Jonathan Coley

Oklahoma State University - Stillwater | Oklahoma State · Department of Sociology

Although the LGBT movement has made rapid gains in the United States, LGBT people continue to face discrimination in faith communities. In this book, sociologist Jonathan S. Coley documents why and how student activists mobilize for greater inclusion at Christian colleges and universities. Drawing on interviews with student activists at a range of...

Why are some US colleges and universities home to secular student organizations whereas others are not? Recent literature suggests that threat can inspire mobilization when groups perceive challenges to their rights or their social standing. Developing the concept of religious threat, I consider whether Secular Student Alliances (the country's larg...

Does mass media discourse influence material outcomes of contentious social movement events? The authors address this enduring puzzle by developing a discursive power resource theory of the press that centers press coverage valence of strikes within the coemergence of the labor movement and mass commercial print media. Employing unique data and pro...

Gendered organization theory highlights the gendered character of organizations. Recent extensions of gendered organization theory show that gendered organizations are simultaneously racialized, cisgendered, and classed. However, prominent studies in this literature downplay the importance of sexuality to gendered organizations. Building on recent...

Research shows that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) student groups facilitate LGBTQ students’ personal development. Nevertheless, we know little about the prevalence of LGBTQ student groups and why some colleges and universities are home to LGBTQ student groups while others are not. Drawing on our original database of officia...

Introduction Because LGBTQ+ student athletes continue to face significant challenges in college sports, some US college and university athletic departments are implementing policies that protect LGBTQ+ students from discrimination and promote LGBTQ+ inclusion. However, we know relatively little about the characteristics of schools that maintain the...

How do characteristics of colleges and universities shape campus activism? In this review article, we provide an overview of the growing body of sociological research on educational opportunity structures at U.S. colleges and universities. Specifically, we synthesize research that discusses how various characteristics of U.S. colleges and universit...

For LGBTQ+ people, religion can be a source of oppression as well as a source of healing and inspiration. Within three socially conservative religious traditions, the authors uncover LGBTQ+ adherents’ efforts to make their faiths more inclusive.

The United States is currently witnessing a surge in labor activism that will likely embolden many workers to engage in occupational activism and thus enact their jobs in socially transformative ways. We illustrate this argument through a case study of K-12 educators who participated in a teachers’ walkout and subsequently became engaged in efforts...

How prevalent are Republican and Democratic student groups, and why are some schools home to Republican and Democratic student groups while other schools are not? Some commentators and scholars suggest that Republican student groups may be less prevalent than Democratic student groups and, when present, will likely be found at “red schools” (rather...

What factors affect the size of advocacy organizations? Some theories suggest that the existence of political opportunities, resources, and grievances in a locality influence advocacy organization size. In this article, we advance an ecological approach to the study of advocacy organizations, arguing that the presence of other collective actors in...

During the labor movement’s formative years, Upton Sinclair was among the most vehement critics of the press for, as he claimed, a wide variety of “capitalist corruptions.” The authors examine one of Sinclair’s central charges in his The Brass Check , the first major book-length criticism of the U.S. corporate press: When strikers are violent, they...

Historically, mainstream LGBTQ+ activism in the United States has excluded the voices of multiple marginalized people, particularly LGBTQ+ people of color and immigrants. Despite increasing scholarly attention to formerly subordinated voices contesting conventional approaches to activism, little is known about how these groups utilize technology to...

Why are some schools home to Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim student organizations but others are not? In this article, we draw on theories of student mobilization, especially recent theoretical insights on educational opportunity structures, to understand the factors associated with the presence and number of minority religious student organiz...

A growing body of scholarship demonstrates the positive role that Asian, Black, Latinx, and native American student groups play in the lives of students of color. Yet, we currently know little about the prevalence of student of color organizations and the characteristics of colleges and universities that are home to one or more student of color org...

Scholarship on social movement schools shows that movements often facilitate the schooling of their participants, while scholarship on the biographical consequences of social movements demonstrates that movements influence their participants' subsequent careers. To date, however, few studies consider whether and how the schooling functions of socia...

Relationships between religion and state are a core focus for social scientists, but little is known about a central set of actors in “church‐state” relations in the United States: local elected officials (mayors, town councilpersons, city commissioners). We report on a unique, representative survey of local elected officials, examining their relig...

Frontline officials (such as mayors and commissioners) are responsible for local-level responses to the COVID-19 pandemic across the United States. Their actions and attitudes, either in support of or opposition to public health recommendations, have resulted in widespread variation in local-level pandemic response. Despite evidence that religion s...

