Clare Saunders

University of Exeter | UoE ·  College of Social Sciences and International Studies

Based on decades of research, this book explores global social change processes through the concepts of social change organisations (SCOs) and social change makers (SCMs) - the individuals working within and alongside SCOs.

The literature on sustainable clothing covers five key thematic areas: problems associated with fast fashion; sustainable fibre production; sustainable design protocols; corporate responsibility; sociological and social–psychological understandings; and pro-environmental behaviour changes. This article interweaves these approaches in a study that a...

Persistent activism has mostly been discussed in the context of Western socio-political and religious movements, where it is attributed to organizational and inter-personal networks and the development of identities and solidarities. Studies of persistent environmental activism are rare in countries that lack durable mobilizing structures. This stu...

Britain's unemployed benefit claimants can now be "sanctioned" for not applying for a job specified by their "Work Coach", and the new "Way to Work" scheme compels them to broaden their job search less than a month after their claim starts. Some advocates of such toughened conditionality, including Conservative Ministers, have suggested that a sign...

Mack and Lansley’s consensual deprivation method determines poverty rates based on the proportions unable to afford possessions or activities that are deemed to be necessities by at least 50% of survey respondents. Using the method, Breadline Britain/Poverty and Social Exclusion studies found that Britain’s poverty rate increased steadily from 14%...

Varieties of political participation have different micro-effects or biographical consequences for those engaging in political action. Gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other markers of difference matter for involvement in political participation and thus also for its consequences. This means that an intersectional perspective is ne...

Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious environmental and social ramifications. However, it is challenging to change the consumer behaviour that drives fast fashion markets because people have complex relationships with clothing. In this study, we illustrate how the relationships that people hav...

Hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) was a controversial issue in the United Kingdom that sparked national and community-led groups to organise protest mobilisations. To date, however, the social science literature has largely focussed upon general anti-fracking discourse rather than on the physical, community-led mobilisations that emerged from the f...

The political party rally was reinvented by Jeremy Corbyn. Despite retaining the rally as an election campaign strategy, Labour calamitously lost the 2019 general election. Did something go wrong with this strategy? This paper analyses the results of a survey of participants in a Corbyn rally in Camborne, Cornwall in 2017, close to two marginal con...

Although there is a developing strand of literature on young people’s participation in environmental activism, there have been few systematic comparisons of their participation in different forms of environmental activism. This article compares the participation of young people and their older counterparts in climate change marches and Global Clima...

Varieties of political participation have different micro-effects or biographical consequences for those engaging in political action. Gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other markers of difference matter for involvement in political participation and thus also for its consequences. This means that an intersectional perspective is ne...

Fast fashion has emerged in the last few decades, clothes have become cheaper, less durable and are purchased more frequently. Shifting consumers away from fast fashion is challenging, even for the more ethically minded. Individuals have different decisionmaking practices and respond differently to social norms. Even the most ethically minded engag...

Research that compares those who do and do not participate in protest over time purports that protesters are becoming increasingly similar to the non-protesting population. Using a protest survey that includes the frequency of protest participation, we consider the extent to which those who protest to different degrees are similar to non-protesters...

Compiled by academics at three UK universities, this report presents a profile of participants in Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) mass civil disobedience actions in London in April and October 2019. The report is compiled from three datasets: a protest survey of participants in each of these two XR actions, with 303 short face to face interviews and 23...

Fast fashion has become notorious for its environmental, social and psychological implications. This article reports on some of the work undertaken as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded ‘S4S: Designing a sensibility for sustainable clothing’ project, which sought to combine social science and participatory arts-based res...

Control of bovine tuberculosis in cattle (bTB) in England and Wales is characterised by conversational and policy impasses, particularly in relation to badger culling. We created four online discussion groups comprising of badger cull supporters, cull‐opponents, aligned antagonists (mixing supporters and opponents affiliated with farming or an envi...

Responses to the Great Recession are varied across welfare states and gendered in their consequences. Combining gender, social policy and social movement scholarship, this paper investigates how the differential policy responses to the Financial Crisis in three European countries shaped gender-differences in anti-austerity demonstrations. We compar...

This paper argues that the agenda-setting power of protest must be understood in dynamic terms. Specifically, it develops and tests a dynamic theory of media reaction to protest which posits that features of street demonstrations – such as their size, violence, societal conflict and the presence of a “trigger” – lead protest issues to be reported a...

