Sherry Cable
Biographic Data
| ID | 3632541 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sherry Cable |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sherry |
| FAMILY NAME | Cable |
| SIGNATURE | CABLE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tennessee at Knoxville |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 206 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Fractured Communities
American Women’s Environmental Activism
Women have played instrumental, often leading, roles in the twentieth-century environmental movement. The sparse literature on women’s activism in the early twentieth century indicates that both White and Black women in the racially segregated, middle-class women’s club movement pursued urban reforms. But White women additionally adopted conservationism, while Black women led the struggle for racial justice. The more robust literature focuses on …
The Risk Society Revisited
Discursive Obstruction and Elite Opposition to Environmental Activism in the Czech Republic
Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists' discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech Republic. Our research examines how democratic states deploy oppositional frames and enlist elite coun…
Sinking under the weight of corruption
The United Nations adopted the 2003 Convention Against Corruption to reduce corruption in developing nations. Corruption's determinants include political systems' permeability to economic influence, state economic intervention, weak political competition and officials' discretionary power to allocate resources. Corruption's outcomes are slowed economic development, misallocation of government resources, income inequalities and, less frequently, d…
Wounded by Friendly Fire
Political movements seek influence in policy-making, but are typically marked by intra-movement conflict, which, analysts argue, reduces the achievement of social change. This article examines the effects of conflict within the Gulf War illness movement on its influencing government policy-making. Using in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analyses, the article assesses the movement's policy outcome, examines the substance of…
The institutional context of Gulf War illness claims
Risk Society and Contested Illness
Wealth production within a "risk society" typically depends on production technologies that expose citizens to dangerous substances. Knowledge of such exposure is, more often than not, hidden from the public. Empirical analyses show that citizens' claims of illnesses caused by risky exposures are frequently contested by the institutions that select production technologies and control information: the government, corporations, and physicians. In t…
Mining for Conflict and Staking Claims
Drawing from extensive fieldwork and document analysis, we examine environmental illness claims in Oklahoma's Tar Creek basin, one of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) premier Superfund sites. Our findings indicate that contested illness in the Tar Creek Superfund site differed from typical cases in that the links between high lead exposures and permanent neurological damage were thoroughly and unequivocally documented. But, despite the…
Drowning in Inequalities
The authors argue that age, sex, and racial differentials in swimming participation are conditioned by the availability of swimming infrastructure and the principle of social exclusivity that limits access of lower status groupings, even where pools and programs are available. In turn, the authors argue that participation in swimming and where that activity occurs (pool versus open water) affect life chances (accidental drowning rates) across sta…
Condescension and Cross-Class Coalitions
This piece focuses on working class activists' perspectives on cross-class coalitions, considering the influence of environmental justice activists' social status evaluations on experiences in cross-class coalition efforts with professional environmental activists. We ask: To what extent have cross-class coalitions been formed between working class and middle class environmental organizations? How did working class activists perceive their experi…
The Globalization of a Minor Sport
We examine the global spread of Masters Swimming (MS) focusing on the economic, social, and demographic conditions associated with its initiation in the United States and its international growth. We characterize MS as a modern sport and look at its subcultural form, organizational structure, practices, and early pattern of organizational growth from bottom to top. Then we describe the top down role of La Federation Internationale de Natation Ama…
Economic Imperatives and Race Relations
Drawing on secondary sources, the authors analyze how contemporary U.S. social institutions continue to produce racial differentials despite considerable pressures for institutional changes to reduce or eliminate those differentials. They argue that the post-Civil War industrial revolution brought economic imperatives that shaped the labor pool and created occupational segregation by race. The principle of racial segregation subsequently permeate…
Illness and the Environment
In myriad ways, humans have gradually tailored their world to meet immediate material needs. In so doing, we have, in the minds of many, systematically altered a formerly hospitable environment into one more ambiguous in its effect on the human organism. Just as environments have adapted in response to human activity, so too is the human body now, in turn, forced to adapt to these altered conditions. Today, mysterious illnesses, from chronic fati…
Women's Work
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to…
Women's Work
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to…
Reconceptualizing Social Movement Abeyance
Questions of social movement emergence and decline have long been of interest to social movement analysts, but discussions related to social movement endurance are relatively new to the field. In this work, we explicitly adapt Verta Taylor's concept of abeyance to a local grassroots social movement organization (SMO), Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians (SICK), that has endured for 18 years and achieved success in multiple campaign iss…
Movement Outcomes and Dimensions of Social Change
We use case study materials on a community mobilization against a landfill proposal to test the notion that social movement outcomes are multidimensional. We find that outcomes of community mobilization at Tug Hill in New York occurred at four levels of the social structure. Outcomes at the individual level benefited activists and included the expansion of friendship networks and personal transformations. Outcomes at the social movement organizat…
Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy
Production and extrapolation of meaning in the environmental justice movement
We analyze the structural determinants of social construction processes in the environmental justice movement. We argue that initial structural conditions legitimated environmental grievances that were transformed in the 1980s into a sense of environmental injustice. Environmental injustice was produced through perceptions of: the Love Canal and Three Mile Island disasters; the Reagan administration's environmental deregulation; and continuing di…
Social Control and Movement Outcome
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was one of several organizations within the modern Native American movement. We analyze AIM using current variants of resource mobilization approaches, new social movement theory and the political process model to explain the organization's rapid demise. We found AIM to be characterized by its urban roots, its militant tactics, and its efforts to produce a collective identity of pan-tribalism. We conclude that, …
The Seeds of Protest
The article reports the findings of our case study of a social movement organization opposed to the pollution of a river by a paper mill. Using data from participant-observation and archival sources, we analyze the relationship between elites and non-elites in this community mobilization. We find that: (1) mobilization was inhibited for 80 years because of the economic oppression of the region; (2) when a movement organization finally emerged, it…
Acting Locally
Because of the contradictions inherent in a liberal democratic state, the environmental regulatory process often fails to protect citizens from corporate pollution. As a consequence, organizations have emerged in some contaminated communities to put pressure on the regulatory process. This paper examines the structural sources of the emergence of grass-roots environmental organizations. These organizations represent a new trend in the environment…
Women's Social Movement Involvement
Data derived from three years of field work illuminate women's participation in a working class, community-based environmental protest organization. Findings show that (1) initial recruitment occur through women's social networks, activating the structurally available; (2) structural availability continues to figure significantly in the ongoing mobilization process in determining who performs which tasks; and (3) the practical necessity that driv…
The Nuclear Cage
Risk Society and Contested Illness
Wealth production within a "risk society" typically depends on production technologies that expose citizens to dangerous substances. Knowledge of such exposure is, more often than not, hidden from the public. Empirical analyses show that citizens' claims of illnesses caused by risky exposures are frequently contested by the institutions that select production technologies and control information: the government, corporations, and physicians. In t…
Acting Locally
Because of the contradictions inherent in a liberal democratic state, the environmental regulatory process often fails to protect citizens from corporate pollution. As a consequence, organizations have emerged in some contaminated communities to put pressure on the regulatory process. This paper examines the structural sources of the emergence of grass-roots environmental organizations. These organizations represent a new trend in the environment…
Women's Social Movement Involvement
Data derived from three years of field work illuminate women's participation in a working class, community-based environmental protest organization. Findings show that (1) initial recruitment occur through women's social networks, activating the structurally available; (2) structural availability continues to figure significantly in the ongoing mobilization process in determining who performs which tasks; and (3) the practical necessity that driv…
Production and extrapolation of meaning in the environmental justice movement
We analyze the structural determinants of social construction processes in the environmental justice movement. We argue that initial structural conditions legitimated environmental grievances that were transformed in the 1980s into a sense of environmental injustice. Environmental injustice was produced through perceptions of: the Love Canal and Three Mile Island disasters; the Reagan administration's environmental deregulation; and continuing di…
Reconceptualizing Social Movement Abeyance
Questions of social movement emergence and decline have long been of interest to social movement analysts, but discussions related to social movement endurance are relatively new to the field. In this work, we explicitly adapt Verta Taylor's concept of abeyance to a local grassroots social movement organization (SMO), Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians (SICK), that has endured for 18 years and achieved success in multiple campaign iss…
Differential Paths to Political Activism
This paper compares political activists from four community protest organizations, formed in response to the March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Using survey data, newsletters, and fieldwork, we document the existence of two separate paths to protest involvement. In two communities, recruitment was less likely to occur along the lines of established social networks. Instead, utilitarian alliances grounded on shared g…
Mining for Conflict and Staking Claims
Drawing from extensive fieldwork and document analysis, we examine environmental illness claims in Oklahoma's Tar Creek basin, one of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) premier Superfund sites. Our findings indicate that contested illness in the Tar Creek Superfund site differed from typical cases in that the links between high lead exposures and permanent neurological damage were thoroughly and unequivocally documented. But, despite the…
Social Control and Movement Outcome
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was one of several organizations within the modern Native American movement. We analyze AIM using current variants of resource mobilization approaches, new social movement theory and the political process model to explain the organization's rapid demise. We found AIM to be characterized by its urban roots, its militant tactics, and its efforts to produce a collective identity of pan-tribalism. We conclude that, …
Movement Outcomes and Dimensions of Social Change
We use case study materials on a community mobilization against a landfill proposal to test the notion that social movement outcomes are multidimensional. We find that outcomes of community mobilization at Tug Hill in New York occurred at four levels of the social structure. Outcomes at the individual level benefited activists and included the expansion of friendship networks and personal transformations. Outcomes at the social movement organizat…
