The SAGE Handbook of Resistance 2016933075, 9781473906433

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The SAGE Handbook of

Resistance

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SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we publish over 900 journals, including those of more than 400 learned societies, more than 800 new books per year, and a growing range of library products including archives, data, case studies, reports, and video. SAGE remains majority-owned by our founder, and after Sara’s lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures our continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

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The SAGE Handbook of

Resistance

Edited by



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David Courpasson and Steven Vallas

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SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Introduction and editorial arrangement © David Courpasson & Steven Vallas 2016 Chapter 1 © Jeffrey Juris and Marina Sitrin 2016 Chapter 2 © Bob Kurik 2016 Chapter 3 © Valentine M. Moghadam 2016 Chapter 4 © David Knights 2016 Chapter 5 © André Spicer and Peter Fleming 2016 Chapter 6 © Erynn Masi de Casanova and Afshan Jafar 2016 Chapter 7 © Amanda M. Gengler 2016 Chapter 8 © Jillian Crocker 2016 Chapter 9 © Linda Blum and Shelley Kimelberg 2016 Chapter 10 © Anniina Rantakari and Eero Vaara 2016 Chapter 11 © Tammi Arford 2016 Chapter 12 © Felipe G. Massa 2016 Chapter 13 © Edward T. Walker 2016

Chapter 14 © Marianne Maeckelbergh 2016 Chapter 15 © Daniel Hjorth 2016 Chapter 16 © Ryan Moore 2016 Chapter 17 © Guillaume Marche 2016 Chapter 18 © Gay Seidman 2016 Chapter 19 © Adam Reich 2016 Chapter 20 © Sierk Ybema, Robyn Thomas and Cynthia Hardy 2016 Chapter 21 © Giuseppe Caruso 2016 Chapter 22 © Pablo Fernández 2016 Chapter 23 © Xueguang Zhou and Yun Ai 2016 Chapter 24 © Lamia Karim 2016 Chapter 25 © Sandrine Baudry and Emeline Eudes 2016

Editor: Judi Burger Editorial Assistant: Matthew Oldfield Production Editor: Sushant Nailwal Copyeditor: David Hemsley Proofreader: Sunrise Setting Ltd. Indexer: Avril Ehrlich Marketing Manager: Sally Ransom Cover Design: Wendy Scott Typeset by Cenveo Publisher Services Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933075 At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4739-0643-3

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Contents List of Figures and Tables viii Notes on the Editors and Contributors ix Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

1

PART I  FOUNDATIONS

29

1

Globalization, Resistance, and Social Transformation Jeffrey Juris and Marina Sitrin

31

2

Emerging Subjectivity in Protest Bob Kurik

51

3

Islamism, Feminism, and Resistance: Rethinking the Arab Spring Valentine M. Moghadam

78

4

The Grand Refusal?: Struggling with Alternative Foucauldian Inspired Approaches to Resistance at Work David Knights

5

Resisting the 24/7 Work Ethic – Shifting Modes of Regulation and Refusal in Organized Employment André Spicer and Peter Fleming

98

121

PART II  SITES OF RESISTANCE

137

6

The Body as a Site of Resistance Erynn Masi de Casanova and Afshan Jafar

139

7

The Complexities and Contradictions of Resistance: An Intersectional Perspective Amanda M. Gengler

156

Individual Constraint and Group Solidarity: Marginalized Mothers and the Paradox of Family Responsibility Jillian Crocker

170

Protecting Our Children: Paradoxes of Resistance in an Era of Neoliberal Education Linda Blum and Shelley Kimelberg

185

8

9

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Resistance in Organizational Strategy-Making Anniina Rantakari and Eero Vaara

208

11

Prisons as Sites of Power/Resistance Tammi Arford

224

PART III  TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER AND RESISTANCE

245

12

Recasting Community for Online Resisting Work Felipe G. Massa

247

13

Between Grassroots and ‘Astroturf’: Understanding Mobilization from the Top-down Edward T. Walker

269

14

From Digital Tools to Political Infrastructure Marianne Maeckelbergh

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15

Resisting the New: On Cooptation and the Organisational Conditions for Entrepreneurship 298 Daniel Hjorth

PART IV  LANGUAGES OF RESISTANCE

317

16

Musical Style, Youth Subcultures, and Cultural Resistance Ryan Moore

319

17

Graffiti as Infrapolitics: A Study of Visual Interventions of Resistance in San Francisco Guillaume Marche

18

Naming, Shaming, Changing the World Gay Seidman

19

Contesting Authority in a Moralized Market: The Case of a Catholic Hospital Unionization Campaign Adam Reich

20

Organizational Change and Resistance: An Identity Perspective Sierk Ybema, Robyn Thomas and Cynthia Hardy

PART V  GEOGRAPHIES OF RESISTANCE 21

The World Social Forum and Global Resistance: The Trajectory of an Activist Open Space Giuseppe Caruso

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336

351

367

386

405

407

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Contents

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Back to Work: Resisting Clientelism in a Poor Neighborhood of Buenos Aires Pablo Fernández

23

Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China Xueguang Zhou and Yun Ai

24

Resistance and its Pitfalls: Analyzing NGO and Civil Society Politics in Bangladesh Lamia Karim

25

Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument Sandrine Baudry and Emeline Eudes

Index

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vii

427

443

461

476

495

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List of Figures and Tables Figures 17.1 Seat the Rich 17.2 Leatherline 17.3 Heklina 19.1 Sisters of St. Joseph gather at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange on October 8, 2010, to demonstrate for an end to human trafficking

342 345 346 376

Tables 10.1 Three approaches to resistance in strategy-making 12.1 Selection of definitions of ‘community’ in sociology and community studies 12.2 Key dimensions differentiating online and offline communities and their resisting work 20.1 General characteristics of three views of resistance to change that feature in different literatures

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210 252 255 395

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Notes on the Editors and Contributors

The Editors David Courpasson is Professor of Sociology at emlyon Business School (France) where he is the Director of the OCE-EMLYON Research Centre. He is also Professor at Cardiff Business School, and the former Editor in Chief of Organization Studies (2008–2013). Professor Courpasson’s research interests revolve around power, workplace politics and resistance, as well as issues of work and occupations. He has published extensively on these topics in journals like Organization Science, Organization Studies, Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice, Human Relations, Journal of Business Venturing, Organization and Journal of Management Studies as well as journals in French. He has also published several books including Power and Organizations (2006, Sage, with Stewart Clegg and Nelson Phillips) and When Managers Rebel (2010, Palgrave McMIllan). Steven Vallas is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston, where he teaches contemporary social theory and the sociology of work. Most of his research has focuses on the processes that generate or challenge organizational inequalities, whether along class (management/worker), gender, or racial lines. His articles and books have appeared in leading sociological journals, dealing with a number of topics, such as the contradictions that unfold with the commercialization of science, the dilemmas that often afflict efforts to empower workers within traditional manufacturing; how technological change disrupts authority relations at work; and the meaning of workplace ‘flexibility’ in the liberal market economies. His most recent book is Work: A Critique (Polity, 2012). He currently edits the Emerald periodical Research in the Sociology of Work.

The Contributors Yun Ai  is a research associate in the National Institute of Social Development, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on institutional changes and governance issues in China, government and grassroots organizations, and state–society relationships. One of Ai’s current research projects examines the process of policy-making and implementation in local governments. She is also working on an ethnographic study of the reform of land ownership in rural China. This research is supported by a grant from the National Social Science Fund of China (13CSH084), and a fund from the program of Marxism Theoretical Studies and Construction, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2014mgchq016).

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Tammi Arford  is Assistant Professor of Crime & Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her broad areas of interest are punishment and social control, c­ ritical criminology, abolitionism, knowledge, power and resistance, and social/criminological theory. Sandrine Baudry is Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of Strasbourg. She is a member of the SEARCH research team and her research areas are the dynamics between citizens and institutions around urban public space, and the greening of the city in the United States and in France. Linda Blum  is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University whose interests include persistence, change, and contradictions in contemporary US gender relations. She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement (University of California Press, 1991), At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon, 1999), and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality (NYU Press, 2015). Giuseppe Caruso is a trainee psychotherapist at the National Health Service England. He also works at the Richmond Fellowship, a mental health charity, in London. Previously he was a researcher and teacher at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He has published extensively on the World Social Forum, on the Free Software movement, on the Right to the City movement and on issues of difference, conflict and democracy in transnational social movements as well as a monograph on traditional health systems in the Peruvian Amazon. Erynn Masi de Casanova is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Making Up the Difference: Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador and Buttoned Up: Clothing, Conformity, and White-Collar Masculinity. She is co-editor (with Afshan Jafar) of the books Bodies without Borders and Global Beauty, Local Bodies. Casanova and Jafar also co-edit the book series Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment. Jillian Crocker  is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, Old Westbury. Her research examines issues of agency and group solidarity at the intersections of communities, work, and families, with particular interests in practices of everyday resistance and the politics of caring labor. In other work she has analyzed gendered patterns in collective bargaining agreements. She received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Emeline Eudes is a lecturer at Sciences et Technologies des Arts (Université Paris 8). Her recent work concerns guerrilla planters in the Paris region, and environmental art and activism. Pablo Fernández  is Professor of Business and Society at IAE Business School, Austral University (Argentina) and member of the OCE Research Center at EMLyon (France), where he obtained his PhD. His research centers on processes of social inclusion in which marginalized actors seek to organize and work together to regain their dignity. At a more broad level, he is interested in understanding issues of power and resistance in and around organizations. Part of his research has been published in Organization Studies and Journal of Management Inquiry. Peter Fleming is Professor of Business and Society at Cass Business School, City University of London. Peter’s research focuses on the changing relationship between business and society,

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Notes on the Editors and Contributors

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with special emphasis on Corporate Social Responsibility and new patterns of conflict in the workplace. He has also extensively studied the causes of organizational corruption in the ­private and public sectors. Amanda M. Gengler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest University. Her research interests include inequality and intersectionality, medical sociology, and the sociology of emotion. Her current research examines the unequal experiences of families whose children are diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses. Cynthia Hardy is Laureate Professor in the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Professor at Cardiff Business School. Her research interests revolve around discourse, power, risk and organizational change. She has published over 60 articles in refereed journals including Academy of Management Journal, Academy Management Review and Organization Studies, as well as numerous book chapters and conference papers. She has published over 10 books, including two SAGE Handbooks: the Handbook of Organization Studies, which won the George R. Terry Book Award at the 1997 Academy of Management; and the Handbook of Organizational Discourse, which won the 2005 Outstanding Book at the Organizational Communication Division of the USA’s National Communication Association. She is co-founder of the International Centre for Research in Organizational Discourse, Strategy and Change (ICRODSC), which links discourse researchers in Australia, the UK, Europe, North America, and Japan. Daniel Hjorth  is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Organization at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, where he also is the Academic Director of the across CBS Entrepreneurship Business in Society Platform. He is also Professor at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University. Hjorth is the editor of the four ‘Movements in Entrepreneurship’ books for Edward Elgar Publ. (together with prof. Chris Steyaert), initiating a European School of Entrepreneurship Research. He has also contributed to the opening up of Organisational Entrepreneurship as research field in the Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship (Edward Elgar, 2012), and recently edited the Oxford University Press Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies (2014, together with Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, and Robin Holt). Hjorth is Senior Editor of Organization Studies (Journal, SAGE) and sits on the editorial boards of Organization (SAGE), Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (Taylor and Francis) and International Small Business Journal (SAGE). Afshan Jafar  is Associate Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College. Her interests are gender, Islam and Muslim immigrants, globalization, and embodiment. She is the author of Women’s NGOs in Pakistan (2011) and the co-editor of Bodies without Borders (2013) and Global Beauty, Local Bodies (2013). Jeffrey Juris  is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Networking Futures: the Movements against Corporate Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008), Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (co-author, Paradigm Press, 2008), and numerous articles on social movements, transnational networks, new media, and political protest in Spain/Catalonia, Mexico, and the US. He is also a co-editor of Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political (Duke University Press, 2013), and has published on Occupy

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Boston, including a widely read piece in American Ethnologist called ‘Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation’. He is currently writing a book regarding media and autonomy based on fifteen months of ethnographic research about ‘free’ or pirate radio activism in Mexico City and beyond. Lamia Karim is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is a cultural anthropologist with a focus on political anthropology. Her primary area of research is Bangladesh in South Asia. Her research interests are in women, globalization, development, the neoliberal state, religious nationalism, human rights, and social movements. Dr. Karim is the author of the much-acclaimed book Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) Shelley Kimelberg is an adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo. Her research has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including City & Community, Sociological Forum, Sociological Perspectives, Journal of Education Policy, and Urban Education. Her most recent work on middle-class parents and urban public schools was featured in Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools (Russell Sage, 2014). David Knights is Professor of Organization Work and Technology at the Lancaster University Business School. His research interests include gender, technology, higher education, and the financial sector. His current research relates to academics in business schools, the global financial crisis, the body and embodiment and most recently, veterinary surgeons. He jointly created and continues to edit Gender, Work, and Organization and has published several books and international refereed journal articles. Bob Kurik is Research Associate in the Department of Social and Cultural Ecology at Charles University in Prague. He was a Fulbright Fellow at UCLA (2013/2014). He received his PhD (2015) in Anthropology from Charles University based on his ethnographic research among activists in Germany. His dissertation titled Revolutionary Amoebas: Political Versatility as the Art of Resistance in Germany explores amoebic subjectivity of left radicals in post-revolutionary times. His main areas of anthropological interest involve protest, subjectivity, ecology, and the Internet. Marianne Maeckelbergh  is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University in the Netherlands and a Marie Curie visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalization Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (Pluto Press, 2009) and is the co-creator and co-producer of the www.globaluprisings.org film series. Guillaume Marche is Professor of American Studies at Universite Paris-Est Creteil (France). His publications deal with contemporary social movements in the United States – mainly the LGBT movement. His research focuses on sexual identities, subjectivity, and the interplay between the cultural and political – as well as the symbolical and instrumental – dimensions of collective mobilization. His recent research also addresses infrapolitical forms of mobilization and the use of biography in social science – especially memoirs and biographies as sociological sources. He is currently working on infrapolitical forms of mobilization in San Francisco – e.g. graffiti, murals, urban greening, LGBT theatricality, public nudity – and on the use of LGBT biographies and memoirs in social movement sociology. He is a member of IMAGER (Institute for the Study of English-, German-, and Romance Language-Speaking Cultures).

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Notes on the Editors and Contributors

xiii

Felipe G. Massa is Assistant Professor of Management, Kloor Professor of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, and co-founder of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development at Loyola University New Orleans. His research is focused on the formation and introduction of disruptive entities, practices, and ideas. In particular, he investigates the efforts of social actors who collectively engage in activities that violate institutional boundaries and span social worlds in the creative industries and online spaces. His articles have appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, among other management and organization theory journals. Valentine M. Moghadam is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, and Director of the International Affairs Program, at Northeastern University, Boston. Born in Tehran, Iran, she is the author of Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (1993, 2003, 2013), Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement (2009, 2013), and other books and journal articles. Her current research compares the transitions in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia with a number of third wave democratic transitions, with a focus on women’s mobilizations and gendered outcomes. Ryan Moore  is Assistant Professor of Sociology at CUNY-Queensborough and the author of Sells like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (NYU, 2010). He lives in New York City and is a member of the editorial collective at Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. Anniina Rantakari is doctoral candidate at the University of Oulu Business School, Finland. Her key areas of research are the process and practice perspectives on strategy, and the ­dynamics of power and resistance in organizational research in general and strategy research in ­particular. In her upcoming doctoral dissertation she examines strategy-making from a Foucauldian perspective. Adam Reich is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He received his PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2012, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia from 2012 to 2014. His focus, broadly, is on economic and cultural sociology. Reich is the author of three books, including With God On Our Side: The Struggle for Workers’ Rights in a Catholic Hospital (Cornell University Press, 2012). He is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology and Social Science & Medicine. Gay Seidman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has focused on labor and other social movements, especially in South Africa and Brazil, and on transnational movements, including the anti-apartheid and feminist movements. Her books include Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa (1994) and Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism (2007). Marina Sitrin is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Justice at the State University of New York. She holds a PhD in Global Sociology and JD in International Women’s Human Rights. She is the co-author of They Can’t Represent US: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (Verso Press, 2014) and the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed Books: 2012), Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press, 2006) and the forthcoming The New Revolutions with the University of California Press. Her work focuses on societies in movement, specifically looking at social relationships and forms of organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics, and affective social

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relationships. She  grounds her work in ethnographic participant observation, oral history, and narrative sociology while striving for militant research. André Spicer is Professor of Organizational Behaviour and the founding director of ETHOS: The Centre for Responsible Enterprise at Cass Business School, City University of London. He is an expert in the areas of Organizational Behaviour, Leadership, and Corporate Social Responsibility. Currently, Professor Spicer is working on a book about stupidity in organizations. Robyn Thomas  is Professor of Management at Cardiff Business School, UK. Robyn’s research primarily focuses on the critical analysis of management and organization, exploring the dynamics of power–resistance relations. Her current research projects include: the critical analysis of the contestation around professional and work-based identities; the construction of age in organizational contexts; and the role of middle managers in strategic change processes. Robyn publishes mainly in management and organization journals, including: Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organization, Journal of Management Studies, and the British Journal of Management. Eero Vaara is Professor of Organization and Management at Aalto University School of Business, a Permanent Visiting Professor at EMLYON Business School, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests focus on organizational, strategic and institutional change, strategic practices and processes, multinational corporations and globalization, management history, management education, and methodological issues in organization and management research. He has worked especially on discursive and narratives approaches. Edward T. Walker is Associate Professor and Vice-Chair in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. He studies how organizations interact with their external environments through public participation and political activism. He is author of Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation (NYU Press, 2015). His articles have appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, and other journals. He is currently studying political mobilization and industry responses to activism around hydraulic fracturing, and continues to investigate political activism and the politics of business more broadly. Sierk Ybema is Associate Professor in the Department of Organization Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research centers on processes of meaning-making, identity construction and organizational politics in a diversity of empirical settings. He has published on culture and conflict, relational and temporal identity talk, managerial discourse and ‘postalgia’, intercultural communications, interorganizational relationships, and organizational change and crisis. Current research projects include the ethnographic analysis of contestation around professional identities and processes of innovation in health care. He has published in such journals as Human Relations, Organization, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, and Work, Employment & Society. Xueguang Zhou  is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a Professor of Sociology and a Senior Fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. His main areas of research are Chinese organizations and management, government behaviors, and the institutional logic of governance in China. His current research projects examine the rise of the bureaucratic state in China and intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy.

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction D a v i d C o u r p a s s o n a n d S t e v e n Va l l a s

Occupy. Indignados. The Tea Party. Anonymous. Black Lives Matter. Pussy Riot. Golden Dawn. Fight for Fifteen. These and other terms have become part of an emerging lexicon in recent years, signs of an important development that has gripped many parts of the world. Social, economic and political conditions have so inflamed social boundaries as to generate increasing levels of contention, often of a highly confrontational sort, throughout the advanced capitalist world. There is an ironic side to this development, since so much contemporary social theory – including Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Pierre Bourdieu, among many others – has been devoted to the phenomenon of cultural domination. In spite of this presumed background of passivity and consent, the social and political landscape has taken an entirely different form. The center, put simply, no longer holds, or at least not to the extent that it once could. There are many reasons why this should not have taken us by surprise. Perhaps the

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most important is that neo-liberal practices have eroded the regulative capacities of the advanced nation states. Fordist economic institutions have been dismantled, financial regulations unraveled, and the welfare state sharply curtailed. Global processes have only further complicated already troubled domestic institutions, as trade politics, migration, war and terrorism have provoked indignation on both the left and the right, with ever-more virulent forms of ethno-nationalism arising in both Europe and the USA. It is not hard to see that civil society has become contentious and unruly. The difficulty is that theoretical conceptions of this ‘turn toward contention’ have lagged far behind the reality, and our conceptual toolkit is in a state of disarray. On offer is a welter of important yet partial insights that overlap and conflict with one another: some have spoken of a socio-political shift from redistribution to “recognition” as a logic of resistance under contemporary capitalism (Fraser 1996; Fraser and Honneth 2003). Others have drawn a picture of ongoing

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contests over “life politics” (Giddens 1991), or of the rise of “explosive communities” and even the “deregulation of violence” (Bauman 2000: 194–6; Appadurai 2006). More recently (and ambiguously) there are frameworks conceived in terms of struggles emanating from the “multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2000). Given the rise of contestation on so many levels, and in light of the conceptual uncertainties that have limited the field, the point seems beyond dispute: that the question of resistance as a social, organizational and political phenomenon needs to be placed at center stage. This volume is but one humble effort in that direction. We do so in full knowledge of the difficulty of the tasks involved. The concept of resistance has attracted the interest of academic specialists in any number of disparate fields. The Rashoman effect has not been absent, as scholars in history, anthropology, cultural studies, and various other fields have invoked a fractured assemblage of concepts and perspectives, each operating in abstraction from the others. Only occasionally have these separate currents of thought and debate flowed together. The result has lent an episodic character to the discussion, which has moved in fits and starts. Even basic questions have remained unclear. What is meant by “resistance”? What forms does it take, and how have these shifted in accordance with the rise of neo-liberalism? In what spaces does resistance grow, and what logics govern its development? And what effects does it exert on the structures it confronts, whether these involve transformation or reproduction? Much of this terrain remains uncharted, or worse: a scholarly no-man’s land that exists as a kind of liminal space. This need not be –and it should not be, at least in view of the rich theoretical legacy on which scholars in resistance studies might conceivably draw. During the first three decades following World War II, for example, landmark studies appeared that held boundless potential for the field’s development. This is nowhere more apparent than in the case of British scholars working in

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history and cultural studies. The former witnessed the appearance of major works as E. P. Thompson’s 1964 Making of the English Working Class and Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels (1965). For its part, the field of cultural studies broke with the conservative tradition of social anthropology to form analyses of the ways in which working-class and youth subcultures appropriated consumer products, infusing them with oppositional elements their designers did not intend (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Moore, this volume). The classic work of Paul Willis (1977; cf. Julie Bettie 2005) reminded scholars of the discursive creativity of subordinate classes and groups, who exhibit subversive practices that – however tragic their ultimate consequences – cannot easily be squared with accounts informed by theories of hegemony or consent. In spite of this rich legacy, and perhaps reflecting the triumph of Thatcherism, by the early 1990s, scholars had by and large come to cast resistance in supportive and often tragic roles, at best. American scholars have rushed into this vacuum, especially in the field of social movements, which has spent decades scrutinizing the ebb and flow of social and political protest. From early post-war studies in the tradition of resource mobilization (Tilly, 1978) to theories premised on the structure of political opportunity, frame alignment, and theories of emotions (see Morris 1992; Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2009), scholars have sought to identify the conditions that account for the rise of protest movements. Scholars in this tradition have begun to speak of the seeming pervasiveness of protest in Western democracies, and in more oppressive regimes as well (Soule & Earl 2005). Some have even spoken of the rise of “social movement societies” (Rucht 1998). One scholar (Putnam 2000: 165), even talked about protest becoming “standard operating procedure,” precisely because of the weaknesses exhibited in electoral political systems. “New” and even “newer” social movements are said to arise, new political causes and

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

identities are constructed, and new alliances all emerge with regularity, leading Rucht to contend that “protest has become a part of everyday politics” (1998: 52). But what happens outside of or “underneath” such outwardly visible movements and protests? When subaltern groups lack the organizational resources needed to mobilize on their own behalf – whether in workplaces, hospitals, schools or cities – how do they resist the claims their overseers make? In what spaces, and with which skills, can subaltern groups share oppositional sentiments and identities? Do such stores of symbolic meanings serve as repositories, pools of emotional energy, from which fuller mobilizations tend to draw? In what ways do elites, through ‘their’ structure(s) of domination, shape the forms that resistance takes? And in what ways does resistance return the favor, reshaping the forms that domination assumes? These questions imply the belief that organized forms of protest are but surface manifestations of a deeper and more ubiquitous yet often elusive phenomenon that warrants much more attention and theorization than it receives. Put differently, it is likely that in a society marked by fragmentation and growing indifference (Courpasson 2016), and in which electoral systems provide few vehicles for meaningful participation, dissenting efforts will be more likely to assume forms that are spontaneous, anonymous and episodic but no less real. Understanding them, and the conditions under which they become consequential, are no trivial matters – certainly not these days. Amidst the welter of contending traditions, the single most influential source of theoretical insight into the everyday resistance of subaltern groups has surely stemmed from the work of James Scott, the political scientist and East Asian scholar whose work focused initially on peasant societies. In his Weapons of the Weak (1985), a nuanced study of struggles between Malay peasants and powerful landowners, Scott’s research led him to conclude that the traditional scholarly “emphasis on peasant rebellion

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was misplaced”. In place of such spectacular confrontations, Scott focused attention on the less dramatic struggles that arise between peasants and landowners, which he termed “everyday forms” of resistance. By this term he meant the prosaic but constant struggle between subordinates and their overseers. He therefore scrutinized “the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth’ (Scott 1985: 29). In a subsequent work, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), he expanded his analysis into historical and cross-cultural terrain, posing a question that constituted a direct challenge to theories premised on ideological incorporation or hegemony: ‘How do we study power relations when the powerless are often obliged to adopt a strategic pose in the presence of the powerful?’ (Scott 1990: xii). His answer, which stresses the performative nature of much public behavior, centers on the existence of what he called “infrapolitics,” by which he meant ‘a wide variety of low-profile forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name” (1990: 19), whose very existence betrays “a critique of power while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct” (xiii). Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, Scott argued that the seeming acquiescence of subordinate groups is often performative, or staged. Using the “hidden transcripts” they fashion amongst their own ranks, members of subordinate groups have a vested interest in concealing their defiant beliefs and actions from the powerful, acting on these beliefs as social and political conditions allow. Put differently, subaltern groups are constrained to engage in “command performances of consent,” even as they struggle to limit the demands that powerful classes and groups can impose on either their labor or their dignity. Because of the disproportionate power that elites enjoyed over the local Malay economy, they were also able to

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largely control public ritual life – that is, the ‘onstage’ conduct of most of the poor in the community. Only ‘backstage’, where gossip, tales, slander, and anonymous sabotage mocks and negates the public ritual order, does elite control fall away … it is only here that the terrain is relatively favorable to the meager arsenal of the disadvantaged (1985: 27).

In shifting the focus to “infrapolitics” and to everyday forms of resistance, Scott is not denying the importance of peasant rebellions or insurgent movements, rare though these may be. Rather, he is directing our attention toward the hidden, less dramatic but equally real forms of resistance that nourish such spectacular eruptions against power for decades before they come to the surface. As he puts it, such latent currents ‘are the stubborn bedrock upon which other forms of resistance may grow, and they are likely to persist after such other forms have failed or produced, in turn, a new pattern of inequity’ (1985: 273). Scott’s work has been much discussed, debated, and critiqued. Anthropologists in particular accused him of numerous sins. Its broad theoretical impact may stem from its effort to provide an alternative to Gramscian conceptions of hegemony and to theories of cultural domination more generally. Its weaknesses, in the view of critics, were manifold: Scott had fixated single-mindedly on resistance, thus generating a ‘thinning’ of its ethnographic accounts (Ortner 1995; Gal 1995; Brown 1996). Scott tended to romanticize resistance, and to find it wherever he looked (e.g., in a smirk or a raised eyebrow), inflating its ideological content beyond what was due. Or, Scott unwisely generalized from peasant to post-modern societies, thereby misconstruing the workings of liberal democratic nation-states. In spite of these doubts, Scott’s argument has provoked an outpouring of theory and research on power, domination, and resistance under many institutional and organizational contexts (as the chapters in this volume attest). But theories do not proliferate in a vacuum. At least part of the reason for the impact

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of Scott’s work, and for the growth in resistance studies more generally, can be traced to historical events. For the 1990s proved hospitable to a widening circle of oppositional movements, many of which were marked by novel organizational forms. Transnational solidarity movements arose (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Klein 1999) that reconfigured the prominence of brand-name products, now viewed as an Achilles’ heel (Seidman 2007). The Chiapas movement of the middle 1990s signified a macro-level demand for autonomy from the state rather than continued reliance on its patronage (Graeber 2002). The Seattle  demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in 1999, which highlighted the ambitions of the World Social Forum (Juris 2008; Juris and Sitrin, this volume), served to legitimate analysis of resistance as an object of study, infusing Scott’s work with an urgency and a relevance that spread throughout many academic domains. In seeking to codify the ensuing work, we do so on the basis of several assumptions. We begin with the baseline assumption that domination can never be total. As Simmel observed, ‘Even in the most oppressive and cruel cases of subordination, there is still a considerable measure of personal freedom’ (Simmel 1950: 182; O’Hearn 2010). Second, we assume that consent is real, and at times even the predominant logic informing both discourse and practices. But consent – and with it, the legitimacy of domination, in Weber’s sense – is often more contingent or unstable than it appears (or even claims). Consent and resistance are often on intimate terms – recall Gramsci’s notion of ‘contradictory consciousness’ – and their manner of combination can drive the nature of social and political action. Consent can at times mutate into resistance, as when established institutions frustrate or repress the deeply held aspirations of once-privileged groups. The result can lead to what Bourdieu once termed a ‘total refusal’, which involved a ‘denunciation of the tacit assumptions of the

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

social order, a practical suspension of doxic adherence to the prizes it offers and the values it professes’ (1984: 144). Here Bourdieu has in mind the events of May 1968, which for a moment disrupted the reproduction processes that ‘normally’ keep the social order intact. Third, we reject any inclination to ‘sanitize the internal politics of the dominated’, as the anthropologist Sherry Ortner puts it (1995: 179). We acknowledge that resistance is never as pure or pristine a phenomenon as generations of Marxist theorists have hoped. When subordinate groups or classes defy their overseers, they often do so in ways that exercise power over groups and classes even more powerless than themselves – and they often do so in ways that are inflected with racial, gender, religious and ethnic hierarchies. Only rarely can we expect resistance to be free of particularistic or parochial biases, identity politics and other variants of tribal discourse. Least pristine are what might be called “negative” or “reactive” resistance – backward-looking movements that, though they engage in behavioral defiance of the state or the established order, do so in ways that invoke primordial forms of solidarity that essentialize the “others” whom they wish to exclude from social citizenship. Instances abound: ethno-nationalist movements arrayed against immigrants and refugees; Islamist groups aiming to restore 8th century conditions by stripping women of their rights; Christian fundamentalisms of varying sorts. Similarities among these instances are surely not accidental. To speak of negative resistance is to beg the question: What are the conceptual boundaries of resistance? How can we conceive of the varying forms it can take? As to the latter question: Resistance studies scholars have engaged in an extended taxonomical debate, resolution of which has, not surprisingly, remained elusive. One marked tendency has been to stress the presence of a defiant or contentious intent on the part of the resisters. The clearest statement of this position is that of Leblanc (1999), who reserves the concept

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for deliberate acts that symbolize a rejection of established conventions based on class and cultural hierarchies (see also Lowney 1995; Haenfler 2004). Leblanc’s research, focusing on female punks, sought to highlight the subculture’s emic properties. She defines resistance in very specific terms, which required a conscious experience of oppression, a subjective intention to oppose this oppression, and a willingness to act (whether via behavior or discourse) against it as well. She concludes that: It is crucial that the first two conditions [consciousness and intent] hold before any observational account can be deemed resistant. That is, the person engaging in resistant acts must do so consciously and be able to relate that consciousness and intent (Leblanc 1999: 18).

A broader, more inclusive and conceptually flexible framework has been advanced by Williams’s analysis of youth subcultures (2009; see also Juris and Sitrin, this volume). In this approach, resistance can be conceived in terms of three overlapping dimensions: openness, scale, and intent. That is, different forms of resistance can be placed on a continuum from overt to covert; pitched at a micro or macro level; and relatively passive or active in outlook. In a similar vein is the typology developed by Hollander and Einwohner (2004: 544), which overlays three dimensions: an oppositional intention by the resister, a recognition of this intent by the action’s target, as well as recognition of the intent by bystanders (see also Prasad and Prasad 1998). The latter approach generates a seven-fold typology with which scholars might disentangle the conditions that promote each type. Though such approaches are useful at their best, at their worst they begin to resemble exercises at botanical classification. The position we have taken here expressly seeks to avoid imposing restrictive conditions on the object of our analysis. For example, to exclude forms of resistance that remain hidden from or unrecognized by their target

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seems both arbitrary and naïve. For as Scott has shown, resisters often have good, survivalbased reasons to conceal the existence of their defiant feelings and beliefs. This is why the powerful are often sincerely stunned to discover that the command performances they have witnessed have not actually been what they seemed all along. Likewise, we have adopted a wary view regarding the question of motive or intent, since in our view conscious awareness is often a fleeting and elusive feature of resisters’ lives. At times the consciousness only emerges from and following the actions at hand. This point is well illustrated in Aihwa Ong’s study of women workers in a Malaysian electronics factory (1987, ch. 9). The harsh and abusive conditions of employment these women suffered imposed on them an extraordinarily painful transition from the relative autonomy of rural village life they had previously known. Inserted within the disciplined and demanding nature of factory life, these women experienced a painful ‘violation, chaos, and draining of one’s essence’ that was at times intolerable. In response to these circumstances, the factory girls throughout many towns and villages exhibited pronounced episodes of spirit possession, in which apparitions seemed to gain control over the women’s bodies, generating outbursts of collective panic and disorder that brought production down for days at a time (see also Lewis 1971). Ong sees these behaviors as reflecting, in a particularly dramatic form, ‘the contradictions between Malay and capitalist ways of apprehending the human condition’ (Ong 1987: 207). More to the point, she finds in them the onset of “an idiom of protest against labor discipline and male control,” even in the absence of any explicit intention to resist. Such events, which decenter the individual actor and lodge resistance in the actions of the group, begin to demonstrate the limits of the Cartesian cogito. Ong’s analysis is important for an additional reason, in that it stands as an early

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expression of the Foucauldian approach toward resistance. The Foucauldian turn that eventually ensued is important, not least because it has shifted the analysis beyond the framework that Scott had initially advanced (see McNay 1997; Burchell 1996; Ong 2003; Lilja and Vinthagen 2014; Knights, this volume). Two such changes seem especially important. First, where Scott was largely concerned with the material trappings of domination (with some allowance for the “symbolic taxes” that subalterns are made to pay) Foucauldian analysis has defined domination in much broader terms, i.e., as a process that subjugates actors to ‘continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors’ (Foucault, in Lukes 1986: 233; see Fleming 2014). In this view, modernity has changed the locus of power within the body politic, pressing it downward, more deeply into the sinews of civil society and thus relying much less fully on the state or property ownership as a source of control. Foucauldian scholars have therefore viewed the exercise of power as lying in the normative apparatuses that underlie and make possible state authority and economic power – apparatuses that are typically inscribed on the surface of individual subjectivity (see Foucault 1976, 2007; see also the chapters by Kurik and by Knights, in this volume). Second and crucially, Foucault insists that the face of power has often shed its negative or repressive guise, and now works by affirming, fostering, and enhancing the capacity for agency and human choice (Vallas and Cummins 2015). This last point is especially important, in that it raises questions about the criteria we use to identify resistance as such. The example that Foucault himself gives is one in which actors speak out against the specter of sexual repression (1976: 3–13), but in so doing are in fact only operating on the very terrain of power itself (cf. Butler 1990). Here again, we find reason to conclude that an oppositional intention can by no means suffice as a valid indicator of resistance. The

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

culture of complaint which Weeks (2005) identified at a British bank seemed on its surface to provide a web of oppositional sentiments and disdain toward management. In fact, however, this culture locked employees into a conservative system of meanings that all but ensured that the status quo at work would never change. For our purposes, resistance constitutes a dynamic phenomenon that can occur at multiple levels and can take multiple forms. It may or may not reflect conscious intent. It may or may not succeed in renegotiating the claims that elites can make on their subordinates. It may or may not harbor a conception of an alternative order, in however inchoate or fantastic a state. Such a broad approach comports with the view advanced by de Certeau (1984), for whom resistance – the ‘art of the weak’ – often relies on reactive forms of bricolage, in which subalterns creatively re-deploy existing discourses, yet without necessarily modifying the order of things (though such change remains conceivable). At a minimum, the presence of such oppositional impulses marks the limits of power’s domain. It is precisely this point Goffman has in mind when he observed that ‘every religious ceremony creates the possibility of a black mass’ (1967: 86). These orienting remarks are meant to open up the field of study that we and our contributors have in mind. In the remainder of this introduction, we seek to chart in more detail some of the theoretical moorings on which the field might draw. Rather than offering a singular perspective on resistance, we have sought to include competing interpretations of this multifaceted phenomenon. Perhaps inevitably, the very complexity of the resisting phenomenon – a dynamic, unstable, and often unpredictable feature of social life – precludes any possibility of being exhaustive. In no sense can this Handbook claim to produce something resembling a representative survey of the field. Our effort instead (fittingly enough) has sought to offer the maximum degree of liberty to authors to propose,

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develop, and defend specific accounts of resistance in a wide array of domains. In many ways, the selected texts and the logic that underlies the volume’s contents reflects our own assumptions about how the field can best advance in the years to come.

Domination and Resistance: Beyond the Binary We begin by outlining a series of propositions that can be gleaned from the last quarter century’s worth of theory, research and practical struggle involving the nature of domination and resistance. A first point, alluded to above, is that paradoxical: that in a sense, domination owes its very existence to the fact of resistance, however implicit the latter may be. As Simmel observed nearly a century ago, ‘the desire for domination is designed to break the internal resistance of the subjugated’ (1950, in Lukes 1986: 203). Thus the very condition of domination lies in the everpresent desire of the subjugated to escape power’s grasp. In other words, domination presupposes a certain level of ‘freedom on the part of the person subjected to [its] authority’ (Simmel 1950: 183). In this sense, then, resistance can be said to cause power. Second, while it is true that power returns the favor, generating resistance on its own account, it is vital that we avoid reifying the concept of domination, which is seldom shaped in terms of a single centralized node or nexus – Power with an uppercase P. Rather, domination is almost always a fractured phenomenon, riddled with complex and intersecting forms, much as intersectionality theorists insist (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000, 2015; McCall 2005). The very existence of multiple roles and axes of inequality, each conflicting with the others, is one major reason why resistance tends to be unstable and can seldom conform to universalistic ideals (Vallas 2016). Third, individuals and groups do not exhibit fixed, pre fabricated characteristics,

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but instead continually constitute and reconstitute themselves as subjects, often as a result of their resistance itself. Resistance, in other words, is a process through which identities and subjects are produced (Thomas 2009; Ybema, Thomas and Hardy, this volume). Because domination, in spite of its haughty appearance, is a contingent and always uncertain project, we see resisting efforts as equally uncertain counter-projects whose effects are not confined to their environments. We therefore break with arguments such as those developed by Bourdieu (1977, 1984), for whom the habitus constitutes an enduring, conservative force that always already favors the status quo (Wade 2011). We see resistance as having productive capacities, then (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012), not least since it leaves its mark on the resisters themselves. Indeed, the fact of resistance reflects the capacity of individual and collective subjects to generate alternative forms of power, distinct from and opposed to those which seek to naturalize themselves over time. A fourth point concerns the contextspecific or situational character of resistant acts. Our point here stresses the need for a relational (as opposed to a substantialist) view of resistance. After all, the “same” act – women’s choice to wear the veil, or to put on make-up, or for that matter to have a nose job – can mean diametrically opposite things, depending on the social context in which the act is lodged. Wearing the veil under the Shah was an act of resistance; wearing makeup and Western clothing (or receiving rhinoplasty) under the Islamic Republic, too, is an act of defiance (see Casanova and Jafar, this volume). ‘The particular social structure provides the grid of intelligibility for making sense of the actions as conforming to or dissenting from the given power configuration’ (Hoy 2004: 3). One goal of this Handbook is its effort to stress the contextual dimension of the practice of resistance, in spite of the urge to view or define it in terms of such abstract universals such as injustice, poverty, exploitation, or empowerment.

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One such abstract universal, however, must be singled out for particular attention: the notion of freedom. Contemporary theorists have often assumed an agnostic stance on the question of freedom and emancipation, largely owing to critiques of the Enlightenment generally. A more hopeful view, which was prevalent in France following the political events of the 1960s, and for a time flourished in the heyday of the Arab Spring, sees resistance as a nascent process of emancipation. Focusing our attention on the concrete conditions, backgrounds, and contexts in which resistance grows, and to which it responds, we invite scholars to ask: What is the emancipatory potential of a given social situation? Where are the unmanaged spaces within which actors can claim the possibility of agency and intervention on their own behalf? How does the intersection of distinct institutional logics open up spaces in which projects of emancipation can grow, however limited their scope or inflected with rearguard elements? From this point of view, resistance becomes a practical work with and for other individuals in order to develop practical and concrete freedom where it does not yet exist (Schaffer 2004). However this assertion always involves a practice of responsibility: following Sartre, “… even in the ethical act, we are not pure; we have committed ourselves to a sequence of events that, once started, are no longer under our control but for which we are fully responsible (…)’ (in Schaffer 2004: 257). Adopting this view toward freedom requires that we acknowledge forms of resistance that rebel against emancipation (Hoy 2004). Indeed, it may often be true that resistance is marked by both moments simultaneously, and vary only in accordance with the relative proportion each influence enjoys over the behavior at hand. We cannot avoid, merely through definitional fiat, the abovementioned importance of negative resistance. Rather, the task is to account for them, and for the path which their participants choose. Such instances may reflect ‘pathologies of

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

the life world” (Habermas 1984), occurring when “discourse-free” steering mechanisms, emanating from the market or the state, actively disrupt the structures that underpin civil society. In a privatized, individualized world that often lacks the basis for community and that fosters a culture of fear (of immigrants, terrorists, minorities, etc.), negative resistance may have greater gravitational pull than its broader, forward-looking cousins. Whether and under which conditions this result obtains, and how it might be counter-acted by movements of a more universalistic sort, remains a central task for theorists and activists alike (see Moghadam, this volume). So pressing are these questions that discussion of them has begun to dominate our daily newspapers.

Spaces of Resistance The importance of spaces to account for resisting activities is obvious: Relating space and resistance is not new because it rests upon an ontology of resistance as a largely situated social practice (Polletta 1999). Where resistance is achieved matters (Courpasson et al. 2016). Resistance is a lived experience that supposes the appropriation, occupation or temporary use of spaces whose meaningfulness for individuals is crucial to the act of resistance itself (Shortt 2015; Courpasson & et al. 2016). Resistant spaces are usually thought either as “free”, permitting opposition because they would be physically and structurally remote from power (Evans and Boyte 1986), or as “liminal” (Turner 1974), that is to say, “in-between” controlled and uncontrolled spaces like corridors, backstage regions where “anything can happen” (Turner 1974). A third, “spectacular” use of space has emerged that reflects our media-saturated condition: public occupations of space, which has been seized or usurped, in effect redeployed as symbols of the need to challenge the social order writ large. Resistant spaces are sometimes ‘dwelled’ by people during the

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time of their resistance; they are places like the Tahrir Square, or walls used by street artists (see Marche in this volume), or small gardens reappropriated by citizens to transform the urban landscape (Baudry & Eudes this volume). Resisters can walk through intersecting places so as to avoid control, or to achieve different things in different places. Spaces offer protection, but also substantial reasons to act from there: their meaningfulness is a condition of their efficacy and propagation (Rao and Dutta 2012). Space has often been thought as a neutral setting (Taylor and Spicer 2007). We suggest, by contrast, that it rather has a strong political inflection, especially in organizations (although not exclusively). We hold this view for at least two reasons. First, organizational spaces are embedded with power but they are also places where corporate power can be contested (Taylor and Spicer 2007). Factories have long been considered as spaces where industrial workers are concentrated to ensure better surveillance and control by entrepreneurs. Scholars have also argued that the construction of specific spatial arrangements around factories such as company towns (Andrew 1999) are means to ensure absolute control over the workforce, extending company reach beyond the work sphere. The most well-known spatial arrangements within organizational boundaries are the Fordist assembly line and Bentham’s Panopticon, both of which materialize the relations of power embedded in spaces and places. Therefore, place is connected to the managerial ability to locate the employee spatially (Jacques 1996). Yet the sheer fact of assembling workers as a body itself opens up the possibility of a broader struggle that was possible in an era in which the putting out system predominated. Moreover, as the labor of surveillance develops, so too do workers skills in identifying spaces that lie beyond the reach of the CCTV cameras. Scott himself was alive to this factor, which was fundamental to his notion of the “hidden transcript,” which could only survive within

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unpatrolled spaces to which only subordinates could gain admittance. Scott’s point is important: spaces permitting resistance are not merely discovered, but are often won, or even produced. Westwood (1984) found that women factory workers carved out cultural spaces of autonomy by invoking feminized rituals involving baby showers and wedding albums that excluded their male overseers. Even privileged groups such as surgeons find that unpatrolled spaces can provide a critical resource for contesting organizational practices that might redefine their ability to exercise power over their subordinates (Kellogg 2009). Inhabitants of organizational spaces often use them in deviant ways, as they move around in trajectories that do not necessarily match the prescribed paths (De Certeau 1984). They also use transitory places to give sense to their everyday life at work (Shortt 2015). The place/resistance nexus is therefore fundamental to account for practices that are elaborated to escape usual controls and expectations; but it is also a way to understand the role of space in shaping specific meaningful initiatives in direct relationship with the very place where they are taken.

Virtual Resistance? To ask the question, “Where do current struggles over the meanings of political appropriation take place?” is to confront the supposed de-territorialization that the internet has wrought. Immediately we see contradictions at work. Tahrir Square symbolized the importance of seizing a physical public space as the basis for an oppositional movement, yet it was itself inconceivable without the de-territorializing media (texting, Instagram, Twitter, blog posts) that resisters used to mobilize and protect themselves. Where do new avenues and means for social mobilization gain momentum? Do social media indeed exert significant influence over the practices and

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outcomes of mobilizations? The results seem to defy simple, one-dimensional accounts. Digital means of communication empower internet trolls to disseminate hate speech and a culture of intimidation – yet they also enable thousands of users to share images and indignation about unjust practices, such as police brutality or the desperate condition of refugees trying to cross European borders. How do online “friends” and followers align with “real” relationships? What is the relation between virtual and “real” communities? In other words, the link between the power of the street and the power of the tweet has yet to be understood (Gerbaudo 2012). Institutionalized politics is often routine, even boring; an effective resisting movement has to engage people’s hearts and minds (Marche 2012: 104). When politics become drudgery, a mere obligation, it ceases to be effective. Politics is much more enticing when it brings an element of desire, of play, and of a social eros that can approximate the Durkheimian notion of collective effervescence. To broach these questions is to ask not only how cultures of resistance arise, but also how they sustain themselves over time. What research we have along these lines suggests that movement persistence depends crucially on the existence of the elements of a moral community – rituals that foster activist identities, and emotional and practical supports that reinforce movement beliefs – that stands at odds with the wider polity (Nepstad 2004; Hjorth 2005; Contu 2014). Long term sustainability of resisting processes presupposes, it seems, the presence of enduring forms of interpersonal attachment and care that do not come out of the blue: ‘the do-it-yourself approach is where we create our own counter-power’ (Marche 2012: 105). In-person friendships and commitments create the social fabric that movements need if they are to build themselves and create counter-power (Simmel 1950): because we are accountable to each other, we feel a collective responsibility to achieve something together. Because we experience everyday

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

intimacy, with friends, families, neighbors engaging the same social problems, we feel the need to achieve something together, be it truly political or rather intended “for the children” (Eliasoph 1998). Can virtual or online communities provide a semblance of such ties? Alternatively, can the accumulation of digital “friends” and “followers” via FaceBook and Twitter serve as a force multiplier, reinforcing or complementing “real” social ties by amplifying a given moral community? Moments of heightened solidarity and emotional entrainment can certainly occur in the absence of physical encounters (R. Collins 2004). This is precisely the point of Courpasson’s (2017) study of a movement among French sales managers who felt gravely wronged by their employer. Though they had never met in person, participants formed a blog that served as a platform for their shared interests. Their movement quickly spilled over any instrumental concerns, however, and eventually fostered a widely reported hunger strike that transformed the lives and the identities of the participants in the struggle. But such stories may well be exceptional. More common may be the story of the poor Syrian boy, face down in the sand, whose photograph went viral as a symbol of the human toll of the refugee crisis. While the photograph provided a flash point of global solidarity, only a couple of weeks later the pragmatics of national politics prevailed, the borders were closed, and refugees were drowning in the Mediterranean Sea once again. Given the “thin” nature of online solidarity, this may indeed be the more prevalent outcome of virtual forms of resistance. The embodied/disembodied element in mobilization takes on a greater importance these days, precisely because of the growing impact of social media. Some have claimed that social media have begun to promote new logics of aggregation (Juris 2008) that foster more horizontal forms of assembly, thus stressing direct action and the prefigurative nature of activist organization (Sitrin 2007; Earl and Kimport 2011; see

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Kurik, in this volume). Is this conclusion warranted by the evidence? And precisely how do new media exercise this effect? Though there is a rich history of studies by social psychologists seeking to understand the conditions that foster a sense of solidarity and group commitment (Coleman 1968; Drury and Reicher 2005), much remains unknown about the nature of ties formed or mediated by new communication technologies. Whether online and offline modes of assemblage are more or less productive, and how they might either complement or compete with one another, remains to be explored. It seems reasonable to expect that Durkheim’s (1967) reasoning has retained much of its validity: Collective empowerment occurs when there is amplification, precipitation of a sense of shared identity, waves of emotional and corporeal effervescence, and rituals that reproduce the sense of community on which the group relies.

Refusing Resistance A Handbook of resistance cannot avoid admitting that many people today would not get involved in doing something about an issue that they might otherwise consider problematic, or unjust, or even cruel. Some people experience politics as an inert and distant world that they do not want to touch. That may be because this issue is “not close to home” (Eliasoph 1998: 1). Being touched by a problem combined with a feeling of powerlessness often leads people to simply “avoid politics”. It is impossible to study resistance without accounting for the many reasons why people often do not resist, that is to say, why [many] people prefer separating life and politics, and that it is actually fine for them. Political silence is often simply produced by the feeling that nothing can be done about certain issues, a mere recognition of ignorance or powerlessness. We do not talk here about the invisible complicity of people

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to their own subjugation, largely studied by hegemony theorists (Gramsci 1957; Burawoy 1979). Gramscian thinking highlights the meanings that people attribute to their specific circumstances, thus offering a way to understand how powerless groups are capable of transforming their situation, or simply accepting it as an obdurate social fact. But there is also a way to talk about the conscious evaporation of claims, the everyday construction of resistance avoidance that is a marker of many contexts, including of course in the workplace (Fleming 2013). People could prefer exiting, devoting energies and creativity in extra-work worlds remote from politics, because they consider resisting as a lost game. They are discouraged from even envisaging that they could change or challenge the status quo of control regimes in excessively powerful surrounding institutions (Hall 1977). Of course, the experience of acceptance and political disengagement is not that simple; real experiences of powerlessness are complex, as Gaventa (1980) has demonstrated, showing that the creation of a culture of political silence does actually not equate with political acquiescence: silence could be turned into challenge at every corner when opposing the mining company was considered possible. Disengagement is not systematically synonymous with political or civilized indifference (Courpasson 2016): it can evolve sometimes because of the “contradictory consciousness” evoked by Gramsci. The culture of silence is a patient autonomous production of people, a cultural knowledge, and not always an external sign of pure complicity or consent. We often consider indeed that resisting initiatives require an explanation while political passivity or consent would be the normal state of affairs. However, apathy also “takes work to produce” (Eliasoph 1998: 6). Indeed, resistance requires that discontent that can be expressed in a “backstage” region (Goffman 1959) connects with the wider world and thereby avoids political evaporation due to everyday life pressures and constraints.

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Whispers then turn into dissent; ideas and claims, wherever expressed, establish circuits that make them audible when this connection is established. Resistance requires that political ideas can circulate in everyday life; studying resistance necessitates understanding the bridges that can be established between everyday discussions, feelings, emotions, encounters, and the challenges of the wider world. When this connection is nowhere to be seen, it is difficult to hope for engagement, risk-taking, sacrifice and work that is required for resistance to become consequential. Resistance requires the contexts, selfhood, friendships and kinship connections, possibilities of empowerment and relations to the world, as well as a sense of community through which people care more and think more about what they can do together to feel better or simply to survive. In other words, to follow again Eliasoph (1998), resistance may well require a sense of attachment to a wider world, in complement to the ‘obvious’ attachment to the mere local context to which we belong. But it also requires making meaning of the very space in which we live, physically vigorous gatherings embroiling people in each other’s lives, as ‘laughing bodies with tastes, passions, manners” (Eliasoph 1998:  12). It is when we affirm voluntary connections to particular people that spaces become meaningful and can turn sociable apolitical grounds for common life into preconditions for some kinds of engagement into dissident acts, based on belonging, companionship, and the capacity to craft a sense of what connects us to broader challenges. On this basis, people may discover and think about wider political forces that produce their problems, locally experienced. Resistance is also the result of a “quality of mind” (Wright Mills 1959) that help people to understand the relationship and interplay between their lived experiences and the wider forces around them. Resisting is a process through which, as Pitkin puts it, people begin a conversation from “I want” and finish by “I am entitled to”, thereby shaping a claim that becomes

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

then debatable and negotiable in its own right (Pitkin 1981: 347).

The “Ends” of Activism Many of the more emancipatory views that scholars have adopted toward the internet depend, in one way or another, on the possible emergence of a public sphere capable of posing a challenge, whether discursive or otherwise, to concentrated sites of economic or political power. In the terms of Jurgen Habermas (1984), the hope has been that systemic differentiation of the life world might enable citizens to invoke their powers of communicative rationality, using them to generate alternative meaning systems that insist on subjecting the workings of the market or the state to discursive legitimation. At this juncture, however, two potential threats come into view. One is that markets have so fully colonized the life world as to envelop the very logic that governs activism. Symptoms of this trend can be found in the increasingly prevalent notion of the “consumer-citizen,” in which agency can only find expression through the purchase of commodities. Here can be found in such kindred notions as ethical consumption, shopping for social change, celebrity activists and brand name support or sponsorship for particular social justice themes. These are so many instances of what Mukherjee and BanetWeiser (2012) have called “commodity activism,” in which actors pursue social change ever more completely through the circuits of consumer capitalism. Doing so may assuage the moral sensibilities of the affluent, and even seem to insert counter-hegemonic norms into commercial activity. Yet the danger is that activism increasingly comes to bear a family resemblance to the very action systems it protests. Anti-sweatshop movements may, for example, begin to locate agency only within the act of consumption, and even “use” sweated labor, as when they

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ask workers from the developing world to participate in solidarity campaigns, often in ways that objectify them or trap them in the victim role (Brooks 2007; Vallas, Judge and Cummins 2015; Seidman 2007 and this volume). A second, related threat to public activism stems from the growth of “astro-turf” movements – campaigns that claim to represent the lived experience and needs of grass roots populations, but are in fact initiated, funded, or guided by an array of corporate or political entities and the consulting firms they engage. Indeed, an entire industry of consulting firms has emerged since the 1970s, which enable client firms to benefit from the rise of seemingly populist upsurges of concerned citizens, whose mobilization is in fact driven by the interests of industry associations, large corporations, and lobbyists (Walker 2009). Examples abound in which consultants and large foundations have mobilized national citizen campaigns around issues of interest to health care corporations, pharmaceutical companies, energy associations, or firearms manufacturers, to name but a few. Here, participation becomes “a mechanism for the reproduction of institutionalized authority; it is a counter-pressure to citizen power that seeks to root elite institutions more deeply in public life” (Walker, McQuarrie and Lee 2015: 17). Indeed, new-media based companies such as Uber can utilize their software directly, mobilizing their own customers and members to engage in forms of activism that fuse the interests of consumer and the corporation, now without the need for consulting firms as intermediaries (Walker, this volume). In a sense, these twin threats draw out the full and challenging implications of Foucault’s famous dictum that ‘resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1976: 95). Yet it is one thing to say that power shapes resistance (and vice versa). But what happens when power infuses itself into resistance and begins to supply its voice, or even its soul? That Foucault wrestled with the question of authenticity through much of

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his intellectual life provides a sign that the issue cannot be quickly dismissed. Is such a hope merely a naïve relic of a simpler time? If astro-turf movements, commodity activism, and what Fleming (2014) has begun to call “biocracy” have begun to manufacture resistance in a prefabricated form, how can the “real” thing survive? Our nineteenth century counterparts had the advantage of confronting power in a centralized, overarching form. We enjoy no such luxury. Partly because of what Giddens (1991) called the “sequestration of experience,” the various domains of the social order often seem to be governed in a loosely coupled way, with each institutional subsystem generating its own terrain of struggle. This fracturing of the life world is only exacerbated by the complex overlay of religious fundamentalism and militarization that the “war on terrorism” has produced. Still, the question must be asked: Does our age foster forms of “counter-conduct” of the sort that Foucault identified in opposition to the Lutheran Reformation (Foucault 2007)? Even as the Great Recession has seemed only to strengthen the grip that neo-liberalism enjoys, several counter-tendencies can be identified. One is rooted in what Saskia Sassen (2014) has termed a “logic of expulsion,” in which the poor are excluded from state support, millions of households have lost their homes to foreclosures, and global mining and energy concerns expand into the environment, leaving “dead zones” in their wake (see also Desmond 2016). In this context, identity movements (Rao 2003) engage in what might be called symbolic tribalism: a political-cultural game in which life-styles and collective identities struggle for predominance, with none able to succeed. In short, “hegemony” is increasingly contested in all directions, and little if anything retains its doxic character (Bourdieu 1977). The question, which the late Ulrich Beck asked but could not answer (1992), is whether the “reactivation of civil society” is at hand, and whether it might somehow succeed in spite of

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the wider trend toward individualization. Our hope is that the chapters in this Handbook will bring us closer to an answer.

What is to Follow Both the theory and the practice of resistance have changed rapidly and substantially in recent years. This has led to more fluidity and more diversity both in the object we hope to grasp and in the approaches we might take toward it. As academics, we must be cautious in our assumptions regarding the validity of our claims, if only because today there are so many ways through which resistance can be expressed. Resistance is a moving target, in other words, or better: a liquid, dynamic form of social and political action that is not easily captured by inherited theoretical categories. This is the context in which the authors prepared their contributions for this Handbook. To address or capture this shifting landscape, we have made choices concerning both the subjects and the authors we wished to include in this project. Ultimately the Handbook surely represents our vision of the terrain. The contributions express diverse aspects of the chosen terrain; obviously other editors would have made different choices, and we have surely omitted many regions of the landscape. This is our only certainty. Notably, we have not included a chapter devoted to the ethics of resistance as a discrete subject in its own right: We see it rather as a matter for analysis within all discourse about resistance. The Handbook is structured in terms of an array of subthemes that in our view represent the emerging body of knowledge in the field. Authors were invited to do more than simply codify existing knowledge (important a task though that is), but in addition to explore possible ways of extending our knowledge in a given realm. Many of the papers therefore highlight peculiar sites, novel forms of action, new uses of resources,

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

and actors not previously seen on the political stage. We also wanted the chapters to share diverse explanations of why resistance is an effective and consequential process, contrary to the oligarchical vulgate that is still prevalent today. The Handbook is organized into five distinct but overlapping sections. Contributions in the Foundations section begin by engaging the theoretical and conceptual frameworks on which resistance studies scholars have relied. The four substantive sections that follow are each devoted to a particular theme: to institutional sites of resistance, the technologies on which resistance relies, the languages in which resistance finds its expression, and the geography of resistance (its distribution in space) as well. Our logic is outlined below.

Foundations The first section addresses key conceptual questions in the field, and represents several analytic traditions in the field. These chapters register the signal contributions that have been made most prominently by anthropologist, feminists, and (surprisingly to some) by scholars in organization studies. Juris and Sitrin’s chapter highlights the distinctive value of “resistance” as an analytic tool, in that it provides access to a broader and more inclusive set of phenomena than can be glimpsed using such concepts as social movements, protests, or political contention. They note, however, that, following Scott too religiously, scholars have tended to fixate unduly on everyday forms of resistance, thereby favoring more localized or micro-level processes rather than struggles that assume a more macrostructurally oriented form. Their chapter redresses this imbalance by explicating anticorporate resistance movements distributed across multiple sites, including Prague and Occupy Boston, Thessaloniki (Greece) and urban-based struggles across Argentina. The substantive story that emerges is one in which prefigurative forms of assemblage emerge

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among movement participants, in spite of their heterogeneous backgrounds (see Juris 2012). Equally important are two methodological themes implied in the Juris and Sitrin paper. First, precisely by conjoining ethnographies that were conducted separately, these scholars have multiplied the breadth of their analysis, making possible linkages and comparisons that would otherwise elude their grasp. And second, these authors engage in a refusal of the objectivist trap which cordons scholars off from involvement in the very movements they would understand.1 The contributions that anthropological theory makes to the study of resistance are also manifest in Robert Kurik’s overview of three decades of thinking about the question of power, subjectivity, and human agency. Kurik’s analysis begins, logically enough, with James Scott and the multiple critiques of his work. He then disentangles the many twists and turns (many provoked by the flow of historical events) which the study of resistance has taken since the 1990s, prominently featuring Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian work. Key here is the struggle to develop a theoretically insightful analysis of resistance that does not sacrifice its ethnographic sensibilities. Achieving this task has periodically required the introduction of new conceptual devices, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome,” Crossley’s “radical habitus” and Kurik’s own “revolutionary amoebas.” The latter concept, based on Kurik’s remarkable fieldwork with radical European communities, begins to show the complex interplay that exists between underground resistance movements and new forms of subjectivity – mostly notably, one that allows subjects to split themselves into conventional and heretical selves. Val Moghadam’s chapter on the Arab Spring is an especially timely contribution that operates at both theoretical and empirical levels simultaneously. The chapter draws on feminist theory to unpack some of the ways in which the struggle between Islamism and Western powers has been gendered in both

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directions. Moghadam’s analysis goes further, showing how gender (and the relative strength of feminist and women’s organizations) drives so much of the ferment that has roiled the Middle East – a fact that was palpably evident in the Arab Spring. Only in Tunisia – a nation in which women’s organizations had long been able to shape family law and policy – did mobilization result in an expansion of freedom for the people involved. Feminist theory, as the author shows, thus makes a double contribution: it provides a critical analysis of Islamism as a key variant of patriarchal thinking, while also tracing the consequences that gender and family law have for the outcome of popular upheavals. The section closes with two papers authored by leading figures operating with the tradition of organization studies. The paper by David Knights surveys the field, tracing the uses of the resistance concept within a welter of traditions that have gained currency in this field: industrial sociology, labor process theory, critical realism, post-humanist feminism, and Foucauldian analysis. Knights is particularly concerned to address the accusation, launched by many critics, that Foucauldian analysis harbors an accommodative nature that leads only to political paralysis (see Zamora and Behrent 2016). Knights expresses his strong disagreement on this score. Relying on what some have called the “final Foucault,” he sees the various technologies of the self as working to conjure identities and subjectivities that align with the demands of the social and political order. Yet, immanent within theoretical and philosophical literatures can be found alternative ways of defining one’s self. Here post-humanist feminism and Foucauldian analysis converge in their call for an ethics that makes possible a refusal ‘to be what one has become through so many procedures, regulations, and exercises of power”. The irony of course is that Foucault, who began his intellectual journey by rejecting any humanist concern for individuality, ended it with a view that hinged on the centrality of the self as a fulcrum point for social change.

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The last chapter in this section is by Spicer and Fleming, who explore the dilemmas that 24/7 capitalism has engendered. Much of the creative power of this chapter stems from its ability to mine popular culture for insights that can be conjoined with social scientific analysis of work organizations (see also Cederstrom and Fleming 2012). Asking why active resistance seems so rare within “absorptive” or high commitment occupations, the authors propose that 24/7 capitalism has reconfigured the very possibility of resistance. When paid employment is no longer what we do, but instead becomes what we are, life itself has been colonized. Where does one run when one’s very self has been enveloped by the forces one might oppose? Foreswearing easy answers, Spicer and Fleming nonetheless propose that the notion of “exit,” initially theorized in Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty nearly a half century ago, assumes newfound significance. Escapism, absenteeism, “presenteeism” all warrant greater attention in an era when “voice” seems only to deepen the malaise from which we now suffer.

Sites The chapters in section II start from the mundane idea that resistance happens somewhere and that this somewhere does matter. The contributions in this section – which again reveal the central contributions of feminist theory and practice – suggest that resisting in prisons, in organizations or in schools entails different configurations, motives, actions and outcomes. This is first because those places themselves have specific physical and material dimensions that both constrain and enable the crafting and development of resisting efforts. This is also because these sites are governed by distinctive institutional logics or forms of control, whose density and magnitude are different – and differently interpreted and subverted – by individuals. Here again, disparate traditions are evident in these contributions,

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

which encompass a wide array of sites but that accord gender a central place, often in combination with other axes of inequality. The chapter by Erynn Masi de Casanova and Afshan Jafar draws on a longstanding tradition within feminist studies that views the body as a site at which power and resistance are conjoined. The authors extract an important cautionary lesson that guards against the assumption that the use of the body – from dress or make-up to body modification – must either reinforce or contest established forms of power. The politics of the body typically exhibits a far more complex and over-determined quality, mixing resistance with accommodation in ways that cannot be reduced to the intentions that drive the act. These matters are sharply debated among feminist and gay rights communities, as is evident in both the “slutwalk” and the “Pink Underwear” movement in India, both of which have provoked sharp controversy. Key, these authors insist, are two points that should be axiomatic: the contextual nature of bodily representations (which are always already “situated”), and the view of the body as the site at which analytically distinct dimensions of inequality intersect. Amanda Gengler’s chapter also uses an intersectional-feminist lens to address the question of agency and resistance. Studying social relations at a shelter for victims of intimate partner violence, Gengler shows how such residential institutions – many of which were established as outposts of the women’s movement – have by and large come to exercise tight and often coercive forms of control over the women they would help, often using an individualizing, psycho-therapeutic discourse. A rhetoric of “empowerment” is everywhere, Gengler notes. Yet, as her fieldwork reveals, such controls exhibit a dual nature: they not only establish limits over the movements and activities of the women at issue; in addition, they provide resources with which women can act back on their overseers. Hers is an ennobling message, indicating how seemingly poor and powerless women can act back on the structures that challenge their

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human dignity. Gengler’s work can be read as an important extension of previous work linking structure, agency and dignity, such as the late Randy Hodson’s (2001) Dignity at Work and, more recently, the comparative study by Michele Lamont and her colleagues (2016), Getting Respect (see also Fernandez, this volume). The chapter by Jillian Crocker provides an interesting counterpoint to that of Gengler. Crocker’s study examines the working lives of lower-income women employed at a nursing home in the Northeastern United States. Again using an intersectional lens, she shows how gender, race, and class combine in ways that establish a grid that can seem coercive and unforgiving: These women have little autonomy in their work and dare not risk insubordination, given their need to support their families. Yet that very fact, it turns out, provides a source of solidarity and mutual support: Since virtually all of the women in Crocker’s study are mothers of young children (and occupy much the same status as workers of color), gender, race and class combine to establish a bond – a willingness to defend one another – that proves indispensable in their dealings with their managers. Crocker’s point serves as a challenge to those who assume either that family life is irrelevant to workplace life, or that it acts to limit worker autonomy and resistance. Quite the opposite can be true. Blum and Kimelberg develop a distinctive approach toward schooling as a site of resistance, again showing the interwoven nature of paid employment and family life. Serendipitously, and much as Juris and Sitrin have done (this volume), they have knitted together two separate studies in which parents (largely mothers) must struggle to ensure the well-being of their children within public schools. The shared context is one in which neo-liberal policies have coercively framed public schooling as a matter of individual choice. Yet social relations continually betray this framing by exposing the normative complexities involved in the exercise of “choice.”

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On the one hand, mothers – especially those whose children have special needs – must engage in years-long struggles against the stigmatizing categories which schools impose on their children, some of whom must take prescription medications as a condition of their continuation in school. Yet how hard can a mother fight before she jeopardizes the child’s treatment at the hands of teachers and administrators? On the other hand, parents who refuse to conform to the middle-class strategy of choosing “safe” (read: white) suburban schools must also struggle with normative dilemmas – in this case, whether they themselves have endangered their children by choosing an “urban” school. What Blum and Kimelberg bring home is the fact that “resistance” is not limited to the external world, but instead passes through the internal emotional lives of parents and especially mothers who must fight for the well-being of their children. Resistance involves not only behavioral defiance but also deeply emotional conflicts as well. The last two chapters in this section focus on the specifically organizational processes that characterize power and resistance. The chapter by Rantakari and Vaara, which again showcases the work of scholars in organization studies, is concerned with the ways in which resistance makes itself felt in the formulation and implementation of corporate strategy. They therefore hope to connect resistance studies to the most prominent economic institutions in advanced capitalist society – not an idle concern, especially in the light of the massive scandals and crises (Enron, Goldman Sachs, Volkswagen, etc.) that have characterized corporate strategy in recent years. It will no longer do, these authors note, to view resistance as either an irrelevant or obstructionist force within the corporate world (as functionalist and managerial approaches have done). Rather, the authors contend that critical (interpretative or post-structural) approaches hold great value here, in that they sensitize us to the inevitable presence and even centrality of resistance as a part of the strategy making process. Failure

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to acknowledge this fact, they imply, will only compound the follies in which corporations engage while also wasting huge proportions of the knowledge that corporations have amassed. Implied here is the need for analysis of managerial structures to acknowledge the inherently political character of strategy formulation (see Thomas 1994). Doing so can be enormously productive, in fact (Courpasson, Dany and Clegg 2012). Finally, the chapter by Arford explores the single most coercive site of power and resistance imaginable: the prison. Following a version of Foucauldian theory, she notes that such sharply coercive settings should provoke resistance virtually everywhere. This is a reasonable assumption, abundantly supported by existing research and Arford’s own analysis of the imposition of censorship regimes within the carceral setting. Interestingly, though the prison figured prominently in the development of Foucault’s own work, Arford finds reason to challenge conventional formulations derived from his work. Casting her net wide so as to encompass forms of resistance not only by prisoners but also by prison workers, she points out that the the prison’s elaborate layers of authority relations introduce pronounced complexities into the nature of resistance. For example, when prison workers evade or subvert the institution’s rules, we would ordinarily view this as resistance. Yet such acts may well imply the exertion of power over prisoners. In such cases, rule breaking is simultaneously power and resistance. Arford calls these acts of “power/resistance,” and expects them to exist wherever complex organizational authority is found. This concept warrants much further application – as does analysis of the repressive nature of carceral institutions and efforts (whether within or beyond prison walls) to overcome their effects.

