'Why Just Go for 51%?' Organizational Structure in the Religious Society of Friends

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51331/1/567.pd

The way is the goal: Ideology and the practice of collectivist democracy in German new social movements.

Social movement theory has acknowledged but not yet adequately explained how similarly situated social movement organizations sometimes adopt very different organizational structures, tactics, and deliberative practices. Building on recent, more culturally inflected work, my dissertation examines how ideology shapes these preferences through an analysis of two competing organizational currents within Germany's vibrant new social movement sector. Over the last thirty years, extraparliamentary activism in Germany has given rise to two divergent democratic countercultures, both deeply committed to a non-hierarchical, collectivist-democratic style of politics. One has roots in the Gandhian tradition of radical nonviolence; the other in the anti-authoritarian autonomous movement (known as the Autonomen). The autonomous and nonviolence movements have developed contrasting forms of collectivist democracy, marked by different ways of dividing labor and running meetings, different decision-making processes, and different tactical orientations. Given that both countercultures exist within the same political-economic regime, have the same class base, and face the same political opportunity structures, my dissertation attempts to account for the development of these distinct countercultures and their specialized organizational forms through an in-depth, comparative analysis of six collectivist groups from each counterculture, located throughout the country and varying in size, age, and issue orientation. On the basis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 63 semi-structured interviews with a matched sample of activists from each counterculture, my analysis shows that the development of what I call the organic and mechanistic forms of collectivist democratic structure is tied to differences in their political ideologies. More specifically, their divergent organizational practices grew out of competing understandings within each tradition of their own core concepts, i.e. autonomy and nonviolence. The way in which the groups dealt with tensions that arose between these competing understandings within their respective ideological systems proved to be a critical factor shaping their contrasting organizational practices. This suggests that the relationship between ideology and social movement practice is conditioned by both the content and the structure of particular ideologies; choices of organizational structure, tactics, and deliberative practices arise out of attempts not only to reconcile ideals with the demands of practical circumstances, but also to reconcile contradictory elements within each group's ideological system.Ph.D.Political scienceSocial SciencesSocial structureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125685/2/3208488.pd

"Wichtig ist der Widerstand" : Rituals of Taming and Tolerance in Movement Responses to the Violence Question

In comparison to the amount of attention it gets in the mainstream media and in activist discussions, the question of how movements resolve "the violence question" has been virtually ignored by movement scholars. Within social movements, whenever protesters participate in "violent" actions, public and private recriminations fly about who "started it", whether or not it was justified, and whether and how disapproving parties should present their views in the press. Before, during, and after the action, moderate and nonviolent civil disobedience groups engage in a variety of "taming" rituals designed to discourage, de-escalate, and/or punish the use of violence as they define it. Some movements, however, have begun resolving this internal dilemma in a new way: rather than the one side trying to "tame" the other, rituals and frames of tolerance and solidarity have been constructed that allow them to work together more effectively, despite their differences. By examining interactions between the German Autonomen and the German nonviolence movement we asks in this paper: Under what conditions are militant and nonviolent factions able to construct common frames and rituals about violence that encourage tolerance and even celebrate different tactical approaches, and when do they interact with mutual animosity, noncooperation, and obstructionism? To address this question, we examine two instances of interaction between the Autonomen and the nonviolence movement in Germany - one in which they constructed rituals and frames of tolerance and worked together fairly successfully (in the actions against a nuclear waste transport in the "Free Republic of Wendland" in March of 2001) and one where they were unable to resolve their differences and engaged in taming rituals, including fierce public denunciations and in-fighting (in the riots on June 2, 2008 during the anti-G8 protests in Rostock). Drawing on field notes from participant observation and extensive media discourse analysis we identify several factors that influence the activists' choice between taming and tolerance. We can show that face-to-face interaction of different movement factions in the run-up of protests only leads to tolerance under specific conditions, of which the experience of previous and the expectation of further collaboration are most important, whereas the range of actors and their breadth of the represented political spectrum only play a secondary role

Scenes and Social Movements

Social movements operate in a realm between the public and private spheres. Researchers have long been aware of these intermediate spheres and have emphasized them as places where oppositional frames and collective identities are constructed. But even as the importance of free-space concepts has not been overlooked, we still know surprisingly little about their inner dynamics, the circumstances under which they arise, or their effect on social movement development.In our contribution we propose to identify this intermediate sphere as scene that is simultaneously a network of people who share a common identity and a common set of subcultural or countercultural beliefs, values, norms, and convictions as well as a network of physical spaces where members of that group are known to congregate.Drawing on data from two movement scenes in Germany we offer 10 propositions about movement-scene linkages that help to understand the roles scenes can play in movement processes related to mobilization, the construction and maintenance of collective identities, practices and organizational forms, and movement longevity

Clinical relevance of host immunity in breast cancer: from TILs to the clinic.

The clinical relevance of the host immune system in breast cancer has long been unexplored. Studies developed over the past decade have highlighted the biological heterogeneity of breast cancer, prompting researchers to investigate whether the role of the immune system in this malignancy is similar across different molecular subtypes of the disease. The presence of high levels of lymphocytic infiltration has been consistently associated with a more-favourable prognosis in patients with early stage triple-negative and HER2-positive breast cancer. These infiltrates seem to reflect favourable host antitumour immune responses, suggesting that immune activation is important for improving survival outcomes. In this Review, we discuss the composition of the immune infiltrates observed in breast cancers, as well as data supporting the clinical relevance of host antitumour immunity, as represented by lymphocytic infiltration, and how this biomarker could be used in the clinical setting. We also discuss the rationale for enhancing immunity in breast cancer, including early data on the efficacy of T-cell checkpoint inhibition in this setting.SCOPUS: re.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe