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Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune
Abstract
In this important contribution both to the study of social protest and to French social history, Roger Gould breaks with previous accounts that portray the Paris Commune of 1871 as a continuation of the class struggles of the 1848 Revolution. Focusing on the collective identities framing conflict during these two upheavals and in the intervening period, Gould reveals that while class played a pivotal role in 1848, it was neighborhood solidarity that was the decisive organizing force in 1871. The difference was due to Baron Haussmann's massive urban renovation projects between 1852 and 1868, which dispersed workers from Paris's center to newly annexed districts on the outskirts of the city. In these areas, residence rather than occupation structured social relations. Drawing on evidence from trail documents, marriage records, reports of police spies, and the popular press, Gould demonstrates that this fundamental rearrangement in the patterns of social life made possible a neighborhood insurgent movement; whereas the insurgents of 1848 fought and died in defense of their status as workers, those in 1871 did so as members of a besieged urban community. A valuable resource for historians and scholars of social movements, this work shows that collective identities vary with political circumstances but are nevertheless constrained by social networks. Gould extends this argument to make sense of other protest movements and to offer predictions about the dimensions of future social conflict.
... Second, the design of recruitment strategies, in which I flesh out the impact of an exclusively framed collective identity on recruitment, and examine the conditions that anticipate exclusiveness in the identity construction process. Scholars identify exclusiveness as a strategy for retaining commitment beyond the end of a protest cycle (Gitlin 1995), in spite of its discouragement of coalition. However, this hampering effect extends to influence recruitment, ignored by scholars who traditionally focus on coalition. ...
... Organizers commonly respond to this period by re-orienting their strategies toward the goal of retaining commitment, in lieu of ascertaining public sympathy. To this end, lack of membership and broad appeal is compensated by narrowing an identity's definition, rejecting alliances in a shift to exclusiveness that hopefully preserves commitment of the remainder (Gitlin 1995;Tarrow 1998). In discouraging coalition, exclusionary identities preclude linkages within a "multiorganizational field" constituted of other movements, authorities, and media (Klandersman 1997). ...
Mainstream structuralist and new social movement theoretical approaches to studying social movements in Western sociological traditions fail to explain why the Sunflower movement fostered solidarity among the Taiwanese while Occupy Central caused public division in Hong Kong. In response, I argue that the successes and failures of both were a function of the consolidation and division of collective identity. Using a qualitative case study, this article analyzes the discursive constructions of collective identity as they intersect with protest spaces, drawing out the events in their protest cycles and identifying the mechanisms within them that constructed and deconstructed collective identity. In doing so, I illustrate three phases of collective identity construction: the creation of collective claims, recruitment strategies, and expressive decision-making. Ultimately, this explicates the movements’ differing outcomes, and how their decline both narrowed and broadened identity in ways that provide a repertoire of ideological narratives usable as recruitment strategies in future mobilizations.
... The level of collective action is always constrained by the social ties, organizational capacity, common interests, and mutual awareness of the potential pool of social movement participants (Gould 1995). Forms of economic development greatly condition these building blocks of social movement activity. ...
The relationship between social movement forms and large scale shifts in economic development strategies, including export agriculture, state-led development and neoliberalism
... Alguns autores dão ênfase em seus estudos à ação da comunidade urbana, compreendida em termos espaciais, e à criação de fortes laços comunitários nos bairros. É o caso de Roger Gould (1995) em sua análise da Comuna de Paris de 1871, na qual considera que a solidariedade de vizinhança e de residência foi fundamental para a organização da ação revolucionária, que, na sua leitura, foi baseada em redes sociais e formas de organização preexistentes, num contexto específico de uma comunidade urbana sitiada. Segundo Gould, foi o fato de as reformas urbanas terem dispersado os trabalhadores, afastando-os do centro e empurrando-os para os novos bairros periféricos, que levou a uma estruturação social baseada mais no local de residência do que na ocupação, ao contrário de 1848, quando a classe teria desempenhado papel central. ...
Resumo Este artigo analisa, a partir de pesquisa original e dos estudos já realizados, as greves e revoltas ocorridas em São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Porto Alegre e outras cidades do Brasil em 1917 e suas reivindicações, a participação dos trabalhadores e dos militantes anarquistas e socialistas nesses eventos, e a circulação das ideias políticas no período, em especial os primeiros impactos no país das revoluções ocorridas na Rússia naquele ano, e como essas novas ideias revolucionárias começaram a transformar os grupos políticos e as organizações dos trabalhadores. As greves daquele ano tiveram um papel basilar para o desenvolvimento posterior do movimento operário e das lutas trabalhistas no Brasil.
... Althusser Thomson 1963Braverman 1974Burawoy 1985: 24 19781979, 19851980modern discourse Bradley 1999Thiel 2007Jones 1983Fantasia 1988;Gould 1995;171 Somers 1997Sewell 1980Berlanstein 1993: 4 Gould 19951871Jones 1983Joyce 1991Berlanstein 1992Aminzade 1981Sewell 1980172 Cai 2006Chen 2000Chen , 2003Chen , 2006Lee 2000Lee , 2007 2004 NGO ...