The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement-with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins-was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis...

A growing body of research examines questions related to the emergence of environmental organizations and the growth of the environmental organizational field in the United States, but we need to know more about why particular environmental organizations grow or decline in terms of membership size over time. In this article, we draw on both qualita...

Although the general public often thinks of schools as "gun-free zones," a growing number of U.S. colleges and universities recognize shooting sports organizations, enabling students to participate in rifle, pistol, shotgun, skeet, and trap sporting events. Building on recent scholarship that employs political opportunity and resource mobilization...

Colleges and universities in the United States are common sites of social movement activism, yet we know little about the conditions under which campus- based movements are likely to meet with success or failure. In this study, I develop the concept of educational opportunity structures, and I highlight several dimensions of colleges and universiti...

Interactions between religion and government, between church and state, have occurred with regularity throughout U.S. history. Over the past several decades, a new church-state regime of accomodationism has encouraged broader and more extensive church-state interaction. Nearly all such interaction is local in nature, but little scholarship systemat...

Due to rapid changes in societal attitudes toward LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court's 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, Christian colleges and universities are experiencing more pressure to become inclusive of LGBTQ students. This article draws...

A growing body of research demonstrates that U.S. politics has become increasingly polarized over the past few decades. In these polarized times, what potential roles might social movements play in bridging divides between, or perhaps further dividing, people across a variety of political and social groups? In this article, we propose a research ag...

Past research reveals the multiple ways that people grapple with the connections between religious and sexual identities. Some people perceive religious identities to be in conflict with lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer (LGBQ) identities, but others believe such identities to be compatible. Some people look to religious authorities for guidance in...

We employ a unique sample of participants in the early 1960s Nashville civil rights movement to examine within-movement micromobilization processes. Rather than assuming movement micromobilization and participation is internally homogeneous, we extend the literature by identifying distinct types of pathways (entry and preparation) and distinct type...

In an era of rapidly evolving attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, why do some Christian colleges and universities continue to discriminate against lesbian, gay, and bisexual students? The most intuitive answer to this question might point to many religious traditions’ conservative teachings about same-sex relationships....

As a site of contestation among job seekers, workers, and managers, the bureaucratic workplace both reproduces and erodes occupational race segregation and racial status hierarchies. Much sociological research has examined the reproduction of racial inequality at work; however, little research has examined how desegregationist forces, including civ...

Why do some Christian colleges and universities approve lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) groups and inclusive nondiscrimination policies while others resist them? Scholars are beginning to develop models to explain LGBT inclusion in schools, but they have undertheorized the role of religion in facilitating or impeding LGBT inclusion....

Employing a unique sample of participants in the early Nashville civil rights movement, we extend the micromobilization literature by conceptualizing “preparation pathways” (“schooling” channels) through which activists acquire insurgent consciousness and capital so crucial for committed, effective, high-risk activism. We identify two key pathways...

Now available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09644016.2014.973222. Research building on political economy and ecological modernization theories has paid increasing attention to the conditions that affect the prospects for environmental reform. Much work focuses on variation among political units in support of a single type of energy...

Research on social movements and frame alignment has shed light on how activists draw new participants to social movements through meaning making. However, the ‘framing perspective’ has failed to interrogate how the form or genre in which frames are deployed affects the communication of meaning. The burgeoning literature on social movements and nar...

Social movement scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the process of “bridge building” in social movements – that is, the process by which activists attempt to resolve conflicts stemming from different collective identities. However, most scholars assume that social movements primarily attempt to resolve tensions among activists themselves,...

Prepublication version available at http://www.davidjhess.net. Wireless smart meters (WSMs) promise numerous environmental benefits, but they have been installed without full consideration of public acceptance issues. Although societal-implications research and regulatory policy have focused on privacy, security, and accuracy issues, our research i...

Why do advocacy organizations focus on some issues rather than others? Issue selection is an important area of study given that advocacy organizations have limited time and resources, and thus many potentially important issues go ignored. Yet issue selection remains an understudied question in the scholarly study of advocacy organizations. In this...

While it is generally well-known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the U.S. southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semi-structured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and...

Prepublication version available at http://www.davidjhess.net. The policy context for green energy laws in the United States has changed over the past few years, because the Republican Party has increasingly opposed renewable electricity and other green energy policies. In this study, we draw on a database of 6071 votes on RPS (renewable portfolio...