Professionalization in Social Movement Organization
This paper is a report on a state chapter of Moral Majority, in which I analyze the professionalization of this social movement organization. Discussed are the structural conditions that influenced professionalization and the implications of such an organizational structure for tactical decisions, using the organization's anti-abortion campaign as an example. I conclude that the ideological nature of the social movement organization's grievances …
Women's Work
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to…
Condescension and Cross-Class Coalitions
This piece focuses on working class activists' perspectives on cross-class coalitions, considering the influence of environmental justice activists' social status evaluations on experiences in cross-class coalition efforts with professional environmental activists. We ask: To what extent have cross-class coalitions been formed between working class and middle class environmental organizations? How did working class activists perceive their experi…
Attributional Processes and Alienation
This paper represents an attempt to understand the lack of strong empirical evidence for the alienation of workers under conditions of task specialization, task routinization, and limited worker control. Based on a review of the literature and informed by'attribution theory, a typology is presented of worker responses to the unequal power relationships in the workplace. The typology identifies responses by the attributions underlying them and sug…
Sinking under the weight of corruption
The United Nations adopted the 2003 Convention Against Corruption to reduce corruption in developing nations. Corruption's determinants include political systems' permeability to economic influence, state economic intervention, weak political competition and officials' discretionary power to allocate resources. Corruption's outcomes are slowed economic development, misallocation of government resources, income inequalities and, less frequently, d…
The Globalization of a Minor Sport
We examine the global spread of Masters Swimming (MS) focusing on the economic, social, and demographic conditions associated with its initiation in the United States and its international growth. We characterize MS as a modern sport and look at its subcultural form, organizational structure, practices, and early pattern of organizational growth from bottom to top. Then we describe the top down role of La Federation Internationale de Natation Ama…
The Seeds of Protest
The article reports the findings of our case study of a social movement organization opposed to the pollution of a river by a paper mill. Using data from participant-observation and archival sources, we analyze the relationship between elites and non-elites in this community mobilization. We find that: (1) mobilization was inhibited for 80 years because of the economic oppression of the region; (2) when a movement organization finally emerged, it…
Wounded by Friendly Fire
Political movements seek influence in policy-making, but are typically marked by intra-movement conflict, which, analysts argue, reduces the achievement of social change. This article examines the effects of conflict within the Gulf War illness movement on its influencing government policy-making. Using in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analyses, the article assesses the movement's policy outcome, examines the substance of…
Professionalization in Social Movement Organization
This paper is a report on a state chapter of Moral Majority, in which I analyze the professionalization of this social movement organization. Discussed are the structural conditions that influenced professionalization and the implications of such an organizational structure for tactical decisions, using the organization's anti-abortion campaign as an example. I conclude that the ideological nature of the social movement organization's grievances …
Attributional Processes and Alienation
This paper represents an attempt to understand the lack of strong empirical evidence for the alienation of workers under conditions of task specialization, task routinization, and limited worker control. Based on a review of the literature and informed by'attribution theory, a typology is presented of worker responses to the unequal power relationships in the workplace. The typology identifies responses by the attributions underlying them and sug…
Differential Paths to Political Activism
This paper compares political activists from four community protest organizations, formed in response to the March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Using survey data, newsletters, and fieldwork, we document the existence of two separate paths to protest involvement. In two communities, recruitment was less likely to occur along the lines of established social networks. Instead, utilitarian alliances grounded on shared g…
The Nuclear Cage
Women's Social Movement Involvement
Data derived from three years of field work illuminate women's participation in a working class, community-based environmental protest organization. Findings show that (1) initial recruitment occur through women's social networks, activating the structurally available; (2) structural availability continues to figure significantly in the ongoing mobilization process in determining who performs which tasks; and (3) the practical necessity that driv…
Acting Locally
Because of the contradictions inherent in a liberal democratic state, the environmental regulatory process often fails to protect citizens from corporate pollution. As a consequence, organizations have emerged in some contaminated communities to put pressure on the regulatory process. This paper examines the structural sources of the emergence of grass-roots environmental organizations. These organizations represent a new trend in the environment…
Social Control and Movement Outcome
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was one of several organizations within the modern Native American movement. We analyze AIM using current variants of resource mobilization approaches, new social movement theory and the political process model to explain the organization's rapid demise. We found AIM to be characterized by its urban roots, its militant tactics, and its efforts to produce a collective identity of pan-tribalism. We conclude that, …
The Seeds of Protest
The article reports the findings of our case study of a social movement organization opposed to the pollution of a river by a paper mill. Using data from participant-observation and archival sources, we analyze the relationship between elites and non-elites in this community mobilization. We find that: (1) mobilization was inhibited for 80 years because of the economic oppression of the region; (2) when a movement organization finally emerged, it…
Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy
Production and extrapolation of meaning in the environmental justice movement
We analyze the structural determinants of social construction processes in the environmental justice movement. We argue that initial structural conditions legitimated environmental grievances that were transformed in the 1980s into a sense of environmental injustice. Environmental injustice was produced through perceptions of: the Love Canal and Three Mile Island disasters; the Reagan administration's environmental deregulation; and continuing di…
Movement Outcomes and Dimensions of Social Change
We use case study materials on a community mobilization against a landfill proposal to test the notion that social movement outcomes are multidimensional. We find that outcomes of community mobilization at Tug Hill in New York occurred at four levels of the social structure. Outcomes at the individual level benefited activists and included the expansion of friendship networks and personal transformations. Outcomes at the social movement organizat…
Reconceptualizing Social Movement Abeyance
Questions of social movement emergence and decline have long been of interest to social movement analysts, but discussions related to social movement endurance are relatively new to the field. In this work, we explicitly adapt Verta Taylor's concept of abeyance to a local grassroots social movement organization (SMO), Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians (SICK), that has endured for 18 years and achieved success in multiple campaign iss…
Economic Imperatives and Race Relations
Drawing on secondary sources, the authors analyze how contemporary U.S. social institutions continue to produce racial differentials despite considerable pressures for institutional changes to reduce or eliminate those differentials. They argue that the post-Civil War industrial revolution brought economic imperatives that shaped the labor pool and created occupational segregation by race. The principle of racial segregation subsequently permeate…
Illness and the Environment
In myriad ways, humans have gradually tailored their world to meet immediate material needs. In so doing, we have, in the minds of many, systematically altered a formerly hospitable environment into one more ambiguous in its effect on the human organism. Just as environments have adapted in response to human activity, so too is the human body now, in turn, forced to adapt to these altered conditions. Today, mysterious illnesses, from chronic fati…
Women's Work
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to…
Women's Work
We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to…
The Globalization of a Minor Sport
We examine the global spread of Masters Swimming (MS) focusing on the economic, social, and demographic conditions associated with its initiation in the United States and its international growth. We characterize MS as a modern sport and look at its subcultural form, organizational structure, practices, and early pattern of organizational growth from bottom to top. Then we describe the top down role of La Federation Internationale de Natation Ama…
Drowning in Inequalities
The authors argue that age, sex, and racial differentials in swimming participation are conditioned by the availability of swimming infrastructure and the principle of social exclusivity that limits access of lower status groupings, even where pools and programs are available. In turn, the authors argue that participation in swimming and where that activity occurs (pool versus open water) affect life chances (accidental drowning rates) across sta…
Condescension and Cross-Class Coalitions
This piece focuses on working class activists' perspectives on cross-class coalitions, considering the influence of environmental justice activists' social status evaluations on experiences in cross-class coalition efforts with professional environmental activists. We ask: To what extent have cross-class coalitions been formed between working class and middle class environmental organizations? How did working class activists perceive their experi…
The institutional context of Gulf War illness claims
Risk Society and Contested Illness
Wealth production within a "risk society" typically depends on production technologies that expose citizens to dangerous substances. Knowledge of such exposure is, more often than not, hidden from the public. Empirical analyses show that citizens' claims of illnesses caused by risky exposures are frequently contested by the institutions that select production technologies and control information: the government, corporations, and physicians. In t…
Mining for Conflict and Staking Claims
Drawing from extensive fieldwork and document analysis, we examine environmental illness claims in Oklahoma's Tar Creek basin, one of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) premier Superfund sites. Our findings indicate that contested illness in the Tar Creek Superfund site differed from typical cases in that the links between high lead exposures and permanent neurological damage were thoroughly and unequivocally documented. But, despite the…
Wounded by Friendly Fire
Political movements seek influence in policy-making, but are typically marked by intra-movement conflict, which, analysts argue, reduces the achievement of social change. This article examines the effects of conflict within the Gulf War illness movement on its influencing government policy-making. Using in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analyses, the article assesses the movement's policy outcome, examines the substance of…
Sinking under the weight of corruption
The United Nations adopted the 2003 Convention Against Corruption to reduce corruption in developing nations. Corruption's determinants include political systems' permeability to economic influence, state economic intervention, weak political competition and officials' discretionary power to allocate resources. Corruption's outcomes are slowed economic development, misallocation of government resources, income inequalities and, less frequently, d…
Discursive Obstruction and Elite Opposition to Environmental Activism in the Czech Republic
Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists' discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech Republic. Our research examines how democratic states deploy oppositional frames and enlist elite coun…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Social movement (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities (8 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Public relations (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works)