A three-year field experiment was conducted with 185 prosperous households to assess whether behavioural interventions by a community environmental group during and after thermal upgrades (cavity wall and/or loft insulation) can achieve reductions in households’ energy use, including reductions in direct and indirect rebound. The engineering interv...

Research on gender and politics has primarily focused on women’s participation in women’s movements and institutional politics separately. Our paper is innovative in multiple respects: First, employing a comparative perspective we analyse what impact gender regimes have on participation in street protests. Second, we study the relationship between...

Globalization encompasses several spheres of human action – the economic, the political and the cultural. This chapter, for analytical purposes, focuses on the relations between social movements and the three spheres separately. The discussion reveals the complexity of the processes of globalization and the multiple ways in which they affect and ar...

Peaks in climate change newspaper coverage have been attributed to key events, such as major international climate change summits, on the basis that these are reported. This approach overlooks the possibility that unreported events have capacity to focus journalists’ and editors’ attention on climate change. This study considers the extent to which...

Environmental conflicts are often framed by an assumption that there are clear divisions between interested parties. As a result, there is a tendency to polarise debates, simplify arguments and miss opportunities for constructive engagement. While these conflicts are rarely amenable to resolution through direct dialogue, diplomacy may offer a means...

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference:...

Current research on the behavioural impacts of social movements tends to focus on their influence on those most intensely involved. Consequently it overlooks the impacts that social movement organisations might have on those outside the activist ghetto. To begin to address this gap in the literature, this article examines the relationship between c...

Over the last decade we have seen the growth and development of low carbon lifestyle movement organisations, which seek to encourage members of the public to reduce their personal energy use and carbon emissions. As a first step to assess the transformational potential of such organisations, this paper examines the ways in which they frame their ac...

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Attitudes research has repeatedly demonstrated that the vast majority of unemployed people want a job and that their employment commitment is generally at least as strong as employed people’s. However, until now it has not asked if they are more likely than employed people to prefer unemployment to an unattractive job. While this oversight reflects...

Using survey data collected at 52 major street demonstrations across five European countries during 2009–2012, this article contributes to the debate on the (contentious) politics of the highly educated in Europe. In particular, it explores which of the theories explaining student activism better capture differences in motivations and ways of engag...

Rio+20 saw commitment from the international community to develop Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to shape the global efforts towards sustainable development. As part of an interdisciplinary curriculum innovation module at the University of Southampton, students take part in a ‘SDGs Summit’. Interdisciplinary student groups represent nation ‘b...

There are good reasons to test more refined measures of protest to better understand protesters' disaffection with and disconnection from politics. This article assesses whether disaffection and disconnection predict each of: protest participation (aggregated), participation in demonstrations, and differential participation in demonstrations. Failu...

This paper compares, contrasts and accounts for the different outcomes of the climate policy networks of two western industrialised nations: Germany and the UK. Both are generally considered to have undergone changes in their environmental policy discourse from end-of-pipe solutions to more integrated forms of environmental management associated wi...

It is well known that the Web, as with any communications technology, has brought new opportunities for citizens around the world to transcend the physical borders of their states. Global Justice activism seeks to challenge dominant socio-political power systems and promote fairer, free and environmentally friendly political discourse on a global s...

This chapter first addresses the ideology and policies aiming to transform the English higher education system in a competitive global market. It then focuses on the motivations and identity of protest participants who attended the two major student demonstrations which occurred in the UK, in the 2010 Winter. At the centre of the demonstrations org...

Although Occupy has received extensive media and scholarly attention, there has not yet been systematic research on its activists' recruitment pathways and modes of participation. In this article, we focus on the mobilization success (Staggenborg 1995) of Occupy and adopt the concepts of 'free space' and 'modes of association' (Polletta 1999) to un...

Current research on the behavioural impacts of social movements tends to focus on their influence on those most intensely involved. Consequently it overlooks the impacts that social movement organisations might have on those outside the activist ghetto. To begin to address this gap in the literature, this article examines the relationship between c...

This chapter focuses on how various social groups (most importantly, the employed and unemployed) differ in their attitudes towards being unemployed and undertaking unattractive jobs. While the research presented here has already been described in Section 3.4, its main features are now reiterated as we outline the chapter’s structure.

Student dissatisfaction with undergraduate research methods courses in politics and international relations is common across the sector. We suggest that methods teaching suffers from an unhealthy disassociation between research in theory – which we call ‘method acting’ – and research in practice. Our critical interviews with eminent researchers exp...

Can community-based behavioural intervention reduce energy use in the home? We report on initial data from an ongoing matched case and control field experiment on energy saving. Household energy use in 175 households is measured using monitoring equipment, recording electrical power consumption and temperature. Participants in treatment and control...

