L W Isaac
Biographic Data
| ID | 42974 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L W Isaac |
| GIVEN NAMES | L W |
| FAMILY NAME | Isaac |
| SIGNATURE | ISAAC L W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2961-7509 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 543 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Movement for Black Lives at Work? Racial Justice Spillover, Labor Organization, and New Worker Militancy
Emerging from a confluence of events - including Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) - racial consciousness has intensified in recent years. In the wake of a long declining labor movement, there has also been a surprising upsurge in labor militancy. Are these two currents systematically related? Situating our analysis in the sociological literature on social movement spillover, we ask if there is evidence of racial justice spillover into and stimul…
Turning Points in U.S. Labor History, Political Culture, and the Current Upsurge in Labor Militancy
I consider the current labor upsurge in context of prior pro-labor transformative turning points in U.S. labor history, all of which involved major changes in political culture. My assessment of key conditions in the current moment centers on three important conditions for changing political culture: (a) anti-racist civil rights-based social movement unionism; (b) changing discourse about the role of unions in political economy; (c) the weak posi…
Private Strike, Public Sphere: Changing Private/Public Relations in US Labor History
Pitting the Working Class against Itself: Solidarity, Strikebreaking, and Strike Outcomes in the Early US Labor Movement
It is axiomatic that high-risk activism requires solidarity if social movements are to have success in struggles against powerful adversaries. However, there is little research that attempts to gauge the impact of various types, limits, or breakdown of solidarity directly and systematically. Drawing from historical political economy, cultures of class formation, and social movement outcome literatures, we address the question of solidarity’s impa…
Repressing worker dissent: Lethal violence against strikers in the early American labor movement
Despite U.S. labor-management history having long been recognized as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation, unanimity has failed to materialize regarding its impact on concomitant labor protests, organizations, and politics. We examine the impact of striker fatalities on the strength and trajectory of the early American labor movement against the null hypothesis that such bloodshed is largely random and/or inconsequenti…
Social movements as schooling for careers: Career consequences of the Nashville civil rights movement
Scholarship on social movement schools shows that movements often facilitate the schooling of their participants, while scholarship on the biographical consequences of social movements demonstrates that movements influence their participants’ subsequent careers. To date, however, few studies consider whether and how the schooling functions of social movements shape participants’ later careers. In this article, through a qualitative comparative an…
Striking News: Discursive Power of the Press as Capitalist Resource in Gilded Age Strikes
Does mass media discourse influence material outcomes of contentious social movement events? The authors address this enduring puzzle by developing a discursive power resource theory of the press that centers press coverage valence of strikes within the coemergence of the labor movement and mass commercial print media. Employing unique data and probability models, the authors examine the impact of negative coverage in three forms (lagged context,…
The Making of a Movement: An Intergenerational Mobilization Model of the Nonviolent Nashville Civil Rights Movement
The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically deriv…
Pathways to Modes of Movement Participation: Micromobilization in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement
We employ a unique sample of participants in the early 1960s Nashville civil rights movement to examine within-movement micromobilization processes. Rather than assuming movement micromobilization and participation is internally homogeneous, we extend the literature by identifying distinct types of pathways (entry and preparation) and distinct types (or modes) of movement participation. Pathways into the Nashville movement are largely structured …
Social movement schools: Sites for Consciousness Transformation, Training, and Prefigurative Social Development
We develop the concept of “social movement school’ (SMS), showing how these organizational spaces are deliberately designed for purposes of educating, mentoring, training, and coordinating individuals as effective, committed movement agents. SMSs can also be important sites of prefigurative design and practice for future societal development consistent with movement goals. We motivate the theoretical significance of SMSs based on five perspective…
Gender Composition in Contentious Collective Action: “Girl Strikers” in Gilded Age America—Harmful, Helpful, or Both
The Gilded Age was a tumultuous period for US labor and capital: the labor movement grew in size and intensity, strikes mushroomed, and women’s labor force and strike participation grew in tandem. Yet little is known about how women’s participation influenced strike efficacy. On the one hand, women may have added numerical force, militant energy for gendered solidarity and therefore contributed to strike success. On the other hand, women’s partic…
Preparation Pathways and Movement Participation: Insurgent Schooling and Nonviolent Direct Action in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement
Employing a unique sample of participants in the early Nashville civil rights movement, we extend the micromobilization literature by conceptualizing “preparation pathways” (or schooling channels) through which activists acquire insurgent consciousness and capital so crucial for committed, effective, high-risk activism. We identify two key pathways in which activists were “schooled” in nonviolent praxis—experience in nonviolent direct action prio…
Insurgent Images: Genre Selection and Visual Frame Amplification in IWW Cartoon Art
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka ‘Wobblies’) developed a rich, extensive movement culture. Focusing on one genre – cartoons – within the Wobbly cultural arsenal, we extend social movement theory in two interrelated ways. First, by asking why Wobblies were attracted to cartoons as a key cultural form of insurgent media, we open the question of genre selection for social movement scholars. In this, Wobblies deployed cartoon art extensi…
ASR 2010 to 2012
Striking Deaths: Lethal Contestation and the “Exceptional” Character of the American Labor Movement, 1870–1970
The decades between the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the post-World- War-II institutionalization of organized labor in the US have been impressionistically characterized by labor scholars as the most violent and bloody to be found in any Western, democratic nation. A variety of different forms of labor repression have been identified and studied. Yet because of a lack of systematic data, none have been able to examine directly the incidence a…
Movements, Aesthetics, and Markets in Literary Change: Making the American Labor Problem Novel
One path to cultural innovation in artistic and literary fields is differentiation of a genre into new subgenres. But what are the dynamics at work in such a process? This article addresses that question by identifying and explaining the emergence and trajectory of a new fiction subgenre-the American labor problem novel-during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I make a theoretical case for the intersection of social movement fiel…
Movement of Movements: Culture Moves in the Long Civil Rights Struggle
In what way do movements move? What do we mean by the movement of movements? While still a rather unconventional stance, I advance the argument that social movements are, at root, culture production agents. Regardless of whatever else they may accomplish, movements produce new cultural forms in the course of struggle; they often change and augment cultural stock in the process, and sometimes live on for generations in collective memory. My answer…
Counterframes and Allegories of Evil: Characterizations of Labor by Gilded Age Elites
Social movement scholars have increasingly focused on the importance of the cultural-symbolic dimensions of collective contention. Conceptual and empirical studies of mobilization (and countermobilization) employing a framing perspective have become a growth industry. In this article, the author expands our purview of the symbolic-representational repertoire employed in collective contention and conceptually distinguishes between counterframing, …
Takin' It from the Streets: How the Sixties Mass Movement Revitalized Unionization
Was the militant zeitgeist of the “long sixties” social movement wave harmful, irrelevant, or revitalizing for labor militancy and union growth? The authors extend research on intermovement relations by examining the influence of ascendant militancy of the new left–inspired mass movement wave on the organizational fortunes of labor. Time‐series models buttressed by secondary historical evidence show that “the movement,” as radical flank, did stim…
In Search Of American Labor's Syndicalist Heritage
How the Civil Rights Movement Revitalized Labor Militancy
Can newly ascendant social movements revitalize the militant culture of older, institutionalized movements? Recent studies have focused on relations between new ascendant social movements like the civil rights, women's, and peace movements that emerged during the postwar cycle of protest, and therefore have been unable to address this question. Focusing on revitalization as a qualitatively different form of intermovement relation, the authors exa…
To Counter 'The Very Devil' and More: The Making of Independent Capitalist Militia in the Gilded Age
This study addresses a neglected question in movement/countermovement dynamics, that is, why do countermovement activists select a particular organizational form in which to mobilize? Contrary to the standard assumption that selection is a simple function of challenging movement characteristics, this study suggests that selection is a matter of organizational correspondence: the extent to which a particular organizational model fits (a) the count…
The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy
Temporally Recursive Regression and Social Historical Inquiry: An Example of Cross-Movement Militancy Spillover
Our focus here is on time-series regression as a formal analytic tool in social historical inquiry. We have three interrelated purposes. First, we argue that conventional time-series regression is typically ill–suited for social historical inquiry because ahistorical assumptions and conventions regarding time undermine the historical character of social “process–as–analyzed”. Second, we present a modified time-series approach – temporally recursi…
Regimes of Power and the Power of Analytic Regimes: Explaining U.S. Military Procurement Keynesianism as Historical Process
(1997). Regimes of Power and the Power of Analytic Regimes: Explaining U.S. Military Procurement Keynesianism as Historical Process. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 30, Research in Historical Sociology, pp. 28-45
Ahistoricism in Time-Series Analyses of Historical Process: Critique, Redirection, and Illustrations from U.S. Labor History