Technologies Section III fastens on the diversity of technologies at work in resisting processes, be

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

they tools or forms of control. Resisting work requires certain forms of expertise because it is a project, often conducted in groups that demand a careful work of coordination and organization. But that work also requires the use and mastering of tools. Like the craft worker who uses a hammer, the resister uses a microphone, a screen, a smartphone, a hood and all manner of costumes, all of which are part of the tools of the trade. We also use the term technology in the broader, Foucauldian sense, referring to the deployment of discourses which, in this case, serve to incite social and political action as well. Resistance today bears the mark of technology in both these senses. Of course, workers in manufacturing plants could often use “their” machines as resisting devices, because they knew these machines and their caprices better than did management (Halle 1984; Vallas 2006). In a similar vein, resisters today must learn to appropriate or re-deploy the technologies of control they confront in their everyday lives. At the micro-social level, citizens are now armed with smartphones that can record the actions of police as they brutalize people of color, bringing public pressure to bear on the criminal justice system in the quest for social justice. At a more macro- or even global level, the expansion of the internet has made it possible for groups like Anonymous (or for rebel technicians like Edward Snowden) to bend algorithmic regimes to a different purpose, enabling the world to peer into the secret practices of state surveillance agencies, thus exposing political hypocrisy on the grandest of scales. Felipe Massa’s chapter builds on a longstanding tradition of research to show how internet-supported communities (such as Anonymous) are instantiated differently from the face-to-face interaction, thus in turn affecting the way through which individuals engage in resisting work. He offers a redefinition of the notion of community to better understand how resisting work takes place and develops in online settings. Massa offers an analysis that shows not only what

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it means to “be communitarian” online, but also the culturally rich forms that interpersonal ties assume even in the absence of bodily co-­presence. The chapter nicely illustrates the power of the internet as a social technology in shaping new organizing practices and structures that can sustain movements against diverse types of oppression. Internet-based communities are generative of norms and values. A sense of trust that does not require a physical co-presence is generated by the expectation that members share common purposes and a similar way of “seeing the world.” The question remains whether online interactions, often ephemeral, allow the necessary depth to build the connections for people to truly engage in significant and enduring resisting processes. The internet can speed up action, but this action can be short-lived. Marianne Maeckelbergh offers a fascinating and creative analysis of the complex ties between social media and the simultaneous production of alternative political values in social movements. She uses cases that are perfect examples of the tight relationships between the uses of social media and physical space: she shows that technologies of resistance are cables and wires, but also meetings, spaces and places, physical encounters, and political values. Social media are embedded in physical spaces because they are the very sites where political values challenge the orientations of dominant classes and elites. By highlighting these complex dynamics, Maeckelbergh not only shows that social media have the power to effect change, at least when they are part of a wider political project. In addition, her chapter reveals how physical spaces are technologies of resistance, providing a new understanding of “infrastructure” as well. She goes therefore a step further than social media studies usually do, by identifying a key process (“resignification”) that intervenes between social media and resistance work. A symbolic and practical inversion of meaning is produced when technologies are used in ways that differ from their intended use.

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Hjorth’s chapter adopts a very different stance to engage in the broad question of the technologies of resistance. He offers a shift in the approach to resistance, reflecting upon resistance ‘from above’. For him, entrepreneurship creates a dilemma for top management because, although integral to the current post-bureaucratic workings and discourses, it also threatens the managerial order and the very efficacy of managerial control. Hjorth shows, by using the concept of ‘co-optation’, how this tension can be resolved by a creative resistance from above: resistance is theorized here as both an object of negation and of agreement. Co-optative management is therefore a particular technology of control and resistance to creative efforts from below. The chapter is an interesting and creative move toward understanding top management resistance as a creative process because, in a sense, going against its very enterprise and autonomy-driven rhetoric obliges management to invent subtle forms of political technologies like co-optation. Edward Walker’s (Chapter 13, this Handbook) builds on his earlier work on “astro-turf” movements (2009; Walker, McQuarrie and Lee, 2015) – campaigns in which firms mobilize what seem to be grassroots movements, but are in fact corporateled campaigns with no real popular base (at least, not at their point of inception). Many have suggested that this category includes the Tea Party movement in the United States, to take but one important example. Walker’s chapter brings to our attention two more recent cases of such “grassroots for hire” movements: First, Uber’s deployment of its customer base, in which it sought to mobilize users and drivers via its own communication system, the better to shape its regulatory environment; and second, the beverage industry’s campaign to defeat the highly restrictive dietary regulations that public health authorities had proposed in New York. Though there are important differences between these two campaigns – ironically, Uber’s intervention was at least partially transparent – the broader lesson here concerns the rise of what

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might be termed “manufactured” or “prefabricated” resistance. Involved here is a kind of corporate ventriloquism, in which profitoriented firms and other organizations emulate the public’s “voice.” The result blurs the line between power and resistance in highly problematic ways. The difficulty here is that even bringing to light such phenomena runs the risk of fostering cynicism and resignation among the very publics that more authentic forms of resistance need as their actual base.

Languages Section IV takes seriously the discourse on which resistance relies. Premised on the notion that discourse, morality, and cultural meanings are all part and parcel of struggles (or the lack thereof), the chapters in this section explore the possibility of cultural resistance, the role of music in fostering defiant subcultures, and the deployment of the arts and collective identities as ingredients that are necessary conditions for the production of resistance itself. The importance of these themes has been registered in many historical events, from the content of slave songs in the Southern United States (Levine 1993), the use of “style warfare” in the Zoot Suit phenomenon during World War II (Cosgrove 1984), and (more recently) the stylized manner of the Mods and Teddy Boys during the 1970s (Hebdige 1979). By its very nature, resisting requires that actors articulate their claims, explaining and expressing what one contests, and on what grounds. Resisting is saying something, expressing one’s voice. At times it can also entail saying nothing and through this silence, expressing one’s refusal. Resistance therefore requires a language, be it musical, loud and joyful, or put as words and signs on a wall or a building, or channeled through specific organizational and institutional vocabularies and motives. Although literature on the cultural media of resistance has progressed through fits and starts, a number of gaps persist in this field.

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

Notably, few have explored the enduring significance of religious doctrines and beliefs in the contemporary world (this is an enduring absence in contemporary theory generally). Likewise, the conceptual frameworks with which to graph “identity” as a phenomenon have remained uncertain, in spite of the proliferation of theories of identity (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). In this context, Ryan Moore’s chapter is especially welcome for its rich discussion of the role that music has played in the shaping of youth subculture. Ironically, though it is an arm of the culture industry, music has undeniably helped sustain subversive styles of life among generations of youth. Much as the tradition of cultural studies would expect, such symbolic expressions as music may be subjected to the logic of commodity production, but can never be fully encapsulated by the market; a good example is hip hop music and style, which have become the basis for a language of resistance with global reach in spite (or actually as the result of) of its commercial success. This mobilizing role, Moore notes, has continued up into the present, as punk sensibilities, hip hop, and indie performers have brought their influence to bear on the WTO protests in Seattle, the Occupy movements, and (most recently) the Black Lives Matter movement. Just as the coming of radio at times helped to foster counter-hegemonic forms of political action (Roscigno and Danaher 2001), so too does popular music provide an ongoing source of discursive resources from which oppositional thinking can draw. The importance of moral discourse for social movements is addressed by Gay Seidman’s chapter, which discusses the normative tactics adopted by global human rights movements since the 1980s. Growing initially out of the anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s, activist scholars began to argue that the ‘Achilles heel’ of consumer capitalism lay in the very brand culture it employed to circulate its goods (Klein 1999). By mobilizing “name and shame” campaigns against

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such commodities as Nike running shoes and Gap apparel, activists hoped to attack the most unsavory of corporate practices (child labor, sweating tactics, or violent intimidation), which were publicly defined as repugnant. Seidman’s analysis shows that the use of shame as a moral lever in fact has a long history, reaching back into the late eighteenth century, when anti-slavery activists organized campaigns against the consumption of sugar, framing its use in tea as constituting a “blood sweetened beverage’ (a reference to slavebased production methods). As Seidman notes, latter day name and shame movements adopt moral discourse ‘not simply to punish bad actors, but as a step toward strengthening, and perhaps institutionalizing, new rules for behavior in the global community’. This use of shame follows an essentially Foucauldian path, in that it seeks to institute new norms by publicly identifying immoral or transgressive behavior as an object lesson of what societies ought not to be. The chapter by Adam Reich provides a fascinating account of the role of morality as a mechanism that can be used either to subvert or to legitimate market-based economic activity. The case at hand is one in which a Catholic order of nuns brought a spiritual framework to bear on the performance of hospital work, thus defining poor pay and working conditions as moral sacrifices that were necessary if the hospital’s mission were to be achieved. Here, morality informed and protected market-based transactions. Yet, as the nuns’ hospital system increasingly adopted a profit-oriented logic, the old morality lost much of its credibility, opening the door to a union campaign. Yet the success of the union efforts required workers and their representatives to appropriate the moral doctrines their overseers had previously used – a process that entailed painstaking efforts to build trust with the religious community in which the hospital was embedded. Reich’s analysis is especially interesting in that it addresses the complex link between resistance and religion – an area that obviously needs much more

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attention than it has received (see Moghadam, this volume). It also insists that morality cannot be viewed as a mere reflection of material influences, as economistic doctrines have commonly assumed. In their contribution on identities, Ybema, Thomas and Hardy offer a framework to understand the relationship between identities and resistance; identity is seen as a source and a basis of resistance, thus extending our understanding of the role of subjectivity in resistance. A focus is therefore operated on forms of micro-political resistance defined as ‘resistance to the dominant at the level of the individual subject’ (Weedon 1987: 111, in Thomas 2009: 173). Studies of how individuals draw on understandings of the self as resources from which to resist dominant attempts to define their work ethics and identities are numerous, but they lack an account of how the micro-politics of identity can give rise to a specific language that creates meaning and strength. Ybema et  al. show how identities are both sources of oppression and of emancipation (in line with feminist theories) and how organizations can be analyzed as sites of political contestation thanks to languages of identity creation. Guillaume Marche (Chapter 17, this Handbook) provides another perspective on language through his detailed study of graffiti in San Francisco, and how they help raising crucial consciousness in an area where the definition of urban citizenship is constantly contested. He shows that the specificity of graffiti as a language of protest is that it generates indeterminate messages, where meaning is not fixed, but rather left to the viewers’ interpretation and appropriation. Graffiti are a peculiar language of resistance because they are confrontational expressions of dissent while at the same time not overtly political. They therefore lead beyond the usual political/non-political divide in resistance studies. Marche also convincingly suggests how graffiti are powerful vehicles of resistance because of their very cryptic, uncertain and ambiguous content. They foster a sort of creative indeterminacy,

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thus triggering invisible interactions among artists, viewers and even authorities, which are themselves in turn generative of significant oppositional practices that could not have happened otherwise, in the open political realm.

Geographies The fifth subsection moves to the spatial and cultural backdrop of all instances of resistance. Resisting processes are complex entanglements of spaces, places, cultures and institutional constraints, histories and power relationships. Geographies of resistance also remind us that resisting processes never escape from the endless circulations of power, because of the deep ‘spatiality’ of the interrelationship between patterns of domination and patterns of resistance. The innumerable knots that connect power and resistance efforts are to be found in the networks, spaces and places that people invest and occupy, or subvert and bypass, thereby showing the spatially situated workings of power and resistance within and across the globe (see Sharp & et al. 2000). The chapters in this section evoke a number of themes that stretch across continents – including both the developing and the developed world – and that often center on the meanings that come to be attached to particular places within the social landscape. Often, the organizational and ideological capacity of political actors seems to hinge on their ability to secure or to defend communal spaces for participants, be they Bengali activists defending sacred land against multinational energy companies (as in Lamia Karim’s account), activists engaged in urban gardening in radical communities in the global north (as in the chapter by Sandrine Baudry and Emeline Eudes), or poor, unemployed members of a cooperative in Buenos Aires, Argentina (in the chapter by Pablo Fernandez). Of course, the rootedness of political subjects in local spaces poses an enormous challenge for efforts to establish a global polity, as in

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

the World Social Forum (here studied by Giuseppe Caruso). The section begins with Karim’s rich account of NGOs engaging in political struggles in Bengladesh. Karim explores the liminal spaces that two NGOs occupied between the Bengali state and civil society. One NGO (GSS) drew on the tradition of leftist political thought in Bangladesh (a tradition heavily influenced by Western radical thought), and mobilized local activists to run for political office. This strategy seemed promising – but perhaps too much so, in that it posed a direct threat to the ruling party, which identified GSS as an “anti-state” organization, eventually leading to its demise. The second NGO Karim studied (the National Committee) adopted a more flexible, locally oriented, place-based strategy that proved conducive to villagers facing development initiatives that would have polluted their soil and water, dispossessed upwards of 250,000 residents, and disrupted their sacred cultural traditions. Narrating dramatic events leading up to violent clashes between villagers and police, Karim extracts a lesson from the contrasting paths these two NGOs pursued, nicely encapsulated in the experience of one tribal group (the Santals), who are aware that “the ashes of their ancestors have mixed with the soil that in turn has nurtured generations,” producing a powerful bond in which “land and identity are inextricably linked.” The deeply symbolic meanings of space, land, and power here powerfully converge. The chapter by Fernandez reminds us that workers from all sorts of backgrounds are forging new alternatives from cooperatives and new social movements to abstaining from work: he points to how workers forge various forms of “freedom” within the confines of the contemporary organization – but also freedom from the wage labor relation itself (Fleming and Mandarini 2009: 340). The issue of emancipation, observed in his chapter through the crafting of alternatives to the current configuration of a “job,” is studied through the entanglement between issues

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of dignity, posed as clear political stake in Argentina, and work as a social form used by jobless people to repair their dignity in a peculiar creative place. Resistance seen as “attempts to regain dignity in the face of organizations at work that violate workers’ interests, limit their prerogatives and undermine their autonomy” (Hodson 1995: 80) has been documented in a long tradition that studies the informal rituals and cultures at work. But this tradition has largely taken the coordinates of paid employment for granted. In his contribution, Fernandez shows that when conditions demand, even people without resources of any sort can become active producers of workplace relations as they remake themselves and their surroundings through mutual support and solidarity. He offers a way to understand how individuals digest imperatives from the social structures, how they stick to the strict limits of their social positions or manage to transform their destinies through peculiar creations of alternative forms of work and cooperation. He also provides a fine attempt to situate these political efforts in a Latin American context that is particularly congenial to this type of creative production of alternatives. China is another fascinating context in which to study resistance. One could consider, if the past is any guide, that repressive forces are always able to control and severely punish contestation in this huge and complex institutional context. Zhou and Ai’s chapter demonstrates that the issue of resistance in China is far from being that simple, if only because China is a fast changing context, where multiple and competing institutions and regimes of power coexist, making resistance itself a heterogeneous and not overdetermined case. The chapter highlights how resisting activities in rural China, at the level of local villages, have been able progressively to transform in a fundamental way the bases of governance in rural China. The state is not capable of exerting control over every aspect of social life; there are therefore manifold patterns of resistance that are mobilized

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to voice grievances and resist injustice in the villagers’ everyday life as well as the abuse of power by village cadres. Overall the chapter shows that resistance need not necessarily be hidden to produce considerable effects on power regimes, despite the highly constraining institutions throughout which microevents and local interactions develop. Baudry and Eudes’s chapter concentrates on another geographical aspect of resistance: urban gardening as a tool of rebellion against the capitalist order presiding over the making of our current urban landscapes. They show that the power of this practice comes from the fact that it largely coincides with current political agenda related to environmental issues such as sustainable development, local food production or citizens’ volunteer work. They highlight the reasons why it thus runs the risk of perpetuating existing relationships in the cities instead of actually disrupting dominant logics. The chapter interrogates the mutual relations between gardening initiatives and public policies, and helps us understand the motives that inform the work of urban gardeners, in particular their relation to the social order. Their analysis is fascinating as it highlights important mechanisms that lead to the co-optation or distortion of the subversive potential of urban gardening (Hjorth, this volume). It provides illuminating examples that show the ambiguities that are inherent to most practices of resistance, as well as their always possible absorption by authorities and official transcripts. A genuine engagement in a practice like urban gardening can lead to the replication of existing patterns of domination, because it can be appropriated by different actors and lead to the legitimation of official uses of public space. Caruso’s contribution (Chapter 21, this Handbook), finally addresses an often neglected dimension of the resisting work in large instances of collective resistance: the very places and organizational ‘designs’ within which resistance is accomplished. He takes the example of the open space ‘structure’ of the World Social Forum to show the

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direct impact that certain types of organizational geographies can have on the creativity of resisting efforts. The open space is an arena where diverse and alternative conversations can be engaged, thus increasing the political scope of activists, and their chance to build more creative outcomes. The WSF provides a particularly relevant instance of an innovative organizational design, as it is thought as “an unmanaged space of self-organization so as activists work together, share knowledge in an enjoying atmosphere.” The chapter therefore shows that a geographical configuration has an influence over the very political project of resisters: it generates an idea of a possible prefiguration of what a just civil global society could be. It highlights why the scale of a given political purpose and plan necessitates the construction of an innovative space for dialogue, where openness opposes to the closure of the very neo-liberal space that is criticized by activists. The space of action and dialogue becomes the very heart of the strategic approach of the movement. The organizational form is consubstantial to the very content of issues that are at the center of activist work: both are constructed and established in tandem. It seems appropriate to close this introduction by speculating on the emergence of the institutional forms that resistance studies will need to fashion if it is to gather strength in the coming years. Magazines, journals, international networks and a formal presence within scholarly and activist discourse may seem on their face to constitute vehicles that are too conventional to support the substance of oppositional ideas. And of course, there must inevitably be a tension between the doxic world of higher education and the heterodox ideas on which resistance is based. Still, to foster a theoretical and conceptual understanding of resistance – its emerging forms and its latent possibilities – requires the invention of conduits that are equal to the task. And indeed, there is evidence of precisely such conduits springing up. As this volume goes to press, we note the emergence of the Resistance Studies

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Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction

Network, housed at the University of Sussex, Gothenburg University and the University of Massachussetts, Amherst. The Journal of Resistance Studies has begun to publish key works of precisely the sort this volume includes (Vinthagen and Johanssen, 2013). Research initiatives are being proposed that can strengthen these links to one another, and conceivably to fields and subfields within established scholarly disciplines. Hopefully, as these efforts are conjoined, volumes such as the current Handbook will soon enough be surpassed, their function having been served. That at least is our hope.

Note  1  Elsewhere, Juris has coined the term “militant ethnography” to capture the tasks in which scholaractivists can fruitfully engage. See Juris 2007.

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Burawoy, M. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond “Identity.” Theory and Society, 29, 1 (Feb.): 1–47. Cederstrom, Carl and Peter Fleming. 2012. Dead Man Working. London: Zero Books. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20. Cosgrove, Stuart. 1984. “The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare.” History Workshop Journal 18 (Autumn): 77–90. Courpasson, David, Francoise Dany, and Stewart Clegg. 2012. “Resisters at Work: Generating Productive Resistance in the Workplace.” Organization Science 23(3): 801–819. Courpasson, David. 2016. Looking Away? Civilized Indifference and the Carnal Relationships of the Contemporary Workplace. Journal of Management Studies, published online 25 January. DOI: 10.1111/ joms.12175 Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43(6):1241–99. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Earl, Jennifer and Katrina Kimport. 2011. Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age. Cambridge: MIT Press. Eliasoph, Nina. 1998. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. UK: Cambridge University Press. Fleming, Peter. 2013. “‘Down with Big Brother!’ The End of ‘Corporate Culturalism’?” Journal of Management Studies, 50(3): 474–495. Fleming, Peter. 2014. “When ‘Life Itself’ Goes to Work: Reviewing Shifts in Organizational Life Through the Lens of Biopower.” Human Relations 67(7): 875–901.

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Foucault, Michel 2007. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège France, 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Fraser, Nancy 1996. Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation. Paper presented at the Tanner lectures on human values, Stanford University, April 30 to May 2. Available at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/ a-to-z/f/Fraser98.pdf Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-­ Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso. Gal, Susan (1995) `Language and the “arts of resistance”’, Cultural Anthropology, 10(3): 407–424. Gaventa, John. 1980. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2012. Tweets and the Streets. Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and SelfIdentity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Random House. Goffman, Erving. 1967, `The Nature of Deference and Demeanor’, in: Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, pp 47–95. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta. 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Graeber, David 2002. `The New Anarchists’. New Left Review 13: 61–73. Gramsci, Antonio. 1957. The Modern Prince and Other Writings. New York: International Publishers. Haenfler, Ross. 2004. “Rethinking Subcultural Resistance: Core Values of the Straightedge Movement.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 33(4): 406–436. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson (eds) 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Subcultures in Post-War Britain. New York: Routledge. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hebdige, Dick 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.

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Hjorth, Daniel. 2005. “Organizational entrepreneurship with Michel de Certeau on Creating Heterotopias (or Spaces of Play).” Journal of Management Inquiry 14(4): 386–398. Hodson, Randy. 1995. “Worker Resistance: An Underdeveloped Concept in the Sociology of Work.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 16(1): 79–110. Hodson, Randy. 2001. Dignity at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollander, Jocelyn A. and Rachel L., Einwohner. 2004. “Conceptualizing Resistance.” Sociological Forum 19(4): 533–554. Hoy, David Couzens. 2004. Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jacques, Roy. 1996. Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge from the 19th to the 21st Centuries. London: Sage. Juris, Jeffrey. 2007. “Practicing Militant Ethnography with the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona.” Pp. 164–78 Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization, edited by S. ­Shukaits, D. Graeber and E. Biddle. Edinburgh: AK Press. Juris, Jeffrey. 2008. Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Juris, Jeffrey. 2012. “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation.” American Ethnologist, 39(2): 259–279. Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kellogg, Katherine. 2009. Operating Room: Relational Spaces and Microinstitutional Change in Surgery. American Journal of Sociology 115(3): 657–711. Klein, Naomi, 1999. No Logo. New York: MacMillan. Lamont, Michele, et al. 2016. Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leblanc, Lauraine. 1999. Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

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Levine, Lawrence. 1993. The Unpredictable Past. NY: Oxford. Lewis, I. M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Lilja, Mona and Stellan Vinthagen. 2014. “Sovereign Power, Disciplinary Power and BioPower: Resisting What Power with What Resistance?” Journal of Political Power 7, 1: 107–126. Lowney, Kathleen S. 1995. “Teenage Satanism as Oppositional Youth Subculture.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 23(4): 453–484. Lukes, Steven. 1986. Power. New York: NYU Press. Marche, Guillaume. 2012. “Expressivism and Resistance: Graffiti as an Infrapolitical Form of Protest against the War on Terror.” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 131: 78–96. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. “The Promise[of Sociology].” Pp. 3–24 in The Sociological Imagination. New York: Grove Press. O’Hearn, Dennis. 2010. “Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance: Irish Political Prisoners on Protest.” American Journal of Sociology 115(2): 491–526. Ong, Aiwha. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173–193. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1981. “Justice: On Relating Public and Private.” Political Theory 9(3): 327–352. Polletta, Francesca. 1999. ““Free Spaces” in Collective Action.” Theory and Society 28:1–38. Prasad, A., P. Prasad. 1998. Everyday struggles at the workplace: The nature and implications of routine resistance in contemporary organizations. Research in The Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 16. JAI Press, Greenwich, CT. 225–257. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rao, Hayagreeva and Sunasir Dutta. 2012. “Free Spaces as Organizational Weapons of the Weak: Religious Festivals and Regimental

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Enterprise. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, Robyn. 2009. “Critical Management Studies on Identity: Mapping the Terrain.” Pp. 166–186 in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies, edited by M. Alvesson, T. Bridgman, and H. Willmott. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vallas, Steven P. 2006. “Empowerment Redux: Structure, Agency, and the Re-Making of Managerial Authority.” American Journal of Sociology 111, 6 (May): 1677–1717. Vallas, Steven P. 2016. Working Class Heroes or Working Stiffs? Domination and Resistance within Business Organizations.” Research in the Sociology of Work, 28: 101–26. Vallas, Steven P. and Emily R Cummins. 2015. “Personal Branding and Identity Norms in the Popular Business Press: Enterprise Culture in an Age of Precarity.” Organization Studies 36, 3 (March): 293–319. Vallas, Steven P., Matthew Judge, and Emily R. Cummins*. 2015. “Workers’ Rights as

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Part I

Foundations

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1 Globalization, Resistance, and Social Transformation Jeffrey Juris and Marina Sitrin

Over the past twenty-five years the relentless onslaught of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization has been met by repeated waves of determined resistance, some rooted in concrete locales, others reaching out across transnational space (see Juris and Khasnabish 2013). Repeated rounds of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003) have sparked struggles around the world, and particularly in the global South, to protect lives and livelihoods from predatory mining, oil and gas extraction, the privatization of communal lands and public resources, and ecological devastation. Meanwhile, grassroots movements and networks across the North–South divide have united through diversity and difference in opposition to the exploitative labor practices, free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs, financial deregulation, and militarism promulgated by governments, corporations, banks, and multilateral political and economic institutions such as the G8, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. Employing

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myriad tactics ranging from land invasions, GMO crop burnings, mass marches, and highway blockades on the part of southern peasant farmers and indigenous movements to the diverse modes of direct action enacted by young protesters in the global North, including festive street theater, occupations of urban space, and pitched battles with police, grassroots activists have combined defensive actions with a more proactive politics of prefiguration: embodying the new world while struggling against the old. Activists and scholars commonly refer to such varied oppositional practices sparked by neoliberalism under the rubric of ‘resistance’. Capitalist globalization is thus widely viewed as both an underlying cause and a facilitator of new forms of transnationally networked resistance (Castells 2010; Hardt and Negri 2004; Juris 2008). In this sense, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, activist networks such as People’s Global Action proclaimed ‘May the Resistance be as Transnational as Capital’, while scholars wrote about ‘global

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resistance’ (Amoore 2005) or ‘globalization and the politics of resistance’ (Gills 2000). However, in most accounts the term resistance is descriptive, operating on a romantic register that likens the resistance to global capitalism to the iconic image of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during the Second World War (Gills 2000; Pile and Keith 1997). Beyond an occasional reference to Polanyi’s counter-movement, Gramsci’s counter-hegemony, or Scott’s infrapolitics (see, e.g., Chin and Mittelman 2000) there have been few attempts to theorize the dynamics of globalization and resistance in relation to the wider literature on resistance. This is largely due, we suggest, to the focus on ‘everyday resistance’ in much of the resistance literature (see Johansson and Vinthagen 2016), and to the existence of other analytic categories such as ‘social movements’ to capture the more collective and public forms of opposition to neoliberal globalization. In the spirit of the present volume, in this chapter we revisit some of our previous and ongoing ethnographic research and writing on grassroots movements and neoliberal capitalism through the analytic prism of resistance. Although we have used the term resistance in our work, we have generally preferred theoretical frameworks such as social movements and ‘societies in movement’ (Zibechi 2010), in part, because much of the resistance literature emphasizes actions that are more individualized, unorganized, and defensive than the forms of collective action we have engaged in and written about.1 That said, the framework of resistance has at least two significant advantages. First, as Sherry Ortner (1995) has written, the category of resistance specifically ‘highlights the presence and play of power’ (p. 175) in a way that many canonical approaches to social movements more focused on the mobilization of resources, political opportunities, and collective identities do not. In this sense, the resistance framework resonates with the cultural-political approach to social movements more common in anthropology that takes

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seriously questions of culture and power (Alvarez et al. 1998). Second, the category of resistance also covers a much wider array of phenomena than social movements, encompassing actions, protests, and events that may be relatively episodic, uncoordinated, and ephemeral. Resistance thus provides a relatively open and flexible analytic terrain for exploring a diverse range of oppositional forms and practices. In this chapter we seek to reorient the study of resistance away from an exclusively negative or defensive focus, and to concentrate more on the creative or productive dimensions of resistance.2 In this sense, just as Foucault introduced a shift in our conception of power from a constraining to an empowering force, we see resistance as more than a reflexive push back against power. Instead, we view resistance as an enactment of alternative power relations, a creative mode of potentia or ‘power-to’ that constructs alternative forms of subjectivity and sociality even as it challenges dominant expressions of potestas or ‘power-over’ (Negri 1991). At the same time, it is also important to recognize that practices of resistance generate their own exclusions, hierarchies, and dominations. Indeed, power and resistance are always mutually constituted and ‘entangled’ in complex ways (Sharp et al. 2000). In what follows, we have selected a few examples that address this question based on our own research and activism with diverse anticorporate globalization, occupy, land defense and recuperated workplace struggles. Our ethnographic examples begin with descriptions by Jeffrey Juris in Prague in 2000, then move to the United States in 2011, then with Marina Sitrin in Greece, from 2011 to 2015, and then in contemporary Argentina. We intentionally cover a fifteen-year period with diverse geographies and types of struggles so as to reflect the argument that this is a wide-ranging global phenomenon, and not the experience of only a few locations or movements. We argue that resistance to neoliberalism and globalization always involves

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Globalization, Resistance, and Social Transformation

a complex amalgam of defensive and proactive social, cultural, and political practices. We begin with a brief analytic discussion, and then turn to several ethnographic cases before concluding with some remarks about the prospects and challenges for contemporary resistances to neoliberal capitalism.

CONCEPTUALIZING RESISTANCE One of the biggest challenges in working with the concept of resistance is the incredible diversity of practices and contexts referred to as resistance in the literature. As Pile (1997) suggests, when thinking about resistance various images come to mind, including French resistance to the Nazis, unemployed people marching against the government, inner-city riots, peace activists leaving peace signs at military bases, or a single individual confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square. To this list we might add the more covert forms of everyday resistance among peasants and other subordinate groups examined by James Scott (1985): ‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on’ (p. xvi). We might further consider diverse forms of ‘cultural resistance’ (Duncombe 2002), ranging from the relatively politicized practices of culture jamming (Lasn 1999) to the more unconscious forms of spectacular youth subcultural resistance explored by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (Hall and Jefferson 1976). Resistance can thus be conceived as individual or collective, overt or covert, intentional or unconscious. At the broadest level, resistance encompasses a ‘sense of action’ and a ‘sense of opposition’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004). We view resistance here as any practice ‘that attempts to challenge, change, or retain particular circumstances relating to societal relations, processes, and/or institutions. These circumstances may involve domination, exploitation, subjection at the material, symbolic, or psychological level’ (Routledge 1997: 69).3

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Various typologies have attempted to characterize diverse forms of resistance (see, e.g., Hollander and Einwohner 2004; Raby 2005; Vinthagen 2007; Williams 2009). For example, Williams (2009) usefully arrays diverse forms of resistance along three continua: passive to active, micro to macro, and covert to overt. The passive to active axis refers to intentions, ranging from the more unconscious forms of subcultural appropriation and bricolage among working-class British youths (Clarke et al. 1976) to the more active forms of dissent such as the highly theatrical modes of street protest enacted by young anti-corporate globalization activists. The micro to macro axis refers to scale, ranging from individual social-psychological practices like the use of the veil by Algerian women as a symbolic protest against French occupation and cultural imperialism (Fanon 1952; see Pile 1997) to more collective and macro-level modes of opposition, culminating in large-scale movements of armed or non-violent resistance. Finally, the covert to overt axis refers to visibility, ranging from the ‘hidden transcripts’ and everyday forms of ‘infrapolitics’ produced outside of public view explored by Scott (1985, 1990) to the most highly visible large-scale mass marches and protests enacted by grassroots social movements. In this chapter we are interested in resistances to neoliberal capitalism that are relatively active, collective and large-scale, and overt, taking place in the context or around the edges of mass movements. Such practices are ‘visible and readily recognized by both targets and observers as resistance’ and are ‘intended to be recognized as such’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 545). To further specify our conception of resistance it might help to address several critiques of the resistance literature, particularly the wave of ‘modernist’ studies of everyday resistance (see Raby 2005) inspired by the groundbreaking work of James Scott and the subaltern studies tradition (see, e.g., Guha 1983). First, in her highly influential article on the lack of ethnographic ‘thickness’ in the

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resistance literature, Sherry Ortner (1995) specifically takes resistance studies to task for ‘sanitizing politics’, that is to say obscuring the fact that resistances ‘have their own politics’, including diverse forms of internal conflict (p. 177). Ortner is building here on Lila Abu-Lughod’s (1990) earlier critique of romanticization in resistance studies, which tend to search for human resistance and creativity outside of and in opposition to power.4 In contrast, we follow Sharp et  al. (2000) in their conception of resistance as always already entangled with power. Inspired by a Foucauldian approach to power and resistance as productive and mutually constituted, these authors suggest, ‘No moment of domination … is completely free of relations of resistance, and likewise no moment of resistance … is entirely segregated from relations of domination: the one is always present in the constitution of the other’ (p. 20).5 On this view, there can be no pure space outside of power, but rather resistances enact alternative power relations, including internal conflicts, exclusions, and dominations. A second and related critique charges the resistance and subaltern studies literature with relying on a preexisting ‘autonomous, sovereign self’, an ‘artifact of “western” theory’ that provides a stable ground from which resistance can be conceived and enacted (Moore 1997: 91). In this sense, Scott’s (1985) ‘realm of autonomy’ or Guha’s (1983) ‘collective consciousness of insubordination’ are conceived as prior to and beyond the reach of power. In our view, however, it is not enough to simply argue for a decentered subjectivity or show how spaces of subalternity and insurgency are ‘mutually imbricated’ with power, domination, and hegemony (Moore 1997: 92). As Sherry Ortner (1995) argues, it is important to deconstruct the ideological construct of the autonomous Western male subject, ‘and yet retain some sense of human agency, the capacity of social beings to interpret and morally evaluate their situation and to formulate projects and try to enact them’ (p. 185). Our solution to this dilemma

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is to emphasize how resistant or insurgent subjectivities are produced and transformed through ongoing cultural-political practices. Resistance thus has to be viewed as performative and embodied (see Vinthagen 2007), as alternative subjectivities, ideas, imaginaries, and social relations are generated within everyday ‘submerged spheres’ (Melucci 1989) and more visible ‘terrains of resistance’ during mass protests and mobilizations. Reflecting the spatialized nature of resistance (see Pile and Keith 1997; Johansson and Vinthagen 2016), a terrain of resistance ‘constitutes the geographical ground upon which conflict takes place, and is a representational space with which to understand and interpret social action’ (Routledge 1994: 561). In this sense, during public moments of collective resistance, activists employ diverse spatial tactics and embodied protest performances to produce insurgent subjectivities and to inscribe diverse cultural-political meanings on surrounding landscapes.6 A final critique of the resistance literature we wish to mention here is Asef Bayat’s (2010) claim that resistance studies often fail to distinguish between defensive and proactive strategies (p. 54). Indeed, as mentioned above, most accounts of resistance neglect the productive dimensions of resistance altogether, reflecting a modernist view of power as repressive and resistance as an effort to repel or deflect repressive power. Instead, if we follow Foucault in reconceiving power as positive and enabling, we ought to similarly rethink resistance as a creative and productive exercise of power. Beyond the domination/resistance binary, both domination and resistance should be viewed as operations of power, the first involving power-over or what Sharp et  al. (2000) refer to as ‘dominating power’, the second corresponding to powerto or what the same authors call ‘resisting power’.7 In this sense, for resistance to occur, ‘power has to be exercised and realized, both by the leaders (in a form that can become dominating in its own right) but also in a more “grassroots” fashion by everyday

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people finding that they have the power to do and to change things’ (p. 3). Scholars such as Bayat (2010) and Raul Zibechi (2010) have explored the constitutive and proactive dimensions of resistance situated in the space between everyday resistance and more highly organized forms of collective action. For example, Bayat is concerned with quiet encroachment, ‘the silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied, powerful, or the public, in order to survive and improve their lives’ (Bayat 2010: 46). In this sense, actions such as illegal electricity and water reconnections in the Middle East are not merely defensive reactions to neoliberal cost-cutting, but are rather ‘cumulatively encroaching, meaning that the actors tend to expand their space by winning new positions to move on’ (Bayat 2010: 56). Zibechi is more concerned with the ways latent forms of communal social organization in Latin America provide critical structures of mobilization during popular uprisings against capitalist globalization. Within such ‘societies in movement’, in contrast to formal social movements and state forces, ‘The “organizations” that carry forward the struggles and insurrections are the same “organizations” embedded and submerged in the everyday life of the people’ (Zibechi 2010: 2). The examples provided from Argentina and Greece illustrate Zibechi’s argument, with movement actors generally not identifying as political, much less a part of a social movement, yet describing how their lives have changed for the better due to their participation. Once again, this kind of resistance is an empowering, creative force. This chapter offers a similar perspective in relation to more macro-level, overt, and consciously organized forms of collective protest and resistance in opposition to neoliberal globalization. Indeed, as Vinthagen (2007) points out, resistances can move beyond defensive actions to build prefigurative social institutions. In what follows, we examine various examples of resistance in the context of anti-corporate globalization, occupy, and

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other anti-capitalist struggles that combine forthright opposition to the prevailing social and economic order with the construction of alternative subjectivities, ideas, and social relations. We specifically argue that resistance to neoliberalism and global capitalism involves a complicated mixture of oppositional practices and more proactive forms of social, cultural, and political construction. In this sense, even the most confrontational direct actions involve the production of alternative subjectivities and social relations, while everyday practices of alternative building such as the organization of grassroots assemblies, cooperatives, and workplace recuperations represent, by their very existence, a form of anti-systemic resistance. We further contend that such resistances are performative, embodied, and spatialized, and they are always rife with internal conflicts, exclusions, and dominations.

RESISTING THE IMF AND WORLD BANK IN PRAGUE After protesters shut down the WTO Summit in Seattle in November 1999, anti-corporate globalization activists around the world were eager to organize more counter-summit actions. Europeans would have their next chance when the World Bank and IMF fall meetings came to Prague in September 2000.8 During the months preceding the action, organizers had worked out an elaborate action plan, dividing the urban terrain of resistance into three color-coded zones. The Blue March would involve high-risk militant action, the Yellow March would entail the lowest risk, and the Pink March would provide an intermediate zone. In practice, the Italian White Overalls transformed the Yellow March into a mass of bodies engaged in spectacular symbolic confrontation, the Blue March became a battlefield pitting Black Bloc swarms hurling stones and Molotov cocktails against riot police armed

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with water cannons and tear gas, and the Pink March provided a space for creative nonviolent blockades. Zones were also created for decentralized actions, and a mobile blend of festive and militant tactics dubbed Pink & Silver. On the morning of September 26, Námêstí Míru Square in Prague was bustling with thousands of activists holding colorful puppets, signs, and props. We lined up in the street along with the Pink March early that afternoon, and, after sending out a scout to make sure the route was clear, we moved out, chanting ‘Hey, ho, ho, the World Bank has got to go!’ Dozens of Czech and international journalists began snapping pictures and recording video footage. We exchanged glances, as our moral outrage transformed into feelings of collective power. We were embodying our networks and generating insurgent subjectivities through a performative ‘assertion of agency’ (Wood 2001: 268). After a few minutes people began shouting at us to slow down. Most of the Pink March had followed the Ya Basta! sound system toward the bridge. The Blue March navigated their way along the western side of the congress center, but the Pink Block was in disarray. Rather than continue with depleted numbers, we decided to turn around and walk back toward the bridge, where thousands of activists from the Pink and Yellow Blocs were standing around a grassy plaza. I made my way through the crowd to get a closer look, and sure enough, two tanks were blocking the bridge flanked by an impressive battalion of soldiers and riot cops. Several hundred Italian, Spanish, and Finnish activists dressed from head to toe in white overalls and protective padding were pushing up against police lines with huge plastic shields and inner tubes. The White Overalls tactic was designed to create evocative images of resistance while generating powerful feelings of affective solidarity via the massing of absurdly decorated bodies in space. After observing the Tute Bianche for several minutes, we rejoined our affinity group,

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and together with several others from Britain, Sweden, and Norway, we began to reorganize the Pink March using our giant flags to lead people down the narrow streets along the eastern flank of the congress center. Eager to begin the blockade, we became more purposeful and serious. By the time we approached the access highway, our ranks numbered several thousand. After a brief spokescouncil meeting, we took up blockades, using our bodies to occupy the space in front of the police lines. The other Pink Bloc group soon came over and joined us. Men in business suits occasionally tried to break through, at which point we would stand up and lock arms to prevent them from passing. The police stood by, some looking fearful, others mildly amused. Beyond the practical impact of the action, protesters were communicating messages of determined yet nonviolent opposition, reproducing archetypical scenes of non-violent protest. At one intersection, a group of Swedes wearing jeans and colorful t-shirts sat cross-legged across from several dozen riot cops in black. As the police threatened to charge, the activists quietly held their ground. Just a few feet away, a lone protester with his hair in a bun kneeled quietly in meditation, holding his hands out before him in a classic sign of peace. Such non-violent performances symbolically contrasted the vulnerable, morally righteous bodies of the protesters with the menacing bodies of the police. At the same time, they created an emotional tone of serene yet determined resistance. As we patiently held our Pink March blockades, the Pink & Silver Bloc danced in and out behind the UK-based Samba Band. Several dozen dancers wearing pink skirts, tights, pants, and leotards, and the occasional silver jump suit, frolicked to the beat of the drums along with their brightly colored masks and flags. Samba dancers not only helped generate affective solidarity, their festive and playful performances also represented a stark contrast to both militant protesters and the Czech police.

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Meanwhile, Radical Cheerleaders and Pink Fairies would occasionally break away from the group, performing ironic cheers and taunting the police. Pink & Silver protesters used burlesque bodies to symbolically contrast a world of utopian creativity, color, and play to the dark, oppressive forces of law and order. This tactic involved a strategic appropriation of carnivalesque performance and aesthetics, including playful mockery, ritualized inversion, gender bending, drumming, dance, outlandish costumes, and wild masks. It also combined militant and playful protest, reproducing a networking logic via the rubric of ‘tactical frivolity’. Pink & Silver, like the larger action of which it was a part, thus created a performative terrain that was oppositional and subjunctive, a platform for critiquing prevailing social, political, and economic orders, while enacting new forms of sociality and generating affective solidarity and resistant subjectivities through mobile and free-form virtuoso performance. As we held our blockades, a battle raged in the west along the Blue March. According to friends, at one point along the march blackclad militants saw a battalion of riot cops, screamed ‘police!’, and then charged at them up a hill, pushing a huge plastic blue ball from Námêstí Míru. Activists were repelled, but regrouped at the bottom of the hill, and continued to charge again and again. They were able to move police lines back until riot cops responded with tear gas and water cannons. Militants then began to dig up cobblestones, hurling them along with Molotov cocktails. The street battle raged for hours. Such militant tactics involve the ritual enactment of violent performances through distinct embodied spatial techniques, political symbols, and protest styles, including black pants and jumpers, combat boots, and bandanas to cover the face, which serve to express solidarity while portraying archetypical images of rebellion. The typical image of the Black Bloc activist reflects a masculine ideal of aggressive confrontation. Their violent performances constitute militant networks by

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physically expressing a radical rejection of the dominant order, including the major symbols of capitalism and the state. At the same time, they generate radical subjectivities through emotionally powerful embodied ritual performances that construct the militant body as the ground of agency and affect. During the action in Prague multiple social movement networks were embodied through diverse protest performances, inscribing distinct political messages on the urban and mass media landscapes, while particular bodily movements and protest styles generated alternative emotions and insurgent subjectivities. Moreover, activists prefigured the directly democratic worlds they wanted to bring through their use of consensus decisionmaking and a spokescouncil model of protest organization based on decentralized coordination among autonomous affinity groups organized into larger clusters and blocs. In this way, the embodied, spatialized, and performative modes of resistance in Prague expressed a clear rejection of neoliberalism and global capitalism, while constructing resistant subjectivities and experimenting with new forms of sociality. At the same time, given that power and resistance can never be uncoupled, the resistances in Prague also involved their own complex internal power dynamics, including exclusions and hierarchies of authority-based factors such as class, gender, knowledge, experience, and English-language facility. Moreover, as with most international mobilizations and forums, only the most privileged and well-resourced actors from abroad were able to participate, with the exception of a limited number of grassroots activists associated with networks that were able to raise funds to cover their travel expenses, including several organizers from India and Latin America who were part of People’s Global Action. Meanwhile, the mobilization in Prague was also rife with internal political and ideological struggle, as reflected in a series of heated debates between socialists and anarchists related to the wisdom of

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organizing a single unified march versus a strategy of smaller autonomous actions. The disagreement was tactical and expressive. For the socialists, a single march would reflect their goal of fomenting a unified uprising from below. For the anarchists, smaller pack actions would express a commitment to diversity, decentralization, and self-management. The eventual compromise was prefigurative, embodying a vision of unity through difference, or a ‘world where many worlds fit’ as the Zapatistas say: marchers started together before splitting into separate blocs, swarming the congress center through a diversity of tactics.

RESISTANCE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN OCCUPY BOSTON When I (Juris) exited the T-station in downtown Boston on October 15, 2011, the day of global actions in support of #Occupy Wall Street and the burgeoning #Occupy Everywhere movements, I immediately accessed my Twitter account.9 The latest tweets displayed on my Android phone indicated a large group of protesters was on its way from the #Occupy Boston camp at Dewey Square and would soon turn a nearby corner. Minutes later, hundreds of mostly young, energetic marchers appeared, decked out in an array of styles ranging from jeans and brightly colored tees to black and khaki army surplus attire and various shades of plaid. I eagerly jumped into the crowd and joined in chanting, ‘Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!’ followed by the emblematic ‘We are the 99%! We are the 99%!’. We soon turned to onlookers and began interpellating them, ‘You are the 99%! You are the 99%!’ After a few minutes, I moved to the sidewalk to take photos and observe the signs on display, which ranged in tone from the populist ‘End the Wars and Tax the Rich!’ to the inspirational ‘1000 cities, 80 countries Today!’ and what could be interpreted as a

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slightly defensive ‘Our message is clear, read the fine print!’. #Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, 2011, in the wake of renewed resistance struggles around the world in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, including the Arab Spring, the occupation of Wisconsin’s statehouse to defend collective bargaining rights (Collins 2012), and the May 15 acampada, or campout, movements in Spain (Taibo 2011). From the beginning, #Occupy was an egalitarian, radically democratic grassroots resistance that provided a progressive alternative to the right-wing populism of the Tea Party and a framework for understanding and challenging inequality and economic stagnation that resonates with wide swaths of the public, from students to workers, professionals, and the unemployed. Like the earlier protests in Wisconsin, #Occupy Wall Street helped to shine a light on the ongoing effects of accumulation by dispossession, in this case, the 2008 Wall Street bailout and the perceived abandonment of the working and middle classes. After gaining visibility on Wall Street, #Occupy quickly spread to other cities, including Boston, where I took part in the first planning assembly and joined in the initial occupation on Friday, September 30. Upon reaching the #Occupy Boston encampment at the conclusion of the October 15 march, the protesters filled the open section of the square in front of the grassy area housing the bustling tent city. Some listened to additional speakers, and others began to watch a youth group performing an Aztec dance. Still others walked through the camp itself, in some cases provided ‘official’ tours by volunteer guides. I had spent several days hanging out at the camp, but each time I visited, I found that new tents and structures had sprung up, so I decided to wander through the emerging terrain of resistance once again. A few minutes after I made my way past the bike racks that marked the entrance to the camp, I stopped at the logistics tent to check the day’s schedule. In addition to the anti-war march and student rally, myriad

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meetings, assemblies, performances, and ‘people’s university’ workshops, including ‘An Introduction to the Solidarity Economy’, ‘Neoliberal Dispossession and the Demand for Demands’, and ‘Whiteness and AllyShip’, were scheduled throughout the day. I then walked down the main ‘street’ inside the camp, past the donations area on the left and, on the right, student and legal tents and the large kitchen area that had sprung up with the help of many local Food Not Bombs members. Moreover, six or seven dozen sleeping tents were set up around the camp, and on any given night several hundred occupiers might stay over. The crowds would swell into the thousands for marches and rallies. A new library tent was being erected next to the media structure near the main ‘plaza’ at the end of the camp, where the General Assemblies were held twice each day. As I walked by, I noticed a handful of activists busy writing press releases, sending tweets, and editing webpages in the media tent and on the plaza a group of forty or so people were listening to the people’s university workshop on solidarity economies. During the evening, General Assemblies – sometimes comprising two or three hundred people or more, particularly on the weekends – might fill the plaza and take part in a complex process of consensus decision-making facilitated by hand signals, speakers’ stacks, and an established order for announcements and proposals. Although the meetings were frequently long and tedious, many occupiers point to these open, participatory assemblies as embodying an alternative to the current representative democratic order disproportionately influenced by the 1%. After passing the direct action and sign tents at the far end of the camp, I walked back along the busy surface road dividing Dewey Square from the Federal Reserve Bank and South Station. Here dozens of occupiers displayed signs to passing cars, eliciting frequent honks of approval and the occasional insult. On this particular day, the highlight was clearly a group of four young men

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decked out in tiny red Speedo bathing suits holding whimsical signs with messages such as ‘Speedos Now!’ and ‘1% of this SPEEDO is covering 99% of my ?@!’ There were also many serious messages, including this poignant personal admission: ‘Make too much money for government assistance, but not enough to support myself: I AM THE 99%!’. My self-led tour concluded with a brief visit to the faith and spirituality tent, where a handful of occupiers were quietly meditating. As the above vignette suggests, #Occupy encampments were autonomous, self-managed cities replete with their own housing, media, newspapers, people’s universities, security, legal teams, libraries, and even spaces for meditation and worship. In this sense, even as they arose to resist global corporate greed and unaccountable financial institutions through mass occupations of urban space and diverse embodied protest performances, quickly ‘cascading’ (Appadurai 1996) around the world through alternative and mainstream media, as with the anti-corporate globalization protests of a previous era, #Occupy encampments also prefigured alternative worlds based on the principles and practices of self-management, autonomy, decentralized coordination, and directly democratic decisionmaking through popular assemblies. Moreover, unlike the networked subjectivities generated during the anti-corporate globalization protests, #Occupy involved the production of a broad-based and populist subjectivity elicited through the disobedient actions of the masses of individuals aggregated in the physical terrains of resistance of the occupations. This insurgent subjectivity has been most clearly signaled through the image of the 99%, symbolizing the vast majority who are excluded from the main circuits of financial and political power that are increasingly monopolized by the 1%. At the same time, any claim to actually represent the 99% is clearly problematic given the multiple racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other differences with such a broad social category, not to mention the fact that at most #Occupy encampments, at least in the US, people of color and especially those from poor and

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working-class communities, were significantly underrepresented. Indeed, unequal power relations and multiple forms of domination, exclusion, and hierarchy were frequently reproduced within occupations. These did not go unchallenged, as evidenced, for example, by the successful effort on the part of a group of women of color to remove post-racial language from the Occupy Wall Street Declaration of Occupation (see Maharawal 2011), or the development of ‘anti-oppression’ and ‘decolonization’ trainings and working groups at #Occupy Boston and many other encampments around the country. Indeed, such complex racial, class, and gender politics reflected the complexity of internal power relations within resistance formations such as #Occupy encampments, as did ongoing ideological struggles related to issues of process, demands, and protest tactics. For example, heated tensions arose between radicals and reformists, between militants and non-violent protesters, and between supporters and detractors of the large-scale General Assemblies.10 Despite such internal contradictions, in line with a performative logic, the 99% names a relation of exploitation and calls into being an insurgent subjectivity capable of not only resisting that exploitation but also building an alternative set of egalitarian and democratic practices and relationships. The claim that ‘We are the 99%’ thus only makes sense in the context of embodied and spatialized acts of resistance, and presupposes an accompanying ‘You are the 99%’, thereby establishing a chain of interpellation through which new insurgent subjects are perpetually being hailed in the context of an open and expansive process of militant subjectification.

OCCUPY, RESIST, PRODUCE: RECUPERATING WORK AND LIFE I (Sitrin) sat in an impossibly smoke-filled room, as only radical Greeks can survive during assemblies and discussions.11 Thirty people had gathered to learn about

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movement experiences in Argentina after the 2001 economic collapse. I was in the social center of Micropolis, in Thessaloniki, a space that houses dozens of creative projects, with new ones being invented almost daily, all trying to stave off some of the harshest effects of the economic crisis, and done using the tools of horizontalism and autonomy. This discussion was specifically on a book I compiled of various self-organized experiences in Argentina, which had recently been translated into Greek. Experiences such as barter and direct producer–consumer networks were discussed, and had already begun in various regions of Greece, as had neighborhood assemblies and the taking over of land for organic gardening and the building of homes. What had yet to happen was the recuperation of a workplace. In that discussion, as in every other one in which I participated while traveling around the country, people were beyond skeptical that it could happen in Greece, declaring it impossible for all sorts of reasons, from culture to the low level of industry to the size of workplaces.

Almost Two Years Later Outside Thessaloniki, Greece We wait at the gate. The person we are traveling with has a cell phone number he calls, there is some back and forth conversation I do not understand and then we wait again. And wait. Eventually two men come out and manually lift the barricading gate and we drive the remaining mile to the doors of the factory. We are at Vio.Me, a workplace that was occupied by the workers in 2012 and is now run collectively – without a boss or hierarchy. We are at the first, impossible, could not happen here, recuperated workplace in Greece. Our friend and translator was the same translator from the event at Micropolis two years prior – he is now one of the coordinators of the Vio.Me community support group, the Solidarity Initiative.

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As the economic crisis deepens, and governments respond with more austerity rather than support, people throughout the world are not only resisting but increasingly creating their own solutions in multiple areas of life. Work is an especially difficult area around which to organize if the government refuses to aid the unemployed or underemployed, and yet it is also one from where some of the most innovative solutions are arising. One alternative to the prospect of unending unemployment is the recuperation of workplaces. No longer demanding on a government that has turned their backs on the population, people are turning to one another. Workers are taking over abandoned workplaces and making them function again, using directly democratic assemblies, equal remuneration, and job rotation practices. Following the lead of Argentina after the 2001 economic collapse, workers in Europe have begun to recuperate their livelihoods, together with the support of the communities around them. There are currently at least a dozen such workplaces in Europe, over 350 in Argentina, and many dozens more in other parts of Latin America. I have visited a number of the European recuperated workplaces over the past two years, as well as continuing to spend time in Argentina, revisiting the ongoing workplaces and checking out the newest, of which there were a few dozen in 2014 alone with over ten recuperated restaurants in the past six months. Their stories are all quite similar to one another. In Vio.Me when the workers occupied the workplace – meaning a number of buildings and a few hectares of land – they had not yet decided that they would recuperate it, but they also knew only an occupation was fruitless. The difference with a traditional workplace occupation and recuperation is generally an occupation comes together with a list of demands on the owners, for things such as back pay or to reopen the workplace. In a recuperation the workers first occupy, and then apply the formula from the Argentine movements – borrowed from the landless movement in Brazil – ‘Occupy,

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Resist, Produce’. The vision and practice of recuperation is putting into production something seen as collectively already yours, based in the meaning of the word to recuperate – to take back. The resist is selfevident, as almost always recuperations face repression from former owners and the government, and then production takes place. In the case of Vio.Me, when the workers occupied they had not yet decided they would put the factory back into production. It was hard for them to imagine what that might look like in Greece, but they also knew the bosses would never respond to their demands. They had heard of the experience in Argentina, but that seemed so distant, as they explained. Fortunately the workers of Vio.Me were connected to a global solidarity network and Greek movements (the basis of what later became the Vio.Me Solidarity Initiative) raised the funds so that a worker from Argentina, who had already gone through the process of recuperation, could meet with the Greek workers. As the workers in Vio.Me now reflect, meeting with Lalo, from a factory that had gone through the same thing they had, and that now was producing, helped them imagine more concretely what it would entail in Greece, and was the final push of confidence they needed to make their decision. In each of the new recuperations in Europe, as with Latin America, workers organize in horizontal assemblies, making sure that each voice is heard and all opinions considered in all things. While there are spokespeople, they are just that, voices that represent the decisions of the assembly, not individuals who make decisions or speak for the other workers. Increasingly with the newer recuperations around the world, one of the first decisions made is to change what is produced. In Vio.Me the factory had produced industrial glues and cleaners, and now, after many discussions amongst the workers and together with their families and supporters, they decided that they did not want to either use or produce toxic material. They now only produce organic material, with products that

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they obtain locally, including lavender and olive oil based cleaners and soaps. While sales and their salaries are still relatively low, they are beginning to make a living. Their survival is in no small part due to the support they receive from people in the community, who see their fates tied to that of the workers of Vio.Me. As soon as the workers of Vio.Me occupied their workplace support came from all sorts of sectors of society. As with the experience of the Argentines, many traditional trade unions and left political parties did not support the process. Using the same argument as has now been used throughout the globe by the more traditional radical left, many unions argued it was an anti-union action since it did not go through them, and the left socialist parties argued that it would make the workers owners and thus capitalists so was not something to be supported. In many ways this was a fortunate rejection as it opened the path for a solidarity initiative that did not involve groups vying for leadership. The workers are the ones who lead the initiative, and many thousands are now working in support of their effort. Solidarity is expressed in many ways, from people physically being a presence at the workplace to help defend against eviction attempts to the coordination of assemblies together with the workers where the community can have a voice in some of the decisions made by workers in the factory. As with workers in the hundreds of recuperated workplaces in Argentina, the workers of Vio.Me are clear that the only way the struggle has been able to succeed is with the close relationships with other people in struggle and organizing. Many argue that the experience of recuperating workplaces is not an alternative to capitalism. And, perhaps in and of itself it is not. However, workers who would have been unemployed are no longer. Thus it is successful in resisting the economic crisis. But it also goes beyond that, these same workers, rather than feeling depressed and having their dignity crushed, are instead leading the

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way for others to retake their lives. As Makis, the spokesperson for the assembly of Vio. Me explains, it is not that one workplace will end capitalism, but the experience is a sort of flexing of the collective anti-capitalist muscle, building towards a broader experience of workers running their workplaces that can eventually lead to running all of society together with the community. The vision is beyond resistance. The experiences of the recuperations are vast and profound, challenging capitalist value relationships as they create something new. This challenge is first in the taking of private property and making it collective and cooperative – challenging the foundation of the capitalist economy. And second, and perhaps more important, is the creation of new values. Around the world there are many tens of thousands of workers directly involved in recuperations and hundreds of thousands more involved somehow in the process. It is creating new value relations. This means most of them are functioning with assemblies and horizontal forms to create alternative ways of relating, breaking with the rules of capitalist production, and creating less exploited and alienated lived experiences. While these new relations break with the rules of capitalist production, they are simultaneously creating new values, and a new value-based relationship to production. Their rule, the rule of those in the movements, is not the accumulation of capital or surplus, but of affect and networks of solidarity and friendship. This new value is experienced on the subjective level, in the change in people and their relationships to one another, but also concretely, in new ways of living based in these relationships. These inspiring changes in subjectivities of course do not occur in a linear way, nor are they without challenges. Power and hierarchy are always present in our forms of relating, and while the workplaces struggle to break these down, they nevertheless appear in various ways. Workers in the process of recuperations as well as after face a number

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of internal difficulties related to the question of power in addition to the external ones, though it is crucial to note that these issues have been sufficiently addressed so as to not disrupt either the day-to-day functioning of the workplace or to cause any workplace to cease functioning. The most difficult area by far has been with the incorporation of new workers on the question of remuneration and political motivations. The tensions that have emerged around unequal remuneration as well as political motivations have yet to be completely resolved, but as of February of 2015 had become an active discussion in most assemblies, evolving from the back room conversations of the previous years. Almost all workplaces agree to pay each worker the same amount – except for those workers who have most recently joined the workplace – those who came in some time after the recuperation process. There is a provisional time period for new participants before they can fully participate in decision-making or receive the same amount of pay. The argument of the workers who have been there longer is that they went through the process of recuperation, had to fight hard to maintain the workplace and thus should receive more pay until the newer participants prove themselves (my words here). Newer workers often feel this is unjust and in one case I know of even left the workplace in search of other employment not feeling it was fair. Additionally, many of the newer workers, not having been through the earlier process of struggle, or sometimes for no apparent reason, are not political and their participation in the recuperated workplace is more like that of any other workplace. This has created tensions within the assemblies and the day-today workings of the recuperations as there is then an uneven motivation behind work and, for example, the decisions to release workers for political projects. While some workplaces have addressed this by only incorporating movement participants, and/or having political orientations, others continue to bring in

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family members and others close to individual workers but not necessarily politically motivated workers, and thus conflicts continue to arise.

DEFENDING THE LAND AND CREATING COMMONS It is really incredible what we did. We stopped Monsanto. There is a great joy in what we have done but also it is really hard to believe when we think about the magnitude of it. This is especially true when we meet people from other places who see what we have done as so huge and want to come and meet us here in Malvinas. It gives you goosebumps when people from the outside share the impact of what happened – what it means – because it really is like, I don’t know if magic would be the word but it is so huge, there is so much emotion. If someone had told me a while back ‘Your future is this’ I would not have believed it, nor anyone else in the assembly – we are all neighbors – women housewives, students, teachers and workers. (Vanessa, speaking in 2015)12

In 2014 the people of Malvinas Argentinas, a town on the outskirts of Cordoba, forced Monsanto to shut down what would have been the world’s largest genetically modified seed processing plant.13 What began with a few neighbors meeting to find out what the ramifications of Monsanto in their town might be turned into hundreds and within weeks many thousands, and then tens of thousands including supporters, organizing regular demonstrations and creating an ongoing blockade of the construction site. The town of Malvinas stopped Monsanto. Their story and inspiration resonate across the globe. As Vanessa and others reflected, if they can stop the giant Monsanto they can change the world: Close to the fire are a retired 80 year-old watchmaker, a public worker, an engineer, a walnut producer, a teacher, a retired policeman, and a housewife. They are part of a big net of citizens’ assemblies, those strange horizontal organizations without bosses, without leaders, without political parties, which are

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open to any member of the community. They hold the blockade during the night … and the blockade will continue until the definitive removal of the company. How did it happen? How, in less than one year, did these assemblies seem to be close to changing history?14

The struggles to defend the earth, water, air, and commons in Latin America is ever increasing, with stories of mega mining projects halted by communities using their bodies as blockades and damming projects halted by assemblies of neighbors. In 2007 and again in 2012, members of the Union of Citizens Assemblies in La Rioja, in the north of Argentina, prevented the strip mining of a mountain called La Famatina by international mining corporations. People from neighboring towns and villages blockaded the roads in order to prevent the passage of the companies’ mining trucks. The first company to withdraw was Barrick Gold, then Shandong Gold, and finally the Osisko Mining Corporation. These victories represent only a few of the many other struggles that are taking place in Argentina, from the far south of Patagonia, up and down the Andean Cordillera, and on to the border with Uruguay. People are occupying potential land exploitation sites, creating permanent assemblies on highways, blocking the spraying of pesticides, as well as preventing the purchase of land by corporations for future private exploitation and preventing the damming up of water sources – among so many struggles. In the process of this militant resistance, they are also opening something up – creating new relationships – transforming their relationships with one another, to themselves, and with their communities by creating different ways of being, living, and surviving together. In La Rioja, those involved in the movement say that ‘the struggle to defend La Famatina is forever’ meaning both in time but also reflecting how things have changed overall in the town and with their relationships. What began as a defense of the mountain, earth, and water has evolved into a new

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space of creation. On the road blockades, for example, people organize to bring food, cook together, arrange medical support, and entertain themselves through music, dance, and storytelling. The relationships developed on the blockades have translated into new ways of relating in day-to-day life – in La Rioja, Malvinas, and other places there are defenses of the land. To defend, as many reflect, is also to create. At the heart of the resistance and creation is the assembly. People in each town and village organize regular open assemblies in their squares and plazas where anyone can speak and be heard. They don’t organize by exerting power over one another, but in horizontal ways so that each person is valued equally for what they have to share. It is in these directly participatory spaces that people make their decisions – whether to blockade Monsanto trucks, mining companies, deforestation carriers, or the building of a dam. And, as people begin to place more trust in one another, and to really listen and hear one other’s voices, their desire to work together is strengthened. The process of transformation spirals upwards and outwards around these personal and political interactions. More community is built, more trust, and in turn the willingness of people to take even more militant action. In many of these struggles people have also begun to create autonomous, self-organized projects that help to sustain their individual and collective survival. Extending from the resistance and new relationships in the dayto-day and week-to-week – looking to future relationships for a community or town. For example, in the town of Malvinas, where the blockade of the Monsanto plant took place, people organized an organic food garden only one month after the encampment was founded. They built a clay oven for baking bread, and constructed adobe walls to protect them from the elements where many activists lived at various times. In Corrientes, a region of Argentina approximately 1,000 kilometers from Buenos Aires, is an area that is still predominately

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indigenous, where Guarani is the co-official language with Spanish. The assemblies decided not only to defend their land from mining and land grabs, but also to create a range of micro-projects to sustain themselves and their communities as a way of protecting the earth and surviving without corporations. As Emilio Patané Sparato, one of the organizers of the Guardians of the Iberá network in Corrientes explains, ‘What is common to the entire organization is the defense of the territory, confronting the advancement of extractive companies that want to plunder, and building autonomy with our own selfmanaged projects that we call sustainable alternatives, which are reflected in our new cooperatives’.15 For example, in the rural zone of Lavalle those families who suffered contamination from fumigation are producing organic food and flowers together and then selling them in the popular markets and fairs. Others are producing bricks from the Paraná River. In Yahaveré, an impoverished rural zone, the indigenous Guaraníes have organized an autonomous community and decided in their assembly to produce beef in harmony with the environment. In other localities, such as Chavarría, San Miguel, and Concepción, they are organizing tourism collectively, in a way that respects the dignity of the communities and serves to share what has been happening with the local struggles. These tourism groups also plan to show others how to help take care of nature. The economic form of organization is cooperative, and the decisions are all made horizontally in assemblies. Emilio continues, ‘The tools we use are forged according to the necessity of the struggle. I think the assembly as a method – building consensus, constructing horizontally and maintaining the struggle’s autonomy – are things that cannot easily be erased’. An area that has created both inspiring and challenging relationships in the land defenses movements is that of regional and international relationships. On the one hand, meeting people who have been inspired by the

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struggle has given movements a huge boost, as Vanessa described above, but at the same time they have also created uneven relationships with regard to access to and invitations from other groups and movements. The divisions arise when particular movement participants are invited to other places in the world and either go outside the democratic process of the assembly and accept the invitations, or, even if it goes through the assembly, there is the discussion and debate around who gets to travel. Unfortunately international groups do not think deeply about these questions and often invite the same person again and again rather than asking the movement to decide who they would like to have participate. The result is a small group of people who travel and get to know other movements globally, creating a hierarchy of contact resources within the movements. It is here again that we see the ways in which power and hierarchy encroach into movements of resistance and creation. While these issues have yet to be completely resolved, some movements, such as the one in Corrientes from which Emilio spoke above, had adopted a similar policy to that of the Landless Movement in Brazil (MST), which is to have one experienced person travel and then insist that a second person be invited that the movement chooses, and the movement always chooses someone with less experience so as to train them in public speaking, meeting etc. In this way they try and break down the emergent hierarchies of people with access to those on the outside and share the skill set involved in public speaking and media work.

CONCLUSION The ethnographic examples in this chapter are organized both chronologically and progressively with regard to the concept and experience of resistance as a creative and concrete practice. Each of the examples we have chosen are part of a much larger sphere

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of organizing that is grounded more in where resistance meets alternatives and creation rather than where resistance takes the form of demands on institutions of power. Common features of this mode of resistance include: direct action over other kinds of protest; the widespread use of direct democracy and consensus decision-making over representational forms; the goal of horizontal relationships to disperse power-over and hierarchy; the rejection of political parties and trade unions as the form of movement organization; and the vision and application of prefigurative politics. Prefiguration is also where one can see the movement examples we selected evolve in a more autonomous, self-organized, and self-sustaining direction. Beginning with the global justice movements, prefigurative forms were temporary and relatively ideologically motivated, reflecting the world one wanted to see in the forms of protest used, including assemblies that were as directly democratic as possible as well as the autonomous selfprovisioning of food, emergency medical care, and legal support for those participating in the actions. A decade later Occupy and similar movements arose around the globe, prefiguring the world desired not only in the moment and ideologically, but also due to a directly experienced lack of alternatives. As the economic crisis deepened, forecasts darkened, and people’s imaginaries became grimmer with deepening austerity, including cuts to health care, housing, and food, the tools of prefiguration became survival tools – in the moment and into what appeared to be, at best, an unstable future. Then we turned to examples where people have no alternative right now – their land is polluted, mountains being blown up for mining, water sources disappearing, and workplaces shuttered. They must organize alternatives so as to survive – and they are using the same tools of direct action and prefiguration based in horizontal forms of relating, from assemblies to creating new forms of power together, as reflected in the

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examples of the recuperated workplaces in Latin America and Europe and land defenses in Argentina. The resistances discussed also exhibit varying degrees of ideological initiation, ranging from the more politicized subjectivities among global justice and many Occupy activists in the beginning, to the increasingly survival-based struggles in many parts of the world evolving into a place of more sophisticated politics and new subjectivities. Global justice movements involved international networks of self-identified activists from myriad backgrounds – all seeking justice in various ways and with a variety of goals. Occupy and the movements of the squares, such as the 15M in Spain – where participants occupied public plazas and squares as a beginning phase in organizing – encompassed a combination of people who had been active before, some in the global justice movements, and others in different struggles from labor to autonomist organizing. Many, however, had also never been political previously and were ‘awakened’ by the moment of the occupations in their cities and towns and from there have become active. This is a consistent story found in interviewing movement participants from Spain, Greece, and Turkey to various parts of the US (Juris 2012a; Sitrin and Azzellini 2014). Last, the contemporary movements for survival such as earth defense and workplace recuperations, are ones where the vast majority and sometimes all of the participants have not been active before and might not even consider themselves political now (Sitrin 2017). It is from these last two areas that we find the framework of ‘societies in movement’ (Zibechi 2010) most useful as it is a description that both addresses the composition of the participants as well as their goals. Rather than traditional social movement actors, movement participants come from similar backgrounds and communities and together rise up to create alternatives necessary for their survival. These movement participants also generally do not organize around the question of demands as

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they explain that they have already found their actions come from a place of having been left out, ignored, and excluded; thus they do not see the use of looking to these same institutions to solve their problems. As the above-mentioned examples suggest, resistance increasingly involves the creation of alternatives – not only because many actors feel or believe that defensive reactions are not enough, but because resisting powers are totally unresponsive, by choice or due to lack of ability to respond. In this sense, communities resisting austerity, crisis, and repression must create their own solutions. As governments turn their backs on populations, people are increasingly looking to one another for solutions, not merely resisting that which is causing their crisis but making the alternative reality in the present. Our examples also reveal how different types of movements and communities vary in their ability to effectively negotiate the complex internal tensions related to power and hierarchy that all resistances must confront. For example, whereas tensions have led to splits or even the dissolution of politically motivated groups involving many younger middle-class activists in the global North, as happened with the Direct Action Network during the height of the global justice movements in parts of the US, or some of the assemblies related to Occupy and the movements of the squares, we have found that the movements more grounded in concrete local struggles over longer periods of time, particularly those concerned with basic survival, including the defense of land and livelihoods, have been more able to find ways to directly and openly address internal tensions. In many cases this is simply a matter of necessity, which rings particularly true in the case of recuperated workplaces, where workers from Argentina to Italy and Greece have talked about how during assemblies they directly address challenges to internal democracy, including attempts to speak for the group without going through collective internal processes (Sitrin 2017). Indeed, the

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need to build sustainable projects of collaborative production and mutual aid raises the stakes. Whereas younger global justice and Occupy activists have taken issues of internal democracy and hierarchy just as seriously (see, e.g., Polletta 2002; Juris et  al. 2012), survival-oriented struggles simply cannot afford to break apart over internal tensions. Such a politics of necessity also perhaps makes them more resilient to repression and intentional disruption, critical issues for all resistances that are beyond the scope of the present chapter. In the opening of new ways of relating and surviving also comes new ways of speaking about what is taking place. There is an increasingly vast vocabulary that generally comes from the movements themselves, to describe these new ways of being and relating. For example, the language of prefiguration that has taken center stage for so many struggles, attempts to describe in part the space of creation in resistance we examine here. Also, the language of horizontalism, diversity through difference, and affect implies a set of relationships internal to movements that is about the construction of a different sort of social and political space – one that facilitates the development of new subjectivities, antagonisms, and forms of power. These relationships are just as central to resistance as the direct action tactics that blockade roads to stop mining companies or keep occupied plazas secure. Similarly, the language of territory or what Raul Zibechi (2012) refers to as ‘territories of resistance’,16 helps to convey the complex ways that alternative social relations and autonomous forms of self-organization are created in particular spaces, such as streets, public squares, and recuperated workplaces, that are opened up when the imposition and dictates of global capital are refused. In this chapter we have examined various examples of resistance to globalization and neoliberal capitalism that suggest the importance of creation and prefiguration. In these and many other examples since the early 1990s, we see an opening up in the spaces

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of resistance beyond the refusal of a particular action, policy, or system, toward the production of possible alternatives – resisting power-over while exercising power-to in the creation of sustainable and more egalitarian models and visions of the future in the present moment. As described, these processes of creation opened in the moments of refusal do not take place outside of the societies from which they have arisen, and one can always see the manifestations of power and hierarchy within internal forms and practices. The strategic challenge for movements is not to ignore power and hierarchy, but to recognize and develop effective ways of dealing with them. Resistances are increasingly building alternative forms of creation, which are often necessary for survival. How and if these alternative forms continue very much hinges on how seriously movements take the challenges of internal power dynamics inherited from the societies they are resisting.