The third sector has a long history of environmental action and yet we lack systematic knowledge of the size, scope and activities of third sector organisations with an environmental mission. To address this gap, we analyse data from two databases – the Charity Commission's Register of Charities and the National Survey of Third Sector Organisations...

The third sector has a long history of environmental action and yet we lack systematic knowledge of the size, scope and activities of third sector organisations with an environmental mission. This research provides the first systematic analysis of registered environmental third sector organisations in England. It is the first attempt to provide a n...

Since the new millennium, scholars have acclaimed a vigorous global justice movement (GJM). Many accounts have stressed the tolerant identities of those involved in this movement, and/or the movement's horizontal decision-making structure. Consequently, formal organizations are often excluded from analysis, precluding the chance to assess systemati...

Data from in-depth interviews with participants in the 2008 Camp for Climate Action, participant observation and documents written by participants, are used to illustrate the tension that developed between reformists and radicals within the Climate Camp. Contrary to surface appearances and expectations derived from previous studies of environmental...

Protest participation scholarship tends to focus on the special characteristics of novices and the highly committed, underplaying the significance of those in between. In this article, we fill a lacuna in the literature by refocusing attention on four different types of protesters: novices, returners, repeaters, and stalwarts. Employing data from p...

The 3rd edition has been expanded to include: •The shift in focus in environmental politics from sustainable development to climate change governance. •An extensive discussion on climate change: including institutional, national and global responses in the aftermath of the Kyoto protocol. •An increased international focus with more case studies fro...

Clare Saunders’ book is an important contribution to the literature on social movements and environmentalism. Using the concept of 'environmental networks', it explores the extent to which social movement theory helps us understand how a broad range of environmental organizations interact. It considers the practicalities of social movement theories...

Key studies of social movement networks use block modelling to uncover movement network structures. While it is promising to see mathematical sociology techniques applied here, there are grounds for engendering an even closer connection between these two fields of study. The mathematical sociology literature recommends, for example, that analyzed n...

This text offers a perspicuous, empirically-informed theoretical overview of the prospects for citizenship in the light of its current political context. The authorial team comprises leading names from across the field, offering a cutting edge analysis of the problems and pressures of citizenship in the twenty-first century. The authors focus in pa...

A central element of the critique that the global justice movement (GJM) mobilizes against the institutions of the neoliberal world order is that the processes of decision-making by which those institutions operate are undemocratic. Dominated by elites operating behind veils of secrecy that are the antithesis of democratic accountability, such inst...

Key studies of social movement networks use block modelling to uncover movement network structures. Whilst it is promising to see mathematical sociology techniques applied to social movement studies, there are grounds for engendering a closer connection between these two fields of study. The mathematical sociology literature recommends, for example...

Now an international network with chapters in 76 countries uniting 5000 local groups and over two million members, Friends of the Earth (FoE) was first established in the United States in 1969 by David Brower. Brower was motivated by his disenchantment with the more moderate Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, which he considered were co-opted by...

Activism is, in many ways, the most important activity undertaken by social and political movements. In short, activism is the action that movements undertake in order to challenge some existing element of the social or political system and so help fulfill movements' aims. Thus, activism includes a wide range of different actions, from participatin...

This volume explores the role of the ECtHR in protecting marginalised individuals and minorities. What factors and conditions have led growing numbers of such individuals and minorities to pursue their rights and freedoms in front of the ECtHR and how has the latter responded to these? Does the Convention and the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Cou...

One of the Global Justice Movement’s central concerns is the lack of democracy of international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the G8, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank (della Porta and Reiter 2006). These organizations make decisions through no more than a handful of elite politicians, who are often heavily biased towards...

Political opportunity structures are often used to explain differences in the characteristics of movements in different countries on the basis of the national polity in which they exist. However, the approach has a number of weaknesses that are outlined in this article. The article especially stresses the fact that such broad-brush approaches to po...

No historical analysis of post-1945 NGOs would be complete without a discussion of NGOs active in the field of international development and humanitarianism. Although this chapter refers to international development and humanitarian NGOs as ‘humanitarian, aid and development organisations’ (HADOs), it does not dispute their status as NGOs. Indeed,...

After the Working Group on Climate Change and Development recognised the challenge that climate change poses to development, a number of environmental and aid, trade and development organisations formed a new politically active coalition, Stop Climate Chaos (SCC), to demand that stronger climate laws be adopted in the UK. The coalition now frames t...