Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 139 p. : ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 128-134).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 21, 2006). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 493-512).

Uppsatsen ämnar undersöka huruvida politiska möjlighetsstrukturer och inramningar i sociala medier kan förklara det ökade stödet för miljöorganisationen Sierra Club. De politiska möjlighetstrukturerna har analyserats utifrån McAdams (1996) fyra dimensioner för att förstå den politiska strukturen i USA. Inramningsperspektivet har använts som verktyg i innehållsanalysen av Sierra Clubs Twitterinlägg som systematiskt valts ut under en treveckorsperiod under 2015 respektive 2016. Inramningsperspektivet inom rörelseforskningen utvecklades av David Snow och Robert Benford som en anpassning av Erving Goffmans ramteori, för att möjliggöra analys på gruppnivå. För att kunna urskilja förändringar i Sierra Clubs retorik har två olika tidsintervaller granskats. Innehållsanalysen visar att Twitter-inläggen ändrat karaktär 2016 och bär på stridslystna undertoner med en tydligt definierad skuldbärare. I analysen av de politiska möjlighetsstrukturerna framkommer en bild av att valet 2016 bidragit till instabilitet i elitgrupperingar. De valda teoriperspektiven har möjlighet att kombinerat förklara Sierra Clubs ökade stöd. Med detta sagt betyder det inte att dessa perspektiv utgör den enda förklaringsmodellen. / This study explores the evolution of the environmental organisation Sierra Club, in relation to the United States presidential election in 2016, through a theoretical perspective. It examines if the theories of framing and political opportunity structures can explain the organisation’s success. The political context was analysed using McAdam’s four dimensions of political opportunity structures in order to determine its restrictions for social movements. A content analysis was applied to Sierra Club’s Twitter posts from a three week period in 2016 and 2015 respectively for the purpose of comparing the rhetoric during the two different time periods based on the key concepts of Benford and Snow’s framing theory. The results show that the election itself contributed to instability between elite alignments while Sierra Club’s Twitter-posts changed tone to become more aggressive and more specific in focusing the blame. The chosen theories proved suitable for analysing the occurrence but we cannot however disregard the possibility of other results emerging when using a different theoretical approach.

Concern of this master thesis are action repertoires of czech feminist organizations. The main goal of this paper is to find out whether there are some types of activism in terms of following characteristics in the Czech Republic: organizational age, political opportunity structure, human and financial resources, and action repertoir to be found. The thesis is devided into two parts - theoretical and empirical. The author introduces evolution of the social movement theory in the theoretical part. Greater attention is given to an advocacy function of civil society organizations and to action repertoire, which social movement organizations use to reach their goals. Subsequently is shown how the literature talks about particular forms of action and its selection. There are characteristics mentioned above used in Hierarchical Cluster Analysis on sample of twenty-nine czech feminist organization in the empirical part. Finally, findings of this paper are being discussed. Keywords: Action repertoires, social movements, social movements organization, non-governmental organizations, feminist organizations, Czech activism.

This project returns to the questions that were once at the center of the urban studies debate over social movements. What are urban social movements, and what impacts do they leave on the cities where they occur? Urban protests in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington are used as the foundation for exploring the following research questions: What urban social movements occurred in the Pacific Northwest during 1990s? What goals were these movements struggling for? What impacts did urban social movements have on daily life in Portland and Seattle? While this project has continuity with earlier attempts to identify, describe, and assess the role that urban social movements play in cities, it also represents a significant departure from the established ways of understanding this phenomenon. Manuel Castells' (1983) theory on urban social movements considered local activism ineffectual, if it could not produce serious revolutionary change. A different portrait of urban social movements emerged in this project. Pacific Northwest urban protests challenged existing social relationships in neighborhoods, at work, in public services, in the construction and use of urban space, and in the imagination of the city. These protests grew out of the everyday life experiences of their participants and sought to transform the patterns and relationships of daily life. Since urban social movements arise from everyday life, their impacts will be evident in a community's use of time, construction of space, development of social relationships, and sense of possibility. The ability of urban social movements to radically alter the everyday lives of their participants and communities of interest is, in and of itself, significant. As these changes reverberate beyond the boundaries of these directly impacted communities, they have the potential to create broader citywide changes. It is these transformations that are the building blocks for the active construction of our urban cultures, spaces, and communities.

This thesis explores how online gaming has become a central tool for networked social movements to participate in consumer activism. I look at the case study of MapleStory: a Korean MMORPG game and their consumer activism efforts started by the players. Migrating from different social media channels to organize, coordinate and strategize ways to create change within their group, through using consumeractivism techniques such as boycotting, protesting and spreading information. I framed this group as an early example of a networked social movements and analyzed their usage of social groups to spread activism messages. Through the internet and new technologies members were able to find their own political voices and teach others how to protest for social change. I also concentrated on the social aspect of these communities and how they fostered social bonds through collective action and participation. I argue that online gaming has become a platform that enables consumers to protest against a company’smal practices by utilizing their positions as consumers of a product.

