P Oliver
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 111420 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | P Oliver |
| NOMBRES | P |
| APELLIDO | Oliver |
| FIRMA | OLIVER P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7643-1008 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1171 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1975 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
The Jena 6
Tens of thousands of mostly younger Black people went to rural Louisiana in 2007 to support the Jena 6, Black students who were overcharged after a school fight. We examine the construction of two narratives. The powerful Jena 6 narrative told how the conflict began when nooses were hung on the school grounds, linking historic racial violence to modern injustice. This narrative emphasized student agency and downplayed documented adult actions. A …
Racial Politics and News Media Coverage of Black Resistance to Police Violence in New York, 1997–2000
Comparing the coverage by The New York Times and two Black newspapers of four episodes of protests about police violence in New York in the late 1990s reveals key differences in the implicit political agendas of the two sources. The New York Times implicitly reinforced dominant political institutions and focused on short-term issues. It emphasized partisan politics as protest motivations, quoted police extensively and often printed material sympa…
Vernacular Traditions, Culture, Rituals & Architecture
Ahmedabad is a UNESCO World Heritage city, located in Gujarat. On the eastern side of the Sabarmati River of the city, there are mills of the textile owners depicting architecture enriched by culture and traditions. The merchants, workers and mill owners had set up markets and their houses along the narrow lanes of the city. Known as Pol houses, they are long linear houses and havelis which have internal courtyards responding to the hot and humid…
Thermal Adaptations in Indian Houses
This study investigates how the residents in Tiruchirapalli, India adapt to extreme summer temperatures within residential buildings, focusing on the hottest hours of the day. The research aims to understand adaptive behaviors to reduce dependence on mechanical heating and cooling systems, emphasizing the importance of innovative building designs
Constructing Relational and Verifiable Protest Event Data
We call for a relational approach to constructing protest event data from news sources to provide tools for detecting and correcting errors and for capturing the relations among events and between events and the texts describing them. We address two problems with most protest event datasets: (1) inconsistencies and errors in identifying events and (2) disconnect between data structures and what is known about how protests and media accounts of pr…
Black Protests in the United States, 1994 to 2010
Using novel data, we provide the first panoramic view of U.S. Black movement protest events as reported in U.S. newswires between 1994 and 2010 and put our quantitative data into dialogue with qualitative accounts. Struggles during these years presaged the Black Lives protest waves of 2014 to 2016 and 2020. Protests increased after the 1995 Million Man March into 2001 but dropped abruptly after the 9/11 attacks. Collective action increased again …
Introduction
This special issue of Mobilization collects five research articles about the Black Lives Movement (BLM) plus two essays by the editors. This introductory essay provides the broad context of the BLM. It shows how the protests and movement demands of 2020 after the horrific murder of George Floyd were tied to the protests and organizing of 2014-16 which, in turn, built on at least two decades of prior organizing. Protests about police violence are …
Resisting repression
This chapter places the Black Lives movement in a context of ongoing struggle against repression in which dissent control and crime control are integrated and resistance to coercive policing is intrinsic to dissent. A review of the history of movements around criminal justice issues shows both the continuity of the Black Lives Matter mobilizations with prior campaigns and the emergence of new groups. Multiple Black organizations addressed issues …
Great Methods Reveal Their Own Limitations
The Ethnic Dimensions in Social Movements
This article draws on work in the social construction of race and ethnicity to explain why racial/ethnic divisions are so often axes of domination and why these divisions are central to social movements. Racial/ethnic groups are constructed in political processes that are intertwined with state formation and social movements. Processes of state formation and collective action create racial/ethnic groups, define majorities and minorities, and crea…
The Revolt of the Reviewers
Black Agency, White Agency
Meeting at Grand Central
The opposing forces diffusion model
This paper re-evaluates a classic deterministic model of collective violence diffusion and demonstrates a series of shortcomings in it. In response, a new model, the opposing forces diffusion model, is introduced. The opposing forces model treats observed event cycles as the result of two underlying logistic diffusion processes, one for provocation of events and one for repression. The result is a model that is more flexible, more straightforward…
Repression and Crime Control
The disciplinary insurgency that created the academic field of social movement studies distinguished dissent from crime. This dichotomy has led the field to ignore the relation between the repression of dissent and the control of "ordinary" crime. There was massive repression in the wake of the Black riots of the 1960s that did not abate when the riots abated. The acceleration of the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States af…
Networks, Diffusion, and Cycles of Collective Action
