In October 2010, the state government of Andhra Pradesh issued an ordinance prohibiting microfinance institutions from distributing and collecting loans following allegations that over-indebtedness and coercive loan recovery tactics were causing borrower suicides. While no evidence substantiating a link between microfinance and borrower suicide has been provided, an anti-microfinance movement across India developed with clients reneging on their loans. Indian microfinance risked insolvency and the once lauded poverty alleviating movement was perceived as a villain by the international community. Microfinance was in crisis. <br>How a social movement such as microfinance responds to a crisis is an understudied topic in social movement literature. By contrast, crisis management is an extensively analyzed topic in business literature. This thesis aims to develop five broad crisis managing concepts from this business literature and probe them in the case of Indian microfinance. The five concepts probed include: denial, retaliation, purification, reform, and re-authentication. All five tactics were observed to occur. This thesis concludes with two findings. First, social movement crisis management is an area primed for future research. Second, this research needs to be applied to other social movements in crisis to eventually develop a model that explains how social movements respond and should respond to crises. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy / MA / Thesis

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University , 2009. / Title from PDF title page (publisher's website, viewed April 21, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-218).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Patricia Yancey Martin, Florida State University, College of Social Sciences, Dept. of Sociology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 27, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Colorado, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-252).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 275-288).

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Also available in print.

Diss. (summary) Karlstad : Karlstads universitet, 2005. / Includes bibliography. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Governments have done little to address poverty and homelessness despite awareness of the increasing number of people affected by these issues. Neoliberalizing processes and resulting federal and provincial social policy changes since the 1980s have driven the decimation of Canada’s welfare state and contributed to expanding inequalities that systematically privilege a wealthy few at the expense of the balance of Canadians, particularly those living in poverty. Collective resistances may be the best available and most powerful tool people in poverty, including those who experience homelessness, possess to challenge government policy directions and outcomes that marginalize their voices, needs, and wants. The literature on collective action of people in poverty and who experience homelessness is sparse. Scholarship incorporating the voices of people who experience homelessness and participate in collective action is meager within this small body of literature. The role agency plays in individual behaviors and how such choices may be shaped by social conditions, is relatively unexamined. An activist ethnography, with structural violence as described by Paul Farmer as the critical frame, was used to explore the role various types of agency played in collective actions of people with experiences of homelessness or experience housing insecurity in the Capital Region of British Columbia. Primary questions guiding the research were “What were participants’ experiences of collective change efforts? How may these efforts be understood within a structural violence framework? To answer these questions I chronicle and critically examine the challenges and successes of “The Committee”, a group of housed and unhoused activists as one example of collective actors that ‘push back’ against processes and practices that produce and reproduce homelessness. Findings suggest that structurally violent processes generate embodied outcomes, lived experiences that constrain agency, often working to exclude people with experience of homelessness from collective resistances. Participation of people who are actively homeless or with experiences of homelessness in collective resistances requires attending to basic material needs and daily life issues in ways that allow meaningful participation in organizing work as a precursor to collective action. Allies can reproduce structures of violence and contribute to dismantling those same structures. Relationships between people with experience of homelessness and allies may work to mitigate unequal power relations, allowing some people with experiences of homelessness opportunities for participation in collective resistances not otherwise available to them. Implications for grassroots organizing and inclusion of people with experience of homelessness in collective resistances are included. / Graduate

This dissertation explores how three social movements deployed an anti-neoliberal master frame during the course of a multi-movement protest wave. Using ethnographic content analysis. I examine the Global Justice (GJM), Antiwar (AWM), and Immigrant Rights movements (IRM) of the 2000s to offer a theoretical synthesis of the framing perspective in social movements and Gramscian hegemony, which I call the counter-hegemonic framing approach. This approach links the contested discursive practices of social movements to historically specific political-economic contexts to offer a macro framework to make sense of this meso-level activity that illuminates the development of a counter-hegemonic master frame. I apply this approach in case studies of each movement and a culminating incorporated comparison. In the GJM chapter, I found that the GJM frames neoliberal institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund as influenced by corporate power. Second, the GJM amplifies the symptoms of neoliberal globalization such as global inequality and environmental degradation. Third, there is a master frame specific to neoliberalism which defines neoliberal globalization as a corporate project that seeks to reduce environmental, human rights, and labor regulations by eroding sovereignty in order to open markets and increase profits. For the AWM, I found that the movement integrated the context of both rollback and rollout neoliberalism into their framing to build opposition to the Afghan and Iraq War. In addition, following the corporate power frame of the GJM, the AWM problematizes the involvement of corporations in foreign policy discussions. For the IRM, I found that one of the central goals of their framing was to deflect blame away from undocumented immigrants. There are two ways the IRM accomplished this. First, the IRM emphasized the economic contributions of immigrants. Second, the IRM emphasized the impact of neoliberal globalization as a cause of increased immigration and social problems for which migrants were blamed. Finally, in an incorporated comparison of these case studies I found a distinct anti-neoliberal “repertoire of interpretation,” which forms the basis of an anti-neoliberal master frame that emphasizes US hegemony, corporate power, economic inequality, and neoliberal rollout.