本文採用馬克思主義的理論視角，分析變化中的農民工抗議行動。 1978年以來，當中國的新工人階級在重新形成時，勞工研究卻拋棄了馬 克思主義的傳統，不再將社會生產關係作為分析的出發點。當下的主流
研究將資本主義的生產體制下的中國農民工抗爭理解為市民運動的一部
分。作者認為這一點理論視角無法理解和解釋近年來農民工抗爭模式的
新轉變。因此他提倡重回馬克思主義的基本觀點，從社會生產關係的分
析視角出發，並與工人在特定的社會文化和歷史政治處境下的具體抗爭
模式相聯繫，分析當前中國的外資和私營企業中日益嚴重的勞資矛盾。
... en actos terroristas, la resistencia no violenta invita a una menor represi?n y peligro f?sico por parte del Estado. Por este motivo, la protesta violenta suele analizarse como un problema de acci?n colectiva (v?anse DeNardo, 1985; Gould, 1995; Weinstein, 2007). Es obvio que la elevada probabilidad de sacrificio de miembros terroristas demuestra el compromiso de estos; no obstante, tambi?n muestra el de la organizaci?n a la que pertenecen, la cual est? evidentemente preparada para sacrificar no solo recursos humanos fundamentales, sino tambi?n miembros que, por su determinaci?n, ...
In the study of terrorism, there is a widespread belief that I call the "Strategic Model". It posits that groups adopt terrorism because it offers the best chance of having their grievances redressed. More specifically, the Strategic Model maintains that attacking civilians with acts of terrorism is a successful way for groups to pressure governments into meeting their political demands. Despite the prevalence of this rationalist perspective, it actually rests on very weak empirical foundations. In the face of terrorism, target countries seldom make strategic concessions to the perpetrators of the attacks. On the contrary, they generally dig in their political heels and go on the offensive. This article looks at why so many scholars assume that terrorism pays despite its political futility.
... The main aim is to account for variations of political participation across a large range of organisations that engage in the unemployment field. In particular, our argument promotes the use of the relational approach already used in the social movement field (Diani 1992 and Gould 1995; Diani and McAdam 2003; Diani and Bison 2004), but with a different emphasis derived from the governance literature (Cinalli 2007a; Christopoulos 2008; Christopoulos and Quaglia 2009; Feiock and Scholz 2010). Instead of using networks to understand the nature of social movements, the governance literature has used relational data to examine the different levels of actors' involvement in the political sphere. ...
This article focuses on political participation of local publics in the unemployment field, examining networks of collective actors in Lyon and Turin. Our main question is: Is the participation of local publics fostered under conditions of more developed governance that increases bottom-up access (formal or informal) to elites and institutions in the policy domain? Drawing upon the most recent developments in literatures on social movement theory, governance and network analysis, this article discusses the main variations in terms of political participation of local publics in Lyon and Turin. It then enquires into the main explanatory factors accounting for these variations, thus showing that the openness of governance does influence the level of political participation of local publics. The main argument is that in an open context participation is low, while in a closed (or underdeveloped) context local publics participate more, with differential access to decision-making according to their resources.
... This can encourage some local politicians to take a pragmatic and more favourable stance on the activities of undocumented immigrants residing in their jurisdictions. Second, certain contexts provide aggrieved actors with thicker and more diverse support networks (Gould 1995; Diani 2004; Nicholls 2008). When early struggles for immigrant rights emerge in these environments, campaign organisers can develop partnerships with other organisations possessing complementary resources (Nicholls 2008). ...
This paper accounts for important shifts in the debate on immigration reform by considering the geographies of protest. Our findings point to the importance of urban hubs of activists and organisations that have worked with one another over extended periods of time. While these urban hubs constitute distinctive activist worlds, they have also connected to one another and coordinated nation-wide actions through a variety of networks (social media, interpersonal, and inter-organisational). Using interviews, network analysis, and data on funding, we show how this decentralised network evolved and eventually outflanked nationally centred and reformist advocacy organisations in recent anti-deportation campaigns.
... Institutional change of this type is an " emergent " —rather than planned— phenomenon. In countless empirical cases, emergence can be traced to experimentation and coordinated action among individuals and organizations (Clemens, 1993; Gould, 1995; Morrill et al., 2003; Nee and Ingram, 1998; Nee and Opper, 2012; Owen-Smith and Powell, 2006; Padgett and Powell, 2012; Powell et al., 1996; Rao, 1998; Rao et al., 2003; Rogers, 1962). " Bottom-up " institutional changes, such as the rise and diffusion of novel organizational forms, practices and industry standards, have been widely documented (Briscoe and Murphy, 2012; Carroll and Swaminathan, 2000; Holm, 1995; Tolbert and Zucker, 1983). ...
