Robert Futrell

UNDERSTANDING MUSIC IN MOVEMENTS: The White Power Music Scene

Relying on the analysis of ethnographic and documentary data, this article explains how U.S. White Power Movement (WPM) activists use music to produce collective occasions and experiences that we conceptualize as the movements music scene. We use the concept “music scene” to refer to the full range of movement occasions in which music is the organizing principle. Members experience these not as discrete events, but as interconnected sets of situations that form a relatively coherent movement music scene. We emphasize three analytically distinct dimensions of this scene—local, translocal, and virtual—and specify how each contributes to emotionally loaded experiences that nurture collective identity. Participants claim that strong feelings of dignity, pride, pleasure, love, kinship, and fellowship are supported through involvement in the WPM music scene. These emotions play a central role in vitalizing and sustaining member commitments to movement ideals.

Framing Processes, Cognitive Liberation, and NIMBY Protest in the U.S. Chemical‐Weapons Disposal Conflict

This paper offers elaborations on current knowledge about social-movement framing processes and cognitive liberation, especially regarding technical controversies and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) protest. The social-constructionist lens of the framing perspective also allows refinements in conventional explanations of NIMBY conflicts. Attention is given to the dynamics of emergence, continuity, and change in framing strategies over time in controversy regarding the U.S. Armys chemical-weapons disposal program. I focus specifically on dynamics involved in the development of cognitive liberation, particularly the framing difficulties that occur in the context of cognitive ambiguities produced by an “information haze.” These ambiguities create problems for developing and linking the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational elements of collective-action frames. I also attend to frame transformation, explaining how transformation may be both animated and constrained by a movements opponent. I conclude that NIMBY is only one possible framing and can be transformed as the context of the dispute shifts. Moreover, framing activities in technical disputes may be particularly difficult due to the role of scientific rhetoric and experts in interpreting risks and shaping understandings of the situation.

Technical adversarialism and participatory collaboration in the U.S. Chemical Weapons Disposal Program

There has been a great deal of theoretical discussion about the merits and faults of greater public involvement in technology policy decisions but comparatively less case-based empirical consideration. This article assesses the theoretical and practical implications of two decision styles—technical adversarialism and participatory collaboration—in decision making on the U.S. Chemical Weapons Disposal Program. This case is useful in that it allows for a longitudinal assessment of these two distinct decision approaches applied to the same policy issue and provides an opportunity to evaluate the differential outcomes produced by each. In addition, the high degree of technical complexity and risk involved offers insight into the role lay citizens can play in even the most complicated technical decisions. Comparing the practical consequences of both decision-making approaches suggests that increasing collaboration among citizens and experts can produce decisions that are both politically viable and technically safer than more insular, adversarial forms.

Neighborhood Connections, Physical Disorder, and Neighborhood Satisfaction in Las Vegas

This study helps to disentangle the mutual effects of neighborhood disorder and social cohesion on how residents evaluate their neighborhoods. We draw upon data from the 2009 Las Vegas Metropolitan Area Social Survey to understand how neighborhood cohesion, physical disorder, and perceptions of crime and safety influence neighborhood satisfaction and neighborhood quality of life among residents in the dynamic, yet understudied, urban context of Las Vegas, Nevada. We use ordinary least squares and binary logistic regression to predict two measures of neighborhood satisfaction. Our results show that even with significant neighborhood disorder, social connectedness with neighbors remains a significant predictor of neighborhood satisfaction. We discuss implications of neighborhood satisfaction research for other fast-changing metropolitan areas.

Water scarcity in the desert metropolis: how environmental values, knowledge and concern affect Las Vegas residents’ support for water conservation policy

This paper examines important associations between environmental values, knowledge, concern and attitudes about water conservation policies in a desert metropolis. Specifically, we consider: (a) the combined influence of environmental value orientation, knowledge of drought conditions and concern about water use on support for water conservation policies; (b) the relative association of each individual variable on policy support; (c) factors explaining support to increase water prices and restrict water use; and (d) associations between socio-demographic factors and water policy support. Based on data from the 2009 Las Vegas Metropolitan Area Social Survey, we find that environmental value orientation, knowledge and concern are all significant predictors of water conservation, but concern stands out as the primary predictor for water policy support. Knowledge of drought conditions is the strongest predictor of support for water price increases, while concern predicts support for water use restrictions. We discuss theoretical implications and offer suggestions for water management, conservation and outreach.

