Activism, Inc.

Activism, Inc. PDF Author: Dana Fisher
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804767781
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Activism, Inc. introduces America to an increasingly familiar political actor: the canvasser. She's the twenty-something with the clipboard, stopping you on the street or knocking on your door, the foot soldier of political campaigns. Granted unprecedented access to the "People's Project," an unknown yet influential organization driving left-leaning grassroots politics, Dana Fisher tells the true story of outsourcing politics in America. Like the major corporations that outsourced their customer service to companies abroad, the grassroots campaigns of national progressive movements—including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Save the Children, and the Human Rights Campaign—have been outsourced at different times to this single organization. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic Party followed a similar outsourcing model for their canvassing. Fisher examines the history and rationale behind political outsourcing on the Left, weaving together frank interviews with canvassers, high-ranking political officials across the political spectrum, and People's Project management. She compares all of this to the grassroots efforts on the Right, which remain firmly grounded in communities and local politics. This book offers a chilling review of the consequences of political outsourcing. Connecting local people on the streets throughout America to the national organizations and political campaigns that make up progressive politics, it shows what happens to the passionate young activists outsourced to the clients of Activism, Inc.

Activism, Inc.

Activism, Inc. PDF Author: Dana Fisher
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804767781
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
Activism, Inc. introduces America to an increasingly familiar political actor: the canvasser. She's the twenty-something with the clipboard, stopping you on the street or knocking on your door, the foot soldier of political campaigns. Granted unprecedented access to the "People's Project," an unknown yet influential organization driving left-leaning grassroots politics, Dana Fisher tells the true story of outsourcing politics in America. Like the major corporations that outsourced their customer service to companies abroad, the grassroots campaigns of national progressive movements—including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Save the Children, and the Human Rights Campaign—have been outsourced at different times to this single organization. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic Party followed a similar outsourcing model for their canvassing. Fisher examines the history and rationale behind political outsourcing on the Left, weaving together frank interviews with canvassers, high-ranking political officials across the political spectrum, and People's Project management. She compares all of this to the grassroots efforts on the Right, which remain firmly grounded in communities and local politics. This book offers a chilling review of the consequences of political outsourcing. Connecting local people on the streets throughout America to the national organizations and political campaigns that make up progressive politics, it shows what happens to the passionate young activists outsourced to the clients of Activism, Inc.

Protest Inc.

Protest Inc. PDF Author: Peter Dauvergne
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745681190
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Mass protests have raged since the global financial crisis of 2008. Across the world students and workers and environmentalists are taking to the streets. Discontent is seething even in the wealthiest countries, as the world saw with Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Protest Inc. tells a disturbingly different story of global activism. As millions of grassroots activists rally against capitalism, activism more broadly is increasingly mirroring business management and echoing calls for market-based solutions. The past decade has seen nongovernmental organizations partner with oil companies like ExxonMobil, discount retailers like Walmart, fast-food chains like McDonald’s, and brand manufacturers like Nike and Coca-Cola. NGOs are courting billionaire philanthropists, branding causes, and turning to consumers as wellsprings of reform. Are “career” activists selling out to pay staff and fund programs? Partly. But far more is going on. Political and socioeconomic changes are enhancing the power of business to corporatize activism, including a worldwide crackdown on dissent, a strengthening of consumerism, a privatization of daily life, and a shifting of activism into business-style institutions. Grassroots activists are fighting back. Yet, even as protestors march and occupy cities, more and more activist organizations are collaborating with business and advocating for corporate-friendly “solutions.” This landmark book sounds the alarm about the dangers of this corporatizing trend for the future of transformative change in world politics.