Most time-ordered analyses of historical processes are rendered because the premises that direct quantitative inquiry obscure changing historical relations through time. These conventional practices stem from three problematic presuppositions: (1) the separation of theory and history, (2) ahistorical conceptions of time, and (3) methodological autonomy and the primacy of the theory of statistical technique. We illustrate how these premises shape …
How the Civil Rights Movement Revitalized Labor Militancy
Can newly ascendant social movements revitalize the militant culture of older, institutionalized movements? Recent studies have focused on relations between new ascendant social movements like the civil rights, women's, and peace movements that emerged during the postwar cycle of protest, and therefore have been unable to address this question. Focusing on revitalization as a qualitatively different form of intermovement relation, the authors exa…
Political Protest Orientations Among Black and White Adults
The political protest activities of the late 1960s and early 1970s stimulated a flurry of empirical research by social scientists seeking explanations. Most of the research, aimed at explaining individuals' radical political orientations, willingness to use protest and perhaps violence, or actual riot or protest participation, has been guided by either a mass society perspective or some variant of the relative deprivation model. After outlining t…
Takin' It from the Streets: How the Sixties Mass Movement Revitalized Unionization
Was the militant zeitgeist of the “long sixties” social movement wave harmful, irrelevant, or revitalizing for labor militancy and union growth? The authors extend research on intermovement relations by examining the influence of ascendant militancy of the new left–inspired mass movement wave on the organizational fortunes of labor. Time‐series models buttressed by secondary historical evidence show that “the movement,” as radical flank, did stim…
Racial Insurgency, the State, and Welfare Expansion: Local and National Level Evidence from the Postwar United States
This paper addresses systematically the possible nexus between insurgent political action and the state apparatus, concentrating specifically on the relationship between urban riots and welfare or reliefgiving activity in the postwar United States. The theoretical warrant for the analysis has its genesis in Piven and Cloward's influential thesis relating insurgency and relief giving in capitalist society. This perspective is juxtaposed with the o…
Movements, Aesthetics, and Markets in Literary Change: Making the American Labor Problem Novel
One path to cultural innovation in artistic and literary fields is differentiation of a genre into new subgenres. But what are the dynamics at work in such a process? This article addresses that question by identifying and explaining the emergence and trajectory of a new fiction subgenre-the American labor problem novel-during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I make a theoretical case for the intersection of social movement fiel…
To Counter 'The Very Devil' and More: The Making of Independent Capitalist Militia in the Gilded Age
This study addresses a neglected question in movement/countermovement dynamics, that is, why do countermovement activists select a particular organizational form in which to mobilize? Contrary to the standard assumption that selection is a simple function of challenging movement characteristics, this study suggests that selection is a matter of organizational correspondence: the extent to which a particular organizational model fits (a) the count…
Recursive Regression and the Historical Use of “Time” in Time-Series Analysis of Historical Process
(1992). Recursive Regression and the Historical Use of "Time" in Time-Series Analysis of Historical Process. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 166-179
Transforming Localities: Reflections on Time, Causality, and Narrative in Contemporary Historical Sociology
Movement of Movements: Culture Moves in the Long Civil Rights Struggle
In what way do movements move? What do we mean by the movement of movements? While still a rather unconventional stance, I advance the argument that social movements are, at root, culture production agents. Regardless of whatever else they may accomplish, movements produce new cultural forms in the course of struggle; they often change and augment cultural stock in the process, and sometimes live on for generations in collective memory. My answer…
Theoretical Generality, Case Particularity: Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Trade Union Growth and Decline
Analyzing Historical Contingency with Formal Methods: The Case of the “Relief Explosion” and 1968
Historical sociologists have been properly critical of the tendency within the social sciences to ignore temporality and, consequently, historical contingency in social processes. These critical assessments have generated alternative formal research methods that either (a) continue to use variable-centered procedures but allow relations between variables to change through time, or (b) abandon variable-centered procedures altogether and move exclu…
Insurgent Images: Genre Selection and Visual Frame Amplification in IWW Cartoon Art
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka ‘Wobblies’) developed a rich, extensive movement culture. Focusing on one genre – cartoons – within the Wobbly cultural arsenal, we extend social movement theory in two interrelated ways. First, by asking why Wobblies were attracted to cartoons as a key cultural form of insurgent media, we open the question of genre selection for social movement scholars. In this, Wobblies deployed cartoon art extensi…
Striking Deaths: Lethal Contestation and the “Exceptional” Character of the American Labor Movement, 1870–1970
