social movements

This study of the Mississippi civil rights movement and the War on Poverty examines the relationship between social movements and policy implementation. A "movement infrastructure" model is developed that focuses on organizational structure, resources, and leadership to account for the impact of social movements on policy implementation.

Using historical analysis of the inclusiveness of Labor Department affirmative action regulations for African‐Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, and white ethnics, this article shows that understanding variations in social movement success requires understanding policy‐elite perceptions of the meanings of social movements and the groups they represent. Variation in perceived meanings along dimensions of definition, morality, or threat helps explain the speed of group inclusion, the amount of mobilization needed, and possiblity for failure.

A variety of social movements are coalescing into transnational networks that oppose the polarizing in-equalities, unaccountable corporate power, and declining social and environmental health of free trade. In the process of sharing grievances and resources, many movements are forging cross-border networks and shaping the beginnings of transnational civil societies.

Macrolevel theories of social movement emergence posit that political opportunity “opens the door” for collective action. This article uses the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to show that collective action need not always require opportunity. Warsaw Jews’ armed resistance was a response not to opportunity but to a lack thereof. Equally important was a strong sense of honor among the ghetto fighters: the hopelessness of their situation helped construct a motivational frame that equated resistance with honor and made collective resistance possible.

The racial and gendered politics of the 1996 welfare reform movement incorporated an anti-immigrant stance that fundamentally altered non-citizens' access to public benefits. This article focuses on community mobilization efforts to reframe the discourse of the “immigrant welfare problem” in order to restore benefits in the aftermath of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Drawing from two years of participatory research in community organizations, I found immigrant rights groups engaged in a variety of counter-rhetorical strategies.

The U.S. Constitution includes civil and political rights—as individual rights—but does not include what is internationally understood to be “human rights,” namely rights we enjoy as equals, including economic, social, and cultural rights, and protections for vulnerable persons, such as children, minorities, mothers, and refugees.

A temporal overlap involving the constructivist turn in sociology and national and transnational human rights struggles has transformed human rights into an important research topic within political sociology.

This article examines the mutually constitutive relationship between global institutions and local social movements. First, drawing on social movement theories and the world society approach, it develops a theoretical framework for understanding the transformative impact of global human rights on local activism.

Evidence of protest expansion both in the United States and abroad has stimulated theoretical discussion of a “movement society,” with some arguing that protest activities are becoming a standard feature of democratic politics. In advancing this claim, many have highlighted the role of domestic factors—for example, generational change or economic affluence—without fully accounting for the possibility that international dynamics may play an important role as well.

The authors integrate social movement outcomes research and the world society approach to build a theoretical model to examine the impact of global and local factors on movement outcomes.