Notes  1  In his review of an emergent anthropology of social movements, Arturo Escobar (1992) makes a similar point in relation to ethnographies of everyday resistance (see, e.g., Comaroff 1985; Ong 1987), which fail to address forms of opposition that are more collective and organized.  2  In a related vein, Manuel Castells (2010) distinguishes between defensive ‘resistance’ identities that build trenches of resistance and survival in the context of neoliberal capitalism and more proactive ‘project’ identities that seek to build new identities that can transform society.  3  Routledge (1997) included ‘intent’ in his original definition, but we choose to remain open on the question of consciousness in relation to resistance.  4  Such a view is clearly articulated in Pile’s (1997) assertion that ‘‘‘resistance” stands in implacable opposition to “power’’’ (p. 1). For his part, Bayat (2010) has also criticized the resistance literature for another form of romanticization: ‘reading too much into ordinary behaviors’ (p. 55).  5  As Foucault (1978) famously argued, ‘Resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (p. 95).

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  6  Complicating de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between ‘strategies’ of power, which control their own places, and ‘tactics’ of resistance, which have no place of their own and always operate along the space, and under the nose, of the enemy (see Pile 1997), Paul Routledge (1996) outlines diverse spatial tactics of resistance, including ‘packs’, which involve movements of deterritorialization across space, and ‘swarms’, movements of territorialization that openly confront power by occupying physical, symbolic, political, or cultural space (p. 521).   7  Scholars such as Bayat (2010) have criticized decentered post-structural approaches to power for deemphasizing the continuing importance of the state and other places where power is ‘far weightier, more concentrated, and “thicker”’ (p. 54; see Routledge 1997 for a similar argument). We agree with this point, but still find it useful to think about the productive, enabling dimensions of power. Distinctions such as those between power-over and power-to, or between dominating power and resisting power, provide a helpful corrective to overly diffuse conceptions of power that see power as operating in the same ways everywhere.  8  This section is adapted and revised from Juris (2008), chapter 4.  9  This section is adapted and revised from Juris (2012a, 2012b, 2013).  10  Here the debate was not so much over consensus process itself, as is often the case within grassroots social movements, but rather between occupiers who favored the open and large-scale popular assemblies, and those who preferred decentralized, smaller-scale forms of coordination. Indeed, in many occupations activists experimented with alternative spokescouncil models based on meetings of delegates from working and affinity groups. Spokescouncils were often criticized as attempts to undermine the popular will of the General Assemblies. This can be largely seen as a tension between a ‘logic of networking’ and a ‘logic of aggregation’ (see Juris 2012a).  11  The examples from Vio.Me in Thessaloniki are based in Marina Sitrin’s fieldwork in Greece in 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Selections of interviews with workers have been published in Telesur and will be used in the forthcoming book, The New Revolutions, with UC Press, 2017.  12  Sitrin, Marina, ‘If We Can Stop Monsanto We Can Change the World’, Telesur Opinions Column, Retrieved May 12, 2015 (http://www.telesurtv.net/ english/opinion/If-We-Can-Stop-Monsanto-WeCan-Change-The-World-20150301-0019.html)  13  The examples from Argentina are based in Marina Sitrin’s fieldwork over the past decade and a half,

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with the specific movements and interviews referred to here conducted in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Selections of the interviews have been published in Opendemocracy.org, Tidal Magazine, Telesur, and Zmagazine online and will be used in the forthcoming book, The New Revolutions with UC Press, 2017.  14  Sitrin, Marina, ‘The Struggle to Defend La Famatina is Forever: How Social Movements in Argentina are Close to Changing the World’, Open Democracy online, Retrieved May 13, 2015 (https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/marina-sitrin/struggle-to-defend-la-famantina-is-forever-how-social-movements-in-arge)  15  Sitrin, Marina, ‘Defending the Earth in Argentina: From Direct Action to Autonomy’, Tidal Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy Magazine online, Retrieved May 13, 2015 (http://tidalmag.org/ blog/everyday-revolutions/defending-the-earthin-argentina-from-direct-action-to-autonomy/)  16  For a more theoretical approach to the relationship between territory and contemporary social movements, see Escobar (2008) who writes about ‘territories of difference’.

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Collins, Joan. 2012. ‘Theorizing Wisconsin’s 2011 Protests’. American Ethnologist 39(1): 6–20. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Duncombe, Stephen, ed. 2002. Cultural Resistance Reader. London: Verso. Escobar, Arturo. 1992. ‘Culture, Practice and Politics’. Critique of Anthropology 12(4): 395–432. Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume I. New York: Pantheon Books. Gills, Barry, ed. 2000. Globalization and the Politics of Resistance. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson. 1976. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude. New York: Penguin Books. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hollander, Jocelyn L. and Rachel L. Einwohner. 2004. ‘Conceptualizing Resistance’. Sociological Forum 19(4): 533–554. Johansson, Anna and Stellan Vinthagen. 2016. ‘Dimensions of Everyday Resistance’. Critical Sociology 42(3): 417–435. Juris, Jeffrey S. 2008. Networking Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Juris, Jeffrey S. 2012a. ‘Reflections of #Occupy Everywhere’. American Ethnologist 39(2): 259–279. Juris, Jeffrey S. 2012b. ‘The 99% and the Production of Insurgent Subjectivity’. Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, February 14, 2013, http://www.culanth.org/ fieldsights/72-the-99-and-the-productionof-insurgent-subjectivity Juris, Jeffrey S. 2013. ‘Spaces of Intentionality’. In Insurgent Encounters, edited by Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish, 39–65. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Juris, Jeffrey A. and Alex Khasnabish, eds. 2013. Insurgent Encounters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Juris, Jeffrey S., Michelle Ronayne, Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle, and Robert Wengronowitz. 2012. ‘Negotiating Power and Difference within the 99%’. Social Movement Studies 11(3–4): 434–440. Lasn, Kalle. 1999. Culture Jam. New York: William Morrow & Company. Maharawal, Manissa McCleave. 2011. ‘Standing Up’. In Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, edited by Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt, and Astra Taylor, 34–40. London: Verso. Melucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Moore, Donald. 1997. ‘Remapping Resistance’. In Geographies of Resistance, edited by Steve Pile and Michael Keith, 87–106. New York: Routledge. Negri, Antonio. 1991. The Savage Anomaly. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ortner, Sherry. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173–193. Pile, Steve. 1997. ‘Introduction’. In Geographies of Resistance, edited by Steve Pile and Michael Keith, 1–32. New York: Routledge. Pile, Steve and Michael Keith, eds. 1997. Geographies of Resistance. New York: Routledge. Polletta, Francesca. 2002. Freedom is an Endless Meeting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Raby, Rebecca. 2005. ‘What is Resistance?’. Journal of Youth Studies 8(2): 151–171.

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Routledge, Paul. 1994. ‘Backstreets, Barricades, and Blackouts’. Environment and Planning D 12(5): 559–578. Routledge, Paul. 1996. ‘Critical Geopolitics and Terrains of Resistance’. Political Geography 15 (6/7): 509–531. Routledge, Paul. 1997. ‘A Spatiality of Resistances’. In Geographies of Resistance, edited by Steve Pile and Michael Keith, 68–86. London: Routledge. Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: CT: Yale University Press. Sharp, Joanne P., Paul Routledge, Chris Philo, and Ronan Paddison, eds. 2000. Entanglements of Power. New York: Routledge. Sitrin, Marina. 2017. The New Revolutions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sitrin, Marina and Dario Azzellini. 2014. They Can’t Represent Us! New York: Verso Books. Taibo, Carlos. 2011. Nada Será Como Antes: Sobre el 15M. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones de la Catarata. Vinthagen, Stellan. 2007. ‘Understanding “Resistance”’. Paper presented at the Resistance Studies Network on December 6, 2007 at Gothenburg University. Williams, J. Patrick. 2009. ‘The Multidimensionality of Resistance in Youth-Subcultural Studies’. Resistance Studies Magazine 1: 20–33. Wood, Elisabeth Jean. 2001. ‘The Emotional Benefits of Insurgency in El Salvador’. In Passionate Politics, edited by Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, 267– 281. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zibechi, Raul. 2010. Dispersing Power. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Zibechi, Raul. 2012. Territories in Resistance. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

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2 Emerging Subjectivity in Protest B o b K u r i k*

Subjectivity has been analyzed ever since an anthropology of resistance embarked on its turbulent voyage at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes more central, sometimes rendered secondary, the concept of subjectivity, embedded in various theoretical currents, has witnessed a fascinating boom of resistance studies in the 1980s, a breakdown after harsh critique in the 1990s, and a second breath of resuscitation, beginning lustily at the turn of the millennium, still breathing until today, and further conceptualized with new terms like urban protest, horizontal democracy, occupation, alter-globalization, anti-austerity mobilization, hacktivism, Arab spring or militant ethnography (Theodossopoulos 2014a). The task of this chapter is to guide the reader through the flourishing field of anthropological studies, with regards to subjectivity in protest. The text is divided into three parts. The first, ‘Disentangling the Field’, provides an overview of key conceptualizations defining this current throughout its existence. In ‘Contemporary State-of-the-Art’, some main clusters of actual research agendas are presented, followed by ‘Emerging Tasks’, outlining some upcoming research challenges.

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DISENTANGLING THE FIELD Theoretical calibrations are presented here by ‘disentangling’ the field into four parts – each corresponding to a particular set of problems, debates, and the analytical equipment at hand. This division is designed to illuminate a rather complex conceptual landscape, but it does so at some cost. The field is divided into conceptual units, though at the expense of some complexities and inter connections, which are left behind. The reference point is almost exclusively social anthropology, which sets aside the interesting conceptualizations of subjectivity and protest, emerging in neighboring disciplines.

Domination and the Resisting Subject The question of subjectivity was present in the establishment of an anthropology of resistance at the end of the 1970s, by echoing predominantly Marxist tasks. ‘Revolution [as] organizing principle [didn’t succeed]’, as Arturo Escobar points out, because ‘people

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failed to behave in the ways predicted by dominant theories … nor did they jubilantly and decisively join revolutionary struggles, as Marxist analysts had prognosticated’ (1992: 402). How is it that the subordinate class and the potential revolutionary subject refuse the historically inevitable path, as foreseen in the canonical texts of Karl Marx? What went wrong when, instead, they seemed to accept the system exploiting them, without being directly coerced? These questions are not new. Western Marxism tackled them from its very beginning (Graeber and Shukaitis 2007: 17), and searched for an answer in the logic of domination, and in the cultural sphere of worldviews, beliefs, ideas, and values. Simply put, people are subordinated not only materially, but symbolically as well. Whereas Engels uses the term ‘false consciousness’ to describe how the proletariat is kept mystified concerning relations between classes (Eagleton 1991), Marx (1998[1932]) argues that the ruling class manages to make its ideas the dominant ones, to which the subordinated class must be subjected. Gramsci (1971) developed the concept of hegemony, through which the values, worldviews, and beliefs of the ruling class become justified, imposed, and accepted by a majority as the universal and natural norm. Hegemony envelops the state, as well as civil society, and is anchored in a combination of enforcement and active consent by the dominated to their domination. As such, it forms the status quo, and makes counter-hegemonies of rebellious consciousness and oppositional ideologies, all but inaccessible. With these explanations, examples of resistance and resistive subjectivity among subordinated people seem rare. But is this really the case? What if the problem lays partly in a narrow understanding of rebellion as open and mass revolution? This possibility emerged in the work of James C. Scott, whose arguments rested on ethnographic fieldwork among peasants in a Malaysian village called Sedaka, which was gripped by the turbulent changes of capitalist development. Agency,

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understood as ‘consciousness – the meaning [people] give to their acts’ (Scott 1985: 38), became a central axis of interest here. Scott was dissatisfied with simplistic and polarized explanations, in which one could only be an organized revolutionary, or else a dominated subject consenting to hegemony. Such a perspective strips away from any peasant the potentiality to resist while avoiding open rebellion, thus reducing him to a non-agentic ‘sack of potatoes’ (Marx 1994[1852]). Scott sought to focus on the in-between positions, highlighting the sphere of what he called ‘infrapolitics’. For most peasants, open rebellion would be a suicidal mission because of their unequal power relations with the state or landowners. But this does not mean that they actively consent to their subordination, and cannot resist. On the contrary, peasants, and other subordinated classes, are capable of imagining an alternative social world, as well as all-or-nothing conflict, but they manage to resist differently. Peasants from Sedaka switch between a public posture of conformity to gain ‘everyday victories’, and an off-stage authentic self using less organized, everyday forms of resistance – the so called ‘weapons of the weak’, such as dissimulation, false compliance, feigned ignorance, slander or codes, and euphemisms (Scott 1985, 1990). What appears as deference due to hegemony, is thereby redefined and recognized as a staged conformity to hegemonic norms. Instead of the polarized notion of either counter-hegemonic revolution or consent to hegemony, Scott develops a more complex approach in which consent is the result of performance management on the public stage. Scott introduces the notion of different ‘transcripts’ reflecting peasants’ conduct towards their own subordination. There are public transcripts for on-stage behavior, hidden transcripts for behavior where the power-holders cannot see or hear, and their variable combinations, transitions, and advancements. Grounded in ethnographic analysis, James C. Scott thus challenged the Gramscian

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theory of hegemony. His work introduced the notion of the resisting subject, providing the foundation for an anthropology of resistance. The result has given rise to a series of debates. Concerning the question of subjectivity, Timothy Mitchell (1990) detects a nonproblematized Cartesian/Western separation of mind and body in Scott’s attempt to picture subordinated peasants as political subjects. Here, the subject is understood ‘as unique self-constituted consciousness living inside physically manufactured bodies’ (1990: 545). In Scott’s account, peasants may lack physical freedom, but still keep their minds and consciousness internally autonomous, and non-colonized by the forces of domination. This enables the worldviews of resisting subjects to be seen as independent of, and non-contaminated by, socio-political and historical power relations. (Such an external concept of power is a direct antithesis of Foucault’s understanding, Mitchell purports, as is discussed further below.) Susan Gal (1995) criticizes another binary fixity in Scott’s work – the one leading to the assumption ‘that the subordinate and the dominant are always clearly definable, unified, and separable groups, unambiguously opposed to each other’ (Gal 1995: 417). In such a perspective, the differences between them are exaggerated. Sherry B. Ortner (1995) problematizes as well ‘a single, unitary, subordinate’ (p. 175), which is created through processes that ‘sanitize the internal politics of the dominated’ (p. 179), embracing a romantic and exotic view of subaltern groups resisting by virtue of their subordination. Instead of homogeneity, Ortner is interested in variable internal divisions and complexities, and even in the existence of dominations among subalterns themselves. Almost two decades later, Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (2014b) works to advance Scott’s concept of resistance, but instead of presupposing an intact consciousness of subordinated people, he is interested – using the example of anti-austerity indignation in Greece – in the local meanings registered within the hidden transcript.

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The result of Scott’s intervention is therefore complex. An anthropology of resistance has emerged, ethnographically documenting weaknesses within the Gramscian theory of hegemony, introducing the resisting subject, insisting that dominated people are not passive but are instead equipped with the agency that enables them to disagree. Yet, as virtuous and necessary as Scott’s account was then, it has left us with a limited conceptual toolkit: Scott’s anthropology is unable to note internal differences between subalterns, and cannot acknowledge the blurred lines and ambivalences that exist between dominant and subordinate groups. Nor can it acknowledge the presence of modifications and failures of resistance, or such neighboring acts as collaboration, compliance, cynicism, or lethargy. Furthermore, too much importance is bestowed, considering subjectivity, on consciousness, viewing the body as detachable from the mind.1 This Cartesian split in post-Marxist social science is most resolutely challenged by Pierre Bourdieu, with his notions of bodily knowledge (2000) and habitus. Bourdieu characterizes habitus as ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu 1990: 53). The Bourdieusian conceptual toolkit, which includes habitus (often misunderstood as a concept for analyzing the reproduction of the status quo), field, and variable capitals, constitutes a significant alternative form of analysis regarding resistant subjectivity, change, and protest. Although space limitations prevent a full elaboration of Bourdieu’s approach, it is important to note that social anthropology has yet to make full use of its theoretical potential. Bourdieu’s work has, however, reverberated throughout ethnographic sociology. For example, Nick Crossley provides a general overview of Bourdieusian pertinence for social movement analysis (2002, 2005), and elaborates on the notion of radical habitus (2003). Yousaf Ibrahim has used Bourdieu’s concepts to study ideological

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struggles for symbolic domination among different resisting groups in the anti-capitalist milieu in Great Britain (2011). Hanna-Mari Husu (2013) considers identity movements, again using Bourdieu’s terminology. Chris Samuel (2013) connects the concept of symbolic violence, with the analysis of LGBT identity in the USA, and Lisa Wade (2011) emphasizes the emancipatory potential of the habitus through the study of dance.

Foucauldian Turn Michel Foucault was rather skeptical about the Marxist understanding of power and resistance because it ‘presupposed a human subject … endowed with a consciousness which power is then thought to seize on’ (1980: 58). Instead of an autonomous subject, he famously claims ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1978: 95). Nor can one separate ideology from power in a way of speaking truth to power, from some non-contaminated position. Foucault’s power and resistance are not external to each other, as presupposed in Scott’s hidden transcripts, but all-penetrating, productive, and always in relation to each other. Under this Foucauldian optic, it is impossible to see power as a form of possession separable from resistance, as if clearly bound spheres of dominant power-holders could exist apart from powerless people in subalternity. Foucault dissects subjectivity through socalled modes or techniques of subjectivation that actively constitute the subject’s mode of being. They are fully comprehensible only as part of Foucault’s entire conceptual grid. He was curious about how ‘problems’ appear historically – be it madness, criminality, disease, or sex – and viewed each as an instance in which power and knowledge combine to generate particular forms of subjectivity. Moreover, such processes were imbued with

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power, understood not as top-down domination, as in Scott’s case, but rather as governmentality, or the art of governing human conduct. In Foucault’s approach, governmentality constitutes a field of procedures and techniques ‘by which one sets about conducting the conduct of others’ (2010: 4). The trinity of Power–Knowledge–Subject constitutes Foucault’s matrix, and provides the basis for his approach toward the power/resistance dyad. Concerning subject formation, Foucault is interested in ‘the different forms by which the individual is led to constitute him or herself as subject’ (2010: 5). This approach implies two intermingled modes of subjectivation – technologies of power/government, and technologies of self – wherein their contact zone sets up the terrain of governmentality. Humans are transformed into individual subjectivities through processes ‘determining the conduct of individuals and submitting them to certain ends’ (Foucault 1988: 18). Here, different knowledge apparatuses and power mechanisms interconnect with the formation of human subjects, with technologies of government acting to produce objectivized subjects. Foucault does not have in mind a mechanistic process, but instead envisions a field of possibilities whereby technologies of the self ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being …’ (ibid.). In other words, forms of governmentality enable selves to differ, transgress, mutate, and resist, though always in the presence of power. To better understand this relative freedom of subject formation, Foucault goes from the 1980s back to antiquity, and scrutinizes the historically specific aesthetics, ethics, and techniques of existence, by which the Greeks sought to cultivate, reflect on, and govern the self, the household, and the polis. In his later works, Foucault asks: ‘what modes of subjectivation are articulated with forms of the government of men, either in order to resist them or to

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inhabit them?’ (paraphrase by Frédéric Gros in Foucault 2011: 350). The interdependent relation between conduct/government of others and conduct/ government of oneself, leads Foucault to understand power as the ‘conduct of conduct’. There is a correlation between historically particular modes of governmentality, and revolts of conduct appropriate to it, which Foucault terms counter-conduct (Foucault 2007). In other and already used words, power and resistance are not here in the relation of externality and clearly separable opposition, but rather of historically particular multiplications, synergies, reorientations, partialities, antagonisms, and entropies. As Arnold I. Davidson points out, ‘conduct and counterconduct share a series of elements that can be utilized and reutilized, re-implanted, reinserted, taken up in the direction of reinforcing a certain mode of conduct, or of creating and recreating a type of counter-conduct’ (2011: 27). These revolts are of conduct, and as such they are connected, but differ from political rebellions against sovereign power or economic rebellions driven, for example, by hunger. Revolts of conduct which emerged, for example, among certain Protestant sects in the Middle Ages, in cases of army desertion, or in different forms of political dissidence were all forged ‘with an aspect of the pursuit of a different form of conduct … than those proposed by the apparent and visible official governmentality of society’ (Foucault 2007: 265). Different forms of subjectivity are formed in counter-conduct – not purified of power, but not the same as subjects formed through dominant conduct. Concerning the treatment of Foucault’s thought in anthropology, Aihwa Ong (1987) provides one of the first attempts to combine it with feminist and post-Marxist questions. Ong studies eruptions of spirit possession among young Malaysian factory women, forming part of counter-tactics and new local subjectivities in the factory regimes set up by transnational corporations in the late twentieth century. In line with Foucault’s relational

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understanding of power and resistance, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) uses the example of women from rural Egypt, to analyze resistance as a diagnostics of power, doing so in ways that consciously avoid romanticizing everyday forms of resistance. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson understand resistance as an ‘experience that constructs and reconstructs the identity of subjects’ (1997: 19). Forms of power are understood as making individual subjects by ‘categorizing the individual, marking him by his own individuality, attaching him to his own identity’ (1997: 20). Within this setting, resistance as an experience produces effects, which may transform, reconfirm, or even strengthen the existing identities of subjects. Saba Mahmood, in her book on the piety movement of Islamic women in secular Egypt, criticizes the ‘teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power’ (2005: 9), typical of post-structuralist feminism. A liberal self is switched into a liberatory self where resistance is understood as aiming toward a state of freedom ‘from relations of subordination’, by subverting and defying dominating norms (2005: 10, 29). Resistance is anchored here in a liberatory cosmology, and thus taken to mean an opposition toward dominant norms in order to be liberated. This is only a historically particular understanding, which bypasses many more practices and meanings of resistance in different cultural settings. Therefore, Mahmood’s task is to move resistance beyond liberatory universalism and forge conceptual tools, which are capable of embracing particular conditions and meanings of resisting acts. Ten years after Sherry Ortner, Saba Mahmood repeats the call for an ethnographically informed, local, and contextual understanding of resistance. In her search for a different analytics, Mahmood turns to Foucauldian subject formations where ‘agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms’ (2005: 15). This fundamental switch from a subject resisting domination,

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to productive and creative subject formations in resistance, allows us ‘to conceptualize agency not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable’ (2005: 18). Such a perspective strips resistance of the automatic, predictable, and thus boring, answer to the question of its relation to established norms. Subjects may as well welcome, inhabit, reorient, resign themselves to norms, while they are formed in resistance – all depending on the particular setting. Mahmood’s turn is capable of answering Ortner’s call for ‘appreciating ways in which resistance can be more than opposition … [and is sensitive to] the multiplicity of projects in which social beings are always engaged’ (Ortner 1995: 191).

Towards an Anthropology of Protest and Social Movement In the 1990s the anthropology of resistance went through a crisis. The concept of resistance itself, which was on fire in the 1980s, came instead under fire – for meaning everything and nothing, for being over-used and over-generalized (e.g. Brown 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997), for not being properly documented ethnographically, as presenting ‘sanitized’ accounts, as neglecting complexity (Ortner 1995), and for exaggerating the role of power (Sahlins 2002) in favor of romanticized, exoticized, pathologized views (Abu-Lughod 1990; Theodossopoulos 2014a). One of the key scholars struggling to resuscitate it with a second breath was Arturo Escobar. His early call (1992), repeated twenty years later by John Gledhill (2012), to focus on ‘more organized forms of collective action or social movements’ (Escobar 1992: 399), challenges the discipline. A courting between anthropology and open protest began. When huge alter-globalization clashes emerged during the millennial turn, and during the 2011 revolts, a decade later, there

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were many young anthropologists ready to study them. Whereas the Foucauldian turn moves from subjects resisting domination (as in Scott’s framework) to subjects formed through resistance, the focus on social movements acted now to guide anthropology out of the crisis of all-encompassing resistance – this time towards studies of protest which have come to define the contemporary anthropology of resistance. Arturo Escobar elaborated the concept of collective identity, borrowing it from sociological theories of the new social movements (e.g. Edelman 2001; Fominaya 2010), and emphasizing ‘cultural struggles over meanings as much as over socio-economic conditions’ (Escobar 1992: 412; Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Alvarez et  al. 1998). In the proliferation of cultural-political identities in the 1990s, the production of difference, and the process of articulation, were crucial. The new collective subjects were constructed through the politicization of difference, the so-called alterization – as was the case with communidades negras on the Pacific coast of Colombia (Escobar 2007, 2008). Crystallization of these communities as distinct political subjects, binds a new singular identity, defined in ethnic terms, as ‘activists unambiguously describe their actions in terms of the right to cultural difference and to a black or indigenous identity’ (2008: 10). Such a political identity is constructed through the practices of articulation. When certain discursive conditions are met, new identity regimes emerge through partial fixation of meanings and identities around particular nodal points such as cultural rights, autonomy, and difference, as in the case of Escobar’s research. Arturo Escobar forged the analytical tools of an emerging anthropology of protest, on a rather classical anthropological subject of inquiry – the marginalized, subaltern community in the rural area of global periphery. With alter-globalization protests hitting the stage in Seattle in 1999, Prague in 2000, and Genoa in 2001, an ethnographic focus

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spills over towards urban centers where white middle-class youths prevail, though not exclusively. This brings practical changes in the politics of difference, as well as new challenges for the conceptual apparatus of an anthropology of protest. Whereas in Escobar’s community one single issue and identity were politicized through alteration, in the alter-globalization movement ‘no one unity [is] applied to all movement actors, no single vision/goal, no single adversary, no single identity [is] shared by all movement actors’ (Maeckelbergh 2009: 7). The driving engine of this ‘movement of movements’ is its capability of embracing all differences. What is seen is the ‘transformation of difference as division into difference as unity’ (Maeckelbergh 2009: 20; Juris 2008). This is echoed most compactly in one of the movement’s key statements of political philosophy and revolutionary theory – in Hardt and Negri’s concept of multitude. Multitude as an emerging collective subject of change is loaded with multiple vectors of differences – be it around gender, class, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, lifestyles, opinions, values, desires, beliefs, forms of labor, etc. The power, as much as the task, of a multitude does not lie in unifying these multiplicities, but in an effort ‘to manage to communicate and act in common, while remaining internally different’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: xiv). One can see that some issues from Gramscian debates take on another form here. Understanding the politics of identity as a discursive articulation of difference, again opens doors for re-addressing counter-hegemonic issues of ideology, knowledge, and consciousness. Moreover, the question of the collective subject of change returns to life, after being derailed with the devolution from Marxian subject to Foucauldian subject formation (e.g. Graeber and Shukaitis 2007: 24). Practices become crucial, because in the multitude, ‘the democratic elements … are pushed further in the network form, and the organization becomes less a means and more

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an end in itself’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 83). The change does not come with seizing the power of the state in the future, but with practicing radical, horizontal democracy in the networks of multitude, here and now. The question of who is the revolutionary subject, is extended and reconfigured, since the ‘ideology of anti-globalization movement is embedded in its practice’ (Graeber 2009: 10–11). Ideology moves from the level of consciousness to that of prefigurative action.

Materials, Assemblages, Affects, Dividuals The above-mentioned approaches and debates constitute the theoretical core of the anthropology of resistance during the last four decades. Recently, new conceptual attitudes and tools have emerged, and are now poised to start shifting studies of subjectivity toward an anthropology of protest. This section outlines the most fundamental conceptual promises of this kind. First of all, a so-called ontological turn has exposed the insularity and anthropocentric arrogance of social science in attributing agency only to humans. Whereas James C. Scott strove, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, to demonstrate that subordinated people do exercise agency, nowadays a growing number of scholars strive to do the same with things and nonhuman beings. Jane Bennett (2010) writes about ‘vital materiality’ to grasp the ‘capacity of things not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (2010: viii). How do digital technologies augment capacities to protest, as well as to repress protest? What impact might the assigning of agency to stem cells, instead of to a soul, have on the abortion debates? Do forests, or tiny and curved streets, hide activists from the police? Can various kinds of matter – or things – differ in their capacities to support rioting?

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Assigning agency to things does not mean that things possess agency – rather, agency is uprooted. This is grasped by the term assemblage (agencement in French), introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987). Human and nonhuman elements form ad hoc coalitions and ‘confederate’ in assemblages. Such organisms do not have one governing head where agency would be cumulated – instead agency is distributed throughout this network in an uneven and elusive way, as a kind of swarm (Bennett 2010: 56, 57). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offer the concept of a rhizome – a plant stem forming sprouts as well as roots with ‘unpredictable shape and capable of growth across multiple dimensions’ (Juris and Khasnabish 2013: 17; Khasnabish 2013). Accenting fluidity over fixity, movement over stability, multiplicity over unity, relativity and connectivity over essential forms, these concepts are well suited to analyzing whole networks of social movements running through the world, as well as its local nodes. In this assemblatic architecture of protests, agency is distributed on various levels and in various relations. Not only is it present around each member and node, but there is, as well, an agency of assemblage, which is irreducible to the sum of its parts. Concerning an agency of the whole, Arturo Escobar understands social movement as an auto-poetic, autonomous, self-producing, and self-organized organism – ‘an individual entity on its own’ (2008: 261). This provides new conceptual possibilities for grasping a collective agency of protests beyond revolutionary eschatology, and the desperate search for the subject of change. How are assemblatic coalitions created? How do they move and stick together? Instead of searching for the glue on the level of ideology, rational choice, discourse, or consciousness as with Gramsci or Escobar, the level of bodily affects and affectivity is accentuated here, and understood broadly as ‘the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness’ (Bennett 2010: xii). Bodies in resistance are first of all emotional, vulnerable, and

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affected up to entering and enduring in protests, rather than calculating rational choices or following ideologies. Assemblages and their parts continuously affect/are affected, and by doing so, they do change themselves and others, as well as form, enter, or leave alliances and movements. Somehow continuously sidelined, corporeal and emotional dimensions enter here more solidly within the anthropology of subjectivity and social movements, as protests are overloaded with fears, indignations, sufferings, ecstasy, pains, joys, exhaustions, etc. Obviously emergent, intensified and transformed, affective states are nothing new in the history of social theory – Durkheimian or Turnerian embodied feelings, produced in rituals, can be classical examples from sociology and anthropology, even though wrapped in different conceptual toolkits. Surprisingly enough, systematic studies of bodily affects and emotions eluded the anthropology of resistance from its beginning. Now, with the affective turn, there are favorable conditions to change this, to make research on affects in resistance an integrated part of the analysis, and even to link it to older anthropological work antecedent to an anthropology of resistance. What kinds of persons are then produced after the ontological turn? The anthropological concept of distributed person provides an answer. Alfred Gell (1998) introduces it in the example of a soldier whose agency is distributed throughout the terrain with his military equipment, such as bullets, binoculars, or mines. Persons become ‘distributed in the milieu (in time and space), beyond the body-boundary’ and consist as well of ‘a dispersed category of material objects, traces and leavings’ (1998: 21, 104). In similar fashion Marilyn Strathern (2001) understands technologies as tools extending human effort, dispersing agency and enlarging the capacities of people. The distributed person leads to the concept of the ‘dividual’ introduced by Strathern to describe ‘the person [as] a partible entity: an agent [which] can dispose of parts, or act as a part’ (1988: 324), as much as it is embedded

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in, and comprehensible through, varied external relations. The Strathernian self is, according to Maeckelbergh ‘a single self [that] travels between different positions and different aspects of the self [and] its various identities are made visible at different moments’ (2009: 220). Gilles Deleuze (1992) uses the term dividual to describe subjectivity in the age of computers. Whereas the middle Foucault conceptualizes how a subject is formed as an indivisible bodily unit – an individual – Deleuze is interested in the subject division and modulation through data samples and, most importantly, codes. When entering a digital world, people are transformed into, and dispersed as, information and codes. They circulate and flow, not only as individual units stripped of their physical bodies, as registered, for example, in digitalized state databases of taxes, social security, or terrorism, but also as divisible parts, such as particular consumer habits, GPS-tracked moves, or browsing preferences, produced through data profiling or sampling for commercial and surveillance reasons. In digital times, individual and dividual registers of subject, are simultaneously and constantly merged. As David Savat writes: a ‘person is, in one and the same moment, both produced as whole, as a distinct and solid form, while on the other hand is always multiple, always more than one, an infinite dispersal of patterns or flow lines of code’ (2013: 70).

CONTEMPORARY STATE-OF-THE-ART In this section I present an overview of the contemporary state-of-the-art concerning the anthropology of subjectivities in protest. The debate is clustered around three key topics – prefiguration, advanced liberalism, and distribution of protest.

Prefiguration Developed as a political strategy in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, prefiguration

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is extensively echoed in anthropology with the alter-globalization movement, as well as with many of the 2011 revolts. Prefiguration challenges contemporary regimes of government by confronting them, and constructing alternative selves, decision-making processes, infrastructures, and worlds, here and now (not after the revolution). The dominant perspective in the anthropology of prefiguration is what Juris calls a ‘practice-based approach’ (Juris 2008: 11), focusing predominantly on analyzing either practices of direct democracy, horizontal decision-making processes, community building, decentralized organizing, direct-action planning, logics of networking and aggregation (Graeber 2009, 2013; Juris 2008, 2012; Maeckelbergh 2009, 2011, 2012), or practices of confrontation and conflict (Krøijer 2010; Scholl 2012; Starr et  al. 2011). Nevertheless, variable conceptualizations of prefigurative subjectivity emerge as well. In this view, new subjectivities are expected to emerge in prefiguration, as one of its political outcomes. Jeffrey Juris (2008) detects an important role of networks in alterglobalization protests. Networks became the political ideal that is foreseen and practiced, resonating with anarchist-inspired principles of the global justice movement, such as selfgovernment, autonomy, diversity, horizontality or free flow of information. Moreover, so-called ‘networking subjectivity’ was produced in the movement at the intersection of norms, forms, and technologies. Both Jeffrey Juris and Marianne Maeckelbergh see alter-globalization subjectivities constituted as collective actors through communication and coordination. Whereas Juris stresses their constitution according to the logic of networking, Maeckelbergh (2009) is interested in the agency of the alter-globalization movement as composed through the merging and connecting of its divisible parts and collective agents – that is, as stemming from the communicative connectivity of the collectives, whereby agents are understood as divisible and complex rather than according

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to the actions of individuals. Prefigurative subjectivity is not produced only in the building of alternatives, but also through the practices of confrontation. Stine Krøijer (2010) detects the bodily synchronicity of activists emerging in temporal moments of street interactions with police, such as riots or ‘kettling situations’,2 during which activists become one moving organ or, as she puts it, ‘one body acting together’ (2010: 144). Such compressed ‘bodily figurations of the future’ transform ‘the experiential state of the body, [its] bodily form and state of vitality’ (2010: 147) through intensification and synchronization of collectively distributed affects such as mutual solidarity, strength, horizontality, rage, hope, and freedom. Whereas alter-globalization protests emerge as very temporary and ephemeral, autonomous social centers may be seen as more durable examples of prefiguration. Stine Krøijer and Inger Sjørslev (2011) elaborate on the notion of the transgression of self in the sociality of a Copenhagen center Ungdomshuset,3 by focusing on the social relations establishing and maintaining collectives. Being part of this center, and its collective sociality, leads toward ‘a kind of transcendence of the self in the social, where collective self-determination and individual self-realization are closely connected’ (2011: 89). Whereas the autonomy of the Kantian subject is an offspring of one’s own individual will, here it is the collective place of autonomous center, which secures one’s individual freedom (for a similar case of autonomy in the alter-globalization movement see Pleyers 2013). This networking focus differentiates alterglobalization subjectivities, from communitybuilding subjectivities, evolving from the 2011 movements. Whereas the first emerged out of several days of intensive protests, the latter was forged during weeks of occupation, when alternative ethics, aesthetics, politics, and logistics in temporal utopian communities were established and maintained in occupied public spaces (see Juris 2012). As

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Werbner et al. highlight, such ‘emergent collectivities transcended their social heterogeneity through a shared aesthetic, and through everyday practices of living together, maintaining hygiene and clinics, cleaning rubbish, sharing food, endless talk and joyful celebrations’ (2014: 7). The processes generating prefigurative, and other forms of, life are loaded with vibrant and intense affects such as feelings of communitas (despite or due to diversity), freedom, effervescence, trust, and love, as much as they enable practicing and reimagining other forms of sociality. Jeffrey Juris uses the term ‘affective solidarity’, to describe the corporeal glue through which Occupy camps stick together, and new people are easily attracted to protests, and cultivate their belonging. Asli Zengin discusses the example of Gezi park in Istanbul, which reveals that the ‘sensorial conditionings’ of the participants shifted within ‘an affective and intimate economy of encounters, touches and dialogues that have opened bodies and lives to new, unpredictable becomings’ (2013). While erupting, and in an initial phase, these protests generate a landscape of strong and pleasant affects with such an intensity that people connect through them to the concrete cause, to broader ideas such as radical democracy, to occupied space, and to each other, and even decide en masse to live in occupied camps or return there on a daily basis. Whereas the global justice protests were largely organized as solidarity parties of the Global North, with poor parts of the Global South, in the 2011 occupations, many of the northern middle-class activists discovered that unemployment, precariousness, and crisis hit their own lives with full force. Misery became a direct experience for them, not only an imaginary description for the longdistance problems of others. It is precisely this so-called ‘subjective turn’ (Razsa 2013), from solidarity with others to ‘the radicalization of personal experience’ (ibid.), which drives people from Occupy Slovenia toward collective efforts and toward ‘forms of

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open-ended subject-making that are embedded in, and constitutive of, collective struggle’ (Razsa and Kurnik 2012: 241). People researched by Razsa and Kurnik meet each other in networks of Direct Social Work, and embark on a process of subject remaking via an intersubjective understanding of shared experiences, and towards a direct democracy. Direct democracy is understood here not as prefiguration, but as a lived experience of a never-ending liberation struggle – a process of becoming with the capacity to transform oneself and others, to cultivate selves as different kinds of subjects, to be ready to confront one’s conditions of living, etc. Emerging collective subjectivities in transnational networks of protest are imbued with many differences, from age, race, and gender, to geopolitical origin, communicative skills, and class – though particular movements differ in their approach to them. By aiming to shed analytical light on them, anthropologists can address, in a new way, an old question of complexity, ambivalence, and internal differences within protest movements. Though dominated mostly by white middle-class urban youth, the movements’ ‘powerful networking ethic of coordination across diversity and difference … allowed them to grasp internal differentiation’ (Juris et  al. 2012: 436; Juris 2013b). On the other hand, even though presented as the unified ‘99%’, there are internal differences and exclusions in the Occupy movement, leading Juris et  al. (2012) to stress the ways in which relationships, positions, and identities are saturated with unequal power, relations, and as such constantly contested and negotiated. A different organizational logic of aggregation (Juris 2012) made it more difficult to even recognize and address internal inequalities in Occupy, not to mention overcoming them, allowing greater access for working-class people and communities of color (for an example of internal conflicts in a rather classical setting of rural communities see Gledhill 2014). Whereas the affects in the prefigurative protests of Europe and North America are

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conceptualized mostly through the lenses of pleasant emotions of solidarity, creativity, joy, sharing, etc., other protests such as the Arab Spring or the Gezi Park demonstrations in Turkey invite scholars to thematize the rather uncomfortable affects such as fear, pain, suffering, sorrow, and grievance, as well as the earthly fragility of the body. Occupied public spaces like Gezi Park in Istanbul or Tahrir Square in Cairo brought together many profound and long neglected grievances of all kinds, and from different groups of people. As Judith Butler (2009) emphasizes, there are power-loaded divisions in the world around the question of whose lives are grievable with personal stories, media attention, and proper investigation, and whose lives will not even make it into the statistical registers of the dead. Under one of the claims ‘to be present-to exist’, the Gezi resistance managed to insist on ‘the visibility of those whose lives aren’t grievable’ (Gambetti 2013). Moreover, protests are meetings with tear gas, rubber or metal bullets, clubs, thugs, violence, stampedes, exhaustion, adrenaline, paranoia, torture, wounds, chaos, mourning, masculine pride, risk, determination, caution, and danger. Violent encounters with police and thugs, in and around the Tahrir Square, are intimate contacts of bodies with clubs bludgeoning them, and thus co-producing new socio-political and corporeal modalities of subjects within revolution. The Egyptian state directly inscribed its opinion of the revolution on protesters’ bodies through harassment, injuries, rapes, tortures, killings, and physical liquidations. With people being violently annihilated during protests, the question of life and death is brought up in protest, and open to reconfiguration. Ayse Parla (2013) notices a paradox in the example of the Gezi Park protests – against the background of dying and death – while exposing the fragility of bodies facing armored vehicles, the protesters reinforced their faith in their own invincibility, which was necessary for them to keep or strengthen their commitment to struggle. This may be connected to

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the issue of martyrdom heavily presented in Egypt, where life after death emerged on a large scale, as dead bodies were transformed into post-visceral figures of martyrdom. As Werbner et  al. point out ‘mourning of the dead in the Arab spring uprisings became key moments of solidarity’ (2014: 8).

Advanced Liberalism When searching for a term that shields actually existing configurations of power in the world, the neoliberal (e.g. Wacquant 2012), or advanced liberal (e.g. Rose and Miller 2008), regimes of government are, since the 1980s, the choice. As Foucault outlines, dominant technologies of government form, as well as dominant technologies of the self.4 Such forms of subject production dominate and structure the field of possibility, but they are not determinant in themselves. Subjects are not produced as homogeneous and monotonous neoliberal selves stripped of agentic capacity. On the other side, and as Foucault insists, one cannot resist from a point external to the dominant mode of subjectivation. In brief, protest is possible, but there are many subtle ways in which neoliberal power is re-inscribed, and interwoven even, in protesting subjectivities. Therefore, such constellations enable us to trace out, with ethnographic detail, particular configurations of protesting subjectivity in neoliberal times.5 In light of the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, and the subsequent rise of Islamophobia, the positions in the book of Saba Mahmood (2005), on ethics and the pietic movement of women in Egypt, seem appealing. Mahmood’s work, partly discussed above, documents the larger Islamic Revival in Cairo during the secular government of Hosni Mubarak, by focusing on an urban women’s mosque movement where an instructive training, in how to live daily according to the rules of Islamic piety, is provided. Lessons in bodily comportment towards ascetic and virtuous practices are crucial – women are trained to

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coordinate their inner states (thoughts, feelings, desires) with outer bodily postures of conduct, expression, and gestures. Along with that, the collective mosque pedagogy in Islamic counter-conduct entails changes in many spheres of life – from standards of household management via proper styles of speech, dress, public debate, or entertainment of adults as well as children, to arrangements concerning care for the poor and weak. Furthermore, in such a public cultivation of virtuous selves beyond incorporating secular values, women manage to batter and alter ‘the historically male …-centered character of mosques as well as Islamic pedagogy … leading to the destabilization of certain norms of male kin authority’ (2005: 2, 175). The recalibration of male dominance in emerging protest subjectivity goes hand in hand with a refusal of a way of life appropriate to secular liberalism, which provides not only an insight into women’s empowerment as pious selves stripped of liberal-feminist normality, but also into a conflict between liberalism and Islamism gravitating around ‘arguments about what constitutes a proper way of living ethically in a world where such questions were thought to have become obsolete’ (2005: 192). Mahmood’s book opens a window into a broader understanding of the ethical dimension of the revolution and counter-revolution happening in Egypt since 2011. Yasmin Moll scrutinizes the role of Islamic televangelists in revolutionary times. Whereas the Tahrir Square occupation is seen as prefiguring a ‘New Egypt’ based on freedom of speech, freedom of religious belief, and gender or social equality, soon after the fall of Mubarak, religious differences were accentuated. Islamic televangelists inculcated a merging of revolutionary and religious ethics in one’s personal redemption. Change in the government should be followed by a revolution of the self, focusing on ‘cultivating certain khuluq, or ethical dispositions, among Muslim Egyptians as a way of fulfilling the promises of January 25th’ (Moll 2013).

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Revolutionary redemption is closely connected to the notion of productivity – the New Egypt emerging in Tahrir is understood as a site of production in the making, to be fulfilled. Productive citizenship seems the only solution for producing this new nation, thus revealing the complexity of politics in Egypt. On one side, the Mubarak regime’s policies, mixing liberalization of the economy with what some would call state terror, triggered the revolution, and on the other side, liberal or even neoliberal language penetrated the cosmology of the protesters. As Moll points out, in their discursive universe, ‘individual citizens are morally responsible for economically improving both their own lives and the lives of others, through their own efforts, rather than through holding the nation-state accountable to its own developmentalist rhetoric’ (ibid.). Different configurations of ethics, subject and protest, in times of advanced liberalism, arise with the Internet, as Gabriella Coleman documents in the example of free and opensource software (F/OSS) hackers (2013) and Anonymous (2014). A hacker’s life, ethics, and aesthetics are not anti-capitalist, but rather very much embedded in a liberal conception of rational and autonomous personhood, actualized for the twenty-first century. Gravitating around a cultivation and maintenance of free software, hackers understand coding itself as a form of free speech and expression. Nevertheless, with the grounding of code writing in one of the key liberal principles, another such principle, namely intellectual property law, is challenged. With the praxis of F/ OSS hacking, the contradiction in the very basics of neoliberal capitalism arises over the issue of copyright with concrete and targeted praxis, not to destroy capitalism, but as Chris Kelty (2012a) notes, ‘to save [it] from the capitalists – to point out its failings and reintroduce certain kinds of limits in the name of freedom and equality’. One of these failings targeted by hackers is the consuming dimension of the neoliberal

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self, known as a disposition to ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson 2010[1962]; Graeber 2011). Instead, the free speech moment in self-cultivation is accentuated, thus producing an ideal type of F/OSS hacker as ‘an autonomous being guided by and committed to rational thought, critical reflection, skills, and capacity’ (Coleman 2013: 11). As the hacker’s praxis makes clear, not all forms of information are congruent with the neoliberal intellectual property regime. The F/OSS hackers subject embodies a particular variation of the capitalist self, which is made out of a combination of highly individual expression, and collective experience. Coleman’s ethnographic case reveals that there are several liberal concepts of freedom and individualism competing with one another. The liberty forged by F/ OSS hackers does not center around ‘the freedom to establish relations of property ownership and exchange’, but instead around ‘the condition necessary for individuals to develop the capacity for critical thought and self-development’ (Coleman 2013: 118). Liberal ethics interwoven into Occupy Wall Street, is yet one more example. Even though the ‘99%’ of OWS aims at targeting the ‘1%’ of neoliberal capitalists, Jason Hickel (2012) not only detects within OWS certain dominant components of liberal ethics in the US, such as the insistence on tolerance and diversity, but he also claims that it was precisely these liberal principles that at the end mitigated the capacity to actually create and foster vivid alternatives to neoliberal normality. Hickel argues that due to the liberal ethic ‘Occupy [was] vulnerable to infiltrators hired by corporations and the state, who find it easy to sway the movement’s agenda or to set up “affinity groups” that operate under the Occupy banner’ (ibid.). Moreover, a clear counter-hegemonic position could not be formulated because of the clash between encouraged diversity of opinions and particularities of demands. Liberal values of inclusiveness and tolerance made it impossible to articulate the antagonistic and excluding

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position in capitalist society, as well as the interests among the ‘99%’. As Foucault (2008) detects, liberalism is interconnected with the notion of security. In an example from the protests against the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, Krøijer (2013) documented the different cosmologies of security being implemented by the Danish police and activists in situations of confrontation (compare with Scholl 2012). Police security operations combining surveillance, patrols, searches, and ID checks, center on searching, spotting, and singling out socalled individual troublemakers. ‘Trouble making’ is constituted as an inherent characteristic of certain types of protesters, connected to their bodily signs and movements in the streets. Then, the police’s task is to link intentions to individual persons, which leads to assigning potential threats to single bodies, and produces singularized enemies of society and state. Krøijer detects in this police work ‘a liberal logic of societal security assuming that society is ultimately made up of intentional individuals who may either be troublemakers or not’ (2013: 43). Against the police logic of security, activists incarnate an alternative model of security – instead of a binary ‘individual/society’, the figure of a collective body, is implemented. As Krøijer displays, protest planning among activists, as well as swarming into collectives during demonstrations, operates beyond the logic bonding intentions and individual bodies. Instead, intentions and agency are relational and belong to the collective body, acting together at the meeting, and in the streets. Moreover, being a trouble-making collective body is more a temporary effect of emerging situations, rather than an inherent characteristic of particular persons. Soo Ah Kwon (2013) provides yet another ethnographic example of protest subjectivity formation interwoven into the technologies of a neoliberal government. In the case of the non-profit organization Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL), established in 1998

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in Oakland, California, Ah Kwon dissects the ambivalent nature of the promotion of youth leadership, social justice, and community building among so-called ‘uncivil youth’. Ah Kwon uses this term not only to describe young people’s practices of political activism, but to also grasp ‘youth of color’ as a ‘governmentalized category of intervention in which nonprofit organizations are called on to care and empower these potentially “at-risk” subjects’ (2013: 6). Youth are formed as subjects under suspicion, pregnant with potential social threat. Therefore, they become objects of the state’s care, regulation, and control where policies of empowerment and criminalization compete. The affirmative governmentality term is introduced to capture governmental ‘strategies to prevent potentially “at-risk” subjects from engaging in the potentially risky behaviors of juvenile crime and sex’ (2013: 4), by promoting youth-of-color activism. The logic of capitalism and the neoliberal state’s art of governance oriented towards becoming better democratic and responsible citizens, meaning entrepreneurial, self-empowered subjects managing one’s potential for social risks (e.g. Rose and Miller 2008), is very well embedded in such activism. Civil society, activist engagement, and non-profit organizations have thus become technologies of the neoliberal government.

Distribution of Protest With a new scientific sensibility towards the agency of materiality, technologies and the selves distributed within them as partible dividuals, new dimensions open up for ethnographic documentation of upcoming subjectivities, and ‘new, cyborgian, hybrid, cross-species, multi-ontological, data-banknetworked forms of life’ (Fischer 2007: 438) emerge, in and around protests. Yannis Kallianos (2013) extends Butler’s (2011) notions of public space as being more than a mere material basis for activity. In the

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example of heavy riots in Greece in the winter of 2008, following the police murder of a 15-year-old student in Athens, he understands the street as a material space loaded with political agency of its own, tied not only to presence, but also to memories of past protests. When ‘the streets are ours’, as radical protesters like the anarchist Black Bloc like to say during political actions, different meanings and affects are produced in the urban space, thus ‘transforming altogether the experience of spatiality’ (2013: 552). My own ethnographic research on the contemporary revolutionary youth in Germany can be instructive here as well. What kind of self and techniques of resistance does one tend to assume in order to be a revolutionary in the contemporary West? What capacities and political actions are acquired in such a revolutionary self-formation? While I was conducting ethnographic research between 2008 and 2015, I was guided by these late Foucauldian questions. When I was following young activists from Germany in demonstrations, riots, direct actions, jails, universities, housing projects, parents’ homes in Germany, as well as during solidarity trips to Mexico, Argentina, Israel, Palestine, Denmark, France, or Italy, I discovered that a concept of political versatility might be helpful here. These young activists form what I call amoebic subjects. Amoebic rebels make use of discussions at universities or in public debates, written texts, talks, etc., but they manage to argue beyond discourse by throwing stones or burning cars in riots, organizing direct actions, smashing corporate properties, beating up neo-Nazis, or attacking ultra-nationalists. As citizens of an advanced liberal democracy, they enter public discussions of contested opinions, persuade people with their critical arguments, and a few of them even vote, but they also explore the political terrain considered illegal. Many of them know how to receive funding from the state, the EU, and civic foundations, but they sometimes use these resources to fight those very institutions. They are anti-capitalist, but

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at the same time very productive, reorienting the disciplinary and neoliberal imperative of productivity towards the fight against capitalism. Amoebic rebels manage to distribute the self through an extensive range of techniques, capacities, actions, and human–nonhuman relations in order to be politically active in a versatile way. It is possible to disentangle the political spanning of the amoebic self into axes of communication, body, in/dividuality, appearance, which poles are all imbued with proper and differing techniques of resistance. Researched youngsters communicate discursively, but they also move beyond discourse, shape their bodies from indolent to seditious, as well as from individual to collective, and their appearance ranges from casual to masked. Besides, when the amoebic self is produced as versatile, acquiring different political shapes, then one of the important techniques in such an architecture of revolutionary life becomes the switching between shapes. Amoebas move forward by changing their shape. Amoebic youngsters move forward by changing their political shape. (e.g. Kurik 2014, 2015). When the 2011 protests occurred, lots of public attention was focused around the role of information technologies in the new ‘revolutions’ and revolts – many times asking if these technologies actually triggered or caused the protests. Instead of answering in causal terms, Chris Kelty (2012b) proposes to analyze, without haste, and with an a priori familiarity, the new connections among existing collectivities, or even the emergence of new kinds of collectivities due to the Internet. Julia Elyachar scrutinizes the ‘social infrastructure of communicative channels in Egypt’ (2014: 453), which emerged, and was maintained, during and after the January 25th revolution, providing new possibilities for information creation and dissemination. Elyachar reorients the focus on agency from humans towards agency distributed via channels of social media, blogs, multilingual e-zines such as Jadaliyya, and suggests that these socio-material and technical bedrocks

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of protests enacted a crucial role in revolts from 2011 on. The importance of communicative and other infrastructures usually becomes apparent during breakdowns – the Mubarak regime’s shutting down of mobile and Internet services in January of 2011 was no exception. During this time, its multilayered architecture, spilling over the digital sphere, was exposed because Egyptians turned to older and more traditional channels, such as landlines, visits, gossip, etc., as well as boat phones or satellite communications, to maintain connections between themselves and the world. The whole revolution was run as a social technology of communicative and relational infrastructure. Julia Elyachar then shows how the Tamarod movement, which emerged later in 2013 against president Mohamed Morsi, used this built-in infrastructure to its advantage by maintaining and extending the web of channels streaming through the Revolution. Revolutions and protests, connected to, and through, information technologies, occasionally bring up the question of who the people are, actually engineering, providing, maintaining, and coding such channels and infrastructures. Julia Elyachar writes rather briefly in this context about ‘geek networks and other forms of expert computer and engineering knowledge’ glued to ‘the astonishing accomplishment, technical skills, and wasted economic potential of Egyptian youth’ (2014: 463). More detailed accounts, of the worlds of people who see binary codes and programming language behind the user-friendly interface, are offered by Chris Kelty, disentangling the life of free and open-source software geeks (2008), and Gabriella Coleman disentangling the life of F/OSS hackers (2013) and Anonymous (2014). Unlike Anonymous, it would be misleading to assume that the common driving force behind geeks and hackers is open resistance. Their subjectivities are organized differently – more concerned with technology itself than with protest. Nevertheless, as Elyachar indicates, and Kelty (2012a) points

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out with the example of the Oekonux project, one can as well detect recent reorientations of F/OSS towards revolutions, online protest, WikiLeaks, counter-cultural DIY communities, critiques of capitalism, the Global Justice movement, or OWS. The Internet is, according to Chris Kelty, a contest, with the potentiality of various outcomes, in which ‘geeks have been most concerned to protect [it] and to keep [it] as radically open as possible … to the creation of alternatives – even if no one uses or needs those alternatives’ (2005: 202). By working on technically and legally securing the very conditions of their existence, free software geeks are an example of ‘recursive publics’ (Kelty 2008). Instead of subalterns, Kelty (2008: 35, 263) writes about superalterns, by which he means highly educated geeks, in Coleman’s rephrase, ‘who not only speak for themselves but talk back loudly and critically to those who purport to speak for them’ (Coleman 2014: 48, 49). They are not a kind of person or a social movement organized around specific ideas, but rather a collective and loose affinity of people who ‘come together in new, technically mediated forms of their own creation’ (Kelty 2008: 94).6 A hacker’s socio-technical self, studied by Coleman (2013), directs his/her own skills, goals, and talents towards practices of making, experimenting, and playing with technologies. These interactions not only bring to hackers affective experiences of joy when overcoming some problems, or frustration when materials resist while being programmed, accomplishment and pride, but also augment their own capacities, as well as the capacities of technologies, to new dimensions. An excitement, springing from the distributed collaboration of making, problem solving, and the improving of informational technologies in the F/OSS arena, outweighs copyrights and patents from the corporate world where, nevertheless, many of them are employed. Hackers connect intersubjectively with one other, and cultivate socio-technical selves and others, through the extension of

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themselves into objects and communicative infrastructures – by ‘endless storytelling … in many technical lingua francas’, hackers ‘communicate and forge a shared sense of technical common stock, of sense “knowhow”, that mixes technological lore with arcane, esoteric humor’ (Coleman 2013: 37). Even though interested mostly in the aesthetic experience of technology production itself, there is a growing number of hackers leaning toward leftist political sensibilities, establishing political hacker collectives all around the world (more in Europe than in the US), and forming new political subjectivities. Anonymous, termed by Coleman ‘online insurgency’ (Coleman 2014: 395), are the most well-known example. Anonymous are a multitudinous global platform without a consistent ideology, which gravitate around core values and principles such as ‘the maintenance of anonymity, a broad dedication to the free flow of information, spirit of humorous deviance, anti-celebrity ethic, rich and varied ways of political intervention’ (2014: 3, 17). There is no official collective with the universal mandate of the Anonymous. Participants are very heterogeneous since everybody can become one. ‘Anonymous is not a unified front’, Coleman tries to capture its character of a loose network of manifold competing groups beyond singular and united subject ‘but a [wily] hydra composing numerous different networks’ (2014: 48, 75). Opposing self-celebrity, leadership, representation, and the status of persons produced as individuals, Anonymous incarnate rather a collectivist ethic. Anonymous are designed as a common focus on poignant, biting, and witty deeds, not as personal property, self-promotion, financial commensuration, or a trademark. With its name, political acts, core values, as well as the icons of masks and headless suits, Anonymous underscores the relevance of opacity in a contemporary society of control and surveillance. Whereas Chris Kelty writes more generally that ‘the un-named and unnameable are powerful figures of critique and

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danger in nearly every figuration of a collective’ (2012b: 7), Gabriella Coleman sees the power of Anonymous’ opacity in the fact that ‘we are all free to choose whether or not to don the mask’ (2014: 400). Moreover, the triangle of anonymity, protest, and subjectivity enables us to tackle one of the contemporary challenges in the anthropology of resistance concerning informational technologies – namely ‘the treatment of virtual worlds as bounded wholes [which] creates an expectation, or hypothesis, that these worlds are both separate from and similar to the real-clothes worlds we have always studied’ (Kelty 2010: 11). As Kelty proposes that, instead of adopting the division between digitality and reality, leading to a scrutiny of either the former or the latter, or reducing the former to be only built on top of or extruded from the latter, research should be designed to focus on particular interconnections, distributions, augmentations, and assemblages. Whereas Coleman’s study (2013) dissipates this challenge by studying the life worlds of hackers as composed not only of coding, but also of conferences and camps, my research of amoebic rebels, switching into the Black Bloc in Germany, approaches the problem through anonymity. Activists assemble as the anonymized coalition not only in streets, but in and via information technologies as well. Distributing and transforming themselves into an encrypted swarm of information connections, while working on some of their political agenda, they disconnect themselves from civil, individualizing, documented, visible, traceable IDs such as IP addresses, cookies, logs, GPS tracks by using various techniques of digital anonymization concerning operation systems, Internet browsing, real-time IRC communication, data storage, etc. Thus, the cultivation of the art of amoebic politics, and the skill to switch between civil and anonymous modus operandi, resembles complex and rather liquid processes whereby the urban streets of cities and the informational sieves of the Internet merge into one an other.

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EMERGING TASKS Let me conclude by outlining some of the tasks facing an anthropology of subjectivity in protest. Concerning prefiguration, one of the challenges for movements lies in a redistribution of prefiguration from volatile mass events like demonstrations, contra-summits, and square occupations, to the more durable infrastructures of local communities and neighborhood networks. In other words, longer-lasting latitudes of prefigurative protest, beyond moments of public events, matter. And anthropologists should follow and document this turn in a prefigurative strategy. As Jeffrey Juris reiterates, insurgent subjectivity could be produced not only in Occupy camps, but also ‘in the ongoing assemblies and working group meetings of the posteviction phase’ (2013a). Occupation served to connect people, and the task after leaving public space is to keep the spirit of insurgent subjectivity alive through its ‘reactivation, expansion and translation into subsequent and sustained phase of subterranean organizing’ (ibid.). Though Juris’s wish hasn’t come true in many US cities, one can see activists leaving occupied places in Spain in advance of a police eviction, in order to disseminate the prefiguration wave into neighborhoods and local assemblies. One can see self-organized solidarity clinics, social centers, factories, etc. in Spain or Greece, which emerged or were empowered after the reconfiguration of welfare under the neoliberal regime of government. This entails the emergence of new collective subjectivities embedded in alternative networks in urban spaces, as well as new political subjectivities stemming from hybrid crossings between movements and upcoming political platforms, and parties such as SYRIZA in Greece or Podemos in Spain. Impenetrable boundaries between horizontal movements from below and representative political structures are blurred, thus opening up space for mutating and amoebic subjectivities in protest.7

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Activists encounter different precariousness in the emerging prefigurative networks of neighborhoods. Moreover, boundaries between activists and marginalized people have blurred – much of the urban middleclass youth composing protests also comes from precarious segments of society (as already documented in Razsa and Kurnik 2012). Thus, such encounters are not only filled with the potential to transform the subjectivities of participants, but also enable an enlarging of the spectrum of anthropological studies concerning subjectivities in protest. Under the contemporary neoliberal regimes of government, millions of people struggle to survive – left alone in extended zones of social abandonment (Biehl and Locke 2010), punished and criminalized for being poor (Wacquant 2009), enclosed in asylum houses or deported as illegal immigrants, impoverished and dropped out of the social security network, shot for being black and racially profiled, divisible as organs for sale in human trafficking, and suffering in wars. And people do rebel, do transform everyday struggles for survival into a protest, and do coalesce with organized activists – Black Lives Matter in the US, La Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca in Spain, or the battles of refugees entering Europe, and risking their lives for the right to stay, are only a few examples of the struggles for survival in contemporary times. Besides, much of the recent literature on prefigurative movements investigates anarchist-inspired activists, and is written by sympathetic anthropologists/activists. Apparently, there is a sort of continuity in this intermingling constellation. Marc Edelman (2001) notices a similar convergence with the older generation of protest scholar, which was often immersed in the study of so-called new social movements, where ‘researchers overwhelmingly choose to study “attractive” movements with which they sympathize’ (2001: 302). But what about subjectivities in protest of non-sympathetic movements, such as anti-immigration and Islamophobic

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protests in Europe, Islamic fundamentalism, or the Tea Party in the US? Edelman’s call for studying more right-wing collective action within the anthropology of resistance seems still urgent, but more realizable nowadays after Mahmood’s ‘liberation’ of resistance from its particular meaning of the opposing norms of domination. An anthropology of subjectivity in protest should spill more systematically over boundaries circumscribing the space for predominantly urban, young, middle-class, white, male protests loaded with worldviews ranging from the revolutionary left to the leftist liberal. The developments after the Arab Spring offer an example to be studied from the longerterm perspective of life after protest, as well as when prefigurative protests undertake the non-sympathetic direction of rapes and killings. Instead of the post-eviction phase, there is a post-revolutionary situation, where ‘the sense of unity and exhilarating communitas generated during the struggle … often crumbles into pre-existing competing movements and ideological camps’ (Werbner et al. 2014: 8). The counter-revolution in Egypt from July 2013 is instructive here – the once unified collective subject of ‘the people’ is divided into what seems an unbridgeable chasm between the secularists and the Islamists. With this in mind, Hanan Sabea underscores the rather ‘fluid and contingent’ boundaries of ‘the people’ (2014: 72). In similar fashion, Dimitrios Theodossopoulos invites us to study ‘the contradictions that emerge in day-to-day life after resistance [loaded with] a sense of exhaustion, desperation, and more importantly, self-interrogation’ (2014a: 425). Moreover, volatility and vulnerability of prefiguration as demonstrated by the examples of the rise of state violence against protesters in Turkey or Egypt, compel us to study prefigurative politics, not only from the site of people in protest constructing alternatives or confronting, but more as a political contest where more actors including opponents of such politics take part. Following up Stine Krøijer (2013) and inviting power

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management of prefiguration into research design may even help us detect new sites of such resistance. The production of subjectivity in protest changed drastically as we have entered informational times. The decisive year was 2001. The ‘war on terror’ was launched after 9/11, resulting in a fast proliferation, implementation, and dissemination of the classificatory figure of the ‘terrorist’, under which many protests have since then been subsumed. In the same year and as a reaction to the alterglobalization movement, the Council of the European Union published and distributed a security handbook for use by police authorities at international events, with the imperative of asserting proactive and preventive protection, and promoting counter-terrorism and public order as one of the major securityrelated tasks confronting the EU. The image of the extremist – yet one more classificatory figure and form of subject in protest – is produced and disseminated throughout (mostly central) Europe. Moreover, everybody now is treated as a potential criminal. As Stine Krøijer underlines ‘the new measures of control and surveillance are directed against not only the known offender, but also all citizens who may potentially become security threats’ (2013: 37). All this is happening on the wave of a so-called ‘digital tsunami’ – a metaphor used for increased data collection, data accessibility, profiling, and dissemination among state and transnational security forces, centralization of databases, and real-time digital data analytics (Krøijer 2013). We are all documented, and the task of a governing regime is to analyze information, detect patterns, and sort it out in order to know, among other things, who merits hyper-documentation, hyper-attention, preventive measures, and hyper-treatment (for general overview of new configurations of power see Deleuze 1992; Rose 1999; Bröckling 2008; Koopman 2014). Many protests and movements receive this hyper-care, and as such are targeted, made visible, surveilled and administered, by their transformation into data, and real-time

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evaluation of such information using new technologies like biometric face recognition system, video-surveillance, GPS tracking, etc. (for general analysis of emerging regime of visibility see De Landa 1991; Hempel et al. 2011). The work of Stine Krøijer (2013), as well as my own research, may be indicative of these trends in control mechanisms. Whereas amoebic revolutionaries assemble during demonstrations into the anonymous collectivity of the Black Bloc, the police proceed with tactics and new technologies by unmasking everybody one by one, dissecting each into bodily singularities, and reconnecting them with legal IDs of persons constituted as individuals, at the same time separating them from citizens endowed with democratic rights, and producing them as political deviants. Afterwards, the deviating and individualized bodies of activists are encoded within digitalized databases in which they are reassembled as concrete ‘left extremists’, composed through different sets of singularizing information. In the activity of maintaining and actualizing the database, the person is produced as a historicized web of data about singular individuality committing politically motivated crimes. The person becomes hyperdocumented, hyper-monitored, and hyperdatabased in state registers. The state apparatus does not recognize, and thus cannot process, assemblatic collectives of the protesting alliance. This alliance needs to be individualized in order to be governed under the sovereign conditions of the state – only humans produced as credentialed identities documented in state databases, can be subjected to punitive and juridical systems, and can be prosecuted, sentenced, and detained (Kurik and Stieber 2015). These processes can be seen as a contemporary variation of Gupta and Ferguson’s (1997) notion of identity being assigned to a subject (e.g. Inda 2005), and have the potential to animate the debates about identity in social movements, with respect to power, and beyond the notion of collective identity. After all, Foucault (2010[1972]: 17) states clearly:

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‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order’. Such insight into the contemporary production of subject in protest is valuable but incomplete, because the protesting people do intervene in the process. In the case of my research, activists refuse to adopt dominant classifications of political extremism as a language for self-conceptualization, and instead confront the knowledge producers, create and disseminate critique or use it as a language of solidarity against state repression. When some activists are raided and prosecuted under the infamous anti-terrorist paragraph 129a (for a reflection of their own experience see Holm and Roth 2010), others organize solidarity demonstrations under the motto ‘We are all terrorists!’ The Black bloc itself is a tactic to avoid being identified and criminalized: against videosurveillance, the activists employ face cloth, position masking, umbrellas, or even camera destruction. Against new technologies of cyber-surveillance, activists use a wide range of encryption techniques. In a way, the whole art of political versatility mentioned above is an adjustment to the protest in the age of big data and total documentation. Upcoming protests like ‘the right to be forgotten’ (against Google), are about to gravitate precisely around the right, as much as art, of not being documented, which Casemajor et al. (2015) name as ‘non-participation’. To grasp the complex web of relations between protest and power, concerning the production of the protesting subject in the informational age, I propose to speak about ‘emerging looping effects on subjectivity in protest’ adapting and upgrading Ian Hacking’s (1995, 2007) concept. The looping effect describes ‘a way in which a classification may interact with the people classified’ (2007: 286) leading to making up new kinds of persons, human kinds (1995) later renamed as moving targets (2007). With the focus on interactive loops, this concept moves not only

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beyond a one-directional labeling theory, but also beyond Theodossopoulos’s (2014a) call for de-pathologizing resistance studies by involving pathologizing discourses and practices into analysis. Nowadays, looping effects may grasp the constitution of protest subjectivity by focusing on the interaction between technologies of self and technologies of government. The latter merges the formation of individuals with the modulation of dividuals, and as such circulates around the production and dissemination of classificatory categories, such as extremist or terrorist, connected to individualizing databases based on standardized, registered, and documented civil IDs, as well as around new information registers of data profiles recognizing the dividual patterns out of an analysis of large quantities of ‘real-time’ digital data. What sort of Hacking’s loops in protesting subjectivity are we about to witness in upcoming times? After the crisis in the 1990s, following the boom of the 1980s, an anthropology of protest seemed to settle as a respected sub-discipline. The example of contemporary studies of subjectivity in resistance, proves this to be right, as much as it reveals many blank lacunae yet to be researched. An anthropology of subject, self and subjectivity in protest promises to generate a very interesting analytical snapshot of emerging configurations of protest – but only when grounded in the constant adjustment of the conceptual apparatus at hand, as well as in the cultivation of a sense of openness to be influenced and surprised by other disciplines and emerging empirical processes.8 This orientation towards the ‘emergent’, concerning protests, seems crucial – but only when understood as the contesting process, whereby tactics of emergence meet techniques of ‘de-emergence’.