Protest as Terrorism: The Potential for Violent Anti-Nuclear Activism

This article examines the potential threat of terrorism toward the Nevada Nuclear Test Site and the proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository by domestic protest groups, particularly anti-nuclear activists. The analysis is based on the history of direct action anti-nuclear campaigns against the facilities, particularly the Nevada Test Site, and suggests that violence as a form of protest, particularly the type of violence that is aimed at jeopardizing human safety (as opposed to violent destruction of property), is very unlikely. It is argued that the normalized relations between authorities and protesters that occurred at the peak of direct actions is critical to maintaining the nonviolence that has characterized activism at the facilities. But, the current climate of heightened government scrutiny and repression toward various types of perceived terrorist threats may affect future forms of protest and engender violent responses on both sides.

The [Un]Surprising Alt-Right:

Robert Futrell and Pete Simi on the simmering sentiments and political fortunes of White supremacists.

Parenting as Activism: Identity Alignment and Activist Persistence in the White Power Movement

This article addresses the relationship between identity and activism and discusses implications for social movement persistence. We explain how individuals negotiate opportunities as parents to align and extend an activist identity with a movements collective expectations. Specifically, we focus on how participants in the U.S. white power movement use parenting as a key role to express commitment to the movement, develop correspondence among competing and potentially conflicting identities, and ultimately sustain their activism. We suggest that parenting may provide unique opportunities for activists in many movements to align personal, social, and collective movement identities and simultaneously affirm their identities as parents and persist as social movement activists.

Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common GroundLabor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground, by ObachBrian K.. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. 338 pp.

from admitting certain limitations of political process theory but at the same time reasserting its heuristic power to refuting almost in toto the criticism. For example, Charles Tilly turns Goodwin and Jasper’s criticism on its head and accuses them of phenomenological fundamentalism when they propose to recognize that cultural and strategic processes define and create structural factors. The terms of a debate that sometimes falls into a dialogue of the deaf is perhaps best summarized by Charles Kurzman: “[Goodwin and Jasper] decry the structuralist bias in social movement theory; leading figures deny that there is a structuralist bias in social movement theory” (p. 111). In spite of a discussion that sometimes takes a polemical tone and confronts authors who talk past each other, this volume offers a number of important lessons to social movement theory and research. I found three ideas particularly useful in this respect. First, Ruud Koopmans’ redefinition of opportunities as “options for collective action, with chances and risks attached to them, which depend on factors outside the mobilizing group” (p. 65) allows to avoid the structural bias decried by Goodwin and Jasper and make political contention rest upon the availability of certain options and the expectation about its outcomes, thus bridging the gap between action and its structural conditions. In this sense, the most fruitful way to use the concept of political opportunities is to study the relationship between variations on such opportunities, or options for action, and variations in the levels and forms of collective action. Second, Charles Kurzman makes three suggestions reflecting a constructionist view of social movements: establishing probabilistic effects, focusing on mechanisms of effects, and exploring deviant cases. This methodological trilogy promises to bring us a step away from a search of invariant models that Goodwin and Jasper—in my view, incorrectly—attribute to political process theory, and one step closer to an explanation of the causes of various forms of contentious politics. Third, Francesca Polletta’s neoinstitutionalist view of culture in structures, rather than defining them as two distinct entities, talks to one of the main issues of the book and an old theme in social science. Indeed, one of the main criticism advanced by Goodwin and Jasper is the structural bias of political process theory and its lack of attention to culture. Conceiving of culture as embedded in structures is a way to avoid the ideational bias they see in the conception of culture put forward by political process theorists. Conversely, as she as well as Ruud Koopmans and Marc Steinberg point out in their contributions, there is a structural dimension to culture and social organization. The book’s declared main goal is to further the dialogue between what has become the dominant, structural approach to social movements, which emphasizes the role of resources, political structures, organizations, and networks, and a cultural or constructionist approach focusing on cultural frames, identities, meanings, and less often, emotions. In the end, however, the central issue it raises is that of agency. This issue is stressed in particular in the chapter by Doug McAdam, but pervades the whole book. Indeed, the emphasis put in the last few decades on political structures has given rise to criticisms as to the little place left to agency in explanations of social movements. By placing this fundamental issue at center stage, this edited collection should be of interest to a wider audience than the social movements scientific community. As the volume editors point out, this book “has broader implications for social science as a whole as it struggles with issues such as culture, emotions, and agency” (p. vii). Therefore, although most of the chapters are previously published materials (in particular, Chapters 1 to 7 appeared as a mini-symposium on social movements in the 1999 volume of Sociological Forum), it is a most welcome and useful assessment of recent theory, one that will contribute to regenerating the field of social movements and contentious politics.