In the Interest of Others

In the Interest of Others PDF Author: John S. Ahlquist
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400848652
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of labor unions that advances a new theory of organizational leadership and governance In the Interest of Others develops a new theory of organizational leadership and governance to explain why some organizations expand their scope of action in ways that do not benefit their members directly. John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi document eighty years of such activism by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the United States and the Waterside Workers Federation in Australia. They systematically compare the ILWU and WWF to the Teamsters and the International Longshoremen's Association, two American transport industry labor unions that actively discouraged the pursuit of political causes unrelated to their own economic interests. Drawing on a wealth of original data, Ahlquist and Levi show how activist organizations can profoundly transform the views of members about their political efficacy and the collective actions they are willing to contemplate. They find that leaders who ask for support of projects without obvious material benefits must first demonstrate their ability to deliver the goods and services members expect. These leaders must also build governance institutions that coordinate expectations about their objectives and the behavior of members. In the Interest of Others reveals how activist labor unions expand the community of fate and provoke preferences that transcend the private interests of individual members. Ahlquist and Levi then extend this logic to other membership organizations, including religious groups, political parties, and the state itself.

The Origins of Women's Activism

The Origins of Women's Activism PDF Author: Anne M. Boylan
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861251
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Tracing the deep roots of women's activism in America, Anne Boylan explores the flourishing of women's volunteer associations in the decades following the Revolution. She examines the entire spectrum of early nineteenth-century women's groups--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; African American and white; middle and working class--to illuminate the ways in which race, religion, and class could bring women together in pursuit of common goals or drive them apart. Boylan interweaves analyses of more than seventy organizations in New York and Boston with the stories of the women who founded and led them. In so doing, she provides a new understanding of how these groups actually worked and how women's associations, especially those with evangelical Protestant leanings, helped define the gender system of the new republic. She also demonstrates as never before how women in leadership positions combined volunteer work with their family responsibilities, how they raised and invested the money their organizations needed, and how they gained and used political influence in an era when women's citizenship rights were tightly circumscribed.

Digital, Political, Radical

Digital, Political, Radical PDF Author: Natalie Fenton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509511709
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Digital, Political, Radical is a siren call to the field of media and communications and the study of social and political movements. We must put the politics of transformation at the very heart of our analyses to meet the global challenges of gross inequality and ever-more impoverished democracies. Fenton makes an impassioned plea for re-invigorating critical research on digital media such that it can be explanatory, practical and normative. She dares us to be politically emboldened. She urges us to seek out an emancipatory politics that aims to deepen our democratic horizons. To ask: how can we do democracy better? What are the conditions required to live together well? Then, what is the role of the media and how can we reclaim media, power and politics for progressive ends? Journeying through a range of protest and political movements, Fenton debunks myths of digital media along the way and points us in the direction of newly emergent politics of the Left. Digital, Political, Radical contributes to political debate on contemporary (re)configurations of radical progressive politics through a consideration of how we experience (counter) politics in the digital age and how this may influence our being political.

The Art of Activism

The Art of Activism PDF Author: Stephen Duncombe
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 9781682192696
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The Art of Activism is an all-purpose guide to artistic activism, combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change. With contemporary case studies and historical examples, chapters on cultural and cognitive theory, sections on what can be learned from unlikely sources like popular culture and marketing techniques, along with investigations into ethics and evaluation, explorations of the creative process and the importance of utopian thinking, and an attached workbook with over fifty exercises to practice, the co-founders of the Center for Artistic Activism take readers step-by-step through the process of becoming, or becoming even better, artistic activists.

Gay, Inc.

Gay, Inc. PDF Author: Myrl Beam
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452957762
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A bold and provocative look at how the nonprofit sphere’s expansion has helped—and hindered—the LGBT cause What if the very structure on which social movements rely, the nonprofit system, is reinforcing the inequalities activists seek to eliminate? That is the question at the heart of this bold reassessment of the system’s massive expansion since the mid-1960s. Focusing on the LGBT movement, Myrl Beam argues that the conservative turn in queer movement politics, as exemplified by the shift toward marriage and legal equality, is due mostly to the movement’s embrace of the nonprofit structure. Based on oral histories as well as archival research, and drawing on the author’s own extensive activist work, Gay, Inc. presents four compelling case studies. Beam looks at how people at LGBT nonprofits in Minneapolis and Chicago grapple with the contradictions between radical queer social movements and their institutionalized iterations. Through interview subjects’ incisive, funny, and heartbreaking commentaries, Beam exposes a complex world of committed people doing the best they can to effect change, and the flawed structures in which they participate, rail against, ignore, and make do. Providing a critical look at a social formation whose sanctified place in the national imagination has for too long gone unquestioned, Gay, Inc. marks a significant contribution to scholarship on sexuality, neoliberalism, and social movements.

