Marc Dixon
Biographic Data
| ID | 79783 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marc Dixon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marc |
| FAMILY NAME | Dixon |
| SIGNATURE | DIXON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3805-3266 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 311 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Running From the Union Label? Labor and Business Political Mobilization in the Golden Age
This paper assesses labor's political effectiveness in the industrial Midwest at the peak of union strength during the 1950s-a time and place that should have been ripe for labor mobilization. Comparing labor and business mobilization and outcomes across key labor elections, I find that politicians and business groups were often successful in persuading industrial communities to vote against labor's interests while unions struggled to shed outsid…
Social Democratic Capitalism
Young Low-Income Mothers' Identity Work around Infant Feeding in the UK
This article focuses on young low-income mothers' engagement with, and management of, potentially conflicting discourses within the context of maternal foodwork. Findings from qualitative, longitudinal interviews with 13 UK women illustrate the performance of identity and family work, in relation to infant feeding and wider maternal practices. Each participant was interviewed twice, once prior to, and then following, the birth of their first baby…
Heartland Blues: Labor Rights in the Industrial Midwest
Heartland Blues provides a new perspective on union decline by revisiting the labor movement at its historical peak in the 1950s and analyzing campaigns over right-to-work laws and public-sector collective bargaining rights in the industrial Midwest. The focus on 1950s labor conflicts, including union failures, departs from popular and academic treatments of the period that emphasize consensus, an accord between capital and labor in collective ba…
Murray, J., & Schwartz, M. (2019). Wrecked: How the American Auto Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete
The role of combinatorial health technologies in supporting older people with long-term conditions: Responsibilisation or co-management of healthcare
Applying a leverage points framework to the United Nations climate negotiations: The (dis)empowerment of youth participants
Young people are both among the generations to be most affected by climate change and critical advocates for climate action. In the face of growing urgency surrounding the climate crisis, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has become an important institutional framework for political progress. We developed a community-based participatory action research project centered on youth involved in the COP climate negotiat…
The Conservative Upsurge and Labor Policy in the States
During the early- to mid-2010s, there was a dramatic upsurge in conservative legislation restricting labor unions in U.S. states. The sweeping Republican victories at the state level in the 2010 midterm elections certainly enabled this legislative surge, though not all states controlled by conservative governments passed such legislation and there was considerable variation in the number of laws passed among states that did. Understanding the con…
The Institutionalization of Anti-Business Protest, 1960-1995
The target a social movement selects is important for the type of tactic employed. Research suggests the state can use both a carrot (access) and stick (repression) to encourage conventional protest. Although corporations are more vulnerable to disruptive protest than the state, we suspect that historical developments, both in terms of the overall institutionalization of protest and the growing power of businesses, may encourage greater routiniza…
Economic Crisis and Mass Protest: The Pots and Pans Revolution in Iceland
Scholars are just now starting to make sense of the Great Recession and its political aftershocks, from the emergence of new social movements to support for nativist candidates and policies in the United States and around the globe. Yet, well before the 2016 election cycle or even the global Occupy movement, Iceland unleashed the first sustained protest wave in the face of the 2008 economic collapse. What started as open-air Saturday meetings in …
Framing the Field: The Case of the 1969 Charleston Hospital Workers' Strike
We investigate how union, employer and allied actors engage in framing contests and seek to gain the upper hand in a strike event by analyzing a historically significant labor and civil-rights struggle in the 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina against the Medical College of South Carolina (MCSC). Through an analysis of newspapers, interviews, and archival materials, we show how discursive tactics by multiple actors supers…
Leveraging corporate influence
Movement scholars have become increasingly interested in the way in which social movement actors target non-state entities, particularly corporations. The reason for this is quite simple: globalization, neoliberal policies adopted by the state, and new legal protections via court rulings have allowed businesses to exert considerable influence across all facets of society. In light of these changes, movements have found targeting the state less ef…
Parenting agendas: An empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development
Intensive parenting debates reflect the critical importance of a child's early years, and parents' roles in determining later developmental outcomes. Mothers are usually assigned primary responsibility for facilitating their infants' cognitive development through adequate and appropriate sensory stimulation. Drawing on Foucault's technologies of the self, this article explores how new mothers shape their mothering practices in order to provide ap…
