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The one-volume encyclopedia will include around 250 essays on the varied experiences of social movement media across the planet over the 20^th and 21^st centuries. It will also contain thematic essays on selected issues such as human rights media, indigenous people’s media, and environmentalist media, and on key concepts widely used in the field-e.g. ‘alternative media,’ ‘citizens’ media,’ ‘community media,’ and ‘social movement media.’ The encyclopedia engages with all communication media: broadcasting, print, cinema, the Internet, popular song, street theatre, graffiti, and dance. Some entries address social movement media of the extreme right. The entries in the encyclopedia are designed to be relatively short, providing clear, accessible, and current information on a topic. ... Read more

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Taken together the essays in this work not only provide new research essential to the study of Islamic societies and Muslim peoples, but also set a new standard for the concrete study of local situations and illuminate the forces shaping the history of modern Muslim societies.This collection is unique in its sophisticated interpretation of the social protest and political resistance movements in Muslim countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors take two principal approaches to the study of their subject. Utilizing "new cultural history," they explore how particular movements have deployed the cultural and religious resources of Islam to mobilize and legitimize insurgent political action. Others rely on "new social history" to study the economic, political, and social contexts in which movements of anti-colonial resistance and revolution have developed. This work brings together contributions from specialists on Islamic North Africa, Egypt, the Arab fertile crescent, Iran and India. ... Read more

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Eclectic and insightful, these essays-by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists-represent a range of subjects on the cause and consequence of protest movements in Latin America, from an examination of the varying faces but common origins of rural guerilla movements, to a discussion of multiclass protests, to an essay on las madres de plaza de mayo. This volume is an indispensable text for anyone concerned with reducing inequities and injustices around the world, so that oppressed people need not be defiant before their concerns are addressed. A new preface and epilogue discuss recent social movements. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great book on Latin American social movements
This book is an excellent academic work that can be used for research as well as interested lay-readers. I particularly like the variation in topics from unconventional guerilla movements, unorganized grassroots movements tomore conventional movements.The topics include important issues like LasMadres in Argentina andeconomic structural reforms in the region. Thebook covers many countries in the region offering a great overview. Thecontributers are all well known in theirrespective disciplines and offergreat insights into Latin American culture and politics. A similar bookwould be Free Markets and Food Riots by Walton yet this book is broader incontent and easier to read. ... Read more

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The U.S. labor movement may be on the verge of massive growth, according to Dan Clawson.He argues that unions don't grow slowly and incrementally, but rather in bursts. Even if the AFL-CIO could organize twice as many members per year as it now does, it would take thirty years to return to the levels of union membership that existed when Ronald Reagan was elected president. In contrast, labor membership more than quadrupled in the years from 1934 to 1945. For there to be a new upsurge, Clawson asserts, labor must fuse with social movements concerned with race, gender, and global justice.

The new forms may create a labor movement that breaks down the boundaries between "union" and "community" or between work and family issues. Clawson finds that this is already happening in some parts of the labor movement: labor has endorsed global justice and opposed war in Iraq, student activists combat sweatshops, unions struggle for immigrant rights. Innovative campaigns of this sort, Clawson shows, create new strategies—determined by workers rather than union organizers—that redefine the very meaning of the labor movement. The Next Upsurge presents a range of examples from attempts to replace "macho" unions with more feminist models to campaigns linking labor and community issues and attempts to establish cross-border solidarity and a living wage. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

a dose of fantasy
The book will not tell you how new forms of organizing will recreate the labor movement.It isn't even clear that the author is able to define what he means by labor movement or that workers matter at all.They are a derivitive force for him, and this book will misinform most students seeking to understand union organizing and the centrality of the working class in any campaign.The examples are shallow.Does one really think that Students Against Sweatshops are the basis for a new labor movement?Do we really think that outside forces will generate new militancy?This book is reminiscent of liberal academics in the last century who found it comfortable to watch from the sidelines--without getting into the fray.One may wonder if this perspective and approach led to the irrelevance of SAWSJ and other organizations seeking to tell workers what's best for them without actually understanding what it's like for us to work on the job.I need a book that does not offer canned strategies but one that will show me that organized labor is willing to support my own organizing on the job.We know how to organize here in Boston and we're not getting help from outside "movements."

