Search results

This chapter presents a case study of the lesbian and gay rights movement following the Supreme Court's decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which was a critical defeat in the campaign for sodomy repeal. Activists responded with a dramatic wave of mobilization by staging protests, successful appeals for organizational donations, building coalitions, and shifting institutional venues. This case provides a paradox for the dominant perspectives within social movement theory and legal mobilization literature, which often traces mobilization back to the expansion of political opportunities. The defeat in Bowers signaled a closing of political opportunities for activists. Drawing from a growing body of literature on political threats and heeding the call to specify the mechanisms of movement dynamics, I show how the defeat in Bowers was translated into proactive mobilization.

The chapter intervenes in the debate among scholars of legal impact about the extent to which law can change society. Reformers, aims are frustrated when targets of law respond with resistance to court decisions, especially where mechanisms to enforce case law are weak (Hall, 2010; Klarman, 2006; Rosenberg, 1991). Even when law’s targets abide by a law, however, other important studies have demonstrated that organizations can leverage ambiguous language to craft policies in compliance that further their aims (Barnes & Burke, 2006; Edelman, 2016; Lipson, 2001). This chapter examines a case in which a state constitutional provision banning affirmative action was written in relatively unambiguous language and one of its targets announced its intention to comply. Through extensive interviews with University officials, this chapter examines the University of Michigan’s use of financial, technological, and political resources to follow the language of the law while still blunting its impact. These findings suggest that to understand law’s impact on society, we need to reconceive compliance and not only take the clarity of the law and its enforcement mechanisms into account but also attend to the goals, resources, and practices of the groups it targets.

The majority of research on intersectionality and social movements has focused on agenda-setting or internal identity processes. However, little research has focused on the ways in which social movements present themselves as intersectional, particularly in recruitment, which is important for building inclusive movements. In this chapter, we begin to outline a theory of movement recruitment based around intersectional identities that draws on work on coalitional recruitment and concepts from framing. In particular, we argue that “identity bridging,” which occurs when two or more identities are linked during recruitment attempts, is a potential tool for inclusive and intersectional recruitment. We evaluate the extent to which movements engage in this style of recruitment using data on intersectional youth identities acknowledged on web-addressable advocacy spaces. Youth are at a critical moment in their identity development, and so it is especially important to engage them in ways that respect their developing intersectional identities. We find that, overall, most movement sites do not engage in identity bridging, and those that do rarely move beyond bridging the youth identities with one other aspect of identity. Based on our theory, this would help to explain why so many movements struggle with issues of inclusivity.

Collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives are known for requiring high levels of participation, striving toward community, and making space for affective relationships among their members. The emotional intensity of such organizations has long been considered both an asset and a burden: while personal relationships may generate solidarity and sustain commitment, interpersonal interactions can be emotionally intense and, if left unmanaged, can even lead to organizational demise. How do collectivist-democratic organizations manage emotions to create and sustain member commitment? This study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a worker-run, worker-recuperated business in Argentina to analyze the emotional dynamics of a democratic workplace. First, the author shows how members of the cooperative engage in emotional labor not only in their customer service, but also through their participation in lateral management and democratic governance. An analysis of individual feeling management, however, provides only a partial picture of emotional dynamics. Drawing on the theory of interaction ritual chains, the author argues that workplace practices like meetings and events can produce collective emotions that are critical to maintaining members’ commitment to the group. Finally, the author shows how interaction ritual chains operate in the BAUEN Cooperative, tracing how symbols of shared affiliation circulate through interactions and are reactivated through the confrontation of a common threat. The author concludes by reflecting on implications for future research on emotions in collectivist organizations and participatory workplaces more broadly.

In this chapter, the authors contribute toward building a better understanding of farmers’ responses to behavioral drivers of land-use decision by establishing an alternative analytical procedure, which can overcome various drawbacks suffered by methods currently used in existing studies. Firstly, our procedure makes use of spatially high-resolution data, so that idiosyncratic effects of physical environment drivers, e.g., soil textures, can be explicitly modeled. Secondly, we address the well-known censored data problem, which often hinders a successful analysis of land-use shares. Thirdly, we incorporate spatial error dependence (SED) and heterogeneity in order to obtain efficiency gain and a more accurate formulation of variances for the parameter estimates. Finally, the authors reduce the computational burden and improve estimation accuracy by introducing an alternative generalized method of moments (GMM)–quasi maximum likelihood (QML) hybrid estimation procedure. The authors apply the newly proposed procedure to spatially high-resolution data in England and found that, by taking these features into consideration, the authors are able to formulate conclusions about causal effects of climatic and physical environment, and environmental policy on land-use shares that differ significantly from those made based on methods that are currently used in the literature. Moreover, the authors show that our method enables derivation of a more effective predictor of the land-use shares, which is utterly useful from the policy-making point of view.

The “New Paradigm” of disability and the International Classification of Function Disability and Health both describe an ecological model of disability that has significantly influenced policy and law, and this model is frequently cited as a background in published research. Given the central role of “the environment” in this ecological model, we asked, what is the status of research on the environment and disability? Specifically, is a scoping review warranted in this area of research?

We conducted a “rapid scan” of the National Rehabilitation Information Center (NARIC) database for articles reporting studies of the environment – defined as the arranged or built environment. We also scanned Google Scholar to ascertain the frequency of articles that might report research into the environment.

NARIC archived 12,486 items published from January 2007 to June 2012; 530 (4.2%) of which contained the search term “environment.” Of the 530 items, 78 (14.7%) also included the terms architecture space, accessibility, and ICF. Over the same time period, Google Scholar returned 109,000 entries to search terms “disability and environment,” 349 (0.3%) of which also included the terms architecture space, accessibility, and ICF.

This application of a method for rapidly assessing the status of the literature suggests that research into some aspects of the environment and disability may be under-represented. A more complete review, requiring more resources, is warranted.

The contributions of this chapter are to establish (a) simultaneous dependence between female labor force participation rate (FLFPR) and their health status measured by the life expectancy; (b) the roles of (i) air pollutants in explaining female life expectancy (FLE); and (ii) joint interactions of different explanatory variables in determining both FLFPR and FLE, by estimating a simultaneous panel model comprising equations of FLFPR and FLE, using Baltagi’s Instrumental-Variable EC2SLS method and 13 major Indian state-level data for urban sector, over 2004–2005 to 2011–2012. The air pollutants (measured by prevalence of SO₂ and NO₂) have significant negative impacts on FLE. The interaction effect of air pollutants with economic growth on FLE is negative implying that the partial effect of a change in growth depends on air pollution level. FLFPR can be improved by reducing air pollution through health, as FLE significantly affects FLFPR positively. The roles of other socioeconomic variables affecting FLFPR and FLE are also evident.

We examine frames expressed during the Arab Uprisings that toppled authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in 2011. Through a visual analysis of 3,506 photographs taken at protest sites, we identify a new type of master frame, the “reclamation” master frame, in which protestors assert their right to what they feel they should have but has not been delivered or has been stolen from them by dictators. In the cases we consider, protestors reclaimed their right to (1) integrity of governance; (2) a proud nation, and (3) the dignity of the victims of state violence. They framed their struggle as a redefinition of the relationship between state and citizens. Identifying the master frame of reclamation as central to the Arab Uprisings, we argue that it helps us understand how protestors sustained mobilization over days and weeks in the face of brutal repressions. We suggest that it opens avenues for research on protests in authoritarian regimes.