Coalitions and the Bottom Line: Strikes, Allies, and Company Stock Returns
Scholars have long recognized how coalitions are critical for many social movements. This is especially evident in the labor movement, which has begun to seek external allies in the face of corporate attacks. Building on qualitative work linking coalition building to success, we seek to identify the mechanisms by which coalitions are able to exert leverage on targets. Specifically, we consider how coalitions allow unions to exert greater financia…
Organization, Opportunity, and the Shifting Politics of Employment Discrimination
Despite the major breakthrough for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists on marriage equality, the fight against employment discrimination remains elusive. Whether one is protected from discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity depends on where one lives and is contingent on a patchwork of state and local policies. In this article, we investigate the adoption of state nondiscrimination l…
Social Protest and Corporate Change: Brand Visibility, Third-Party Influence, and the Responsiveness of Corporations to Activist Campaigns
From corporate social responsibility initiatives to the adoption of domestic partner benefits in large firms, there is mounting evidence of the impact of activism on corporate behavior. This study advances the understanding of these outside challenges by identifying the multiple and context-dependent ways that movements matter for corporate change. Drawing from data on wide-ranging “corporate campaigns” waged by social movement organizations agai…
Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement by Thomas Geoghegan
Union Organizing and Labor Outreach in the Contemporary United States
Despite their long decline, labor unions increasingly find themselves in the news. From the spirited debate over income inequality, to fights over minimum wage and the unlikely mobilization of fast food workers at the very bottom of the American labor market, labor issues are of great public interest. In this article, I review scholarship on contemporary union organizing and outreach activity. This work suggests that while innovative organizing a…
Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy
Allies, Targets, and the Effectiveness of Coalition Protest: A Comparative Analysis of Labor Unrest In the U. S. South
Social movement scholars suggest that coalitions comprise a significant and growing portion of all protest mobilizations. Such organizational collaboration is of great practical importance to the labor movement in particular, as unions struggle to succeed on their own in a difficult economic and political environment. Yet surprisingly little is known about the factors underlying the development and success of coalitions. In this article we advanc…
Activist Human Capital: Skills Acquisition and the Development of Commitment to Social Movement Activism
Social movement scholars have long recognized that participants in one campaign often develop a commitment to activism that inspires continued participation for years, even a lifetime. Scholars have identified a number of factors that inspire the development of commitment, including consciousness raising, empowerment, social ties and the development of a shared collective identity. In this article, we highlight another factor that the movement li…
We Can't Win This on Our Own: Unions, Firms, and Mobilization of External Allies in Labor Disputes
To cope with steep losses in membership and eroding legal protections, some unions have begun to look outward for help. Scholars likewise point to broad-based coalitions as a potential route to labor's revitalization. Yet surprisingly little is known about union coalition work, from when and why it occurs to what union allies typically bring to the table. We take up these issues with a unique dataset on strike events from the 1990s and 2000s, con…
The Uneven Patterning of Welfare Benefits at the Twilight of AFDC: Assessing the Influence of Institutions, Race, and Citizen Preferences
Scholars have been slow to test welfare state theories on the extensive subnational variation in the United States during the recent period of retrenchment. We assess institutional politics theories, literature on race and social policy, and public opinion arguments relative to levels of support in states' Aid to Families Dependent Children programs from 1982 until its elimination in 1996. Pooled time-series results demonstrate that the determina…
Union Threat, Countermovement Organization, and Labor Policy in the States, 1944-1960
This article evaluates social movement perspectives on repression and movement-countermovement organization relative to the wave of policy setbacks that unions experienced in the pivotal two decades following the New Deal. An event history analysis of the adoption of right-to-work laws across states between 1944 and 1960 supports social movement perspectives that emphasize the relative threat posed by challenging groups, but the impact of threat …
Changing to Win? Threat, Resistance, and the Role of Unions in Strikes, 1984-2002
Much of what we know about strikes is grounded in the context of postwar Fordism, a unique historical moment of relatively institutionalized labor‐management relations. Yet the resurgence of corporate resistance over the past quarter century, coupled with an increasingly hostile political and economic climate, has fundamentally transformed the American industrial landscape. Drawing from this research and insights on social movements and formal or…
Status, Networks, and Social Movement Participation: The Case of Striking Workers
