The Limits of Social Mobilization in Planning

This paper tests the limits of social mobilization in planning by considering its ethical and practical boundaries. In the first section I explore two theorists of social mobilization in planning, John Friedmann and Mark Purcell. I argue that both rely on the claim that there is something morally problematic about decision-making in planning that is not exercised directly and democratically. Moreover, they both argue for the morally superiority of direct democratic control in planning. In the second section I consider two arguments for why we might accept the view that social mobilization is morally preferable to other forms of decisionmaking in planning. The first is by arguing that indirect centralized power structures alienate people from their original state of autonomous control. The second is by arguing that social mobilization will lead to the morally best outcomes. Ultimately I conclude that neither argument works well and that there are not conclusive reasons to argue that there is something morally better about social mobilization as a decision-making structure in planning compared to other forms of decision-making that don?t rely on direct democratic control. In the third section I consider subjectivity in social mobilization. That is, I argue that social mobilization implies a certain view of subjectivity as able to consistently resist social and political passivity, and universalize a kind of perpetual struggle for autonomy. Then, in the fourth section I analyze subjectivity in social mobilization through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Based on Merleau-Ponty, I argue that subjectivity as implied by social mobilization is not plausible. Instead of viewing passivity as the enemy of justice, phenomenology reveals passivity to be a necessary and fundamental structure of subjectivity

China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement

[Excerpt] The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen movement, albeit as subordinate partners to the students, labor activism since then has been almost entirely confined to the working class. While the ranks of aggrieved workers have proliferated (expanding from workers in the state-owned sector to include migrant workers) and the forms and incidents of labor activism have multiplied, there is hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, we observe that a long-term decline in worker power at the point of production – power that was previously institutionalized in skill hierarchies, union representation, democratic management, permanent or long-term employment, and other conditions of service constitutive of the socialist social contract - is going on even as workers gain more power (at least on paper) outside the workplace. New labor laws have broadened workers\u27 rights and expanded administrative and judicial channels for resolving labor conflicts. These legal and bureaucratic procedures have atomized and depoliticized labor activism even as they have engendered and intensified mobilization outside official limits

The Limits of Social Media Mobilization: How Protest Movements Adapt to Social Media Logic

The emergence of social networking sites offers protest movements new ways to mobilize for action and draw attention to their issues. However, relying on social media also creates challenges, as social media follow their own principles. If protest movements want to be visible in news feeds, they have to adapt to so-called social media logic, as originally postulated in mediatization research. The principles of social media have been conceptualized. However, there is a lack of empirical research on how political actors perceive and orient to this logic, how they learn about it, and the consequences for mobilization (i.e., communicating protest issues as well as taking protest action). As protest movements are an integral part of modern democracies, use social media somewhat intensively, and usually build on a fluid network structure that allows us to examine adaptation processes in greater detail, they are particularly suitable for addressing these questions. Semi-structured interviews with activists organizing protest actions or managing social media accounts from 29 movement organizations in Germany (N = 33) revealed that protest movements have internalized social media logic and paid attention to not only the design but also the timing of posts to suit algorithms. The protest organizations generally built on their experience with social media. The degree to which they followed these principles was based on available resources. Limits of this adaptation arose, for example, if sensitive or negative content rarely produced likes or, increasingly, personalization evoked a presumed hierarchy within the movements

Mobilization

Mobilizations against world ordering often evade the concepts and categories available for comprehending them. Central to the praxis of many social movements is a challenge to ways of knowing that bolster or render invisible dominant relations of power. International political sociology has a fertile affinity with the often turbulent and transgressive praxis of popular mobilizations. Applying the insights of international political sociology to political mobilization runs against the grain of dominant approaches to resistance, in which the struggles of social movements are read off ready-made accounts of power. To engage practices of mobilization with a upon the disruptive and upon limits of preconceived categories also requires us to interrogate our own terms of engagement. Mobilizations are often pitched not only against relations of oppression, exploitation or domination, but also against the very concepts and categories through which such relations are rendered intelligible, natural or legitimate

Skill-induced Mobilization at Work: a Study of an Activist Group

International audienceThis article explores the way in which skills may mobilize individuals within an organization. To that end, it considers skills rather as mobilizing resources for individuals than strategic resources for the firm. This suggests other ways through which skills can contribute to the firm and HR policies. The theoretical framework of resource mobilization, coming from the sociology of social movements, provides explanations in this regard. The empiric part is based upon a twelve-month ethnographic work among the feminist activist group “La Barbe”. This part explores how an organization with few resources can mobilize and retain its members by providing skills that are coherent with their individual paths (especially the search for personal emancipation). Recommendations and the limits for human resources management are discussed to conclude, in particular, on the mobilization of talents

'Don't get arrested!' Trust, miscommunication, and repression at the 2008 anti-G8 mobilization in Japan

Transnational coordination and communication have become increasingly important themes in scholarship on social movements. The alterglobalization movement is one of the most globally networked movements in recent history. As part of its repertoire, every year thousands of people travel from around the world to protest the G8, the gathering of the world's eight most powerful leaders. When the G8 came to Japan in 2008, local activists decided to organize a mobilization similar to those previously held in Western Europe and North America. The shift from Europe to Japan, however, proved more difficult than anticipated. I explore three factors that together hindered the mobilization: trust, miscommunication, and state repression. Through an analysis of action planning meetings, I explore how interpersonal trust combined with dynamics of individual and collective risk to shape relations of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. I describe the interplay among trust, miscommunication, and repression to show how interpersonal trust undermined the movement's own goal of prefiguring more horizontal political structures and, paradoxically, expanded the impact of state repression by creating an individuation of responsibility that implicated movement actors themselves in narrowing the forms of protest available

Social Entrepreneurship and Broader Theories: Shedding New Light on the “Bigger Picture”

This article documents the results of a research workshop bringing together six perspectives on social entrepreneurship. The idea was to challenge existing concepts of the economy, the firm, and entrepreneurship in order to shed new light on social entrepreneurship and on our existing theoretical frameworks. The first two contributions use a macro-perspective and discuss the notion of adaptive societies and the tragedies of disharmonization, respectively. Taking a management perspective, the next two focus on the limits of conventional assumptions in management theory, particularly human capital theory and resource-based view. The final two contributions follow an entrepreneurship perspective highlighting the usefulness of mobilization theory and the business model lens to social entrepreneurship. Despite this diversity, all contributions share the fact that they challenge narrow definitions of the unit of analysis in social entrepreneurship; they illustrate the aspect of social embeddedness, and they argue for an open-but-disciplined diversity of theories in social entrepreneurship research

Do the Haves Come Out Ahead in Alternative Justice Systems? Repeat Players in ADR

Marc Galanter\u27s essay, Why the Haves Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change (Why the Haves Come out Ahead), published twenty-five years ago, set an important agenda for those who care about the distributive effects of legal processes, including those of us who have been engaged in jurisprudential, intellectual, and empirical debates about the relative advantages and disadvantages of alternative and conventional legal procedures. As a document of legal intellectual history, this Article was formed in the crucible of the Legal Mobilization and Modernization program at Yale Law School that spawned so many law and . . . studies, including legal pluralism, law and society, critical legal studies, and in its own way, even law and economics studies. A seminal work in the socio-legal studies canon, Galanter\u27s article demonstrates the complex patterns of how law and legal institutions actually work, beyond descriptions of legal doctrines and assumed efficacy and penetration of law. In some senses, it is a continuation of legal realism, reminding us of the importance of studying the legal institutions in which the law is embedded and suggesting, at its end, how we might reform or adjust those institutions to produce optimal social change (in this case, redistribution of resources and delivery of justice)