A parsimonious set of mechanisms explains how and under which conditions behavioral deviations build into cascades that reshape institutional frameworks from the bottom up, even if institutional innovations initially conflict with the legally codified rules of the game. Specifically, we argue that this type of endogenous institutional change emerges from an interplay between three factors: the utility gain agents associate with decoupling from institutional equilibria, positive externalities derived from similar decoupling among one’s neighbors, and accommodation by state actors. Where endogenous institutional change driven by societal action is sufficiently robust, it can induce political actors to accommodate and eventually to legitimize institutional innovations from below. We provide empirical illustrations of our theory in two disparate institutional contexts—the rise of private manufacturing in the Yangzi delta region of China since 1978, focusing on two municipalities in that region, and the diffusion of gay bars in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. We validate our theory with an agent-based simulation.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) achieved a series of military successes in revolutionary wars. Based on new county-level panel datasets from China, this study uses the shocks brought about by a civil and foreign war to test the impact of Confucianism on the war mobilization capacity of the CPC. We find that, during the civil war, Confucianism did not significantly affect CPC’s war mobilization; however, during the foreign war, it significantly improved CPC’s capacity to mobilize people. This demonstrates the differentiated effects of Confucianism by war type through three different mechanisms: “loyalty,” “just war,” and “patriotism.” Our findings shed light on the role of native cultural norms in collective action.
This chapter examines the question of the specific form of organization of workers’ power in the Paris Commune of 1871. It seeks to show that only an understanding of the transition process that surpasses economism allows us to see why Marx considered the Paris Commune as the first experience of a workers’ power. Precisely because they did not understand this, academic critics were able to support, against Marx’s analysis, the thesis that the Commune represented just another popular uprising like so many others in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our ideas are presented concurrently with a critical evaluation of part of the bibliography on these historical processes. Although these processes have been widely discussed in specialized historiography, we believe that, because our analyses are informed by an issue ignored or rejected by historiographic research, we manage to shed some new light on them.
This study discusses the questions of terrorism among the international communities. The threat of terrorism has affected international peace and security. Further, we have to study to elucidate the main roots of terrorism and how to save the world community from the danger of it. The study relied on the concept of collective security derived from the theory of bargaining and idealism to explain why states come together to fight terrorism. The authors use this method to search the result through empirical analyses. As a result of this study, the terrorist activities displaced the people and restricted sustainable development. The result also shows that due to the terrorist events, people suffered from many basic human rights. Thus, many parts of the world have been destabilised from the act of terrorism and are continually struggling to restore peace and security.
In this paper, I present a case of dispute resolution from Pakistan where kinship leaders play a key role in resolving local disputes. Scholars often cite that such practices provide evidence of a failed state. However, I show how these traditional practices elucidate ongoing processes of boundary management. On the one hand, these practices reveal the efforts by non-state leaders to carve out their autonomy by taking on a role traditionally played by the state. In fact, their ability to management local/state boundaries is linked to how they manage boundaries within their communities. The state, in turn, recognizes or legitimates these boundaries when it is politically convenient or allows them to save face. I document such negotiations in my research and show how they are critical to understanding how villagers see the state and vice versa. The Pakistani case is important as the ubiquity of its alternate dispute resolution system problematizes the taken-for-granted status of the state and makes visible the mechanisms by which the boundaries between the state and society are continually negotiated and the implications for the citizen/state relationship.
Given decades of military rule and a tightly moderated national public sphere, political participation in Pakistan historically has been extremely constrained and shallow. In contrast, drawing on my ethnographic research conducted from 2013 to 2019, I present the case of the dera, a gathering place for men in villages, where surprisingly there is a measure of public debate. Such spaces have typically been ignored because they are informal and hidden within personal networks. In spite of its informality, I show how the dera has considerable influence over village life. While individuals who manage deras do not have formal authority, they frame local debates, influence social customs and rules within the village, and importantly mediate the relationship between villagers and state representatives. Unlike the Habermasian public sphere, interactions within the dera often contribute to uncivil discourse, fractious interactions, and scandal. I argue that exploring such uncivil dynamics of public life can contribute to an understanding of public participation in Pakistan more broadly, especially highlighting the exclusion of the subaltern or marginalized populations. Beyond Pakistan, I make the case for how decoupling of the public sphere from the state can reveal interstitial spaces such as the dera and the local gatekeepers who manage such spaces, as well as elucidate how micro public spheres influence participation in formal political institutions.
Other contributions to this book have examined the impact of political context on political behavior in the field of unemployment and precarity and have focused on the multi-organizational nature of the unemployment and precarity field and its network dynamics. This chapter consists of a research design that analyzes the impact of the actors’ networks on the various types of political engagement of organizations in the field of unemployment and precarity politics while taking into consideration the key role of welfare regimes. We performed a comparative analysis of Cologne, Kielce, and Turin. While they differ in their degree of flexibility in labor market regulations, these three national cases are comparable in terms of their restrictive approach vis-à-vis the unemployed and precarious workers. Relationally, we have singled out the role of brokerage as a main network attribute of the actors. The primary point that we would like to emphasize is that brokerage stands out as a valuable measure that captures actors’ capacity to foster exchanges within the field in terms of both bonding in the public domain and creating linkages between the public and the policy domains (Cinalli 2004, 2007). We have focused on three main variables of political engagement: mobilizing members, lobbying, and general involvement in political activities.