Uses simulation models to explore network mechanisms in diffusion processes and protest cycles. The network dimension is taken into account, focusing on three processes: information flows, influence flows, and the construction of joint action. The repeatable and reversible nature of protest requires models of diffusion that focus on the spread of actions and not the spread of ideas across actors. Moreover, while diffusion processes tend to genera…
The Coevolution Of Social Movements
Movements develop in coevolution with regimes and other actors in their environments. Movement trajectories evolve through stochastic processes and are constrained, but not determined, by structures. Coevolution provides a theoretical structure for organizing existing understandings of social movements and sharpening future research. Stochastic thinking is essential for recognizing the both the volatility and path dependence of collective action …
Finding Collective Events
Researchers collecting data on collective events have often relied on ad hoc procedures and untested assumptions. A detailed comparison of different sources and data-gathering strategies for one month of events in one city challenges several assumptions made in prior studies. Police agencies and news sources have their own logics of jurisdiction, producing both incomplete and selective records of collective events. Different strategies for search…
Whatever Happened to Critical Mass Theory? A Retrospective and Assessment
Between 1983 and 1993 the authors published a series of articles and a book promulgating and explicating 'Critical Mass Theory,' a theory of public goods provision in groups. In this article we seek to trace the growth, change, or decline of the theory, primarily through an analysis of all journal citations of the theory. We find that the majority of citations are essentially gratuitous or pick a single point from the theory, which may or may not…
Political Processes and Local Newspaper Coverage of Protest Events
Political processes affect both protest and news coverage of protest, but past research has failed to examine these interactions. Data from one city reveal the interaction of political process, news value, and news routine factors in news coverage of protest versus other message events. Protests about legislative issues received the most coverage. Controlling for issue type, protest forms were covered less when the legislature was in session, whi…
Mobilization Forum
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hank Johnston, Pamela Oliver; Mobilization Forum: Reply to Snow and Benford. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 1 March 2000; 5 (1): 61–64. doi: https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.5.1.f1ln5344r872755u Download citation file: Ris (Zotero…
What a Good Idea! Ideologies and Frames in Social Movement Research
Frame theory is often credited with "bringing ideas back in" social movement studies, but frames are not the only useful ideational concepts. The older, more politicized concept of ideology needs to be used in its own right and not recast as a frame. Frame theory is rooted in linguistic studies of interaction, and points to the way shared assumptions and meanings shape the interpretation of events. Ideology is rooted in politics and the study of …
How Events Enter the Public Sphere
Protest events occur against the backdrop of public life. Of 382 public events in police records for one year in a small U.S. city, 45% convey a message, 14% involve social conflict, and 13% are standard protest event forms. Local newspapers covered 32% of all events, favoring events that were large, involved conflict, were sponsored by business groups, and occurred in central locations. The more liberal paper also favored rallies and events spon…
From Local to Global
A case study of the anti-dam movement in southern Brazil shows how particular local mobilizations are linked to national and global economics, politics, and social movements. In the early stages, the progressive church was the predominant influence and was largely responsible for framing the key issue as peasants' right to land, while left intellectuals contributed a class analytical frame. After 1988, the weakening of the regional power company …
Diffusion Models of Cycles of Protest as a Theory of Social Movements
This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding social movements as interrelated sets of diffusion processes. It first explains why such a conception is broadly useful to scholars of social movements, and then gives some preliminary examples of such theorizing. A social movement can be understood as a complex set of many actions by many different collective actors all oriented toward some very broad issue or goal. These actions affe…
What a Good Idea! Ideologies and Frames in Social Movement Research
Frame theory is often credited with "bringing ideas back in" social movement studies, but frames are not the only useful ideational concepts. The older, more politicized concept of ideology needs to be used in its own right and not recast as a frame. Frame theory is rooted in linguistic studies of interaction, and points to the way shared assumptions and meanings shape the interpretation of events. Ideology is rooted in politics and the study of …
Social Networks and Collective Action
Most analyses of collective action agree that overcoming the freerider problem requires organizing potential contributors, thus making their decisions interdependent. The potential for organizing depends on the social ties in the group, particularly on the overall density or frequency of ties, on the extent to which they are centralized in a few individuals, and on the costs of communicating and coordinating actions through these ties. Mathematic…
The Paradox of Group Size in Collective Action
