This research explores the themes of participation and professionalization as they intersect with power in domestic violence advocacy by using a case study from one region in Kentucky. Throughout this dissertation, I investigate the ways political and economic pressures influence local domestic violence advocates and the ways these macro-level pressures influence 1) an advocate's level of participation in the organization and 2) a transition in social service provision to a professional model of advocacy. The research illustrates that the nature of domestic violence service provision is changing in the United States as a result of the increasingly privatized nature of social service provision and subsequent shifts in domestic violence advocacy participation practices and professionalization trends.Specifically, I explore the relationships between power and levels of participation in domestic violence advocacy by examining the relationship between power, the expectation for increased professionalization within social service agencies, and the local level negotiations of these expectations. Furthermore, I provide an ethnographic description of the daily activities of a domestic violence organization to illustrate why, how, and what aspects of the program are transformed in a new model of professionalized social service provision. Additionally, this research includes the voices of oral history participants in the domestic violence social movement in Kentucky. As services in Kentucky undergo a transformation aimed at further professionalizing domestic violence advocacy, the historic local knowledge of domestic violence advocacy and activism is useful for clarifying the foundations of contemporary advocacy service provision and activism by providing a longitudinal perspective.The changing field of domestic violence advocacy is marked by the move towards unequal power relationships between the advocates and the women, the lack of victims' and advocates' participation in the creation and implementation of programming and services, and the professionalization of domestic violence organizations and workers. This local case study contextualizes the trends that are currently acting upon social service organizations in general, thereby illustrating thecomplexity of human service provision by examining the multiple messages that domestic violence advocates, and thus human service care workers in general, negotiate.

This dissertation examines the growth of environmentally sustainable commercial building practices as a voluntary, market-based standard called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), created by the US Green Building Council. I address how environmental ideals became institutionalized and integrated into the design and construction of commercial buildings through the growth of this standard. My goal is to discuss the site at which an ideal becomes a part of organizational practice and to discuss mechanisms by which social movement ideals become institutionalized without the state as a coercive force.First, I look at the historical context in which the environmental movement and the green building movement emerged to see understand adoption of voluntary market-based standards. The USGBC was able to bring together three disparate forms: environmental ideals, the creation of a voluntary standard and a market-based profit focus. I examine how the decentralized environmental movement, the rise of "third wave" environmentalism and corporate strategic environmentalism and a lack of political opportunity made this new form a useful strategy for the movement. Then I examine the importance of the LEED AP accreditation program as a mechanism for integrating green practices into professional work by socializing them through three frames, the LEED system, integrated design and high efficiency buildings. I introduce a new model called hybrid professionalization to explain the integration of social movement ideals across an industry and with a variety of professional groups. Finally, I turn to the demand side of the field to examine the role of organizational consumers and their strategies to rationalize green building to stakeholders. I discuss various ways that green buildings allowed organizations to display and enact their greenness.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between black millennial political activism and social media use. In Phase One of the study, the attitudes of 126 black 18-29 year olds were measured via survey. Results from the survey show that there is a significant relationship between social media use and political activism. In Phase Two, ten high-scoring participants from Phase One were interviewed and analyzed using thematic coding. Examination of the influence of social media on black millennials can inform strategy used for the advancement of black communities and black activism through widespread, effective communication and an advocacy platform accessible by all.

A massive open-cast coal mine was proposed for Phulbari in 1994, with the support of the government and international financial organisations. Threatened by displacement, the apparently powerless community mobilised against the mine. Allied with the national and the transnational activist organisations, they successfully stopped the mine. This remarkable success is the subject of the thesis. This resistance is compared quantitatively with the incidence of protests in 397 other mines in the South Asia. Predictors of protest include density of population, proportion of area under forest cover, and ownership by a multinational company. These factors alone would predict a high probability of protest in Phulbari. To understand how the resistance unfolded and why it was successful, the thesis relies on ethnographic evidence. I conducted participant observation and interviewed sixty-four individuals in Phulbari and Dhaka in Bangladesh and in London. Mobilisation against the mine can be explained in part by dialogic framing. Local challengers continuously opposed the dominant discourse of development. Crucially, they shifted their identity to legitimize their opposition to the mine by tagging it with nationalism. As a result, local resistance established links with national left-wing activists. Mobilisation culminated in a mass march of 70,000 in 2006, which was fired on by government forces, with several casualties. Repression failed to quail the resistance. Continued mobilisation was motivated by emotional responses like anger, and facilitated by cultural practices like the obligatory funeral procession. Media reports of the repression catapulted the resistance on to the global stage. This alone is not sufficient to explain the formation of a transnational alliance against the mine. This was maintained by the presence of a large community of Bangladeshi living in Britain, and the mediating role of the left-wing activists in Bangladesh; both groups could translate between locals and western NGOs. This transnational coalition impeded the mining company by targeting international financial organisations, Western governments, the government of Bangladesh, and investors in London. As a result, the company’s share price has collapsed and there seems little prospect of the project proceeding.