Let's Wait and See
Dr. Clawson, a leading sociologist, has failed to make a convincing case for a revival of the labor movement in the United States.He sees the working class as a secondary force in social movements and does not say how an upsurge will emerge. Clawson lists a litany of familiar cases of labor revitalization, each in themselves are important examples of organizing, but as a whole they don't amount to the basis for a labor revitalization.The only way Clawson sees labor as advancing is through glomming on to new social movements that are appearing today. This revisionist perspective does not provide any historical substantiation for a labor upsurge, despite ample evidence the labor movement became dominant when class conflict had been on the rise.This post-modernist perspective is the most absurd effort to demonstrate how labor will grow by eliminating class conflict from the calculus. More important are other social movements based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation.While the identity movements are important, Clawson, in true post-modernist form, removes the working class from any upsurge.No new case studies that can be found elsewere are provided in this book, nor does Clawson provide a systematic approach to students seeking to understand the enigma of American labor activism and the absence of labor power.

Best book on reviving the American labor movement
This book takes a long-range look at the problem of how to revive the American labor movement. It rejects quick-fix solutions and argues that: (1) Labor movements grow mainly in relatively brief periods of upsurge, as at the beginning of the 20th century and during the 1930s; (2) Upsurges happen in unpredictable ways due to a confluence of factors many of which are beyond the control of labor leaders and organizers; (3) During upsurges, workers develop new forms of solidarity that extend across boundaries of craft, industry, race and sex - often in defiance of official law.So what should labor activists be doing between now and the next upsurge?Most of the book is directed toward answering that question.Clawson analyzes a number of organizing projects and campaigns.He is especially anxious to highlight successes, but does not shy away from criticizing failures.His tone throughout is supportive and respectful - both of professional organizers and worker activists.The book is indispensable for anyone who is sincerely interested in helping to revive the labor movement.

Upsurge Fantasy
The central premise of this book is that a progressive "political-social-economic reversal" is likely to occur in the United States and will be driven by a transformed and advancing labor movement. This contention is made against the fact that the unionization rate of private sector workers in the US has dropped from 39 to 9 percent in the last fifty years. The author's optimism is based on some recent organizing successes and on the possibilities of drawing upon a social movement paradigm. However, it is problematical that the author does little in the way of exploring the ideological or political basis for any such upsurge.

In the 1990s some unions took advantage of the community support systems of "ghettoized" Latinos and blacks doing low-wage service work to apply militant pressure and win labor contracts for such workers as janitors, nursing home attendants, and dry-wall workers, etc. In a different vein, Harvard clerical workers were able to develop a potent solidarity over the course of fifteen painstaking years of developing relationships resulting in a unique and cooperative contract with Harvard University. However, few workers now live in small urban communities where many may work for the same or similar employers. Suburbanization has undermined that key basis of worker solidarity. The focus on immigrant communities and unique organizing situations seems to write off the vast majority of American workers.

The author casts a longing eye on the civil and feminist movements of the past as possible paradigms for a renewed labor movement. But he does not acknowledge the fundamental difference between movements trying to exercise basic political rights and one that is cast as infringing on private property rights, which is exactly how corporations view unionization drives. The Civil Rights movement led to general public pressure to stop the deprivation of basic rights to all citizens. Any number of other movements such as the 1960s anti-war movement, the environmental movement, and more recently the anti-sweatshop movement has successfully illuminated various flaws or hypocrisies in our political and economic systems. However, none of those movements has posed a fundamental challenge to the capitalistic economic system.

In the decades prior to WWI, before the resurgence of labor in the 1930s, sizeable segments of the American working class were well aware that capitalism took away control of their economic destinies. The Knights of Labor, the IWW, and the socialists all contested this loss of control. But their influence had largely disappeared by the late 1920s. It was, in fact, the extreme excesses of capitalism, coupled with the fact of an urbanized working class, which led to the resurgence of labor in 1930s. Despite unemployment rates of 30 percent, the state and economic elites were able to contain discontent by creating a labor relations system whereby unions partnered with management in a social accord where adequate wages and benefits were the quid pro quo for restraining worker activism. The grievance systems found in most bargaining agreements were elementary forms of workplace systems of justice. However, in no sense, did workers achieve democracy within workplaces.