Many sociologists incorrectly believe that larger groups are less likely to support collective action than smaller ones. The effect of group size. infact, depends on costs. If the costs of collective goods rise with the number who share in them, larger groups act less frequently than smaller ones. If the costs vary little with group size, larger groups should exhibit more collective action than smaller ones because larger groups have more resourc…
How Events Enter the Public Sphere
Protest events occur against the backdrop of public life. Of 382 public events in police records for one year in a small U.S. city, 45% convey a message, 14% involve social conflict, and 13% are standard protest event forms. Local newspapers covered 32% of all events, favoring events that were large, involved conflict, were sponsored by business groups, and occurred in central locations. The more liberal paper also favored rallies and events spon…
A Theory of the Critical Mass. I. Interdependence, Group Heterogeneity, and the Production of Collective Action
Collective action usually depends on a "critical mass" that behaves differently from typical group members. Sometimes the critical mass provides some level of the good for others who do nothing, while at other times the critical mass pays the start-up costs and induces widespread collective action. Formal analysis supplemented by simulations shows that the first scenario is most likely when the production function relating inputs of resource cont…
Political Processes and Local Newspaper Coverage of Protest Events
Political processes affect both protest and news coverage of protest, but past research has failed to examine these interactions. Data from one city reveal the interaction of political process, news value, and news routine factors in news coverage of protest versus other message events. Protests about legislative issues received the most coverage. Controlling for issue type, protest forms were covered less when the legislature was in session, whi…
Rewards and Punishments as Selective Incentives for Collective Action
Positive and negative selective incentives are shown analytically to have different structural implications when used to induce collective action. Positive selective incentives are effective for motivating small numbers of cooperators and generate pressures toward smaller, more "elite" actions, unless the incentives have jointness of supply. Negative selective incentives are effective for motivating unanimous cooperation, but their use is often u…
The Coevolution Of Social Movements
Movements develop in coevolution with regimes and other actors in their environments. Movement trajectories evolve through stochastic processes and are constrained, but not determined, by structures. Coevolution provides a theoretical structure for organizing existing understandings of social movements and sharpening future research. Stochastic thinking is essential for recognizing the both the volatility and path dependence of collective action …
From Local to Global
A case study of the anti-dam movement in southern Brazil shows how particular local mobilizations are linked to national and global economics, politics, and social movements. In the early stages, the progressive church was the predominant influence and was largely responsible for framing the key issue as peasants' right to land, while left intellectuals contributed a class analytical frame. After 1988, the weakening of the regional power company …
Repression and Crime Control
The disciplinary insurgency that created the academic field of social movement studies distinguished dissent from crime. This dichotomy has led the field to ignore the relation between the repression of dissent and the control of "ordinary" crime. There was massive repression in the wake of the Black riots of the 1960s that did not abate when the riots abated. The acceleration of the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States af…
Whatever Happened to Critical Mass Theory? A Retrospective and Assessment
Between 1983 and 1993 the authors published a series of articles and a book promulgating and explicating 'Critical Mass Theory,' a theory of public goods provision in groups. In this article we seek to trace the growth, change, or decline of the theory, primarily through an analysis of all journal citations of the theory. We find that the majority of citations are essentially gratuitous or pick a single point from the theory, which may or may not…
Finding Collective Events
Researchers collecting data on collective events have often relied on ad hoc procedures and untested assumptions. A detailed comparison of different sources and data-gathering strategies for one month of events in one city challenges several assumptions made in prior studies. Police agencies and news sources have their own logics of jurisdiction, producing both incomplete and selective records of collective events. Different strategies for search…
The Ethnic Dimensions in Social Movements
This article draws on work in the social construction of race and ethnicity to explain why racial/ethnic divisions are so often axes of domination and why these divisions are central to social movements. Racial/ethnic groups are constructed in political processes that are intertwined with state formation and social movements. Processes of state formation and collective action create racial/ethnic groups, define majorities and minorities, and crea…
Gender and the Construction of Consent in Child-Adult Sexual Contact
Neither legalistic gender-neutral categories nor prior feminist theories adequately capture all of the gender dynamics of child sexual abuse. Surveys of 923 young adults, 88 of whom reported sexual contact with adults before they were 16, complemented by intensive follow-up interviews with 18 reporting contact, reveal that gendered constructions of sexuality and dominance make the experience of abuse significantly different for boys and girls. Gi…