The purpose of thinking communism from Marx and beyond Marx organizes the contents of this chapter. At this closing point, we focus on some of the few fragments of the Marxian work where the place of politics in a hypothetical post-capitalist society is formulated, fundamentally around the experience of the Paris Commune. Next, Marx’s ontology and his political economy are outlined as two places to revisit by the emancipatory critique in order to radicalize the sense of totality present in the whole of Marx’s work and to attend from there to the place of politics for the communist management of the life in common. Finally, already beyond Marx, we leave traced some lines of research in the fields of philosophical anthropology, political economy, and political science to contemporarily face the challenges associated to think the need of a Politics with an emancipatory sense, recognizing the inexhaustible character of social antagonism and the ontological finitude of social powers.
Through what processes does territory facilitate the formation and growth of a grassroots party organization? Despite an extensive literature into why parties favour a territorial model of activist organization, much less is known about how territory facilitates grassroots party-building. The paper addresses this question by drawing on qualitative research with a centre-left Argentine party named Nuevo Encuentro (NE), focusing on the period of its growth in the City of Buenos Aires (CABA) between 2011 and 2017. NE is a typical case study of a party that sought to establish itself and grow via the build-up of a territorial organization. Bridging across, and extending, literatures on party organization and the geographies of activism, the paper argues that territory facilitates grassroots party-building through three interrelated processes. First, territory facilitates the recruitment of party activists by providing a relational context for building shared political subjectivities. Second, the territoriality of the branch as a site of political organization provides social proximity that nurtures the building of new bonds and strong-tie relations. Third, following recruitment, territory supports that reproduction of party activism through place-based attachment and emotional ties. These interrelated processes are considered through an analysis of three NE branches in CABA.
To provide a global answer to a global problem, the climate change movement (CCM) has long organized itself around international organizations and summits. However, waning trust in a multilateral answer to climate change has motivated many in the CCM to abandon their traditional focus on UN climate summits (COPs) and to rely increasingly on decentralized actions and organizing. This fundamental transformation of the CCM has remained understudied. An important emerging question is what role global aspirations still play and how a ‘global’ CCM can be organized independent of the ‘globality’ provided by COPs. This article draws on interviews, observations and document analyses around and after the COP21 climate summit (Paris 2015) to offer an exploratory analysis of some of the main goals and efforts to construct alternative ‘globalities’. The findings depict both strengths and limitations of these strategies, which inform suggestions for future research.
This article develops an ecological theory that shifts the paradigm of professional mobilization from causes to relational spaces. It analyzes different species of activist professionals by locating them in an ecology of activism and examining how collective action emerges from their boundary work with the ecology's increasing density and consolidation. It empirically grounds the theory by explaining the political activism of Chinese lawyers in the early twenty-first century and how it led to a government crackdown in 2015. Using interviews, online ethnography, and archival data collected from 2005 to 2017, the research demonstrates that Chinese lawyers' political mobilization has experienced three stages: (1) vacancy and isolation (2000-2007), (2) spatial consolidation (2008-2011), and (3) boundary work (2011-2015). The study has implications for theories of social space and for understanding professional mobilization in authoritarian contexts and beyond.
© 2019 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.
Abstract This paper examines the process of protest claim-making by reconstructing the semantic structure of online communication that took place prior to the first street event of a protest. Topic networks are identified on the basis of topic modeling outputs, deeming topics to be connected if they share the same terms. Semantic communities within such topic networks are specified by patterns of inter-topic relations with the aim to delineate the emergence of cohesive semantic communities as protest claims. This paper argues that protest claims are developed through the repetition of specific arrangement of topics, which generates relevance among topics discussed concurrently and continually over time. The iterated patterns shape semantic coherence through brokering terms that connect topics in consistent ways. Findings are presented by investigating 17 daily corpora of digital posts produced on a bulletin board from April 16 to May 2, 2008, which constitutes the pre-protest period of the Candlelight Protests in South Korea against a government policy on beef trade with the United States.
We examine how recruiting managers cope with communal norms and expectations of favoritism during recruitment and selection processes. Combining insights from institutional theory and network research, we develop a communal perspective on favoritism that presents favoritism as a social expectation to be managed. We subsequently hypothesize that the communal ties between job applicants and managers affect the strategies that managers employ to cope with this expectation. We test these ideas using a factorial survey of the effects of clan ties on recruitment and selection processes in Kazakhstan. The results confirm communal ties as antecedents to the strategies managers use to cope with communal favoritism. Surprisingly, the results also show that these coping strategies are relatively decoupled from managers’ recruitment decisions. The findings contribute to favoritism research by drawing attention to the mitigating work of managers in societies in which favoritism is common.
As we are concerned with prompting an understanding of enhanced repertoire identities as a pathway toward terrorism, our remarks will fall under six headings. First, there is to be clarified state constructionist perspectives to understand state’s role on the formation of terrorist organizaitons. Secondly, there is to be examined enhanced repertoire identity as a pathway toward political violence and terrorism. Thirdly, there are discussions that arise from the effects of repertoires on identity formation. Fourthly, we will notice the interactional relationships between repertoires and framing process. Fifthly, this paper will analyze the relationships between repertoires and organizational types. Finally this work will evaluate the influences of repertoires on the formation of identity as pathways toward political violence and terrorism.