Individual participation has been at the core of much theorizing and research on social movements. Little of this attention, however, has focused on the labor movement and individual strike involvement. In this article, the authors extend the literature by employing rational choice and network perspectives on social movement participation and by analyzing strike mobilization in a recent action by the Communication Workers of America. The data are…
Activist Human Capital: Skills Acquisition and the Development of Commitment to Social Movement Activism
Social movement scholars have long recognized that participants in one campaign often develop a commitment to activism that inspires continued participation for years, even a lifetime. Scholars have identified a number of factors that inspire the development of commitment, including consciousness raising, empowerment, social ties and the development of a shared collective identity. In this article, we highlight another factor that the movement li…
We Can't Win This on Our Own: Unions, Firms, and Mobilization of External Allies in Labor Disputes
To cope with steep losses in membership and eroding legal protections, some unions have begun to look outward for help. Scholars likewise point to broad-based coalitions as a potential route to labor's revitalization. Yet surprisingly little is known about union coalition work, from when and why it occurs to what union allies typically bring to the table. We take up these issues with a unique dataset on strike events from the 1990s and 2000s, con…
Allies, Targets, and the Effectiveness of Coalition Protest: A Comparative Analysis of Labor Unrest In the U. S. South
Social movement scholars suggest that coalitions comprise a significant and growing portion of all protest mobilizations. Such organizational collaboration is of great practical importance to the labor movement in particular, as unions struggle to succeed on their own in a difficult economic and political environment. Yet surprisingly little is known about the factors underlying the development and success of coalitions. In this article we advanc…
The Politics of Labor-Management Relations: Detecting the Conditions that Affect Changes in Right-to-Work Laws
To contain the costs of conflicts between labor and management, governments in the advanced democracies have adopted far-reaching provisions that regulate labor-management disputes. This close control means that the legal climate is an important determinant of victory in these struggles, but there is almost no statistical research on the recent politics of labor-management relations despite the theoretical importance of this issue. To begin to fi…
Manufacturing Dissent: Labor Revitalization, Union Summer and Student Protest
During the late 1990s, college students across the United States mobilized around labor issues. Our research explores whether this explosion of student protest activity was generated, in part, by concerted efforts of the AFL-CIO through its Union Summer college student internship program. A statistical analysis of factors influencing the location of Students Against Sweatshops chapters and student labor protest confirms that the Union Summer prog…
Union Threat, Countermovement Organization, and Labor Policy in the States, 1944-1960
This article evaluates social movement perspectives on repression and movement-countermovement organization relative to the wave of policy setbacks that unions experienced in the pivotal two decades following the New Deal. An event history analysis of the adoption of right-to-work laws across states between 1944 and 1960 supports social movement perspectives that emphasize the relative threat posed by challenging groups, but the impact of threat …
Changing to Win? Threat, Resistance, and the Role of Unions in Strikes, 1984-2002
Much of what we know about strikes is grounded in the context of postwar Fordism, a unique historical moment of relatively institutionalized labor‐management relations. Yet the resurgence of corporate resistance over the past quarter century, coupled with an increasingly hostile political and economic climate, has fundamentally transformed the American industrial landscape. Drawing from this research and insights on social movements and formal or…
Movements, Countermovements and Policy Adoption: The Case of Right-to-Work Activism
Research on social movements and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years, yet little of this work considers the role of movement opponents in the political process or how the movement-countermovement dynamic is influential in contests over policy. This historical study begins to fill this void by analyzing the contestation between employers and labor movement actors in relation to two critical right-to-work campaigns in the indust…
Limiting Labor: Business Political Mobilization and Union Setback in the States
The 1940s were heady times for the American labor movement. The tight wartime labor market and the backing of the federal government in defense industries facilitated impressive membership gains for both AFL and CIO unions. By 1945, labor unions represented almost 35 percent of the workforce—a more than fivefold increase from the early 1930s. What is more, union membership gains penetrated previously unorganized and resistant regions like the Sou…
Unions, Solidarity, and Striking
Organizational resources and group solidarity are central foci in literature on social movements generally and worker insurgency specifically. Research, however, seldom deals with both simultaneously and their potential interrelations. In this article, we examine the complex relationships between union organization and worker solidarity relative to strike action. We draw on a data set of 133 content-coded workplace ethnographies and use a combina…
Parenting agendas: An empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development