Mobilization Forum
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hank Johnston, Pamela Oliver; Mobilization Forum: Reply to Snow and Benford. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 1 March 2000; 5 (1): 61–64. doi: https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.5.1.f1ln5344r872755u Download citation file: Ris (Zotero…
Constructing Relational and Verifiable Protest Event Data
We call for a relational approach to constructing protest event data from news sources to provide tools for detecting and correcting errors and for capturing the relations among events and between events and the texts describing them. We address two problems with most protest event datasets: (1) inconsistencies and errors in identifying events and (2) disconnect between data structures and what is known about how protests and media accounts of pr…
Introduction
This special issue of Mobilization collects five research articles about the Black Lives Movement (BLM) plus two essays by the editors. This introductory essay provides the broad context of the BLM. It shows how the protests and movement demands of 2020 after the horrific murder of George Floyd were tied to the protests and organizing of 2014-16 which, in turn, built on at least two decades of prior organizing. Protests about police violence are …
Rewards and Punishments as Selective Incentives
Apex games place weak players in the formal equivalent of a multiperson prisoner's dilemma in which each weak player must choose between competing against the other weak players for the opportunity to coalesce with the strong player or cooperating with the other weak players to produce a jointly preferable outcome. Punishments, not rewards, are predicted to be effective for enforcing cooperation by the weak players. Fifty-four groups of four subj…
Black Protests in the United States, 1994 to 2010
Using novel data, we provide the first panoramic view of U.S. Black movement protest events as reported in U.S. newswires between 1994 and 2010 and put our quantitative data into dialogue with qualitative accounts. Struggles during these years presaged the Black Lives protest waves of 2014 to 2016 and 2020. Protests increased after the 1995 Million Man March into 2001 but dropped abruptly after the 9/11 attacks. Collective action increased again …
The opposing forces diffusion model
This paper re-evaluates a classic deterministic model of collective violence diffusion and demonstrates a series of shortcomings in it. In response, a new model, the opposing forces diffusion model, is introduced. The opposing forces model treats observed event cycles as the result of two underlying logistic diffusion processes, one for provocation of events and one for repression. The result is a model that is more flexible, more straightforward…
Reach and selectivity as strategies of recruitment for collective action
Theoretical investigation of a mathematical model of organizing for interdependent collective action compares the advantages of emphasizing reach, i.e. the sheer numbers recruited, to the advantages of emphasizing selectivity, i.e. the mean resources or interests of those recruited. The context is an accelerating production function in which each additional contribution has an increasing effect on the total payoff; this context is most likely at …
Selective Incentives in an Apex Game
The effect of a selective incentive system on the likelihood of collective action is tested using an experiment with an Apex Game, a power-imbalanced game in which the weak players choose between competing against each other to form an alliance with the strong player or cooperating with each other in a unanimous alliance of weak players (excluding the strong player). A theoretical introduction analyzes the nature and importance of selective incen…
Great Methods Reveal Their Own Limitations
The Revolt of the Reviewers
Earth as a Building Material Today
Journal Article Earth as a Building Material Today Get access PAUL OLIVER PAUL OLIVER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 5, Issue 2, 1983, Pages 31–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/5.2.31 Published: 01 December 1983
Cultural Differences in Children's Concepts of Reading and Writing
Previous research has indicated that children enter the task of learning to read in a state of cognitive confusion regarding the function and nature of the task. The present investigation was addressed to the hypothesis that cultural differences in home background are an important influence in the development of children's understanding of the purpose of writing and their concepts of the language units employed in the written code. 92 non-Indian …
Selective Incentives in an Apex Game
The effect of a selective incentive system on the likelihood of collective action is tested using an experiment with an Apex Game, a power-imbalanced game in which the weak players choose between competing against each other to form an alliance with the strong player or cooperating with each other in a unanimous alliance of weak players (excluding the strong player). A theoretical introduction analyzes the nature and importance of selective incen…
Rewards and Punishments as Selective Incentives for Collective Action
Positive and negative selective incentives are shown analytically to have different structural implications when used to induce collective action. Positive selective incentives are effective for motivating small numbers of cooperators and generate pressures toward smaller, more "elite" actions, unless the incentives have jointness of supply. Negative selective incentives are effective for motivating unanimous cooperation, but their use is often u…
Earth as a Building Material Today
Journal Article Earth as a Building Material Today Get access PAUL OLIVER PAUL OLIVER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 5, Issue 2, 1983, Pages 31–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/5.2.31 Published: 01 December 1983
