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"Social movement theory"
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The politics of common sense : how social movements use public discourse to change politics and win acceptance
\"The way that movements communicate with the general public matters for their chances of lasting success. Devo Woodly argue that the potential for movement-led political change is significantly rooted in mainstream democratic discourse and specifically in the political acceptance of new issues by news media, the general public, and elected officials. This is true to some extent for any group wishing to alter status quo distributions of rights and/or resources, but is especially important for grassroots challengers who do not already have a place of legitimated influence in the polity. By examining the talk of two contemporary movements, the living wage and marriage equality, during the critical decade after their emergence between 1994-2004, Woodly shows that while the living wage movement experienced over 120 policy victories and the marriage equality movement suffered many policy defeats, the overall impact that marriage equality had on changing American politics was much greater than that of the living wage because of its deliberate effort to change mainstream political discourse, and thus, the public understanding of the politics surrounding the issue\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Identifying New Social Movements in Lithuania: The Case of Local Food
This paper presents a New Social Movement approach to the studies of local food system development. It aims to identify whether local food initiatives coalesce into a movement in Lithuania, drawing on the characteristics derived from the New Social Movement theory. Discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews with representatives of local food organizations and initiatives are applied as main methods of the study. Results reveal that social processes around local food are characterized by much unified commitment of participants to a cause, moderately expressed opposition to the adversary of movement, and fainting networking among them. The evidence of all applied characteristics suggests that local food movement is present in Lithuania yet in the incoherent and insubstantial form.
Journal Article
A Dynamic Process Model of Private Politics: Activist Targeting and Corporate Receptivity to Social Challenges
This project explores whether and how corporations become more receptive to social activist challenges over time. Drawing from social movement theory, we suggest a dynamic process through which contentious interactions lead to increased receptivity. We argue that when firms are chronically targeted by social activists, they respond defensively by adopting strategic management devices that help them better manage social issues and demonstrate their normative appropriateness. These defensive devices have the incidental effect of empowering independent monitors and increasing corporate accountability, which in turn increase a firm's receptivity to future activist challenges. We test our theory using a unique longitudinal dataset that tracks contentious attacks and the adoption of social management devices among a population of 300 large firms from 1993 to 2009.
Journal Article
Sustainability and firm performance: the role of environmental, social and governance disclosure and green innovation
PurposeThis paper aims to determine whether financial performance is affected in firms adopting separately or jointly two sustainability tools (green innovation and environmental, social and governance reporting (ESG)).Design/methodology/approachThe empirical study examines a sample of 211 S&P 500 firms over the 2011 to 2019 period and uses the quantile estimation method.FindingsThe results show that two dimensions of ESG disclosure (the social and governance dimensions) and green innovation positively affect financial performance. This result suggests that sustainability tools have a strong financial impact. The positive relationship between green innovation and financial performance is detected at the 10th quantile up to the 70th quantile. This finding suggests that financial performance needs a moderate investment in green innovation. When considering the joint effect of ESG disclosure and green innovation, our findings show that the positive impact of some ESG disclosure dimensions (social and governance) on financial performance is more observable with a moderate investment in green innovation.Originality/valueThis study highlights the prominent role of sustainability tools in financial performance. Despite the contributions of the literature, to our knowledge, the relationship between these tools and financial performance is not yet comprehensively investigated. Sustainability is less studied from the social movement perspective. This paper is among the few to study the effect of ESG reporting on financial performance in a world of green innovation.
Journal Article
Blacklisted Businesses: Social Activists' Challenges and the Disruption of Corporate Political Activity
This paper explores whether and how social activists' challenges affect politicians' willingness to associate with targeted firms. We study the effect of public protest on corporate political activity using a unique database that allows us to analyze empirically the impact of social movement boycotts on three proxies for associations with political stakeholders: the proportion of campaign contributions that are rejected, the number of times a firm is invited to give testimony in congressional hearings, and the number of government procurement contracts awarded to a firm. We show that boycotts lead to significant increases in the proportion of refunded contributions, as well as decreases in invited congressional appearances and awarded government contracts. These results highlight the importance of considering how a firm's sociopolitical environment shapes the receptivity of critical non-market stakeholders. We supplement this analysis by drawing from social movement theory to extrapolate and test three key mechanisms that moderate the extent to which activists' challenges effectively disrupt corporate political activity: the media attention a boycott attracts, the political salience of the contested issue, and the status of the targeted firm.