What is to be learned about the labor upsurge of the 1930s? As noted, a sizeable minority of the working class gained mostly material benefits along with some job security. But a majority of the working class was not included in this compact, especially blacks and women. Was there a transformation in the political thought of the working class? At best, this labor upsurge resulted in a short lived, mildly social democratic slant in the larger political system. In the last 30 years the American working class has supported politicians who have constructed a global neoliberal system that has been highly detrimental to their interests.

A key theme in the book is that had the labor movement joined with social movements over the past decades, the economic terrain would now be favorable to workers. But the constituencies and relationship to the remainder of society of unions and single issue movements are sufficiently different to call into question any synergistic joining together. The author continues this theme by calling for a "fusion" of labor with progressive movements. Other than a few isolated instances of labor-community actions and some middle-class college kids smearing egg on the face of some oblivious college administrators, the nature of how this fusion would work is not addressed. Actually, some critics see serious shortcomings in emphasizing the mobilization of close-knit communities in union campaigns, calling it "militancy without democracy." Worker democracy to many is no less than the full participation of workers or elected representatives in most workplace decision making.

This author, like most labor advocates, does not address whether American labor unions effectively serve the interests of the working class. The labor-friendly institutions of European social democracies provide one measuring standard. A combination of labor-influenced political parties, works councils, and active employment policies surpass the minimalist American system. Furthermore, those bodies and structures serve the entire working class and not the small minority found in American unions. European unions operate within the confines of this system.

In addition, labor commentators seldom comment on the political sophistication and participation of the American working class. Given the fact that economic and political elites have generally constructed a political and economic system that immensely benefits them, it is difficult to understand a labor strategy that does not directly and substantially attempt to transform that system. Ad hoc organizing or single issue mobilizations are unlikely to substantially alter the status quo.

The reader is left wondering what is the basis for any sort of progressive upsurge. The forces and thinking for such an upsurge simply do not exist. The labor movement has not in 80 years led a radical challenge to the current economic system that favors the few over the many. Of course, if unemployment ever reaches 30 percent again, there will be an upsurge of some type. But the author's suggestion of an upsurge is not based on that occurring. ... Read more

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Critics of liberalism in Europe and North America argue that a stress on 'rights talk' and identity politics has led to fragmentation, individualisation and depoliticisation. But are these developments really signs of 'the end of politics'? In the post-colonial, post-apartheid, neo-liberal new South Africa poor and marginalised citizens continue to struggle for land, housing and health care. They must respond to uncertainty and radical contingencies on a daily basis. This requires multiple strategies, an engaged, practised citizenship, one that links the daily struggle to well organised mobilisation around claiming rights. Robins argues for the continued importance of NGOs, social movements and other 'civil society' actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy. He goes beyond the sanitised prescriptions of 'good governance' so often touted by development agencies. Instead he argues for a complex, hybrid and ambiguous relationship between civil society and the state, where new negotiations around citizenship emerge. Steven L. Robins is Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Stellenbosch and editor of Limits to Liberation after Apartheid(James Currey).Southern Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB) ... Read more

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Researchers and students from divergent academic disciplines share an interest in the study of social movements and collective action. Through a variety of disciplinary approaches and techniques, researchers seek to understand the emergence and development of collective action. In the last few decades, the field of social-movements-studies has proliferated enormously, covering a wide array of movements, issues and places. With this growth, social movement scholars have criticized the traditional vision of collective mobilization as the results of irrational behavior and have instead developed a range of new approaches.

The expansion of the field has also led to increased theoretical debates and attempts to synthesize the different perspectives. But these attempts have met with the obstacle of the field being multidisciplinary. Discussion a theory from many areas of research can lead to misunderstandings. With this in mind, this book aims to revisit the disciplinary roots of social movement studies. Each discipline raises its own questions and approaches the subject from a different angle or perspective.

The chapters of the proposed handbook are written by internationally renowned scholars representing the various disciplines involved. They will review the approach their discipline has developed and discuss their disciplines’ contributions and insights to the knowledge of social movements. Furthermore, each chapter addresses the “unanswered questions” and discusses the overlaps with other disciplines and reviews the interdisciplinary advances so far.