Notes  *  This publication was supported by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports – Institutional

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Support for Long term Development of Research Organizations – Charles University, Faculty of Humanities (Charles Univ, Fac Human 2014, 2015).  1  Social theorist Jon Beasley-Murray (2010) writes about ‘post-hegemony’ in which social order is no longer secured by consent, ideology, and knowing, but by habit and affect.  2  As the English Wikipedia explains: ‘Kettling (also known as containment or corralling) is a police tactic for controlling large crowds during demonstrations or protests. It involves the formation of large cordons of police officers, which then move to contain a crowd within a limited area. Protesters are left only one choice of exit controlled by the police – or are completely prevented from leaving, with the effect of denying the protesters access to food, water and toilet facilities for an arbitrary period determined by the police forces’ [accessed on October 13, 2015].  3  Ungdomshuset – ‘the Youth House’ was a popular social center of the autonomous leftist scene in Copenhagen, which lasted from 1982 until 2007.  4  In neoliberal times humans are produced as much as produce themselves as efficient, modern, auditing, risk-managing, calculating, possessive, autonomous, optimizing, individual, entrepreneurial, accounting, preventive selves as well as democratic, bio-social, responsible citizens (e.g. Shore and Wright 1999, 2004; Strathern 2000; Rabinow 2003; Inda 2005; Bröckling 2007, 2008; Rose and Miller 2008; Bröckling, Krasman and Lemke 2011; Brady 2014).  5  For a Foucauldian analysis of social movements from a non-anthropological perspective see e.g. Death (2010), Ullrich (2010), Davidson (2011), Baumgarten and Ullrich (2012), Butler and Athanasiou (2013).  6  Kelty identifies the spectrum of geeks ranging from ‘polymaths’ to ‘transhumanists’ according to their attitudes towards technology. Whereas polymaths see technology in a rather pragmatic way of human ingenuity and error as an ‘intervention into a constituted field of organizations, money, politics, and people’, for more universal-oriented transhumanists it is sort of ‘autonomous force made up of humans and impersonal forces of evolution and complexity’ pregnant with the power to technically augment and ‘transcend the limitations of the human body as currently evolved’ (2008: 79, 86).   7  Even longstanding advocate of autonomous horizontalism Antonio Negri admits (2015) that with and after the 2011 protests some form of strategical leadership of multitude and seizure of power is useful.  8  The Emergence concept is no exception. It originates in complexity theory where it describes

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assemblages becoming auto-poetic entities – ‘the appearance of self-organizing systematic focus achieved by constraining the action of the components making up the system’ (Protevi 2009: 7). It was soon adopted and reworked in social anthropology – e.g. Fischer writes about emerging forms of life (1999, 2007), Biehl about emerging lives in struggle (Biehl et al. 2007; Biehl and Locke 2010) to stress the temporal dimension of the present and the upcoming. Marianne Maeckelbergh and Arturo Escobar, two scholars influenced by complexity theory, bring the concept into the anthropology of protest. Whereas Maeckelbergh is interested in the ‘emerging democratic alternative’ (2009: 5) in alter-globalization movement, Escobar focuses on ‘the emergence of black ethnicity’ (2007: 249), ‘emergence of the category of comunidades negras’ (2008: 10) as ‘bottom-up processes in which agents working at one (local) scale give rise to sophistication and complexity at another level’ (2008: 273).

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Ethnography, and the Political. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 108–129. Protevi, John (2009) Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rabinow, Paul (2003) Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Razsa, Maple (2013) ‘The subjective turn: the radicalization of personal experience within Occupy Slovenia’, in Fieldsights – Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, February 14. (http://culanth.org/fieldsights/ 74-the-subjective-turn-the-radicalizationof-personal-experience-within-occupyslovenia) Razsa, Maple and Kurnik, Andrej (2012) ‘The Occupy movement in Žižek’s hometown: direct democracy and a politics of becoming’, American Ethnologist, 39(2): 238–258. Rose, Nicolas (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. London: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nicolas and Miller, Peter (2008) Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Sabea, Hanan (2014) ‘“I dreamed of being a people”: Egypt’s Revolution, the people and critical imagination’, in P. Werbner, M. Webb and K. Spellman-Poots (eds), The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: Beyond the Arab Spring. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 67–93. Sahlins, Marshall (2002) Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. Samuel, Chris (2013) ‘Symbolic violence and collective identity: Pierre Bourdieu and the ethics of resistance’, Social Movement Studies, 12(4): 397–413. Savat, David (2013) Uncoding the Digital: Technology, Subjectivity and Action in Control Society. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Scholl, Christian (2012) Two Sides of a Barricade: (Dis)order and Summit Protest in Europe. New York: SUNY Press. Scott, James C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Shore, Cris and Wright, Susan (1999) ‘Audit Culture and anthropology: neo-liberalism in British higher education’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5(4): 557–575. Shore, Cris and Wright, Susan (2004) ‘Whose accountability? Governmentality and the auditing of universities’, Parallax, 10(2): 100–116. Starr, Amory, Fernandez, Louis and Scholl Christian (2011) Shutting down the Streets. Political Violence and Social Control in the Global Era. New York: New York University Press. Strathern, Marilyn (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn (ed.) (2000) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London, New York: Routledge. Strathern, Marilyn (2001) ‘The patent and the Malangghan’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18(4): 1–26. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios (2014a) ‘On depathologizing resistance’, History and Anthropology, 25(4): 415–430. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios (2014b) ‘The ambivalence of anti-austerity indignation in Greece: resistance, hegemony and complicity’, History and Anthropology, 25(4): 488–506. Ullrich, Peter (2010) ‘Preventionism and obstacles for protest in neoliberalism: linking governmentality studies and protest research’, in F. Hessdörfer, A. Pabst and P. Ullrich (eds), Prevent and Tame: Protest under (Self) Control. Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, pp. 14–24. Wacquant, Loïc (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wacquant, Loïc (2012) ‘Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 20(1): 66–79. Wade, Lisa (2011) ‘Emancipatory promise of the habitus: Lindy hop, the body, and social change’, Ethnography, 12(2): 224–246. Werbner, Pnina, Webb, Martin and Spellman-Poots, Kathryn (2014) ‘Introduction’, in P. Werbner, M. Webb and K. SpellmanPoots (eds), The Political Aesthetics of

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Global Protest: Beyond the Arab Spring. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–31. Wikipedia.org, ‘Kettling’, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Kettling [accessed on October 13, 2015].

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Zengin, Asli (2013) ‘What is Queer about Gezi’, in Fieldsights – Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, October 31. (http://culanth.org/fieldsights/407-whatis-queer-about-gezi)

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3 Islamism, Feminism, and Resistance: Rethinking the Arab Spring Va l e n t i n e M . M o g h a d a m

INTRODUCTION Resistance to domination or illegitimate authority takes many forms and it may be individual or collective. Over the course of modern history, there has been resistance to political, economic, or cultural change; to dictatorial states; to military attacks, invasions, and occupations; and to policies or laws deemed coercive or alien. Tactics may be militant, as in individual or organized use of violence; these may be justifiable and legitimate or deemed acts of terrorism. Other tactics of resistance are non-violent, as in research, lobbying, and advocacy; strikes, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and rallies; and subcultures, alternative communities, and nonconforming comportment or other quotidian forms of resistance. James Scott (1987) famously described the everyday ‘weapons of the weak’ in his study of Southeast Asian peasants; in their separate writings, Diane Singerman

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(1996) and Asef Bayat (1999) discuss how individuals and small communities in Egypt and Iran might resist domination or deprivation through various survival strategies or ‘quiet encroachments’. The literatures on revolutions, anti-systemic movements, new social movements, and democratic transitions have sought to capture the dynamics of more organized resistance movements: their origins and antecedents; ideologies, actors, and strategies; strengths and weaknesses; achievements and longer-term outcomes. In our post-9/11 world, resistance has been used widely in association with armed movements, as in the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the bombing of Gaza, and the Iraqi armed resistance to the 2003 US invasion and occupation. Islamist movements, in particular, are considered to be a prominent form of resistance – to military incursions and occupation; to

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Western cultural incursions; and to policies and practices deemed inimical to Islam. The feminist movement has not typically been cast as a resistance movement, although various scholars and activists have debated its revolutionary or reformist character and accomplishments. And yet across time and space, feminist movements have emerged to resist male domination and women’s subordination, patriarchal states and non-state actors, and oppressive market processes. They have done so in a number of ways: creating feminist organizations with a collective identity and common purpose; engaging in research to document injustices and demand change; lobbying like-minded elite allies; through advocacy via their own publications and websites as well as through the mainstream media; organizing seminars, meetings, and press conferences; and organizing public rallies and demonstrations around specific grievances or campaigns. Unlike other organized resistance movements, feminist movements have been famously nonviolent although they have been known to be confrontational. From time to time, feminist groups might clash with other civil society or social movement actors, but around the world, they work in coalition with like-minded partners toward longer-term socio-political change and an end to patriarchy, violence against women, and repression.1 In this paper, I put the spotlight on Islamist and feminist movements, with a focus on contentious politics involving these two sets of actors in the years leading up to the 2011 Arab Spring and in its aftermath. Indeed, the Arab Spring constitutes an appropriate and instructive case study that enables the examination of Islamism and feminism as two opposing forms of resistance in the context of socio-political change. Although multiple countries were involved in or affected by the Arab Spring, here I focus on Tunisia, for three reasons. First, although a small country situated in the Arab North Africa subregion (the Maghreb), Tunisia is known for its liberal family law, or Code du Statut Personnel (CSP), adopted by the postcolonial state under President Habib

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Bourguiba in 1956. Second, Tunisia has long been home to several vibrant feminist organizations (discussed more fully below) that have historically worked in coalition with progressives in the country’s large trade union movement and with left-wing political parties to challenge authoritarian rule and advance a socialist, democratic, or secular alternative. Third, Tunisia is the birthplace of the Arab Spring, and has the distinction of being the positive example and outcome of the Arab Spring, with successful democratic procedures and an egalitarian constitution, in part because of its influential women’s rights movement, even though its fledgling democracy is being sorely tested by Islamist extremists. Although Tunisia is not the only country in the region to have experienced a feminist–Islamist contention, the ideological gap between the two movements and their respective political-cultural projects was especially visible during the early years of the country’s democratic transition (2011– 2014), when the new constitution was being forged and intensely debated. Questions addressed in this paper are: what were the goals of the Islamist and feminist movements during the period of protest and transition? How and why did the goals clash, and with what effects? What were feminists resisting, and what have they been building? To address the questions and provide context, I begin with an overview of the movement known as ‘political Islam’, showing its varied forms as well as its links to Western foreign policy.2 I then turn to the global feminist movement, its presence in Arab countries, and the struggle around Muslim family law. The case study of Tunisia highlights the divergent agendas, forms, and methods of resistance of the two movements.3

ISLAMISM: IDEOLOGY, MASCULINITY, AND POLITICAL POWER The Islamist movements that burst onto the international scene in the late 1970s and spread

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in the 1980s were rooted in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century revival movements, which in turn claimed to be following the path taken by the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century AD. Islamic intellectuals such as the Egyptians Rashid Rida, Sayyid Qutb, and Hassan alBanna (who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1929), and Abdul Ala Mawdudi (who founded the Jamiat-e Islami in India in 1941) all took issue with modernity as it was proceeding in their countries and called for a return to strict implementation of Sharia law. Qutb’s 1948–1950 stay in the United States convinced him that the jahiliyya, the socalled age of darkness in pre-Islamic Arabia, had returned and needed to be combated. His book Jahiliyyat al-Qarn al-Ishrin (‘The jahiliyya of the twentieth century’) suggested that Muslims should lead humanity once more out of the jahiliyya created and defended by the West. Today’s militant Islamists use his arguments to describe the state of the world and justify their aggressive tactics. Militant Islamists also are inspired by the rigid legacies of Ibn Taymiyyah, a medieval Hanbali jurist, and Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, an eighteenth-century theologian who formed an alliance with Muhammad Ibn Saud and built a religio-political movement that was defeated by the Ottomans but in the twentieth century formed the foundation of the new state of Saudi Arabia. Salafists and jihadists emphasize the doctrinal obligation of Muslims to defend the faith when Islam is deemed to be under threat. They point out that Muhammad and his companions engaged in battle to defend themselves and spread the faith, and they interpret Quranic verses in particular ways to justify attacks on ‘apostates’ and ‘infidels’. Some fundamentalists may prefer to separate themselves from secularists and non-believers, but jihadists such as alQaeda, Al-Shabab, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Hizab-e Tahrir, and ISIS/ISIL have the wider ambition of fighting the ‘near enemy’ (the local state authorities) and the ‘far enemy’ (the US and other Western powers) in order

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to spread their own version of Islam. Hugh Roberts (2003) has shown how Algeria’s Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) was part of the legacy of orthodox, urban-based Islamic revivalists associated with the Salafists of the early decades of the twentieth century against the more traditional, rural-based maraboutic Islam. FIS and its more extremist offshoot, le Group Islamique Armée, fought the Algerian state in the 1990s and called feminist organizations the derogatory term ‘hizb al-Fransa’, or the French party. If in the Christian world, processes such as the Reformation, Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution helped to undermine religious authority and usher in secularization, such processes have not run their course in the Muslim world. Sociologist Mansoor Moaddel (2005) has traced the evolution of Islamic modernism, liberal nationalism, and Islamic fundamentalism, arguing that the movements arose in the context of different global developments, resources, cultural capital, and institutional ties. He adds, ‘Yet Muslims reached no lasting agreement on the form government should take, the appropriate economic model, the relationship of Muslim nations with the outside world, the status of women, their national identities, and the relation of Islam to rational analysis and rule making’ (p. 1). Secularization has been resisted by fundamentalists of various religions, but in the Islamic world the relationship with modernity and its secular accoutrements in the political and cultural spheres has been especially vexed. Separation of ‘mosque and state’, women’s legal equality, and equality of Muslim and non-Muslim citizens have been consistently contested. Thus ideologies such as liberalism and communism – both of which advance such principles and values – also have been resisted, whether by states or non-state actors. During the Cold War, the struggle against communism made Islamists occasional allies of repressive regimes as well as the US, whether in Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, or

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Yemen. Throughout this period, the United States was in close alliance with oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which participated in the fight against communism. It used its wealth to build mosques and other institutions and networks across the globe (while not permitting any churches on its soil), influence the change of women’s dress across the Muslim world, and finance jihadists. The ‘arms pipeline’ to the Afghan mujahideen and other militant Islamist groups during the 1980s was made possible by Saudi and Kuwaiti money as well as the CIA and the Pakistani secret service. In 1992, the US-supported Afghan mujahideen toppled the modernizing, leftwing government of President Najibullah. By this time, Islamist networks existed across the globe and proliferated steadily. By turning a blind eye to its ally’s role in the expansion of a virulent form of Wahhabism across the globe, the US helped foster the growth of Islamist groups.4 The attack on the World Trade Center and other sites in the US on September 11, 2001 has been called ‘blowback’, the unintended consequence of the misguided policies listed above.5 Yet the policies continued; thus, Afghanistan was invaded to dislodge the ruling Taliban in October 2001 and Iraq was invaded and occupied in 2003 to dislodge Saddam Hussein. In both cases, Islamist resistance movements grew. The US, UK, France, and NATO responded to the 2011 Arab Spring protests by deciding on more ‘regime change’, this time in Libya and Syria. Once again, the moves against nominally secular rulers motivated Islamist fighters, who felt they could recreate the caliphate of the past. Arms, funds, and logistical support from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Turkey, along with the collapse of once-strong states in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, helped to expand al-Qaeda and to create the so-called Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL). Among other outcomes, such external interventions and regime destabilizations have complicated internal dynamics in Tunisia, which has seen jihadist activity on its soil in part emanating

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from groups in Libya, and has experienced a large number of young men leaving for the so-called jihad in Syria. What are Islamist grievances? At one time, parliamentary and militant Islamists alike objected to Western support for Israel and dismissals of Palestinian claims for statehood. This was a key grievance of locally based resistance movements and networks such as Palestine’s Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and the Palestinian question also featured in the grievances of the transnational al-Qaeda. For the most part, however, Islamists tend to blame the spread of Western values and practices for a wide variety of social and economic ills, including rising unemployment, stagnant economic development, soaring debt, housing shortages, dwindling public social and welfare expenditures, and the breakdown of the traditional Muslim family. Blaming Western influence for such developments, notes Wiktorowicz, is ‘an important component of most Islamic movement diagnostic frames’. It follows that the solution is the return to or strengthening of Islamic values, norms, and laws. Thus, ‘Islamists are Muslims who feel compelled to act on the belief that Islam demands social and political activism, either to establish an Islamic state, to proselytize to reinvigorate the faithful, or to create a separate union for Muslim communities’ (Wiktorowicz 2001: xx). Some argue that the turn to violence occurs when the state forecloses opportunities for participation and inclusion in the public sphere and resorts to repression (Hafez 2003). Yet the violence perpetrated over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1989 and the Danish cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, along with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in early 2014, were not related to state repression. Grievances against Western intrusions or the lack of opportunity may be a motivating factor, but given that power and ideology are gendered, hegemonic or hypermasculinity should be considered as well.

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Hegemonic masculinity has become a key concept in gender analysis since R. W. Connell (1998) identified it as a particular culture’s standards and ideal of real manhood, at a particular time in history. In countries such as the US and Australia, hegemonic masculinity is defined by physical strength and bravado, exclusive heterosexuality, suppression of ‘vulnerable’ emotions such as remorse and uncertainty, economic independence, authority over women and other men, and intense interest in ‘sexual conquest’. What Connell has defined as ‘emphasized femininity’ is constructed around adaptation to male power. Its central feature is attractiveness to men, which includes physical appearance, ego massaging, suppression of ‘power’ emotions such as anger, nurturance of children, exclusive heterosexuality, sexual availability without sexual assertiveness, and sociability. Both standards and ideals may be observed in many cultures, albeit with variations in the sexual element. For example, in Muslim cultures, female modesty is valued far more than sexual availability. And rather than intense interest in sexual conquest, hegemonic masculinity in a typical Middle Eastern context might lie in the capacity to protect family or personal honor by controlling the comportment of the women in the family, the community, or the nation. Lauren Langman and Douglas Morris (2004) have added another dimension, pointing out that civilizations and cultures based on conquest or expansion, societies where politics and militarism are fused, and countries where the military is a central and valorized institution all exhibit discourses, images, and practices of ‘heroic masculinity’. In considering American society and the role of its military in both economic growth and empire building, and in considering the foundational narratives of heroic masculinity in Islam, one can imagine a ‘clash of heroic masculinities’ between the American security state and transnational Islamist networks; Palestine’s Hamas and the Israeli military; President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria

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and the armed rebels; the two competing governments of a disintegrating Libya and the various militia; and Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran vying for regional power.6 That ISIS in Iraq and northern Syria has been fought by Kurdish women fighters is an interesting twist on such gendered clashes involving hyper masculinity. From a feminist perspective, hegemonic, heroic, or hypermasculinity is a causal factor in war, as well as in women’s oppression. In Western countries, feminists might resist hegemonic standards by asserting their intellectual abilities rather than sexual appeal to men; in Muslim countries feminists might assert their right to be accepted as citizens, workers, and professionals rather than exclusively as wives and mothers. And across the world, many feminists join or lead peace, anti-militarist, and other non-violent movements.

What of Islamic Moderates and Democrats? In contrast to militants, moderate Islamic movements, networks, or groups generally engage in non-violent organizing and advocacy in civil society. Moderate Islamists generally eschew violence as a tactic to gain political or state power; they take part in electoral politics and field candidates, sometimes openly through their own political parties and other times through independents; and they take an active part in civil society associations or build new ones. Political parties that have been said to be moderate and even democratic include the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and Jordan, Islah of Yemen, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkey, and the Parti de la Justice et du Développement (PJD) of Morocco. 7 In Turkey, the AK Party claims to accept the secular and republican ideals of modern Turkey’s founder Kemal Ataturk. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood – which won many parliamentary seats and the presidency in the first post-Arab Spring elections – insisted

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that it favored democracy and civil rights for all citizens. After Tunisia’s January 2011 political revolution, al-Nahda (Ennahda in the Tunisian spelling) took part in the country’s first democratic elections for a Constituent Assembly, held in October 2011. Rachid Ghannouchi, head of Ennahda and its spiritual guide was quoted as saying that he saw his party as ‘an open space: open to religious people, non-religious, male, female, open to all Tunisians’.8 Such statements seemed to refute earlier warnings about Islamist ‘gray zones’: positions on the application of Islamic law; the use of violence; political pluralism; civil and political rights; equality and rights of women; and equality and rights of religious minorities (Brown et al. 2006). However, with the Arab Spring and the electoral successes of Islamic parties in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, inconsistencies were observed, whether because of internal divisions that might be behind some more extremist politics, or because of ‘double talk’, that is, the difference between what is outwardly expressed and what is internally affirmed. For example, in the new century, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) distanced itself from some of the more rigid doctrines of its founder. Yet it continued to proffer its slogan ‘Islam Is the Solution’ and to call for adherence to the Sharia. Shrewd political maneuvers, including extensive participation in local councils, grassroots associations, and syndicates, assured electoral gains by moderate Islamists associated with the MB. The Brotherhood’s first political platform advocated banning Coptic Egyptians (who make up one-tenth of Egypt’s population) and women from becoming president, and it raised the specter of an Iran-style religious council. The MB leadership viewed globalization as naked US ambition, and regarded Western democracy as ‘subservient to whims of the masses, without moral absolutes’.9 In August 2010, the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR) issued a statement criticizing the MB’s Youth Forum

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for denying, during its mock presidential elections, a request by the forum’s Muslim Sisters’ Group to be included as potential nominees. That November, the ECWR issued another press release protesting the parliament’s overwhelming vote against the appointment of women judges.10 In March 2011, after the Arab Spring protests that brought down the Mubarak government, the ECWR decried the absence of women from the committee drafting Egypt’s new constitution, dominated by MB members. Apart from vague references to social justice, the MB never demonstrated any particular interest or expertise in economic issues and did not develop a coherent critique of, or alternative to, Egypt’s neoliberal economic strategy. Whatever popular support the MB had at the start of the Egyptian political revolution was squandered on its emphasis of religion, culture, and identity rather than the tackling of the country’s poverty and high unemployment, and on the increasing authoritarian tendencies of President Mohammad Morsi, leading to renewed protests that only ended with a military coup in July 2013. Although much controversy continues to surround the military’s coup, its removal of Morsi, and the banning of the MB, what some scholars had argued earlier about the MB seemed true. According to Mona El-Ghobashy (2005: 391), ‘They still grant culture and identity issues pride of place in their platform’. For Alison Pargeter (2010), the Muslim Brotherhood is in essence a reactionary movement, unable to break from its past. The record of Islamist parties thus far also suggests that social and economic justice is not part of their mission or political agenda. Turkish sociologist Haldun Gulalp (2001) has noted that the rise of Islamism coincided with the decline of the Keynesian economic project, Fordist industrialization, and the welfare state, with its attendant focus on the working class. Islamism gained prominence concurrently with the economic trends of privatization, subcontracting, and entrepreneurship, which favor property owners and

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small businesspeople. In contrast to Latin American-style liberation theology, with its focus on the poor and its demand for redistribution, Turkey’s Islamist Welfare Party created a new capitalist culture, prioritizing both business and Islamic lifestyle norms such as the wearing of the veil, religious schooling, and the prohibition of alcohol. Although the Islamist party’s discourse of ‘justice’ appealed to working-class voters, the party was in reality an extension of the neoliberal project. The Welfare Party was succeeded by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has deepened the neoliberal project even further while its president also exhorts Turkish women to have at least three children. Networks of Muslim liberals and democrats emphasize the ‘inner struggle’ that Muslims are called on to perform in order to strengthen their faith and live peaceably, and they apply ijtihad, or reinterpretation of texts and the law to account for changed sociopolitical conditions. The Gulen movement, founded by a Turkish religious scholar now living in the US, promotes peaceful spirituality. Minority Islamic sects such as Turkey’s Alevis and the worldwide communities of Ahmadiyya and Ismaili are not only peaceful and often liberal but also frequently under attack by the dominant Sunni communities. Various academics in Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, are associated with a liberal or modern interpretation of Islam, although they may come into conflict with hardliners in government or among Islamist groups. Islamic feminists – not to be confused with Islamist women – have taken issue with patriarchal and violent interpretations of Islam, seek legal reforms, and call for women’s rights through their own re-readings of the Qur’an and early Islamic history. Among the most organized, vocal, and visible are Malaysia’s Sisters in Islam (SIS), who work with feminist groups across the globe and are associated with the transnational feminist network Women Living under Muslim Laws and with Musawah, dedicated to equality and justice in the Muslim family.11 Many of the

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Muslim groups or scholars with liberal views on cultural and social issues should not be deemed ‘Islamist’, but they also may not be highly representative of populations in the Muslim world, especially on such issues as homosexuality, gender equality in religious and family matters, and the equal legal status of all citizens.

FEMINISM: RESISTANCE AND CHANGE The women’s rights movement has been the subject of considerable scholarly analysis (Beckwith 2007; Chafetz and Dworkin 1986; Margolis 1993; Moghadam 2005; Molyneux 2001). Feminist theorizing has focused on national-level factors such as the growth of the population of educated women with grievances about their second-class citizenship; varieties of feminism; the evolution of women’s movements and campaigns; and cross-regional similarities and differences in mobilizing structures and strategies. Research also distinguishes feminist movement as a social movement guided by feminist ideas and women’s movement as defined by a demographic group or constituency, with the former being a subset of the latter. Contemporary feminist movements in the Middle East and North Africa have their own histories, but what is arguably a global women’s rights movement has its roots in firstwave feminism, with its focus on suffrage and justice for women, and in second-wave feminism, with its demands for equality and cultural change. As a new resistance movement, first-wave feminism brought about international women’s organizations around abolition, women’s suffrage, opposition to trafficking in women, anti-militarism, and labor legislation for working women and mothers. The early twentieth century also saw the emergence of an international socialist women’s movement. In 1900 the Socialist International passed its first resolution in

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favor of women’s suffrage, and suffrage became a demand of socialist parties in 1907. Within the Second International, the women’s organizations of France, Germany, and Russia mobilized thousands of working-class as well as middle-class women for socialism and women’s emancipation. In Asian countries, as Kumari Jayawardena (1985) showed, many of the women’s movements and organizations that emerged were associated with socialist or nationalist movements. Examples of early international women’s organizations are the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (associated with socialist and communist movements), and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). In promoting women’s rights, maternity legislation, and an end to child labor, they engaged with inter-governmental bodies such as the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization (Berkovitch 1999). Second-wave feminism called for cultural change to accommodate demands for women’s equality and autonomy. Having emerged from other social movements while also rooted in the first wave, second-wave feminism had socialist, liberal, and radical strands. Starting largely within national borders in the 1970s, it began to take on a global, transnational form in the mid-1980s, the result of both the opportunities and challenges of globalization and the spread of the United Nations’ global women’s rights agenda. Feminism in Arab countries, including Tunisia, is intimately connected to these processes and is a strong advocate of the international standards and norms that have come to comprise the global women’s rights agenda. These include the 1952 UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women, followed by the 1957 convention on the nationality of married women; the 1960 UNESCO convention against discrimination in education;

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and the 1962 UN convention on consent to marriage, minimum age for marriage, and registration of marriage. In 1979, and in the aftermath of the first UN world conference on women and during the Decade for Women, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination was adopted. Known as the international bill of women’s rights and usually referred to by its acronym, CEDAW, it became controversial and contested in many countries but especially in Muslim-majority countries. CEDAW is very clear that its provisions obtain across cultures and religions, stating in Article 2 that ‘States Parties … undertake … to take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices which constitute discrimination against women’.12 After CEDAW went into force in 1981, countries chose to ratify completely, or to ratify the convention with reservations (as with many Muslim-majority countries that claimed that where a CEDAW provision contradicted Sharia law, the latter would take precedence), or to remain outside the convention (as with the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran). By 2012, nearly all countries around the world had ratified the Convention, and a number of Arab countries, notably Morocco and Tunisia, had removed the reservations they had earlier inserted. Feminism and Islamism came into conflict in the late 1980s, when Islamist movements demanded the reinforcement and strengthening of existing Islamic laws and norms, or their introduction and strict application. In addition to the prohibition of alcohol and usury, and the insistence that women veil in public, Islamists demanded on orthodox interpretation and implementation of Muslim family laws, which regulate marriage, divorce, child custody, inheritance, and other aspects of family relations. Muslim family laws – which date from the Middle Ages and reflect one or another of the four Sunni schools and the Shia school of jurisprudence, and were codified in the modern period of state-building – place females under the authority of male

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kin and wives under the control of husbands, thus conferring on them second-class citizenship. Although notions of Islamic ‘complementarity’ of sex roles may once have been considered equitable and natural, the rise of second-wave feminism and subsequently of global feminism put feminism and fundamentalism on a collision course.

The Problem of Muslim Family Law Muslim family law is predicated on the principle of patrilineality, which confers privileges and authority to male kin. Brothers inherit more than sisters do, and a deceased man’s brothers or uncles have a greater claim on his property than does his widow. The groom offers a monetary gift (mahr) to the prospective bride and must provide for her; in turn, he expects obedience. Provisions regarding obedience, maintenance, and (unequal) family inheritance presume that wives are economic dependents, thus perpetuating what I have termed the patriarchal gender contract (Moghadam 1998: ch. 1; 2013b: ch. 3). In the modern or postcolonial era, as Muslim family law became codified, only Tunisia and Turkey adopted European-style civil codes or family laws. Tunisia modernized its family law immediately after independence, allowing women rights to divorce and child custody, and banning polygamy, although unequal inheritance was left intact. Turkey’s family law was not based on Islam but was quite conservative nonetheless, until the women’s movement forced changes in 2001. Social changes have rendered Muslim family law (MFL) an outdated institution and social policy. MFL is at odds with long-standing discourses about the need to integrate women in development. It also contravenes the equality provisions of national constitutions and those articles in the labor laws that describe an array of rights and benefits to women workers. The growth

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of a population of educated and employed women with aspirations to full social participation and equal rights of citizenship has led to dynamic women’s movements and campaigns for repeal of discriminatory laws, and specifically for reform of family laws. In the 1990s, as women’s rights groups expanded throughout the Arab world, a primary goal was the modernization of family laws, the removal of articles placing women under the supervision of male kin, and the adoption of laws banning discrimination and ensuring women’s legal equality. Other demands came to be criminalization of all forms of violence against women, including ‘honor crimes’; equal nationality laws so that a woman married to a foreign-born man could confer her nationality on her children; and enhanced economic and political participation. A key campaign was spearheaded by the Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité, a network formed by Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisia feminists in the early 1990s. In a 2003 book that was subsequently translated into English, the authors point out that among the many reasons why MFL is in need of reform is its divergence from the social realities and actual family dynamics of many countries, where women must seek work to augment the family budget and where women are increasingly looking after their elderly parents.13 In other words, where MFL does not directly stand in the way of women’s economic participation and rights, it is an anachronism in light of contemporary family needs and women’s aspirations. Although Arab women’s collective action for full and equal citizenship has resulted in a number of important legal and policy reforms, feminists and Islamists remain on opposite sides of the question of family law and the legal equality of women. Across the region, women’s organizations self-identify as democratic as well as feminist, often issuing statements in favor of equality, participation, rights, and real democracy, frequently referring to themselves as part of the ‘democratic’ or ‘modernist’ forces of society. Examples of such women’s

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rights organizations are Algeria’s Centre d’Information et de Documentation sur les Droits de l’Enfant et de la Femme (CIDDEF) and 20 Ans Barakat; Tunisia’s l’Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates (ATFD) and l’Association des femmes Tunisiennes pour la récherche et le développement (AFTURD); and Morocco’s l’Union d’action féminine (UAF) and l’Association démocratique des femmes du Maroc (ADFM). In their stated objectives and in their practices, the region’s feminists are vocal advocates of democracy, and women’s rights groups are agents and allies of democratization. A Tunisian feminist lawyer associated with the ATFD told me in 2004: ‘We recognize that, in comparison with other Arab countries, our situation is better, but still we have common problems, such as an authoritarian state. Our work on behalf of women’s empowerment is also aimed at political change and is part of the movement for democratization’. On the 50th anniversary of Tunisia’s landmark Code du Statut Personnel, women’s groups joined with human rights groups and the country’s main trade union to celebrate women’s rights. A 2008 press release issued by the ADFT declared that ‘no development, no democracy can be built without women’s true participation and the respect of fundamental liberties for all, men and women’.14 In the wake of the Arab Spring, there were fears that newly empowered Islamists would seek to undo the gains made by women’s rights advocates and their allies, including repeal of family law reforms. Egypt’s Salafists, for example, had called for the repeal of women’s rights to divorce, lowering the age of marriage from eighteen to fourteen, decriminalizing female circumcision, and enforcing Sharia law. In Libya, among the first statements issued by the head of the National Transitional Council was that polygamy would be restored. Morocco’s Islamist Prime Minister Benkirane argued that families suffered when women left the home for employment, saying that it was akin to the lights going out in the home. Feminists

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protested with placards that read, ‘I am not a chandelier’ and castigated Benkirane for other comments deemed insulting to women.15 Tunisian feminists welcomed democracy but feared that it would open political and physical space to Islamists intent on ending liberal legislation and resisting any further moves toward women’s emancipation.

CASE STUDY: ISLAMISM VS FEMINISM IN TUNISIA Postcolonial Tunisia was built on the pillar of modernity and a moderate Arab-Muslim identity, with the rights of women firmly enshrined in the family law and personal status code, known in French as le Code du Statut Personnel (CPS) and in Arabic as the Medjella.16 Adopted in August 1956, the CPS was the most liberal in the Arab region, as it raised the age of marriage for girls to 17, banned polygamy outright, and gave women the right to divorce and child custody. Tunisia also gained the distinction of producing many women lawyers and jurists, who were probably inspired by the French-educated lawyer-president Habib Bourguiba. Tunisia’s ‘state feminist’ regime was reflected in Bourguiba’s measures to improve the legal status of women, encourage schooling and higher education, and incorporate women in public administration; medical abortions were legalized in 1973. Under these conditions, the feminist movement grew. In a special issue of a Lebanese women’s studies magazine, scholar Evelyne Accad (1985: 1) wrote: Having lived and worked, read and met most of these women during the six months I spent in Tunisia as a researcher, I can only conclude that Tunisia is indeed a vital and dynamic place for women. Despite political upheavals in the Arab world the achievements of Tunisian women are a leading force not only for Tunisia; but for their sisters in other parts of the world.

Accad also described her interview with a leading Tunisian feminist, legal scholar

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Hafidha Chékir. She explained that Chékir saw three kinds of feminist movements: the reformist, which seeks to improve women’s condition; the radical, which goes beyond mere reforms and attacks the foundation of patriarchal society; and the ideological, which combines class struggle and women’s equality. Chékir argued that Tunisia needed to integrate all three types for a more ‘militant’ triple action: a feminist struggle for the acquisition of full citizenship in a democracy and for a change of the socio-economic structures. Accad further reported that according to Chékir, Tunisia’s feminist movements had the necessary components for the transformation of the entire society, because their struggle combined the fight against social exploitation, political imperialism, and the specific oppression of women. At the same time, Chékir (1985: 6) saw the misogynous attitudes and, above all, the Islamic revival movement, as the most serious threats to women wanting to achieve equality and obtain their rights. These ideas were rooted in Tunisia’s own political history as well as in connections with France, where many Tunisian feminists spent some time studying. In addition, socialist and communist ideas were present in Tunisia (as they were in many Third World countries) and were especially strong among students, women’s rights activists, and intellectuals, even though the communist party had been banned in 1963. Shortly thereafter, Tunisia, like other countries in the Arab region and elsewhere in the Muslim world, began to experience pressure from Islamists, specifically in the form of the mouvement de la tendance Islamique (MTI), which later was renamed Ennahda (or Al-Nahda). According to one activist, the emergence of Islamists in the late 1970s was in part a move to counter the growth of the radical student movement.17 Inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran and by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the MTI was founded by Rachid Ghannouchi in 1981 but was banned in 1989 when members were charged with inciting violence. The ban was

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welcomed by Tunisian feminists and secularists, although a number of secular human rights lawyers were appalled when the new president, Zein El-Abedine Ben Ali, ordered the jailing of many Islamists, whom they subsequently came to represent in court. Various forms of resistance were thus presenting themselves in Tunisia: feminists resisting Islamist pressures; Islamists resisting Western values, including secularism and feminism; feminists, progressives, and Islamists resisting state authoritarianism. In the 1990s, social and economic development, a well-organized social provisioning system, and friendly ties with Europe as well as the Arab world and Africa ensured Tunisia’s stability. While ruling in an authoritarian manner despite regular elections, Ben Ali continued the secular republican legacy of his predecessor and explicitly presented himself as a champion of women’s rights. The end of the Cold War and democracypromotion activities by the European Union and the US created some room for maneuver for Tunisia’s burgeoning civil society, with its occasional manifestations of opposition by the trade union, feminist associations, human rights groups, and dissidents associated with left-wing political parties. (The former communist party, now renamed Tajdid, or Renewal, was legalized in 1993.) Trade unionists occasionally protested structural adjustments and neoliberalism; human rights activists decried the arrest of Islamists and political repression generally; and women’s rights groups became especially active. In addition to helping form the Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité, Tunisian women’s groups worked together and with other civil society associations on human rights, social welfare, and fair elections. In the new century, the ATFD and AFTURD also turned their attention to the gaps in family law that still permitted unequal inheritance, to domestic violence, and to sexual harassment. Policies of economic liberalization, coupled with the expansion of the population of educated youth who could not find gainful

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employment, generated societal dissatisfaction and other conditions conducive to the outbreak of mass social protests. Privatization, the rising cost of living, and high unemployment – all of which were exacerbated by the global recession of 2008 – triggered a number of labor protest actions. The 2010 WikiLeaks revelations of the corruption and self-enrichment of the president’s wife’s family enraged Tunisians. When a street vendor who was ordered to stop his trade resorted to self-immolation in December 2010 after being denied justice, his act seemed to symbolize a protest against the collective loss of dignity. The tragedy led to massive street protests the following January with slogans such as ‘Ben Ali, d’égage’ (Ben Ali, get out) and ‘emploi, notre droit’ (employment is our right).18 Leftists, secularists, feminists, trade unionists, and supporters of Ennahda all took to the streets, while young people kept up the momentum through social networking media. At the time of its political revolution, Tunisia had several preconditions conducive to a more women-friendly outcome of its democratic transition: a respectable female share of employment; a female share of parliamentary seats that was larger than the global average; a relatively strong tradition of secular republicanism; and its liberal family law, along with well-established feminist organizations and policy institutes with transnational links. Relatively small but very well-organized with deeply committed activists, the Tunisian feminist movement had developed a sophisticated critique of the state and patriarchy, was an active member of the Collectif Maghreb, and helped produce a number of important documents and reports on women’s conditions in Tunisia. The country’s ties to the European Union, the country’s strong trade union, and the human rights organizations were other advantages. Given these preconditions, it was perhaps no surprise that Tunisia’s transitional governing body in 2011 endorsed gender parity in political representation (Khalil 2014).

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Because Ennahda won a plurality of votes in the October 2011 elections rather than an outright majority, it formed a coalition government with two secular political parties. President Ghannouchi presented himself as a moderate and democrat, but Tunisian feminists and many secularists felt that Ennahda was coddling the bands of bearded Salafist men bent on disrupting artistic gatherings deemed un-Islamic, attacking cafés and shops that sold alcohol, and trying to change the university dress codes so that heavily veiled women, wearing the Saudi-style niqab, could attend classes. The emergence of Islamism following the Revolution raised a dilemma for feminist activists. On the one hand, they were committed to the democratic process, which had brought Ennahda to power. On the other hand, the fact that Ennahda women wore modest Islamic dress and a headscarf seemed to suggest that unveiled Tunisian women deserved moral opprobrium, and certainly the Salafists took advantage of the new political environment to express their hypermasculinity and harass unveiled women as well as public figures known to be staunch secularists. Tunisian feminists were furious when Islamists spoke of overturning the ban on polygamy or tolerating ‘religious marriages’ that would enable a man to have more than one wife simultaneously or to ‘marry’ one ‘temporarily’. And they were appalled when Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali, an Ennahda member and former political prisoner, hosted a high-ranking Palestinian Hamas official in November 2011 at which he said: ‘The conquest of Jerusalem will set out from here. You are witnessing a divine, historic moment – a new era in civilization, God willing: the sixth caliphate’.19 Such a declaration seemed to violate the country’s tradition of secular republicanism and moderate Muslim identity. In December 2011, an Ennahda member of the Constituent Assembly, Souad Abderrahim, argued against single mothers, asserting that they ‘do not deserve any governmental help’ because they are a ‘disgrace’ to the country ‘and have no right to exist’.20

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Such statements created a polarizing situation in the country, with secularists, feminists, and leftists on one side, and Islamists of varying hues on the other. Indeed, Nadia Chaabane, a French Tunisian who returned to the country to take part in the revolution, told me that she had decided to run in the elections for the Constituent Assembly under the El Massar party (formerly Tajdid) as a form of ‘personal defiance’ of the Islamists.21 She won a seat and – with allies in the Constituent Assembly and in civil society – spent two years opposing efforts to mention Sharia in the draft constitution and to call women and men ‘complementary’ rather than equal.

Resistance to Islamism Dr Amel Grami, a scholar and women’s rights activist who is a professor of Islamic studies at Manouba University outside Tunis, described how life had changed since Ennahda had come to power in the October 2011 election: The main subject is civil liberties and how to survive the current wave of violence against women. There is tension vis-à-vis women in terms of their clothes, their life-style, etc. For example, swimming in Ramadan causes problems now for some women. It is a new phenomenon in Tunisia …. There are others who are using violence in order to ‘correct’ the behavior of women. It is not possible any more for women activists to travel around the country on their own at night or to go to rural areas, especially to some areas where fundamentalists impose their rule, such as rural areas near Bizerte where there is reported to be Salafist controlled territory or ‘Imara Salafya’. Tunisia is not the same as it was two years ago. We do not have the same freedom of movement. (Grami and Bennoune 2013)22

Grami also said that CEDAW was being attacked by Islamists (the Minister of Religious Affairs opposed the lifting of the reservations) and that the women from the Ennahda party had organized a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Women under the slogan: ‘If you commit adultery, you should be punished’ (Grami and Bennoune 2013). Although Ennahda was frequently portrayed

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in the international media as moderate, Nadia Chaabane said: ‘We did not believe a single word of the many declarations uttered by Ennahda which sought to reassure and affirm the sanctity of women’s achieved rights’.23 Tunisia’s feminist movement fought to be part in the agenda-setting process during the transitional period and the deliberations of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), charged with drafting a new constitution. Feminist organizations remained mobilized, insisting that women’s presence in political bodies increase and that there be no changes to the country’s fairly egalitarian family law, which, they pointed out, reflected the prevailing reality of family relations.24 When Islamists in the NCA proposed constitutional language referring to women and men as ‘complementary’, feminists posted an online petition on 2 August 2012 entitled ‘Protégez les droits de citoyenneté de la femme en Tunisie!’, which acquired over 30,000 signatures.25 A coalition of ATFD, AFTURD, the Human Rights League, the UGTT Women’s Commission, the Tunisian section of Amnesty International, and the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia called for full and equal citizenship.26 Eventually Ennahda backed down and agreed to retain the constitutional reference to women’s equality. The years 2012 and 2013 were turbulent and risky for Tunisia’s fledgling democracy, and gave rise to questions about the moderate and democratic nature of the Islamists in power and their social base of support. The nearly year-long clash at Manouba University between Islamists and secularists, along with the assassinations of key left-wing political figures, revealed the dangers of militant Islamists while also undermining the government’s legitimacy.

Contention at Manouba University Manouba University, located on the outskirts of Tunis, is known for its modernist Islamic studies and for reinterpreting the Qur’an. Amel Grami herself wrote about apostasy and mixed marriage in Islam, and her

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conclusion that the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man was not forbidden under Islam and Sharia ‘disturbed the fundamentalists’. Following the elections, some mosques now run by Salafists called for a takeover of Manouba University to ‘oppose the work done there by secular intellectuals’. As Grami explained, she arrived on campus one day in November 2011 to find someone giving a sermon and calling on the students to throw her out of the university. ‘Luckily, they did not recognize me, but they denounced me because I am supposedly against Islam, because I teach comparative religion, and according to them I stand with the Jews and Christians, so I am against Islam. And that year I was teaching another course about feminism, so I am the “bad girl of Islam”’ (Grami and Bennoune 2013). In spring of 2012, Manouba’s dean of the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities, Habib Kazdaghli, an expert on minorities, especially Tunisia’s Jewish minority, was harassed by Salafists, angered that he would not permit a classroom to be converted to a prayer room (in part because of the shortage of classroom space, and in part because of the presence of mosques nearby) and would not allow female students in Saudi-style niqab to attend classes. The Salafists’ sit-ins and lock-downs prevented thousands of students from taking exams.27 During this period, the university received hardly any assistance from the police or the Ministry of the Interior, leading many feminists and secularists to suspect a collusion between the Ennahda government and the violent Salafists.28 Grami explains: I myself was surrounded by a group of students and their supporters and told to ‘dégage’. It hurts, these groups of students considering that you are evil, you are ‘Aytem França’ – the orphans of France, that you are representing the West. … I spent my life teaching values, and I am a member of many groups for interfaith dialogue. My whole project is the right to be different and the philosophy of differences in terms of race, class, gender, religion. Then, finally, I found myself the other.

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And this, after the revolution no less. (Grami and Bennoune 2013)

On March 7, 2012, when the Salafists lowered the Tunisian flag over the university and raised their own black flag, the Tunisian population seemed to turn against the Salafist occupiers. In what became an iconic image, an athletic female student, Khaoula Rachidi, defied the Salafists, climbed on the roof and put the national flag back up.29 Still, the Salafists continued to believe that they were above the law and could operate with impunity. This self-perception was strengthened by the fact that those who attacked the US embassy in September 2012, during the furor over the US-made film ‘The Innocence of Muslims’, received only a six-month suspended sentence.

The Assassinations of Front Populaire Political Figures The situation came to a head in 2013, when in February the human rights lawyer and secularist, Chokri Belaid, was assassinated, presumably by extremists. Then in July, Mohamed Brahmi, a member of the Constituent Assembly, was assassinated. Both Belaid and Brahmi were members of the left-wing Front Populaire. The democratic opposition galvanized itself and began protesting the government and especially Ennahda for creating an enabling environment for the Salafists and extremists. In organized protests in front of the Constituent Assembly building, angry citizens blamed Ennahda for not having cracked down on hardline extremists when they first appeared. As Amel Grami explained in 2013, some hardliners were Ennahda members: In the West, they often talk about Ennahda as homogeneous, but what we witnessed this year was fragmentation inside the party. Even inside Ennahda we find a radical grouping. This includes, for example, Sadok Chourou, a member of the Constituent Assembly, and Habib Ellouze. … [Ellouze] appeared in some Ennahda gatherings, meetings and videos calling for ‘purification’ of the

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media, and purification of intellectuals, and inviting preachers from Egypt and the Gulf to promote female genital mutilation and the veil. Sadok Chourou also called for the application of hudud punishments [corporal punishments like flogging and stoning derived from Sharia law], and for dealing with demonstrators by cutting off their hands and their legs according to Islamic law. So, who exactly is moderate? A woman member of the Constituent Assembly from the Ennahda party called for segregation of beaches and of public transportation. The radical wing inside the ‘Shura Council’ [which leads Ennahda] is quite influential. (Grami and Bennoune 2013)

Mbarka Brahmi, widow of the slain Mohamed Brahmi, openly blamed Ennahda for the assassinations and violence, called for an investigation into the ‘political money’ that Ennahda was receiving from external sources such as Qatar and Turkey, demanded the resignation of the Tunisian government and the Constituent Assembly, and appealed for ‘real change’ in Tunisia (Bennoune and Brahmi 2015).30 With daily strikes, sit-ins, and rallies organized by the democratic opposition demanding erhal and d’égage, the Ennahda-led government faced a mounting political crisis. The government’s legitimacy was badly hurt by the assassinations, the brazen nature of the Islamist extremists, the casualties within the Tunisian army when attacked by jihadists near the Algerian border, and the continued socio-economic problems and demands. The UGTT, League of Human Rights, and two other civil society organizations mediated between the opposition and the government, orchestrating an agreement whereby the government would step down in favor of a non-partisan and technocratic interim government, the Constituent Assembly would complete its task of drafting the new constitution, and elections would be held in Fall 2014. As Mbarka Brahmi explained in an interview: My husband’s assassination was a wake-up call. The struggle is not between Muslims and nonMuslims, nor is it between believer and nonbeliever. Islam is our religion, our culture. However,

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our Islam is a moderate and a particular Islam. In Tunisia we do not accept that the Islam of other societies be applied here because we have our own Islam which is consistent with the specificity of our society. For example, in Tunisia, you cannot tell a man without a beard that he is a kafir [nonbeliever]. Islam does not mean that a woman must wear a niqab. We in Tunisia are not used to these things. Our society will not get used to them. (Bennoune and Brahmi 2015)

Both Grami and Brahmi are very suspicious of a presumably moderate Islamist party with members who oppose women’s equal rights, take a traditionalist view of Islam, and support violence to achieve their aims. Amel Grami has said that ‘Tunisians must resist and fight for a better future for their children. … All Tunisians – intellectuals, artists, journalists – should assume their responsibility to spread awareness, to promote a culture of peace, and advance a moderate interpretation of religious texts and modern education’ (Grami and Bennoune 2013). Mbarka Brahmi similarly has said: I wish for peace and security for Tunisia, because it is our only shelter. We are not used to hearing fundamentalist speeches, or to witnessing extremist practices like assassinations and terrorism. So, I hope Tunisia can be healed. The terrorists need to be prosecuted, but at the same time we need to give voice to a peaceful discourse, not one full of hate and revenge. We need a brilliant future for our kids – mine and those of all Tunisians. (Bennoune and Brahmi 2015)

Tunisian Feminist Activism Today At the opening assembly of the World Social Forum of March 2013, held in Tunis, Ahlem Belhaj, president of Femmes Démocrates, speaking in both Arabic and French, cited the feminization of poverty, violence against women, and ‘an economic system that exploits women and men’ as the main challenges facing the world’s women, and she called for international solidarity to end these realities.31 Over the years, Tunisia’s feminist organizations have established hotlines for women victims of violence, conducted

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research on the plight of women in factories, informal labor, and rural sectors, and called for decent work and wages as well as more generous maternity leave. As a feminist trade unionist told me, ‘Women’s economic independence and control over income is very important. We want to have women’s economic security, we are always mindful that la citoyenneté complète has to include the economic’.32 In 2014 and 2015 the ATFD and its partners began to push conceptual and political boundaries by adopting ‘gender-based violence’ and extending it to include acts of violence against women and men accused of ‘immoral’ acts, whether premarital sex or adultery or homosexuality. Some daring proposals were made, not only to criminalize all forms of rape, but also to call for acceptance and non-penalization of cohabitation of consenting adults, and for ‘la liberté de choix du partenaire et de l’orientation sexuelle’.33 In late Fall 2014, a document drafted by legal experts from ATFD and another feminist group, Beity, was presented for the Ministry for Women’s Affairs for comments, but after it was forwarded by the ministry to other agencies, it was rejected by the government and triggered a backlash from conservatives against ATFD for its presumed libertinism and promotion of immorality. One opinion piece in particular accused the feminist organizations of supporting abortion as a ‘solution’ to premarital and extramarital sex.34 As noted, abortion has been legal in Tunisia since 1973 and the service has been provided in public hospitals and clinics, but in postauthoritarian Tunisia, there has been open criticism of the law from within conservative circles. In the article, the author claims that Tunisia has the highest rate of abortion in Africa and that the feminist proposal to end penalization of premarital sex, adultery, and cohabitation would result in even more abortions. The very harsh article adds the following: ‘Au regard d’un féminisme dénué de toute morale, l’avortement est donc présenté comme une “solution” à un évènement assez

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courant de la vie sexuelle qu’on mène en dehors des relations de mariage’.35 This line of thinking is typical of many Ennahda supporters, for whom issues of morality and the traditional family are paramount. In the parliamentary elections of late fall 2014, the secular political party Nidaa Tounes won the most seats, and its leader, Beji Caid Essebsi, was elected president. As in 2011, however, it was compelled to form a coalition government, and Ennahda joined with two secular parties.36 The proportion of women winning parliamentary seats was not as high as expected, but at 31% it was higher than previous years, and in the world’s top 35 countries with a 30% female share or more, according to the Interparliamentary Union’s database. In early January 2014, the new constitution was adopted to much acclaim domestically and internationally. It now allowed for freedom of conscience, banned takfir (the issuance of charge of apostasy), established the state as custodian and as protector of religion, established employment and healthcare as citizen rights, and made the state responsible for ending violence against women.

CONCLUSION: ISLAMIST VS FEMINIST RESISTANCE For millions of Muslims worldwide, such as Mbarka Brahmi and Amel Grami, Islam is practiced in peace and with quiet dignity. Islamism as politicized movement and ideology is based on selective Islamic theology and history but motivated by contemporary developments. I have argued that certain Western countries and their regional allies are responsible for the expansion of Islamism, but it is also true that Muslim concerns about cultural invasion, or the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, or the presence of ‘infidel’ soldiers and ‘crusaders’ in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, or even relatively minor events such as satirical cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper or the

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awarding of a British medal of honor to the writer Salman Rushdie – these can trigger intense emotions and strong beliefs about insults to Islam, a war against Islam, and the religiously mandated imperative to defend the faith in a militant fashion. Islamist methods thus range from participation in electoral politics to spectacular acts of violence, including suicide attacks and the atrocities committed in Syria and Iraq. Radicals and those who turn to violent contention justify their actions by selective recourse to Islamic scriptures regarding the imperative to defend Islam against its enemies, and by a virulent form of hegemonic masculinity and male privilege. As for moderate Islamists, they find themselves in contention with feminists around family law reform as well as the goals of tolerance, equality, human rights, and women’s full citizenship – values that should be acknowledged. In juxtaposing two forms of resistance movements, Islamism and feminism, this paper has sought to highlight their divergent goals and methods and to show that not all resistance movements are to be celebrated. The Tunisian case in particular exemplifies the distance between the two movements. At the same time, Tunisia is the only instance – apart from Morocco – where the emancipatory hopes of the Arab Spring were at least partially fulfilled. Elsewhere, the aspirations for greater political participation, rights, and dignity that erupted in the public squares of Cairo and other Arab cities in 2011 were crushed. What explains Tunisia’s relative success? In my judgment, the ability of Tunisia’s women’s rights organizations to lead or join coalitions resisting the excesses of Islamist rule and insisting on a progressive democratic transition was central to that country’s more positive outcome. Whereas Tunisia’s Islamists sought to resist so-called Western values and solidify their version of an Islamic state, feminists resisted that particular agenda in favor of a civil state respectful of religion but premised on gender justice and social justice. The challenge that remains pertains to the revolution’s socio-economic grievances

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and demands. Islamist resistance in Tunisia (and elsewhere) has been directed not at capitalism but at undesired cultural values, hence the inability or unwillingness of the governing coalition to craft a coherent and alternative socio-economic program. Feminists and their allies, therefore, need to ensure not only that Islamists do not dominate the culture war but that progressives develop a coherent plan for economic development and for social and gender justice that would bring dignity and wellbeing to all Tunisian citizens.

Notes  1  Elsewhere I have compared and contrasted the three transnational social movements of Islamism, feminism, and global justice in terms of their historical roots, their relationship to neoliberal capitalist globalization, and their divergent agendas. See Moghadam (2013a).  2  The terms fundamentalism, political Islam, and Islamism are sometimes used interchangeably. Although fundamentalism does not always have an explicit political agenda, its emphasis on public observance of Sharia does have legal and policy implications. Islamist is the shorthand for mobilizations of Muslims calling for the introduction, observance, or strengthening of Islamic law; as such, it is both ideology and movement. The literature distinguishes moderate, radical, and extremist Islamists. See Marty and Appleby (1991, 1992, 1993), and Kepel (2002).  3  This paper draws on my previous and ongoing research (Moghadam 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014), as well as on the relevant secondary sources. I have visited Tunisia on many occasions; since its 2011 political revolution I have conducted interviews with various political actors.  4  For more details on Western and Saudi support for Islamism, and full references, see Moghadam (2013a), ch. 3. For details on Islam in Indonesia, including the 1965 coup, see Hefner (2000) and http://www.johngittings.com/id58.html. A discussion of the murderous coup, and the complicity of the US, Britain, and Australia may be found at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/ programs/hindsight/accomplices-in-atrocity-theindonesian-killings-of/3182630#transcript   5  See especially Chalmers Johnson, ‘Blowback’, The Nation, October 15, 2001. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/Johnson

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 6  Saudi Arabia’s military spending for years has been considerably higher than Iran’s; recently its defense budget has been five times higher. See The Economist, ‘After the Nuclear Deal’, May 16, 2015, p. 42.   7  See, e.g., Rosefsky Wickham (2002) and Schwedler (2006).  8  Ghannouchi, cited in Leila Fadel, ‘Islamists’ Win Tests Tunisia Democracy’, Guardian Weekly, (November 4, 2011), pp. 4–5.  9  David Wroe, ‘Divisions in the Muslim Brotherhood’, The Age, (November 16, 2007), http://www. theage.com.au/news/world/divisions-in-muslimbrotherhood/2007/11/16/1194766965617.html   10  Nehad Komsan, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood … Returning Egypt to an Age without Law’, press release issued by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, Cairo (August 25, 2010); ‘Who Judges the Judges? A Black Day in the History of Justice in Egypt’, press release issued by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, Cairo (November 16, 2010), available at http://www.ecwronline.org  11  See http://www.musawah.org/. The transnational organization was founded in Malaysia and plans to shift its secretariat to Rabat, Morocco.  12  CEDAW http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/ cedaw/text/econvention  13  Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité (2003). The authorized English translation by Chari Voss is Guide to Equality in the Family in the Maghreb (Bethesda, MD: Women’s Learning Partnership, 2005).  14  The quote is from Bochra Belhaj Hamida of ATFD, in a conversation with the author, Helsinki, Finland, September 9, 2004. Mme. Belhaj Hamida was elected to the Tunisian parliament in late fall 2014, as a member of the Nidaa Tounes party. The 2008 press release, ‘AFTURD’s Declaration: Fighting Against Attempts of Regression’ (Tunis: Association des Femmes Tunisienne pour le Recherche et Développement, September 26, 2008), was made available to me by Khedija Arfaoui at the time.   15  Personal communication from Professor Fatima Sadiqi, Washington, DC, November 2014. See also ‘Moroccan Women Demand Apology from Benkirane over Disparaging Statement on Al Jazeera’, Morocco World News, (August 7, 2012), http:// www.moroccoworldnews.com/2012/08/50927/ moroccan-women-demandapology-from-benkirane-over-disparaging-statement-on-al-jazeera  16  For details, see Arfaoui (2007, 2011); Chékir and Arfaoui (2011); Charrad (2001).  17  Nadia Chaabane, personal communication, June 2015.  18  From my notes at a seminar on the Arab Spring organized by UNESCO, Paris, June 21, 2011. On Tunisia’s political economy in the new century, see Ben Romdhane (2006).  19  Personal communication from Khedija Arfaoui; see also http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/

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salah-horchani/020815/hamadi-jebali-archetype-de-l-islamiste-se-disant-modere-qui-feint-dignorer-l-islam-politique-et  20  Cited in Anna Mahiar Barducci, ‘Single Mothers Have No Right to Exist’ (December 2011) Available at http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2650/ tunisia-single-mothers  21  Personal communication from Nadia Chaabane, June 2015.  22  Karima Bennoune is herself a celebrated Algerian-American legal scholar and human rights activist opposed to Islamism.  23  Personal communication from Nadia Chaabane, June 2015.   24  Personal communication from Khédija Arfaoui, Bellagio, September 14, 2011 and various e-mail exchanges. Over the years I have collected many documents and reports issued by Tunisian women’s organizations. See also Tchaicha and Arfaoui (2012).  25  ‘Protégez les droits de citoyenneté de la femme en Tunisie!’, Avaaz.org: Petitions Citoyennes (August 2, 2012). http://www.avaz.org/fr/petition/Protegez_les_droits_de_citoyennete_de_la_ femme_en_Tunisie/  26  See http://www.babnet.net/cadredetail-53060.asp   27  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/world/ africa/tensions-at-manouba-university-mirror-turbulence-in-tunisia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2  28  Grami notes that the son of Ali Larayedh (the then Minister of the Interior from Ennahda) was with the Salafist militants at Manouba. 2   9  See Lakhdar Souid, ‘Le Coeur palpitant des Tunisiens’, in Femmes et Réalités, no. 16, March 2012 – March 8, special issue ‘Quelle printemps pour les femmes?’ (pp. 28–30). He writes: ‘Dans un autre temps et un autre pays, la geste de Khaoula vous fait penser à l’américaine Rosa Parks, …’. From a lower-income family in Gafsa, Khaoula is tall with short hair and seemingly sweet while assertive. She is quoted as saying: ‘Je n’ai aucune couleur politique, mais je suis Tunisienne et fière de l’être’ (p. 30). For more on the aggressive behavior of Salafists, see ‘Tunisia : Violence and the Salafi Challenge’, International Crisis Group, Report no. 137, February 13, 2013, http:// www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-northafrica/north-africa/tunisia/137-tunisia-violence-and-thesalafi-challenge.aspx   30  Mohamed Brahmi’s widow pointed out that her husband was a devout Muslim ‘but not an Islamist’.  31  Author notes, WSF, University of Tunis, El-Manar campus, Tunis, March 25, 2013.  32  Samia Letaief, interview with the author, AFTURD office, Tunis, March 5, 2014.   33  ‘Le Droit à l’Avortement en Tunisie – 1973 à 2013’. Tunis: ATFD, Oxfam, and World Social Forum (March 2013).   34  See Mona Ben Gamra, ‘Libertinage au nom du féminisme’, Le Temps (December 5, 2014)

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http://www.letemps.com.tn/article/88052/libertinage-au-nom-du-f%C3%A9minisme  35  ‘From the vantage point of a feminism devoid of any morality, abortion is thus presented as a “solution” to an inevitable outcome of a sexual life outside of marriage.’  36  The Front Populaire refused to join the coalition government or even to accept a cabinet post because of the participation of Ennahda.

REFERENCES Accad, Evelyne. 1985. ‘Women in Contemporary Tunisia’. Al-Raida, vol. VIII, no. 33 (1 August). Arfaoui, Khedija. 2007. ‘The Development of the Feminist Movement in Tunisia 1920s–2000s’. International Journal of Humanities, vol. 4, no. 8: 53–60. Arfaoui, Khedija. 2011. ‘Women on the Move for Gender Equality in the Maghreb’, pp. 101– 138 in Graciela Di Marco and Costanza Tabbush (eds), Feminisms, Democratization and Radical Democracy. Buenos Aires: UNSAM. Bayat, Asef. 1999. Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press. Beckwith, Karen. 2007. ‘Mapping Strategic Engagements: Women’s Movements and the State’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 9, no. 3: 312–38. Ben Romdhane, Mahmoud. 2006. ‘Social Policy and Development in Tunisia since Independence: A Political Perspective’, pp. 31–77 in Massoud Karshenas and Valentine M. Moghadam (eds), Social Policy in the Middle East: Economic, Political, and Gender Dynamics. New York and Geneva: Palgrave Macmillan and UNRISD. Bennoune, Karima and Mbarka Brahmi. 2015. ‘Opposing political Islam in Tunisia: Mohamed Brahmi’s widow speaks out’. OpenDemocracy (March 19). https://www.opendemocracy. net/5050/karima-bennoune-mbarka-brahmi/ opposing-political-islam-mohamed-brahmiswidow-speaks-out Berkovitch, Nitza. 1999. From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organizations. Baltimore, OH: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Brown, Nathan, Amr Hamzawy, and Marina S. Ottaway. 2006. Islamist Movements and the Democratic Process in the Arab World: Exploring Gray Zones. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Paper No. 67 (March). http://www.carnegieendowment. org/files/cp_67_grayzones_final.pdf Chafetz, Janet S. and Gary Dworkin. 1986. Female Revolt: Women’s Movements in World and Historical Perspective. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld. Charrad, Mounira, 2001. States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial: Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chékir, Hafidha. 1985. ‘What Feminism for Tunisia?’. Al-Raida (Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World, Beirut), vol. VIII, no. 33 (1 August). Chékir, Hafidha and Khedija Arfaoui. 2011. ‘Tunisia: Women’s Economic Citizenship and Trade Union Participation’, pp. 71–92 in Valentine M. Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow (eds), Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Trade Unions and Women’s Social Rights. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité. 2003. Dalil pour l’égalité dans la famille au Maghreb. Casablanca: Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité. Connell, R. W. 1998. ‘Masculinities and Globalization’. Men and Masculinities, vol. 1, no. 1: 1–20. El-Ghobashy, Mona. 2005. ‘The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 37: 373–95. Grami, Amel and Karima Bennoune. 2013. ‘Tunisia’s fight against fundamentalism: an interview with Amel Grami’. OpenDemocracy (October 7). Available at https://www. opendemocracy.net/5050/amel-gramikarima-bennoune/tunisias-fightagainst-fundamentalism-interview-withamel-grami. Gulalp, Haldun. 2001. ‘Globalization and Political Islam: The Social Bases of Turkey’s Welfare Party’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 33: 433–48. Hafez, Mohammed. 2003. Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic

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World. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Hefner, Robert. 2000. Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jayawardena, Kumari. 1985. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Kepel, Gilles. 2002. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Khalil, Andrea. 2014. ‘Tunisia’s Women: Partners in Revolution’. Journal of North African Studies, vol. 19, no. 2: 186–99. Langman, Lauren and Douglas Morris. 2004. ‘Hegemony Lost: Understanding Contemporary Islam’, pp. 182–206 in Thomas Reifer (ed.), Globalization, Hegemony and Power: Antisystemic Movements and the Global System. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Margolis, Diane. 1993. ‘Women’s Movements around the World: Cross-Cultural Comparisons’. Gender & Society, vol. 7, no. 3 (September): 379–99. Marty, Martin E. and R. Scott Appleby (eds). 1991, 1992, 1993. The Fundamentalism Project, vols. 1–3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moaddel, Mansoor. 2005. Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. 1998. Women, Work, and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2005. Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks. Baltimore, OH: Johns Hopkins University Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2013a. Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement, 2nd edn. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2013b. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the

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Middle East. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2013c. ‘What is Democracy? Promises and Perils of the Arab Spring’. Current Sociology, vol. 61, no. 4 (June): 393–408. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2014. ‘Democratization and Women’s Political Leadership in North Africa’. [Columbia] Journal of International Affairs, vol. 68, No. 1 (Fall/Winter): 35–53. Molyneux, Maxine. 2001. Women’s Movements in International Perspective: Latin America and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pargeter, Alison. 2010. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition. London: Saqi Books. Roberts, Hugh. 2003. The Battlefield: Algeria 1988–2002, Studies in a Broken Polity. London: Verso. Rosefsky Wickham, Carrie. 2002. Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt. New York: Columbia University Press. Schwedler, Jillian. 2006. Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen. New York: Cambridge University Press. Scott, James. 1987. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Singerman, Diane. 1996. Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tchaicha, Jane D. and Khedija Arfaoui. 2012. ‘Tunisian Women in the Twenty-first Century: Past Achievements and Present Uncertainties in the Wake of the Jasmine Revolution.’ Journal of North African Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (March): 215–38. Wiktorowicz, Quintan. 2001. The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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4 The Grand Refusal?: Struggling with Alternative Foucauldian Inspired Approaches to Resistance at Work David Knights

The literature on resistance within organization studies is broad ranging and draws only limitedly upon the work of Michel Foucault. Part of the reason for this is that, for many, Foucault’s refusal to make grand narrative claims or prescriptions on behalf of this or that struggle made him seem quietist from a political point of view (Fleetwood and Ackroyd, 2004) or more damagingly, incoherent (Fraser, 1989). Also he refused to focus too much of his attention directly on resistance for fear that his insights could readily play into the hands of those exercising power as they seek to deflect or co-opt resistance (Foucault, 1977; Sheridan, 2003). In an attempt to advance the cause of a Foucauldian take on resistance even against his own occasional better judgement, this chapter focuses on developing what may be

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seen as his later more ontological endorsement of resistance as living an ethical and aesthetical life. Compatible with but as a development of Foucault’s ‘grand refusal’, I engage with posthumanist feminist alternatives on resistance that challenge instrumental and rational self-interested relations through developing an embodied and ethical engagement with others. Lest the ‘grand refusal’ be seen as another grand narrative prophesying imminent social transformations, the question mark in the title is there to indicate ambivalence, ambiguity and uncertainty – the opposite of any totalizing claims. In so far as the dominant capital–labour paradigm in the resistance literature (e.g. Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Thompson and Vincent, 2010) within organization, work and management claims some transcendental

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insight into the structures of society that are to be opposed, there is a mountain of authoritative knowledge to problematize in this field. Not least is the very notion of resistance itself since a universal definition is neither feasible nor desirable (Fleming and Spicer, 2007). Sometimes resistance is seen simply in terms of its functions or dysfunctions for organizations (Gouldner, 1954). An alternative is to distinguish resistance in terms of action or behaviour that is intentionally opposed to something and is readily recognized as resistance (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004: 538–542). While this is analytically helpful in studying traditional forms of resistance such as industrial disputes or political protests, it deflects attention from more localized and informal enactments of, for example, sabotage that may have disruptive effects on an organization, even though these were not necessarily intentional. For our purposes, Fleming and Spicer’s (2007) focus on resistance as struggle in relation to refusal, voice, escape and creation is of more relevance to the theme of this chapter. This is because, as the title of the chapter indicates, refusal is the central focus and this invariably involves voicing disagreements or dissatisfactions, and escaping the subjectivity that is the historical legacy of so many exercises of power through creating oneself as an ethical and aesthetic subject (Foucault, 1982, 2011). This departure from transcendental approaches where the target of resistance is known and defined in advance in favour of an immanent examination of localized practices and subjugated knowledges can be unsettling because it does not provide blueprints or even strong guidelines of how to proceed (Curtis, 2014). Similarly, there is also scepticism concerning our other theoretical inspirations in posthumanist feminist modes and affective modes of resistance (Gatens, 1996; Braidotti, 2011; Hynes, 2013). They advocate embodied and ethical engagement with others rather than following instrumental goals in pursuit of individual, group or class interests or what is sometimes described as identity politics

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(Hekman, 2010). The aim of this chapter is to provide a brief historical examination of discourses on resistance for purposes of rendering the alternatives suggested above more plausible. The first half of the chapter provides a synopsis of the literature on resistance from traditional industrial relations studies, labour process, workplace sociology, poststructural and critical realist approaches, as well as some discussion of quasi-democratic deterrents to resistance. While the synopsis is not exhaustive of the field on resistance, it incorporates much of the literature concerned with work and organization. While it is important to ‘dwell in the embodied power of history’ (Stoller, 1997: 43) at the same time, it is acknowledged how speaking about the past always involves concerns with the present or what can be described as a genealogy that involves a ‘history of the present’ (Foucault, 1979). However, rather than begin our genealogy with ancient Greece or even transitions to modernity as Foucault might have done, the chapter is less ambitious, starting out by outlining some of the early concerns about resistance in Anglo-American workplaces from the latter half of the twentieth century until the present. In the second half of the chapter, the focus is on an alternative approach to resistance that except through the development of certain micro-resistance studies (Thomas and Davies, 2005a; Anderson, 2008; Courpasson et al., 2012) has tended to be neglected in this field. Here the analysis is informed by the work of Michel Foucault, posthumanist feminism and theorists of affect. Foucault has had a widespread impact within organization studies in general, in relation to discourse theory, discipline and the body, epistemology, genealogy, power and subjectivity, sexuality, and strategy (Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Barratt, 2008; Knights and Morgan, 2014). Posthumanist feminism and theories of affect have had less impact but since the global financial crisis, there has been renewed interest in ethics within organization studies and here a refreshing alternative is on offer (Malloch and

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Mamorsky, 2013). With limited exceptions (see Signe, 2007; Hynes, 2013; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014), however, these approaches seem to have bypassed the resistance literature. Consequently, the analysis will have few resources to draw on from the literature and thereby be somewhat more speculative in design.

