Social Order of Collective Action

The Wisconsin Uprising of 2011

Häftad, Engelska, 2020

659 kr

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The Wisconsin Uprising of 2011 was one of the largest sustained collective actions in the history of the United States. Newly-elected Governor Scott Walker introduced a shock proposal that threatened the existence of public unions and access to basic health care, then insisted on rapid passage. The protests that erupted were neither planned nor coordinated. The largest, in Madison, consolidated literally overnight into a horizontally organized leaderless and leaderful community. That community featured a high level of internal social order, complete with distribution of food and basic medical care, group assemblies for collective decision making, written rules and crowd marshaling to enforce them, and a moral community that made a profound emotional impact on its members. The resistance created a functioning commune inside the Wisconsin State Capitol Building.In contrast to what many social movement theories would predict, this round-the-clock protest grew to enormous size and lasted for weeks without direction from formal organizations. This book, written by a protest insider, argues based on immersive ethnographic observation and extensive interviewing that the movement had minimal direction from organizations or structure from political processes. Instead, it emerged interactively from collective effervescence, improvised non-hierarchical mechanisms of communication, and an escalating obligation for like-minded people to join and maintain their participation. Overall, the findings demonstrate that a large and complex collective action can occur without direction from formal organizations.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2020-07-09
Mått154 x 217 x 20 mm
Vikt408 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor274
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781498568999

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Preface IntroductionChapter 1: Analyzing the 2010 Elections Chapter 2: Summary History of the Wisconsin UprisingChapter 3: The Source of Collective Effervescence: Conceptual FoundationsChapter 4: Totally Alive: Effervescence in the Wisconsin UprisingChapter 5: Internal Order and Youth Authority in the Wisconsin Uprising Chapter 6: The Information Station Chapter 7: Mobilization in the Wisconsin Uprising: Conceptual Foundations Chapter 8: We Just Had To Do It: Escalating Obligation in the Wisconsin UprisingChapter 9: Self-Interest and Altruism: Union Concessions in the Wisconsin Uprising Conclusion: The Social Order of Collective Action References

At the heart of Kearney’s book is a conventional study with unconventional findings. . . It is unconventional in that its findings will shake some of the presuppositions of traditional social movement theory. The most compelling argument in this respect is the lack of a role for formal organization, and the importance of elements of order that are emergent from the social action itself. A lot of this must be put down to the insider perspective of the book: Kearney was an active player in the events as well as a social researcher of them. This enables him to move beyond the impression that this was a union-organized protest and allows him to unpack the role of formal organizations to the point at which they disappear. It also provides a rich sequential narrative of the protest events that retains elements that too often get expunged by scholarly movement analysis: the anger, the excitement, the confusion, the hope, and the ebbing away of all of these (despite the large numbers, the uprising failed to impact policy). In short, it retains a complexity to the action that surely comes from having been a part of its very unfolding.