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The Social Context of the Mau Mau Movement in Kenya (1952-1960) explores the social climate that united different clans and ethnic groups and sustained the Mau Mau Movement. Through analysis of _Social Movement_ literature, historical accounts, and a first-hand narrative from Muigai Kanyua, a fighter in the Mau Mau forest for at least three years, this new work explores a relatively unexamined aspect of the Mau Mau movement. ... Read more

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Social Movements of the 1960s
I can't write a review since I never received the item. Will never do business with this website again.

A great review of 1960s social movements
For someone who wants more than just an overview, this text provides a concise history of social movements in the 1960s. Well-documented in a clear writing style. ... Read more

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Balakrishnan Rajagopal's fundamental critique of modern international law draws attention to traditional Third World engagements.Rajagopal challenges current approaches to international law and politics either through states or through individuals.With transnational and local social movement action now becoming increasingly visible and important--as witnessed in Seattle in 1999, he demonstrates that a new global order must consider seriously the resistance of social movements in the development of international law. ... Read more

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Explores ten historical locations associated with various political and social movements. ... Read more

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The Politics of Protest offers both an historical overview and an analytical framework for understanding social movements and political protest in the context of American politics. The book suggests that protest movements, while clearly located in our nation's history from the Boston Tea Party to the Civil Rights Movement, are by no means confined to the distant past. It argues that to understand our political system, and our social world, we need to understand protest movements. The Politics of Protest begins with a brief history of social movements in the United States from the development of the American Republic. It then moves on to an introduction of the social impulse to protest, considers the strategies and tactics of social movements, looks at the institutional response to protest, and finally considers the policy ramifications. Each chapter includes a brief narrative of a key movement that illustrates the topic in the chapter. These narratives--addressing such diverse topics as Dorothy Day's Catholic Workers protest against nuclear fallout drills in the 1950s, the Greensboro civil rights sit-in in 1960, and the so-called Battle in Seattle anti-globalization rally--draw students in and give them a clear sense of how and why this matters to them. ... Read more

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Good introduction but a little background could help
This a good introductory text and I am using it as my text for an intro undergrad class.My only negative comment is that much of academics is a progression from previous theories.It would have helped if he had provided more background on previous theories and shown how his perspective is a progression from these earlier models.While his points are comprehensible without prior knowledge of the social movements literature, my novice students find it diffult to fully understand without at least a little background.

A Very Good Book
Meyer has written a clear, sensible, engaging book on a topic too often obscured by academic code. Meyer is good at showing what the connections are between institutional and non-institutional politics, and goes well beyond the simple assertion that these connections exist.Where others often lament these connections or use them to shed doubt on the actual accomplishments of social movements (i.e., "the system was adjusting anyway"), Meyer shows both that American political structures tend toward incremental change and that action outside of these structures sometimes brings more rapid and systemic change, but that this extra-institutional action is also limited by the durability of our constitutional system. Meyer takes policy change seriously, too, but unlike the change-would-have-happened-anyway crowd, he also calls our attention to the dynamics by which movements and authorities attempt to claim credit for change. Thus, in the end, however pessimistic Meyer can be about the prospects for radical change driven by social movements, he cautions against those who downplay the importance of social movements and protest in contemporary American life.This is a perfect introductory text for a class, and one that is usable at both graduate and undergraduate levels. ... Read more

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This book updates and adds to the classic "Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies", showing how social movement theory has grown and changed-from an earlier emphasis on collective behavior, to the resource mobilization approach, and currently to analyses that emphasize culture, ideology, and collective identity. Top social scientists combine insiders' insights with critical analyses to examine a wide variety of social movements active in the most recent U.S. cycle of protest. "Waves of Protest" is a must-read for students of social movements, social change, political sociology, and American studies. ... Read more