Degrowth is an emerging field of research and a social movement founded on the premise that perpetual economic growth is incompatible with the biophysical limits of our finite planet (D’Alisa, Demaria & Kallis, 2014a; Asara, Otero, Demaria & Corbera, 2015). Despite the important work that degrowth scholars and activists have done to broadcast the fundamental contradiction between endless compound growth and a finite resource base, degrowth remains politically marginal, having received little mainstream attention or policy uptake. This thesis explores why. In particular, I examine barriers to and pathways towards the uptake of degrowth in Canada, a country that disproportionately contributes to climate breakdown. To do so I ask: 1) What barriers exist to advancing a degrowth agenda in Canada?; 2) How specifically do those barriers block degrowth from taking hold in contemporary Canadian policy and political discourse?; 3) How (if at all) are Canadian activists seeking to address these barriers? This research reveals that the political economy in Canada, and the way that is expressed in concentrations of elite and corporate power has given certain actors, particularly the fossil fuel industry, immense economic and political power. These concentrations of power, and the ways they are maintained reinforce a politics and discourse that is highly antithetical to the politics of degrowth, and thus serve as a major barrier to the emergence of degrowth. I argue, in order to move towards a degrowth politics, the hegemony of fossil capitalism in Canada, and the specific class interests that support it needs to be challenged. While degrowth has a strong critique of economic growth and capitalism, this alone is not enough. Any movement towards degrowth will require transforming power relations. This means continuing to explore the concrete ways specific institutions continue to create the political economic conditions that support fossil fueled growth as its main priority, and prioritizing building broad based movements to counter them. / Graduate

This study examines solidarity and fragmentations between trade unions and civil society organisations under the Labour and Civil Society Coalition LASCO, during the fuel subsidy mass-protest in Nigeria. To understand the basis of LASCO’s mobilisation during the strike/ mass-protest and the tension that follows the suspension of the strike within the alliance, the study utilises the literature on Social Movement Unionism especially in South Africa, with emphasise on trade unions community and political alliances. The classical SMU literature especially applied in South Africa and Brazil revealed that authoritarian industrialisation and repressive Apartheid work-place regime prompted unions to use innovative strategies of using their bargaining power to challenge the state, by rendering themselves ungovernable both in the work-place and in the society through linkages with communities. This study, relying on a case study method and participant observation of the strike and mass-protest in Kano, revealed that SMU mobilisation in Nigeria was triggered by predatory and weak state, whose rent seeking permeates the administration of subsidy in the oil industry. Secondly, the study argued that the tensions and divisions within LASCO alliance following the suspension of the perceived unilateral suspension of the strike by the Trade Unions explains the political and class orientation of both trade unions and civil society organisations. The study argues that Trade Unions behaviour in the context of the strike lean towards Hyman pessimist view of trade unions or what Beiler et’al called accommodatory strategy, a view that see unions as negotiators of order both in the work-place and in the larger society. On the other hand the civil society organisations typified multi-level organisations with different orientations that always seek for transformation of the social order or what Beiler et’al called transformatory strategy.

Cette thèse se propose d’étudier la politique linguistique de la Chine, à travers le prisme du mouvement pour la défense du cantonais apparu durant l’été 2010, le contexte général étudié étant celui allant des années 1950 à aujourd'hui. Durant l’été 2010, plusieurs manifestations au nom de la défense du cantonais ont eu lieu à Guangzhou, capitale de la province du Guangdong (Chine) et à Hong Kong, donnant lieu à des retombées médiatiques et des effets différés sur le plan politique en Chine. Cette affaire a révélé un sujet longtemps mis à l’écart dans l’aménagement linguistique de la Chine: celui des dialectes. Lors de la campagne de promotion du mandarin en 1955, peu d’attention avait été accordée au statut des autres langues du groupe Han, conventionnellement regroupées sous le terme de « dialectes ». Sous l’influence de l’urbanisation, de la mondialisation et de la promotion du mandarin, les dynamiques sociolinguistiques sont devenues de plus en plus complexes et diversifiées au sein du territoire. La demande pour trouver un point d’équilibre entre unité et diversité devient de plus en plus importante dans l’aménagement linguistique du pays. Reposant sur le débat autour du cantonais, cette étude s’attache à comprendre la synergie entre les pratiques, les aménagements et les idéologies linguistiques, ainsi que l’articulation des perspectives macro et microsociales dans la politique linguistique de la Chine. Elle met enfin en lumière le fait que si la politique linguistique intérieure chinoise est désormais l’objet d’une attention académique soutenue en Chine, elle le doit en partie au mouvement pour la défense du cantonais en 2010. / This study aims to examine the language policy of China through the prism of the “Movement for the defense of Cantonese” which happened during the summer of 2010. The general context studied is from the 1950s to the present days. In the summer of 2010, several demonstrations in the name of defending Cantonese broke out in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, resulting in numerous media spillovers and a series of political effects. The debate revealed a topic which has long been neglected in China’s language planning: the question of dialects. Ever since the beginning of the Mandarin promotion campaign in 1955, little attention has been paid to the status of other languages of the Han ethnic group, conventionally called "dialects". Nowadays, as China’s language situation is becoming more and more dynamics and complex under the influence of urbanization, globalization and the promotion of Mandarin, the demand for a balance between unity and diversity has become increasingly important in the country’s domestic language planning. Based on the debate over Cantonese, this study tries to understand the synergy between practice, management and ideology as well as the articulation of macro and micro perspectives in China's language policy. It also highlights the fact that if China’s domestic linguistic policy is now in the spotlight of academic attention in China, it owes partly to the movement for the defense of Cantonese in 2010.