This chapter reveals that the Third Line Construction brings to life a number of remote, wild, and uncultivated spots in mountainous areas. In each of these newly created spots, a group of well-educated people are gathered and put in their efforts for the sake of industrial production. Transferred from leading cities, these people maintain their habits of urban life, which is in sharp contrast to the surrounding rural areas. With the development of the factory and the provision of essential supporting facilities, these previously uncultivated spots gradually develop into many “mini-cities” independent from the surrounding villages. It is precisely this unique characteristic of isolation that carves the featured relationship of workers and their workplaces.
Relational sociology regards social relationships and networks as core features of the social world. It theoretically reflects on their nature and on their connections to other social features, including inequality, culture, institutions, and fields of society. Building on a processual ontology, I argue that all of these emerge, reproduce, and change in the sequence of communicative events. As a type of social structure, social relationships and networks are composed of relational expectations about how particular actors are supposed to behave towards specific others. They map observable regularities in communication, and make for them. Within this theoretical framework, a number of forms of meaning are examined with regard to their interplay with network constellations: communication draws on culturally available models (‘relationship frames’) to construct the expectations in relationships. Social categories make for the ordering of ties in a network, but also depend on networks as patterned accordingly. And social networks are imprinted with relational institutions making for the pattering of social ties by structurally equivalent roles. Actors in social relationships and networks can be individuals, but also collectives or corporates.
The Paris Commune of the spring of 1871 was essentially an emergent and makeshift government that ruled Paris from late March to May 28, 1871. It emerged largely as the result of a series of interconnected events: the Franco-Prussian War and France's defeat; the fall of the Second Empire associated with an uprising among discontented French workers and other Parisian residents; the siege of Paris by Prussian forces and their defeat; the attempt to restore order within Paris, which failed on March 18; and the flight of the government to Versailles. Following the March 26 municipal election (with a low participation of 230 000 out of 485 000 registered voters), the Commune assumed control of the city. However, its reign was short lived, as it ended on the afternoon of May 28, with the surrender of the last barricade after one week of fires and street fighting. This week of fighting, known as “La semaine sanglante” (the bloody week), resulted in an estimated 15 000 to 20 000 insurgents killed or summarily executed. The few communes in the provinces lasted but a few days (Gaillard 1971; Aminzade 1993). The 72 days of the Commune's existence have generated several thousands of books and articles (Lissagaray 1876; Le Quillec 2006), and it still generates scholarly inquiry and debate. The word “commune” is ambiguous: it harks back to the basic structure of the local French administration—a municipality (une commune); it evokes the insurrectional Commune of the 1792/1793 French Revolution; and it appears in ideologies of direct government from the 1850s onwards. The aim of the 1871 Commune was not merely governance; it was primarily military: to fight against the Versailles government (les “Versaillais”).
This article explores how contemporary theories of gentrification improve our understanding of past urban change. Discussing municipal housing statistics and local newspaper coverage from late-19th-century Berlin, it first illustrates the tremendous increase in rents that the German capital witnessed in the second half of the century. Rather than focusing on the rise of highly segregated neighbourhoods as urban historians usually do, the article then studies to what extent the growth of industrial cities like Berlin was accompanied by physical displacement in existing proletarian and middle-class quarters. Based on a methodologically innovative use of historical address books, it thus portrays an uneven geography of inner-city transformation. By compiling samples of socio-demographic change on the micro-level of individual streets, this article reveals that historical patterns of displacement followed a peculiar logic that affected socio-economic groups very differently. The article indicates that there exists a contentious pre-history of gentrification that has been utterly neglected in urban studies so far. At the same time, it epitomises the potential of historical research for the advancement of urban theory.
Human activities are always undertaken in certain places. The natures and the spatial configurations of those places, either as built or natural environments, will shape the ways in which the places are used and understood. More specifically, they shape the spatial activities of the people who live in or use the place, pattern the ways in which information is transmitted and people are encountered, and affect the feeling and understanding of people toward the places. We may call the patterns of interaction between humans and the physical (built or natural) environment, as well as the patterns of interactions among humans under a certain physical environment, ecological determinants.
This chapter revolves around the theme of coordination problems and social conflict. It discusses coordination problems as a topic for social research, its relation to social conflicts, and discusses why it is important to model coordination problems as embedded in dynamic networks. The chapter presents a formal game-theoretical model for such problems and derives some analytic results on stable states of this model. As is characteristic for this type of model, however, the analytic results leave many open questions. Therefore, the chapter demonstrates the application of computer simulation to further study the behavior of the model under different circumstances. It explains properties of the stable networks in terms of polarization and efficiency by the model parameters using statistical regression analysis, and presents summary statistics for the stable states.
