing redevelopment in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company—Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences.

Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.

Berrey’s other publications on this and related topics are available here.

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when hybrid organizational identities can help attract supporters – AJS paper by Heaney and Rojas now available online

How can social movements gain supporters?  According to Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas‘s hot-off-the-virtual-press Jan. 2014 AJS paper “Hybrid Activism: Social Movement Mobilization in a Multimovement Environment,” one way that social movement organizations can appeal to prospective members is to use a hybrid identity that can attracts individuals from a variety of social movement interests. While prior studies have argued that hybrid organizations are penalized by an “illegitimacy discount” for not having a clear identity, the authors argue that boundary-crossing works for some contexts such as social movements.

Here’s the abstract:

Social movement organizations often struggle to mobilize supporters
from allied movements in their efforts to achieve critical mass. The
authors argue that organizations with hybrid identities—those whose
organizational identities span the boundaries of two or more social
movements, issues, or identities—are vital to mobilizing these constituencies.
They use original data from their study of the post-9/11 U.S.
antiwar movement to show that individuals with past involvement in
nonantiwar movements are more likely to join hybrid organizations
than are individuals without involvement in nonantiwar movements.
In addition, they show that organizations with hybrid identities occupy
relatively more central positions in interorganizational cocontact networks within
the antiwarmovement and thus recruit significantly more
participants in demonstrations than do nonhybrid organizations. Contrary
to earlier research, they do not find that hybrid organizations are
subject to an illegitimacy discount; instead, they find that hybridization
can augment the ability of social movement organizations to mobilize
their supporters in multimovement environments.

Kudos to the authors for wearing-out-the-shoe (p)leather: Using survey data collected from antiwar movement demonstrators in several major US cities between 2007-2009, the authors identified which organizations protestors belonged to, and which organizations had recruited them to these demonstrations.  After collecting online information about these organizations’ missions, a team of coders (followed by another team of coders for inter-rater reliability) then identified these organizations as belonging to one or more of 11 non–mutually exclusive categories: antiwar, peace, peace church, social justice, personal identity, partisan or ideological, education related, religious, environmental, labor union or labor related, and other.  Using these categories, the authors identified organizations as hybrids if they spanned categories.  As a validity check on this coding of organizational identities, the authors subsequently conducted interviews with organizational leaders.

Check out a preview here.

new labor in new york book now out

GC colleague Ruth Milkman and Murphy Institute colleague Ed Ott have co-edited a new book, New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement (2014, ILR Press), that should interest readers who are looking for content on recent organizing efforts in the labor movement.

In the preface, authors Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott write about the genesis of the book, with case studies researched and written by grad students enrolled in a year-long course:

This book is the culmination of a long process of collective effort.  It began in early 2011, when we decided to co-teach a seminar in the Sociology program at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center entitled, “Toward a New Labor Movement:  Community-Based Organizations, Unions and Worker Centers in New York City.”  To enroll in the course, interested students were required to make a commitment to conduct in-depth fieldwork and to write a case study of an organizing campaign or group, with the understanding that we would eventually try to publish an edited volume like this one.  We were extremely fortunate to attract an extraordinary group of Ph.D. students from various departments at the Graduate Center, as well as a few from the Labor Studies Masters’ program at CUNY’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, where both of us are on the faculty.

Check it out.

book spotlight: No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America

While attending a Burning Man-related event in NYC during the mid-2000s, I ran into a group of well-dressed “advocates” who satirically called themselves “Billionaires for Bush (or Gore).”  Using personas like Ivy League Legacy (aka Melody Bales) and Phil T. Rich (Andrew Boyd), this troupe has deployed humor, irony, and satire to underscore the weakening of democracy by moneyed interests and the resultant growing inequality.  According to the NYT, this group was one of many that were under surveillance by the New York Police Department (NYPD) during the months leading up to the the 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC.

Rutgers anthropologist Angelique Haugerud‘s (2013) No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America delves into this irrepressible and well-organized social movement group.  The book kicks off slowly, with the obligatory carnival analysis that characterizes many academic studies of festivals and performance.  Nonetheless, the book excels in contextualizing larger social issues, including the erosion of American safety net policies and the ascendency of the financial sector.  Using interviews and observations, Haugerud reveals how this social movement group has secured an audience and media presence: building up a recognizable brand (“Billionaires for X” – or in the case of Mitt Romney, “Multi-Millionaires for Romney”), storytelling to rally the troops around co-optations of various political candidates’ messages, hustling for resources (i.e., bartering a canoe for 100 tuxedos to dress “Billionaires”), and using humor and impression management to deflect public stereotyping of demonstrators as militant, “angry,” and “smelly.”  This book neatly captures the challenge of how to get social movement messages out via corporate media, which for the most part, have eschewed careful analysis of complex phenomena, while sidestepping barriers to free assembly and free speech.  In addition, the book depicts the difficulties of coordinating local chapters whose members may have their own ideas about acceptable practices and messaging that could muddy the social movement brand.