The decades between the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the post-World- War-II institutionalization of organized labor in the US have been impressionistically characterized by labor scholars as the most violent and bloody to be found in any Western, democratic nation. A variety of different forms of labor repression have been identified and studied. Yet because of a lack of systematic data, none have been able to examine directly the incidence a…
Development, inequality, health care, and mortality at the older ages: A cross-national analysis
We examine mortality at ages 50 and above in female populations of 38 countries and control for variation in quality of the mortality data. We find that economic development, economic distributional inequality, and basic primary health care have independent cross-national effects on cause of death structures and that these effects are not uniform across the age intervals of interest. As improvements occur in level of living and heath care, age-sp…
Preparation Pathways and Movement Participation: Insurgent Schooling and Nonviolent Direct Action in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement
Employing a unique sample of participants in the early Nashville civil rights movement, we extend the micromobilization literature by conceptualizing “preparation pathways” (or schooling channels) through which activists acquire insurgent consciousness and capital so crucial for committed, effective, high-risk activism. We identify two key pathways in which activists were “schooled” in nonviolent praxis—experience in nonviolent direct action prio…
Counterframes and Allegories of Evil: Characterizations of Labor by Gilded Age Elites
Social movement scholars have increasingly focused on the importance of the cultural-symbolic dimensions of collective contention. Conceptual and empirical studies of mobilization (and countermobilization) employing a framing perspective have become a growth industry. In this article, the author expands our purview of the symbolic-representational repertoire employed in collective contention and conceptually distinguishes between counterframing, …
Determinants and Behavioral Consequences of Psychological Modernity: Empirical Evidence from Costa Rica
A major goal of research on national development and underdevelopment is to specify and empirically test propositions drawn from theories emphasizing individual, societal, or international determinants. In this paper we examine a central premise of individual modernity theory that psychological modernity mediates the effects of background factors and directly affects individual behaviors thought to contribute to societal modernization. Several an…
Social movement schools: Sites for Consciousness Transformation, Training, and Prefigurative Social Development
We develop the concept of “social movement school’ (SMS), showing how these organizational spaces are deliberately designed for purposes of educating, mentoring, training, and coordinating individuals as effective, committed movement agents. SMSs can also be important sites of prefigurative design and practice for future societal development consistent with movement goals. We motivate the theoretical significance of SMSs based on five perspective…
Comparative Economic Inequality
Striking News: Discursive Power of the Press as Capitalist Resource in Gilded Age Strikes
Does mass media discourse influence material outcomes of contentious social movement events? The authors address this enduring puzzle by developing a discursive power resource theory of the press that centers press coverage valence of strikes within the coemergence of the labor movement and mass commercial print media. Employing unique data and probability models, the authors examine the impact of negative coverage in three forms (lagged context,…
The Rise of Historical Sociology
Social movements as schooling for careers: Career consequences of the Nashville civil rights movement
Scholarship on social movement schools shows that movements often facilitate the schooling of their participants, while scholarship on the biographical consequences of social movements demonstrates that movements influence their participants’ subsequent careers. To date, however, few studies consider whether and how the schooling functions of social movements shape participants’ later careers. In this article, through a qualitative comparative an…
Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies
Comparative Economic Inequality
Quality of Higher Education and Sociopolitical Attitudes
Journal Article Quality of Higher Education and Sociopolitical Attitudes Get access David Knoke, David Knoke Indiana University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Larry Isaac Larry Isaac Indiana University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 54, Issue 3, March 1976, Pages 524–529, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/54.3.524 Published: 01 March 1976
Determinants and Behavioral Consequences of Psychological Modernity: Empirical Evidence from Costa Rica
A major goal of research on national development and underdevelopment is to specify and empirically test propositions drawn from theories emphasizing individual, societal, or international determinants. In this paper we examine a central premise of individual modernity theory that psychological modernity mediates the effects of background factors and directly affects individual behaviors thought to contribute to societal modernization. Several an…
Political Protest Orientations Among Black and White Adults
The political protest activities of the late 1960s and early 1970s stimulated a flurry of empirical research by social scientists seeking explanations. Most of the research, aimed at explaining individuals' radical political orientations, willingness to use protest and perhaps violence, or actual riot or protest participation, has been guided by either a mass society perspective or some variant of the relative deprivation model. After outlining t…
Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies
