John Krinsky

Social Movements and Social Networks: Introduction

In this Introduction we provide a brief literature review of work on social networks and social movements, a brief introduction to certain key concepts and debates in social network analysis, and a brief introduction to the articles which follow in the special issue.

Changing Minds: Cognitive Systems and Strategic Change in Contention over Workfare in New York City

Combining recent and foundational work in cultural theory in social movement research and cognitive psychology, this paper presents a synthetic model of cognitive processes in the context of political contention. Despite broad interest in the intersection between culture and cognition, and in the cultural dynamics of social movements, there has been little systematic effort to understand the cognitive processes of change in social movement settings. The paper constructs and illustrates a model of cognitive change with reference to a case study of opposition to workfare in New York City, where the legal and political construction of workfare workers has been marked by considerable ambiguity. In tracing the ways in which activists changed their minds about strategy and definitions, the paper integrates environmental, cognitive, and relational dynamics in explanations of political contention to advance a non-individualist, broadly materialist and pragmatist theory of cognitive development.

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City By Nicole P. Marwell University of Chicago Press. 2007. 290 pages.

its own goals. Through this analysis we see the powerful effect of an opposing movement; it effectively changes the entire playing field. However, Fetner goes beyond this tight analysis and attempts to demonstrate the Religious Right’s control of the gay rights issue as a whole. While it is true that the Religious Right has had the upper hand in resources and mobilization, the lesbian and gay movement has prevailed in the majority of court challenges and seems to be winning in the court of public opinion. Data show that tolerance for homosexuality has increased at a rate greater than that attributable solely to demographic factors. In other words, lesbians, gays and their supporters are convincing the American public (slowly but surely). Fetner also tries to show changes in the realm of framing and emotions, but she lacks a critical engagement of the literature in these two areas. In one chapter Fetner claims that lesbian and gay activist groups changed their framing strategies in response to the anti-gay politics activists. Unfortunately the basis for this claim – a noticeable change between documents published before and after anti-gay activities – is insufficient. Scholars have shown us that framing depends both on the actions of those who create frames and on the expectations of those who consume them, and with such a complex mix it is premature to attribute message change to this one factor. Actors’ emotions, likewise, are most likely important factors in the ways that these movements influence one another, but this claim is not explored in depth. Rather it is mentioned as a side note. Fetner’s analysis shows convincingly that the Religious Right has won the arms race in building a bigger movement and choosing political fights, but this does not necessarily translate to winning the war of establishing public policy and changing public opinion. Despite these weakness, Fetner’s book is an important contribution to literature on opposing social movements and the dynamics of both lesbian and gay politics and the Religious Right in the United States. Struggles between the two groups promise to continue into the future, as David continues to search for an effective sling.

55 cloth,

for the linkage, connection, and even integration of interpersonal harms or traumas and the recovery, for example, from ordinary sexual assaults to the extraordinary gross human rights violations like genocidal rape. To address the restorative connections between ordinary interpersonal offenses and extraordinary state-criminal offenses, RJ advocates understand that changes are required at the cultural, individual, institutional, and structural levels of society. In these narratives, the personal and the political as well as the individual and the social must come together to be addressed as part and parcel of a transformative justice. At this juncture in history, RJ consciousness may not yet be a household or universal concept. It may not even constitute a social or political movement in its own right. However, at the beginning of the wenty-first century RJ is important to the larger global struggle for human rights. In terms of the study of social control, deviance, and the law RJ now finds itself to be a contemporary or obligatory object of criminological and criminal justice education.

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The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America, David S. Meyer’s fine synthesis of contemporary studies of social movements, offers what he calls a “frustrating” but realistic look at social movements in the United States. Focusing on questions of institutional analysis and strategy, Meyer argues that the American political system was designed by its founders to stymie radicalism by co-opting the demands of newly organized interests. This both encourages the formation of social movements and limits their potential. Nevertheless, Meyer makes the case that social movements produced the most important expansions of citizenship rights (civil, political, and social) in the United States and the impetus for policy change on matters of war and peace, nuclear power, consumer safety, and other issues. Meyer opts for a limited and state-centered definition of movements as coalitions and networks of actors that engage in protest and efforts to change policy, working both inside and outside of established networks of governance and government institutions. Movements matter because they expand and refashion these networks, changing, in the process, the terms— both organizational and symbolic—by which they work. Movements succeed to the extent that these changes are made routine, or institutionalized. They succeed more when they recognize their (limited) victories and claim credit for them. Meyer’s emphasis on American politics lends the book one of its greatest strengths. First, it is a distinctive twist. Few other general treatments of the subject locate social movements in the context of the United States’s political history and institutions. Instead, general studies of social movements in political science cluster in the comparative politics subfield. As a result, they often miss the key importance of institutional structuring and channeling of protest, and construct their theories of political opportunities for mobilization largely on the basis of coalitional fragmentation. The strength of Meyer’s focus on American politics is that he can show the ways federalism, constitutional liberties, and the balance of powers limits protest in a durable way. Second, the thematic unity and simplification that Meyer’s strategy affords the book makes it easy to read and, likely too, to teach. On the other hand, The Politics of Protest sometimes demands comparisons that do not appear. When Meyer writes that American political institutions are “relatively accessible” to new claimants (the comment arises, among other times, in a discussion of the labor movement), I wanted to know more about the implicit comparison. Indeed, the lack of a working-class-based political party in the United States has often been understood as the result of a chain of factors in the late nineteenth century that can all be interpreted in terms of strong institutional constraint that bolstered the hand of employers and condemned workers to needing a social movement ever since. This is one of several instances (not just having to do with missing comparisons) in which Meyer opts for simplicity over qualitative richness of exposition. This problem, while not pervasive, means that the reader who is already familiar with social movements scholarship is left wondering why not acknowledge a factual complication here or theoretical difficulty there. In other words, Meyer’s approach, while generally sound, sometimes detracts from his larger project of demonstrating the ways in which political institutions inform and are informed by the strategic choices movement activists face in the course of a movement. The Politics of Protest mainly accomplishes his goal of clarifying the institutional shaping of strategic dilemmas. For example, Meyer recasts Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy” from a dismal assessment about the prospects of popular power into the basis of a nuanced discussion of the stakes of organizing choices. Choices about organizing, he writes, take shape amid dominant organizing models into which elites frequently channel challengers, and amid the real material needs of the challengers’ constituents. Survival and heterodoxy, service provision and less tangible politics, discipline and ideological heterogeneity, and time commitment and ease