Thesis advisor: Candace Jones / Online communities support collective action without many of the constraints that have belied collective actors and formal organizations in the past. They have become increasingly pervasive platforms for activism as well as potential catalysts for novelty in organizing practices. Scholars have shown that by leveraging affordances of the Internet, these communities have displaced or become complements to face-to-face organizations such as churches, community centers, labor unions and political groups that have traditionally structured civic engagement. Few empirical studies, however, systematically address how processes ranging from mobilization to the coordination of complex, large-scale collective action and practices that enable and support these processes are different in online environments. In this dissertation, I provide conceptual background that supports the study of online communities as dynamic and diverse modes of civic engagement. I reveal how locations, boundaries, interactions and identities are instantiated differently in online communities, influencing processes and practices that are crucial to social change. Using Internet-based ethnographic methods, I examine: (1) how an online community called `Anonymous' experiences shifts in purpose as it transitions from being focused on recreation to becoming both an incubator and support system for several social change projects and (2) how the community adopts a repertoire of coordinating practices that allows it to organize complex projects. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

Using the example of a locality this thesis examines the key elements of the new public health from a geographic perspective. Three voluntary groups (based in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets) have been examined as a case study of expressions of the new public health. The thesis argues that the new public health is an urban social movement, which has expressions at the local level which vary. It is argued that this variance results from the key elements which inform and shape the new public health. They are the nature of the public health activities and initiatives carried out; the organisation and representation of the groups that make up the movement; and the knowledge and activities informed by sense of the place that the groups have. The sense of place of the groups collectively, and the individuals within the groups, informs what public health activities and initiatives are implemented based on perceived need. The sense of place of the area is also the main mobilising factor for the agents who make up the public health groups and hence the new public health movement. The new public health movement is an urban social movement organised at a number of different geographical levels and in particular at the local and international levels. In discussing and describing how the new public health is a social movement, the thesis contends that previous exploration of social movements has failed to examine the importance that place has to the organisation and shape that movements take. This thesis, through a geographic analysis, constructs a new framework for looking at urban social movements with an emphasis on place. It also outlines how an geographical analysis of the new public health can broaden the focus of current research within medical geography by examining health within the wider context of society.

The study of ideology has long interested sociologists and consumer researchers alike. Much consumption research has approached ideology from various macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. However, many studies fail to address the dialogical interplay among these three levels of analysis when examining how ideology manifests in, and interacts with, consumer identity projects. Many consumption-based studies examining ideology provide descriptive and normative accounts, affording practices of consumption emancipatory potential. In response, this research adopts a critical marketing perspective in order to draw out the macro and political implications of meso cultural production systems and micro consumption experiences and identity projects. Focusing on the contemporary American feminist movement, and on discourses around sex and sexuality, it explores how hegemonic (patriarchal) and counterhegemonic (feminist) ideologies are communicated in the marketplace, through the media, to understand their role in regard to consumers’ lived experiences and interactions with advertisements. Working within the consumer culture theory tradition, this thesis employed a variant of phenomenological interviewing that explored female emerging adults’ sexual narratives and their interpretations of sexualized ads. By generating data on a specific type of experience, inferences were drawn about how young women experience and relate to the contemporary feminist movement. In total, 14 American women, aged 20 to 31, were interviewed twice and also created media collages of what they considered ‘sexy’. Implementing a multi-step hermeneutic analysis, the data were analyzed through an iterative process, moving back and forth between the idiographic cases and theory. Through multiple iterations, micro, meso, and macro level inferences were made. This study suggests that young women foster diverse and temporary identifications with feminism in the pursuit of two, often overlapping, goals: ontological security and status. This results in a micro process of ‘ideological shifting’, which has depoliticizing effects, insofar as (anti-) feminist brands and identities were readily appropriated and discarded depending on specific contexts and situations. Thus, contrary to much work in the consumer culture theory tradition, which presents consumption as having transgressive and liberating effects, this study finds that while the young women had the power to dialogically interact with marketized (meso level) ideologies that constitute the marketplace, they failed to intercept the macro level processes of marketization and commodification and consequently did not challenge the hegemonic (patriarchal) ideology at large. In adopting a critical perspective, this study offers valuable insight into the relationship between ideology and consumer behavior. Ideology is shown to be disseminated via hegemonic processes of commodification and marketization. Because these processes occur at a macro level, counterhegemonic ideologies are hegemonized and subsequently depoliticized before even reaching the consumer on a micro level. By examining ideology across all three levels, this study finds that consumer agency is largely relegated to the realm of the marketplace, where consumers’ dialogical interactions and consumption practices do not challenge the macro ideologies or oppression at large, but merely alter their marketplace expressions.