Journal Article
The Geospatial Characteristics of a Social Movement Communication Network
Social movements rely in large measure on networked communication technologies to organize and disseminate information relating to the movements' objectives. In this work we seek to understand how the goals and needs of a protest movement are reflected in the geographic patterns of its communication network, and how these patterns differ from those of stable political communication. To this end, we examine an online communication network reconstructed from over 600,000 tweets from a thirty-six week period covering the birth and maturation of the American anticapitalist movement, Occupy Wall Street. We find that, compared to a network of stable domestic political communication, the Occupy Wall Street network exhibits higher levels of locality and a hub and spoke structure, in which the majority of non-local attention is allocated to high-profile locations such as New York, California, and Washington D.C. Moreover, we observe that information flows across state boundaries are more likely to contain framing language and references to the media, while communication among individuals in the same state is more likely to reference protest action and specific places and times. Tying these results to social movement theory, we propose that these features reflect the movement's efforts to mobilize resources at the local level and to develop narrative frames that reinforce collective purpose at the national level.
Journal Article
Framing Social Problems in Social Entrepreneurship
Social entrepreneurship (SE) is perceived as a legitimate and innovative solution to social problems. Yet, when one looks at the literature one finds that the social problems that the SE movement seeks to address and how these problems are identified and defined are not studied. This lack of attention to the defining of social problems in SE has implications for the domain for problems do not exist unless they are recognized and defined, and those that define problems have influence on how these will eventually be addressed. Our paper presents an analysis of framing activities in SE done by the actors involved in the development and promotion of the SE movement. Our analysis reveals that these actors are concerned with creating an ecosystem to support social entrepreneurs. Critical analysis of discourses of these actors reveals a powerful mobilization discourse, one that supports social entrepreneurs as the agents of change. We also find that as the SE movement emerged at the beginning of a cycle of protest against capitalist systems, their framing of SE as system changing of these very systems therefore finds strong resonance with a wide variety of actors.
Journal Article
The Use of Disruptive Tactics in Protest as as Trade-Off: The Role of Social Movement Claims
In protest, activists sometimes turn to disruptive and violent tactics to meet their goals. Doing so, however, can also undermine support for their claims. We argue that how protestors weigh this trade-off depends on their targets and the extent to which their claims appeal to diverse constituencies, which then factors greatly into their choice of protest tactics. We complement past work that suggests that forces of professionalization and counterpressure alter activists' tendency to use violent and disruptive tactics. With data on over 23,000 protest events in the United States between 1960 and 1995, we find that protest events characterized by broadly resonating claims are more likely to employ tactics that are disruptive but nonviolent. By contrast, events espousing narrower claims are more likely to employ disruptive tactics that are also violent. Moreover, when governmental entities are targeted, protests are less likely to witness the use of both violent and nonviolent disruptive tactics. We discuss the implications of our results for social movement theory and the dynamics of collective violence.
Journal Article
Combining transition studies and social movement theory: towards a new research agenda
This article addresses two central—yet insufficiently explored—characteristics of some social movements: i.) abrupt and rapid social mobilizations leading to ii.) the construction of novel political processes and structures. The article takes a novel approach to these issues by combining social movement literature and the notion of free social spaces with transition studies, which focuses on large-scale socio-technical transitions. This theoretical integration highlights the co-evolution between free spaces and societal transitions, and it is based upon complexity-thinking, which is essential to deal with non-linear dynamics. A key insight is that to enable bottom-up societal transitions, radical social movements need to proactively develop solid alternatives to existing societal structures, to be ready once a window of opportunity opens. This theoretical approach is empirically illustrated using the APPO-movement in Mexico in 2006.
Journal Article
Understanding diversification of strategies and tactics in Swedish mining resistance: the fanning-out effect of goals and contextual opportunities
Europe is witnessing increasing protests against mining. Social movements mobilizing against resource extraction projects, (i.e. anti-extraction movements) are typically heterogeneous actor networks using diverse tactics to stop projects and promote other forms of societal development. I investigate two prominent anti-extraction movements in Sweden and explore how movement actors’ goals and interpretations of contextual opportunities shape their strategies and tactics. I study tactics over eleven years and use frame analysis to explore actors’ goals, interpretations, and strategies. Results show how diverse goals lead to diversification of tactics in movements by prompting movement actors to relate to different policy areas, that is, issue-specific contexts. Furthermore, actors’ experiences of interacting in different issue-specific contexts created differences in actors’ retrospective reasoning, which reinforced variation in tactics by informing interpretations of contextual opportunities. The study contributes to social movement theory by explicating how the content of goals shape interpretations of contextual opportunities and by extension diversify movement actors’ strategies and tactics. This adds to the understanding of how socio-political context influence tactical choices in concert with other explanations such as action traditions, diffusion, and available resources. Understanding diversification of movement tactics is important for handling increasingly complex conflicts over natural resources.
Journal Article