Although Haugerud adopted the name of Billionaire persona, she didn’t fully immerse in Billionaire character, opting for a primary identity as a resident anthropologist who overtly took notes while at meetings and events.  How she negotiated access isn’t entirely clear, although the troupe seemed to appreciate being the focus of an anthropological study.  In all, this book offers a vivid depiction of the strategy and tactics of a contemporary social movement.  Those who are involved in social movements will find the practices depicted useful for expanding the organizing toolkit.

cfp 5th Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies, Havana, Cuba, April 2-5, 2014

For those of you looking for a reason to head to Cuba and present your research, here’s your chance.

“Constructing Alternatives: How can we organize for alternative social, economic, and ecological balance?”
5th annual Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies, Havana, Cuba, April 2-5, 2014

“…the purpose of this 5th LAEMOS Colloquium is to share empirical and theoretical research on the dynamics of development, resistance, and innovation with the aim to promote alternative forms of organization in Latin American and European societies…Under the general theme of the meeting, the aim is to collect and connect a broad variety of studies, narratives and discourses on initiatives for alternative forms of development and innovation. We also welcome studies and reflections about the redefinition of boundaries, collaboration, and conflict among government, business, and civil society, in shaping social change, organizational (re-)configuration, and developmental action…

In particular, this is a Call for Papers for the following prospective sub-themes (but not limited to them):
The corporatization of politics and the politicization of corporations
The political economy of organizations
Sustainable and unsustainable tales of sustainability and social development
Alternative roles and forms of managerial action
Alternative spaces: communities, cities as models of collective agency
Transnational networks for protest and for change
Digital worlds, online forms of organization and action

Papers taking an interdisciplinary perspective on dynamics of change, innovation, power and resistance are particularly encouraged. Theoretical and empirical papers looking at alternative forms of social, economic, and ecological development from an organizational perspective are also of special interest. They may include studies that link micro level case analysis to macro level institutional and global forces, that investigate processes as well as structures, and that take a historical and contextual approach….

Deadlines:
Subtheme Proposal: July 31, 2013
Abstract submission (1,000 words): 15 November, 2013
Notification of acceptance: 15 December, 2013
Submission of full paper (6,000 words): 5 March, 2014
You are welcome to submit a subtheme proposal at laemos2014 [at] gmail.com. For more information about the conference and frequent updates please check www.laemos.com.”

Full cfp available here.

democracy and direct action according to David Graeber

For those of us who wish to consider the implications of recent worldwide events, three of anthropologist David Graeber‘s books offer a deeper understanding of relatively unfamiliar organizing practices and their relationship with democracy:

(1) Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009, AK Press)

(2) Revolution in Reverse (or, on the conflict between political ontologies of violence and political
ontologies of the imagination) (2007)

(3) The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013, Random House)

Fabio’s previous posts covered one of Graeber’s most famous books Debt. For those of us who teach and practice orgtheory, Graeber’s work on direct action and criticisms of bureaucracy offer much-needed insight into how collectivities can gel in taking action. In particular, his in-depth account of how groups make decisions by consensus offers rich examples that can help students and practitioners understand the steps involved, as well as the pitfalls and benefits of these alternatives to topdown orders. (Other examples in the research literature include Francesca Polletta’s research on SDS and my own work on Burning Man – see chapter 3 of Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event).

religion and immigration rights in the US

Yesterday’s WSJ featured an interesting (gated) front page article on growing support among some evangelical congregations for extending immigration rights to undocumented immigrants. Drawing on the Bible to justify “welcoming the stranger,” leaders have urged outreach efforts and political mobilization for overhauling immigration reform, even though these activities may alienate some congregants and politicians. According to the WSJ, one opposing politician has countered supporters’ assertions with the claim that “The Bible contains numerous passages that do not necessarily support amnesty and instead support the rule of law. The Scriptures clearly indicate that God charges civil authorities with preserving order, protecting citizens and punishing wrongdoers.” Clearly, groups and individuals are tapping logics of religion and the state to offer various rationales for the status quo versus change.

Sociologist Grace Yukich has conducted research on a similar movement for immigration rights among Catholic groups. Her forthcoming book One Family Under God: Religion and Immigration Politics in the New Sanctuary Movement (Oxford) examines how supporters simultaneously engage with a larger social movement at the grassroots level and reshape the composition of their flock. Check out more about Yukich’s work via her blog posts on Mobilizing Ideas and The Immanent Frame.

please welcome guest blogger Kathleen Blee!

Folks, we’re in for a real treat. UPitt sociologist Kathleen Blee will be guest blogging here at orgtheory! Her recently published book Democracy in the Making: How Activist Groups Form (2012, Oxford) won the 2012 ARNOVA Outstanding Book in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research Award. You can read more about the ARNOVA Book Award committee’s take on the book’s contributions here.

Kathy also has numerous publications, which includes research about members’ involvement in organized hate movements. We’re looking forward to reading more about her thoughts on the research process and her findings.

Let’s give Kathy a warm welcome!