AN HISTORICAL TRAWL THROUGH THE LITERATURE Resistance Through Industrial and Workplace Conflict It now seems an age since trades unions engaged their members regularly and routinely in collective industrial action designed to extract concessions from management regarding pay or other terms and conditions of employment. Postwar full employment and economic growth in the western democracies provided the conditions whereby power relations between capital and labour were slightly less asymmetrical than in other periods of history. At first, industrial action was orderly in that power was exercised on both sides of the capital labour divide through centrally and bureaucratically organized national institutions, thus enabling collective negotiations readily to reach compromised settlements. Of course, there were disputes in a variety of sectors but most of these took an official institutionalized form (Lane and Roberts, 1971; Hyman, 1972). At this time, the predominant perspective among industrial relations theorists was either unitarist (Mayo, 1949; Dunlop, 1958; c.f. Taylor and Walton, 1971), where conflict and resistance were seen as a form of deviance that had to be eradicated or pluralist, where there was faith in the collective bargaining institutions to negotiate compromises that settled conflicts (Clegg, 1971; Flanders, 1971). As shopfloor workers began to realize their growing power in the context of skilled and semi-skilled labour shortages, disputes took

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an unofficial form in what became known as wildcat strikes (Gouldner, 1954; Eldridge, 1968). Here localized industrial action organized by shop stewards proliferated to cause disruptions in the orderly and stabilized patterns of collective bargaining and resulted in leapfrogging wage claims that could not be controlled readily by the centralized formal collective bargaining institutions. Interpreting this as widespread ‘disorder … of great concern to all sections of society’, Flanders and Fox (1969: 174) and other industrial relations scholars advocated reform as a way of avoiding the collapse of the formal institutions of collective bargaining and their potential replacement with draconian legal restrictions backed up by a coercive and repressive state regime. Many had decided that reform was needed because the institutions of industrial relations were seen as more important than just collectively bargaining on behalf of trade union members for a better share of economic resources but was concerned with more general rights, ‘promotion of the “rule of law”’ and, along with the government and employers’ associations being a partner in the management of the economy (Flanders, 1970: 224–225). However, there were some dissenting voices within the academic community, amongst whom was Fox whose work after supporting reform (Flanders and Fox, 1969) became more radicalized. He argued that, far from reducing inequalities, the institutions of collective bargaining simply provided legitimacy for them and did nothing to eradicate the atmosphere of distrust that stemmed from restricted tasks, low discretion, coercive, close supervision and the reduction of labour to a mere cost of production (Fox, 1974). Once a ‘low trust dynamic’ prevails, the vicious spiral of management control and worker resistance and indifference becomes difficult to reverse (ibid.: 102). Others (e.g. Hyman, 1975, 1978; Crouch, 1977; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980) also challenged the pluralist establishment consensus and their position was boosted by the emergence of a

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neo-Marxist labour process theory stimulated by Braverman (1974) and his many more or less sympathetic critics (Aronowitz, 1978; Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1979; Elger, 1979; Cressey and MacInnes, 1980; Stark, 1980; Knights and Willmott, 1990).

Labour Process Theory The publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital (Braverman, 1974) gave rise to this revival of an interest in Marxism or what became known as neo-Marxism as providing a plausible theory to explain the growing industrial unrest in capitalist economies. Not only did Braverman revise Marxist theory to take account of the growth of monopolies within western capitalism but he also provided a more accessible account; albeit one that stimulated controversy among a group of academics that eventually took the label of labour process theorists. Braverman was criticized for being too uncritical of Marx in seeing capitalist development as moving inexorably toward its own monolithic domination of social life that could only be disrupted once the forces of production outgrew existing capital–labour relations, bringing about the inevitable political revolution. A particular focus of this critique was Braverman’s belief in the effectiveness of Marx’s notion of deskilling that he attributes to the success of Scientific Management and its separation of ‘conception’ from ‘execution’, whereby management appropriated the former so that labourers were restricted to executing tasks (Taylor, 2011). This reappropriation of management control was effective in relation to tasks that could be routinized and where pay could be directly linked to performance as in piecework. But this model of work is built on an assumption that capitalists are ‘veritably omniscient’ and labour ‘infinitely malleable’ (Stark, 1980: 92). Revolving around this view of capitalism creating an increasingly degraded, alienated and deskilled workforce, different

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theorists have directed their criticisms on an unwarranted degree of determinism (Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1979); an ahistorical romanticism especially regarding craft work (Elger, 1979; Littler, 1982) have changed the punctuation too ideological, thus failing to see the subsumption of labour under capital as a tendency rather than an inevitable logic (Aronowitz, 1978); and conspiratorial in attributing too much intentionality to capital or teleological in the sense of treating consequences of development as if they were causes (Stark, 1980). Central to these criticisms of Braverman as conspiratorially deterministic and of being ahistorically ideological is an inadequate or, should we say, an omnipotent and omniscient conception of capitalist power and the neglect of the subject, both of which we will return to later when discussing Foucault’s contribution. For Braverman the ‘real subordination of labour’ is an undeniable feature of capitalism whereas his critics see it as a tendency that involves inherent contradictions. At root, this contradiction stems from the socialized character of production where labour cannot be wholly coerced into activity and because the realization of surplus value (profit) is as dependent on the expansion of use-value as it is on its transformation into exchange value through the market. Consequently, labour cannot be wholly subsumed, deskilled or degraded since its socially creative power of production is a necessary condition of capital growth (Cressey and MacInnes, 1980: 12). Of course, if wholly subordinated or subsumed under capital, not only would the productive power of labour be curtailed but also we would not witness any resistance and that blatantly contradicts the history of industrial relations. In an attempt to retrieve labour process theory from what some had claimed was ‘beyond repair’ (Coombs, 1985; Storey, 1985: 194), Thompson (1990) sought to reestablish what was the core of the theory. The theory revolves not around the Bravermanian conception of deskilling and ever intensive

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management control but concerns itself with the more Marxian notion of the indeterminacy of labour in the process of transforming its power into profits or surplus value (ibid.: 99). For Thompson (ibid.), the following four crucial elements identify the theory: first, labour and the appropriation of its power by capital is to be privileged; second, the logic of accumulation demands a constant revolution of the production process partly because of competition within capitalism but largely because of labour’s inherent antagonism and resistance to capital; third, there is a control imperative because the market is a necessary but insufficient means of regulating labour; and finally fourth, because the capital–labour relation is essentially antagonistic or a zerosum game, it is subject to conflict and resistance particularly over economic returns. However, resistance and conflict coincide with compliance and cooperation and in some cases even consent since outside of social revolution, economic livelihood is tied to the prevailing productive arrangements. On the other hand, this compliance and consent is not just a product of necessity on the part of labour, it is also engineered or manufactured (Burawoy, 1979) by management on the basis of its anticipated productive outcomes. Although these theorists recognize employee subjectivity and identity as a factor in the development of labour resistance or consent (Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 334), critics suggest this is somewhat reluctant in that they continue to treat it as ‘of marginal importance relative to the seemingly impersonal and objective “logic of accumulation” that compels the “control imperative”’ (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2009: 935). While agreeing with Thompson concerning the centrality of the indeterminacy of labour power, his critics do not believe this can be reduced to an issue of labour and suggest a negative ontology that extends a lack of determinacy to almost everything; that is, reality, knowledge and subjectivity (ibid.: 938). This challenges labour process neo-orthodoxy for narrowly focusing on the

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strength of labour’s wage-effort bargaining power as residing in its productive potential, which can so easily be undermined by direct management control. Knowledge of this indeterminacy needs to be extended beyond labour as a factor of production but also to labour as a subject as also reflexively to those subjects conducting the research. But doing this creates problems for the ontological objects and epistemological representations of neo-orthodox labour process theory, where traditional divisions between researcher and researched, capital and labour or wage and effort are reified rather than explored in terms of fractious and fragmented processes of fragility, friction, flux and flow. As is clear from so much research, resistance at work takes many diverse forms that cannot be reduced to the utilitarian calculation or the logic of economic instrumentalism, as represented by negotiations about conditions/wage-effort ratios. In so far as this logic is reflected and reproduced in both traditional industrial relations and labour process theory, whether of an orthodox or neo-orthodox form, it had and continued to be both reinforced but also challenged by more localized empirical, sociological studies of the workplace.

Workplace Sociology Outside of traditional industrial relations or labour process theory, research on resistance that stands outside the formal institutions has taken a variety of forms. Roy (1952), for example, studied how workers in a US factory played numerous pranks, the most memorable of which was a routinely repeated theft of a banana out of one of their workmates’ lunchboxes that thereby created amusing banter. Roy understood these rituals only as indirect resistances to the subordination of shopfloor garment work in the sense that they were simply one way of relieving the boredom of the routines of their labour. In this case, the workers were so isolated from the management that their resistance

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probably helped sustain the existing relations of power and subordination by virtue of channelling frustrations into ‘harmless’ fun, as was also the case in accounts of ‘game playing’ on the shopfloor involving maximizing bonuses in piece-rate work through what was described as ‘making out’ (Burawoy, 1979). Although seeming like resistance to the official rules, this absorption in the game deflected workers from any direct resistance to management control and indeed, by default, played into their hands in facilitating higher levels of productivity as a result of competing for bonuses. Research in Sweden (Palm, 1977), which until recently had one of the most ‘progressive’ systems of social welfare, low unemployment and high levels of economic prosperity (ibid.: viii), found that workers in LM Eriksson – a telephone equipment company – were bored and frustrated, living for their time away, or ‘flight’, from work where they dreamed of a freedom and contentment that rarely ever was realized. In short, the workplace was seen as so alienating as to follow these workers into their private lives and though Palm only hints at why this is the case, it is not difficult to see that much of the problem is a function of tasks being so rigidly controlled. This could be seen to confirm the labour process (Braverman, 1974) view of Taylorist forms of management where conception or organizing the work was taken out of the hands of workers so that they were left only with executing the tasks much like robots. Instead of making the work fun, resistance in this case took the form of mental distancing – a practice that perhaps damaged the whole being of the worker and not just their time at work. What is significant in these studies is how differently workers resist to what they perceive to be the boredom of routinized labour – some seeking to transform the situation to render it less meaningless and others finding it so meaningless as to see escape as the only solution. It is important also to recognize how resistance and consent are

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not necessarily discrete phenomena but often mutually embedded in workplace relations (Collinson, 1992, 1994). So, for example, resistance often takes the form of ridicule and humour such as ‘taking the piss’ (Knights and Collinson, 1987; Collinson, 1992; Ashcraft, 2005), whereby in seeking to secure their masculine identities, shopfloor workers at Slavs contrasted themselves with the ‘effete’ and effeminate human resource managers and others (e.g. the researcher) who were not involved in hard physical labour. They felt that human resource managers just delivered platitudes, including what they described as the ‘bullshit from Barney’ – the US managing director (Knights and Collinson, 1987: 462). However, there is a rationale in this ridicule or ‘resistance through distance’ in that they enjoy ‘pulling the wool over the eyes’ of managers, for example, in ensuring that rates for a task are fixed at well below their capability so as to always have a ‘bank’ of output in reserve (Collinson, 1994: 33–34). This practice stretches back as far as the Hawthorne experiments (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939) and is recorded in numerous places (Walker and Guest, 1952; Burawoy, 1979; Knights and Sturdy, 1990). Manipulating by withholding information from the rate fixer is contrasted with the opposite strategy where, for example, a woman seeking promotion extracted as much information as possible from management to build an effective discriminatory case against them, which the author described as ‘resistance through persistence’ (Collinson, 1994: 47). Returning to the sub-culture of a masculine sense of toughness, it is interesting that when it really counted to resist in a situation of redundancy at Slavs, the self-same shopfloor workers who had previously ridiculed management found the ‘hard’ technical and mathematical financial accounts of the business plausible in a way that was not the case with those ‘feminine’ HR managers. They saw financial facts as grounded much like their own physical labour, thus leaving the shopfloor with no basis to resist their

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devastating impact on continued employment. Often then resistance in the form of humour may be enjoyable but only limitedly effective in challenging the power that really subordinates and perhaps subjugates shopfloor workers. This would also often be the case with respect to various kinds of resistance such as factory deviance or industrial sabotage (Taylor and Walton, 1971), escape attempts (Palm, 1977; Cohen and Taylor, 1992), fiddling (Mars, 1982), organizational misbehaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999) and a general treatment of the organization as a cultural ‘playground’ in which joking rituals, ‘ironic repartee’, ‘wilful rule breaking’ and other ‘acts of rebellion’ are prolific (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 3). As with much rebellious behaviour, the outcome often does not extend beyond strategic replacements of personnel in a kind of circulation of elites and in this and other senses, while causing temporary disruptions, it can play into the hands of those exercising hierarchical power by actually facilitating operational efficiency in the organization. This is not necessarily to be decried and indeed the power of subordinates to change management decisions as a result of their resistance has been seen to validate the idea of it being productive, not just of subjectivity as Foucault (1982) describes, but also of organizational practice (Courpasson et  al., 2012; Courpasson, 2016). They argue that it is important to focus on resistance ‘not as an event or identity-shaping phenomenon but as a set of skillful acts that can significantly transform organizations over time’ (Courpasson et  al., 2012: 802). This kind of optimism about productive resistance is refreshing when many theorists are cynical (Fleming and Spicer, 2003), and are inclined to see resistance as a form of co-optation, where it only ‘fuels the totality, which feeds off it like a vampire’ (Fleming, 2015: 189). Another highly optimistic account reported changed working practices resulting in the dismissal of several employees who resisted

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the changes and this led them to mobilize public protests throughout France facilitated by social media and the construction of a very effective Internet blog. After 3 years of protest involving a hunger strike in which the dismissed employees sacrificed health, and in some cases life itself, the corporation paid compensation to avoid further damage to the company’s image (Courpasson, 2016). Yet it could be seen as a little romantic to describe this as productive resistance even though it provides clear evidence that well-organized protests can result in corporate or managerial capitulation (see also Knights and McCabe, 2016). For as many have argued, organizations tend to ossify in the absence of an imaginative breach of conventions, norms and rules (Bensman and Gerver, 1963; Knights and McCabe, 2003). Changing political contexts of neo-liberal challenges to unions during the late 1970s combined with the growing popularity of poststructural theory, resulted in many workplace sociologists focusing less on resistance itself as on the conditions that render it increasingly difficult if not impossible (Holtzhausen and Voto, 2002: 77).

THE POSTSTRUCTURAL TURN In conditions of rising unemployment and political interventions to obstruct collective resistance to management control, researchers turned to Foucault rather than Marx to provide theoretical inspiration. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) was the impetus to understanding how not only were the external conditions of union decline and neoliberal markets rendering resistance problematic but so also was the subjectification or internal self-discipline of labour. Foucault (1980) has described this in terms of biopower and governmentality where subjects are routinely the target of surveillance and discipline. A range of workplace studies have drawn on Foucault to discuss employee

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self-discipline and surveillance under systems of teamworking (Sewell, 1998), concertive control within self-managing teams (Barker, 1993) or as a result of internally developed, self-imposed rules surrounding shopfloor games (Burawoy, 1979). This kind of selfdiscipline removes the need for conventional kinds of management control but awareness of the importance of identity to employees provides managers with a new regulatory resource. Thus they can manipulate the conditions whereby workers’ identities are secured precisely through complying with organizational objectives such that identity becomes a means of controlling the workforce (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). However, there has been a limited backlash to this narrative of the demise of resistance where it is argued that ‘much of the literature has failed to acknowledge the duality of managerial control’, which not only limits but also facilitates ‘resistance from below’ (Vallas, 2016: 102). He and others also found that the narrow focus on class conflict or on discourse within the literature neglects a diversity of gender, ‘ethnoracial’ and ‘structural’ conditions that provoke resistance (Hodson, 2001: 111; Vallas, 2016: 116). Others have also reported, for example, on the limits of self-discipline through teamworking (Knights and McCabe, 2003: 115– 142) or indeed have more broadly produced evidence from a range of ethnographies contradicting the claim that resistance has virtually disappeared due to the growth of service work, worker self-discipline and other managerial controls (Hodson, 2001). While sharing much in common with these authors, the claim that traditional theorists have neglected structural issues is a little wide of the mark and indeed attention to structure could be seen theoretically as a weakness because it invokes dualistic conceptions of power and resistance that Foucauldian analyses have sought to discredit (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994). We agree with Vallas (2016: 122) that Foucault cannot be responsible for the tendency for discourse analysts to neglect institutional apparatuses and material

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relations, for his genealogy always traced the conditions of possibility of current practice in governmental arrangements of the past. Indeed, he argued, that there is a ‘regular, though variously actualized, interdependence between “the government of men” and the “manifestation of truth”’. The art of government is ‘government in the name of truth’ (Gordon, 1991: 8). But an important legacy of Foucault’s work was to break from the tradition of studying resistance dualistically as a discrete phenomenon rather than as integral to power/knowledge relations (Foucault, 1980; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994). Poststructuralist studies within the workplace usually discussed resistance in the context of power (although often independently of knowledge) and with relation to subjectivity/identity (Jermier et  al., 1994; Knights and McCabe, 2003; Merilainen et al, 2004; Thomas and Davies, 2005a). As one author implored, resistance should be studied ‘as a complex, often contradictory, and socially situated attempt to construct oppositional meanings and identities’ (Mumby, 2005: 36). The literature on subjectivity also sees resistance and the identities that are enacted through it as gendered (Thomas and Davies, 2005b: 718) and/or linked to different sexualities (Fleming, 2007). Also just as power and resistance are far from polarized mutually exclusive categories or events, compliance and resistance often can be seen to merge and overlap such that resistant intentions may have the unintended effect of producing compliance, as the latter may also result in effective forms of resistance. This ambivalence is because ‘there are active processes of identity formation at work that are not fully circumscribed by either compliance with, or resistance to, organizational control’ (Iedema et al., 2006: 1112). While these attentions to subjectivity and identity are important contributions to studies of resistance, their limitations are that they remain largely at the discursive level – something that is eschewed by our next set

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of theorists – critical realists. For they refuse to transform all reality into a set of discursive constructions but retain a notion of some transcendental reality or force that while directly unobservable, can be discerned from the effects it has on empirical events. In relation to resistance, critical realism has captured the hearts and minds of neo-Marxist labour process researchers because its theoretical sophistication provides some legitimacy for the theory. However, this is seemingly at the cost of a multiplication of the ontological and epistemological problems that were detected earlier.

Critical Realism Returning to labour process analysis, following the critiques of Braverman and the encroaching poststructural theory in sociology, there was a concern among the neoorthodoxy to claim a theoretical heritage that was inspired by Marx but went beyond him. The chosen candidate of critical realism appeared sufficiently robust to challenge what was seen as an attrition of the analysis in the turn to discourse, language and symbols and away from class conflict, collective solidarity and resistance. We have already discussed earlier how labour process theorists sought to establish core theoretical propositions such as the indeterminacy of labour, the unpredictability of which serves to facilitate resistance to direct control. This was in opposition to the more contingent and empirically verifiable notions of deskilling and intensification of labour that Braverman sought to establish as the impetus for resistance. But it was soon recognized that this core was insufficient to link labour at work to broader class power that could lead to a broader resistance to capitalist relations of production. Consequently a ‘transaction model’ was introduced that provided a link between the core theory and social relations external to the workplace (Thompson, 1990; see also Thompson and Vincent, 2010),

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reflecting a ‘complex and interrelated layering of social experience’ (Thompson, 1990: 112–113). In response to their critics who challenged labour process theory for neglecting subjectivity, some authors talked about it in terms of aesthetic maintenance, whereby identity and the body were treated as important commodities to trade and negotiate with organizations to support their strategies of resistance within the labour process (McKinlay and Smith, 2009). Others have argued that this is a rather crude way of treating subjectivity since it reflects and reinforces precisely the instrumental conceptions that are one of the objects of criticism regarding the capitalist treatment of labour as a commodity (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2009). Labour process theory needs to move beyond, rather than reproduce, the very epistemological and ontological paradigms that inform its focus of critique. One way to do this is to engage with the more embodied and ethical modes of being and becoming associated with the immanent philosophies of Foucault and posthumanist feminism (Knights, 2015). However, labour process theory chose instead the more abstract path of critical realism (Bhaskar, 1997 [1975], 1998) since this was felt to be the kind of rigorous approach that would stand up philosophically to that of poststructuralism. It offered a transcendental and ontological contrast to the immanent theories of poststructuralists such as Foucault. Although sympathetic to Foucault in his early writings, Fairclough (1992) declared himself a critical realist in later work (Fairclough, 2005) and was an important resource for the labour process theorists. His is a ‘philosophy of (social) science’ (p. 927) that while social constructionist subscribes to a ‘dualist ontology’ (p. 928) relating to subjects and objects, agents and structures, or power and resistance. Thus critical realism celebrates rather than rejects dualistic analysis (Reed, 2000) because as a metaphysical ontology, it believes in the real existence of structures, organizations and institutions that even when not observable directly are seen to be

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experienced through their effects. This metaphysical notion of power that while unobservable directly can be observed through its causal effects is articulated as follows: ‘social formations have powers that are separate from their constituent subjects and that these powers do not need to be recognized within language to be really influential’ (Thompson and Vincent, 2010: 5). Following this dualistic frame of analysis, the focus is on ‘the relationship and tension between pre-constructed social structures, practices, identities, orders of discourse, organizations on the one hand, and processes, actions, events on the other’ (Fairclough, 2005: 923). Along with constructionists, Fairclough acknowledges that organizations are ‘emergent effects of social process’ within which change is inherent (p. 928). However, he argues that ‘once constituted, such objects as organizations become durable entities with their own causal powers to shape processes and events’ (p. 929) and resistance is therefore an external force not intrinsic to, or embedded within, the power relations it opposes. Fairclough does acknowledge some contingency such as unpredictability and the interventions of agents who apparently also have causal powers. What he does not seemingly recognize, however, is how organizations are networks of delicate and diverse, sociomaterial relations that are held together through the continual enrolment and mobilization of complex allies and alliances (Latour, 2005). While they can become comparatively stable, such networks of power can just as easily be disrupted through acts of organized resistance whether of a rebellious, reformist or revolutionary nature. By focusing on organizations as static, or one might say reified, objects rather than as dynamic processes of organizing, critical realism offers a ‘sleight of hand’ that provides an appearance of their durability and causal powers. For organizations only appear to have such solidity insofar as they go unchallenged and although resistance is rarely effective in overthrowing established power regimes, it can be highly disruptive.

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Moreover, from time to time organizations do collapse or are swallowed up by resistance from other more robust organizing networks. This critique of critical realism does not deny the hierarchical inequalities surrounding exercises of power or the discursive constructions that put subordinates at a massive disadvantage when it comes to resistance. Through attracting alliances, enrolling and mobilizing human and material artefacts, meaning is repeatedly transferred and transformed and practices enacted or performed in ways that can result in robust networks becoming durable if not irreversible (Latour, 2005). The point is that while domination is a possible outcome, power–knowledge relations are rarely so robust as to eradicate resistance completely. Not least this is because the continuity of any social organization depends on the creative, collaborative, co-operative actions of subjects that comply or consent with, rather than disrupt or resist, the exercises of power. This takes us to some more recent understandings and the way that institutions and organizations might anticipate and seek to displace or deter resistance.

Resistance Through Consent/ Participation In addition to the playground metaphor that while fun and a distraction from the tedium of the daily drudgery of routinized labour is far from challenging to existing power, Fleming and Spicer (2007) draw on the idea of work being like a prison where the corporation dominates our lives, leaving little space for escape other than resignation and cynical distancing. Because this metaphor neglects the opportunities for playful and disruptive subversion of the earlier image, they explore a third more optimistic alternative of seeing work as more like the site of a parliament where there is a continuous cacophony of views and interests struggling for attention. Resistance takes the form of a struggle or refusal to be drowned in a sea of conflicting voices but it needs to be recognized

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how this ‘right to be heard’ is co-opted by institutions as a way of fabricating apparent levels of participation that might preclude the need, or at least the urgency, for resistance. Walker (see Chapter 13, this volume) speaks of ‘astro turf’ grassroot resistance movements that are actually promoted and funded by corporations because it deflects protests that might be potentially more damaging to their interests. Of course, generating consent through democracy as a deterrent against resistance is one reason why governmental institutions, corporations and especially the media promote (pseudo) participation as a way of making people feel involved rather than distant from a centralized monopolizing power. Consequently, participation will be encouraged and even demanded not only at work through social events, well-being and self-development programmes but also in every aspect of life in the wider society as a result of radio and TV talk ins, use of social media, and audience participation within shows from comedy, through chat and ‘trash’ to serious politics. The media of newspapers, magazines, radio and television bombard us with imperatives to be involved whether through letters, phone calls, emails, or the Internet in giving voice to our anxieties, opinions, experiences and votes to the point at which many of the new entertainment services they provide become almost dependent on audience participation and certainly so for their popularity and longevity. While the most extreme of these are the ‘rapport talk’ shows of Oprah Winfrey and the ‘tabloid shows’ of Jerry Springer or the TV talent shows such as X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing, hardly a single show including even news programmes is produced without the consumer as part of the production process. In the broader field of production and distribution, customer participation has also been growing at an intense rate assisted by new technology that enables and imposes increasing levels of self-service in retail stores, online and especially through a multiplicity of devices on computers, mobile phones and laptops. As unpaid functionaries, consumers contribute

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to private profit in ways that go beyond mere consumption. This is one part of a growing development whereby the laudatory symbols of democracy and participation are deployed as a means of transforming the whole population into collaborators in the expansion and intensification of labouring processes that sustain and advance corporate enterprise. But it does not stop there, because employees are also pushed into engaging more as wholly embodied beings in the enterprise economy or enabling capitalism to draw upon bio-social resources beyond itself for its reproduction (Fleming, 2014). While there is a danger here of slipping into conspiracy theory when suggesting that capitalism trades on our entrapment in working to maintain a comparatively advantaged lifestyle, corporate business seems to have few limits on its predatory expropriation of ‘free’ labour. What, however, may be more of a problem for this analysis is how Fleming remains locked into a traditional idea of work as drudgery from which all workers need to escape, thus reducing resistance to a fairly individualistic attempt to retain some personal autonomy. This could be seen as a kind of cynical distancing that in earlier work was acknowledged to be incapable of challenging power and the unequal ‘distribution of resources’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 40). This form of ‘dissent’ or resistance is principally about liberating the self so that it can reside once more in its own ‘authentic’ space, which is not only tautological as they claim (ibid.: 45) but also unacceptably essentialist. They therefore and more acceptably prefer to conceptualize resistance and power as an ‘interface’ where ‘the notion of ‘struggle’ comes into play’ (ibid.: 46). But unless struggle can become collective, it remains locked in a preoccupation with autonomy for the self that is driven by identity rather than politics.

AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW What is interesting is that almost all the theories and approaches to resistance that we

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have examined so far remain at the level of discourse, the symbolic or semiotic and seemingly ignore the body and its affects or materialities and their effects (c.f. Hynes, 2013; Knights and McCabe, 2015). Of course, material objects and bodies necessarily are present in any analysis of resistance but what is significant is that, in much of the literature, they are simply taken for granted rather than examined or interrogated. This is because many traditional studies are ensnared by representational or realist accounts of industrial conflict and confrontation arising from the labour process in the workplace or of adversarial politics institutionally. Other studies have theorized resistance in terms of the symbolic world of discourse and this again tends to leave the body and materiality out of account. Outside of the realist accounts, the literature tends to be dominated by human-centric notions of resistance (Caruth et al., 1985: 23). If we are to break free from resistance viewed in terms of agency combined with its binary – the structure of power and knowledge – we have to conceive and embody humans not only or principally as beings that deploy and manipulate symbols but also as ‘sensate, suffering, skilled, sedimented, and situated creature[s] of flesh and blood’ (Wacquant, 2015: 2).1 We turn now to the work of Foucault who, although seen as a major discourse analyst, always remained grounded in social practices that are embedded in the power/knowledge/ resistance relations of bodies and materials as well as cerebral interventions. Drawing on insights from a posthumanist feminist literature on embodied ethics and the turn to affect further enhances his focus on resistance to bio-power.

FOUCAULT AND POSTHUMANIST FEMINISM [T]here is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than the relationship one has to oneself. (Foucault, 2005: 252)

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The reluctant acknowledgement of the importance of subjectivity in theorizing the labour process in neo-orthodoxy analysis combined with Fleming and Spicer’s (2007) idea that we focus on struggle as the interface between resistance and power lead us to the later Foucault (1997, 2011). While understanding that capital is dependent on the consent and creative potential of labour, the neo-orthodoxy does not embrace this knowledge of the freedom of subjects to engage or disengage as a productive potential in resistance as well as in consent. The notion of struggle captures this but not fully in the sense that it is left under-explored in Fleming and Spicer (2007). The remainder of this chapter therefore seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature on resistance. First it should be acknowledged that this notion of struggle in which binaries between power and resistance are eschewed (Knights and Willmott, 1999/2004: 113) emanates from Foucault’s (1980) challenge to the neo-Marxist tradition of treating power as negative, coercive or repressive action upon subordinates and as the property of persons, groups or the state. Because it demands the free cooperation, compliance or consent of those on whom it is exercised, power involves positive and productive as well as negative and coercive relations, and its capillary-like distribution means that it is rarely exhaustive of the space from which resistance emerges. Yet neither relations of power nor resistance are free of tensions and inconsistencies, not least because of the ways in which, in practice, they remain ambiguous and unpredictable, slipping and sliding inside and outside of one another like a two-way transitioning between caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly. A number of authors claiming to subscribe to Foucauldian analyses speak about the micro-politics of resistance (Thomas and Davies, 2002; Pacholok, 2009) but there are problems in this description. It would seem to have been hi-jacked from Foucault’s objection to ‘grand narrative’ accounts that are more about exercising power than describing

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events and his consequent argument that all we can ever study or observe are localized situations of struggle where, for example, subjugated knowledges are deployed to challenge prevailing norms and power relations (Foucault, 1977). This is not to say that the ‘global’ is not already present in local events but we cannot develop discourses of it independently from such events. Foucault refrained from using the notion of micro versus macro analysis as this establishes a false dualism, which is particularly prevalent in economics. However, a micro-politics approach has been very prevalent in recent discussions of resistance (Holtzhausen and Voto, 2002; Thomas and Davies, 2005a, 2005b). At first sight, the distinction between local and global (Foucault, 1980) might be seen simply to reproduce the dualism albeit with different terms. However, this change in terminology breaks any association with dualistic thinking for global issues are always embedded in, and affected by, local events. Nonetheless, for Foucault who is more concerned with being non-dualistic rather than speaking about it (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994), given its grounding in struggles and resistance from conditions of subjugation, this usage is a methodological rather than an epistemological prescription. So, for example, a local workplace struggle against the subjugated effects of sex discriminatory practices such as the example of ‘resistance through persistence’ described earlier, reflects global issues concerning universal human rights. But also the global feminist movement generally informs this local struggle, which in its turn contributes to claims regarding a more universal global campaign. However, what is even more distinctive about Foucault’s analysis is his argument that both the first and final point of the struggle against subjugation is the relationship with oneself or what one can say is the ‘grand refusal’ to be what one has become through so many procedures, regulations, and exercises of power (Foucault, 1982, 1986, 1997). It is

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important to make a distinction here between subjugation and subordination to management control for the latter is more explicitly tied to a notion of hierarchy and the expectations of one’s position in it. Subjugation, on the other hand, may well incorporate such subordination but is about how ‘individuals are transformed into subjects ‘who secure their sense of reality’ (Knights, 1992: 525), their meaning and their very identity by participating in the social practices that power invokes. For that reason, resistance is harder because it involves resisting one’s very own identity. Consequently where, as has historically been reported by sociologists from Donald Roy to Michael Burawoy, there are cracks in the bureaucratic regulations through which workplace disruptions can occur, these may actually be as much if not more about identity politics as resistance – a concern with securing one’s own identity. In this sense, the immersion in an identity that attracts self-discipline and self-surveillance tends to preclude seeing it as subjugation, thus displacing any refusal to be what one has become as a result of so many strategies and tactics of power. Nonetheless, power and self-discipline are rarely totalizing and tensions around difference and diversity are never far from the surface or incapable of bubbling over. This can result in the kind of hyper and pessimistic activism that Foucault (2011) describes as the ‘courage of truth’, involving a permanent critique of society through speaking out despite its risks to the self or to life itself. As has been argued, labour struggles can ‘simultaneously resist and reproduce’ (Kondo, 1990: 221) the power–knowledge relations that subjugate those in subordinate relations. Take again the example referred to earlier of ‘resistance as persistence’ where a woman challenged management’s decision not to promote her through asserting her ‘rights’ for information and due process. Part of the reason for the decision was the gender insensitivity of masculine discourses within which management were steeped yet

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the successful challenge to the discrimination was made possible only by mobilizing precisely such aspects of masculinity as assertiveness, aggressive determination and single-mindedness, linear rationality and restrained emotion. This is not to argue that these ‘tough’ aspects of behaviour are the prerogative of men, for that would be to reinforce a male–female binary and, as has been argued, while it may not always be clear what is masculinity, it cannot be seen merely to ‘reduce down to the male body and its effects’ (Halberstam, 1998: 1). For discourses of masculinity and femininity affect and are performed, albeit variably, across the range of gender and sexual boundaries. However, it can be seen in the example above that in challenging masculine decision-making, their (in)sensibilities are reproduced, as also is the case when the concern with equal opportunity of women (and minorities) has the effect of reinforcing and intensifying the individualistic, competitive and masculine norms of business (Knights and Tullberg, 2012). In short, when resistance seeks to challenge masculine domination and existing distributions of scarce resources, it often has the effect of reproducing the very values that it might otherwise seek to disrupt – namely, the instrumental masculine and economic discourses through which power is exercised. Because of this paradox, some critics have sought to redirect the focus of reflecting on resistance away from economic matters to those of ethics and embodied relations at work (Kenny, 2010; Painter-Morland and ten Bos, 2011; Pullen and Simpson, 2009; Pullen and Rhodes, 2010, 2014). They have drawn on philosophical and posthumanist feminist ethics and theories of affect to draw attention to the absence of embodied relations in many management and organizational regimes. These are at least partly a function of the hyper masculine ethos whereby a disembodied linear rationality and aggressive instrumentalism combined with homosocial male bonding and often-homophobic sensibilities dominate relations and serve to advance

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and protect economic and political privilege (Knights and Tullberg, 2012). Resistance to the relatively closed circle of masculine elitism that sustains the taken for granted privileges of management is difficult and, as we have suggested, often ends up emulating precisely the masculine norms that it ostensibly denigrates. An alternative form of resistance could evolve from employees’ desire for ‘an ethical engagement in the socio-political context of organizations’ (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014: 790). Here we might see some questioning of the masculine disembodiment that sustains homosocial elitism and its preoccupation with competition for material and symbolic privileges. For these provide an impenetrable screen that removes subjects from the raw and unmediated embodied differences of the face-to-face relation and allow for the displacement of any sense of an ethics of responsibility to the Other (Levinas, 1985; Ziarek, 2001; Pullen and Rhodes, 2010). While eschewing intimacy and embodiment in social relations is not in itself instrumental, it has the effect of protecting individuals from even recognizing, let alone confronting, the moral consequences of their actions. In particular, it leaves managers cocooned in their self-contained sense of superiority and separation from those who do not, and by definition cannot, enjoy their material and symbolic privileges. The Enlightenment and its promotion of the rights of the autonomous self, combined with ideologies of equal opportunity, simply provide the rationale for a sense of self-satisfaction and justification for inequality and privilege. In this sense, the Enlightenment reinforces individualistic responsibilities to the self in advance of any responsibility to the Other and when this preoccupation with the self is pre-eminent, morality is reduced to an exercise of power where the image of what it is to be ethical transcends any sense of responsibility. Of course, discourses and practices of corporate social responsibility and the domination of

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rule-based systems encourage this reduction of ethics to its mere appearance and image or to minimal levels of compliance. It is obvious that discrepancies will almost always occur between ethical being and its appearance in imagery especially when ethics is reduced to a mere compliance with rules. It is necessary once again to repeat the argument that obeying rules is not in itself an ethical act since the latter demands a moral dilemma, or what Derrida (1995) describes as a situation of undecidability. Compliance is essentially an instrumental act designed to avoid the shame or punishment that might result from a breach of rules and, in this sense, very far removed from ethics. It is only because of prevailing disembodied relations that compliance with rules can kindle claims to moral integrity and probity, as frequently occurs when corporate executives and politicians are caught up in national and international scandals. If a breach of rules cannot be proven, they have no case to answer regardless of the ethics. While not resistance in the conventional sense, the appeal to affect and ethical sensibilities has a potential to challenge and disrupt a whole range of oppressions that seem to be readily deflected when corporate or political power subscribes to enlightenment values of human rights and respect for diversity. This is because paradoxically these values reinforce individualism at one and the same time as homogeneity. The individual has rights insofar as they do not undermine social order and stability and difference is acceptable as long as it can be managed through programmes that organize or eliminate the heterogeneity through its reduction to a manageable classification or range of diverse groups (Noon, 2007; Knights and Omanovic´, 2016). Although those resisting enlightenment beliefs may remain essentially subjugated, the resistance can be contagious when it ‘bears witness’ to a form of ethical life and in this sense contributes to struggles that challenge and disrupt the prevailing social order (Foucault, 2011; Munro, 2014; Clarke and

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Knights, 2015). Posthumanist feminist ethics is disruptive if only because it refuses to endorse the domination of disembodied masculine discourses that reduce materiality to economic performance and identity politics to preoccupations with securing the self through social confirmations (Ziarek, 2001; Braidotti, 2011). By retrieving ethics from its deontological or utilitarian straightjacket in cognitively based rules or from predefined virtues, posthumanist feminists (Barad, 2003, 2007; Braidotti, 2011, 2013) dismantle the binary separations and elevations of mind over body and self over other that reflect and reinforce dominant masculine discourses. If ethics is about embodied engagements with the other, it ‘precedes the intentionality of consciousness’ that is concerned with the instrumental control of externalities. In doing so, the self becomes responsible to ‘the other who is different from us but to whom we cannot be indifferent’ (Levinas, 1985: 95 my emphasis). Ethics is then a form of resistance that is characterized first and foremost by us refusing to be the self that we have become through so many exercises of power and subjugating demands (Foucault, 1982, 1997). Instead of resistance being characterized as negative and focused on dismantling existing relations, an ethics of engagement involves a more positive and productive mode of self and potential social transformation. But it carries risks to the self ‘by being exposed to a multiple audience, and that at the same time is sensitive to the ways it puts others at risk’ (Signe, 2007: 298). Inspired by Foucault’s (1986) concern for the ancient Greek commitment to caring for the self, I subscribe to his belief that ‘there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself’ (Foucault, 2005: 251–252) While this may appear on the surface to be individualistic or even narcissistic, caring for oneself is ‘not in order to escape from the world but in order to act properly in it’ (Groz, 2005: 702). It also ‘is a transgressive experience insofar as the self is no longer

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the sedimented construct of external systems of constraint and prescriptions’ (Foucault 1991: 45). Moreover, it reflects an ethics of engagement, embodying a ‘position of otherness’ (Foucault, 2011) that is outside of identity politics or a preoccupation with the self as a socially sanctioned image or identity (Ziarek, 2001). Posthumanist feminists have an interest in displacing identity politics because of its heavily gendered nature in reflecting an instrumentally rational and teleological project with the specific aim of securing the self. Usually this goal resembles, if it is not an emulation of, masculine (albeit self-defeating) attempts to produce an orderly and predictable world in which to secure a solidified sense of self (Clough, 1992). Seeking to secure identity ordinarily involves a ‘bounded, ego-indexed habit[s] of fixing and capitalizing on one’s own selfhood’ (Braidotti, 2011), whereas the ethical and aesthetic self is a more open and evershifting subject positioning that embraces both a transformation of the relationship one has with oneself and others as well as a willingness to be truthful despite the risks involved (Foucault, 2011): [t]here are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and [the subject] tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to. (Foucault 1983: 212)

But the second is a resource for self-transformation to become an ethico-political subject. In order to embrace this kind of subjectivity, our struggles of resistance have to involve a ‘grand refusal’ to be what we have become through so many exercises of power (Foucault, 1982) and this means disrupting representations and practices that reflect and reproduce an ethics of narcissism in the pursuit of secure and solidified senses of the self (Knights, 2015). Given that the self is a product of historical powers, ‘the main problem [is] the politics of ourselves’ (Foucault, 1993: 222–223). This requires ‘work by the self on

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the self’ (Foucault, 1997: 286) that enables us to ‘practice a certain code of conduct and construct our own morality’ (Bardon and Josserand, 2011: 507) rather than just live like automatons, complying with the norms and constraints of historically handed down cultural and institutional power. This may then replace an ethics of rules and regulations that has been discredited by its failures (e.g. the Holocaust, the Gulags, the Global Financial Crisis) so as to confront us with the undecidability, which is the foundation of every ethical act (Derrida, 1995). In addition, it is also about the art of living an aesthetic existence where caring for oneself is the first call on caring for others insofar as true knowledge depends wholly on ‘an essential position of otherness’ (Foucault, 2011). Finally, this can be complemented by drawing on the embodied notion of affect (Spinoza, 1955; Deleuze, 1994) as ‘pre-personal intensities and associated transitions in capacities for action’ (Hynes, 2013: 564), through which potentially we can also seek to ‘reconfigure the very meaning’ of resistance (Hynes, 2013: 563). For this turn to affect departs from traditional notions of resistance as always a visible and intentional reaction to that which it opposes since embodied affect opens up the space ‘in between’ consciousness and matter, instrumental rationality and emotional irrationality, the macroscopic and the microscopic, and the individual and the collective and is thereby no longer either on the negative or positive side of a polarized dualism. For the capacity to affect and be affected precedes the individualized subject that we have become through so many exercises of power. This does not make affect presocial but it is only social in an open-ended way and ‘in a manner “prior to” the separating out of individuals’ (ibid.: 564) as subjectified in the way that Foucault has described. Affect then is not so much a dimension of the subject but that the subject is a dimension of affect and is indeed ‘in excess of conscious perception’ (Adkins and Lury, 2009: 9; quoted in Hynes, 2013: 564). Affect is then

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an unrealized potential or virtual reality that only becomes manifest in action whether this be exercises of power or of resistance, but it is because this bodily potency ‘is only vaguely felt and rarely recognized as such that contemporary power, and indeed resistance, can exploit affect so effectively’ (ibid.: 565). This is possible because affect is always a ‘transition’ rather than a state of being and is thus open to endless opportunities for creative and productive action (ibid.: 573).

CONCLUSION This chapter has attempted to provide an overview of different approaches to resistance at work in organizations but with the aim of exploring the later work of Foucault, posthumanist feminists and theorists of affect. Accordingly, I turned first to the early literature within industrial relations and workplace sociology that after the rise of the neo-Marxism of Braverman gave way to the development of labour process theory. In the mid twentieth century, there was much industrial conflict and researchers of industrial relations tended to subscribe either to a Marxist celebration of it or sought unitary or liberal pluralist means of managing it so as to sustain social order. The Marxists interpreted every conflict as part of a class struggle to overthrow capitalism and bring about the socialist nirvana. Conservatives sought to reverse any erosion of capitalist/managerial or state power to maintain the status quo, whereas the liberals had a not dissimilar effect but through negotiation and compromise with the opposing forces of struggle. It can readily be argued that in late twentiethcentury western society, the liberal consensus prevailed but not without the help of some fairly repressive legal constraints on labour and its trade union power base. The explanation for the collapse of struggles against the established order are too complex to provide a full account of here but one

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major factor was that only limited numbers of the labouring classes had concerns for the politics of socialist revolution or even socialism through democratic means. The majority sought simply to improve their economic situation largely through means legitimately supported by the existing state institutions. Labour process theorists, on the other hand, proceeded to develop theoretical and empirical studies of workplace resistance and employee relations but, as time proceeded, became more and more academic as they sought sophisticated explanations of the historical and contemporary development of capitalism. Partly for this reason but also to distinguish labour process theory from a fast developing interest in philosophically informed poststructural analyses of power and resistance, it turned to a new neo-Marxist inspired critical realism. Here unobservable social formations were given independent causal powers by virtue of their observable effects but, of course, tracing effects back to unobservable causes has to be seen as an act of faith rather than an empirically proven relationship. Retaining an empiricist epistemology, Foucault eschewed this reversion to metaphysics and its tendency to draw on ‘grand narrative’ explanations of events in terms of transcendental social structures rather than immanent social relations, insisting that we only speak about discourses and practices that can be observed. Consequently his understanding of resistance departed from Marxist or neo-Marxist accounts and remained focused on what subjects can do in their everyday lives in refusing to accept the subjugation that can be an effect of power– knowledge relations. Following this immanent approach I have sought to explore the possibility of resistance as involving a ‘grand refusal’ but only grand in the sense that the struggle to transform the self ethically and aesthetically demands a lot of work on ourselves. For to overthrow the conditions that have constituted us as particular subjects involves the courage to speak the truth rather

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than subordinate the self to the norms that promise a secure identity. Finally, it is important to indicate some of the implications of this analysis of resistance and these can be viewed in terms of contributions of a theoretical, empirical and practical nature. Theoretically, it encourages research that refuses to treat resistance as a discrete phenomenon or in a binary separation from power. It breaks then with dualistic forms of analysis but not only those relating directly to resistance but also those concerned with productive as opposed to repressive power, agency and structure, material and symbolic relations, and masculine and feminine discourses. Empirically it encourages research that is politically and philosophically aware and focused on ethics and difference. It seeks to inform social and political practice with the intention of supporting organizational and self-transformation that undermines economic rational self-interest and self-aggrandizing narcissism. Practically, in the context of neo-liberal western economies that are ethically degenerate and have spawned numerous ethical scandals, culminating in the global financial crisis of 2008, there is some urgency for moral regeneration (Knights and McCabe, 2015). Clearly the old system of deontological or consequential ethics with its constraining rules and regulations has passed its ‘sell by date’ even though the authorities routinely return to it in the absence of clear alternatives. Future research could develop these ideas but in particular, as David Courpasson suggested in his review of this chapter, a worthwhile project would be to bridge the alternative approaches of Foucault and posthumanist analysis to earlier studies in order to show how they might interpret the data and research differently. While I have hinted at something of what this would imply in the text, to do full justice to such a task would require access to the original data that these studies drew upon, and involve more scholarly work than appropriate for a single chapter. Foucauldian ethics, posthumanist feminism and the theory of affect offer alternative forms of resistance that unfold within spaces ‘in between’ consciousness and the body,

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rationality and emotion, the collective and the individual, and the actual and the virtual where ethics can be retrieved from its straightjacket in cognitive-based deontological or utilitarian rules. They break the binary separation, and elevation of mind over body and self over other that reflect and reinforce dominant homosocial and heterosexual hegemony as encapsulated in heteronormal masculine discourses. This supports analysis of resistance that refuses to restrict it to adversarial and aggressive masculine confrontations where there is only one winner. Instead and more positively what is proposed is ethical engagements with both one’s own self and with others in ways that can be contagious when they ‘bear witness’ to a form of life that challenges and disrupts the prevailing social order regardless of the risks to identity and even one’s own life. By returning ethics to a relation of bodily engagement ‘that precedes the intentionality of consciousness’, it concerns our responsibility to the other who is different from us but to whom we cannot be indifferent (Levinas, 1985: 95; quoted in Barad, 2007: 392, our emphasis). More generally, this literature challenges the dominance of cognition and language over experience and the body, not only in representational but also in social constructivist discourses (Braidotti, 2011). By affirming the body and embodied relations (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989; Foucault, 1997), the ‘in-between’ spaces of ambiguity and ambivalence, flux and flow, and fragility and fragmentation can be explored as a form of ethical agility. Moreover, while a necessary condition for the possibility of ethics, embodied engagement with both human and material artefacts is more compatible with the intra-actions within which the natural and social world are mutually embedded (Barad, 2007).

Note  1  Interestingly this quote was taken from a pre-publication copy and in the actual published version, ‘creatures of flesh and blood’ become ‘corporeal creatures’ – a language much more compatible with the abstract and sanitized world of symbols.

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Process Analysis. London: Palgrave Press, pp. 83–96. Vallas, S. P. (2016) Working class heroes or working stiffs? Domination and resistance in business organizations. Research in the Sociology of Work, 28: 101–126. Wacquant, L. (2015) For a sociology of flesh and blood. Qualitative Sociology, 38(1): 1–11. Walker, C. R. and Guest, R. H. (1952) The Man on the Assembly Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ziarek, E. P. (2001) An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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5 Resisting the 24/7 Work Ethic – Shifting Modes of Regulation and Refusal in Organized Employment André Spicer and Peter Fleming

INTRODUCTION In a fascinating account of the neoliberalization of university education, Martin Parker (2014) tells a harrowing story about life at Euro Business School (a pseudonym). Euro Business School (EBS) was an attractive new home for Parker for a number of reasons. The University had recently appointed a new Vice Chancellor, one of the most renowned critical social scientists in the world. The business school itself had long been the home of scholars of a critical persuasion. The only problem was the Business School had just appointed a new Dean who launched a programme of ‘earth shattering change’. This involved dissolving existing governance structures, implementing a new set of performance metrics, significantly increasing tuition fees, encouraging some long-standing staff to leave, eliminating administrative

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roles and restructuring departments. The result was significant disquiet among faculty. Staff satisfaction plummeted, the number of faculty on stress leave rocketed, and staff turnover accelerated as rumors of misery in the school spread throughout Europe. After having left himself, Parker was troubled by one question: Despite the fact that one of the groups contained a strong concentration of industrial relations specialists, resistance appeared to be limited to exit … with almost no sustained collective counter voice to the Dean’s strategies. So, why was dissent so muted, and what does this tell us about the capacities of responsibly autonomous professionals to resist the managerialism that they teach about? (Parker, 2014: 282)

We argue that this is an important question that remains unexplored in workplace resistance studies. Most research focuses on issues of either collective or individual voice

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(Fleming, 2014a). Standing up to be heard, expressing a grievance or disagreement either formally or informally and pushing back. But as Parker’s account demonstrates, in some cases employees view the act of being heard as either pointless or even dangerous. We suggest that under the phenomenon of what some have called 24/7 capitalism (which includes) rampant managerialism this desire to simply leave is increasingly prevalent (CederstrÖm and Fleming, 2012; Fleming, 2015). More and more employees recognize that speaking out often has little or no impact on the objective organization of the workplace. In such contexts, it would be tempting to think that resistance has finally disappeared. This, we think, would be a mistake. Just as the declining influence of unionism brought about a refocusing of the scholarly gaze onto various forms of ‘micro-resistance’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2010), we think that rise of the 24/7 workplace requires another refocusing around the concept of exit. What is the best way to theorize exit in the context of extant studies and gauge its normative and practical effectiveness under neoliberal 24/7 capitalism, whereby escape is believed to be the only possible course of action? Parker (2014) views it as a ‘limited’ and rather last ditch method of resistance. Is there anything that can be redeemed in the concept of exit? To answer these questions, we begin by analyzing the changing power relations in the neoliberal enterprise: the rise of precarious employment, the personalization of employment relations, and the increasing importance of self-mangement. We argue that work becomes an ever-present force in people’s lives, making traditional avenues of contestation feel as if the work ethic is being reinforced rather than delimited. Hence the feeling that neoliberal work systems are somehow inescapable. Then we evaluate the forms of resistance common in the current workforce and evaluate their effectiveness for fighting the 24/7 work ethic; namely, unionism, social movements, and micro-resistance, before turning to the relatively unexplored

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notion of exit as a strategy for refusing contemporary work relations.

CHANGING EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS We are swiftly moving towards a ‘24/7 work ethic’ that must inevitably shift the way in which the power of employment is resisted. For example, according to a recent survey the average worker spends 36 days a year writing work emails in England. London workers in particular receive around 9,000 emails each year. This tells us much about the ritual of work in late capitalist societies. Only neoliberal capitalism could subvert the labor-saving possibilities of an invention like email and use it to extend the working day ad infinitum. The tyranny of workplace email is now so out of control that even the multinational corporation is starting to have second thoughts about its utility. Some French companies, for example, have banned its employees logging on in the evening. No wonder employees today desperately note that ‘My work is my life’ (Michel, 2012: 344). Similarly, a number of German firms automatically erase incoming emails when its employees are on holiday. For we all know how those last few days of vacation are often ruined by dark thoughts of the overflowing inbox awaiting us at the office. Capitalism understands its own limitations here. Hence it tries to moderate the 24-hour work ethic it has unleashed with the rise of neoliberal (un) reason, a task it struggles with as the 2013 death of Bank of America intern, Moritz Erhardt, demonstrates – he died after working 72 straight hours. One of the central shifts in workplace regulation during the last quarter century is associated with the rise of what Crary (2013) calls the 24/7 capitalism, which we suggest also represents a certain type of work ethic. This culture of productivity, associated with neoliberalism, ‘renders plausible, even

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normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits’ (Crary, 2013: 9–10). Let us now unpack some of the definitive features that are driving this 24/7 work ethic.

The Personalization of Employment Compared to the workplaces that say Weber analyzed – where the public and private, official and unofficial – were strictly separated, modern managerialism seeks to blur this boundary for significant reasons. Whereas in Weber’s time, bureaucracy was defined by removing all non-official and non-work associative from the job, today many employees are encouraged by ‘liberation management’ to express their independence, unique personalities, and all that is different about them, including their sexual orientation and lifestyle. Indeed, one of the strangest aspects of contemporary management discourse is its explicit reliance on facets of life that Fordism would have deemed out of place in the office. In some large US corporations, for example, workers are invited to express who they really are outside of their work roles. The management consultant Gurnek Bains (2007) describes this in terms of authenticity. On the basis of a number of empirical cases, he notes how ‘enlightened’ CEOs attempt to increase engagement among the workforce by having them reveal their true personalities, which dismantles the boundary between work and self. If non-work signifiers are today found in the workspace, then the reverse has occurred too. The code of productivity has escaped the cubicle, infiltrating life and society more generally. Most employees, of course, still clock in and out as per usual. But an interesting trend appears to be gaining momentum. In their best-selling pop-business book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (2011), Ressler and Thompson note the prevalence of Results Only Work Environments (or ROWE) in US industry. Many companies

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now focus on output indicators, rather than inputs as conventional management wisdom prescribes. As long as a project deadline is met, for example, firms do not care when, how, and where the work is done – be it in your underwear in the middle of the night or in a local café on Monday morning. As for the danger that workers might simply sleep all day? According to the authors, the exact opposite occurs: ‘It’s not about giving people more time with the kids. ROWE is not about having more time off. … [Y]ou may even work more’ (2011: 61). A very interesting illustration can be found in Michel’s (2012) recent study of employees in a large US bank. Senior management strategically transformed the work setting into a home away from home, removing all concrete demarcations that might have once separated work from home, leisure, and life more generally. This was presented in the parlance of freedom and increased benefits, since employees could now access the workflow process whenever they liked, include personal events and interests in the office schedule, and cultivate a workplace climate that was almost indistinguishable from living as such. Michel notes, ‘The bank erased distinctions between work and leisure by providing administrative support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, encouraging leisure at work, and providing free amenities, including childcare, valets, car service and meals’ (Michel, 2012: 336). These so-called freedoms came at a cost. Michel closely documented the way in which existence in this lifestyle firm was completely overtaken by work. There were no boundaries to separate personal concerns from those of the job, prompting some to complain that they no longer had a life outside the office. But the first casualty of this universalization of work was not family life, holidays, or hobbies. It was the body. Given the longitudinal nature of Michel’s study, over a nine-year period, she was able to observe the physical impact associated with micro-regulation at work. After years of dealing with a chaotic

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managerial paradigm, deploying broader life resources to get the job done, the physical organism ended up spent and broken. Some companies go to even greater lengths to capture life on the job. Land and Taylor’s (2010) investigation of an ethical textiles manufacturer in the United Kingdom tells us why. They report how managers painstakingly replicated themes indicative of life beyond work on the company’s premises. To give the job and products a veneer of authentic chic, the firm openly promoted the leisurely pastimes of its workers, within both the organization’s internal culture and its external identity: ‘In order to establish the authenticity of the brand, this immaterial labor of brand management drew upon the recreational activities of employees. This inscription of employees’ lives into the brand created the economic value of the company’s products, situating their “lives” as a form of productive labor or “work”’ (Land and Taylor, 2010: 408).

Self-Management and Neoliberal Capitalism Why are we working now more than ever when its cultural legitimacy has reached an all-time low? The bills need to be paid, for sure. But something else is happening here. The rise of what Fleming (2014b) terms ‘bio-regulation’ in and around the workplace (that is, where ‘bios’ or life itself is put to work on a permanent basis) is inextricably linked to the shifting tactics of capitalist regulation. Following the 1970s structural crisis, the rise of neoliberal hegemony signaled to working people that the gains made after World War II were but a temporary indulgence. That this class offensive was justified with rhetoric of saving society from bankruptcy is no surprise. But history did not turn out as planned. This variant of capitalism was seriously unable to organize itself. As a result, a reconfiguration took place to save

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it. The management function was displaced onto workers themselves. This is why neoliberalism now sees us constantly concerned with its problems, integrating them into our life problems in order to get things done. Self-management and selfexploitation become the key centers of control under these socio-economic conditions. This undoubtedly represents a quantitative shift in capitalist regulation – more time spent in the office or worrying about it due to labor intensification and the lengthening of the working day. But it is more importantly a qualitative change, too. Our jobs now become something very intimate to us, especially when they rely on interpersonal aptitudes and emotional intelligence to make things happen, as many occupations do today. A number of studies point to this qualitative shift in work regulation. For example, Rob Lucas’s (2010) autobiographical essay ‘Dreaming in code’ exemplifies this inessential but ritualistic element of bio-regulation. The computer programmer describes a life so integrated with his job that sleep is even a place of labor, dreaming up solutions to problematic code conundrums in the middle of the night. He writes, ‘Dreaming about your work is one thing, but dreaming inside the logic of your work is another. … [I]n the kind of dream I have been having the very movement of my mind is transformed: it has become that of my job. This is unnerving’ (Lucas, 2010: 125). Lucas’s sleep work is symptomatic of organizational power relations that no longer rely on timetables and direct orders. This is a question of not only more hours – but more personhood. This qualitative shift is no more evident when we see workers toiling even when it is not functionally necessary. A recent study by Gregg (2011) is helpful for illustrating this. Like those we discussed above, the media and IT employees she met were completely indexed to their jobs, to the point where one interviewee even continued to work when immobilized in a hospital’s emergency ward

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following a serious accident: ‘loyalty to the team has the effect of making extra work seem courteous and common sense’ (Gregg, 2011: 85).

RESISTING 24/7 CAPITALISM – INCLUSION OR EXIT? There is no doubt that worker resistance is still alive and well today. However, under the conditions described above, the problem for anyone wanting to oppose work concerns identifying a suitable target since power has become integrated into our life processes. What kind of contestation can subvert a mode of regulation that captures and utilizes not only our labor power but life itself? These questions are significantly different to those that might have confronted the typical factory worker or bureaucrat, both for whom life and work are clearly demarcated. Let us now examine the different approaches to resistance and how well they can counter the effects of 24/7 capitalism, before exploring the concept of exit.

Unionism Well-established collective modes of voicing employee discontent such as unions continue to be a presence, but have dramatically declined since 1980 in many developed countries (Wallerstein and Western, 2000). For instance in 1973, 34% of men and 16% of women working in the US private sector were unionized. By 2007 that number was 8% for men and 6% for women. At the same time there has been a 40% grow in wage inequality, which is coincidental according to Western and Rosenfeld (2011). This has largely been due to the resurgence of neoliberal economic policies throughout the world which typically have an explicit anti-union dimension to them. As union power has declined, so has its signature mode of resistance: the strike. Between

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1971 and 1980 there were on average over 250 strikes in US workplaces involving more than 1,000 people each year. Between 2001 and 2010, this number dropped to about 10 (Milkman and Ott, 2014: 5). Moreover, a US study found that institutionalized unions especially in the manufacturing sector took a conciliatory approach and focused on wage negotiations rather than direct action. In this context of weak institutionalized unions and the rise of the 24/7 work ethic, it is no surprise that we see the appearance of ‘alt labor’ movements that are more grass-roots and adaptable to shifting employer tactics related to precarity (Wright, 2013). For example, a fascinating study comparing the mobilizing efforts of the grass-roots United Farm Workers (UFW) and the more traditional Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee found that the former succeeded where the latter failed (Ganz, 2000). This was because the UFW operated on a local level, was able to organize locally, and made good use of on-the-ground information. There are some distinctive features of these ‘social movement unions’ (Dibben, 2006). They focus on neighborhoods, established social networks such as faith-based communities, and more effectively use online networks (Dibben, 2006). They also can involve coalitions with other civil society organizations. This is useful in relation to highly precarious and labor-intensive occupations. For example, the US has recently seen the emergence of the ‘workers centers’ movement (Milkman and Ott, 2014) that assists unregistered immigrants who drive taxis in New York. However, it appears that while these developments are important, the overall structure of the neoliberalized employment systems in the mainstream and underground economy has not been greatly modified by these social organizations. They provide aid and assistance to those most exploited and unprotected from capitalism, but have not been as successful in lobbying for paradigmatic change. In recent years there has been explosion of these grass-roots centers in many large US cities.

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Social Movements As traditional modes of unionism have faced stiff challenges, and alt labor movements garner only local appeal, some have attempted to link the refusal of work to issues that might have a much broader appeal. New social movements in particular – such as Occupy Wall Street – have been very prominent in this regard. Alain Touraine (1971) noticed nearly half a century ago that in the wake of the 1968 uprisings in Paris the decisive site of social struggle had shifted away from the factory floor towards the broader technocratic organization of society itself. Moreover, this followed a major shift whereby the traditional industrial working class was replaced by a post-industrial group of knowledge/service workers: … one of the significant aspects of the May Movement is that it demonstrated that sensibility to the new themes of social conflict was not most pronounced in the most highly organized sectors of the working class. The railroad workers, Dockers, and miners were not the ones who most clearly grasped its most radical objectives. The most radical and creative movements appeared in the economically advanced groups, the research agencies, the technicians with skills but no authority, and, of course, in the university community. (Touraine, 1971: 18)

While the state has typically been the target of many social movements, a study of social movements in the US between 1960 and 1990 found that nearly 40% challenged non-state organizations, and many of those were businesses (Walker et  al., 2008). And they can have a significant effect. For example, a study examining company-focused demonstrations reported in The New York Times between 1962 and 1990 noted a corresponding 0.4% to 1% drop in share-price (King and Soule, 2007). The difference between unionism and new social movements is that the latter often situate their action in wider civil society. As we have already seen, some unions have already followed this route. However, worker expression of dissatisfaction is increasingly directly

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not so much at work as an isolated site but the whole way of life that is fostered under 24/7 capitalism. Disgruntlement with a job can be transferred onto many other movements addressing problems around gender, racism, sexuality, disability, mental illness, concerns about human rights, and much more. Often it has been the new social movements in these areas that have mounted some of the more dynamic challenges of power relations in the workplace. Often social movements seek to mobilize people’s dissatisfaction not as workers but as consumers (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004). This happens through a range of consumer movements whereby activists try to put pressure on companies to change their employment practices through actions like boycotts. If they gain national media attention, around 25% of firms will change their practices (King, 2008). Corresponding with the rise of 24/7 capitalism and its attendant employment practice, we have witnessed the appearance of an international anti-precarity movement throughout the world (Lee, 2007). This generally has its roots in Europe, springing initially from the May Day protests which morphed into groups like the Chainworkers in Italy, Les Intermittents in France, and Los Indagnados in Spain. Young people and immigrants employed in the low-wage/long hours economy are the prime focus. Often these movements stage media savvy protests to highlight the fate of its members. One well-known example are the events featuring San Pracario – a new patron saint of precarious workers – who would appear at events including film festivals, fashion shows, and protests (Tari and Vanni, 2005). What is fascinating about this movement is that it self-consciously uses many of the features of the precarious, self-managed workplace indicative of 24/7 capitalism itself. Just as the unions of the mid twentieth century seemed to mirror the structure of the corporations they challenged, the precarity movement also bears an uncanny resemblance to the

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hyper-flexible organization dominating the neoliberal order (Böhm et al., 2010). And herein lies the weakness of such social movements in relation to the 24/7 work ethic. They often seek to call for better work conditions and pay – that is to say, be included in the mainstream workforce – rather than challenge the institution of work itself. What tends to go unrecognized is that even this ‘mainstream’ workforce is now buckling under the pressure of work, albeit with better pay, as we have noted in the first part of this chapter (also see Fleming, 2014b). Such social movements therefore risk remaining marginalized to the main power centers of the employment system.

Micro-Resistance While some precarious and self-managed workers have sought to mobilize collectively through unions and social movements, many express their dissatisfaction towards their employers in a direct yet unorganized manner. Such practices are often minor, informal, and anonymous, but still disrupt the rhythm of work in the office or warehouse (see Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995; Thomas and Davies, 2005; Spicer and Böhm, 2007). What might be called ‘micro-resistance’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2010) involves acts whereby the subversive agent remains under the radar and avoids public detection, including a ‘wide range of behaviour – from failure to work very hard or conscientiously, through not working at all, deliberate output restrictions, practical joking, pilferage, sabotage and sexual misconduct’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 1–2). Workplace micro-resistance is by no means new. The phenomenon was at the heart of early classics in industrial sociology such as Bensman and Gerver’s (1963) study of the bending of rules in an aircraft factory, Roy’s (1952, 1958) investigation of informal game playing in a machine shop, and Gouldner’s (1954) study of the misuse of company

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equipment in a gypsum mine. These studies documented employee responses to classic industrial and Fordist methods of control associated with production line work. However, from the 1990s onwards, researchers began asking how workers articulated their dissatisfaction in post-industrial work settings where the mechanisms of control are cultural. Studies found that an important facet of micro-resistance in these settings involved targeting and undermining the official narrative of the firm, entailing a kind of ‘symbolic sabotage’. This might include cynical responses to corporate culture initiatives (Kunda, 1992; Fleming and Spicer, 2003), attempts to reclaim valued identities in the face of managerial discourses (Thomas and Davies, 2005), lampooning management (Rodrigues and Collinson, 1995), the creation of deviant subcultures (Jermier et al., 1991), the maintenance of unsanctioned routines (Prasad and Prasad, 2000), the circulation of stories to challenge favored managerial versions of events (Vaara and Tenari, 2002) to name just a few. A common theme running through most of these studies is that resistance in settings where culture is an important regulatory mechanism tends to involve struggles around identity and discourse. Most investigations concerning microresistance have tended to focus on stable workplaces where there was at least some ability to discern who were managers and who were being managed. But there has been much less in the way of research exploring the kinds of micro-politics which come about in workplaces where self-direction is common, characterized by high levels of precarity, and the pressure to produce is a constant presence. In the context of 24/7 capitalism, if the room for large-scale and organized movements of resistance appear to have contracted somewhat, then the same seems true for micro-resistance as well. This is not because control has finally colonized every aspect of the employee worldview. Instead, the neoliberalization of employment functions in the opposite direction, by using the agent’s

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own autonomy and freedom to get the most out of its workforce. As work bleeds into a holistic lifestyle it appears that only when the body breaks down that some kind of respite becomes available. For example, in her ethnographic account of a publishing house and a media organization Ekman (2014) found the pressure to be a worker 24/7 and the desire to evade that pressure led to high levels of stress. When one employee returned to work after having collapsed in the office from a stress-related incident, she was told by her boss ‘Don’t worry, I’ve had stress breakdowns too!’ (Ekman, 2013: 153). Breaking down, it seemed, was part of the job … and the only way to escape the all-encompassing pressure to produce. Perhaps the most telling account of how difficult 24/7 hour capitalism is to resist is given by Lucas, the ‘sleep working’ IT employee mentioned above. He points out the problems of resisting his workplace using classic methods of refusal, which are typically studied in organization studies and sociology: Given the individually allocated and project centered character of the job, absenteeism only amounts to self-punishment, as work that is not done will have to be done later under increased stress. Given the collaborative nature of the work, heel dragging necessarily involves a sense of guilt towards other workers. On the production line, sabotage might be a rational tactic, but when your work resembles that of an artisan, sabotage would only make life harder. … It is only when sickness comes and I am involuntarily incapable of work that I really gain extra time for myself. It is a strange thing to rejoice in the onset of a flu. (Lucas, 2010: 128)

According to Lucas’s account, when work is ever present, the only way out seems to be when your body breaks down where he can temporarily exit the situation. He is free to neglect his assignments. But no matter what he does, how much he protests, they remain waiting for him like a pile of unpaid bills. The example illustrates the need to develop a conceptual approach to exit as a motif of resistance.

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CAN EXIT BE THEORIZED AS A MODE OF RESISTANCE? In 2010, Jonathan Gotschall was sitting in a cubicle, thinking his career was ‘dead in the water’. Jonathan was in his late 30s, had a PhD, worked as an adjunct Professor in English, and paid $16,000 a year. As he paced about his office, he looked out the window and suddenly noticed something he had not seen before: Mark Sharder’s Academy of Mixed Martial Arts. In the shopfront display, two men inside a chain-linked metal cage were dancing, kicking, punching, and falling over: ‘they were so alive in their octagon while I was rotting in my cube’. It was then the idea suddenly came to him: ‘That’s how I’ll do it … That’s how I’ll get myself fired’. A few months later, he began training as a cage fighter at the Mark Sharder’s academy. He gradually built up his skills. A few years later Jonathan found himself in a cage in a Las Vegas hotel, face to face with a young man he had never met and who he was about to beat unconscious. Jonathan’s story represents a whole new genre of academic writing that has recently emerged called ‘quit lit’ (Bogost, 2015). A similar theme reoccurs in this literature. Most quitters report a deep investment in developing an academic career, train for decades, and sacrifice large parts of their lives for it. They become successful and suddenly get dejected with the extreme demands placed upon them by petty bureaucrats, excessive workloads, high levels of insecurity, increasingly meaningless work, impossible performance targets set by bosses who have never taught, and so on. Fighting back is no longer an option – they just want out. This desire to exit is not limited to academia. In other professions, the intention to quit seems to be rising. For instance, a recent survey of senior doctors in the UK found that 81% said they intended to retire from their jobs early due to increasing work pressures, stress, health problems, and relationship breakdowns caused by their jobs (The Guardian, 2015).

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The British Medical Council found that 57% of General Practitioners were considering leaving the profession (The Mirror, 2014a). Two-thirds of nurses say they would quit if they could (The Mirror, 2014b). Quit rates among lawyers in the US are so high there is an entire industry devoted to helping people to leave (The Atlantic, 2014). While each of these professions is different, they have all been the subject of increasing managerial demands and a work ethic that has destroyed all work/life balance. Let’s explore the various types of exits that may correspond with the rise of 24/7 capitalism.