When research gives voice to groups or people who are considered “deviant” this can lead to the charge that research is biased. In this paper, I will discuss the issue of bias in relation to my own work on the PKK. I will argue that the accusation of bias is related to a hierarchy of voices, in which some voices are considered more credible than others. I will furthermore argue that when we want to understand how particular actors make sense of themselves, their being in the world, and their interaction with others, then clearly, there is no other option but to observe their perspective.When research gives voice to groups or people who are considered “deviant” this can lead to the charge that research is biased. In this paper, I will discuss the issue of bias in relation to my own work on the PKK. I will argue that the accusation of bias is related to a hierarchy of voices, in which some voices are considered more credible than others. I will furthermore argue that when we want to understand how particular actors make sense of themselves, their being in the world, and their interaction with others, then clearly, there is no other option but to observe their perspective
RESUMO Este artigo analisa o papel dos piquetes em duas das mais importantes greves da história brasileira, a “greve dos 400 mil”, que envolveu diversas categorias industriais em São Paulo e cidades vizinhas em 1957, e a “greve dos 41 dias”, em 1980, organizada pelos metalúrgicos do ABC Paulista, na região metropolitana da cidade de São Paulo. Embora separadas no tempo em quase 25 anos, essas duas grandes paralisações se tornaram exemplos paradigmáticos das formas de ação sindical, tanto do sindicalismo sustentado pelo bloco formado pelas forças “nacional-reformistas” e comunistas, hegemônicas no período anterior ao golpe civil-militar de 1964, quanto do “novo sindicalismo” que emergiu a partir do final dos anos 1970. A análise mais detida das greves mostra elementos destacados de aproximação e semelhanças entre os dois movimentos. A análise mais apurada da ação dos piquetes indica um repertório organizativo mais permanente e resistente do que indicado pela bibliografia especializada e pelo discurso das lideranças políticas e sindicais.
By investigating flows
of energy, matter
and information during the Siege and Commune of Paris from 1870 to 1871 this analysis attempts to show how human cognition
intersects with its environment
to form self-organizing
, complex adaptive systems. While traditional explanations of the Commune have generally revolved around Marxist analysis, it is possible to analyse the events
of 1871 as transformations
in the urban and cognitive
ecology
of the city. Specifically, utilizing the perspectives of Material Engagement Theory
and distributed cognition
, this paper explores the ways in which cultural materials feedback
into cognitive processes to shape social activity. Changes in Paris’ urban ecology
produced selection mechanisms
which facilitated Parisians organising around different institutional settings. Radical clubs, vigilance committees and worker’s cooperatives were able to provide stability in a rapidly degrading urban environment, and thus a point of departure for new forms of social organisation to emerge. To facilitate this process, Parisians modified their environments, both within and outside of these institutional settings, in ways that altered the flow of information
through the city and provided new ways of engaging in a revolutionary context. Parisians utilised material artefacts
such as rifles, flags and bodily decorations in order to distribute cognition, enabling collective revolutionary action
. This paper shows that the most important feature of urban environments
is the ability to facilitate individual and collective adaptation to ecologies dominated by the physical and cognitive presence of their own species. In this view, cities are understood as selection driven adaptive landscapes, co-evolutionary structures that emerge to facilitate and sustain dense human habitation through the material organization of cognition. The transformations
in Paris’ urban ecology
led to Parisians reconfiguring their cognitive environments, precipitating the development of radical social institutions
. Artefacts, circulating in human ecologies, function to entangle human cognition and behaviour into coherent environmental relationships. Thus, human societies do not fundamentally break from the natural world but are part of a developmental continuum with evolutionary and ecological dynamics.
Das Thema interkulturelle Kommunikation wird bisher in der Soziologie wenig behandelt. Stattdessen beschäftigen sich etwa Psychologen, Anthropologen, Kultur- und Kommunikationswissenschaftler, Linguisten und Philologen mit dem Thema. Lediglich von der Seite der Phänomenologie gibt es eine Auseinandersetzung mit interkultureller Kommunikation. Der phänomenologische Ansatz – etwa in den Arbeiten von Hubert Knoblauch und Thomas Luckmann (di Luzio et al. 2001) – lässt allerdings einen Aspekt des Themas weitgehend außer Acht, den ich für ein wesentliches Alleinstellungsmerkmal und einen wichtigen Beitrag einer soziologischen Perspektive auf interkulturelle Kommunikation halte: die Rolle des sozialen Kontexts.
El artículo pretende reabrir el debate historiográfico sobre el impacto de la Comuna de París en la España de 1871. Tras valiosas contribuciones que han subrayado la llegada de relatos y refugiados de la Comuna a la España en revolución, o las presiones de Thiers sobre el gabinete Serrano-Sagasta para la persecución de estos últimos, este artículo sostiene que fueron las concretas experiencias autóctonas de conflicto social y político las que resultaron fundamentales en la recepción española de la revolución parisina. Los debates parlamentarios de mayo de 1871 sobre la Comuna y la AIT nacieron de un específico episodio local de protesta obrera y movilización política plebeya. Un episodio que tuvo lugar en Barcelona durante los casi tres meses de vida de la Comuna. Y un episodio que, como tal, apenas ha recibido atención historiográfica. La paralización sindical de la mayor fábrica textil de España, la Fábrica Batlló, y la mayor victoria electoral del Partido Republicano Democrático Federal (PRDF) tras la caída de Isabel II, confluyeron en la Barcelona de aquella primavera. La Comuna contribuyó a fundir ambos acontecimientos; a ella recurrió el patriciado barcelonés para desacreditarlos y hostigarlos, urgiendo la intervención de Sagasta. La ofensiva gubernamental contra sindicalistas y republicanos locales se cobijó bajo el manto del ataque de Versalles sobre París, exactamente durante los mismos días de mayo de 1871.