Firm behavior and performance has become increasingly susceptible to the influence of secondary stakeholders—namely community activists, advocacy groups, religious organizations, and other non-governmental organizations that often represent a broader social movement. Despite recent suggestions that secondary stakeholder demands trigger an important two-sided interactive process between secondary stakeholders and their targeted firms, little theoretical or empirical attention has been placed on firm-sided factors that influence the dynamics and outcomes of these interactions, especially the role and influence of the firm’s top managers during these interactions. In this three-essay dissertation, I theorize about and examine the influential role that the firm’s top managers expectedly occupy within the interactions that occur between secondary stakeholders and the firms that are the targets of their demands. My dissertation contributes to advancing strategic management and organization research by (1) examining influential managerial attributes that influence their firm’s responsiveness toward secondary stakeholder activism, and (2) examining certain important consequences of managerial responses for secondary stakeholder behavior and the targeted firm.

This thesis focuses on whether protest affects the levels of repression in electoral democracies and, if so, in what manner. After an overview of the literature, Chapter 2 contains an empirical analysis of the relationship between protest and repression at a global level, using a dataset of 71 democracies over 10 years. The results point to a positive association between protest and repression that is driven primarily by post-1974 democracies. The chapter then develops a theoretical model of the costs and benefits accruing to a democratic leader when deciding whether to repress a protest. The model yields a number of testable hypotheses about which factors will affect the likelihood that repression will be chosen, which are then tested for using cross-national and sub-national data. The impact of constitutional constraints is examined first using the cross-national dataset, which reveals that executives in new democracies centralise power in response to protest. Chapter 4 is a quantitative study of the 27 Brazilian states over a 9-year period using data on the repression of land protesters and political variables. The results indicate that governors with precarious political positions are less likely to promote repressive policing strategies. Chapter 5 uses data drawn from five Brazilian national newspapers to identify whether under-reporting of land protest events might contribute to the level of state repression. Chapter 6 is a qualitative comparison of two states – São Paulo and Pará – and suggests that while tight political control over the police explains repression in the former, the unaccountability of the police and the ideology of the main opposition parties in the state assembly may explain why the latter has a much higher level of repression than would be predicted by political factors alone. Chapter 7 revisits the cross-national dataset of 71 democracies to test whether additional determinants of repression identified in Chapter 6 have an effect at the global level.

Food Hubs are in a unique yet precarious position to help the local food movement reform unsustainable aspects of the conventional food system but they themselves face challenges in strategic planning and managing growth. Due to the lack of consensus on what local food’s values are, the construction of meaning and the local food movement itself is at risk of being coopted by the very systems it seeks to reform. This research aims to explain the role of key stakeholders and their impact on the local food movement through a sequential explanatory design which seeks to answer the questions of who and what really counts among Food Hub stakeholders. Relying on stakeholder theory, stakeholder salience and social movement frameworks, the research has shown that Food Hubs consider their internal and customer stakeholders as highly important to strategic planning, yet could work more effectively at engaging regulatory and community stakeholders to construct and advance their own objectives as well as those of the local food movement.

The challenges of water governance in Chile today lie at the confluence of growing water demands, increasing climatic variability, and mounting discontent with neoliberal water policy. These these dynamics coalesce in the Maipo, Chile's most densely populated river basin and seat of the capital city, Santiago. The Maipo River sustains the growing capital city of Santiago, booming agricultural production in the Santiago valley, and hydroelectric generation from the river's swift descent from the Andes. Now, with the population of Santiago exceeding 5 million, a seventh year of drought racking central Chile, and controversial hydropower development sparking mass protests, the stakes of water governance in this critical river basin are higher than ever. Based on in-depth empirical research in the Maipo River basin, this thesis explores how processes of environmental and social change interact with Chile's internationally famous water laws to shape water governance, understood as the set of processes through which actors influence decision-making and conflict resolution related to water resources. Bringing legal geography and political ecology into conversation with water governance literature, I analyze the ways that law, social mobilization, and water scarcity are shaping water governance. In Chapter 1, I analyze the law of river sectioning and the way it influences water use and management practices throughout the Maipo River basin. Chapter 2 explores the Alto Maipo hydropower conflict in the upper basin and demonstrates the important role of social movement actors trying to shift water governance in new directions. Themes from both of these chapters converge in Chapter 3, which examines the struggle over the meaning of water scarcity in the context of increasing attention to drought and climate change. These dynamic socio-environmental processes are considered in relation to each other as integral parts of the ongoing negotiation of water governance. This research aims to insert considerations of social and environmental justice into ongoing policy debates about water governance in Chile to address the conflicts stemming from uneven access to resources and decision-making.