Search results

The purpose of this study is to discuss how ethnicity and gender influence high-tech entrepreneurship in the Cambridge cluster emphasizing homophily and how and why bridging and bonding ties are created in moving individuals from the periphery to cross the threshold into acceptance.

The authors present findings on the micro-dynamics of ethnicity and gender in high-tech entrepreneurship underpinned by homophily. The authors discuss how ethnicity and gender influence who enters and stays in high-tech entrepreneurship university spinouts. Through an entrepreneurial narrative qualitative approach, the authors explore how and why bridging and bonding ties may be created and the challenges for those at the periphery to cross the threshold into acceptance. The study adopts an entrepreneurial narrative qualitative approach using interviews with individuals associated with the Cambridge cluster.

The authors add to the entrepreneurship literature by responding to the call for multiplexity within homophily, and the research indicates that homophily strongly influences who enters and who leaves the cluster based on bridging and bonding ties. The findings address the need for more focused understanding of entrepreneurial clusters and how mechanisms can be developed to create an environment to nurture both bridging and bonding ties. It is possible for an entrepreneurial cluster to be perceived as attractive and thriving while being homophilous. Ethnic individuals and women continue to struggle to gain acceptance in the Cambridge cluster.

Interviews were conducted by one person – an ethnic minority female – for continuity of all interviews. Yet as many of the participants were not minorities, it is possible that an interviewer who was not an ethnic minority may have elicited different narratives.

The study adds to the entrepreneurship literature by focusing on multiplexity within homophily in examining the dynamics of homophily in the context of the Cambridge cluster and the significance of nurturing bridging and bonding ties. The research comments on implications for practice among three interlinked but autonomous groups: first, the individual entrepreneurs; second, the networks she/he belongs to; third, the university as both fertile ground for entrepreneurship and an educational institution where entrepreneurship education is engaged in for encouraging and supporting spinouts.

Activists understand that achieving social reform via advocacy campaigns requires competencies in a wide range of cultural and political venues. However, differences in movement organizations’ identities and subsequent strategy choices often lead to inter-organizational conflict that detracts from achieving the desired reform goals. In this study, the argument is presented that the exchange of resources, such as proficiencies and skills derived from organizational specialization, in combination with strong personal ties between the organizations’ leadership structure, which forge a degree of trust despite ideological differences, will lead to cooperation. To understand when groups engage in strategic resource exchange and inter-organizational cooperation within a particular issue field, several women’s rights action campaigns organized by women’s groups in New Delhi, India are analyzed. The qualitative data utilized in this chapter consist of in-depth interviews with members of several women’s groups as well as organizational documents; thus, enabling a process-tracing approach to support the argument that personal ties drive the formation of informal inter-group coalition building to advance women’s rights in India.

In recent years, the long-declining U.S. labor movement has refocused in new and promising ways on rank-and-file mobilization, in organizing drives, collective bargaining conflicts and political campaigns. Such efforts are widely viewed as the best hope for revitalizing the labor movement: breathing new life into tired old unions, winning organizing drives and raising membership levels, increasing political influence, pushing toward the power necessary to reform labor law and ineffective labor institutions. The stakes are high and the goals ambitious: to close the “representation gap” at the workplace, reverse growing economic and social inequality, and build new coalitions for expanded democratic participation in local, national and global politics.

Hunger strikes have a long history in efforts to achieve social change but scholars have made few comparative, empirical, or theoretical contributions to understanding their dynamics and connections in the social movement and nonviolent action literature. We examine hunger strikes from 1906 to 2004 with a comparative perspective, elaborating on its use as a tactic of nonviolent change. Using data assembled from the New York Times, Keesing's Worldwide Online, and The Economist we analyze how, when, where, and why hunger strikes occur, and by whom they have been utilized to seek change. In general, findings reveal that hunger strikes over the last century have been widespread phenomena that are typically small, brief, and relatively successful tactics against the state. Several themes emerge regarding hunger strikes including their appeal to the powerless and emergence when few political opportunities exist, their significance for third-party mobilization, and the role of emotions in the protest dynamics. Taken together, the power struggle involving the hunger strike is an important example and extension of “political jiu-jitsu” as presented by Sharp (1973).

The overall aim of this article is to discuss the conditions and character of collective protest in schools. When do pupils as a collective gain the ability to express critical views on the policies of schools, and what is that criticism about? Using Sweden as an example, I discuss this question by studying the collective organisation of pupils from the 1920s to the 1980s.

The article discusses and compares two phases of pupils' collective organisation in Sweden: one dominated by pupil councils, one by national organisations. The article discusses how pupil councils at individual schools arose in the wake of the 1928 grammar school charter, and illustrates its influence using a case study of a grammar school in Stockholm. Furthermore, the article investigates how national organisations, first formed in 1952, expressed their concerns about national school policies.

The first phase (ca. 1928–1951) was dominated by the idea of discipline, and the main task of pupil councils was to help teachers in maintaining discipline. The second phase (ca. 1952–1989) was instead characterised by a heightened focus on protests and democracy. From then on, the main idea was that pupil councils and national pupil organisations should change the school, making it more suited to the needs of the pupils.

There is much research on university students and student uprisings. However, much of the previous research on the student voice is related to the upheavals of the long 1968. By concentrating its efforts on a limited time period when protest was more obvious, previous research has arguably not been able to discuss transformations over time.

Using data from a multi-method study with a national reproductive justice coalition, this chapter examines the emergence of the US reproductive justice movement. I first examine how reproductive justice emerged in relation to the mainstream women's movements. Then I demonstrate how, due to the relationship between reproductive justice and social identity, the boundaries of the reproductive frame and movements are simultaneously broader and more constrained in meaning than reproductive rights. Finally, I show how (perceived) co-optation leads to tensions between movement sectors and weakens the potential for reproductive justice to reinvigorate activism around reproductive issues. I conclude with how the success of the reproductive justice movement, including around diversity and coalition building, can inform other social movements.