Organizing resistance movements: contribution of the political discourse theory

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of articulating Political Discourse Theory (PDT) together with Organizational Studies (OS), while using the opportunity to introduce PDT to those OS scholars who have not yet come across it. The bulk of this paper introduces the main concepts of PDT, discussing how they have been applied to concrete, empirical studies of resistance movements. In recent years, PDT has been increasingly appropriated by OS scholars to problematize and analyze resistances and other forms of social antagonisms within organizational settings, taking the relational and contingent aspects of struggles into consideration. While the paper supports the idea of a joint articulation of PDT and OS, it raises a number of critical questions of how PDT concepts have been empirically used to explain the organization of resistance movements. The paper sets out a research agenda for how both PDT and OS can together contribute to our understanding of new, emerging organizational forms of resistance movements.</jats:p

Globalisation from Above? Corporate Social Responsibility, the Workers' Party and the Origins of the World Social Forum

In its assessment of the origins and early development of the World Social Forum this article challenges traditional understandings of the Forum as representing ‘globalisation from below’. By tracing the intricate relations among elements of business, civil society, and the Workers’ Party in the first years of the Forum, this article reveals the major role played by a corporate movement stemming from the Brazilian democratisation process in the 1980s, and how this combined with the transformed agenda of the Workers’ Party as it gained higher political offices to constrain the Forum’s activities from the outset. In so doing, this article challenges not only widespread conceptions of the Forum as a counter‐hegemonic alternative but also current critiques concerning its subsequent limitations. Furthermore, it reveals how traditional understandings of the World Social Forum and of global civil society are underpinned by flawed assumptions which typecast political activities in the global ‘South’

Sociedade civil e Estado no Brasil: da autonomia à interdependência política

O conceito de sociedade civil é bastante contestado no seu uso e na sua capacidade de explicação analítica. Reelaborado na teoria democrática nos anos 1990, ele tem sido bastante utilizado no Brasil em diferentes acepções. Alguns autores defendem o seu uso, tal como estabelecido na sociologia-política norte-americana (Cohen e Arato) enquanto outros criticam a ideia da autonomia social a ele inerente. Neste artigo, descrevo o surgimento da sociedade civil no Brasil durante os anos setenta e analiso suas principais áreas de atuação durante sua primeira fase. Analiso também uma segunda fase de interação entre Estado e sociedade civil, mostrando a existência de uma interdependência entre ambos.The concept of civil society is essentially contested in its capacity to explain modern societies. It has been re-elaborated during the early nineties and in its renewed version has been employed in Brazil. A few authors defend its analytical use within the new anglo-saxon model provided by Cohen and Arato whereas other authors criticized the idea of social autonomy. In this article I will describe the emergence of civil society in Brazil during the late seventies and will approach its main area of social action during this first stage. I will also approach a second phase in civil society organization in which it moved to a strategy of inter-dependency with the state