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Waves of Protest Review
Waves of Protest provides an invaluable source of analytical and factual insight into social movements since the nineteen sixties.This collection of essays exceeds in examining social movements through a cohesive paradigmof mobilization, organization, consciousness, strategy and tactics, anddecline.The five parts serve to illuminate the interconnection that allsocial movements touch and further produce a map of how to tap into socialconsciousness. These essays range in political perspective andsubject matter, yet each combines elements of political, social andcultural examination. This approach to dissecting the social movements forthe reader allows the book to be just as valid for a history class as it isfor a sociologist or a political science major yet the true power of thisbook exists for those who wish to bring about change in this world.Byshowing the vast connections of pre-existing social networks, analyzing thepro's and con's of social movement organizations power structures, to eventhe way a crisis crystallizes a movement, the collection of essays provideenough insight to learn from the past so new formes of protest may occur. Being published in an age of mass cultural homogenization, one must wonderwhy more attention was not paid to questioning what effective ways couldspear head the next needed set of social waves.Though many prison doorshave been broken open since the sixties the glass ceiling still holds muchmore subtle, but no less effective ways of confining all subordinateclasses.Though there is no easy way to face the new movements needed tostop corporate media control, or educational inadequacy the only way toface the next series of problems is to learn from the past advances andmistakes and Waves of Protest excels at illuminating the necessary andcritical factors of social movement since the sixties. ... Read more

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Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent, the story of a South Korean social movement, offers a window to a decade of tumultuous social protest in a postcolonial, divided nation. Abelmann brings a dramatic chapter of modern Korean history to life--a period in which farmers, student activists, and organizers joined to protest the corporate ownership of tenant plots never distributed in the 1949 Land Reform.
From public sites of protest to backstage meetings and negotiations, from farming villages to university campuses, Abelmann's highly original study explores this movement as a complex process always in the making. Her discussion moves fluently between past and present, local and national, elites and dominated, and urban and rural. Touching on major historical issues, this ethnography of dissent explores contemporary popular nationalism and historical consciousness. ... Read more

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A first-rate ethnography of the 1980s Korean society
There are not many good history or ethnograpy books about the Korean society of the 1980s except for some impressionistic or too journalistic writings, even though the period is very important in terms of the political, social, cultural and intellectual transformation of contemporary South Korea. In this sense, this book by Nancy Abelmann is superb.

This book focuses on tenant farmers' movement in 1987, both in a Southwestern village of Korea and in Seoul. In this process, the author not only deals with farmers' movement, but also examines the issues of class, nation, capitalism and democracy in the context of modern Korean history. Especially, the wholeness of social movement in Korea is revealed, when the author finds some links between 'minjung'(people, mass) like farmers on the one hand and student activists on the other. In this way, this book may become one of the rare books revealing some clear pictures of progressive Korean student movement during the 1980s, which was decisive in the process of 1987 democratization movement and later changes in South Korea.

And this book is also theoretically insightful and sound in terms of relating both a history writing and politics as inseparable discursive constructions, while showing the importance of [class] positioning in narrating history. Thus, the author compares both narratives given by capitalists who hire tenent farmenrs on the one side and by farmers and minjung activists on the other.

Compared with other books about Korea of the same period, this book includes more enormous details with a focus on farmers' movement in the 1980s. And the author's concious self-positioning among other subject figures in this work appears to be one of interesting characteristics here.

It can be said that this work, with a book about Korean Workers by Hagen Koo, is a must-read for understanding the transformation of 'social mentalities' in today's Korean society, which had a watershed in the 1980s and still going on in different forms in the current post-radical social context since the early 1990s. ... Read more

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Women's grassroots activism in Latin America combines a commitment to basic survival for women and their children with a challenge to women's subordination to men. Women activists insist that issues such as rape, battering, and reproductive control cannot be divorced from women's concerns about housing, food, land, and medical care. This innovative, comparative study explores six cases of women's grassroots activism in Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile. Lynn Stephen communicates the ideas, experiences, and perceptions of women who participate in collective action, while she explains the structural conditions and ideological discourses that set the context within which women act and interpret their experiences. She includes revealing interviews with activists, detailed histories of organizations and movements, and a theoretical discussion of gender, collective identity, and feminist anthropology and methods. ... Read more

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Women and Social Movements in Latin America:Power from Below
I never received the book.I asked for a refund and emailed the individual responsible for the book.What is going on?This situation must be investigated.

limited access to abortion
The book studies how women's issues interleave deeply with various social movements in Latin America. Across several countries, there are case studies of women's involvement and activism. A key topic that repeatedly arises is reproductive rights. Centred around getting safe and legal abortions. In some countries like El Salvador, abortion is illegal, which greatly increases the risk to women who need terminations.

Another topic is how the pervasive poverty in many countries worsens the daily struggles of women, who might have a primary responsibility to deal with raising a family. Worsened by a common factor that jobs dominated by women are often low paying. ... Read more