When research gives voice to groups or people who are considered "deviant" this can lead to the charge that research is biased. In this paper, I will discuss the issue of bias in relation to my own work on the PKK. I will argue that the accusation of bias is related to a hierarchy of voices, in which some voices are considered more credible than others. I will furthermore argue that when we want to understand how particular actors make sense of themselves, their being in the world, and their interaction with others, then clearly, there is no other option but to observe their perspective.
Scholarship on militant organizations and rebel movements emphasizes the effects of fragmentation and disunity on military and political outcomes. Yet this scholarship’s focus on formal, durable, and externally observable aspects of organizational structure omits the social practices that constitute, reinforce, and reproduce intra-group schisms. How do intra-organizational divisions calcify into permanent cleavages? What processes reproduce factions over time? Using the case of Fatah in Lebanon, I argue that informal discursive practices—e.g., gossip, jokes, complaints, storytelling—contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of intra-organizational factions. Specifically, I focus on how networks of meaning-laden, money-centric discourse structure relations among militants who identify as being “Old Fatah.” I demonstrate that while these practices frequently originate in the organizational realm, cadres subsequently reproduce them within kinship, marriage, and friendship networks. This “money talk” between age cohorts within the quotidian realm connects younger members of Fatah to older cadres through collective practices and conceptions of organizational membership. These practices both exemplify an intra-organizational schism and constitute, in part, the faction called Old Fatah. Examining how symbolic practice comprises social structure thus provides important insight into the politics of organizations such as militant groups, social movements, and political parties.
Significance
The social network structure of a small-scale society is crucial to formation of raiding parties involved in violent between-group raids. We mapped the social networks among Nyangatom men in a defined area of Ethiopia and ascertained membership in 39 intergroup raiding parties over 3 y. Although a small set of leaders initiated raids, they were not especially crucial for the composition of the raiding parties; instead, aspects of social network structure served to determine group composition and to amplify group size, once a raid was initiated. Intergroup violence, like other forms of collective action, depends on social structure and not just individual agency. This is relevant to spontaneous violent activities in settings as diverse as revolutions, gangs, and terrorist groups.
Marx's theory of the proletariat is in need of serious reconsideration. Its theoretical demarcation of the proletariat with regard to other subaltern groups (the lumpenproletariat and chattel slaves) is inconsistent; the concrete class analyses based on this theory have, to a significant extent, been refuted by empirical historical research; and its forecast of the growth of the proletariat has only been confirmed partly by later developments. Arguably, we need a new conceptualisation of the proletariat that is based on inclusion rather than exclusion
Research on civil wars has recently shifted from an almost exclusive emphasis on highly aggregate, crossnational research designs to more disaggregated, subnational research designs (Kalyvas 2008).1 Most of the recent crop has tended to disaggregate on the basis of geographic locations or events, but a few researchers have turned their attention to individuals (e.g. Blattman and Annan 2006; Guichaoua 2010; Humphreys and Weinstein 2004, 2007, 2008; Mvukiyehe and Samii 2008; Mvukiyehe et al. 2007; Pugel 2006; Samii et al. 2009; Viterna 2006).
Scholars have recognized that contentious political action typically draws on relatively stable scripts for the enactment of claims making. But if such repertoires of political practice are generally reproduced over time, why and how do new modes of practice emerge? Employing a pragmatist perspective on social action, this article argues that change in political repertoires can be usefully understood as a result of situated political innovation—i.e., of the creative recombination of existing practices, through experimentation over time, by interacting political agents for whom old repertoires were proving inadequate to the changing context of action. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by applying it to explain the historical emergence of a new set of populist mobilizing practices in early twentieth-century Peru. The results have implications for the study of political action and historical change.
Das Verhältnis von sozialen Bewegungen und Demokratie ist keineswegs eindeutig. Dieses zu Ende gehende Jahrhundert wurde wesentlich von anti-demokratischen Bewegungen geprägt — und dies nicht nur, wenn wir den eher bescheidenen Maßstab liberaler Demokratien anlegen. Während die verschiedenen Spielarten des Faschismus explizit als anti-demokratische Mobilisierungen antraten, geriet der demokratische Anspruch des ‚demokratischen Zentralismus ‘und der Rätedemokratie kommunistischer Spielart (Sowjets) rasch zur Mogelpackung. Wer erinnert sich noch daran, daß die Selbstbezeichnung Kommunisten einmal am Vorbild der Pariser Commune orientiert war, die bereits Karl Marx in seiner Analyse des Bürgerkriegs in Frankreich als ‚endlich gefundene politische Form der ökonomischen Befreiung der Arbeit ‘gefeiert hatte. Die politische Faszination der Commune — für Marx leuchtendes Vorbild, wie eine der bürgerlichen Spielart überlegene, demokratische Form der Diktatur des Proletariats aussehen könnte — liegt, noch heute für die Bewegungsforschung anregend (Gould 1995), in dem für kurze Zeit praktizierten, auf Nachbarschaften gegründeten Modell umfassender kommunaler Selbstverwaltung.