Intensive parenting debates reflect the critical importance of a child's early years, and parents' roles in determining later developmental outcomes. Mothers are usually assigned primary responsibility for facilitating their infants' cognitive development through adequate and appropriate sensory stimulation. Drawing on Foucault's technologies of the self, this article explores how new mothers shape their mothering practices in order to provide ap…
Social Protest and Corporate Change: Brand Visibility, Third-Party Influence, and the Responsiveness of Corporations to Activist Campaigns
From corporate social responsibility initiatives to the adoption of domestic partner benefits in large firms, there is mounting evidence of the impact of activism on corporate behavior. This study advances the understanding of these outside challenges by identifying the multiple and context-dependent ways that movements matter for corporate change. Drawing from data on wide-ranging “corporate campaigns” waged by social movement organizations agai…
The Uneven Patterning of Welfare Benefits at the Twilight of AFDC: Assessing the Influence of Institutions, Race, and Citizen Preferences
Scholars have been slow to test welfare state theories on the extensive subnational variation in the United States during the recent period of retrenchment. We assess institutional politics theories, literature on race and social policy, and public opinion arguments relative to levels of support in states' Aid to Families Dependent Children programs from 1982 until its elimination in 1996. Pooled time-series results demonstrate that the determina…
Political partisanship, race, and union strength from 1970 to 2000: A pooled time-series analysis
Racial Competition and Class Solidarity
The University Works Because We Do: On the Determinants of Campus Labor Organizing in the 1990s
University campuses experienced a surge in protest activity around labor issues during the late 1990s, highlighted by several high-profile graduate employee unionization campaigns. Some scholars and activists attribute these developments to notable changes in the academy, while others note that this wave of activity coincided with revitalization efforts by the broader U.S. labor movement that included reaching out to new constituencies and colleg…
Can States Lead the Way to Universal Coverage? The Effect of Health‐Care Reform on the Uninsured
Objective. This study assesses the impact of state policy reforms on health insurance coverage in the U.S. states considering three approaches to reform: consumer protection policies, policies relaxing regulation on insurance companies, and policies expanding public benefits. Methods. Using data collected from several publicly available sources, we estimate state insurance coverage using fixed‐effects pooled time‐series regression from 1992 to 20…
Status Divisions and Worker Mobilization
The relatively conservative trajectory of the American labor movement often has been attributed to enduring status divisions among workers such as race and ethnicity, occupation, and skill. Such divisions, it has been argued in the literature, fragment working-class organization and pose limits on solidarity. Recent analyses of labor and class-based mobilization, however, have begun to challenge this assumption, suggesting that the impact of pert…
The role of combinatorial health technologies in supporting older people with long-term conditions: Responsibilisation or co-management of healthcare
The Conservative Upsurge and Labor Policy in the States
During the early- to mid-2010s, there was a dramatic upsurge in conservative legislation restricting labor unions in U.S. states. The sweeping Republican victories at the state level in the 2010 midterm elections certainly enabled this legislative surge, though not all states controlled by conservative governments passed such legislation and there was considerable variation in the number of laws passed among states that did. Understanding the con…
Framing the Field: The Case of the 1969 Charleston Hospital Workers' Strike
We investigate how union, employer and allied actors engage in framing contests and seek to gain the upper hand in a strike event by analyzing a historically significant labor and civil-rights struggle in the 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina against the Medical College of South Carolina (MCSC). Through an analysis of newspapers, interviews, and archival materials, we show how discursive tactics by multiple actors supers…
Young Low-Income Mothers' Identity Work around Infant Feeding in the UK
This article focuses on young low-income mothers' engagement with, and management of, potentially conflicting discourses within the context of maternal foodwork. Findings from qualitative, longitudinal interviews with 13 UK women illustrate the performance of identity and family work, in relation to infant feeding and wider maternal practices. Each participant was interviewed twice, once prior to, and then following, the birth of their first baby…
Leveraging corporate influence
Movement scholars have become increasingly interested in the way in which social movement actors target non-state entities, particularly corporations. The reason for this is quite simple: globalization, neoliberal policies adopted by the state, and new legal protections via court rulings have allowed businesses to exert considerable influence across all facets of society. In light of these changes, movements have found targeting the state less ef…
Union Organizing and Labor Outreach in the Contemporary United States
Despite their long decline, labor unions increasingly find themselves in the news. From the spirited debate over income inequality, to fights over minimum wage and the unlikely mobilization of fast food workers at the very bottom of the American labor market, labor issues are of great public interest. In this article, I review scholarship on contemporary union organizing and outreach activity. This work suggests that while innovative organizing a…
Status, Networks, and Social Movement Participation: The Case of Striking Workers
Individual participation has been at the core of much theorizing and research on social movements. Little of this attention, however, has focused on the labor movement and individual strike involvement. In this article, the authors extend the literature by employing rational choice and network perspectives on social movement participation and by analyzing strike mobilization in a recent action by the Communication Workers of America. The data are…
Unions, Solidarity, and Striking
Organizational resources and group solidarity are central foci in literature on social movements generally and worker insurgency specifically. Research, however, seldom deals with both simultaneously and their potential interrelations. In this article, we examine the complex relationships between union organization and worker solidarity relative to strike action. We draw on a data set of 133 content-coded workplace ethnographies and use a combina…
Status Divisions and Worker Mobilization
The relatively conservative trajectory of the American labor movement often has been attributed to enduring status divisions among workers such as race and ethnicity, occupation, and skill. Such divisions, it has been argued in the literature, fragment working-class organization and pose limits on solidarity. Recent analyses of labor and class-based mobilization, however, have begun to challenge this assumption, suggesting that the impact of pert…
The Politics of Labor-Management Relations: Detecting the Conditions that Affect Changes in Right-to-Work Laws
To contain the costs of conflicts between labor and management, governments in the advanced democracies have adopted far-reaching provisions that regulate labor-management disputes. This close control means that the legal climate is an important determinant of victory in these struggles, but there is almost no statistical research on the recent politics of labor-management relations despite the theoretical importance of this issue. To begin to fi…
Limiting Labor: Business Political Mobilization and Union Setback in the States
The 1940s were heady times for the American labor movement. The tight wartime labor market and the backing of the federal government in defense industries facilitated impressive membership gains for both AFL and CIO unions. By 1945, labor unions represented almost 35 percent of the workforce—a more than fivefold increase from the early 1930s. What is more, union membership gains penetrated previously unorganized and resistant regions like the Sou…
Racial Competition and Class Solidarity
Manufacturing Dissent: Labor Revitalization, Union Summer and Student Protest
During the late 1990s, college students across the United States mobilized around labor issues. Our research explores whether this explosion of student protest activity was generated, in part, by concerted efforts of the AFL-CIO through its Union Summer college student internship program. A statistical analysis of factors influencing the location of Students Against Sweatshops chapters and student labor protest confirms that the Union Summer prog…
Movements, Countermovements and Policy Adoption: The Case of Right-to-Work Activism
Research on social movements and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years, yet little of this work considers the role of movement opponents in the political process or how the movement-countermovement dynamic is influential in contests over policy. This historical study begins to fill this void by analyzing the contestation between employers and labor movement actors in relation to two critical right-to-work campaigns in the indust…
The University Works Because We Do: On the Determinants of Campus Labor Organizing in the 1990s
University campuses experienced a surge in protest activity around labor issues during the late 1990s, highlighted by several high-profile graduate employee unionization campaigns. Some scholars and activists attribute these developments to notable changes in the academy, while others note that this wave of activity coincided with revitalization efforts by the broader U.S. labor movement that included reaching out to new constituencies and colleg…
Can States Lead the Way to Universal Coverage? The Effect of Health‐Care Reform on the Uninsured
Objective. This study assesses the impact of state policy reforms on health insurance coverage in the U.S. states considering three approaches to reform: consumer protection policies, policies relaxing regulation on insurance companies, and policies expanding public benefits. Methods. Using data collected from several publicly available sources, we estimate state insurance coverage using fixed‐effects pooled time‐series regression from 1992 to 20…
Union Threat, Countermovement Organization, and Labor Policy in the States, 1944-1960
This article evaluates social movement perspectives on repression and movement-countermovement organization relative to the wave of policy setbacks that unions experienced in the pivotal two decades following the New Deal. An event history analysis of the adoption of right-to-work laws across states between 1944 and 1960 supports social movement perspectives that emphasize the relative threat posed by challenging groups, but the impact of threat …
Changing to Win? Threat, Resistance, and the Role of Unions in Strikes, 1984-2002
Much of what we know about strikes is grounded in the context of postwar Fordism, a unique historical moment of relatively institutionalized labor‐management relations. Yet the resurgence of corporate resistance over the past quarter century, coupled with an increasingly hostile political and economic climate, has fundamentally transformed the American industrial landscape. Drawing from this research and insights on social movements and formal or…