Modern Architecture since 1900
Journal Article Modern Architecture since 1900 Get access William J. R. Curtis , Phaidon Press , Oxford , 1982 . 416 pp., illus. £30. PAUL OLIVER PAUL OLIVER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 5, Issue 2, 1983, Pages 55–56, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/5.2.55 Published: 01 December 1983
Collective Action
Rewards and Punishments as Selective Incentives
Apex games place weak players in the formal equivalent of a multiperson prisoner's dilemma in which each weak player must choose between competing against the other weak players for the opportunity to coalesce with the strong player or cooperating with the other weak players to produce a jointly preferable outcome. Punishments, not rewards, are predicted to be effective for enforcing cooperation by the weak players. Fifty-four groups of four subj…
Let the People Decide
A Theory of the Critical Mass. I. Interdependence, Group Heterogeneity, and the Production of Collective Action
Collective action usually depends on a "critical mass" that behaves differently from typical group members. Sometimes the critical mass provides some level of the good for others who do nothing, while at other times the critical mass pays the start-up costs and induces widespread collective action. Formal analysis supplemented by simulations shows that the first scenario is most likely when the production function relating inputs of resource cont…
The virtue of explicit values in the social sciences
Because we are social animals, people have norms and value schemes which strongly influence behaviour. Social scientists are firstly people and bring value schemes to their work, A simple model is proposed of three entities — the observed, the observer and the paradigm used by the observer — which involves three value schemes and the relationships among them.Some examples are given from economics and psychology to illustrate how value schemes aff…
Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change
The Paradox of Group Size in Collective Action
Many sociologists incorrectly believe that larger groups are less likely to support collective action than smaller ones. The effect of group size. infact, depends on costs. If the costs of collective goods rise with the number who share in them, larger groups act less frequently than smaller ones. If the costs vary little with group size, larger groups should exhibit more collective action than smaller ones because larger groups have more resourc…
Social Networks and Collective Action
Most analyses of collective action agree that overcoming the freerider problem requires organizing potential contributors, thus making their decisions interdependent. The potential for organizing depends on the social ties in the group, particularly on the overall density or frequency of ties, on the extent to which they are centralized in a few individuals, and on the costs of communicating and coordinating actions through these ties. Mathematic…
Modeling the Second-Order Problem is not Easy
A Theory of the Critical Mass
Collective action often depends on the social ties among members of a group. For example, it is widely agreed that participants in social movement organizations are usually recruited through preexisting social ties and that mobilization is more likely when the members of the beneficiary population are linked by social ties than when they are not (e.g. Tilly, 1978; Oberschall, 1973). In a recent paper (Maxwell, Oliver and Prahl, 1988) we have used…
Relating Theory and Data
Struggle, Politics, and Reform
Reach and selectivity as strategies of recruitment for collective action
Theoretical investigation of a mathematical model of organizing for interdependent collective action compares the advantages of emphasizing reach, i.e. the sheer numbers recruited, to the advantages of emphasizing selectivity, i.e. the mean resources or interests of those recruited. The context is an accelerating production function in which each additional contribution has an increasing effect on the total payoff; this context is most likely at …
Building Popular Power
The Myth of the Madding Crowd.Clark McPhail
The Critical Mass in Collective Action
The problem of collective action is that each member of a group wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she 'free rides', reaping the benefits of collective action without doing the work. Inevitably the end result is that no one does the work and the common interest is not realized. This book analyses the social pressure whereby groups solve the problem of collective action. The authors show that the problem of collective act…
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a theoretical study of the dynamics of public-spirited collective action as well as a substantial study of the American civil rights movement and the local and national politics that surrounded it. In this major historical application of rational choice theory to a social movement, Dennis Chong reexamines the problem of organizing collective action by focusing on the social, psychological, and mo…
The Critical Mass in Collective Action
The critical mass and the problem of collective action 2. Building blocks: goods, groups and processes 3. The paradox of group size 4. The dynamics of production functions 5. Social networks: density, centralization and cliques 6. Selectivity in social networks 7. Reach and selectivity as strategies of recruitment 8. Unfinished business References Name index Subject index
Social Movements
The Critical Mass in Collective Action
Political science (33 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Collective action (17 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Economics (15 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Physics (11 obras)