Why Exit? Exit has been examined by social theorists and economists more generally. Hirschman’s (1970) classic treatment of the subject argues that exit remains a central means for communicating dissent in commercial organizations as well as some public sector organizations. He argues that people tend to exit when the life quality in a company declines past a point which they think is irreparable. The decision to exit typically occurs when the costs of voice are too high (maybe it will take too much effort or lead to severe sanctions), inefficacious (even if a member got their point across nothing would be done), and there are few reasons for staying (because there are better alternatives available and one is not particularly committed to an organization). On the surface, exit is a fairly straightforward phenomenon – it involves the ‘permanent movement away from the company’ (Withey and Cooper, 1989: 521). However, a deeper consideration led Hirschman to point out that exit may certainly include permanent exit with no possibility of return, but also temporary exit from the company followed by a return. To this we might add a range of other less perceptible forms of exit such absenteeism, lateness, and seeking a transfer (Farrell and Rusbult, 1992). Thus exit

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involves broader attempts to withdraw from work, either on a temporary or permanent basis. But how exactly ought we theorize exit in the context of the employment power relations we have examined in this chapter, namely 24/7 capitalism, where the entire self is enlisted? We now know that neo-managerialism succeeds when it makes work appear universal and unending: not only is there the increasing time spent at work, but also time thinking about work, preparing for work and so-forth. We suggest that forms of opposition are emerging that seek to reappropriate that time through exit, autonomy, and self-valorization. Because the neoliberal enterprise is so dependent on the self-management and self-reliance of employees (which transforms work into an endless exercise), that inbuilt autonomy might be valorized by workers themselves. In this sense, exit is just another way of describing the struggle to be left alone (see Hardt and Negri, 2000; Fleming, 2014a). Let us now examine some typical modes of exit in relation to the 24/7 work ethic.

Absence Perhaps the most obvious form of exit involves permanently absenting yourself from the organization. When we think of exiting an organization, one particular model comes to mind: quitting. Walking out of a job uses one of the very few formal freedoms any worker actually has: that is, to leave. These might be ‘noisy exits’ (Hirschman, 1970) or departures that are embittered but silent. Such silence may be enforced by a legal settlement or individuals wishing to avoid having their reputation and future opportunities ruined. And there are those who simply cannot be bothered making any noise. A well-established literature on job quitting argues it is often driven by employee dissatisfaction (Mobley, 1977). This dissatisfaction is typically underscored by a range of factors including high stress levels, low work

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group cohesion, a lack of autonomy, low satisfaction with leaders, feelings of distributional injustice, and a lack of promotional opportunities (Griffeth et al., 2000). Quitting may become a kind of social movement, such as those who consider themselves ‘downshifters’. These are people with high-status jobs seeking to forge a lifestyle they find more meaningful, authentic, and perhaps less stressful. A study of Australian downshifters found they were typically motivated to exit financially rewarding and highstatus roles in order to take on what they saw as more autonomous and authentic work (Tan and Tan, 2000). Often this process of downshifting is seen as a way of escaping from, or at least trying to reconfigure, the consumption–work nexus. One Finnish study of media texts about career change noted this pattern (LaPointe and Heilmann, 2014). Central to the exit narrative were phrases like ‘dreamcatching’ (pursuing a long-held passion or hobby) and ‘meaning-making’ (escaping what they see as a meaningless job). Downshifting is also interconnected with what some have dubbed the ‘the opt out revolution’. In her article on the topic Belkin (2003) argued that the formal equality which many women had was increasingly being interpreted as a sign that they should act just like men. According to Belkin, competitive career demands override other values special to women such as childrearing and life fulfillment endeavors. In a world where work becomes everything many choose to ‘opt out’ of professional careers to pursue motherhood, for example, instead. Belkin’s article has been the source of significant criticism. For instance, a comprehensive empirical study comparing female employment rates between 1960 and 2005 found a consistent rise in female participation in the workforce. Although there might be no full-blown trend of ‘opting out’, it seems to have created a pervasive and for some – an attractive – narrative (Grusky and Szelényi, 2007). Alongside permanent quitters is a population of people who would like to quit but do

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not or cannot. ‘Reluctant stayers’ (Hom et al., 2012) tend to show high levels of work avoidance behavior. They may turn up to work and clock in but instantly bunk off. Falling in between the quitters and the reluctant stayers are those employees who find ways to be absent from the job while successfully maintaining their office post. Sickness provides useful avenue for this, as Lucas (2010) noted in the example above. In the UK alone, the Office of National Statistics found that 131 million workdays are lost due to sickness absence in 2014. Some may temporarily depart work due to the lifestyle factors associated with high-stress jobs, including jobrelated depression, smoking, heavy drinking, drug abuse, and lack of exercise (Harrison and Martocchio, 1998)

Presenteeism Presenteeism is where people are actually at work, but not working (Johns, 2010). This may be due to illness (Aronsson and Gustafsson, 2005), for obvious reasons. But it may also be motivated by a feeling of disengagement with an overworked lifestyle. Actors may mentally exit but physically remain put. A Gallup survey found that world-wide, 64% of employees are ‘not engaged’ at work and 24% are ‘actively disengaged’ with their work. Some commentators have heralded the rise of ‘brown-out’ in the workplace where feelings of lethargy, meaninglessness, and low interest predominate. Many of the features associated with ‘brown out’ are center-pieces of the 24/7 workplace since the constant and inescapable presence of work cannot be totally filled with exciting and engaged work. Indeed, since work has become an all-encompassing lifestyle, it is resisted by exploiting these inevitable moments of ‘empty labor’ (Paulsen, 2014), mindlessly surfing the internet, playing video games, undertaking personal tasks, or even taking a nap. For example, Spicer (2015) noted how an overworked member of

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the UK parliament sat through a committee hearing for three hours playing Candy-Crush (a particularly idiotic computer game). Another example is presented by an academic when he described how: the point when I decided I didn’t care about that [academic] job any more was when I stopped turning off the sound on my computer games during office hours. There’d be some student waiting outside for feedback on his assignment and I was like, ‘wait, just let me finish killing this dwarf and I’ll get back to you’. (Graeber, 2015: 174)

This type of withdrawal is often driven by feelings of being swamped or overwhelmed by the job. For instance, one study found that when faced with difficult customers 72% of employees either left the workfloor or ignored the customer and started speaking with a fellow employee (Bailey, 1996). Another study found that bus drivers faced with difficult work situations often engaged in ‘surface acting’ (pretending they were engaged with their work) but then simultaneously withdraw, such as having colleagues do their job (Scott and Barnes, 2011). What this suggests is that jobs that require employees to be highly involved and psychologically present (even after they have formally checked out) and that provide no space to ‘let off steam’ can drive some to exit through psychological and physical withdrawal. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that many highinvolvement 24/7 workplaces which try to take over an employee’s entire life are also marked by high levels of withdrawal like endless computer games, or marathon internet shopping sprees during office hours.

Escapism A final and related mode of ‘exit as refusal’ involves what we will call escapism. This occurs when someone physically remains in an organization but imagines themselves elsewhere. The imagination becomes a vehicle for vacating the workplace and its pressures. There are certainly some overlaps here

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with presenteeism. However, escapism differs insofar as it involves crucial aspects of the imagination which can transform a boring work task into something else entirely. Typically, explorations of escapism have emphasized how cultural products such as television and now the internet or social media serves as an escape outside of work. The idea is that when you have clocked off work, you might withdraw into activities which take one far away from the demands of work. However, it is not just contemporary mass media which offers these cheap forms of escape. Tuan’s (2000) analysis of escapism charts the wide range of cultural texts that offer people an ability to picture themselves otherwise. Indeed, there are many leisure activities which have strongly escapist themes. Consider the example of tourism. Indeed on focusing on the intrinsic qualities of the special destination, the promise of a temporary escape from the dross of work is mostly emphasized. One UK-based budget airline company actually uses the slogan ‘escape’. Other more illicit forms of escapism include the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol as well as sexuality. These are practices which people feel will allow them to escape from the overwhelming demands of work (CederstrÖm and Fleming, 2012). The relationship between work and extrawork escapism has received some attention from researchers. In their melancholic masterpiece, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno (2008 [1944]) repeatedly note the close relationship between the total conformity demanded in the factory or office and the controlled release offered by popular culture. Such escapism seems recalcitrant but is actually only an extension of the rationalized system in disguise. This theme is echoed in John Jermier’s (1985) fictional portrayal of a factory worker who uses drugs and television to escape the production line. In one recent study, a consultant describes how alcohol abuse was actively encouraged in his company as a way to switch off after work:

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After you work 16 or 17 hours a day, paradoxically when you come home you can’t get any sleep … Thoughts keep turning in your head without being able to stop. So after a couple of days, I said I’m unable to fall asleep, and my colleagues said – well the best trick is when you come home, that is to the hotel of course, go over to the minibar and pull out all those little whisky bottles and then down them in one go. That usually helps. So drinking, even alcoholism, is very much encouraged in the company. (Cederström and Grassman, 2008: 49)

While there are many examples of people psychologically escaping once the workday is done, what is equally interesting are those employees who deploy similar methods on the job. Of course, there are the expected time-wasting activities like playing video games, watching movies, and surfing the net which happen in the office every day. However, more extreme forms of escape can also be found, including alcohol use (see Fleming, 2015). For example, drinking and taking drugs during a work shift were fairly normal occurrences at General Motors Freemont plant in California before it closed in 1982. One former employee described how ‘there was a lot of booze on the line’ and how he would ‘bring a thermos of screwdrivers with me’ to drink as he was on the line (see Langfitt, 2010). But the temptation to drink on the job is much stronger under conditions in which work is considered otherwise inescapable (see Fleming, 2015). Illicit substance abuse and sex on company time may also be used as a way of mentally ‘zoning out’ from a job that demands more and more of our selves and identities. The final form of escapism that links with the topic of exit and resistance is fantasy. In his seminal essay on the topic, Yiannis Gabriel (1995: 478) points out how most organizations have a ‘dreamworld where desires, anxieties and emotions find expression in highly irrational constructions’. According to Cederström and Spicer (2014) such fantasies can become horrific and used by employees to refuse work explicitly.

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These are often based on images of destruction, death, and immolation. For example, Cederström and Fleming (2012) mention a management consultant who dreamed his air flight to a client meeting some catastrophic fate in which there are no survivors. Then there is the CEO who admitted to his coach that ‘… I find myself actually hoping I’ll have a heart attack. At least it would be an honorable way out’ (Kibler, 2015). Or a contract worker in a distribution center who frequently fantasied about his warehouse being destroyed by a nuclear bomb (Southwood, 2011). In each of these rather violent fantasies, we find that the image of death and destruction becomes a means of escaping from what appears to be the unending demands of work.

CONCLUSION It is clear that the forms of exit we have analyzed above are perhaps not new. Absenteeism and quitting are as old as work itself. What we are suggesting is that this motif of exit gains special meaning under the present conditions of post-industrial work relations and neoliberal forms of governmentality. What we have called the 24/7 work ethic gives the idea of exit a specific set of political connotations that we suggest might be indicative of novel and emergent practices of resistance. Work has not only become increasingly precarious and difficult to find with the rising tide of unemployment. Moreover, the transformations of work we are referring to here are not only related to increased working hours or the advent of mobile technology that has extended of the logic of production into the private realm on an unprecedented level. What we refer to as the 24/7 work ethic – the subjective correlation to what Crary (2013) calls 24/7 capitalism – relates to the way in which our entire life processes become directly or indirectly framed by our jobs. As Cederström and Fleming (2012) put it, a job

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is no longer something we do among other things but is now something we are. The salient desire to exit enters the discourse of neoliberal work relations – particularly as a discourse of refusal and resistance – in a paradoxical manner in this sense. Under Fordism when work was still the conditions of work were fighting for and the self/job boundary was clear, the thought of exit would not really have made much sense. The point of resistance was to be included or have the system change in such a way that our inclusion entailed more favorable terms. However, when work becomes so all-encompassing, in which protest and dissatisfaction simply ‘feeds the beast’, as the faculty at Parker’s (2014) Euro Business School mentioned at the beginning of this chapter believed, then simply escape or exit seems like the only rational option. Herein lies the paradox. It is only when a job is experienced as inescapable that the theme of exit gains force. Perhaps this is yet another contradiction in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm, along with the celebration of personal freedom and the reality of forced work, the rise of liberating mobile technologies and the tyrannical realities of email and so many others. One can see that the exit strategies we outline lie along a conceptual continuing in which the most concrete form of escape – quitting – is then followed by increasingly more abstract tactics, with escapism being perhaps the most non-figurative of them all. We mention this because it perhaps provides a frame of reference for making some normative judgments about the effectiveness of each method of exit. It is tempting to suggest that the more concrete variants of exist are perhaps the more effective. This is especially so given that ‘escape fantasies’ potentially play into the ideology of neoliberalism more insidiously, allowing people to psychologically ‘let off steam’ and still put in long hours at the office. That may be true. But the continuum may have conceptual depth or a second dimension in which, for example, quitting is preceded by escape fantasies or presenteeism

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is practiced alongside absenteeism and soforth. To truly gauge the effectivess of exit we would have to hypothesize its success (or otherwise) against more traditional forms of resistance, in which organized inclusion (rather than exit) might have been enacted instead. In the case of Euro Business School, for example, it was clear that any vocal challenge simply provided a target for a rather aggressive form of managerialism. Inclusive resistance would be a danger option to pursue. So that leaves the choice of remaining silent and putting up with the new regime or departure. However, if there was a stronger union presence, a more strident form of direct action and so-forth, who knows? There are no ultimate standards to judge. Rather than get bogged down in these normative discussions, our chapter has simply sought to introduce the notion of exit into the research agenda and provide some preliminary guidance on how it might be approached by resistance scholarship. We certainly do not want to portray exit as some mysterious road to pure freedom, as has tended to happen with the notion of ‘exodus’ by the Italian autonomist school of researchers (see Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2009). On the other hand, we also do not think it is wise to dismiss exit as straight-out self-defeating. In the end, we hope that this emergent trend might attract more sustained attention so that a set of robust theories may shed light on this curious phenomenon.

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Roy, D. (1958) Banana time: job satisfaction and informal interaction. Human Organization, 18: 158–168. Scott, B. A. and Barnes, C. M. (2011) A multilevel investigation of emotional labor, affect, work withdrawal, and gender. Academy of Management Journal, 54(10): 116–136. Southwood, I. (2011) Nonstop Inertia. London: Zero Books. Spicer, A. (2015) MPs could do a lot worse than play Candy Crush in meetings. The Conversation. Available at http://theconversation.com/ mps-could-do-a-lot-worse-than-play-candycrush-in-meetings-35290 Spicer, A. and Böhm, S. (2007) Moving management: theorizing struggles against the hegemony of management, Organization Studies, 28(11): 1667–1698. Tan, H. H. and Tan, C. S. F. (2000) Toward the differentiation of trust in supervisor and trust in organization. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 126(2): 241–260. Tari, M. and Vanni, I. (2005) On the life and deeds of San Precario, patron saint of precarious workers and lives. Fibreculture Journal, issue 5 [Internet]. Available at http:// journal.fibreculture.org Thomas, R. and Davies, A. 2005. Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: new public management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organization Studies, 26(5): 683–706. Thompson, P. and Ackroyd, S. (1995) All quiet on the workplace front? A critique of recent

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trends in British industrial sociology. Sociology, 29(4): 615–633. Touraine, A. (1971) The Post-industrial Society. New York: Random House. Tuan, Y. F. (2000) Escapism. Baltimore, OH: John Hopkins University Press. Vaara, E. and Tenari, J. (2002) Justification, legitimization and naturalization of mergers and acquisitions: a critical discourse analysis of media texts. Organization, 9(2), 275–304. Walker, E. T., Martin, A. W. et al. (2008) Confronting the state, the corporation, and the academy: the influence of institutional targets on social movement repertoires. American Journal of Sociology, 114(1): 35–76. Wallerstein, M. and Western, B. (2000) Unions in decline? What has changed and why. Annual Review of Political Science, 3: 355–377. Western, M. and Rosenfeld, J. (2011) Unions, norms, and the rise in U.S. wage inequality. American Sociological Review, 76(4): 513–537. Withey, M. J. and Cooper, W. H. (1989) Predicting exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect. Administrative Science Quarterly, 34: 521–539. Wright, C. (2013) The Museum of illegal immigration: historical perspectives on the production of non-citizens and challenges to immigration control, in Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, edited by L. Goldring and P. Landolt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 31–54.

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PART II

Sites of Resistance

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6 The Body as a Site of Resistance Erynn Masi de Casanova and Afshan Jafar

INTRODUCTION: BODIES, RESISTANCE, AND POWER [L]ike norms, resistance is multifaceted. Scholars have theorized at length the many faces of resistance, involving lesser and greater degrees of intentionality and recognition by the many actors involved … We define embodied resistance, then, as oppositional action or nonaction that defies contextual body norms, and it comes in many forms. (Bobel and Kwan 2011: 2)

Many studies of bodies use gender as a primary lens. Feminist studies of the female body – historically a site of male domination – grapple with questions of power versus resistance, or agency versus submission. These studies often ask whether women’s body practices are best read as ‘false consciousness’, not in an economic sense, but in the sense of: (1) supporting the status quo that keeps women oppressed, and (2) identifying with the ideologies of the oppressor. Can women act as autonomous agents? Men’s bodies are also subject to social control, though in different ways than women’s bodies (Grosz 1994). Given their generally

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greater social and economic power, though, what constitutes resistance for men’s bodies? We follow in the footsteps of intersectional feminists who believe that there are important differences among men and women and not just between them. Intersectional feminists illustrate that our locations along various axes of identity (e.g., gender, race, class, sexuality), intersect to produce multiple layers of privilege and oppression, often simultaneously (Crenshaw 1989). Thus, it is impossible to think of embodied resistance in general, or offer a universal theory of embodied resistance, because no one is just a body or the body. At the same time, it is not enough to focus just on gender in studying the social construction of bodies. We all have intersecting identities associated with both ascribed and achieved characteristics. These multiple identities mean that our bodies are simultaneously individual and members of various collectives, and may be the sites of converging forms of oppression. A white, able-bodied, middle-class, heterosexual woman has different embodied experiences than a Latina, disabled, working-class, lesbian woman. The

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varied permutations of identities rooted in the body can motivate and express (individual and collective) resistance to the existing social order. We may be attuned to different social problems and grievances based on the type of body we are/have. In this way, embodied differences or similarities among people may make collective resistance less or more likely. This corporeal diversity brings us to an important point: embodied resistance has limits. As French social theorist Michel Foucault wrote, ‘nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis of self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (1977a: 153). Leaving aside the issue of Foucault’s sexist language, it is clear that our simply being/having human bodies cannot be the sole foundation for resistance. When power is internalized, individuals engage in self-surveillance. To illustrate this situation, Foucault draws on architect Jeremy Bentham’s model of the Panopticon, a prison in which all cells can be viewed from the guard tower and prisoners behave as if they were being watched at all times (despite not being able to see into the guard tower; Foucault 1977b). The totality of the Panopticon leads some scholars to claim that the Foucauldian theoretical ‘vocabulary’ may not be useful for speaking about ‘periodic refusals of control’ (Bartky 2010: 95). In this conception, power operating through social institutions produces ‘docile bodies’, as the human body is ‘the object, target, and instrument of power’ (Grosz 1994: 146). Foucault also theorized that power can produce resistance. Forms of resistance are ‘inscribed’ in power as its ‘irreducible opposite’ (Foucault 1978: 96). However, because power is diffuse rather than located in one place, person, or institution – Foucault uses the visual metaphor of a system of capillaries – it may be difficult for people to find a concrete target against which to resist. Since power does not act in a top-down manner, we are all implicated in power relations, and even the most revolutionary acts are embedded in these relations (Foucault 2003; see

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also Grosz 1994 and Pickett 1996). ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault 1978: 95). The power–resistance dialectic plays out on and through bodies. Feminists have criticized Foucault for writing ‘as if the bodies of men and women did not differ’ and failing to recognize that gendered forms of social discipline result in women’s bodies being made more docile than men’s (Bartky 2010: 79). Hence the fraught relationship between feminist intellectuals (politically committed to undoing male domination) and Foucault’s theories, which seem to shut down possibilities for collective and individual resistance. Scholars seem divided over whether and how resistance is possible, a debate that is complicated by the variations in how Foucault himself defined power and resistance over the course of his career (Pickett 1996). Some theorists who build on Foucault display slight optimism about the potential for resistance. Since power inevitably generates resistance, some norms (for example, gendered body norms) may be fruitfully resisted. Judith Butler (1990) argues that bodies become male or female through a set of iterative social, cultural, and psychological practices or ‘performances’. There is an element of spontaneity in every performance, which means that changing even seemingly minor details in our bodily enactment of gender can question the binary gender regime that positions men and women as polar opposites. Using these theories as a point of departure, our purpose in this essay is to explore the idea of the body as a site for resistance through a discussion of the scholarly literature and popular cultural trends related to bodies and embodiment. Rather than treating resistance as a binary, in which you are either engaged in resistance or not, we follow the lead of many recent researchers who acknowledge the complexity of resisting social and political control at, with, and through the body. Embodied actions may contain elements of both accommodation and

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resistance (MacLeod 1991; Weitz 2001), these actions may be read differently in different contexts, and what feels liberating for one individual may not lead to more widespread resistance or change (Braun 2010; Gagné and McGaughey 2010; Pitts 2003; Pitts-Taylor 2007). As we often tell our students, to their frustration, the answer to whether a particular bodily practice challenges norms and ideals is often: ‘it’s complicated’ or ‘it depends’ or ‘yes and no’. Our principal argument here is that context matters for understanding embodied resistance. and we echo the assertion of other scholars that ‘without attention to the specific cultural and historical context in which resistance takes place, the term [resistance] is “little more than an umbrella for phenomena that are superficially similar”’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 543, citing Korovkin 2000). Our discussion of the body and embodiment offers concrete examples of body practices that complicate common understandings of resistance and conformity. We’ve divided our analysis into subsections on (1) beauty, (2) body modification, (3) dress, and (4) protest, though these categories clearly overlap.

BEAUTY It is impossible to avoid a discussion of beauty ideals, especially for women, when talking about the body. It is often the very first thing that students in our courses think about when discussing the body. The oppressiveness and restrictiveness of beauty ideals is something that most of us are intimately familiar with. Dieting, working out, running, skipping dessert, are all acts that have become normalized for many people. But are beauty ideals as ubiquitous and universal as they seem? Are people engaged in resisting beauty ideals? If so, how? Can conforming to beauty ideals also be an act of resistance? There is much research that reveals that the white ideal of a thin, blonde, young, almost girlish, woman is not one that has

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appeal across different ethnic groups or globally. African-American women, for instance, often report higher body satisfaction than their white peers (Duke 2000; Lovejoy 2001; Parker et  al. 1995). This is in part because they do not see the white ideal as applicable to them, so they tend to reject it. Women of color may focus more on style, or attributes that they feel are more representative of their ethnic groups. One of us also documented this pattern of emphasizing style and engaging in supportive appearance-related interactions among young Latin American women (Casanova 2004). Across the ocean, in India, we see what initially appears to be an acceptance of the white, skinny ideal. Women in Bollywood films are often lighterskinned, and are significantly thinner than they used to be (Jafar 2012). Yet, as Talukdar (2012) reveals, there are fissures in this ideal. Talukdar discusses the ‘thin but not skinny ideal’ among young women in India. Although these women are quite preoccupied with dieting and losing weight, they also reject the ultra-thin western ideal of a beautiful body. Instead, their views are shaped by family practices and Indian traditions in addition to western ideas of beauty. As we discuss these examples above, we should ask: Is this resistance because it rejects western or white ideals? Or is it conformity and accommodation because it still upholds the ideals of a particular group? Are women conforming to what the cultural beauty ideal is within their communities as they reject white, western ideals? One example of women actively conforming to western beauty ideals complicates this picture further and raises the question of whether such conformity can be an act of rebellion. Karim (2013) discusses the phenomenon of rhinoplasty (nose jobs) in Iran as just that. She argues that in Iran, where western ideals are explicitly rejected by the government and women have to follow a strict dress code, a nose job becomes a way for women (and some men) to take a defiant stand against the anti-western sentiments of the government

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and the strict control of bodies and appearance. In this way, a nose job communicates the message: ‘I own my body, I own my nose. And I can alter my nose myself if I please’ (Karim 2013: 56). Both of the examples above – dieting in India and rhinoplasty in Iran – actively reject certain ideologies while upholding a different set of ideologies and norms. These examples point to the importance of understanding these practices through an intersectional lens. Dieting for a white, middle-class American woman does not hold the same meaning as for a brown-skinned, middle-class Indian woman. Similarly, we cannot transpose our understanding of nose jobs from California to Iran without acknowledging that the particular context and location of the actors changes the meaning of the act. Further, both cases show that resistance and conformity/accommodation are much more complex than a binary framework allows. We can see elements of both resistance and accommodation in these actions or practices. While some ethnic and racial groups may allow for more flexibility regarding the thin ideal, disgust for fat and fatness are ubiquitous in the US (Solovay and Rothblum 2009). Fat – talking about it, demonizing it, worrying about it – seems to be one of our major pastimes (Farrell 2011; Greenhalgh 2015; Nichter 2000). Embracing fat and fatness, then, becomes one of the most overtly political acts of embodied resistance. Disgust for fat is something that we see in minority communities as well as dominant groups. For instance, men who are generally considered beautiful in the gay community are young, thin or muscular, and hairless. Gay men who are fat (known as ‘big men’ or ‘chubs’) and those who are hairy and fat (known as ‘bears’) have often been marginalized within the gay community. In response, big, hairy, gay men and their admirers (‘chasers’) started forming their own communities. The first Girth and Mirth Clubs (social organizations for big men) were started in the 1970s and the first bear

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clubs started in the 1980s (Pyle and Klein 2011). These clubs are now part of associations that organize national and local events such as pool parties, bar parties, sex and bathhouse parties, and other social events. It is in the very public nature of these events and clubs that the fat and hairy gay man’s body, as well as its appeal to the chaser, challenge the dominant gay ideal of an attractive and sexy male body. ‘In effect, the self-presentation of big men and bears proclaims, “I am fat and gay and I love it!” … Similarly the public sexualization of fat or hairy male bodies by chasers contests cultural codes of beauty and sexuality’ (Pyle and Klein 2011: 83; see also Whitesel 2014). Body hair on gay men isn’t the only kind of hair that is political. For African-American women, hair has a long political history (Banks 2000; Craig 2002; Patton 2010; Rooks 1996). In 2012, 16-year-old gymnast Gabby Douglas, competing in the Olympics, became the first African-American woman to win the individual all-around competition and also helped the US win its first team gold since 1996. Yet the chatter on social media wasn’t about her amazing accomplishments. It was about her hair. Many saw her hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail with some extra clips to keep it in place, as unkempt. This debate reminds us how, for a long time, AfricanAmerican women’s hair has been divided into ‘good’ hair and ‘bad’ hair. Despite wearing straight extensions, Douglas was revealing ‘bad hair’ growing out underneath the extensions. As Banks (2000: 2) discusses: Hair matters in black communities, and it matters in different ways for women and men. For black women in this society, what is considered desirable and undesirable hair is based on one’s hair texture. What is deemed desirable is measured against white standards of beauty, which include long and straight hair (usually blonde), that is, hair that is not kinky or nappy. Consequently, black women’s hair, in general, fits outside of what is considered desirable in mainstream society.

In such an environment, simply letting your hair grow without intervention is an

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act of rebellion. This is why natural hair (hair that has not been chemically treated or straightened) was an important part of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Craig 2002). However, we must keep in mind that while an Afro or natural hair hardly ever contradicts definitions of masculinity, it does go against norms of femininity that pressure black women to straighten their hair to be considered respectable (Craig 2002). Thus, underscoring the importance of an intersectional lens, we see that the same act can have different meanings and costs for men and women. While hair takes on heightened importance for African–American women, hair, for women in general, is an important aspect of identity. Weitz (2001) documents the various ways that women seek power through resisting or accommodating mainstream hairstyles. She discusses women who opt for power via traditional strategies (accommodating mainstream ideas of attractiveness such as long hair; hair that is dyed blonde or red; hair that is dyed to cover up gray hair) and women who seek power through non-traditional strategies (rejecting or resisting mainstream ideas of attractiveness by choosing very short hair, gray hair, hair that is covered up, dreadlocks or Afros). Ultimately, she argues, both strategies face limitations when analyzed through the lens of resistance. Women who employ traditional strategies, often do so actively to gain (sexual) power over men. Yet Weitz believes that in order for it to be labeled resistance, an act should not just be personally empowering, but should also challenge cultural ideals that support subordination. In the case of women who opt for traditional strategies, Weitz argues that while they gain individual power, their actions do not challenge women’s subordination, nor do they challenge the idea that a woman’s worth is defined by her beauty. On the other hand, women who opt for non-traditional strategies, while certainly engaged in resistance by challenging mainstream beauty ideals, still place women’s bodies at the center of these power

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struggles and possibly pit women against each other (e.g., if women with short hair are empowered, then those with long hair are not). Furthermore, though Weitz does not discuss how women may compensate for very short hair by playing up femininity in other ways, anecdotal data suggests that might be the case. That is, a heterosexual woman who cuts her hair short, may start to wear more makeup, or dress in more typically feminine ways, in order to emphasize her femininity and her heterosexual status. Considering the time and money women spend on removing body hair, it’s safe to say there is more at stake than simply aesthetics. Women’s body hair is another example of how inaction can be interpreted as rebellion (Herzig 2015). As Fahs and Delgado (2011) document, the costs of growing body hair for women are many. They are seen as dirty, gross, unappealing, and manly. These costs are heightened for women of color and for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, who already fall short of the white, middle-class ideal of femininity (Fahs and Delgado 2011). Here again, the same act of rebellion can have different consequences depending on the actors’ location and their various intersecting identities. Fahs and Delgado discuss Lupe, a woman of color who did not want to reinforce stereotypes of women of color as ‘unkempt’ or dirty, saying ‘I come from a family that didn’t have much money, and to let yourself go is going against everything I have been taught. I’m always careful about coming across as respectable and clean, just so I don’t confirm all of those stereotypes people have of me as dirty and low class’ (2011: 19). On the other hand, lesbian and bisexual women in this study worried about ‘outing’ themselves by growing body hair, thus exposing themselves in a way that heterosexual women didn’t have to (Fahs and Delgado 2011). This is similar to Weitz’s (2001: 674) study of women’s hairstyles, where she reports that ‘Erica, a young lesbian, explained that her long hair allows her to pass as heterosexual and thus

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has helped her get and keep jobs’. The desire to not grow body hair or the act of not cutting one’s hair short is not simply about conformity, but rather aims to avoid further marginalization. The examples above of hair (including body hair), weight, and plastic surgery all point to the complex nature of conformity and resistance to beauty ideals, and the importance of avoiding simplistic divisions between the two. These examples show why it is impossible to think of resistance and accommodation as a binary and why any analysis of specific practices is incomplete without an accompanying analysis of the intersecting identities and locations of the actors who engage in them. Once we start investigating the contexts within which each act or practice is embedded, we understand the multiple meanings that each is imbued with.

BODY MODIFICATION Can modifying the body be a form of resistance? Can we distinguish between types of body modification that are resistant or counter-hegemonic and those that are not? Or is every act of embodied resistance tinged with aspects of conformity and compliance? If we think of a newborn baby’s body, everything that is done to that body can be considered a modification: clothing, grooming, circumcision, and many other practices. This early body modification doesn’t help us answer our questions about resistance and individual agency, however, as babies are powerless to choose or refuse such interventions. Because socially motivated changes to the physical body begin at, or even before, birth, Elizabeth Grosz argues that ‘it is problematic to see the body as a blank, passive page, a neutral “medium” or signifier for the inscription of a text’ (1994: 156). For this essay, we define body modification as intentional changes made to the body, and we are

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primarily concerned with such practices in contemporary capitalist societies (as opposed to ‘primitive’ forms of ‘body inscription’ [see Grosz 1994 on the work of Alphonso Lingis]). Within this category, we will focus on three types of body modification that inspire debates over whether they are resistant or conformist: (1) elective (aesthetic) cosmetic surgery; (2) tattooing and piercing; and (3) modifications related to disabilities and body weight. Although humans have always adorned themselves and altered their bodies, some current body modification is associated with new technologies. Because of these connotations of modernity, men and women in so-called developing countries may practice certain body modifications to claim membership in today’s globalized world. Body modification has become important for individual identity and social interaction as the body comes to dominate our concepts of personhood and the self (Giddens 1991; Gimlin 2002; Shilling 2003). People devote a lot of time to ‘body projects’, activities that remake the body and communicate who we are (or want to be) to others; the body modifications we discuss here are often part of larger body projects (Shilling 2003). Body projects are subject to moral evaluations, and may be judged by those around us as good/necessary or bad/illegitimate/over-the-top. Most people are not willing to tattoo their face, as former boxer Mike Tyson did, and then say ‘You don’t like it, don’t look at it. It’s my face. Fuck you!’ (Tallerico 2013). Body modifications do not send unequivocal messages that we can control. Multiple meanings exist, and context matters, as anyone who has covered up a tattoo or piercing for a job interview can attest. Cosmetic surgery, especially on women’s bodies, is often viewed by feminists as a capitulation to unrealistic demands of feminine beauty (Kaw 1993; Pauly Morgan 1991). Even scholars who see women’s choice of aesthetic surgery as an exercise of individual agency emphasize the social

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constraints within which this choice is made (Davis 1995; Gagné and McGaughey 2010; Pitts-Taylor 2007). At best, such surgery is seen as a sensible reaction to extreme pressures on women to be physically normal (if not perfect). Women who opt for many surgeries or more radical surgeries may be seen as addicts and failed women (Pitts-Taylor 2007). Atypical surgical modifications of the body, however, are often viewed by scholars as forms of resistance. In this vein, academics have been fascinated by female French performance artist Orlan, who undergoes elective surgical procedures as a form of social commentary, pushing the boundaries of acceptable embodiment (e.g., by getting implants at the edges of her forehead; Jones 2008). Though less shocking than Orlan’s body projects, men’s consumption of aesthetic surgery may also be seen as challenging traditional stereotypes of masculinity that denigrate men who are concerned with their physical appearance (Gill et  al. 2005). To avoid the feminine connotations of surgery, though, most men justify going under the knife as a strategic decision to improve their career opportunities (Davis 2002). Gender confirmation surgery, formerly known as sex reassignment, is an elective surgery that raises unique questions about resistance. Whereas feminist research tends to criticize cisgender women’s1 cosmetic surgery, there is disagreement about the meanings of trans (transgender or transsexual) bodies going under the knife. People who surgically alter their bodies to cross gender boundaries are often labeled transsexual (Crawley et  al. 2008: 26). On one hand, in getting sex-change surgeries, transsexuals resist the imposition of biological sex categories, choosing sex for themselves. In making this choice, they rebel against the sex they were assigned at birth, and perhaps against the concomitant gendered social expectations. On the other hand, some trans people who choose surgery could be seen as upholding the traditional binary sex/gender order by transforming their bodies from male to

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female or female to male. Is it conservative, even reactionary, to assume that men must have penises and women must have vaginas? In the US healthcare system, trans people must use standardized language in order to receive psychologists’ or psychiatrists’ approval for sex reassignment surgery (Windsor 2011). For example, they are often pressured to say that they feel they were born in the wrong body, or to live as a person of their desired gender for a given period of time before seeking surgery (Windsor 2011). Rather than choosing physical sex characteristics a la carte from a menu of options, trans people encounter a rigid binary male–female system with little tolerance or awareness of within-sex body variations (Crawley et  al. 2008). Thus at the individual level, a person may choose gender confirmation surgery to resist their originally assigned sex, but this may do little to challenge biologically-based gender norms at the macro level. Body modification includes processes such as tattooing, piercing, and scarification. These are not new techniques for marking the human body, although the technology used to make these marks has evolved to include earpiercing guns and electric tattoo machines. The changing significance of body modifications across historical periods is evidence of social construction. Fifty years ago, for example, tattoos were for bikers, sailors, or prisoners. Today, they are acceptable bodily adornments for suburban soccer moms, though heavily tattooed people still experience stigma in many social settings (Anastasia 2013). Piercing has experienced a contemporary renaissance in the Global North, moving beyond simple gender-conforming earrings on women2 to encompass larger-gauge holes and jewelry and a plethora of body parts (e.g., navels, genitals, eyebrows, lips). Both women and men engage in these practices. Alternative body modification subcultures have emerged in recent decades, with the growing, yet far from widespread, popularity of practices such as branding and other forms of scarification (Pitts 2003). Pitts argues that,

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while we should not discount the subversive and highly personal meanings that body modifiers assign to their own practices (e.g., reclaiming the body after rape or abuse), these individuals cannot control how others view their marked bodies. They exert control over the appearance of their bodies, but may still experience stigma based on others’ perceptions of them. The modified body may have a semiotic function, but as Goffman (1969) would put it, the messages that are ‘given off’ might be different than those that are intended. Some groups of people create collective identities based on both bodily traits and the shared experience of social rejection. Two examples of such groups are Deaf3 communities and fat activists. With the emergence of new techniques for modifying bodies, these communities face new challenges and threats to collective identity. Many Deaf leaders and activists oppose cochlear implants (CI), electronic devices that bypass the ear by sending sounds directly to the auditory nerve. They argue that converting deaf people into hearing people erases their identity; the word ‘genocide’ has even been used to describe the threat of CIs to the Deaf community. CIs also support an unequal system in which spoken language is seen as inherently superior to signed language (Mauldin 2011). Yet people are motivated to obtain CIs, not only to hear sounds or make their bodies more ‘normal’, but also because contemporary societies value body projects and practices that are seen as improving or optimizing the performance of the human body. Similar issues have arisen in fat activist circles with the increased availability of weight-loss surgeries such as Lap-Band or gastric bypass (Farrell 2011). The social value placed on body projects and thinness, and the association of healthy living with moral correctness, pressure even those who have politicized their fat bodies to pursue such surgical interventions (Farrell 2011). Can they still be members of fat-positive social groups after weight-loss surgery?

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While body modifications (e.g., cosmetic surgery, cochlear implants) can be seen as assertions of identity, they may also be viewed as symbolically shunning a previous identity and divorcing the individual from a particular minority subculture or other social group. Bodies may be seen by other people as resisting or conforming to social norms depending on one’s social position and the context. Scholars tend to see these practices as simultaneously embodying acceptance of some particular body ideals and rejection of others. Changing individual bodies may relieve the suffering associated with corporeal stigma, yet without changing the larger social systems that categorize and degrade bodies with supposedly undesirable characteristics. Individual body modifiers have agency as they shape and alter their physiques, yet their actions do not usually change social structures at the macro level. Braun (2010: 1403) makes this argument when discussing the phenomenon of female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS), whose rise is often tied to the increased mainstream popularity of pornography: [FGCS] can potentially relieve the distress an individual woman feels and may even improve her self-esteem and sex life … At the same time, however, the promotion of this intervention is creating a situation that is worse for women overall, one in which women have yet another body worry and a particular genital norm to live up to. In this way, it can be seen as disempowering for women as a group.

DRESS Often viewed as superficial and unimportant, dress and particular items of clothing are anything but. From Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits to Sarah Palin’s skirts, from hoodies to hijabs, from SlutWalk getups to burqas to Gothloli fashion, we can no longer relegate dress to the realm of the frivolous. Dress matters. As Reger notes, ‘dress as a form of political protest blends individual subjectivity and culture

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by signifying one’s membership in a group or sub-culture’ (2012: 210). Dress can be a way that marginalized groups declare their membership and strengthen their sense of community, a way that people resist laws imposed on them by a government or colonial power, or a way for groups to draw attention to restrictive or unfair social norms by explicitly rejecting them. The hijab (headscarf worn by some Muslim women, often referred to as a veil) is a particularly interesting item of clothing when viewed through the lens of resistance. Wearing the hijab is seen as an illustration of Muslim women’s oppression in western media, and public perceptions of the practice reflect this media construction (Stabile and Kumar 2005). Yet, looking at the history of the practice and its current resurgence, we get a very different picture. The history of the hijab is complicated precisely because it has never had a uniform or universal meaning. In nineteenth-century Egypt, veiling was a sign of status and wealth – a marker of privilege (Ahmed 2011). In some other countries, like Pakistan, the hijab wasn’t really worn at all until the last couple of decades, but the burqa (head to toe covering) was worn mostly by working-class women. By the 1940s and 1950s, the hijab was hardly seen in Egypt (Ahmed 2011), yet towards the end of the twentieth century, it had made a comeback (MacLeod 1991; Mahmood 2011). The French colonizers in Algeria and the English in Egypt saw the hijab as a sign of backwardness and oppression (Scott 2007). In the early 1990s, young Indonesian women living in Java voluntarily donned veils (called jilbab) to express a cosmopolitan, global Muslim identity that they saw as modern rather than traditional (Brenner 1996). The history of veiling reveals that the hijab (or its local variation) has been adopted by women to show resistance to colonial power and local governments and that it has been taken off and rejected by women when it has been imposed by the state. This was the case in Iran: in 1936, the country’s political

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leader Reza Shah banned the wearing of veils, a move that was protested, especially by working-class women. In 1979, after the Islamic Revolution, the wearing of veils was mandated by law – a move that was protested again by women (especially during the first couple of years; Shilandari 2010). Contemporary debates over the use of the hijab show that western attitudes haven’t changed much. French politician Nicolas Sarkozy referred to it as a sign of ‘subservience and debasement’ (Chrisafis 2009). So why do we see a resurgence in this practice? Once we stop seeing the hijab as a backward or oppressive practice and place it firmly in the modern context, where it belongs, we see how it is deployed as resistance by disenfranchised Muslim youth in large parts of the western world. In 2004 France banned the use of headscarves in all schools. We have seen similar discussions and concern around veiling in most other European countries, as well as in Canada, Australia, and the US. For many European nations, banning veils of all kinds is a symbolic stand against the perceived threat of Islam. Yet these moves further marginalize already disenfranchised immigrant populations. Thus, some young women, even against the wishes of the older generations, take on the headscarf as a symbolic gesture of solidarity and pride in their identity (Killian 2003; Williams and Vashi 2014).4 As Scott states, ‘in England, where the niqab, which covers a woman’s entire face except for her eyes, was the focus of controversy … the number of wearers is tiny, though BBC news reported an increase in sales of niqabs in response to ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw’s proposal to ban them’ (2007: 3). Clearly, the increased appeal of hijabs or niqabs cannot simply be explained as a rise in religiosity among Muslims. Ironically, some young Muslim women are using the very thing that western media portrays them as having no control over – their bodies – to take a political stand. In 2012, after Trayvon Martin, a young African–American man, was shot and killed

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in Florida by a neighborhood watch member, a discussion arose around hoodies (hooded sweatshirts) that has some commonalities with the hijab debates. As more and more people discussed whether Martin presented himself suspiciously by wearing a hoodie, the hoodie became imbued with symbolic significance and was adopted as a form of protest. Social groups came together around a shared notion of marginalization. After the death of Martin, and the brutal beating and murder of a hijab-wearing Muslim immigrant woman named Shaima Alawadi in California,5 many college campuses organized ‘hoodies and hijabs’ protests (Balekdjian 2012). More recently, hoodies entered the news again when an Oklahoma Senator proposed a bill that would bar people from wearing a robe, hood, or mask in public. In response, several Oklahoma pastors planned a ‘hoodie protest’ and a ‘Wear-A-Hoodie-To-Church’ campaign, for which they encouraged people (pastors included) to come to church wearing hoodies (Mintz 2015). Race and class matter for the social construction of the hoodie. When wealthy white Silicon Valley executives like Mark Zuckerberg wear hoodies, they are seen as resisting traditional business norms, but are not criminalized (Casanova 2015). What we see in the case of these items is that stigmatized clothing can be adopted by marginalized groups as a form of political resistance. The wearers of these items are asserting their right as residents of these nations to cover or uncover their bodies as they please. The recent international phenomenon of SlutWalks offers another interesting example of the power of clothing as a form of resistance.6 Started in Toronto, Canada in 2011 because of a comment made by a police officer about women’s responsibility to not dress like ‘sluts’ in order to prevent sexual assault, SlutWalks quickly spread to other countries, including the US, Germany, England, Ireland, Indonesia, India, China, Peru, and Brazil. The idea behind SlutWalks is to challenge the culture of slut-shaming and the belief

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that women invite rape by what they wear. SlutWalks, as popular as they have been, have been contentious, even within feminist communities. There are many who believe that by using the word ‘slut’ and by dressing in ‘slutty’ clothes (although marchers are free to wear any kind of clothing), women are really just playing into the demands of a hypersexualized culture in which they feel pressure to be ‘sexually available’ (Dines and Murphy 2011). However, others argue that although SlutWalks may not be challenging structural inequality, they are bringing unprecedented attention to larger cultural messages about women’s bodies and sexuality (Valenti 2011). Kapur (2012: 13) argues that in the case of India, even though some see SlutWalks and the somewhat comparable Pink Chaddi [Pink Underwear] Campaign as an irrelevant ‘western’ phenomenon or a ‘middle-class indulgence’, SlutWalks and Pink Chaddi have called the dominant activism around rape in India into question.7 Attempts to change rape laws have ended up reinforcing the notion of women as victims only, rape as dishonor (instead of a crime against women), and sex/ sexuality as something dirty and shameful, according to Kapur (2012). So in some ways, ‘SlutWalks and Pink Chaddis put women’s sexuality out there – in public – not as something that is shameful, embarrassing or disgusting, but as something that a healthy society should embrace, respect and defend’ (Kapur 2012: 17–18). Through the phenomenon of SlutWalks and Pink Chaddis, we see feminists grapple with a theme that surfaces repeatedly in discussions of the body: Is this resistance or accommodation? Are women upholding the status quo or challenging it? And once again, we see that the answers to these questions are complicated. While it seems that on the one hand, the bodily presentation of SlutWalk protesters plays into the demands of a hypersexualized culture, the demand that all women deserve to be free of harassment challenges oppressive cultural ideals. To complicate the picture further, we caution readers to think about what kinds of

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bodies are left out of these protests, and what kinds of bodies are deemed worthy of display in a protest. That stigmatized items of clothing can serve as a political statement is clear enough. But what about clothing that conforms to traditional ideals? Can that ever be subversive? An excellent example of the complexity behind this question is the rise of the Gothic and Lolita (G & L) movement in Japan, or GothLoli for short, which is part of the Lolita movement that emerged in Japan in the 1990s (Monden 2008). GothLoli is a combination of the words ‘Gothic’ and ‘Lolita’ used to ‘designate a young woman whose image is inspired by little girls’ fashions of the Rococo, Romantic, and Victorian periods, and is signified by her child/doll-like appearance’ (Bernal 2012: 118).8 Not only does the GothLoli look like a doll herself, she also plays with dolls, and designs and makes clothes for dolls. Because of the emphasis on cuteness (frills, ruffles, petticoats, umbrellas), and childlike behavior, it would be easy to write this off as an act of extreme conformity to traditional ideas of subservient femininity. However, as with other practices that we discuss in this chapter, studying the context within which the GothLoli enacts and embodies her identity changes how we understand this practice. As Bernal (2012) points out, many analysts see GothLoli culture as a rebellion against traditional expectations of adulthood and especially womanhood. The GothLoli, in fact, often incites ridicule or contempt, especially because she is seen as rejecting Japanese ideals of womanhood. The GothLoli rejects sexuality, marriage, adulthood, responsibility, family, and the ideal womanly body, by refusing to grow up. However, there is no denying that although the GothLoli image is not meant to entice or attract, it is reminiscent of the little-girl look in pornography and thus problematic. According to Pinckard (quoted in Bernal 2012: 129), the image is still rebellious, as it conveys ‘we are dolls … but don’t play with us. We bite … [I]t’s a “screw you” to creepy older men who might fetishize the Lolita’.

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There is one other aspect of GothLoli culture worth noting: it is an urban subculture of girls and young women. This is unusual, as popular perceptions and academic research reinforce the idea of urban subcultures as masculine. But when the GothLoli steps out, frills and all, onto the city streets of Japan, it is hard to overlook her. This discussion of clothing and dressed bodies reveals a basic sociological idea: reality is not inherent in a particular object or practice. A hoodie, a hijab, fishnet stockings, or a pink chaddi, is nothing more than a piece of cloth. It is the meaning constructed around the material object, and its use by particular bodies, that gives it the ability to become a marker of resistance. But because the meaning constructed around an object or practice varies from one context to another, it is difficult, if not impossible, to say with certainty that a particular way of dressing, or a particular item of clothing, is always about conformity or resistance. And feminist research encourages us to accept the idea that embodied practices can be simultaneously resistant and conformist.

PROTEST What besides bodies can resist? It is my body that marches in demonstrations, my body that goes to the polls, my body that attends rallies, my body that boycotts, my body that strikes, my body that participates in work slowdowns, my body that engages in civil disobedience. Individual bodies are requisite for collective political action. Whether engaging in the macropolitics of collective struggle, or in the micropolitics of individual resistance, it is bodies that resist. And this resistance, like power, comes from everywhere – from social movements, from alternative discourses, from accidents and contingencies, from gaps between various ways of thinking, from gross material inequality, and from recognizable asymmetries of power. (McLaren 2002: 116)

What about the role of bodies in actual political resistance, within or outside organized social movements? All protesters have bodies, and may use them to make political

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statements, yet bodies are surprisingly invisible in much of the literature on social movements, which tends to focus on structural and organizational aspects, or on outcomes (Hohle 2010). Embodied protest, which could also be called ‘physical resistance’, may ‘include behaviors as dramatic as violence or as subtle as working slowly, feigning sickness … or stealing from one’s employer’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 536). In her study of women’s resistance in neoliberal Argentina, sociologist Barbara Sutton (2010) lays out five ways that bodies matter in social movement and political protest. Using these five dimensions, we discuss how resistance can occur through the use of the body, providing historical and contemporary examples of embodied resistance with a political purpose. 1 Political protest is performed by human beings who have/are bodies. This seemingly obvious point is often neglected in studies of social movements. Recent activism in the United States has made strategic use of protesters’ bodies as a tactic. We see this in the ‘die-ins’ used to call attention to the killing of young black men by police. Die-ins have occurred in several US cities in the wake of widely publicized cases in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and elsewhere. In another example, an individual action by one Columbia University student, carrying around a mattress to protest the school’s handling of her allegation of rape, led other student activists at Columbia and around the world to pick up mattresses in solidarity. Even the most straightforward and time-honored social movement activity, the protest march, depends on the ability of bodies to move from one point to another, and on hands to carry signs or other items. 2 Bodies may be used in protests to convey symbolic messages. Whether they are dressed in attention-getting ways, painted on, or placed in specific postures, human bodies’ semiotic capabilities are often explored and exploited by activists. In the fight against the British colonial regime, for example, Nigerian women protested by baring their breasts and other body parts (Bastian 2005). Their purpose was to shock and shame the British colonizers and

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their indigenous helpers. This tactic of using, or simply threatening, nakedness, has also been used by Nigerian women in more recent protests against multinational oil companies (Bastian 2005). The twenty-first-century immigrants’ rights movement in the US has also used bodies to symbolize commitment to hard work and American identity, as seen in protesters’ wearing work vests and carrying American flags. Of course, messages conveyed by protesting bodies may be read in multiple ways. Observers of an immigrant march in the US may be offended by the use of the flags of immigrants’ home countries alongside American flags. Similarly, there is no way to keep viewers of a body-baring protest (for example, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ ‘I’d rather be naked than wear fur’ campaign) from being sexually aroused or amused by this display. Nevertheless, in these and other protest actions, the body is intended to visually symbolize political stances or ideas. 3 Protesters’ bodies have needs and may be seen as fragile. Organizing protests, even for a small number of people, involves thinking about the physical needs of the protesters. If the political action goes on for hours, days, or weeks, the participants need food and toilets, places to rest, and protection from the elements. During occupations of public space, as seen recently in Egypt’s Tahrir Square or Occupy Wall Street (in Manhattan and other parts of the US), activists’ bodies have needs that cannot be ignored and are usually met through cooperation and collaboration, though there may also be tensions and conflicts among activists. Such cooperation and collaboration have often been part of Latin American social movements, with the establishment of ollas populares (community kitchens) nourishing protesters while also building solidarity and reaffirming social networks (Sutton 2010). 4 Protest involves emotions, which are embodied. Recently, sociologists have addressed the role of emotions in social movements (Goodwin et  al. 2001). Studies of social movements that attend to emotions, however, often stop short of considering affect (the ways that emotion is felt and expressed in the body). Emotions can motivate people to protest, and emotions must also be managed during and after protest. In addition, protest may evoke strong emotions in nonparticipants. For example, the effectiveness of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers

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of disappeared persons in Argentina, depended not only on their successful embodiment of traditional, appropriate femininity, but also on the emotional reactions of those who saw them silently marching while holding photographs of their missing relatives (Taylor 1997). Israeli women protesting the occupation of Palestine in recent decades, members of a group called the Women in Black, had to work to control their emotions in the face of verbal abuse by people passing by (Sasson-Levy and Rapoport 2003). In contrast to these silent protests, some social movement actions involve loud demonstrations of feeling. Organizers hype up the crowd and activists make noise with their voices, musical instruments, and other items (e.g., bullhorns, pots and pans). Protesters moving their bodies as they march or chant may feel a collective sense of euphoria. Bodies are relevant to protest because they are the vehicles through which emotion is displayed or dissimulated. 5 The number of bodies involved in protest may affect success and visibility. Gathering many bodies together in one space can make a powerful political statement. For instance, the sheer number of bodies occupying the National Mall in Washington, DC during Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963 made support for civil rights reforms visible. It may be easy for authorities (governments, employers, etc.) to ignore small groups of protesters, but a huge picket line is a public relations problem that demands attention. The uprisings collectively known as the Arab Spring (in 2010–2011) demonstrated that actions involving many bodies protesting in public, even when those bodies are not armed, can threaten political regimes and force change. Social movement and labor organizations spend much time, energy, and money recruiting participants and securing enough protesting bodies to draw the attention of those in power. Political parties, who may be part of the formal political establishment, are also aware of the power of many bodies brought together in public, and these organizations use rallies and other gatherings to push for reform or embody opposition to their foes.

Sutton (2010) thus provides a useful way to classify and analyze the social dynamics of embodied political resistance. We propose adding two more aspects of bodies in

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political protest. First, scholars have largely overlooked forms of protest that result in the destruction of the body. Related to Sutton’s (2010) claim that protesters’ bodies are sometimes constructed as fragile, we think it is important to consider acts that damage or destroy the human body. This category of embodied resistance includes, for example, public self-immolation by opponents of the war in Vietnam or the Chinese occupation of Tibet,9 or hunger strikes that may end in death (recently in the news were fasting prisoners in California and Guantánamo). Perhaps the most extreme examples of bodily protest, these acts are shocking and sobering, revealing the total commitment of the activists to getting their message out. They are willing to die to draw attention to what they see as a serious injustice. Protesters of this type may see themselves as sacrificing their own lives to save the lives of others. Second, protest often requires a minimum of physical stamina and ability: it is taxing on the body to march, sit in, stand in public, shout, and so on. For this reason, many social movement activities are conducted by able-bodied adults or youth. What does this narrowed definition of protest mean for those who cannot physically stand up for themselves, who are disabled, very old, or very young? If their grievances are to be publicized through social movement, they may have to depend on allies or representatives to do some of the physical work of protest, or to help them do this work. More empirical research on modes of protest for these populations is needed.

CONCLUSION: BEYOND BINARIES Throughout this chapter, we have argued and shown through various examples that embodied resistance cannot be thought of as a binary. To ask whether something – an item of clothing or a body modification – is an act of subversion/rebellion or an act of accommodation/conformity misses the point

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entirely. Acts, practices, and pieces of clothing must be understood in their particular context. And actors must be understood within various intersecting systems of power, privilege, and oppression. As Susan Bordo argues: ‘[S]ubversion is contextual, historical, and, above all, social. No matter how exciting the destabilizing potential of texts, bodily or otherwise, whether those texts are subversive or recuperative or both or neither cannot be determined in abstraction from actual social practice’ (2003: 294). To this we would add that even when we look at the historical and social context (of a bodily practice for instance), we might find that it is both destabilizing as well as reinforcing certain cultural ideals. In the academic literature on beauty, body modification, dress, and protesting bodies, we see a commingling of resistance and accommodation that reminds us that even the most revolutionary acts are embedded in deep-rooted power relations.

 7  The Pink Chaddi Campaign was started in 2009 as a response to Hindu right-wing activists (Sri Ram Seva) attacking and molesting women at a bar for being indecent and westernized. The SRS further warned about protests if anybody celebrated Valentine’s Day. In response, a nonviolent protest movement, a group of selfproclaimed ‘Consortium of Pub-going, Loose, and Forward Women’, using social media and traditional means to recruit members, started the Pink Chaddi Campaign by encouraging women to send pink underwear to the SRS headquarters (Kapur 2012).  8  According to Monden, ‘although there is no clear definition of GothLoli, it functions as a blanket name for varied Lolita fashions, including Gothic/ Black Lolita (black and white), Sweet Lolita (pastel coloured), Classical Lolita (“maiden” style with slightly less lacy and less elaborate clothes), and Gothic Aristrocrat (dark but lacy and elaborate “Count” style for both men and women)’ (2008: 24–25).  9  The Arab Spring uprisings were sparked in part by the self-immolation of a young Tunisian protesting against the government.

REFERENCES Notes  1  By cisgender women, we mean people who are assigned the female sex at birth and live and identify as female.  2  Feminine beauty is associated with piercing the earlobes in order to wear earrings; many ethnic communities pierce infant girls’ ears shortly after birth. In this case, we might not consider piercing a form of resistance.  3  Deaf is capitalized when it implies a political orientation and group affiliation rather than a physical condition.  4  This is not to say that people don’t have religious motivations for adopting the hijab. Some certainly do. But for some, even when it is ostensibly about religion, we see that their religious identity only becomes paramount to them in the context of being maligned and marginalized.  5  What initially was ruled a hate crime, because of a note that said ‘This is my country, go back to yours, you terrorist’, was later deemed to be domestic violence.  6  Although much of the discussion regarding SlutWalks hinges on the use of the word ‘slut’, we focus here on the spectacle of the body and dress in these protests.

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Ahmed, Leila. 2011. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Anastasia, Janelle-Maralyn. 2013. ‘Tattooed Women as Marked Deviants? Performing Acts of Affiliation, Attraction, and Rebellion – Desire’. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. Balekdjian, Janine. 2012. ‘Columbia Students Protest Stereotypes with “Hoodies and Hijabs” Vigil’. The Nation, April 8. Accessed on March 12, 2015. http://www.thenation. c o m / b l o g / 1 6 7 2 7 9 / columbia-students-protest-stereotypeshoodies-and-hijabs-vigil Banks, Ingrid. 2000. Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness. New York: New York University Press. Bartky, Sandra Lee. 2010. ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’. In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, Third Edition,

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edited by Rose Weitz, pp. 76–97. New York: Oxford University Press. Bastian, Misty L. 2005. ‘The Naked and the Nude: Historically Multiple Meanings of Oto (Undress) in Southeastern Nigeria’. In Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface, edited by Adeline Masquelier, pp. 34–60. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bernal, Kathryn A. Hardy. 2012. ‘Japanese Lolita: Challenging Sexualized Style and the Little-Girl Look’. In Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style, edited by Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles, pp. 117–132. Albany, NY: SUNY press. Bobel, Chris, and Samantha Kwan. 2011. ‘Introduction’. In Embodied Resistance: Breaking the Rules, Challenging the Norms, edited by Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan, pp. 1–12. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Bordo, Susan. 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley. CA: University of California Press. Braun, Virginia. 2010. ‘Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery: A Critical Review of Current Knowledge and Contemporary Debates’. Journal of Women’s Health 19(7): 1393–1407. Brenner, Suzanne. 1996. ‘Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and “the Veil”’. American Ethnologist 23(4): 673–697. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Casanova, Erynn Masi. 2004. ‘No Ugly Women: Concepts of Race and Beauty among Adolescent Women in Ecuador’. Gender & Society 18(3): 287–308. Casanova, Erynn Masi. 2015. Buttoned Up: Clothing, Conformity, and White-Collar Masculinity. Ithaca, NY: ILR/Cornell University Press. Chrisafis, Angelique. 2009. ‘Nicolas Sarkozy Says Islamic Veils Are Not Welcome in France’. The Guardian, June 22. Accessed on March 12, 2015. http://www.theguardian. c o m / w o r l d / 2 0 0 9 / j u n / 2 2 / islamic-veils-sarkozy-speech-france Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the

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Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. Crawley, Sara L., Lara J. Foley, and Constance L. Shehan. 2008. Gendering Bodies. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Anti-Racist Politics’. The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167. Davis, Kathy. 1995. Reshaping the Female Body. New York: Routledge. Davis, Kathy. 2002. ‘‘  ‘A Dubious Equality”: Men, Women, and Cosmetic Surgery’. Body & Society 8(1): 49–65. Dines, Gail, and Wendy Murphy. 2011. ‘SlutWalk is Not Sexual Liberation’. The Guardian, May 8. Accessed on March 12, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/08/ slutwalk-not-sexual-liberation Duke, Lisa. 2000. ‘Black in a Blonde World: Race and Girls’ Interpretations of the Feminine Ideal in Teen Magazines’. Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly 77 (Summer): 367–392. Fahs, Breanne, and Denise A. Delgado. 2011. ‘The Specter of Excess: Race, Class, and Gender in Women’s Body Hair Narratives’. In Embodied Resistance: Breaking the Rules, Challenging the Norms, edited by Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan, pp. 13–25. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Farrell, Amy Erdman. 2011. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977a. Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by Donald Bouchard. Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, Michel. 1977b. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. Gagné, Patricia and Deanna McGaughey. 2010. ‘Designing Women: Cultural

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Hegemony and the Exercise of Power among Women who have Undergone Elective Mammoplasty’. In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, Third Edition, edited by Rose Weitz, pp. 192–213. New York: Oxford University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and SelfIdentity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gill, Rosalind, Karen Henwood, and Carl McLean. 2005. ‘Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity’. Body & Society 11(1): 37–62. Gimlin, Debra L. 2002. Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving. 1969. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds. 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Greenhalgh, Susan. 2015. Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Herzig, Rebecca M. 2015. Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. New York: New York University Press. Hohle, Randolph. 2010. ‘Politics, Social Movements, and the Body’. Sociology Compass 4(1): 38–51. Hollander, Jocelyn A. and Rachel L. Einwohner. 2004. ‘Conceptualizing Resistance’. Sociological Forum 19(4): 533–554. Jafar, Afshan. 2012. ‘Progress and Women’s Bodies’. TEDxTalks, 23:36 Posted May 7. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BaxnvwffWbE Jones, Meredith. 2008. Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery. Oxford: Berg. Kapur, Ratna. 2012. ‘Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture: The Postcolonial Politics of Feminism Lite’. Feminist Legal Studies 20(1): 1–20. Karim, Persis. 2013. ‘In Praise of Big Noses’. In Global Beauty, Local Bodies, edited by Afshan Jafar and Erynn Masi de Casanova, pp. 51–58. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaw, Eugenia. 1993. ‘Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian American Women and

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Cosmetic Surgery’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7(1): 74–89. Killian, Caitlin. 2003. ‘The Other Side of the Veil: North African Women in France Respond to the Headscarf Affair’. Gender & Society 17(4): 567–590. Korovkin, Tanya. 2000. ‘Weak Weapons, Strong Weapons? Hidden Resistance and Political Protest in Rural Ecuador’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 27: 1–29. Lovejoy, Meg. 2001. ‘Disturbances in the Social body: Differences in Body Image and Eating Problems Among African American and White Women’. Gender & Society 15: 239–261. MacLeod, Arlene Lowe. 1991. Accommodating Protest: Working women, the new veiling, and change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press. McLaren, Margaret. 2002. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2011. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mauldin, Laura. 2011. ‘Cochlear Implants and the Mediated Classroom-Clinic: Communication Technologies and Co-operations Across Multiple Industries’. Disability Studies Quarterly 31(4). Retrieved from http://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/1713 (accessed on August 2, 2016). Mintz, Zoe. 2015. ‘Oklahoma Pastors Wear Hoodies to Church to Protest Proposed Ban’. International Business Times, January 21. Accessed on March 12, 2015. http://www.ibtimes.com/ oklahoma-pastors-wear-hoodies-church-protest-proposed-ban-1790492 Monden, Masafumi. 2008. ‘Transcultural Flow of Demure Aesthetics: Examining Cultural Globalisation through Gothic & Lolita Fashion’. New Voices 2: 21–40. Nichter, Mimi. 2000. Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say about Dieting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parker, S., M. Nichter, M. Nichter, N. Vuckovic, C. Sims, and C. Ritenbaugh. 1995. ‘Body images and weight concerns among African American and white adolescent females: Differences that make a difference.” Human Organization 54: 103–114. Patton, Tracy Owens. 2010. ‘Hey, Girl, Am I More than My Hair? African American Women and Their Struggles with Beauty,

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Body Image, and Hair’. In The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings, edited by Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut, pp. 349–366. New York: New York University Press. Pauly Morgan, Kathryn. 1991. ‘Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women’s Bodies’. Hypatia 6(3): 25–53. Pickett, Brent L. 1996. ‘Foucault and the Politics of Resistance’. Polity 28(4): 445–466. Pitts, Victoria. 2003. In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. 2007. Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pyle, Nathaniel, and Noa Logan Klein. 2011. ‘Fat. Hairy. Sexy. Contesting Standards of Beauty and Sexuality in the Gay Community’. In Embodied Resistance: Breaking the Rules, Challenging the Norms, edited by Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan, pp. 75–87. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Reger, Jo. 2012. ‘DIY Fashion and Going Bust: Wearing Feminist Politics in the Twenty-First Century’. In Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style, edited by Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles, pp. 209–226. Albany, NY: SUNY press. Rooks, Noliwe. 1996. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sasson-Levy, Orna and Tamar Rapoport. 2003. ‘Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case’. Gender & Society 17(3): 379–403. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2007. The Politics of the Veil. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Shilandari, Farah. 2010. ‘Iranian Woman. Veil and Identity’. Gozaar, September 7. Accessed on March 12, 2015. http://www.gozaar.org/ english/articles-en/Iranian-Woman-Veil-andIdentity.html Shilling, Chris. 2003. The Body and Social Theory, Second Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Solovay, Sondra and Esther Rothblum. 2009. ‘Introduction’. In The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra

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Solovay, pp. 1–7. New York: New York University Press. Stabile, Carol and Deepa Kumar. 2005. ‘Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender and the War on Afghanistan’. Media, Culture & Society 27(5): 765–782. Sutton, Barbara. 2010. Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women’s Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Tallerico, Brian. 2013. ‘Spike Lee, Mike Tyson Bring Riveting “Undisputed Truth” to HBO’. RogerEbert.com. Retrieved from http://www. rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/spike-leemike-tyson-bring-riveting-undisputed-truthto-hbo (accessed on March 13, 2015). Talukdar, Jaita. 2012. ‘Thin But Not Skinny: Women Negotiating the “Never too Thin” Body Ideal in Urban India’. Women’s Studies International Forum 35: 109–118. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Valenti, Jessica. 2011. ‘SlutWalks and the Future of Feminism’. The Washington Post, June 3. Accessed on March 12, 2015. http://www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/slutwalks-andt h e - f u t u re - o f - f e m i n i s m / 2 0 1 1 / 0 6 / 0 1 / AGjB9LIH_story.html Weitz, Rose. 2001. ‘Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation’. Gender & Society 15(5): 667–686. Whitesel, Jason. 2014. Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma. New York: New York University Press. Williams, Rhys H. and Gira Vashi. 2014. ‘Hijab and American Muslim Women: Creating the Space for Autonomous Selves’. In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, Fourth Edition, edited by Rose Weitz and Samantha Kwan, pp. 331–345. New York: Oxford University Press. Windsor, Elroi J. 2011. ‘Regulating Healthy Gender: Surgical Body Modification among Transgender and Cisgender Consumers’. PhD dissertation, Georgia State University. http:// scholarworks.gsu.edu/sociology_diss/55

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7 The Complexities and Contradictions of Resistance: An Intersectional Perspective Amanda M. Gengler

In her classic work, Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins conceptualizes racism, sexism, and capitalism as interlocking structures that are mutually reinforcing, arguing that, ‘each system needs the others in order to function’ (1991: 222). In the 25 years since, scholarship on what has become known as ‘intersectionality’ has exploded. Adopting intersectionality as an ‘analytical strategy’, scholars have pushed a variety of sociological subfields forward, from macrolevel studies of work to micro-level studies of identity (see Collins 2015 for a review). As Collins argues that ‘intersectionality’s raison d’être lies in its attentiveness to power relations and social inequalities’ (2015: 3), intersectionality as both a theoretical framework and an analytic strategy is of great value to those interested in more fully understanding the thorny and multifaceted dynamics of resistance. In fact, as Collins traces the

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roots of intersectional thinking back even to the work and writings of Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, late-nineteenthcentury activists who framed Black women’s experiences as simultaneously constrained by racism, sexism, and economic oppression – we might understand this perspective as a form of resistance in and of itself. Here, I argue that adopting an intersectional perspective can help us to tease out some of the complexities and contradictions of resistance, allowing us to better understand the conditions under which it fails and succeeds – sometimes simultaneously. To begin, I’ll outline some of the contradictions and complexities of resistance as revealed by feminist analyses of people and organizations seeking to challenge tenacious structures of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. After briefly reviewing a collection of studies and historical examples

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that capture the tension between challenging inequality and reproducing it, I’ll argue that theories of intersectionality can help us better understand this paradox, and how the ‘interlocking’ nature of systems of inequality can buttress them against resistance efforts. Finally, I’ll turn to data drawn from my own ethnographic study of a contemporary battered women’s shelter to show how an intersectional analysis can help us to explain how the reproduction of inequality can flourish even in spaces explicitly designed to challenge it.

