Suchergebnisse

"Social movements are important means of bringing about political and cultural changes through collective action. The study of social movements helps us to understand how movements can achieve change, as well as how they are limited in doing so, by examining political and cultural opportunities and obstacles, organizational dynamics, resources, collective action frames, and strategies and tactics. The field of social movements is an exciting one, and scholars continue to produce new studies of a wide array of social movements in many different countries, while activists also regularly provide accounts of their experiences in social movements. Relevant to both activists and social scientists, the area is one that students find important and interesting. Given the proliferation of social movement scholarship in recent decades, it is a daunting task to attempt to capture the field in a short book. Thus, my goal is simply to introduce students and other readers to some interesting history, ideas, and questions about social movements. No single researcher can be an expert on all of the many social movements that might be covered in such a book, and I have limited myself to some of the movements that I have followed for many years in teaching and researching in the area. The book began with a Canadian edition, and later second and third Canadian editions, published by Oxford University Press Canada, which con-tain much more Canadian content. Some of this material, as well as material on other countries, remains in the American editions, but they include a lot more material on the United States. In the American editions of the book, I added a chapter on right-wing movements, which are particularly important in the United States. I also considered adding a chapter on the civil rights movement, which is obviously very important as well to the United States, but I decided instead to expand somewhat the material on the civil rights movement in my chapter on the protest cycle of the 1960s. My rationale for doing this instead of including a whole chapter on the civil rights movement is that there is so much excellent scholarship available on the movement that instructors can easily use to supplement my brief treatment. Hopefully, students will find this selection of contemporary protest movements interesting and will learn enough about theoretical ideas and approaches to movements to be able to apply this knowledge to other movements of interest"--

"In the summer of 2014, representatives of several environmental groups in Pittsburgh began meeting to plan for local participation in the People's Climate March to be held in New York City on September 21, 2014. The Sierra Club, 350.org, and other national and international groups were organizing the march around a UN meeting on climate change held in New York in advance of the Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015. Across the country, grassroots groups, including affiliates of Rising Tide North America and the Climate Justice Alliance, were organizing to attend the People's Climate March and to participate in a week of activities that would include a nonviolent direct action in New York's financial district to "flood Wall Street" on the day following the main march. Radical and mainstream environmentalists alike were eager to be part of these events, and participants in the Pittsburgh meetings included a staff member of the Sierra Club and members of the Global Warming Action Team of the Allegheny Group of the Sierra Club, local anti-fracking and environmental justice groups, student environmental groups, and a community organization called Action United. In addition to organizing Pittsburgh residents to attend the People's Climate March, their goal was to build a diverse local climate movement consisting not only of environmentalists, but also unions, faith leaders, students, and residents of disadvantaged communities"--

Qualitative fieldwork methods, particularly participant observation, afford a close-up look at the dynamics of social movements, allowing researchers to directly observe processes such as strategic decision making and the creation of social movement communities. Extended fieldwork allows us to see how movements and organizations change over time. This article reports on the value of long-term participant observation in a study of grassroots environmentalism in Pittsburgh. I show how the method increases our understanding of how and why people get involved in the movement; the importance of tactics in mobilization; and the challenges of organizing and developing strategy in movement organizations. The study compares organizations that vary by structure and ideology and points to the importance of looking at the multiple and lasting impacts of movement actions and campaigns. The article also notes some of the difficulties of fieldwork, the desirability of team research and multimethod studies, and suggestions for future research.

Following an overview of promising approaches to linking micro- & macrolevels of analysis in research on social movements, directions toward the development of a meso approach are suggested. It is argued that focusing on the mesolevel -- ie, structural but subsocietal phenomena -- allows greater insights into social movement processes, including their emergence, maintenance, & outcomes. Linkages between actors & structures at the micro- & micro-/macrolevels during each of these processes are illuminated with real-life examples. K. Hyatt Stewart