Undercurrents

Undercurrents PDF Author: Steve Davis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119669235
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Improve your knowledge of the ways global trends shape activism with this insightful volume that will supercharge your impact on communities and organizations Undercurrents: Channeling Outrage to Spark Practical Activism brings the perspective of experienced global social innovation leader, scholar and speaker, Steve Davis, to bear on some of the most powerful and helpful macrotrends rippling through society today. The book teaches readers how to harness their outrage and capitalize on global trends to instigate and encourage change across the world. The author identifies five global undercurrents with outsized importance that are shaping our world: Global economies are moving away from the old pyramid model into a diamond, bringing powerful new possibilities for human well-being; Communities are becoming the customer – rather than passive beneficiaries - as social change is increasingly led by local voices and activists; Equity is leveling and reshaping the field of social change and activism; Digital disruption, through the power of data and digital tools, impacts almost everything; and The middle of the journey to social change is becoming surprisingly sexy, as we focus on adapting innovation for widespread impact at scale. The book’s lessons are supported throughout by stories, experiences, data and observations from across the globe. Undercurrents is perfect for activists and leaders of all kinds who aim to increase their impact on their organizations and the world at large, as well as the intellectually curious who hope to increase their understanding of the changing world around them.

How Organizations Develop Activists

How Organizations Develop Activists PDF Author: Hahrie Han
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199336768
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Why are some civic associations better than others at getting - and keeping - people involved in activism? From MoveOn.org to the National Rifle Association, Health Care for America Now to the Sierra Club, membership-based civic associations constantly seek to engage people in civic and political action. What makes some more effective than others? Using in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments, this book compares organizations with strong records of engaging people in health and environmental politics to those with weaker records. To build power, civic associations need quality and quantity (or depth and breadth) of activism. They need lots of people to take action and also a cadre of leaders to develop and execute that activity. Yet, models for how to develop activists and leaders are not necessarily transparent. This book provides these models to help associations build the power they want and support a healthy democracy. In particular, the book examines organizing, mobilizing, and lone wolf models of engagement and shows how highly active associations blend mobilizing and organizing to transform their members' motivations and capacities for involvement. This is not a simple story about the power of offline versus online organizing. Instead, it is a story about how associations can blend both online and offline strategies to build their activist base. In this compelling book, Hahrie Han explains how civic associations can invest in their members and build the capacity they need to inspire action.

The Capitalist and the Activist

The Capitalist and the Activist PDF Author: Tom C. W. Lin
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523092009
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
2023 Axiom Business Books Award Silver Medalist (Business Commentary) 2023 Nautilus Book Award Silver Medalist (Social Change & Social Justice) This is the first in-depth examination of the important ongoing fusion of activism, capitalism, and social change masterfully told through a compelling narrative filled with vivid stories and striking studies. Corporations and their executives are at the forefront of some of the most contentious and important social issues of our time. Through pronouncements, policies, boycotts, sponsorships, lobbying, and fundraising, corporations are actively engaged in issues like immigration reform, gun regulation, racial justice, gender equality, and religious freedom. Despite corporate social activism being everywhere these days-witness how quickly companies and progressives united to oppose North Carolina's bathroom bill or support the Black Lives Matter movement-there has been no in-depth examination of the far-reaching consequences of this movement. What first principles should guide businesses' approaches? How should activists engage with businesses in a way that is most beneficial to their causes? What are potential pitfalls and risks associated with corporate social activism for activists, businesses, and society at large? Weaving studies and stories, Temple University professor of law, Tom C. W. Lin offers a road map for how we got here and a compass for where we are going as a nation of capitalists and activists seeking profit and progress.