Search results
emotional factors influence behaviour. Yet, because he believed it was ‘not possible to get empirical proof of the motivation behind any person’s action[s]’, he removed them from his research agenda [1965: 61]. Consequently, Olson’s work ignores emotions and identities, which are aspects of human behaviour that give us a much richer understanding of movements and participation, beyond mere self-interested action. Extending Olson’s application of rational choice theory, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald concentrated their attention on social movement organisations (1973, 1977
In 1960–62, a large number of white autochthonous parents in Southall became very concerned that the sudden influx of largely non-Anglophone Indian immigrant children in local schools would hold back their children’s education. It was primarily to placate such fears that ‘dispersal’ (or ‘bussing’) was introduced in areas such as Southall and Bradford, as well as to promote the integration of mostly Asian children. It consisted in sending busloads of immigrant children to predominantly white suburban schools, in an effort to ‘spread the burden’. This form of social engineering went on until the early 1980s. This book, by mobilising local and national archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals the extent to which dispersal was a flawed policy, mostly because thousands of Asian pupils were faced with racist bullying on the playgrounds of Ealing, Bradford, etc. It also investigates the debate around dispersal and the integration of immigrant children, e.g. by analysing the way some Local Education Authorities (Birmingham, London) refused to introduce bussing. It studies the various forms that dispersal took in the dozen or so LEAs where it operated. Finally, it studies local mobilisations against dispersal by ethnic associations and individuals. It provides an analysis of debates around ‘ghetto schools’, ‘integration’, ‘separation’, ‘segregation’ where quite often the US serves as a cognitive map to make sense of the English situation.
The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been reinvigorated in recent years. Its public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible, replete with rioting, barricades and Molotov cocktails. This book is concerned not so much with anarchist theory, as with examining the forces that give the Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement its specific shape. The author draws on Alberto Melucci's (1995a) work on collective identity, while offering a first-hand, ethnographic account of Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians in action, based on his time there in 2011 and 2013, living, squatting and protesting within this milieu. In the course of the chapters of the book, the author argues that varying shades of anarchic tendencies, and ensuing ideological and practical disagreements, are overcome for the most part in (often violent) street-protests. Athenian anarchists and antiauthoritarians are a pertinent area of research because of both their politics and their geographical location. There is the whole 'rise of anarchism throughout the activist world' phenomenon, visible from Seattle to Genoa, Quebec City to São Paulo. Anarchist and anti-authoritarian social movements are prominent actors in resistance to the current phase of capitalism in multiple, global locations. Throughout Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and the Antipodes, radical resistance to neo-liberalism often has an anarchist and/ or anti-authoritarian cast.
). 12 Ibid. 13 See for example: Robert Michel, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Collier Books, 1962); Doug McAdam, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (eds.) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12
Altman, ‘Embodied Health Movements’, p. 73; Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004; Tarrow, Power in Movement; McAdam, Political Process . 29 Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer Zald, Comparative perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 30 Brown and Zavestoski, ‘Social Movements in Health’, p. 690; Emily S. Kolker
and Mayer Zald called, after Michael Harrington, the “conscience constituents”, that is direct and often decisive supporters of a social movement organisation who, nevertheless, “do not stand to benefit directly from its success in goal accomplishment”.50 The role of the “conscience constituents” has often been deemed all the more pivotal in circumstances when the aggrieved group is made up of members of a subordinate class, 51 in the present case immigrant, largely non-Anglophone communities. The RRB and Usha Prashar As we already know, the RRB took the issue of