This article examines how neighborhood disadvantage affects neighborhood collective action. Neither the urban poverty literature nor the collective action literature has adequately examined how poverty would affect neighborhood level collective action on their own. I seek to bridge these two literatures to examine how collective action operates in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Though the existing literature would argue that increased social disorganization due to depopulation, social isolation, and hyper-segregation would result in decreased collective action, I argue that other neighborhood characteristics may offset the lack of ‘resources’ and ‘organization’ available to disadvantaged communities. I use the Chicago Tribune from 1970 to 1990 to create a data set of neighborhood-level protest events. Using random effects negative binomial regression, I show that while disadvantage does indeed negatively impact mobilization, factors such as the racial composition of the neighborhood, organizational density, and prior mobilization rates can offset the impact of increasing neighborhood disadvantage.
What happens if we decide to plot sequences as graphs? Can this approach increase our knowledge of the underlying structure common to the single sequences? Moreover, will this approach bring to the surface the structures, patterns, and careers still (perhaps) hidden to our eyes and knowledge?
The use of graphic visualization and the social network analysis suggested in this paper have two purposes. One is to find new ways to present results; the other is to gain a new perspective from which to observe sequences. To do this, however, we need to see sequences not as individuals moving from one state to another but as individuals who exhibit common career patterns.
This proposal starts from the intent to find a new way to observe how careers develop over time and thus to capture their dynamic evolution. To this end, we need to give physical form to sequences and their underlying generative processes: that is to say, we must convert sequences into objects—networks graphs—with which it is possible to explore how they evolve.
Since the early 1990s, social networks and culture are increasingly seen as intertwined and studied in conjunction. This “cultural turn” of network research is based on the relational sociology of Harrison White and others. It links classical structuralism with cultural analysis. Three approaches to the linkage of culture and social networks can be distinguished: The first traces cultural developments, for example, in science or in art, to network constellations: collective identities arise out of densely connected networks; new styles emerge at the intersection of network clusters from the combination of previously unconnected repertoires. The second approach views social networks themselves as intricately interwoven with culture. Roles in a network (e.g., kinship roles) are built on culturally available blueprints (institutions). As are relationships that varyingly adopt relationship frames such as “love” or “patronage.” Styles and collective identities develop from network constellations and shape them in turn. The third approach analyzes culture itself as a network of symbols and concepts. Their meaning lies in the relations to other concepts and symbols. Network analyses of culture have frequently analyzed the meaning of role categories and of relationship frames, thus linking the three approaches. Areas of particular interest for going forward include research on micro-events in networks, the interplay of networks with ethnic categories and cultural differences, and the role of networks in societal fields.
Keywords:
social networks;
culture;
institution;
role;
relationships;
style;
collective identity;
category;
identity;
story
This chapter focuses on what some in our digital media era have termed “the Long Tail” of media; in other words, small-scale media projects, typically operating on low to no budget. Until the beginning of the 2000s, nano-media projects – most often small scale, often ephemeral, almost always underfunded or entirely unfunded – were basically under the radar of conventional media research, outside of Latin America. That scenario has changed quite noticeably, with the publication of more and more research studies in this area. It is appropriate to try now to clear the conceptual ground, given the considerable number of terms for nano-media which are also out there. Probably the commonest term is “alternative” media, though from one perspective it is a completely vapid designation, since everything is alternative to something.
According to many pundits, we are living in a “high-risk society,” a kind of postmodern frontier economy (Mandel 1996). Workers are being advised to take care of themselves and their kin because government, unions, and corporations are unwilling to shoulder as much risk as in the past. Public programs such as Social Security and Medicare are in fiscal distress; at the very least, it is unlikely that government will assume new social risks, such as national health insurance. Meanwhile, unions are a shrinking portion of the labor force, representing less than 9 percent of private-sector employees; few believe that they will soon stage a major revival. And corporations—on whom workers once counted for stable career jobs and generous “fringe” benefits—insist that those days are over and never coming back.
This article deals with the factors of production and of reproduction of collective identity on the basis of a discussion of theoretical frames pertaining to philosophy, sociology, ethnology and social psychology. Focusing on collective identity leads ipso facto to studying production and reproduction of social groups. However there are several approaches to such processes: the first one can be labelled as « weak constructivism » and supports the idea that the formation of a group structured around collective goals, quest for recognition or autocategorization of its members is enough either to produce a social group without calling up to group identity, or to produce collective identity based on the borders of the group. Margaret Gilbert’s thesis on the collective joint intentions, Sartre’s analysis of the groups- in fusion, Tajfel’s social psychology as well as the perspective advocated by his followers or the theories of rational choice, have delineated such an approach of identity as either useless or as « strategic », « situational », infinitely plastic and negotiable.On the contrary, this paper proposes a defense of « strong constructivism » which implies that, even if identity is the outcome of a process of construction, such a process is subjected to more constraints than decision and autocategorization and is structured around social properties which frame the behavior of social agents prior to being used as strategic resources. Spinozian anthropology, critical sociology and several works of social history provide the basis of such an approach.