RESISTING INEQUALITY OR REPRODUCING IT? A RECURRING PARADOX Numerous scholars have shown how those seeking to challenge oppression can engage in actions that at the same time perpetuate it. Men civil rights movement leaders, for instance, vocally and passionately resisted racial oppression while sometimes uncritically reinforcing sexist practices by marginalizing the organizing work women leaders performed behind the scenes (Barnett 1993). Though women in the civil rights movement often participated centrally in mobilization, decision-making, and leadership roles, forming a critical ‘intermediate layer of leadership’ (Robnett 1996), they received little public recognition for this work until feminist historians began explicitly calling attention to the pivotal roles women like Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, and Bernice Johnson Reagan (among many others) played. Men often reflexively assumed women leaders would perform the ‘housekeeping’ of the movement in addition to these roles, expecting them to take meeting notes or make the coffee (LeGates 2012 [2001]). Though Black women in the movement were developing their own feminist critiques of their social positions and their position within the movement, the choice to

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prioritize the fight against racism and present a united front in the battle against racial oppression was a strategic one. Belinda Robnett (1997) found that many of the women leaders she interviewed were generally untroubled by the gendered dynamics within SNCC or SCLC, as the ability to fight back against racism was such a novel, empowering, and liberating experience itself. Movement participation did provide Black women with access to roles they had never held before. Bernice Johnson Reagan told Robnett that ‘[though] the ideas about what women should do and what men should do showed up in the civil rights movement among men and women … I was challenged to go further than I’d ever gone before’ (1997: 37). Support for male leadership grew from the nuanced perspectives women leaders held regarding the significant threats and degradation Black men faced, and their recognition that in order ‘to be taken seriously by the [patriarchal] white establishment, [the movement] would undoubtedly have to be led by men’ (1997: 42). On a smaller scale, Sherryl Kleinman (1996) uncovered similarly complex dynamics among a group of health professionals who tried to run an alternative health organization with explicitly egalitarian goals that eschewed capitalist profit motives. Yet by focusing on ideals and values and minimizing or stigmatizing talk about money, the inequality in pay, status, and recognition between the (mostly women) support staff and high-status medical professionals became invisible, justified, and impossible to address. Instead of eliminating inequality, the egalitarian ethic of the organization often masked inequalities between organizational members, allowing these divides to deepen while those in charge could take pride in their lofty goals and idealistic rhetoric. Such blind spots are not limited to those fighting one form of inequality while remaining comfortably complicit in another. Women often participate actively in behavior that perpetuates women’s subordination either

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while working to navigate within its constraints or, sometimes, even while attempting to challenge men’s dominance. Rose Weitz, for instance, using data from interviews with women about their strategic presentations of self through their hairstyles, argues that resistance and accommodation to social and cultural expectations go hand in hand. Weitz found that many of the women she interviewed deliberately selected hairstyles that would help them gain social power in relationships, in the workplace, and even to make political statements (as in the case of Afros and other natural hairstyles for Black women). Yet at the same time, she suggests, these strategies for gaining social power could simultaneously reflect accommodation to subordination on another plane. Women who styled their hair in ways designed to be attractive to male partners might achieve desired relationship goals, but did so by investing in traditional ideals of beauty, and solidifying the centrality of women’s appearance to their worth. Women who cut their hair in more conservative styles in order to be taken seriously at work may at the same time have lent credence to the notion that to be less-feminine is to be more-professional (implying, conversely, that to be feminine is not professional). So while women’s decisions about how to wear their hair could make them feel more powerful, and perhaps confer advantages in social or professional realms, their efforts often reinforced the cultural ideas at the root of the catch-22s they found themselves in to begin with. Chauntelle Tibbals’ (2007) ethnography of women restaurant workers points to similar dynamics. She showed how women servers actively constructed different types of highly gendered presentations of self in order to maximize their economic success (by increasing their tips) on the job. Some women adopted overtly sexualized gender performances; others deferent, innocent, or ‘girly’ gender presentations (complete with glitter and plastic pastel jewelry); while still others, especially older women, adopted warm,

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nurturing, and motherly interaction styles. These efforts, like the strategic hairstyles above, helped the women enacting them to gain some social power and economic profit, and, Tibbals argues, to distance themselves from the homogenized low-status work they had to perform. Yet at the same time, these efforts required women to double-down on traditional requirements of femininity, encouraged women’s sexual objectification, and made their economic success dependent on both. Paula Rothenberg points to ‘edgy’ t-shirts marketed to young women that proclaim the wearer to be a ‘dirty girl’ or offer strangers the invitation: ‘discipline me’, as an especially alarming instantiation of this phenomenon (2007). While some might interpret such messages as an indication of women’s sexual liberation and agency – and they certainly undermine ideologies about women as pure or frigid and push back against ‘slut-shaming’ – a woman’s value is reduced once again to her sexual availability to men. The very real abuse and sexual violence women continue to be subject to is trivialized. Ignoring the larger cultural context in which these messages are embedded, Rothenberg suggests, obscures the fact that such ‘fashion choices … do not represent a challenge to patriarchy, let alone capitalism, instead, these “choices” reflect a total submission to those systems’ (2007, see also Dines and Murphy 2011 on this dynamic in contemporary ‘slut walks’). Women’s individual-level resistance efforts, then, exist within a broader context that requires women to discipline their bodies and selves in a very Foucauldian (1977) sense in order to be taken seriously and gain social power. Though significant gains have been made as a result of feminist action – educationally, economically, and socially – one could argue that women’s bodies are more disciplined than ever. Sheila Jeffreys (2005) documents the pervasive social and physical harms perpetuated against women’s bodies through beauty regimens and fashion fetishes, highlighting the parallels

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between practices of foot-binding and stiletto heels, genital mutilation, and a particularly disturbing recent trend in cosmetic surgery: ‘labiaplasty’. As pornography has gone mainstream, women’s bodies are held to higher and increasingly more artificial standards (Dines 2010). To fail to meet these standards can have significant interpersonal and economic consequences. Furthermore, as Connell (2002) has argued, we learn from a young age to take pleasure in gendered rituals. It can thus both feel disappointing to give up practices that one has learned to see as ‘fun’ and enjoyable, and be pragmatically difficult to give up practices that confer concrete social and economic benefits. Even when the actor him- or herself recognizes the individual harm such practices can cause – and their broader function in perpetuating inequality – the barriers to significant change are many. In each of the above instances, an intersectional perspective can help us to better understand why it is so difficult to resist enduring systems of inequality without inadvertently lending them support. In several of the examples above, the pursuit of economic interests thwarted women’s abilities to more forcefully challenge gender inequality. Because women’s socio-economic standing is often tightly bound up with their relationship status, employability, and ability to please others (tipping customers, for example) economic interests discourage women from challenging the gender order too deeply. Collectively shared efforts to resist racism, in the case of organizations like SNCC or the SCLC – or capitalism, in the case of Kleinman’s alternative health center – can encourage men and women to reproduce and ignore other inequalities in the service of more narrow aims. Adia Harvey Wingfield (2014) has argued that a similar dynamic may be playing out in the contemporary ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, in which a focus on police violence against Black men – an unquestionably gendered issue – nonetheless ‘renders invisible’ women victims of police violence,

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and might make women victims of intimate partner violence less willing to call for help when experiencing abuse in relationships with Black male partners whom they fear might be injured or killed by police if they seek intervention. Elsewhere, I have argued that an intersectional framework is also critical for understanding the success of micro-level acts of resistance. For instance, in the battered women’s shelter I studied (Gengler 2012), residents sought to resist staff members’ efforts to control them (ironically, through a rhetoric of women’s empowerment), by asserting their own agenda during group meetings instead. Their efforts to do so were most successful when they directly leveraged their social positions in ways that bolstered their resistance efforts. For instance, women emphasized their identities as mothers, as women of color, as older women, or poor women with valuable hard-lived life experience to draw sharp differences between themselves and more privileged staff, establish an alternative authority, and make staff feel uncomfortable enough to back down in their control efforts (Gengler 2012). At the same time, however, as considered in greater detail below, this also meant residents generally uncritically embraced gendered identities and ideologies. Kimberle Crenshaw’s highly influential (1991) theoretical advancement of intersectionality was in fact developed in part through her analysis of the experiences of poor women of color seeking shelter services. Their experiences, she shows, were shaped significantly by racial discrimination and economic exploitation, not only by their subordination to male partners. Battered women’s shelters, she argued, are not always equipped to deal with the multiplicity of inequalities women confront, and sometimes reinforce them – for example, by failing to provide adequate services to Spanish-speaking women. It seems fitting then to consider how the organizations that grew from such a ‘successful’ resistance movement can function both as sites of resistance to a patriarchal gender order, and

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spaces in which the gender order and other social inequalities are actively maintained and reproduced.

BATTERED WOMEN’S SHELTERS: A CLOSER LOOK The battered women’s movement is one of the quintessential success stories of feminist resistance to patriarchy. While men’s violence against their women partners has gone on for centuries, it was long understood to be a private family matter at best, and a man’s right at worst, until the early 1970s. It was only after the battered women’s movement – an offshoot of the broader second-wave women’s movement – began naming the problem and garnering media attention and institutional recognition from criminal justice, health care, and other organizational systems that the problem of ‘wife abuse’1 as it was initially termed, came to be understood as a legitimate social problem in the public sphere (Loseke 1992; Tierney 1982). In the years that followed, activists – many of them former battered women themselves – began opening small, grassroots shelters to house women and children fleeing abusive homes across the nation. By 1980, there were somewhere between 300 and 700 shelter and safe-house programs for battered women (Schechter 1982) in the United States. Today, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, there are over 2,000 US organizations that provide housing to women fleeing abusive relationships and another 1,300 or so that provide other services of some kind. That there are more resources, support, and viable alternatives available to women experiencing abuse now than ever before is unquestionable. Yet this astonishing success has not come without cost. As is the case for many resistance movements that begin with revolutionary aims, such efforts can lose some of their more radical edges as they grow and attain

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mainstream success. Activists may find themselves making compromises in order to be taken seriously, or may be blind to other systems of inequality they are uncritically reproducing along the way. Success itself may bring a wider collection of people to the table that can shift or water-down movement aims. In their efforts to overturn patriarchal justifications for men’s violence against women partners, battered women’s movement activists in the 1970s had to successfully construct a social problem that would generate societal concern, and work to maintain ownership of that problem (Tierney 1982). The public construction of the battered woman rests on a narrative that frames wife abuse as a particular kind of violence that is physically damaging, severe, undeserved, and completely without cause (Loseke 1992). While this narrative successfully captured public attention and institutional legitimacy for a problem that had not previously been seen as one, Doni Loseke describes how this process simultaneously led to the construction of a very particular ‘battered woman type person’ that has had a powerful influence on who is seen as a ‘legitimate’ victim of the problem of wife abuse and who is not. In order to get help, women must work to prove themselves and their abuse an instance of this ideal type. As the solution to the problem was constructed as a safe place to escape to, movement activists began opening small, volunteer-run shelters, often operating on shoe-string budgets and existing largely through underground networks. Within just a few years, the incredible success of the movement resulted in rapidly expanding services, and more and more shelters cropping up across the country. Yet the problem of violence against women remains far from solved. Shelters still teem with women fleeing abusive homes, and many shelters are unable to serve the number of women who seek their help. The structure and management of shelters has shifted dramatically over the years, often moving away from an early political focus on feminism and

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advocacy for women as an oppressed group within a patriarchal gender order, and shifting instead increasingly ‘onto the terrain of the state’ (Bumiller 2008; Reinelt 1995). The successful expansion of the movement’s funding base led to increasing professionalization and bureaucratization of women’s shelters, morphing them into social service, rather than social movement, organizations. Instead of challenging larger structures and ideologies that facilitate women’s subordination, many of these organizations now focus primarily on ‘reforming’ individual ‘clients’ (see also Dobash and Dobash 1992; Loseke 2003; Schechter 1982; Stark 2007). Rather than devoting their efforts to consciousnessraising or political and legislative change (though some organizations still do some of this), many shelter workers have become bogged down in the more individually focused daily work of sorting women who petition for help as ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ clients (who do or do not fit the battered-woman-type-person, Loseke 1992), requiring women to follow strict rules and ‘work on themselves’ once admitted to a shelter (Ferraro 1983; Loseke 1992; Loseke and Cahill 1984), and policing and modifying women’s childrearing practices during their stay (Gengler 2011). Though supported by larger budgets and personnel than early activists could have dreamed possible, many shelters have lost their grassroots structure and activist orientations along the way Overt consciousness-raising thus occurs with far less frequency, and individual therapeutic interventions are common and often heavily emphasized. Despite these significant shifts over the past 40 years, some of the rhetoric voiced by these organizations does still draw on the feminist ideas that were formative in the early days of the movement. Much of the curricular materials used in even more therapeutically focused organizations continues to echo elements of the more radical critiques of patriarchy that were central to early activists’ constructions of the problem. Many of these draw from the classic ‘Duluth

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Model’ developed by Ellen Pence in the early 1980s in collaboration with the Domestic Abuse Intervention Program (Pence and Paymar 1993). These materials are centered around the ‘power and control wheel’, a graphic representation similar to a pie chart that highlights the tactics men use to control their partners (e.g. ‘isolation’ and ‘using children as a weapon’) and ties these various strategies back to the root issue of men’s power and control over women (the center of the wheel). This illustration, which can be found in almost every shelter and social service agency that addresses the problem of intimate partner violence today, explicitly includes ‘using male privilege’ as one of the eight spokes on the wheel. These early and well-reproduced materials also emphasize other key aspects of early movement narratives, including the isolating and potentially fatal nature of abuse, the social and economic barriers women face to leaving violent relationships, and the ongoing, cyclical nature of abuse. These materials (often in the form of charts, illustrations, and handouts)2 greet many women upon their entrance to battered women’s shelters or upon initial contact with a counselor who helps them to recognize their relationship as an abusive one, and have successfully influenced many women’s understandings of the problem. Yet while these vestiges of overt feminist efforts to directly connect violence against women to patriarchal ideologies and gender hierarchies linger, they sometimes seemed, during my observations at one particular shelter, to merely nod ritualistically to earlier movement goals rather than support ongoing feminist mobilization. More disconcertingly, the rhetoric of women’s empowerment was itself used paradoxically as a tool of control by staff to get residents to follow rules and tolerate sometimes condescending programming (Gengler 2012). Other researchers have similarly documented how progressive rhetorics like that of women’s empowerment can be adopted even in penal settings, illustrating

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how progressive ideas can be co-opted – sometimes with good intentions – to facilitate less than progressive outcomes (Goodkind 2009; Haney 1996, 2010; Hannah-Moffat 2000). At Recourse, the battered women’s shelter I studied, ideologies that reinforced existing gendered social arrangements, and that diverted from or dismissed the need for feminist collective action, were also common, as I demonstrate below.

Recourse Beginning in the fall of 2007, I spent about 10 months observing a weekly mandatory group meeting at an 18-bed battered women’s shelter I call Recourse (a pseudonym), located in a mid-sized city in the southeast. Housed in a large, fading yellow Victorian home filled with shabby furniture and in need of a variety of repairs, women were admitted to the shelter only after contacting the larger umbrella organization, of which the shelter was one of multiple services the agency provided (in addition to case management for non-shelter residents, educational outreach, court advocacy, etc.). The women admitted came mostly from the local metropolitan area or nearby counties. Approximately 45% of residents attending the group I observed during the period of the study were Black, 40% were white, and 15% were Latina, Native American, Asian, or Arab. The shelter usually housed six to nine women at a time, along with their children. The group I observed rotated between topics of ‘self-awareness’ or parenting, and often also included discussion of logistical matters related to house chores or other business. During the first half of my observation, this group was facilitated by Beth, a white woman in her late twenties with a master’s degree in social work. When Beth left to take a full-time position elsewhere, this group was taken over by Gloria, a Black woman in her late forties with an associate’s degree in psychology. Group was scheduled to run for

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75 minutes, but in practice lasted anywhere from one to two hours, usually the latter. Since I often spent time chatting with staff and residents before and after Group, my visits to the shelter were typically between two to three hours each week. Over the course of my observation, 58 women attended at least one of the group sessions I observed. Twentynine of these women were present at three or more sessions, and eight were present at between six to nine observed sessions.3 Despite the occasional use of some of the classic curricular materials from the battered women’s movement’s more radical origins, women at Recourse never framed their experiences of abuse as part of a systemic and structurally based social problem rooted in a patriarchal gender order, as early movement activists worked so hard to do. The women at Recourse, at times even staff members, instead often minimized abuse, emphasized their own complicity or culpability, and actively reinforced popular essentialist understandings of the inherent biological nature of men and women. This in turn led to individualistic conceptualizations of particular men as pathologically abusive and selfish, rather than as gendered actors shaped by their social position in a hierarchical gender order that (unjustly) naturalizes women’s subordination to men’s dominance. Here then, I show how ideas that bolster the status quo can thrive even in spaces designed to resist it.

Gender Essentialism Essentialist gender ideologies – which construct masculine and feminine ‘characteristics’ to be biological, rather than social, in nature – were a part of the fabric of everyday culture in the shelter. During interviews, casual conversations among residents, and even during some formal group sessions, ‘women’ as a group were often pointed to as innately ‘bitchy’, hormonal, gossipy, and/or prone to ‘drama’. The difficulties that arose over the course of

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sharing living space in the shelter were often explained by pointing to the challenge of ‘living in a house full of women’. Amber (a white woman in her mid-twenties) explained this challenge to me by saying, ‘there’s a lot of estrogen in the house … so you’re gonna have conflicts … and there’s gonna be back-fighting, talking about other people’. In Amber’s view, house conflict was due to gendered biological processes (‘estrogen’) and just the way women ‘are’. Jaren (a Black woman in her early twenties) voiced a similar perspective about the inherent ‘nature’ of women, telling me in an interview, ‘I don’t really deal with females too much cause I don’t have time for that drama … the more girls come in, the more drama comes’. Even Gloria, one of the group facilitators, chastised the women for ‘bitching’ and frequently reminded them that she did not want Group to become a ‘bitch session’. By relying on gendered tropes about women as naturally inclined to excessive complaining that trivializes women’s concerns and perspectives writ large (see Kleinman et  al. 2009) Gloria too leaned on essentialist ideas about women, and used it to quash women’s efforts to speak out against inequalities within the shelter, and the sometimes infantilizing rules and activities they were subjected to. This type of gender essentialism was used to explain men’s behavior as well. For instance, one night as I chatted with the women before Group, Adrienne (a Black woman in her midforties) told us that her partner was supposed to attend anger management courses, but that he ‘never would’ because ‘men won’t ever do this’ while women would ‘deal with it’ and ‘want to get help and go to the classes’. Other women in the room actively agreed. During another group session Gloria went over a list of warning signs of potentially abusive relationships during Group. She told the women it could be hard to recognize these signs because ‘men are charmers’. Latisha (a Black woman in her late twenties) agreed, chiming in that men are ‘manipulative’ and ‘know just

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what to say’. Rosalyn (a Black woman in her mid-forties) also located the problem in the innately manipulative nature of men, telling us: ‘Young men can promise you anything in the world … they’ll just tell you anything to get what they want’. While on the surface these constructions of the problem as rooted in men’s nature as men might seem to echo movement narratives that work to emphasize the gendered nature of domestic violence, this profoundly essentialist and psychological rather than structural construction of the problem stops short of the sort of critical consciousness-raising early movement leaders were aiming for. Instead, ideologies about the essential nature of men and women blocked structural critiques of violence against women as a social problem embedded in systems of oppression – and as a problem that might be changed through sustained political challenge seeking to upend the gender order and open up possibilities for new understandings around what it means to be men and women in relationships. If men simply ‘are’ this way, there was little the women felt they could do about it.

Individualism and a Therapeutic Culture Conversely, individualist ideologies and other underlying assumptions embedded in the broader therapeutic culture that has permeated so many aspects of modern life (Giddens 1991) hinted at the possibility for individual men to change their ways, but in doing so, these constructions of the problem also prevented structural critiques of patriarchal social arrangements from taking root. These ideas suggested that men who abused women were not dominating women as a result of their position in a patriarchal structure, but doing so as a result of a psychological defect within themselves. During the groups that she facilitated, Gloria often told residents of their abusive partners, ‘these guys are sick, just sick’ and exhorted them to

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remember that ‘you can’t make sense of these guys, you’re trying to rationalize the irrational’ (emphasis mine). Instead of framing violence against women as something one might make quite a lot of sense of by examining the culture in which men and boys are raised, or women’s hierarchical location in systems of inequality that can keep them dependent on men for economic support, a few individual ‘sick’ men are deemed the problem. The implication of this understanding of abuse is that there is no need for women to challenge current social arrangements or gender ideologies, only for them to learn how to distinguish between men who can be trusted and relied upon from the bad apples. The solution for many, then, was only to support themselves independently as long as absolutely necessary before finding a ‘better’ man. Indeed, given the employment conditions available to most of the women in the shelter, supporting themselves and their children without a second wage earner would be extraordinarily difficult. Women’s economic subordination thus deepened their gendered subordination. Another component of the individualistic construction of men’s abuse was the conviction expressed by a number of women that their abusive partners needed to ‘do their own [therapy] work’ in order to change into better and more responsible men. During a Valentine’s Day group session, Gloria told us about a new resident’s recent visit home to gather some of her belongings before returning to the shelter, which involved an encounter that had evoked jealousy and suspicion in her partner: Gloria told us that when Grace (a Black woman in her late twenties) went home, ‘of all things she took, she took a flat-iron, and he was saying “what does she got a flat iron for?’’’ Grace said, ‘as if I could be going out on a date when I’m here at the shelter with the kids’. She told us that she told her husband, ‘You didn’t change’. Gloria responded, ‘Yeah, he’s not ready. He’s not ready. He needs to do his own work, work on himself, on his own issues’ (emphasis mine).

Similarly, other women framed their partners as at core ‘a good man’ or ‘good as

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gold when he’s not drinking’ and blamed drugs, alcohol, or gambling – and a lack of motivation to rehabilitate these vices – as the cause of their partner’s abusive behavior. Holly blamed her partner’s abuse both on his drinking, and on her bad relationship with his mother, telling me that ‘the problems’ only started when they moved nearer to his mother, who was ‘always in their business’. All of these narratives framed abuse as an individual man’s specific psychological problems rather than a result of the broader conditions that structure men and women’s lives and cultural ideas about violence and the rights and obligations of men and women in relationships. Within this framework, political change that challenges the gender order wasn’t even on the table.

‘Basically, it was Both of Us:’ De-gendering Violence Against Women For some women at Recourse, individualist conceptions of violence led to a de-gendering of violence against women altogether, a construction that would have been inconceivable to early movement activists. Lilly’s account of her abuse serves as a case in point. Lilly (a white woman in her mid-twenties) initially framed her abuse as something she had not done enough to prevent: We lived out in [a suburb] with his friend … away from the bus lines and he had me right where he wanted me too. That’s when that started. The first time he ever hit me, he just kicked me. He kicked me in my face, and he knocked me backwards into, like, an exercise machine, and that’s when it all started. And once you’ve stayed that one time they hit you, they know they got you. They know you’re not gonna leave. Not for a while. ‘Cause if you don’t leave that first time, you’re not telling them ‘I ain’t gonna take this, bye’. You’re telling them that they can hit you again. And you ain’t gonna do nothing about it.

Though Lilly’s narrative reflects some elements of those classic feminist conceptualizations of abuse – in particular an emphasis

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on men’s attempts to isolate their partners and the recurring and violent nature of abuse – she begins to individualize the problem and shift blame to herself by framing the abuse as something that it was her responsibility to have stopped. In failing to do so, she suggests, perhaps she had tacitly granted him permission to treat her this way. Lilly ultimately completely de-gendered the violence in her relationship and took an even more direct and even-handed portion of the blame: We both have a lot of things we have to work on. It’s like me and my negative attitude. I used to piss him off because I would gripe about a lot of stuff. And he would run off, or he’d get mad and pop me. You know, and I have some anger issues. I can say that I wasn’t, he was not the only one abusing. I didn’t hit him, I knew better than that, but I would call him stupid … [and other names for which he gave her a black eye] so basically it was both of us, both of us had bad attitudes, both of us were not on the right track (emphasis mine).

Lilly very nearly justifies her partner’s violence because of her ‘griping’ and ‘negative attitude’. By equating name-calling with being punched in the face, she claims both of them erred, and thus both were responsible for the abuse. Angie (a white woman in her early thirties) constructed her abusive relationship similarly; framing it as a mutual dynamic both she and her partner contributed to and both needed to work to end. Both of them had struggled with drug and alcohol problems, and had worked to fight their addictions. She referred to the abuse in her relationship with joint language (using the terms ‘we’ and ‘our’), and pointed to the addiction as the underlying cause of both of their behaviors. In an interview she told me ‘most of our stuff was verbal because we were just learning to deal with life on life’s terms without drugs, right? Like beer. Or pills. Anything to calm us down’. She later described an incident in which she ‘ended up getting extremely angry with him and said some very ugly things to him that made him put his hands around

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my throat’ (emphasis mine) and went on to explain even this action by saying, ‘I mean I’m not perfect, nobody is, I can, you know, own my mistakes and take responsibility for the things that I’ve done’. In Angie’s story, she is not the blameless woman helplessly tossed around by a cruel and evil man as is the ideal-typical ‘battered woman’ in the early public wife-abuse story. She is nearly the opposite of that ‘battered woman type’. She is an active participant whose own bad behavior, anger, and verbal attacks caused her partner to begin to strangle her. This conceptualization of abuse as an outcome of the actions of both parties reflects the success of individualist explanations for a whole host of social problems (including drug and alcohol abuse), combined with more recent popular notions that erase the gendered elements of men’s violence against women. Here, relationship violence is framed as merely an equal opportunity problem of men and women abusing one another, as has been suggested by the highly controversial work of Murray Straus and Richard Gelles based on the conflict-tactic scales they developed nearly 30 years ago (Straus et al. 2006). This construction has enjoyed considerable play in popular media, and retains a great deal of popular currency despite strong sustained challenges by many who find both the research instruments and the authors’ interpretations highly problematic (cf. Dobash et al. 1992). But Lilly and Angie’s stories can also be understood as attempts to construct themselves as agentic actors who have exerted power over their own experiences rather than as passive victims of either individual men or structural arrangements (see also Lempert 1996). Neither of them paints themselves as helpless at the hands of their partners and both tell stories of how they too struggled with addiction, anger, and impulses to be violent or verbally abusive with their partners. These stories not only reflect what Loseke (2001) calls the ‘messiness of lived experience’, but also serve to discursively

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level the uneven playing field in their relationship through the stories they tell. This might be understood as its own sort of resistance effort, one that allowed them to carve out what they may have seen as a more symbolically powerful role in a complex multifaceted situation. Occupying marginalized positions in stratified gender and economic systems, they ultimately pose a challenge to neither in their efforts to feel a greater sense of power and control than these positions otherwise offer them. Doing so obviated any sharp critique of the structural conditions that increased their vulnerability to abuse, and conveniently renders the need for sustained collective action dedicated to changing those conditions unnecessary.

CONCLUSION As with the examples we saw earlier, acts of resistance – even those as substantial as leaving one’s home and partner to stand up against abuse – can be tempered by the inherent difficulty of challenging multiple interlocking structures of inequality at once. The women staying at Recourse, though able to find safe refuge from violence in the home due to earlier feminist efforts to define such violence as unacceptable and create safe spaces for escape, remained in a very precarious economic position. They needed to support their children, find a permanent place to live, and often find new jobs. Many believed that they would be most economically secure if they also entered into new partnerships with ‘better’ men, or could get their former partners to change. To join a feminist effort to challenge the gender order itself, or otherwise openly adopt a critical perspective on the systems of social and economic inequality in which they were embedded might jeopardize women’s immediate ability to meet urgent social and economic needs. Furthermore, shelter staff did little to propose alternative visions or foster more incisive

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social critiques. As previously noted, many shelters made significant compromises in pursuit of expanding space, growing their staff, and obtaining state recognition and support. In the early days of the movement, shelters were often staffed by activists and formerly battered women themselves. But in order to increase their funding base and gain economic power, they compromised these ideals, shifted to a model in which shelters are primarily run by professionally credentialed women who usually come to this work from relatively privileged backgrounds, and aim primarily to accomplish individual rather than social change. Again, the interlocking nature of systems of inequality operate to reinforce one another and take some of the wind out of the proverbial sails of efforts to tackle one particular dimension of inequality more fundamentally. This is a familiar story. Pierre Bourdieu proposes an intersectional dynamic of sorts in his work connecting the durability of masculine domination to its deep roots in institutions like the family, the church, and educational systems (2001). He points also to the role of the state in ensuring ‘public patriarchy’ by ‘ratifying and underscoring the prescriptions and proscriptions of private patriarchy’ and making the patriarchal family a central element of the ‘moral order’ (p. 87). At the same time, he suggests that radical change in educational systems has offered women opportunities to obtain economic independence and challenge family structures: showing how blows to domination and subordination in one arena can spill over into others. The fact remains, however, that in order to strike those blows, strategic or simply unreflexive compromises may be made. In Powers of the Weak, Elizabeth Janeway (1980) argues that women’s ‘acts of courage’ (in other words, resistance) are most effective when they ‘affirm woman’s proper role … [and] proper sphere’. Otherwise, she asserts, they ‘carry an aura of strangeness and deviance and raise questions’ (1980: 294). Steven Lukes (2005) similarly reminds us that power

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is ‘most effective when least accessible to observation’ (p. 64). This is a significant incentive, then, to continue acting primarily in ways that do not challenge the status quo in order to make any particular act of resistance or social challenge in a specific, localized domain more successful. Though the women at Recourse have dramatically challenged their role as submissive partners by leaving their relationships and former homes, they embrace feminine and maternal identities in the shelter and reaffirm their commitment to finding new relationships with better men. The popular cultural ideologies at the root of women’s subordination remain unchallenged, and as Rose Weitz reminds us, without challenging those underlying ideologies, subordination itself is not resisted (2001: 670). Here, I have attempted to provide just a small window into the complexities of resistance, while suggesting that an intersectional perspective can help us to better understand the contradictions inherent in so many acts of resistance, and why structures of inequality are so persistent despite the significant challenges that have been mounted against them. Though the battered women’s shelter movement pushed hard against patriarchal ideologies around violence against women, economic interests have tempered the strength of this resistance – as was the case in other forms of women’s resistance discussed earlier. Within the civil rights movement, patriarchal ideas and patterns of behavior could be strategically employed to get efforts to resist racism to be taken more seriously. Sociologists interested in resistance and social change must stay closely attuned to the ways in which resistance to structures of inequality – and accommodations to them – go hand in hand, and in the complex ways these systems of oppression are bound up with one another. By adopting an intersectional perspective while studying resistance, the full constellation of both the possibilities and limitations of resistance can begin to come more clearly into view, allowing us to

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better understand the conditions under which resistance succeeds and falters.

Notes  1  The social problem originally named ‘wife abuse’ has since come to be known by a variety of names. From ‘battered wife’ to ‘battered woman’, ‘domestic violence’ to ‘intimate partner violence’ or ‘violence against women’, the terminology itself reflects a struggle over the politics of gender and inclusivity. No term seems to sufficiently capture the inclusivity of the movement’s aims (one does not have to be married to be abused by her partner, nor does abuse occur only in heterosexual relationships) but, on the other hand, not dismiss the deeply gendered nature of the problem. The broad nature of some of the latter terms used to refer to the problem includes more potential victims (i.e. gays and lesbians who experience abuse at the hands of their partners) but may have the unfortunate side effect of de-politicizing the highly gendered nature of the problem as one rooted in patriarchal power dynamics. Alternatively, terms such as ‘violence against women’ capture the gendered character of this violence, but conflate phenomena of a variety of forms, from partner abuse against women in their homes, to sexual assaults by acquaintances or strangers in public spaces, prisons, or in times of war, to sex-selective infanticide and genital mutilation (see Watts and Zimmerman 2002). Here, I use these terms somewhat interchangeably as needed, or as reflecting the original author’s own usages.  2  For examples, see the public websites of national organizations such as: http://www.ncdsv.org, http://www.domesticviolence.org, and http:// www.thehotline.org/.   3  I took detailed ‘jottings’ during each group I observed, and drew from these notes to reconstruct full field notes immediately following my visits to the shelter (Emerson et al. 1995). I also conducted 15 intensive interviews, 11 with residents and 4 with staff, all of which were recorded and transcribed in full throughout the course of the project. Transcripts and field notes were coded and analyzed throughout the study following an inductive, grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2006).

REFERENCES Barnett, Bernice McNair. 1993. ‘Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender,

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Race, and Class’. Gender & Society 7(2): 162–182. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Polity Press. Bumiller, Kristin. 2008. In an Abusive State. Durham: Duke University Press. Charmaz, Kathy. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Conciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. ‘Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas’. Annual Review of Sociology 41(1): 1–20. Connell, R.W. 2002. Gender. Cambridge: Polity. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’. Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299. Dines, Gail. 2010. Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Dines, Gail and Wendy J. Murphy. 2011. ‘Slutwalk is Not Sexual Liberation’. The Guardian, May 8. Dobash, R. Emerson and Russell Dobash. 1992. Women, Violence, and Social Change. New York: Routledge. Dobash, Russell P., R. Emerson Dobash, Margo Wilson, and Martin Daly. 1992. ‘The Myth of Sexual Symmetry in Marital Violence’. Social Problems 39: 71–91. Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ferraro, Kathleen J. 1983. ‘Negotiating Trouble in a Battered Women’s Shelter’. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 12: 287–306. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Random House. Gengler, Amanda M. 2011. ‘Mothering Under Others’ Gaze: Policing Motherhood in a Battered Women’s Shelter’. International Journal of Sociology of the Family 37(1): 131–152. Gengler, Amanda M. 2012. ‘Defying (Dis) Empowerment in a Battered Women’s Shelter: Moral Rhetorics, Intersectionality, and Processes of Control and Resistance’. Social Problems 59(4): 501–521.

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Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Selfidentity: Self and Society in the late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goodkind, Sara. 2009. ‘“You can be anything you want, but you have to believe it”: Commercialized Feminism in Gender-Specific Programs for Girls’. Signs 34: 397–421. Haney, Lynne. 1996. ‘Homeboys, Babies, Men in Suits: The State and the Reproduction of Male Dominance’. American Sociological Review 61: 759–778. Haney, Lynne A. 2010. Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hannah-Moffat, Kelly. 2000. ‘Prisons that Empower: Neo-liberal Governance in Canadian Women’s Prisons’. British Journal of Criminology 40: 510–531. Janeway, Elizabeth. 1980. Powers of the Weak. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks. Jeffreys, Sheila. 2005. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. New York: Routledge. Kleinman, Sherryl. 1996. Opposing Ambitions: Gender and Identity in an Alternative Organization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kleinman, Sherryl, Matthew B. Ezzell, and A. Corey Frost. 2009. ‘Reclaiming Critical Analysis: The Social Harms of “Bitch”’. Sociological Analysis 3: 47–68. LeGates, Marlene. 2012[2001]. In their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society. New York: Routledge. Lempert, Lora Bex. 1996. ‘Women’s Strategies for Survival: Developing Agency in Abusive Relationships’. Journal of Family Violence 11: 269–289. Loseke, Donileen. 1992. The Battered Woman and Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife Abuse. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Loseke, Donileen R. 2001. ‘Lived Realities and Formula Stories of “Battered Women”’. Pp. 107–126 in Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World, edited by J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein. New York: Oxford University Press. Loseke, Donileen. 2003. Thinking About Social Problems. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Loseke, Donileen and Spencer Cahill. 1984. ‘The Social Construction of Deviance: Experts

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on Battered Women’. Social Problems 31: 296–310. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pence, Ellen and Michael Paymar. 1993. Education Groups for Men who Batter: The Duluth Model. New York: Springer. Reinelt, Claire. 1995. ‘Moving onto the Terrain of the State: The Battered Women’s Movement and the Politics of Engagement’. Pp. 84–104 in Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Robnett, Belinda. 1996. ‘African-American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954– 1965: Gender, Leadership, and Micromobilization’. American Journal of Sociology 101(6): 1661–1693. Robnett, Belinda. 1997. How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Rothenberg, Paula S. 2007. ‘Snatched from the Jaws of Victory: Feminism Then and Now’. Counterpunch. Retrieved from http://www. atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/1541-snatchedfrom-the-jaws-of-victory-feminism-then-andnow.html [accessed on June 22, 2016]. Schechter, Susan. 1982. Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement. Boston, MA: South End Press.

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Stark, Evan. 2007. Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal life. New York: Oxford University Press. Straus, Murray A., Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz. 2006. Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Tibbals, Chauntelle Anne. 2007. ‘Doing Gender as Resistance: Waitresses and Servers in Contemporary Table Service’. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(6): 731–51. Tierney, Kathleen J. 1982. ‘The Battered Women Movement and the Creation of the Wife Beating Problem’. Social Problems 29: 207–220. Watts, Charlotte and Cathy Zimmerman. 2002. ‘Violence Against Women: Global Scope and Magnitude’. The Lancet 359: 1232–1237. Weitz, Rose. 2001. ‘Women and their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation’. Gender and Society 15: 667–686. Wingfield, Adia Harvey. 2014. ‘Gendering BlackLivesMatter: A Feminist Perspective’. Pacific Standard (online). Retrieved from http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/ genderi ng-bl ac kl i v es matter-femi ni s tperspective-96710 (accessed on August 2, 2015).

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8 Individual Constraint and Group Solidarity: Marginalized Mothers and the Paradox of Family Responsibility Jillian Crocker

INTRODUCTION The problem of union decline in the contemporary United States raises two related issues, one presumably long-term, the other shortterm – both equally salient. First, and most widely recognized among labor scholars, what needs to happen to revitalize the labor movement? The second, in the absence of formal, organized, and recognized protections, what strategies can – and do – workers use to assert their dignity on the job? This chapter focuses on the latter. Research on workplace resistance often attempts to examine the factors that limit workers’ capacity to engage in efforts in opposition to unreasonable managerial practices, as well as the ways in which external

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factors shape workers’ ability to defy rules, resist protocols, and defend personal dignity. Examinations of such questions have periodically noted the significance of family life for workplace experiences, and when they do, such research typically discusses families as a normalizing force – as an obstacle to worker resistance and worker solidarity. In this chapter I find partial support for that position, but argue that such an approach is too narrow. At an individual level, the low-wage careworkers in this study certainly work to protect their own employment in the interest of their family responsibilities – often maintaining an image of compliance against even direct assaults on their dignity. But as I illustrate below, at the same time an individual might choose to comply with a resented policy or

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expectation herself, she will also actively support another’s act of defiance. While the routine acts of resistance performed by these individuals may not fully transform the organization, the peer support among these workers, many of whom are single mothers, turn individual acts aimed simply at defending dignity into collaborative efforts aimed at supporting other marginalized mothers.

LITERATURE REVIEW Making Sense of ‘Resistance’ Despite a considerable amount of scholarly attention, the broad subject of resistance has evaded a precise, and agreed upon, definition – with scholars often either neglecting explicit definition or using the term in contradictory ways (Hollander and Einwohner 2004). While some research on resistance has focused on clearly oppositional actions that are intentionally concealed (e.g. Scott 1985, 1990), other work has examined the significance of actions that are overt but the impact of which are debatable (e.g. Weitz 2001). Considerable research has emphasized the formal, overt, organized, and intermittent strategies that workers employ to transform organizational structure. Other work has emphasized the significance of ambiguous, less coordinated, and typically less dramatic practices employed by individuals enduring harsh or oppressive circumstances (Hodson 1995, 2001; Jermier et al. 1994; Prasad and Prasad 2000; Scott 1985, 1990). While this diversity of uses has raised debates among political scientists and anthropologists about what sorts of actions or behaviors constitute legitimate topics of study, sociological research has more often been characterized by its avoidance of definitional issues (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 537; Johansson and Vinthagen 2016). A consequence of this ambiguity, as Weitz (2001) observes, is that some scholars see resistance nowhere, while others see it everywhere.

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Intent and recognition are two key features of a working definition of resistance, both of which highlight its interactive character (Hollander and Einwohner 2004). While difficult to assess, the intent of an action generally falls to the actor(s) to establish. Recognition, by contrast, signifies the acknowledgment of an action as resistance by either the intended target or by a third party (such as the media, onlookers, or researchers), which sometimes produces conflicting interpretations. The issue of recognition has been a particular point of contention among scholars, who routinely raise the question of whose recognition (or lack of recognition) of an act as resistive carries the most weight (Hollander and Einwohner 2004). Within this debate, Rubin (1996) goes so far as to argue that only actions equally recognized by actors, targets, and third-party observers are truly resistance. Taking the opposing position, Scott (1985, 1990) focuses on what he terms everyday, or routine, resistance – drawing a direct contrast to less common but more formal, organized, and conventionally political forms of collective resistance. Routine resistance is inherently ambiguous, in addition to usually being necessarily covert and often spontaneous (Scott 1985; Prasad and Prasad 1998, 2000). Defined loosely as commonplace efforts that exist as a permanent but background feature of daily life, and directed toward the goal of ‘making a tolerable living’, this formulation of resistance is intended to capture actions ranging from horseplay and gossip to theft and even coordinated (if covert) boycotts. ‘Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines’ Scott explains, (Scott 1985: 8), but he nonetheless argues that the commonplace acts he describes are, in fact, ‘resistance’ insofar as they ‘deny or mitigate claims made by appropriating classes’ (Scott 1990: 302). And while Scott’s work has been the focus of much of the critique of these types of actions, he is certainly not alone. Some scholars point to the importance of everyday resistance for future transformative efforts (Pande 2012; Stombler and Padavic 1997) while others question conventional notions of what constitutes ‘authentic’

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strategies of resistance (Kelley 1994) or underscore the importance of the micropolitics of resistance for individual and collective experience (e.g. Glenn 1992, 2004).

Everyday Resistance at Work While attention to everyday resistance has increased in recent years, it still receives relatively limited attention (Johansson and Vinthagen 2016) – and research on workplace resistance is no exception (Roscigno and Hodson 2004). Furthermore, many of the sociological studies that do examine everyday resistance have focused on the enumeration of actions that do or do not qualify (Mumby 2005). For example, while Roy (1959) describes workers’ daily ‘banana time’ as one of several resistance strategies used to break the monotony of profoundly repetitive labor and as a manifestation of workers’ agency, Burawoy (1979)1 attempts to make the case that such activities are in fact a manifestation of capitalist relations of power. In his analysis, workers’ primary mode of resistance, the game of ‘making out’, created competition among coworkers – the cooptation of which, he argues, significantly increased worker productivity. In this way, he asserts, ‘making out’ was not resistance at all. Lopez (2006) makes a similar argument, characterizing nursing assistants’ normalization of ‘shortcuts’ as accommodation of an organizational structure that requires workers to undercut standards of care to secure profits. Studies such as these, which take the position that workers’ actions either are, or are not, resistance, obscure the complexity and ambiguity of such actions (Mumby 2005). Specific instances of resistance may have multiple meanings, and consequences, that are not obvious either to workers or to management. For the purposes of this chapter, I use an understanding of resistance, like Scott’s (1985, 1990), that emphasizes actors’ intent, particularly in the face of circumstances that

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make overt actions decidedly risky.2 In particular, I draw on definitions of resistance that emphasize the accounting of any effort that asserts worker autonomy and dignity despite management claims (Hodson 1995, 2001), or that underscore the importance of even ‘ambiguous confrontations’ for experiences of work and workplaces (Paules 1991; Prasad and Prasad 1998, 2000; Westwood 1985). In a service-based economy characterized by high levels of occupational gender segregation, a distinct challenge for the study of workplace resistance is the interpretation of actions that on the one hand are clear acts of workplace resistance, but which simultaneously draw on and reinforce conventional gender norms (e.g. Lamphere 1985; Westwood 1985). Ideals of workplace transformation in tension with normative gender performance have been highlighted in the context of labor mobilization – where less combative organizing strategies have seen particular success in gender-segregated workplaces (Hoerr 1997; Clawson 2003), as well as in negotiated union contracts – where contract provisions reinforce conventional gendered divisions of household labor (Crocker and Clawson 2012). Following such work, this chapter offers a contextualized account of the negotiation of power relations for individuals as workers with a complex set of interests and motivations that extend beyond class position.

The Role of Family in Workplace Resistance While organizational structures, jobs, and workers have traditionally been theorized as gender neutral, analyses of ‘advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity’ indicate otherwise (Acker 1990: 146). And while some aspects of gender identity are products of organizational structures and processes (Acker 1990), experiences of gender emerge

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in complex ways constrained by often conflicting demands, and ideologies, of work and family (Garey 1999). At home, affluent women may sometimes withdraw from the constraints of paid employment to focus on ‘intensive mothering’ (Hays 1996), but doing so does not necessarily reflect preference so much as a concession to unsupportive workplaces (Stone 2007). Working-class families must often resolve conflicting demands of work and home, but their strategies may undermine family and gender convention in ways they prefer to overlook – especially for men (Deutsch 1999; Shows and Gerstel 2009). At work, even the rhetoric of family can be used by management to exploit workers (Dodson and Zincavage 2007), despite the value of those same family-like relationships for careworkers’ experiences (Diamond 1992; Foner 1994). Not without contestation (e.g. Putnam 2000), a broad literature on family characterizes the nuclear family (Barrett and McIntosh 1982), and marriage in particular (Gerstel 1988), as a ‘greedy institution’ (Coser 1974) – a depoliticizing set of relationships that diverts energy and resources away from kin (Sarkisian and Gerstel 2008) and community (Barrett and McIntosh 1982). Analyses of the US labor movement have examined the role of women workers’ families as a particular obstacle, real or perceived (e.g. Clawson 2003; Kessler-Harris 1985, 1995), to solidarity among workers.3 Scholars of social movements further complicate our understanding of the implications of family for activism, with mixed findings of the influence of social factors (McAdam and Paulsen 1993) including family, intimate relationships (Goodwin 1997), and other ‘biographical constraints’ (McAdam 1986; McCarthy and Zald 1973; Schussman and Soule 2005) on protest participation. This chapter builds on such literature, examining the extent to which family – whether as a greedy institution (Coser 1974) or otherwise normalizing force (e.g. Williams 2000) – influences the enactment even of deliberately low-risk infrapolitics (Scott 1990).

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Intersectional feminist theorists have clearly illustrated the ways in which particularly oppressive or marginalizing circumstances have yielded everyday mechanisms of resistance that are covert as well as creative – and among scholars, that are conventionally under analyzed (Collins 2000; Johansson and Vinthagen 2016). Women of color especially have navigated such conditions, Collins (2000) argues, with their roles as central figures in communities and families having important effects on their efforts to make harsh conditions tolerable. An intersectional analysis of work experience, therefore, must offer a contextualized analysis of these conditions – as well as efforts to negotiate them – through the lens of interacting systems of oppression. This chapter analyzes experiences of workplace resistance with an understanding that the experiences, interests, and identities of these workers are shaped not only by class structure, but by social positions constituted by class, race, and gender.

DATA AND METHODS The data for this paper are part of a larger project that examines the processes by which work hours and schedules are negotiated in four healthcare occupations: physicians, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), nurses, and nursing assistants (Clawson and Gerstel 2014; Gerstel and Clawson 2014). The project utilized multimethod and multi-level data including surveys, intensive interviews, organizational observations, and documents (e.g. staff schedules and memoranda). Observations offer unique insight into organizational and interactional processes (Tope et al. 2005). This chapter draws on data collected during approximately 10 months of nonparticipant ethnographic observation at one of the healthcare organizations in the study: the Berkman nursing home.4 Observations were supplemented with data

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from 30 intensive interviews conducted with 23 nursing assistants and 7 nurses at Berkman as well as analysis of documents collected during observations. All interviews were transcribed in full, and both observations and interviews were coded using NVivo.

Research Setting Berkman is an independently operated nonprofit, non-union, average-sized, skilled nursing facility located outside of a metropolitan area in the northeast. Its 200 beds are divided equally across five units. Officially, each unit is staffed with approximately one nursing assistant per six residents on day and evening shifts, and one nursing assistant per twelve residents on the night shift – although actual staffing levels vary from day to day. In addition, there are typically two nurses assigned to a unit, as well as administrative nurses and an administrative assistant on the day shift. On the evening shift there are only two nurses, and on the night shift only one. While the scheduler at Berkman does sometimes use nurses from a private agency, all nursing assistants are employed directly by the facility. The workers observed in this study are, as are nursing assistants more generally, overwhelmingly (96%) women. While the residents of Berkman are almost entirely white, the nursing assistants are primarily (nearly 90%) women of color. Most are mothers, and in many cases are single mothers of young children. Despite these similarities, individuals did describe variations in experience concerning family support, class background (if not current socioeconomic status), religious affiliation, nationality, and ethnicity. Nursing assistants are supervised directly by nurses on their assigned unit, under whose licenses they are authorized to provide care. While, like nursing assistants, nurses at Berkman are primarily women, they are overwhelmingly (84%) white, and only a handful were recorded as having children under 12.

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Nurses are charged with enforcing organizational policy and, ultimately, with ensuring resident safety. Even so, the two groups have very different care responsibilities: while nursing assistants focus on hands-on care tasks, nurses are responsible for paperwork and spend the bulk of each shift dispensing medication. In this chapter I begin by outlining the significance of family responsibilities for nursing assistants’ regulatory defiance. I then illustrate the ways in which a self-awareness as family providers constrains informal workplace resistance, while simultaneously offering a source of group solidarity.

Family and Defiance: Navigating Work–Family Tension As with most workplaces, experiences and responsibilities beyond the walls of the Berkman nursing home often seep in to shape decisions that workers make throughout the day. The extent to which ‘life’ interferes with the expectations of the ideal worker is perhaps amplified among lowincome occupations. At Berkman, this tension is especially evident in those decisions that are related to the defiance of official institutional policies. Workers regularly reported taking longer or more frequent breaks than are officially allowed. This is especially true when having ‘bad days’, which were characterized as days that might have included anything from a dispute with a loved one, or complications of childcare, to simple exhaustion. In addition to taking extended breaks, nursing assistants who are working the overnight shift to manage childcare, to work a second job, or to attend school might even sleep during their shift (sometimes deliberately) – which commonly created tension among coworkers and between workers and supervisors. The role of family in the negotiation of daily work experience becomes particularly clear in the broader context of schedule

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management. The demands of parenthood, and for many of these workers, of single parenthood, regularly force many workers to make difficult decisions about adhering to official scheduling policy – or bending the rules to care for their families.5 When unable to work, employees at Berkman are expected to notify management as far in advance as possible, with at least four hours’ notice ahead of time. Of course, such advance notice of a canceled shift is not always possible. And while workers receive six paid sick days a year, they are penalized each time they use one: the first time they call out workers receive a verbal warning, the second and third times they receive written warnings. The fourth time that a nursing assistant calls out in a 90-day period, she is fired. This policy is far from an empty threat. During the observation period one well-respected, hardworking nursing assistant was known to be fired for accumulating four callouts in a brief period when flu-like symptoms were passed among her children – and finally to herself. Workers were well aware of this woman’s situation and the reason for her dismissal, which served as a reminder of the policy’s harshness. Even if a worker does know in advance that she will need time off, the Berkman scheduler can still refuse to grant it. In such cases an employee has the option of swapping schedules with a peer, provided such arrangements can be made and that the change does not generate any overtime pay. Whether for sickness or personal reasons, this solution is not always feasible, particularly during busy times of year, periods of acute understaffing, or when there is limited notice. When workers encounter such conditions, and are unable to arrange time off through official channels, they are often forced to make decisions that either sacrifice family needs or put their employment in jeopardy. For example, as one nursing assistant described: They [management] told me well, I’m sorry, but you have to find your own replacement, or if you call out you’ll get wrote [sic] up. I’m like what?! Well, you’re going to have to write me up because

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this is very important. This is something to do with my child’s school.

Although in circumstances like this one a worker might choose to be disciplined rather than fall short of family obligations, most workers will first make every effort to arrange a change in shifts with a coworker. Scheduling data for Berkman support the observation that tension between work and family obligations pressures individual nursing assistants to make tough choices. Analysis of six months of handwritten schedules obtained during observation indicate that mothers of young children and nursing assistants are significantly (p < 0.001) more likely than those without school-aged children or nurses both to call out and to swap shifts. Combining the two categories, over a six-month period the average nursing assistant mother had more than seven (7.31) days when she called out or swapped shifts with a fellow employee in order not to work the regularly scheduled shift, compared to only 3.35 such days for nursing assistants who were not mothers (p < 0.001). That is, mothers missed an average of more than one day per month, and non-mothers less than half that. Interviews and observations confirmed that mothers called out – typically risking disciplinary action – not only for their own illness, but also in many cases when their children were ill or needed to see a doctor. And mothers sometimes wanted or needed to attend meetings or events at their children’s schools, whether to watch a performance or attend a conference about a child’s difficulties and misbehavior.

Family Responsibility as Individual Constraint While one’s family can at times motivate rule-bending behaviors such as canceling a shift at the last minute, workers’ responsibilities to their families were also described as a primary reason that so many rules, despite

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being judged unnecessary or foolish by workers, are followed at all. Asked about the experience of the interaction between work and family, one nursing assistant highlighted this reality – somewhat scoffing at the question: That’s the whole reason I’m working, is for [my] children, and, I mean, you have to work to pay bills – that’s for your children.

Nursing Assistants at Berkman are classified as full-time at 32 hours per week. On the one hand, their access to healthcare benefits at 32 hours is highly regarded. At the same time, however, for most of these low-income workers, the pay earned for 32 hours’ worth of work was insufficient to support their families – even for those women who were in dual earner couples. Many nursing assistants worked second, and sometimes third, jobs. Those same women, and others, were also regularly looking for opportunities to pick up supplemental shifts at this chronically understaffed facility. Often bargaining with each other to take on already scheduled shifts, the refrain ‘I don’t need a day off – I need the time’ was common when speaking of upcoming holidays. Such financial motivation, spawned by management’s decision to limit regular work hours, encourages engagement with the sort of scheduling ‘flexibility’ that Susan Lambert and her colleagues (e.g. Lambert 2008; Lambert et  al. 2012) have criticized. Nursing assistants were consistently observed to be asking whether they could work for others. That is, in addition to asking for a coworker to cover a shift that one desired not to work, nursing assistants regularly accosted peers with the request to come in to work a shift for a peer to earn extra income. At Berkman, nine out of 10 workers picked up at least one shift over the six-month period, almost three-quarters of workers did so at least once a month, and half did so at least twice a month. Low-wage nursing assistants were tolerant both of having insufficient work hours and with consistent understaffing

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on the floor not only because they strongly felt that their work was important and necessary, but because – in the short term – their own and their families’ well-being depended on the income generated from these additional shifts. As one worker justified her decision to work supplemental hours, ‘I have to do this; it will help us so much’. In a workplace where four callouts in a rolling 90-day period can mean job loss, and in an economic climate where job opportunities are limited, workers are routinely forced to grapple with the importance of their responsibilities to their families. While nursing assistants routinely described aspects of their jobs as frustrating, they also emphasized the importance of staying employed and bringing home a paycheck. On one occasion, the apparent termination of a recently hired nursing assistant lead to an externalization of this type of thinking. When the Assistant Director of Nursing publicly instructed a recently hired worker to come with her off the unit, and to ‘bring [her] coat’, the remaining workers – veteran and new – watched with interest and huddled around the unit desk. Quickly they began to discuss the circumstances of this young woman’s dismissal in hushed voices. What began as simple information sharing quickly took on features of veteran staff socializing the recent hires. Assistant 1: They [the nurses] watch everything. Assistant 2: When you punch in, when you punch out … Assistant 3: And not just when you punch in, but what you’re doing when you punch in. Do you stand out here gabbing, or get to work? They watch everything.

This description of how the nurses (‘they’) perform their managerial duties served as a warning to the newer workers that they would be under constant surveillance, and that their jobs are constantly on the line. Following this education, the conversation shifted to a more general reflection on

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the nursing assistants’ positions as workers – specifically, as working mothers. The young woman who was just escorted off of the unit, who had just turned 18 and did not have any children, was perceived by the group to have been too immature, and not sufficiently motivated, to deal with the pressures of constant surveillance. She was untrained in selfregulation, the veterans assessed, and she lacked the pressure to support children that the more mature workers consistently felt. This tension between how a worker who is unburdened by family responsibilities would operate in a workplace such as this one, and how the workers who have family obligations feel compelled to react to various indignities, is a constant struggle. One veteran worker described for the group that often when one of ‘them’ (the nurse-managers) tells/asks her to do something: I want to be like: ‘What did you say? [rolling eyes, turning head, hand raised] Psshh’. But instead I’m like: ‘What did you say? [cheerfully, song-like] I’m cooomiiing! [jogs down the hall]’

She then explained her daily performance of compliance, ‘You gotta think about your kids and those new sneakers they want’. The group nodded in collective agreement with this sentiment, expressing support for the position that they cannot afford to lose this job because they have children. While the opportunity for such explicit and collective sharing was infrequent during work hours, these sentiments were routinely echoed in casual conversation. Nursing assistants may at times have had critiques of the rules and expectations of their work, but as the above situation demonstrates, family obligations constrained their willingness to assert demands for respect and improved working conditions.

Family, Class, and Group Solidarity Despite its important role in motivating compliant behavior – or at least the presentation of compliance – among individual nursing

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assistants, family also played a crucial role in motivating peer complicity, and even active support, for others’ resistance. While at a personal level a worker might feel and say that family obligations made some unsanctioned behaviors too risky, rules were still routinely broken or ignored at Berkman. And because nursing assistants perceived one another not just as coworkers, but in some sense as co-mother-workers, they expressed a particular commitment to supporting one another in the face of workplace discipline. This support, or sometimes simple complicity, was an active expression of solidarity among women marginalized not just as workers, but as mothers and caregivers. Workers at Berkman routinely engaged in various forms of routine resistance – including everything from gossiping about managers to extending the length of their breaks to overtly eating meals in public areas designated off limits to food. Unlike worksites that are not focused on care, a considerable number of the ways that these women asserted their autonomy have consequences for other workers. For example, when a worker decided that it wasn’t necessary to distribute clean linens (a not-uncommon occurrence), another worker would be inconvenienced by having to retrieve them herself – possibly in the middle of another task. What stands out is that despite this inconvenience, CNAs accept, and even support, their coworkers’ resistance. Peers withhold information about such transgressions, often talking among themselves, but rarely reporting to superiors. While to an outsider many of these actions might seem minor, to both the workers who were gaining some time, autonomy, or dignity – and to the workers who had to pick up their slack – such actions were certainly significant. As one nursing assistant put it, We’ll report it to the nurse … they will see something if they need to see something. But other than that, no, we will handle it ourselves.

Not only do CNAs not report rule violations, they actively support it, often covering

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for each other despite both risk and inconvenience. For example, on one occasion, upon realizing that a coworker had not yet returned from her lunch break, Agnes was observed to be visibly irritated. She audibly described being tired, and how much she wanted to get off the unit, and complained to her peers that she had to wait until Anne Marie returned until she could get her lunch. Such occurrences were common at Berkman, where breaks were rotated to ensure an adequate staffing level on the unit. In this case, Agnes did wait, rather than complaining to a nurse, which would certainly have earned the tardy nursing assistant (Anne Marie) a warning in her file. In fact, later that afternoon, the Assistant Director of Nursing (ADON) directly accused Anne Marie of taking a longer break than she was allowed. Despite the fact that everyone who had been working on the unit at the time had likely heard Agnes complain about Anne Marie delaying her lunch, the group collectively intervened, confronting the manager and discounting her observation – quickly explaining that Anne Marie was in fact back – that they had seen her in the hall. Not only did Agnes not report Anne Marie, but she and the others quickly covered for her when the ADON accused her of violating the rule. Such practices, which in some sense serve as an extreme and active version of the ‘web of silence’ observed by Scott (1985), were common. Let’s say a nurse comes and says, ‘Who’s got this patient’, right? And you’ll say Mariah, cause she’s on. Well, [the nurse will] say, ‘Where is she?’ I says, ‘Well, she’s busy right now. You want me to go and do that?’ You know. And then I’ll go or whatever.

Asked whether this statement meant that the speaker, and others, would actively misrepresent the availability of a coworker who was not actually occupied, but was in fact simply absent, she confirmed. This strategy of either ignoring or addressing in-group – both directly and indirectly – others’ acts of resistance was commonly described by nursing assistants:

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Mariah might say something jokingly you know, but she’s not gonna report you.

Workers might express frustration to one another, or even occasionally confront a peer about unacceptable behavior, but in most circumstances there was a clear expectation that a worker who reported a peer’s transgression to a nurse or manager was a ‘rat’. Typically, that sort of behavior (reporting rule violations) was evidenced only among newer workers, and was deliberately eliminated over time with socialization, in part, because alliances developed among workers: Anyways, we always help each other, so as far as Shakira or Steph, I really don’t care, because we’ve always got our back. I don’t even have to ask.

Given the potential inconveniences experienced in a work unit where even individual responsibilities are part of a larger web of care, the question that emerges is what motivates nursing assistants to insulate each other from discipline even at cost to their own effort and work routine. When asked how she handled such situations, Suzanne shared a common refrain: We all cover for each other … Because we understand.

What does it mean to ‘understand’? Eve, explaining her choice not to report her peers’ extensions of break length (in particular) despite the frustration they caused her, said something equally vague: I don’t report them, I don’t like to report people. Q: Why not? Uh, we are all humans.

Pushed to explain what in particular concerned her about holding peers accountable for violating work rules, Eve explained that ‘they have kids’, and that many of her coworkers rely on their work at Berkman to provide for their families. She went on to describe her own challenges providing for

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her now teenaged son, as well as the lifeupset a peer had experienced when she had been temporarily suspended from work for disciplinary reasons. Nursing assistants are generally tolerant of one another’s routine resistance, despite the reality that such resistance sometimes makes their own individual work days more stressful or strenuous. Their empathy for one another, as ‘humans’ who ‘understand’ what their lives are like, is at least in part driven by an awareness that these women are not just workers in an exhausting occupation, but mothers whose earnings are crucial for the survival of their families. As another nursing assistant explained: I look at it like, yeah, they all have children, and I don’t want a – I want a clear, a clean conscience.

Emphasizing the limited availability of gainful employment, the uncertainty of the economy, and the rising costs of fuel, this woman explained that she would not play the role of one more factor making life difficult for her coworkers. Other workers described their tolerance of peers’ resistance not as an important way of protecting one another from job loss, but instead as a simple matter of having been there themselves. For example, one aide described how difficult getting to work can be for her peers with young children – particularly when their childcare falls apart at the last minute, or when they are fighting with a loved one. Her understanding was based on a combination of her own experiences when her kids were younger as well as her sense of what her coworkers are going through. Another explained that while it can be difficult to pick up extra tasks while a coworker puts her head down for a nap in the breakroom, sometimes, with all she has going on at home, she really just needs to take that nap. The same force that constrains workers’ own willingness to risk discipline – that is, their responsibility to their families – fosters a sense of understanding that their peers are daily facing similar constraints. Not reporting

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rule violations is the product of perceiving coworkers as marginalized mothers, in many cases much like themselves. While decisions not to report, or to actively hide, coworkers’ rule violations may be accompanied by the weight of increased work responsibility or inconvenience that insulates the organization against negative consequences of routine resistance, such decisions both draw on and reproduce a conceptualization of nursing assistants as a unified and marginalized ‘us’ (e.g. D’Art and Turner 2002). This ‘us’ is in clear opposition to the ‘them’ of nurses, including nurse-managers. For example, most mornings around 8am – a critically busy time of morning when every resident is bathed, dressed, and prepared for breakfast – one nursing assistant would announce the arrival of the nurse manager by loudly singing ‘Here comes my boss. Here she comes’. Such a practice was perhaps in part personal and fun, but it also functioned to alert coworkers to the immediate presence of a supervisor. This foundation for a collective identity also undergirds a nascent sense that the organization would run smoother – and the care provided would be of higher quality – if the nursing assistants themselves had the authority to make the rules – a central feature of class consciousness. For example, at a meeting organized to address an upcoming accreditation review and to field worker concerns, one nursing assistant raised a question about the (in)effectiveness of micro-managing break times for reinforcing the purported organizational ‘patients first’ mentality. She asked, How can an aide get in trouble for taking her lunch a few minutes late? If a resident needs your help with something, or simply calls your name, are you supposed to say ‘Sorry, gotta go to lunch?’

Similar critiques of organizational policy were common, and echoed in comments about the timing of resident meals as well as worker breaks. Even the idea that nursing assistants and residents share a familial bond offered

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motivation to make the case that aides should have more autonomy when it comes to providing care. Describing the emotional reward, as well as risk, of caring so deeply for these nursing home residents, one worker in particular repeatedly made the case to me that ‘aide’ or ‘CNA’ didn’t fully cover the work that they actually do throughout the day. ‘We are their family’, she once said, ‘… they light up when they see us’. The job description outlined in her employee manual hardly covers the weight that such a responsibility carries.

DISCUSSION Conceptualizing class solidarity in contemporary society demands attending to not simply identity, but interests – including interests beyond the workplace (e.g. Clawson 2003). Low-income workers, and particularly women workers of color, are widely recognized for their historical and persistent exclusion from the conventional norms of femininity (Collins 2000). The nursing assistants at Berkman live in different towns, work different shifts, are from different countries, and practice different religions. What nearly all of them share, however, is that their ability to support their families – whether alone or with the help of a partner or kin – is of central concern. In that vein, this chapter argues that for these workers the practices through which solidarity develops hinge not on an outmoded conceptualization of their relationship to the means of production, but on something far more intimate – their common interests as marginalized mothers. Throughout each day individual workers routinely make decisions about whether to undermine or violate workplace rules. These violations make their days a little more tolerable, but risk their job security, and by extension their ability to fulfill family responsibilities. Negotiating that tension often comes at the cost of coworkers’ time and energy.

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Paradoxically, the same priorities that in some circumstances motivate compliance with workplace rules by individuals simultaneously form a basis for worker solidarity when those rules are challenged by others. While considerable research has highlighted the former, family as a greedy institution (Coser 1974) that constrains community connection (Barrett and McIntosh 1982) and risktaking behavior (McAdam 1986; Williams 2000), here I want to underscore the latter. Solidarity among nursing assistants in this study has among its roots the awareness of a shared experience as family members, and in particular, as mothers struggling to provide for their families. Expectations of the ideal worker ignore the external responsibilities of families and communities. For these women, being a good mother requires being seen as a good worker by management. A good mother doesn’t put her ability to support her family at risk. This impression management is facilitated by coworkers, and is the product of an awareness of shared experience. The nursing assistants at Berkman do not illustrate a clear case of worker unity in defiance of management authority. Quite the opposite: Workers often complain about each other. These complaints, however, are kept among themselves – in the same way a family might keep even the most heated internal disputes private, shielded from the judgment of outsiders. And unlike Scott’s (1990) conceptualization of hidden transcripts that undermine authority, this privacy protects, rather than conceals, the practice and image of group solidarity. In doing so workers reinforce group solidarity and ensure individuals’ continued employment at Berkman, despite the additional work burden placed on peers. Why protect those who make their workdays more strenuous? As one nursing assistant put it, and others echoed, because ‘they have children’. Contrary to the position that family is depoliticizing, these workers’ experiences demonstrate that family can also be repoliticizing. Decisions that workers make are influenced

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by outside factors, such as families – their own and others’. But here the story is more complicated than simple constraints on risktaking, rule-breaking behaviors. Workers continue to resist workplace rules, but characteristic of workers in the most precarious circumstances, they use relatively low-risk strategies – like calling out sick or taking an extra break – that insulate not just themselves, but those who depend on them. While some conceptualizations of resistance might exclude such covert actions, doing so makes invisible the micropolitics of daily living. Not only do families push workers to be creative or surreptitious, they offer a common bond. Insulation against supervisory discipline, or potential job loss, comes both in the form of covert actions, as others have so vividly demonstrated, and in the form of coworker solidarity, as this chapter illustrates.

CONCLUSION It can be tricky to actually measure consciousness (Fantasia 1988; Wright 1997). Nonetheless, the observations that workers at Berkman make about their relationship to their supervisors, and their beliefs about the ways in which their families’ well-being may be at odds with workplace policies, illustrate a subjectivity as both workers and mothers that is inherently grounded in both class and gender. And why wouldn’t ‘class’ consciousness, or class formation, account for the realities of gender-typed and gender-segregated workplaces? Building on prior research that demonstrates that workplace resistance is influenced by gendered work cultures (e.g. Pierce 1996; Vallas 1993; Westwood 1985), the experiences of workers at Berkman suggest that these cultures of resistance are fundamentally motivated by concerns about workers’ roles as mothers and providers. These class practices, and the informal social network that facilitates them, have the capacity to transform class consciousness (Wright 1997).

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The idea that workers recognize their own precarity, recognize their interests as in opposition to that of their supervisors, and recognize their shared experience not just as low-income workers, but as low-income women workers and mothers of color, is a twist on traditional conceptualizations of class consciousness. These women – despite an emerging sense of solidarity – do exhibit restraint in their daily enactment of workplace resistance, pursuing limited actions that make their workdays more tolerable but do not overturn the relations of power. Some would argue that such restraint constitutes consent to their own exploitation (Burawoy 1979). In fact, more than simply not undoing the structure that promotes their exploitation, these nursing assistants actively collaborate to maintain an image of compliance with that system. In addition to lying or looking the other way on behalf of peers, as a team these women at times even work harder than they otherwise might be required to work. In most cases these workers’ choices about how best to achieve autonomy, and dignity (Hodson 2001), are based on the requirements of their other – primary – role: mother. Despite being constrained, I argue that this everyday resistance is just as significant as more overt, dramatic, actions. Although informal, often uncoordinated, and occasionally even the source of coworker tension, these actions shift the dynamics of power, offering a foundation ‘upon which other forms of resistance may grow’ (Scott 1985: 273). Future research should examine the extent to which that foundation bears such weight.

Notes  1  Notably, Burawoy’s influential argument is based on an ethnography of the same machine shop years later.  2  That said, for those particularly concerned with the issue of recognition, the data described in this chapter do illustrate features of what others

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would characterize as target (nurse-manager) and third-party (the researcher) recognition.   3  Others, like Franzway (2000), have taken the opposite perspective, examining union involvement itself as a greedy institution.  4  All names are pseudonyms.  5  For a detailed description of such choices, see Gerstel and Clawson (2014).

REFERENCES Acker, Joan. 1990. ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations’. Gender and Society 4(2): 139–158. Barrett, Michele and Mary McIntosh. 1982. The Anti-Social Family. London: Verso Press. Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clawson, Dan. 2003. The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Clawson, Dan and Naomi Gerstel. 2014. Unequal Time: Gender, Class, and Family in Employment Schedules. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Coser, Lewis. 1974. Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment. New York: Free Press. Crocker, Jillian and Dan Clawson. 2012. ‘Buying Time: Gendered Patterns in Union Contracts’. Social Problems 59(4): 459–480. D’Art, Daryl and Thomas Turner. 2002. ‘The Decline of Worker Solidarity and the End of Collectivism?’. Economic and Industrial Democracy 23(1): 7–34. Deutsch, Francine M. 1999. Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diamond, Timothy. 1992. Making Gray Gold: Narratives of Nursing Home Care. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press. Dodson, Lisa and Rebekah M. Zincavage. 2007. ‘“It’s Like a Family”: Caring Labor, Exploitation, and Race in Nursing Homes’. Gender & Society 21(6): 905–928.

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Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foner, Nancy. 1994. The Caregiving Dilemma: Work in an American Nursing Home. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Franzway, Suzanne. 2000. ‘Women Working in a Greedy Institution: Commitment and Emotional Labour in the Union Movement’. Gender, Work and Organization 7: 258–268. Garey, Anita. 1999. Weaving Work and Motherhood. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gerstel, Naomi. 1988. ‘Divorce, Gender, and Social Integration’. Gender and Society 2: 343–367. Gerstel, Naomi and Dan Clawson. 2014. ‘Class Advantage and the Gender Divide: Flexibility on the Job and at Home’. American Journal of Sociology 120(2): 395–431. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1992. ‘From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18(1): 1–43. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2004. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodwin, Jeff. 1997. ‘The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement: Affectual Ties and Solidarity in the Huk Rebellion, 1946 to 1954’. American Sociological Review 62: 53–69. Hays, Sharon. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hodson, Randy. 1995. ‘Worker Resistance: An Underdeveloped Concept in the Sociology of Work’. Economic and Industrial Democracy 16: 79–110. Hodson, Randy. 2001. Dignity at Work. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hoerr, John. 1997. We Can’t Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hollander, Jocelyn A. and Rachel L. Einwohner. 2004. ‘Conceptualizing Resistance’. Sociological Forum 19(4): 533–554. Jermier, John M., David Knights, and Walter R. Nord. 1994. Resistance and Power in Organizations. New York: Routledge.