In uneasy partnership at the helm of the modern state stand elected party politicians and professional bureaucrats. This book is the first comprehensive comparison of these two powerful elites. In seven countries--the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands--researchers questioned 700 bureaucrats and 6OO politicians in an effort to understand how their aims, attitudes, and ambitions differ within cultural…
Comparative Economic Inequality
Comparative Economic Inequality
Racial Insurgency, the State, and Welfare Expansion: Local and National Level Evidence from the Postwar United States
This paper addresses systematically the possible nexus between insurgent political action and the state apparatus, concentrating specifically on the relationship between urban riots and welfare or reliefgiving activity in the postwar United States. The theoretical warrant for the analysis has its genesis in Piven and Cloward's influential thesis relating insurgency and relief giving in capitalist society. This perspective is juxtaposed with the o…
Period effects on race- and parity-specific birth probabilities of American women, 1917-1976: A new measure of fertility
Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies
Development, inequality, health care, and mortality at the older ages: A cross-national analysis
We examine mortality at ages 50 and above in female populations of 38 countries and control for variation in quality of the mortality data. We find that economic development, economic distributional inequality, and basic primary health care have independent cross-national effects on cause of death structures and that these effects are not uniform across the age intervals of interest. As improvements occur in level of living and heath care, age-sp…
Work Organization and Class Structure
America in Decline: An Analysis of the Developments toward War and Revolution, in the U.S. and Worldwide, in the 1980s, Vol. 1
Ahistoricism in Time-Series Analyses of Historical Process: Critique, Redirection, and Illustrations from U.S. Labor History
Most time-ordered analyses of historical processes are rendered because the premises that direct quantitative inquiry obscure changing historical relations through time. These conventional practices stem from three problematic presuppositions: (1) the separation of theory and history, (2) ahistorical conceptions of time, and (3) methodological autonomy and the primacy of the theory of statistical technique. We illustrate how these premises shape …
Theoretical Generality, Case Particularity: Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Trade Union Growth and Decline
The Enabling State: Modern Welfare Capitalism in America.Neil Gilbert , Barbara Gilbert
Recursive Regression and the Historical Use of “Time” in Time-Series Analysis of Historical Process
(1992). Recursive Regression and the Historical Use of "Time" in Time-Series Analysis of Historical Process. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 166-179
The Rise of Historical Sociology
Analyzing Historical Contingency with Formal Methods: The Case of the “Relief Explosion” and 1968
Historical sociologists have been properly critical of the tendency within the social sciences to ignore temporality and, consequently, historical contingency in social processes. These critical assessments have generated alternative formal research methods that either (a) continue to use variable-centered procedures but allow relations between variables to change through time, or (b) abandon variable-centered procedures altogether and move exclu…
Regimes of Power and the Power of Analytic Regimes: Explaining U.S. Military Procurement Keynesianism as Historical Process
(1997). Regimes of Power and the Power of Analytic Regimes: Explaining U.S. Military Procurement Keynesianism as Historical Process. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 30, Research in Historical Sociology, pp. 28-45
Transforming Localities: Reflections on Time, Causality, and Narrative in Contemporary Historical Sociology
The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy
Temporally Recursive Regression and Social Historical Inquiry: An Example of Cross-Movement Militancy Spillover
Our focus here is on time-series regression as a formal analytic tool in social historical inquiry. We have three interrelated purposes. First, we argue that conventional time-series regression is typically ill–suited for social historical inquiry because ahistorical assumptions and conventions regarding time undermine the historical character of social “process–as–analyzed”. Second, we present a modified time-series approach – temporally recursi…
In Search Of American Labor's Syndicalist Heritage
How the Civil Rights Movement Revitalized Labor Militancy
Can newly ascendant social movements revitalize the militant culture of older, institutionalized movements? Recent studies have focused on relations between new ascendant social movements like the civil rights, women's, and peace movements that emerged during the postwar cycle of protest, and therefore have been unable to address this question. Focusing on revitalization as a qualitatively different form of intermovement relation, the authors exa…
To Counter 'The Very Devil' and More: The Making of Independent Capitalist Militia in the Gilded Age
This study addresses a neglected question in movement/countermovement dynamics, that is, why do countermovement activists select a particular organizational form in which to mobilize? Contrary to the standard assumption that selection is a simple function of challenging movement characteristics, this study suggests that selection is a matter of organizational correspondence: the extent to which a particular organizational model fits (a) the count…
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (22 works) · Economics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Race, History, and American Society (15 works) · Social movement (13 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (12 works)