Political partisanship, race, and union strength from 1970 to 2000: A pooled time-series analysis
The Uneven Patterning of Welfare Benefits at the Twilight of AFDC: Assessing the Influence of Institutions, Race, and Citizen Preferences
Scholars have been slow to test welfare state theories on the extensive subnational variation in the United States during the recent period of retrenchment. We assess institutional politics theories, literature on race and social policy, and public opinion arguments relative to levels of support in states' Aid to Families Dependent Children programs from 1982 until its elimination in 1996. Pooled time-series results demonstrate that the determina…
We Can't Win This on Our Own: Unions, Firms, and Mobilization of External Allies in Labor Disputes
To cope with steep losses in membership and eroding legal protections, some unions have begun to look outward for help. Scholars likewise point to broad-based coalitions as a potential route to labor's revitalization. Yet surprisingly little is known about union coalition work, from when and why it occurs to what union allies typically bring to the table. We take up these issues with a unique dataset on strike events from the 1990s and 2000s, con…
Allies, Targets, and the Effectiveness of Coalition Protest: A Comparative Analysis of Labor Unrest In the U. S. South
Social movement scholars suggest that coalitions comprise a significant and growing portion of all protest mobilizations. Such organizational collaboration is of great practical importance to the labor movement in particular, as unions struggle to succeed on their own in a difficult economic and political environment. Yet surprisingly little is known about the factors underlying the development and success of coalitions. In this article we advanc…
Activist Human Capital: Skills Acquisition and the Development of Commitment to Social Movement Activism
Social movement scholars have long recognized that participants in one campaign often develop a commitment to activism that inspires continued participation for years, even a lifetime. Scholars have identified a number of factors that inspire the development of commitment, including consciousness raising, empowerment, social ties and the development of a shared collective identity. In this article, we highlight another factor that the movement li…
Union Organizing and Labor Outreach in the Contemporary United States
Despite their long decline, labor unions increasingly find themselves in the news. From the spirited debate over income inequality, to fights over minimum wage and the unlikely mobilization of fast food workers at the very bottom of the American labor market, labor issues are of great public interest. In this article, I review scholarship on contemporary union organizing and outreach activity. This work suggests that while innovative organizing a…
Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy
Coalitions and the Bottom Line: Strikes, Allies, and Company Stock Returns
Scholars have long recognized how coalitions are critical for many social movements. This is especially evident in the labor movement, which has begun to seek external allies in the face of corporate attacks. Building on qualitative work linking coalition building to success, we seek to identify the mechanisms by which coalitions are able to exert leverage on targets. Specifically, we consider how coalitions allow unions to exert greater financia…
Organization, Opportunity, and the Shifting Politics of Employment Discrimination
Despite the major breakthrough for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists on marriage equality, the fight against employment discrimination remains elusive. Whether one is protected from discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity depends on where one lives and is contingent on a patchwork of state and local policies. In this article, we investigate the adoption of state nondiscrimination l…
Social Protest and Corporate Change: Brand Visibility, Third-Party Influence, and the Responsiveness of Corporations to Activist Campaigns
From corporate social responsibility initiatives to the adoption of domestic partner benefits in large firms, there is mounting evidence of the impact of activism on corporate behavior. This study advances the understanding of these outside challenges by identifying the multiple and context-dependent ways that movements matter for corporate change. Drawing from data on wide-ranging “corporate campaigns” waged by social movement organizations agai…
Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement by Thomas Geoghegan
Framing the Field: The Case of the 1969 Charleston Hospital Workers' Strike
We investigate how union, employer and allied actors engage in framing contests and seek to gain the upper hand in a strike event by analyzing a historically significant labor and civil-rights struggle in the 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina against the Medical College of South Carolina (MCSC). Through an analysis of newspapers, interviews, and archival materials, we show how discursive tactics by multiple actors supers…
Leveraging corporate influence
Movement scholars have become increasingly interested in the way in which social movement actors target non-state entities, particularly corporations. The reason for this is quite simple: globalization, neoliberal policies adopted by the state, and new legal protections via court rulings have allowed businesses to exert considerable influence across all facets of society. In light of these changes, movements have found targeting the state less ef…
Political science (32 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Economics (23 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (22 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Social movement (14 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (11 works) · Law (10 works)