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Johansson, Anna and Stellan Vinthagen. 2016. ‘Dimensions of Everyday Resistance: An Analytical Framework’. Critical Sociology 42(3): 417–435. Kelley, Robin. 1994. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: The Free Press. Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1985. ‘Problems of Coalition building: Women and Trade Unions in the 1920s’. In Ruth Milkman (ed.), Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, Boston, MA: Routledge, pp. 110–138. Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1995. ‘Where are the Organized Women Workers?’. In C. Moses and H. Hartmann (eds), U.S. Women in Struggle: A Feminist Studies Anthology, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 110–133. Lambert, Susan J. 2008. ‘Passing the Buck: Labor Flexibility Practices that Transfer Risk onto Hourly Workers.’ Human Relations 61(9):1203–1227. Lambert, Susan J., Anna Haley-Lock, and Julia R. Henly. 2012. ‘Schedule Flexibility in Hourly Jobs: Unanticipated Consequences and Promising Directions’. Community, Work and Family 15(3): 293–315. Lamphere, Louise. 1985. ‘Bringing the Family to Work: Women’s Culture on the Shop Floor’. Feminist Studies 11(3): 519-540. Lopez, Steven Henry. 2006. ‘Culture Change Management in Long-Term Care: A Shop Floor View’. Politics & Society 34: 55–80. McAdam, Doug. 1986. ‘Recruitment to HighRisk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer’. American Journal of Sociology 92: 64–90. McAdam, Doug and Ronnelle Paulsen. 1993. ‘Specifying the Relationship between Social Ties and Activism’. American Journal of Sociology 99: 640–667. McCarthy, John D. and Mayer D. Zald. 1973. The Trend of Social Movements in America: Professionalization and Resource Mobilization. Morristown, NJ: General Learning. Mumby, Dennis. 2005. ‘Theorizing Resistance in Organization Studies: A Dialectical Approach’. Management Communication Quarterly 19(1): 19–44. Pande, Amrite. 2012. ‘From “Balcony Talk” and “Practical Prayers” to Illegal Collectives: Migrant Domestic Workers and Meso-Level

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Resistances in Lebanon’. Gender & Society 26(3): 382–405. Paules, Greta Foff. 1991. Dishing it Out: Power and Resistance among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant. Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press. Pierce, Jennifer. 1996. Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Prasad, Anshuman and Pushkala Prasad. 1998. ‘Everyday Struggles at the Workplace: The Nature and Implications of Routine Resistance in Contemporary Organizations’. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 15: 369–403. Prasad, Pushkala, and Anshuman Prasad. 2000. ‘Stretching the Iron Cage: The Constitution and Implications of Routine Workplace Resistance’. Organization Science 11(4): 387–403. Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roscigno, Vincent J. and Randy Hodson. 2004. ‘The Organizational and Social Foundations of Worker Resistance’. American Sociological Review 69: 14–39. Roy, Donald. 1959. ‘Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction’. Human Organization 18: 158–168. Rubin, Jeffrey. 1996. ‘Defining Resistance: Contested Interpretations of Everyday Acts’. Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 15: 237–260. Sarkisian, Natalia and Naomi Gerstel. 2008. ‘Till Marriage Do Us Part: Adult Children’s Relationships with Their Parents’. Journal of Marriage and Family 70: 360–376. Schussman, Alan and Sarah A. Soule. 2005. ‘Process and Protest: Accounting for Individual Protest Participation’. Social Forces 84: 1083–1108. Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shows, Carla and Naomi Gerstel. 2009. ‘Fathering, Class, and Gender: A Comparison of Physicians and Emergency Medical Technicians’. Gender & Society 23(2): 161–187.

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Stombler, Mindy and Irene Padavic. 1997. ‘Sister Acts: Resisting Men’s Domination in Black and White Fraternity Little Sister Programs’. Social Problems 44: 257–275. Stone, Pamela. 2007. Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tope, Daniel, Lindsey Joyce Chamberlain, Martha Crowley, and Randy Hodson. 2005. ‘The Benefits of Being There: Evidence from the Literature on Work’. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34: 470–493. Vallas, Steven P. 1993. Power in the Workplace: The Politics of Production at AT&T. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Weitz, Rose. 2001. ‘Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation’. Gender & Society 15: 667–686. Westwood, Sallie. 1985. All Day, Every Day: Factory and Family in the Making of Women’s Lives. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Williams, Joan. 2000. Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It. London: Oxford University Press. Wright, Erik Olin. 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. London: Cambridge University Press.

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9 Protecting Our Children: Paradoxes of Resistance in an Era of Neoliberal Education Linda Blum and Shelley Kimelberg

INTRODUCTION Over the last several decades, the neoliberal embrace of free markets and global competitiveness in US political life has made its way into American public schools (Hursh 2007; Lipman 2011). Faced with widespread educational disparities, policymakers and government leaders adopted a market-based approach to reform, implementing a now entrenched regime of standardized assessment and accountability measures, exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Chubb and Moe 1990; McDermott 2011; Mehta 2013; Peterson and West 2003). While the consequences of this shift for increased federal control over and involvement in public schools is well documented (see, e.g., McGuinn 2006; Mehta 2013; Peterson and West 2003), less attention has been paid to the degree to which neoliberalism has cast

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the education of young children as a matter of personal, rather than social or collective, responsibility. Indeed, the explicit focus on competition that is a central part of twentyfirst-century education reform is an amplified and intensified version of a broader change that has unfolded in the American educational system over the last century, one which has served to ‘undermin[e] education as a public good’ and instead empower ‘educational consumers’ (Labaree 2012: 41), thus establishing a ‘zero-sum game’ (Labaree 2012). This emphasis on the role of individual consumers in the educational marketplace, coupled with the increasing prominence of ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting (Lareau 2003) among the middle- and upper-middle class, has led to heightened scrutiny of the decisions that parents make vis-à-vis their children’s education. The rapid expansion of school choice mechanisms (e.g., lotteries,

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charter schools, vouchers), for example, is premised on the belief that parents should (and will) act predictably, in ways that ‘optimize’ the educational outcomes for their children (Bast and Walberg 2004; Greene et  al. 2010). This belief persists, despite considerable evidence that school choice sets and choice processes are highly stratified, thus leading to outcomes that often reproduce the very inequities that such initiatives purport to rectify (see, e.g., Bell 2009; Cobb et  al. 2009). Despite growing media coverage of the complaints from parents, teachers, and administrators concerning several hallmarks of twenty-first-century schooling (see, e.g., Mead 2015; Wong 2014 for discussions of high-stakes testing, the Common Core, and teacher assessment), scholarly research on organized resistance to this regime has been scant – perhaps simply because, to date, there has been little such resistance, other than among teachers’ unions.1 Nevertheless, individual parents regularly engage in subtle, ‘everyday’ acts of resistance in educational settings that both challenge our understanding of the forms that resistance takes, and complicate the picture of why parents, specifically mothers, resist, and to what end. In this paper, we reflect on several paradoxes of resistance from the perspective of two qualitative studies of mothers actively negotiating school systems on behalf of their children. The first case concerns mothers who resisted school pressures to medicate or otherwise exclude or isolate their children, all of whom had mild to moderate special needs. The second case focuses on middle-class mothers who made the decision to send their children (all of whom were typically developing) to relatively disadvantaged urban public schools, thus resisting ‘white flight’ to the suburbs or to private school alternatives. In highlighting the experiences of these mothers, we demonstrate a number of complexities inherent in school-based resistance that is undertaken not by students, but by parents. We argue that these cases are important

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both because they challenge some of the normative assumptions common to resistance studies in general, and because they highlight how the individualism and divisiveness that neoliberal approaches to education instill in communities influence the experience and consequences of resistance for parents and children alike. In the sections that follow we briefly review the relevant literature and provide an overview of our two studies. We then discuss four key themes that emerged from our analysis: (a) relationality and resistance in the schooling context; (b) the role of insiders, outsiders, and perceived threats; (c) targets of resistance and disciplinary social norms; and (d) the consequences of resistance for class reproduction.

THE SCHOOL AS A SITE OF RESISTANCE The notion of schools as ‘arenas of contestation and struggle among differently empowered cultural and economic groups’ (Giroux 1983a: 74) figures most prominently in the works of Henry Giroux (see, e.g., Giroux 1981, 1983a, 1983b, 2001; as well as Aronowitz and Giroux 1985). While strains of resistance theory in education scholarship can be traced back several decades before Giroux (see McGrew 2011 for an exhaustive review of the literature on class-based student resistance), Giroux’s call to ‘understand more thoroughly the complex ways in which people mediate and respond to the connection between their own experiences and structures of domination and constraint’ (1983b: 290) positioned resistance at the core of a theoretical framework that explicitly recognizes individuals’ agency in the schooling environment. In doing so, Giroux deliberately set theories of resistance against the ‘reproduction models of schooling’ (1983b: 261) that captured the discipline’s attention starting in the late 1960s. Perhaps most notable in this regard is Bowles and Gintis’s (1977) seminal work,

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Schooling in Capitalist America. The political-economic approach advocated by the authors was significant for laying bare the linkages between schools and a highly stratified labor force. Nevertheless, Giroux argued, this ‘economic-reproductive model’, seen also in the writings of the Marxist scholar Althusser (1971), ‘failed to capture the complexity of the relationship between schools and such other institutions as the workplace and the family. Within its grimly mechanistic and overly determined model of socialization there appears little room for developing a theory of schooling that takes seriously the notions of culture, resistance, and mediation’ (1983b: 266). Other reproductive theories, such as the ‘cultural-reproductive model’ (Bourdieu 1977, 1984; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), and the ‘hegemonicstate reproductive model’, based in part on the thinking of Gramsci (1971) and the later writing of Poulantzas (1978), avoided the sheer determinism that characterized Bowles and Gintis’s work, by bringing culture, relationships, and struggle into the discourse concerning the reproduction of class location via the schooling apparatus. Yet ultimately, Giroux contended, despite leveling an important challenge to traditional views of the education system as a means to social mobility, these theories fell short. Most importantly, Giroux critiqued what he saw as a ‘structured silence regarding how [emphasis added] teachers, students, and others live out their daily lives in schools’ thereby resulting in ‘an underemphasis on how human agency accommodates, mediates, and resists the logic of capital and its dominating social practices’ (Giroux 1983b: 282). For a deeper understanding of the responses of marginalized students to dominant structural forces, several ethnographic studies are particularly revealing. Paul Willis’s 1977 classic study of working-class boys in the UK, frequently cited as the basis for resistance theory, is arguably the most well known among these works (McGrew 2011; Willis 1977). By highlighting the

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ways in which the opposition and defiance displayed by the ‘lads’ served not only to hinder their academic success but also to ensure that they assume working-class jobs as adults, Learning to Labour unpacked the mechanisms by which human agency mediates the creation of the class hierarchy (Willis 1977). Similar accounts that acknowledged the intersection or co-construction of class with racial inequality in the US can be found in MacLeod’s comparison of the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers in Ain’t No Makin’ It (1987) and Fine’s depiction of the ‘production’ of high school dropouts in Framing Dropouts (1991). More recently, scholars have broadened the scope of inquiry, noting the lack of attention to the ways in which student resistance is structured and performed on the basis of gender, race, sexual orientation, and geography. Indeed, a male-centric view of student resistance, according to Giroux, was one of resistance theory’s biggest limitations in its initial applications: ‘As a number of feminists have pointed out, resistance studies, when analyzing domination, struggle, and schooling, generally ignore women and gender issues and focus instead on males and class issues’ (Giroux 1983b: 287; see also Bettie 2014: 33, 39). Building on the work of earlier feminist scholars (e.g., McRobbie 1978; McRobbie and McCabe 1981), Bettie’s (2014 [2003]) analysis of Mexican-American and white girls in California, and Pascoe’s (2007) examination of sexuality and masculinity in high school, addressed this weakness squarely, underscoring the centrality of gender norms, heteronormativity, and the gendered social order in the schooling milieu.2 Similarly, Hendrickson (2012), in a remark on the predominantly urban focus of this literature, described how the student resistance displayed in a working-class Appalachian school could not be understood apart from the community’s rural context and values. As the advent of neoliberal educational policies in the US has prompted an increase in so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ disciplinary

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practices in schools, longstanding concerns about the ways in which the educational system sorts marginalized students into a classstratified labor force have been joined by new concerns about schools’ role in connecting students to a different institution: the criminal justice system. Accordingly, several works over the last few years have documented student resistance to policing in schools and aggressive suspension and expulsion practices, examining how the responses of youth – in particular, young men of color – to these policies is used to justify the ‘hypercriminalization’ of their behavior and facilitate their eventual introduction, not to working-class jobs, but to jail or prison (Ferguson 2000; Nolan 2011; Rios 2011; Weissman 2014). Finally, it is notable that most of the scholarship concerning resistance in the educational context focuses on the action of students in response to school-based authority figures, and thus largely on older teens in high schools, who are facing the transition to adulthood. There is comparatively little work that examines acts of resistance undertaken by other actors in this space (e.g., parents), or by families of young children, though nearly a decade of schooling occurs prior to high school (but see Dyrness 2011; Li 2005; Sieber 1981 for exceptions).

MOTHERHOOD, SCHOOLING, AND THE POTENTIAL FOR RESISTANCE Important scholarship by feminist sociologists Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith, concerned with these earlier schooling years, illustrates the centrality of mothers’ work as active subjects coordinating family and school and supporting schools themselves, extending theories of reproduction rather than resistance (2005). According to Griffith and Smith, the availability (or lack) of mothers’ unpaid work with schools is a crucial part of class reproduction processes – not only ensuring their own children’s advantage, as notably emphasized in

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the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984) and Annette Lareau (2000a, 2003) – but also improving the functioning of the school as a whole (see also Reay 1998). Indeed, Griffith and Smith conclude by identifying a core dynamic of neoliberal education: ‘We can see an intensification of [such] mothering work as resources are withdrawn from schools and governments hand down the work of teaching and learning to the family’ (2005: 11). Here Griffith and Smith explicitly build on feminist theories of the ‘intensive motherhood’ normative in a postindustrial or neoliberal era (Hays 1996) and the related notion of ‘concerted cultivation’ developed by Lareau (2003) to understand the need, with declining middleclass opportunities, for mothers to intervene continuously and ‘shrewdly’ in their children’s school and extra-school lives. While these frameworks largely exclude the possibility that women and mothers might resist class reproduction processes or school regimes,3 in the years following second-wave feminism, many feminist scholars painted quite a different picture of motherhood. We are particularly inspired by work recovering the varied ways in which women and mothers were not actually ‘unorganizable’ (as had been assumed by much of the American labor movement), but instead were active in communities and workplaces in both everyday acts and larger moments of collective resistance – from protests over food prices or evictions, to mass strikes and local and international peace movements, at least some of which created alliances across class and ethnoracial location (see, for example, Milkman 1985; Ruddick 1989; Rupp 1997; Sklar 1993). Still other work, though, reminds us that ideologies of motherhood in the US have tended to impose harsh normative divides that discipline women and measure mothers against each other, making such alliances difficult to establish; that is, historically, women’s valorous citizenship has rested on only those upstanding moral mothers contributing to the nation’s future, the health and wellbeing of its children. A strikingly persistent

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divide institutionalized in significant policy domains has sorted such mothers from those cast as disreputable or unfit, whose children tax or pollute the nation – often casting immigrant, working-class, and nonwhite women as such ‘bad’ mothers, blamed for a historically varied range of larger social ills, whether inherently or through their inability to keep ‘respectable’ homes (e.g., Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998; also Blum 1999, 2007, 2011).4 The threat of such normative sorting encourages women to police themselves and engage in ‘boundary-work’ (Lamont and Molnár 2002) against others through fear of being judged inadequate or unwomanly. In the literature on urban poverty, for example, we see poor women for whom middle-class definitions of the ‘good mother’ are largely unattainable (Verduzco-Baker 2011) reconstruct notions of the ‘good mother’ by drawing boundaries against demonized others. In decrying the actions of ‘bad’ mothers in their communities – those few who jeopardize their children’s welfare to satisfy a drug addiction, or who fail to keep their children clean, clothed, and fed – low-income mothers redefine ‘good’ mothers as those women, like themselves, who do not do such things (Edin and Kefalas 2005). To be sure, the construction and deployment of such ‘symbolic boundaries’ (Lamont et al. 2015) are not confined to low-income mothers, but rather are evident across class lines (e.g., the middleclass breastfeeding advocates described in Blum 1999). Furthermore, the evaluation of one’s fitness as a mother rests not only on mothering practices undertaken within the traditional domain of the home. Indeed, as we will demonstrate, normative judgments carry over into mothers’ work in other spheres, including the focus of this chapter: schools.

OUR CASES The present chapter is based on the collaborative analysis of two qualitative studies of

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mothers’ engagement with schools and schooling-related decisions. In the first study, Blum examined how diverse mothers raising kids with invisible disabilities – in the burgeoning mild to moderate categories of ADHD, autism spectrum, and other emotional-behavioral disorders – understand their kids’ diagnoses and negotiate with schools on their behalf. In the course of the research she spoke with 48 mothers in varied class and ethnoracial locations, households, and school districts, asking how they viewed their responsibility or blame for their children’s troubles and the extent to which they contested medicalization (see Blum 2015). In the second study, Kimelberg interviewed 38 urban middle-class parents – largely white, highly educated mothers – about their decisions to retain their residence in Boston and send their children to relatively disadvantaged public schools in the city, resisting the flight to the suburbs or private schools that most in their class position undertake (see Kimelberg 2014a, 2014b; also Billingham and Kimelberg 2013; Posey-Maddox et  al. 2014). While we conducted our respective studies independently, we were inspired by the examples of collaborative analyses discussed in Lahelma et al. (2014) as a means of generating ‘new kinds of interpretations’ via ‘joint reflections that draw from … studies with their own research questions’ (p. 51). Unlike the more well-established method of collaborative ethnography, whereby researchers coordinate their fieldwork efforts either to gather data from one research site, or to study the same phenomenon in different research sites (Burawoy et al. 1991; May and PattilloMcCoy 2000: 66), collaborative analysis allows for reflections on studies that were not only conducted independently across discrete settings, localities, and even decades, but also motivated by unique research interests (Lahelma et  al. 2014). By recognizing and leveraging the methodological value of informal discussions between researchers, collaborative analysis focuses attention on

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the relevant themes and ‘serendipities’ that emerge across distinct studies, allowing for novel interpretations of existing findings, or the construction of new findings based on a shared reconsideration of the data (Lahelma et al. 2014). In our case, the decision to pursue a collaborative analysis was prompted by discussions that revealed intriguing similarities (and some important differences) in the ways in which our respondents pushed back against the expectations and normative demands placed on them as mothers as they navigated different aspects of the schooling process for their children. This led us to revisit our respective data sets, individually and jointly, with a fresh eye toward the question of resistance in schools. Through a process of written and oral exchanges occurring over the span of seven months, we analyzed and discussed our findings in depth. Our research ultimately surfaced four key themes concerning motherhood and school resistance. It is to these themes that we turn now.

RELATIONALITY AND RESISTANCE IN THE SCHOOLING CONTEXT A fundamental, if not always explicit, assumption in resistance studies maintains that acts of resistance are typically undertaken by freely acting, usually male, autonomous individuals. Like the normative ideal worker (Acker 1990; Blair-Loy 2005; Williams 2000), the ideal resistor is unencumbered, free of the sticky interdependence of relations of intimacy and care, or enmeshment in emotional and practical needs. Yet as our respective studies suggest, attention to the more subtle, ‘everyday’ acts of defiance or struggle undertaken by mothers vis-à-vis the schooling of their children highlights important issues concerning the degree to which relationality – embodied in this case in the demands of motherhood – shapes the nature and consequences of resistance.

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Specifically, because their more-or-less vulnerable children will bear the bulk of the day-to-day consequences of their actions, resistance can be an especially complex and fraught experience for mothers. Several white working-class mothers in Blum’s research, for example, expressed concern that they had gone too far resisting school pressures, with negative consequences for their kids. Such school pressures were sometimes to label kids, but at other times, if labels led to costly school services rather than to medications, mothers might have to fight to have more accurate diagnoses recognized. Meg’s5 son Stephen struggled with dyslexia, but she explained, school personnel rejected the diagnosis despite evaluations she obtained from specialists; they were denying most special-ed services, ‘trying to claim it was ADD’, and were beginning to treat the boy harshly: I was called a ‘trouble-parent’ by the teachers … a trouble-parent, meaning that I was nothing but trouble … they were very cold … Because of the um atmosphere in the school and what I fought for him, I was advised to have him transferred to um another school … That way nobody knew him, he started fresh. But what I didn’t realize is my reputation, I’m fighting for my child, moved to the other school.

Similar qualms about how their individual acts of resistance might affect the well-being of their children emerged in Kimelberg’s research with privileged mothers in Boston. Millie recalled that her choice to utilize city public schools for her children had clearly set her apart from her peers in the neighborhood. ‘Everybody I knew, everybody in this neighborhood, all went to different private schools. Seriously … if they didn’t leave [for the suburbs], all their kids were going to private schools.’ A very successful and happy first few years in her daughter’s elementary school reinforced Millie’s belief that her decision to defy the social and normative pressures to send her children to elite private or suburban schools had been a good one. Yet when her daughter began taking practice

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tests in preparation for the entrance exam for Boston Latin, one of the most prestigious public high schools in the US, her confidence wavered. ‘There were words on these tests that she didn’t know that I just couldn’t believe she didn’t know. And I was thinking, “Oh my God! I’ve totally screwed her over. I shouldn’t have left her in [public school].”’ Blum discovered extra layers of complexity for those raising children of color, like Rosa, a working-class mother who identified as Black Honduran. Rosa attempted to resist pressures from schools to medicate one of her sons, and later, her stepson. She suspected such pressures in part extended from negative racial stereotypes and asked provocatively about the disproportionate numbers of children of color in special ed, ‘OK, wait a minute. Is it that they can’t deal with children of color?’ Yet, at the same time, her resistance was tempered by the realistic threat of school failure, highlighted when a neighbor’s son was ‘thrown out of the high school’ – in her account, because his mother would not relent to medication. After many months of school meetings and medical appointments, Rosa described: At first, yes, I disagreed [but] I just basically aim for my children getting a high-school diploma. It was like, ‘OK, whatever we have to do, we have to do’ … I just gave in. I threw the towel in and said, ‘Well, maybe his is ADD.’ And they gave him Ritalin.

Individual resistance on behalf of a vulnerable child can also be complicated by the immediacy of children’s daily ongoing lives in schools. Several mothers Blum interviewed were ultimately successful in battles for out-of-district placements for their children – yet such battles could take months or even years, all the while leaving children in standardized settings, in which school personnel could become more antagonized. One divorced white mother, Shauna, emphasized that the three years of battling for more suitable accommodations for her son led to a child who was ‘school-phobic’ and traumatized. ‘I had been trying to play by the rules you

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know, … we don’t want to alienate anybody. We want[ed] to play by the rules,’ Shauna recounted. But, [Finally] … I walked into the vice principal’s office, and I just sat in his chair, and I said ‘What you have done, what this school has done to [my son] has been an outrage and I will get a lawyer!’ And I knew that I could, ‘And I will sue! … he’s lost three years of his education as far as I’m concerned, [and the] damage to his self-esteem, the school phobia he has developed, the stress it has put on him and our household and my daughters, it has been outrageous!’ … And the principal said, ‘We’ll make sure that he gets the [placement]. We won’t stand in the way of that.’ I said ‘you better not.’ … So here’s this kid who they said didn’t need an ed plan … My point being that he might have been successful if they just had given him a fucking ed plan in fourth grade. So now we’re in the end of sixth grade and he’s going to now go to an outplacement. So this poor kid now has to be sent out of his community … So this was really traumatic for [my son].

Another mother, Susan, was the only one Blum met who actually went so far as to sue her school district, ultimately coming to a settlement in which the district covered her daughter’s outplacement tuition and her legal fees. Yet, like Shauna, Susan – also white, middle class, and divorced – offered that her daughter was harmed by the years of waiting, with each additional harsh word from a teacher or peer leading to yet another humiliating ‘meltdown’ and her daughter’s becoming ‘very teary-eyed and anxious all the time’. ‘How much is my daughter scarred by this experience?’ she explained, ‘Because you know what? At least today, it takes years to get a school system to recognize your child. And are you willing to put your child, are you willing to take the risk? Unfortunately I couldn’t afford to do anything other.’ The mothers in Kimelberg’s research faced a different reality. First, they were largely unfettered by the constraints Blum’s mothers experienced by virtue of their children’s needs for specialized services. Second, they possessed the financial resources that would enable them to exit Boston’s public schools at any point should they become dissatisfied. Thus, on the whole,

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they had comparatively more control over their situations. Furthermore, their neurotypical children, likewise advantaged by their race and class location, did not suffer any of the stigma and strain associated with being the ‘difficult’ student in the classroom, as many of the children of Blum’s respondents did. Nevertheless, some of the mothers in Kimelberg’s study expressed concerns that the atypical schooling decisions they made on behalf of their children – specifically, to opt for urban public schools that lacked the pedigree and resources commonly sought by privileged families – increased the risks posed to their children (for more on perceived risk in the school decision-making process, see Cucchiara 2013; Kimelberg 2014b). Thus despite dissimilar circumstances, several Boston mothers constructed notions of ‘vulnerability’ that paralleled those voiced by Blum’s mothers. Amanda, for example, explained: It’s hard to say, OK, take your kid and put them in a lab and trust that it’s gonna be ok. I mean, my husband is looking at me like, are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the right thing? And I just have to keep being like, ‘I think we are. I think they’re OK.’ Do I lose sleep thinking, am I gonna raise a kid with trauma? Is she gonna get hurt someday? Is there going to be something irreparable? I don’t know. But I also feel like I can’t keep her in a bubble and then have her come out at the end like, ‘Oh, I have no sense of the reality of the world.’

Interestingly, in both studies, respondents acknowledged that their fears were, at least in part, a product of the fact that their children were seen as ‘outsiders’ in their classrooms and schools. Yet the distinct contours of our two cases illustrate the degree to which the identification of, and relationship between, insiders and outsiders in the schooling context is not clear cut, but rather ambiguous and dynamic.

INSIDERS, OUTSIDERS, AND PERCEIVED THREATS Given the emphasis on accountability and competition in current neoliberal education

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policies, parents’ consideration of the risks of individual resistance are necessarily bound up with their understanding of where their children are positioned in the educational landscape, and which students are viewed as ‘threats’ to achievement in that environment. Thus, while mothers in both of our studies recognized that their children were, in some ways, ‘outsiders,’ the implications of this outsider status were not uniform. Mothers in Blum’s study recounted how their children, seen as outsiders due to their special needs, were often cast as a threat to the classroom as a whole. In Kimelberg’s study, conversely, mothers whose children were likewise outsiders due to their race and class position, sometimes cast other students in their urban classrooms as the threat. Thus, boundarywork was evident in both studies. Yet key differences emerged on the basis of whether the mothers in question were primarily the subjects or the objects of that boundary-work. Blum found that experiences of stigma (Goffman 1963) were to a surprising extent shared across wide differences in class and racial location among mothers raising kids with invisible disabilities. In fact, her interviews, taken together with a content analysis of parenting advice books, suggest that the fear of such burgeoning brain-based disorders may be particularly acute in the US today. The precariousness of opportunities in an innovation-, information-, and knowledgebased economy, with success seeming to hinge on superior brain-power, may provoke fears of possible contagion, as expressed by several mothers. Certainly, managing such painful experiences complicates resistance and any attempt to make it more collective, particularly when trying to protect a younger child. Patricia, a Black single mother with some community college education whose young son (her only child) struggled with learning disorders and bullying at school, mused, ‘It seems like when you have a disability of some sort, it’s still taboo, you know? [People

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think,] “I don’t want to catch it. I don’t want to be around you.”’ Heather, a white married mother of two with a high school degree, was more emphatic in her complaints, with her son sharing similar experiences of bullying by peers at school: ‘You know, I think there’s also always an element of, “Is my kid gonna catch this?” … I really get that off of people. It’s like OK, [my son] Jared’s not gonna give it to them.’ Many mothers Blum interviewed volunteered in their kids’ schools, in part to protect their vulnerable kids from such bullying – but also to combat the isolation they experienced in the school community and from other mothers. Blayne, also a white mother of two married to a blue-collar husband, recounted sadly: [Y]es, I’m very, very isolated. Like in the PTO, when I was hospitality chair, I got no volunteers. I didn’t know one single parent in [my son’s] class. I mean, the others, when they organize stuff, they ask all their friends, other mothers from their kids’ classes. And at the meeting … I’d asked for volunteers and not gotten any … I mean, I think they all knew about [my son]. Word gets around fast.

Affluent mothers also experienced such incidents. Theresa, a white full-time homemaker with a high-earning husband, described: There’s one mom and son I have a hard time with … and the son was a bully really … at the cafeteria [he] would have the kids raise their hands if they were friends with [my son] … at the beginning like a bunch of kids raised their hands. And by the end, none of them were! … And [if they did] he would say, ‘You are? … [But] he’s a kid with problems!’

Theresa went on to describe confronting this child’s mother: ‘So I called the mom …. She was saying to me, “Oh thank you for telling me this! Our kids are so sheltered here, they’re just not –.” I mean she all but said, “They’re not used to dealing with kids with problems.”’ Facing the competitive pressures endemic in the postindustrial knowledge economy, parents with typically developing kids may

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understandably perceive the disruptions of kids ‘with problems’ as taxing school resources and personnel. While relatively few parents in Kimelberg’s study discussed special needs students explicitly or at length, those that did expressed a range of opinions about how their presence in the classroom affected the schooling decisions they made on behalf of their own children. One mother pointed to the inclusive program in her child’s school as simply one of several characteristics – much like the presence of an auditorium or a respected music curriculum – that differentiated it from other schools. Another mother, Pat, referenced the special-ed programming as a benefit to all students, including her son (who does not have diagnosed special needs), because it meant that the teachers were especially sensitive and responsive to the unique learning style and personality that each child brings into the classroom: … it’s an inclusive school, so all the teachers are special-ed trained, which, though we don’t have a special-needs child, it’s a huge benefit, because they’re already trained to sort of meet your child where they’re at, and modify their teaching style to meet each kid’s individual needs. And every kid has a specialty of some sort, I think.

At the same time, there were a few parents who voiced apprehension about the presence of special-ed children in the classroom, demonstrating the type of ‘othering’ behavior that Blum’s families experienced as the objects of boundary-work. For example, as Kyle reflected on how he weighed various characteristics of schools when evaluating options for his son, the question of how special needs students might negatively affect the learning environment came to the fore: Well, how many special-needs kids do we want Chris going to school with? … And um, [sighs] you know my bias is, sheesh, you know, maybe the fewer of those the better, because you know, there are some kids flipping out, you know, … that doesn’t seem real conducive to a learning environment.

Like Kyle, David viewed the issue of special-needs children as a ‘practical’ matter,

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framing his concerns about IEPs (individualized education programs) as an indicator of the disproportional demands on a teacher’s time, attention, and energy that certain students might place:

Yet later in the conversation, Kimberly noted the implications for her daughter when a schoolmate, who was bused to the school from a predominantly poor, black neighborhood in the city, was killed near his home:

I think the number of kids with IEPs would be a concern. Just because, kids with IEPs often have special needs and if the resources … if the teacher doesn’t have enough support, either parents or other [staff], then the concern is a teacher being stretched too thinly and not having access for the kids.

But when the kid got murdered this year, [i]t freaked her out. She doesn’t understand that the kids that she goes to school with come from different areas of the city where this kind of stuff happens on a daily basis. And I have to tell you, I don’t want her as a ten-year-old to have to know that. So that kind of stuff is hard … [but] I guess it is what it is and you just kind of deal with it.

Kyle and David were unique in this case not only because of their gender6 – numerous studies demonstrate the degree to which most childrearing matters concerning schooling are handled principally by women (DeSena 2006; Griffith and Smith 2005; Lareau 2000b; Reay 1998) – but also because of their candid discussion of special-needs students as threats to the quality of education their own children might receive.7 Indeed, the parents in Kimelberg’s study more commonly identified the potential threats to their children not on the basis of disability or diagnosis, but rather in only slightly veiled racial and class-based terms. In other words, when reflecting on whether their resistance to the suburban and private school options typically selected by middle-class families engendered risks for their children, Kimelberg’s mothers tended to situate these risks in the disadvantaged students who compose the majority in Boston’s public schools. The following exchange with Kimberly, a white mother of two, is illustrative. Asked whether she would recommend her children’s public K-8 school to other professional families like hers, Kimberly replied confidently: I would, without qualification, recommend the school. … I would tell you that you need to understand that you’re going to an urban school and there will always be a certain segment … So like in kindergarten, she [daughter] had a kid in her class who stayed back because his mother went to jail for robbing a bank. So they hear these kinds of things. Does it affect them? No.

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Kimberly, like other mothers Kimelberg interviewed, had consciously resisted the ‘pull’ to the city’s affluent suburbs that so many of her middle-class counterparts now called home. Doing so, however, meant that her children – in many ways the ‘outsiders’ in their city schools – might be exposed to the type of undesirable situations and circumstances frequently attributed in the media and in popular discourse (whether accurately or not) to the city’s poor, racial minorities. This was the rationale cited by Sharon, one of the few middle-class mothers in Kimelberg’s study who ultimately opted not to send her children to Boston Public Schools: ‘… I’m concerned about the peers, because some of the children come from families, pretty tough situations, and maybe I want to keep my boys in a bubble. I want to keep them boys a little while longer’. By and large, though, most of the mothers in Kimelberg’s study conceded that attempts to protect their children from all conceivable harm by seeking out more privileged schooling environments were limited in their effectiveness, if not futile, because all social contexts carry inherent risks, albeit sometimes of a different variety (Cucchiara 2013; Kimelberg 2014b).8 References to the impact that disadvantaged children could have on their own kids’ educational experiences thus speak as much to the pervasiveness of racial and class stereotypes (Goyette et al. 2012) – and the boundary-drawing or ‘class shaming’ endemic in highly stratified societies (Bourdieu 1984;

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Sayer 2005) – as to the specific fears of these parents. Ultimately, both of these cases reveal the role that positionality – i.e., where parent and child stand relative to others in the classroom, school, or community – plays in individual acts of resistance or ‘resisting work’ (Courpasson et  al. 2012) in the educational sphere, by influencing both the decision to resist as well as the potential consequences of resistance. As we discuss below, they likewise complicate our understanding of the ‘targets’ of resistance. Specifically, while much of the extant literature focuses on acts propagated by subordinates against clearly identifiable superordinates, our cases highlight tensions that are defined as much by resistance to or negotiation with culturally defined norms and societal pressures as by struggles with static authority figures or institutional structures.

TARGETS OF RESISTANCE AND DISCIPLINARY SOCIAL NORMS In addition to the divisive atmosphere in school communities created by neoliberalism, the accompanying discourse of individual parental responsibility, and the demands of school choice, mothers’ ability to resist the external pressures placed on them were made more complex by the normative divides long sorting mothers into those good and bad, those contributing to or harming the nation’s future. This disciplining binary has long historical roots in the US, drawing moral boundaries based on ethnoracial and class differences and stereotypes; yet it compels all mothers to demonstrate the moral fitness to raise the nation’s next generation of productive, virtuous citizens rather than unruly or lawless children who merely sap the nation’s resources. The persistence of such normative or ideological evaluation fuels schisms in contemporary school communities because mothers may engage in

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boundary-work to demonstrate moral worthiness against others by maintaining or increasing social distance. As several, including Blum, have argued, this is also encouraged by a culture pervaded by mother-blame (Blum 2007, 2015; Malacrida 2003; Singh 2004). Such normative or ideological conventions are a more diffuse target or object of resistance activities compared to formal school policies or centralized authorities, and thus are more easily overlooked or minimized. Similar to assessments of students, assessments of good and bad mothers rely on larger cultural rhetorics and often pervade formal settings, influencing institutional actors as well as other parents. In Blum’s research, mothers felt acutely the threat their kids posed to local school budgets and how this reframed their maternal contribution or citizenship in the eyes of both institutional and noninstitutional actors. Even those white and affluent knew they might fall dangerously close to the bad mothers whose children ‘pollute’ the nation. Sadly, the inclusion emphasized in the 1970s disability rights legislation as a broad societal good, better for all children and families, has fallen by the wayside. Though evoked by Pat among Kimelberg’s respondents, this ethos seems largely a remnant from an era of enlarged public responsibility, more generous budgets, and less severe moral boundary-making. Special education in the current context appears instead, as to Kyle and David, to be in zero-sum competition with regular education (Ong-Dean 2009), opposed to rather than enhancing the mainstream classroom, and a threat to school and community standing. Several of the affluent mothers among Blum’s interviewees exemplify such wrestling with awareness of being judged bad mothers, knowing that special needs kids tax local school resources and may be perceived as threats to other families. Angie worried about the rancor of friends and neighbors in her middle-class community after she successfully negotiated an out-of-district placement for her vulnerable son:

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There’s a lot of people that see that van pull up [his alternate transportation]. And they’re like, ‘Why is he getting special treatment?’ … The special-ed parents … we’re the big, bad guys … But I have nothing to be ashamed of. I pay my taxes, you know, just like everybody else.

This sense of being judged by other parents for the schooling decisions they made was also common among the mothers in Kimelberg’s study, though they and their typically-developing children were less easily cast as carriers of stigma and contagion. Most recalled family members or friends looking askance at them, even bluntly challenging the wisdom of their thinking, when they announced their intention to send their children to Boston Public Schools. For some, particularly those who were acutely aware of the long history of race and class tensions underlying school assignment in Boston (Lukas 1985), it was hard to escape the feeling that no matter which decision they made, there were critics at the ready. Felicia, a white mother who had enrolled her daughter in a predominantly black elementary school in the city, expressed this ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ sentiment with a great deal of frustration: It’s painful to have conversations with white parents when they make assumptions about what I think and feel and what I want for my kid. And it’s painful to have conversations with parents of color who can’t trust me because, you know, I look the way I look, and so I’ve gotta have an agenda, I must be trying to take over their school so it can have more white kids. I had a [black] mom walk up to me and be like … ‘How do you feel taking your kid to this school every day and taking seats away from kids in this neighborhood who would benefit from going to Maple, and instead your kid has a seat?’ And I just said, ‘Well, where’s my kid supposed to go to school? And what is our neighborhood? Because I walk my kids to school every day, so we don’t live that far away. And where is she supposed to go to school? Is she supposed to go to school at the Willow? Where all the white parents want their kids to go to school? Because then we’d be taking school seats at the Willow that would keep black kids from going to the Willow and getting quality education and then we’d be segregating our schools. Where do you want me

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to go?’ She’s like, ‘These kids in this neighborhood need these seats.’ So you can’t win either way.

Felicia’s story underscores the tensions and contradictions that parents encounter when they act against dominant middleclass norms. To her white peers and relatives, Felicia’s choice to send her child to an urban public school was both concerning and perplexing, in that it effectively crossed – even flouted – the symbolic boundaries drawn to maintain distance and protect social standing. At the same time, Felicia’s unorthodox schooling choice raised the suspicions of the racial minorities in her neighborhood, who questioned her motives and decried her actions as evidence of ‘opportunity hoarding’ (Tilly 1998) in the educational marketplace. Ultimately, Felicia found herself subject to boundary-work on the part of both dominant and minority groups – the former rendering normative evaluations of her as a bad mother, and the latter casting judgment of her as a bad citizen. Colleen, another of Blum’s interviewees, also wrestled with the negative judgments and boundary-making of other families and institutional actors, but in this instance because she and her son posed a threat to school and community standing in an affluent, high-status, largely white town. Initially, like most in Blum’s study, Colleen enrolled her vulnerable younger son James in the local public school, where he remained through elementary school despite increasing struggles. Colleen had less doubt about her status as a good mother, notably describing herself as known in the school community because of her two older children’s successes, a status she was grateful for when repeatedly resisting unfair treatment of James: I often thought, ‘I’m so glad this is my third child because my other two children are in school already.’ … They’re both great citizens, they’re good students, they’re popular, people love them. No one thinks I’m at home beating this one [James] … so it was very helpful to me and my husband to be well known and respected and have a reputation already when [James] went into school.

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Yet, at the same time, Colleen also emphasized the distress she experienced when mothers involved primarily with James’ class judged her through a different lens. One particularly difficult incident occurred two days prior to James’s last day in elementary school. To celebrate the students’ imminent passage to middle school, the ‘room mothers’ for James’ class had organized and run a day of activities for the children, most of whom had attended school together since kindergarten. ‘One of the room mothers calls me and says, “Colleen, this is horrible. I can’t believe it happened, but the class picture was taken and James is not in it.”’ James, she was told, had had a ‘meltdown’ when jostled by other kids after a lengthy period of standing and waiting, and he had been escorted to a quiet room to calm down. But to Colleen, it was ‘completely unacceptable’ and ‘absolutely outrageous’ that they had not immediately called her. ‘I said to the principal (a strong ally of Colleen’s and advocate for James), “Somebody could have called me. I mean you have called me when he needs a napkin at lunchtime! … There were about one hundred things that could have been done. And none of them were done.”’ We discovered in mothers’ constructed narrative accounts, moreover, that pervasive cultural norms sharply dividing good mothers from bad provoked difficult self-doubt in mothers themselves. Kimelberg, for example, found that even mothers who appeared steadfast in their belief that they had made the ‘right’ choice by electing to remain in the city and utilize an urban public school, often admitted to lingering concerns and selfdoubt. Notably, these thoughts typically centered on whether they had somehow fallen short in their duties as a good neoliberal mother to provide the best possible environment for their children (for more on this, see Kimelberg 2014a, 2014b). To assuage her fears of substandard mothering, one Boston mother, Carla, drew on her knowledge of child psychiatry (Winnicott 1953) to contextualize the decision she made to embrace

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an ‘up and coming’ city school as opposed to a private or suburban alternative with a ‘proven’ track record: One thing that I definitely learned is my attitudes are not static … I think for us, there’s a lot of unknowns and uncertainty … about what school is supposed to be, and … certainly among the yuppie crowd … if you’re providing a good enough school for your kids … [T]here was this guy, Winnicott, who introduced the idea of the ‘good enough mother,’ that a child doesn’t need a perfect mother. In fact, they shouldn’t have a perfect mother. They need a good enough mother. The good enough mother will provide nurturance, food, take care of her child, but she’s not perfect, and through her imperfections, her empathic failures, the child learns that the world is unfair and yet they can repair the relationship with their mother. So that has gotten me through a lot of parenting.

While Carla’s appeal to ‘expert’ advice was somewhat unique in Kimelberg’s study – and clearly a product of her highly educated background – Blum’s respondents were much more likely to have regular, direct encounters with professionals. Many of these encounters, as earlier stories like Shauna’s suggest, were quite contentious. Yet Blum discovered that most mothers, even when they appeared as the lone heroic warriors she referred to as ‘vigilantes’ in taking the ‘law’ into their own hands to advocate for their children (2015), spoke of important allies among teachers and other ‘psy sector’ professionals.9 Such allies provided important practical support navigating institutional requirements, but just as important, their support often affirmed women’s sense of moral worthiness against the critical informal judgments surrounding them. Patricia (who spoke earlier of the taboo against disabilities), for example, relied on a counselor to reassure her she ‘was doing enough’ on behalf of her struggling son. Mothers’ targets of resistance were, thus, quite selective and not, as many resistance studies might suggest, uniformly directed at those in professional authority. Even Colleen, so distressed with the local school community, praised the principal: ‘[the principal] he

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was a wonderful man … You g[et sent] to the principal’s office, there’s this really nice guy in here who will play chess with you.’ Blum found mothers’ resistance to the medicalization of their children’s issues to be similarly selective, as they wrestled with confusing, contradictory normative pressures surrounding the ubiquitous use of psychiatric medications to treat US kids today. Mothers reported harsh judgment from family and friends for medicating, yet met with similar judgment in schools for refusing to medicate struggling kids. Rather than either wholesale rejection or wholesale acquiescence to medicalization – though this did describe a few of the mothers Blum met – in the present context of overstretched public schools, resistance often looked more like resistance to overmedicating. Blum heard from mothers struggling to reduce dosages, to augment with alternative and complementary treatments, to navigate numerous drug choices to reduce side effects, or to reduce multiple prescriptions to just one. Across wide gulfs of social advantage and disadvantage mothers selectively resisted like low-income Rosa, who had ‘thrown the towel in’ so her son would complete high school. Cara, also a woman of color but a divorced breadwinner and upwardly mobile college graduate, explained: ‘I’m still a parent struggling with the medication … I was omitting the dosage at home … so I would only allow the medication to be administered then [at the school], just the lowest dosage’. Cara also resisted additional medications, like several others, for example, married working-class Hermalina: I knew Clonidine was a blood pressure med [often used for mood stabilization in kids] with a lot of side effects. So we [referring to her son’s teacher, who became a strong ally] compared the research … we kept in touch on a daily basis. So then I took him off it. And he has been fine ever since. I mean, not fine, but you know, not lashing out. A plus for me!

Yet finally, like many, white, lower-middle-class Faith could not escape a lingering

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shame that she administered a psychoactive medication, ‘I felt like I had sent my child to The Valley of the Dolls’.10 Media analysis, unfortunately, reveals two widely circulating images of mothers who medicate their children, both framing such women as ‘bad mothers’: while the more benign suggests a white affluent woman who medicates her child as a ‘quick fix’ for academic underperformance, or as a fad followed by the selfish career-obsessed, the more monstrous represents single mothers, often lowincome women of color, willing to drug their children simply to receive public assistance through SSI, the Social Security funds for indigent families with disabled kids known as ‘the other welfare’ (see Blum 2015).

CONSEQUENCES OF RESISTANCE FOR CLASS REPRODUCTION Lastly, our two cases raise interesting questions about the role that resistance plays in challenging, perpetuating, or even exacerbating class reproduction. Much of the outright criticism and less overt, but no less troubling, judgment that the mothers in both of our studies experienced was rooted in the beliefs of other parents (typically mothers) that the choices our respondents made would ultimately limit their children’s future opportunities. Theresa, for example, a mother in Blum’s research, had sought an out-of-district placement for her son, who had been bullied in his local public school in a well-todo town. Yet negative gossip questioning her maternal fitness followed Theresa, as she recounted with distress: It’s normal to go to private school in this town. So other mothers ask me, ‘Oh, which one [is your son attending]?’ ‘I haven’t heard of that one.’ And I just say, ‘Oh, it’s really small.’

Similarly, Beth, an affluent mother from Kimelberg’s study, recalled being offended when a neighbor, a blue-collar worker in her

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gentrified neighborhood, expressed surprise that she had chosen to send her children to Boston Public Schools rather than move to the suburbs, as he was planning to do: I’m like, ‘Excuse me? My husband is a very successful businessman and we’ve chosen to go to [Boston Public Schools]. What exactly are you saying? That the schools are good enough for us, but not good enough for you and your family?’

Indeed, at first glance it may seem that the actions of Kimelberg’s respondents, in particular, would undermine the smooth transmission of class advantage, as they chose schools that lacked the stellar reputation typically sought by privileged parents eager to secure their status for the next generation. But as our analyses suggest, the reality is likely much more complicated. In the case of Beth, for example, the substantial financial, social, and cultural capital that her family possessed allowed her to provide a wide array of enrichment activities to complement and supplement the formal education that her children received (for more on this topic, see Kimelberg 2014a). For her less wealthy neighbor, who had been raised in the neighborhood before it had gentrified, not selecting the ‘right’ school, or taking a chance on an academically ‘risky’ urban public school could have greater consequences for his children’s social mobility. Furthermore, Kimelberg’s research reveals an interesting paradox: while the relatively disadvantaged schools that her respondents chose might appear, on the surface, to threaten the security of their class position, they also provide their children with yet another valuable form of cultural capital. David, for example, put it this way: So part of the reason we are in [Boston Public Schools] is because of the diversity. Both the race, socioeconomic, religious diversity. To me there’s a lot of value there. That’s life. And I think the quicker a kid functions well in that environment … the better he or she will be.

Specifically, several respondents noted that the racial and socioeconomic diversity that their children encountered in a city

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public school offered the opportunity to gain comfort with different cultures, ideas, and ways of behavior that have an instrumental use in the marketplace (see Kimelberg and Billingham 2013). As Berrey (2015) describes, appeals to diversity across the corporate, higher education, and civic landscape now typically emphasize the competitive advantages afforded by diversity, rather than the ethical or moral need to honor differences. Chambers et al. (2008), for example, make the case for colleges and universities to reward a student’s possession of ‘diversity capital’ in the admissions process, in an effort to encourage parents to consciously choose more integrated K-12 schools for their children. Ultimately, however, Berrey (2015) argues that the treatment of diversity as a strategic asset simply reinforces the social order rather than contributing to real racial equality. Indeed, as Reay et al. (2007) note in their research with progressive white parents in the UK, ‘[e]ven those white middle classes committed to multi-ethnic schooling face the perils of middle-class acquisitiveness, extracting value from, as they find value in, their multi-ethnic “other”’ (p. 1041). Lastly, a few of the mothers in Kimelberg’s study reflected on how sending their children to an urban public school could confer a different set of advantages in a hyper-competitive college marketplace. By ‘going against the grain’, their children – because they would be the privileged children in a not-very-privileged setting – could stand out, in a twist on the proverbial ‘big (more advantaged) fish’ in a ‘small (less advantaged) pond’. As Carla recalled the discussions she and her husband had had about the joint schooling – residential decision, she mused: [We thought] maybe it will be better to … not move to someplace like [wealthy suburbs], where all the parents are intense and all the kids are intense, but move to a school where [daughter] can feel smart. You know? Move to a school, you know, not the place where everybody is so crazy … where you can sort of feel, you know, good about your school and not like … you need to be working harder than everybody else.

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This sentiment reveals an awareness of how her child’s privileged status would be a point of distinction in her otherwise disadvantaged school, presumably enabling her to rise to the top academically in a way that would not be possible – or at least much more difficult to accomplish – in a school populated with students from equally privileged, driven families. It also, it is worth noting, marks an effort to resist the community ‘helicopter parenting’ dynamic that tends to foster a pressurecooker environment in many high-achieving private and suburban schools (for more on this, see Cucchiara 2013; Kimelberg 2014b). A more relaxed child, Carla reasoned, would be a happier and more successful child. Among the mothers Blum spoke with, individual resistance on behalf of a vulnerable child also revealed fears for their child’s future and for the need to transmit cultural capital, which could also lead to class boundary-making. Affluent white homemaker Theresa, for example, who described neighbors’ attempts to discover the status of her son’s private school, had herself been distressed that the school was in a diverse urban neighborhood with students drawn from the city. In fact, she described her first visit to the school as ‘depressing’, explaining awkwardly: I remember [thinking], you know, to be prepared that it wasn’t physically um appealing, you know. But … when we asked, you know, what is the teacher turnover and how long have these people been here, the teacher that [our son] ended up with had been there for twelve years …. I mean we cared more about the teaching and the, you know, what was going on, and less about the um the physical plant. But it is, you know, your first impression is, you know, a little bit like that.

Theresa, not surprisingly, was hopeful her son might be able, after spending several years in an appropriate setting for his special needs, to return to their wealthy town’s local high school. Other affluent mothers Blum spoke with emphasized strategies they followed to continue to transmit cultural capital to

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struggling kids, though perhaps more so than in Kimelberg’s research, they worried such strategies might not be enough. Judith, for example, told of many difficult incidents in which her son’s volatility at home with his siblings seemed a direct result of frustration from the academic pressures in their affluent town’s schools; yet, she continued to plan the ‘highbrow’ enrichment activities during school breaks and vacations that according to Bourdieu, privileged mothers engage in to transmit a sense of entitlement and ‘superior taste’ (Bourdieu 1984). Judith described skiing and sailing expeditions and overseas vacations with a volatile child as ‘always just a very low-grade stress on the family’, though at moments, she confessed, ‘it made life ten times more challenging’; but she added that, with her resolve, ‘it didn’t stop us’. Yet Judith worried this would not be enough to ensure a vulnerable son’s future: [A neighbor who was a good friend], she’d talk about being so worried about her older [typically developing] son and I just want to scream. It’s like, ‘Come on, he’s thriving. He’s doing well. Maybe he’s not getting straight As, but so what? You know, I’m just worried about like my kid even making it!’

In the competitive and divisive environment of neoliberal education, Blum met just a few mothers who seemed able to make their resistance work more collective. Strikingly, these few identified as ‘Black Latinas’, immigrant mothers, who sought support through a local Latino community center to resist school policies on behalf of their kids. Mildred, Lucia, and Hermalina each expressed a sense of marginality and oppositional consciousness toward the public schools, with Mildred explaining that her family ‘was looked down upon’ as ‘Black Latino immigrants’ with Spanish their primary language. Lucia agreed, recounting that it took several years to have her son reassigned after being mistakenly labeled learning disabled, ‘It’s the same discrimination from the barrier about the language. A barrier

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… because we had accent[s]!’ Beyond the divisiveness we each heard so much about in school communities, Lucia, Mildred, and Hermalina provide a glimpse of an alternative: along with several others whom Blum was unable to meet, they coached one another in preparation for IEP meetings, helped one another with letters of response, and assisted each other in filing official complaints. As Mildred said, ‘It’s very hard fighting the system by yourself’ (Blum 2015).

CONCLUSION To date, most of the literature on resistance in schools has focused on student responses to educational authority figures and institutional structures. In this chapter, we sought to expand our understanding of the nature and consequences of school-based resistance by shifting attention to a different set of actors in this space: mothers. In doing so, we identified four themes that challenge some assumptions commonly found in the field of resistance studies and highlight the complexity inherent in resistance work undertaken in this domain. First, we suggest that mothers’ resistance in schools is unique in its relationality: that is, it is performed primarily on behalf of another, a young child, and as such is embedded in the intimate interdependence of daily caregiving. Many of our current assumptions about resistance and protest are based on notions of autonomous actors – whether workers, citizens, high school students, or more solidaristic social or class groups. The mothers in our two cases, however, were keenly aware that the immediate and future effects of their decisions – to medicate or not, to select a certain type of school, even to confront other mothers in the school community – would be felt most deeply by their children. Specifically, our findings suggest that future scholars of resistance and protest ought to take seriously that resistors are often embedded in families

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and relations of intimacy, vulnerability, and obligation that contrast sharply with the ‘romanticized’ masculine images of ideal resistors (see note 2). Indeed, the emotional, physical, and educational needs of their children both influenced our respondents’ decisions to resist, as well as shaped their concerns about the vulnerabilities and risks those decisions would expose their children to on a daily basis. Second, our findings underscore the importance of more complex notions of positionality. Conceptions of resistors as subordinates – individuals who lack power and are members of subaltern groups – may misrepresent or obscure the shifting relational dynamics of power, stigma, and belonging in our neoliberal, postindustrial era. On the simplest level, our work demonstrates that acts of resistance in the competitive educational landscape are routinely undertaken by even quite privileged mothers. Perhaps more importantly, our case studies reveal the role that boundary-work plays in mothers’ acts of resistance. Our respondents’ identification of children – theirs and others’ – as insiders or outsiders in the classroom was central to their decisions to resist (or not), and yet their stories reveal just how blurry the line separating the ‘threat’ from ‘threatened’ can be. As these cases remind us, one can be considered both an insider and an outsider depending on from whose vantage point the act of resistance is viewed. Third, we emphasize a related point: the ‘objects’ of individuals’ resistance are not always clearly defined, traditional authority figures, authoritative discourses, or established organizational policies or practices. To be sure, we saw some examples – particularly in Blum’s research – of acts of resistance directed toward school personnel and other educational professionals. But equally prominent in the narratives of our respondents were the normative pressures they felt as mothers, pressures that dictated how they – and, by extension, their children – must act in order to be deemed ‘good mothers’ by their

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peers and broader society. Such acts of resistance were directed against rather diffuse cultural norms governing gendered responsibilities to maintain family and community standing or respectability. By advocating for children with special needs or making unconventional school choices, our respondents, wittingly and unwittingly, posed threats to such norms arguably no less powerful than traditional forms of authority or authoritative knowledge. Finally, we discuss the complex, and sometimes unexpected, ways in which mothers’ resistance in schools – a well-established domain of social reproduction – can both challenge as well as perpetuate the transmission of class- and race-based advantages. Some of the mothers we interviewed – for example, Blum’s immigrant mothers – fit the more common narrative in resistance studies of marginalized groups ‘fighting the system’ to ensure more equitable treatment and outcomes for their children. For the more privileged mothers in our studies, however, the story was often more complicated. Kimelberg’s mothers, in particular, sometimes found that their decision to enroll their children in ‘risky’ urban public schools – a decision that ostensibly should hamper the smooth transmission of social privilege – could instead further advantage their children, by delivering new forms of cultural capital and serving to make their children stand out in a competitive landscape. Combined with the themes identified above, these findings emphasize the need for scholars to consider carefully the paradoxes that may arise in both the nature and consequences of resistance work in the era of school choice. In this chapter we have focused most of our attention on the similarities that emerged from our joint analyses of these two cases. As we briefly note above, we do not wish to minimize the differences between our two research groups and the situations they confronted. Blum’s mothers and children wrestled much more with the pervasive and damaging stigma associated with an involuntary condition (i.e.,

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their children’s disability). The challenges faced by Kimelberg’s mothers, on the other hand, were, at least to a certain degree, a product of the unorthodox decisions that they chose to make, and which they could likely undo if they so chose. There are undoubtedly other differences that exist and that would be worthy of further exploration if space permitted. Nevertheless, we think it bears repeating that despite these differences, all of our mothers confronted a neoliberal educational landscape that places the many decisions that individual parents must make under a bright, unrelenting light. It seemed to us when we first began thinking about this chapter that there had been surprisingly little organized parent resistance to neoliberal educational regimes. Reflecting on our findings, however, we see several points worth highlighting. The first is that the potential for collective activism within this space must be considered against the broader trajectory of educational reform. Like immiseration theories of class revolt that predicted workers would rise up when hunger and want became too severe relative to employer wealth, the gradual infusion of neoliberal principles into US public schools over the past several decades appears to have hit a new level of intensity, raising the question of whether an eventual ‘tipping point’ is in view. Future research should focus on whether the confluence of new curricular standards, increased standardized testing mandates, and calls to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores – all of which represent marketized educational solutions delivered, sometimes spearheaded, by for-profit businesses – will give rise to organized parent response. It remains an open question whether the examples of resistance seen in some communities, with parents refusing to allow their children to take certain standardized tests, represent the beginning stages of a movement to challenge neoliberal school reform, or are merely isolated cases of individual dissent. Indeed, as the findings from our two studies suggest, the more interesting question

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may not be why organized parent resistance has been lacking to date, but rather why we would expect it. Given the degree to which neoliberalism has reshaped public education as a competitive landscape, with schools deemed winners and losers and parents treated as consumers, divisiveness, rather than communal action, seems the more likely outcome. Nevertheless, we have argued, mothers do resist, but in ways that are primarily individual and quotidian – and with consequences that, perhaps paradoxically, can carry a much larger social import. Finally, our joint analysis in this paper suggests the importance for resistance studies of not only taking gender seriously, but, also, the distinct positionality of mothers (and other primary caregivers). While we do not wish to invoke essentialized notions of mothers as all equally privileged or inherently devoted, the relationality of acting in schools on behalf of younger children in the current era both encourages, emboldens, and yet sharply limits resistance. Mothers, our studies indicate, are all-too-aware that their children will bear the immediate consequences of their negotiations with school systems. Moreover, with future opportunities for many increasingly precarious, it may be easier to blame individual mothers, to more harshly measure maternal fitness and school choices against others, than to encourage resistance and inclusion on behalf of all children and families.

Notes  1  As of this writing, resistance to specific aspects of school reform appears, at least anecdotally, to be growing. While much of this has been spearheaded by teachers’ unions and education advocates (e.g., FairTest: the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, www.fairtest.org), we found evidence of mounting efforts embraced, if not led, by parents. One example is the ‘Opt Out’ movement, which encourages parents to protest the use of highstakes tests by refusing to let their children take them. In some Brooklyn schools a majority of students ‘opted out’ in 2014 (Bellafante 2014).

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 2  Bettie’s and Pascoe’s school ethnographies were each additionally influenced by the poststructural theories of Foucault and Butler, theories also emphasizing culture, language, and discourse. Bettie instructively reviews the dilemma of agency and resistance posed by poststructural theories of the discursive construction of the subject in the introduction to her second edition (2014, especially pp. xxvii–xxxiv); she also reviews the related dilemmas in the theories of Bourdieu and the Gramscian-influenced work she terms ‘cultural Marxism’, in the latter case, with its ‘romanticization’ of male youth resistance to class reproduction ‘at school, at work, and on the street’ (2014 [2003]: 33).   3  Lareau’s work might suggest potential spaces for resistance in the misrecognition or devaluing by middle-class professionals and educators of working-class and Black childrearing strategies and ‘socio-emotional style[s]’ (Lareau and Horvat 1999: 42, 49; Lareau 2003).   4  Historians contend that blaming mothers for larger social ills has great power as metaphor and ‘extraordinary elasticity’ over time, with the range of ills in the US including such issues as crime, juvenile delinquency, and even in some eras the Communist menace (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998: 18).  5  All names of individuals and schools are pseudonyms.  6  Nearly all of the respondents in Kimelberg’s study were women, in part because subjects were recruited primarily from parenting discussion boards populated nearly exclusively by women. Kyle and David were interviewed as an extension of the main study to further explore several issues that had surfaced during the research.  7  However, this tendency to perceive special needs students as posing a threat is borne out by largescale survey research by social psychologists at Indiana University. They found at least twenty percent of Americans were willing to admit that they did not want kids exhibiting symptoms of ADHD or depression in their children’s classrooms, with higher percentages reporting that they prefer their children not befriend such kids. Such estimates are also likely to understate the extent of prejudice, with, according to the researchers, respondents unlikely to acknowledge more deep-seated, ‘virulent’ beliefs (Martin et al. 2007: 62; also McLeod et  al. 2004; Pescosolido et  al. 2007a, 2007b).  8  For example, respondents discussed the rampant consumerism and peer pressure found in many affluent suburbs (for more on this, see Kimelberg 2014b). Recent reports also highlight higher rates of depression, anxiety, and some forms of

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substance abuse in wealthier communities (see, e.g., Levine 2006; Luthar 2003).  9  The term ‘psy sector’ refers to all those such as social workers, school counselors, psychologists, in the related fields of mental health provision (Malacrida 2003).  10  The Valley of the Dolls, a steamy bestseller by Jacqueline Susann (1997 [1966]), became a hit movie mythologizing the ruin resulting from the abuse of ‘dolls’ or barbiturates in Hollywood.

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Blum, Linda M. 2011. ‘Not Some Big, Huge, Racial-Type Thing, But …’. Signs 36(4): 941–967. Blum, Linda M. 2015. Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality. New York: NYU Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. London: Sage Publications. Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 1977. Schooling in Capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Burawoy, M. et al. 1991. Ethnography Unbound. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chambers, Julius, John Boger, and William Tobin. 2008. ‘How Colleges and Universities can Promote K-12 Diversity: A Modest Proposal’. Poverty & Race 17(1): 1–13. Chubb, John and Terry Moe. 1990. Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Cobb, Casey, Courtney Bell, and Robert Bifulco, eds. 2009. Special Issue on Informing the Future of School Choice Policy. Peabody Journal of Education 84: 107–278. Courpasson, David, Francoise Dany, Stewart Clegg. 2012. ‘Resisters at Work: Generating Productive Resistance in the Workplace’. Organization Science 23(3): 801–819. Cucchiara, Maia. 2013. ‘“Are We Doing Damage?” Choosing an Urban Public School in an Era of Parental Anxiety’. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 44(1): 75–93. DeSena, Judith. 2006. ‘“What’s a Mother to Do?” Gentrification, School Selection, and the Consequences for Community Cohesion’. American Behavioral Scientist 50: 241–257. Dyrness, Andrea. 2011. Mothers United: An Immigrant Struggle for Socially Just Education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Edin, Kathryn and Maria Kefalas. 2005. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ferguson, Ann. 2000. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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Fine, Michelle. 1991. Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban Public High School. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Giroux, Henry. 1981. Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Giroux, Henry. 1983a. Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Giroux, Henry. 1983b. ‘Theories of Reproduction and Resistance in the New Sociology of Education: A Critical Analysis’. Harvard Educational Review 53(3): 257–293. Giroux, Henry. 2001. Theory and Resistance in Education: Toward a Pedagogy for the Opposition. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goyette, Kim, Danielle Farrie, and Joshua Freely. 2012. ‘This School’s Gone Downhill: Racial Changes and Perceived School Quality among Whites’. Social Problems 59(2): 155–176. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Greene, Jay et  al. 2010. Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education. Washington, DC: Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Griffith, Alison and Dorothy Smith. 2005. Mothering for Schooling. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Hays, Sharon. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hendrickson, Katie. 2012. ‘Student Resistance to Schooling: Disconnections with Education in Rural Appalachia’. High School Journal 95(4): 37–49. Hursh, David. 2007. ‘Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies’. American Educational Research Journal 44(3): 493–518. Kimelberg, Shelley M. 2014a. ‘Beyond Test Scores: Middle-Class Mothers, Cultural Capital, and the Evaluation of Urban Public Schools’. Sociological Perspectives 57(2): 208–228.

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Kimelberg, Shelley M. 2014b. ‘Middle-Class Parents, Risk, and Urban Public Schools’. In Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools, edited by Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette. New York: Russell Sage, pp. 207–236. Kimelberg, Shelley M. and Chase Billingham. 2013. ‘Attitudes toward Diversity and the School Choice Process: Middle-Class Parents in a Segregated Urban Public School District’. Urban Education 48(2): 198–231. Labaree, David. 2012. Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ladd-Taylor, Molly and Lauri Umansky, editors. 1998. ‘Bad’ Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press. Lahelma, Elina, Sirpa Lappalainen, Reetta Mietola, and Tarja Palmu. 2014. ‘Discussions That “Tickle Our Brains”: Constructing Interpretations Through Multiple Ethnographic Datasets’. Ethnography and Education 9(1): 51–65. Lamont, Michèle and Virág Molnár. 2002. ‘The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences’. Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–195. Lamont, Michele, Sabrina Pendergrass, and Mark C. Pachucki. 2015. ‘Symbolic Boundaries’. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 850–855. Lareau, Annette. 2000a. Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education, 2nd edition. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield. Lareau, Annette. 2000b. ‘My Wife Can Tell Me Who I Know’. Qualitative Sociology 23(4): 407–433. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lareau, Annette and Erin Horvat. 1999. ‘Moments of Social Inclusion and Exclusion: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in FamilySchool Relationships’. Sociology of Education 72: 37–53. Levine, Madeline. 2006. The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. New York: Harper Collins. Li, Guofang. 2005. Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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10 Resistance in Organizational Strategy-Making A n n i i n a R a n t a k a r i a n d E e ro Va a r a

INTRODUCTION While resistance has been studied in several areas in social sciences and has been increasingly acknowledged as a key part of management and organization research, there are areas such as strategic management that have not been engaged with the issue of resistance in a profound manner. The reasons for this are in part obvious: strategy scholarship has by and large followed traditions where rational decision-making rather than social phenomena such as power have been in the centre stage. Thus, scholars interested in topics such as resistance have faced major paradigmatic hurdles when trying to make their voices heard among strategy researchers. Strategy has thus resisted resistance. Why should we care? Our point of departure in this chapter is to argue that a better understanding of resistance advances our comprehension of the social dynamics of strategy-making. By strategy-making we mean the processes, activities and practices

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involved in strategy formation or implementation in and around organizations. Strategymaking has been studied in interlinked streams of strategy process and practice research and especially in the body of more critical work on strategic management (for reviews, see Floyd et  al., 2011; Vaara and Whittington, 2012). In particular, the critical stream of strategy research has started to explicitly or implicitly examine the role of resistance in strategy-making (Dick and Collings, 2014; Ezzamel and Willmott, 2008; Laine and Vaara, 2007; McCabe, 2010). However, by and large resistance has remained a marginal issue in strategy research. We argue in this paper that this should not be the case. On the one hand, a deeper understanding of the social dynamics of strategymaking – that strategy process and practice research as well as more critical scholars call for – arguably requires taking power and thereby resistance seriously. On the other hand, in today’s world strategic processes tend to transcend organizational boundaries

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and involve more and more people in one way or another, and an understanding of the ways in which they may or may not engage with strategy-making is difficult without the notion of resistance. Thus, it is our objective to provide an overview of how prior research has dealt with resistance in this area and to then suggest avenues for future research to advance our understanding of resistance as a key issue in strategy-making. In this chapter, we distinguish and elaborate on three perspectives on how resistance has been dealt in strategy research: the functionalist–managerialist approach; the interpretative approach; and the critical approach. Each of these three streams of research offer fundamentally different conceptions of strategic decision-making, strategic processes and strategic practices, implying very different views on resistance. The bulk of research on strategy-making is functionalist and managerialist in orientation and treats resistance primarily as an impediment to the implementation of strategic ideas and initiatives. Interpretative studies in turn focus on issues such as polyphony, ambiguity or conflict. Thus, these studies tend to acknowledge that strategic ideas and initiatives or more fundamental issues may be resisted, but resistance itself remains an implicit theme in this body of work. Finally, there is a third stream of research consisting of critical strategy research that is characterized by a poststructuralist orientation. These are the studies that have focused on issues such as power and subjectivity in strategy-making. They also include a nascent body of work that deals explicitly with resistance. For example, Ezzamel and Willmott (2008) examined how strategy discourse may be reproduced or resisted in specific organizational settings, McCabe (2010) studied how power is exercised in and through strategy and how it may be resisted, Hardy and Thomas (2014) elaborated on how power–resistance relations may be a crucial part in the construction of new strategies, and Dick and Collings (2014) reflected on how resistance may be a key part of being a strategist.

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We build on these studies in this paper, but also suggest that there is more to the critical perspective. Thus, we outline avenues for future research by pointing to four topics that warrant special attention if we are to better understand the fundamental role of resistance in strategy-making: the mobilization of collective resistance, resistance as an inherent part of the dynamics of strategy-making, resistance and redefinition of subjectivity, the various modes and the role of sociomateriality in resistance, and ideological reproduction and resistance.

A WORKING DEFINITION OF RESISTANCE Although not central in strategy research, the question of resistance has started to receive more attention in organizational studies in general (Clegg et  al., 2006; Courpasson et al., 2012; Piderit, 2000). In this section, we present our working definition of resistance. This definition serves a two-fold function. First, it provides a lens through which we look at resistance in prior studies of strategymaking. Second, it offers a platform for suggestions for future research. We draw on a Foucauldian definition of power that implies the immanence of resistance. In other words, power necessitates resistance because ‘where’s power, there’s also resistance’ (Foucault 1978: 75). Thus, when both power and resistance are immanent elements of social phenomena, power is seen as a strategic ‘game’ characterized by struggles and contradictions. This lens allows us to see power and resistance as inherent elements of social dynamics in a range of social and organizational phenomena, including strategy-making. In line with Foucault’s (1978, 1980) insights, we see power and resistance involving negative and impeding effects, but also positive and facilitative implications. In so doing, we follow recent organizational

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studies that have started to uncover these enabling aspects of resistance organization studies (Courpasson et al., 2012; Cutcher, 2009; Thomas and Davies, 2005; Thomas et al., 2011). Accordingly, resistance is not only understood merely as a negative element, as a force that, for example, impedes change in organizations, but also a force that also produces movement and change. Consequently, resistance is an inherent part of the social dynamics of organizations that may or may not manifest itself as a counter-force to power or domination. This means that resistance can also be seen as a fundamental element of organizational strategy-making.

THREE APPROACHES TO RESISTANCE IN STRATEGY-MAKING In the following, we will present and elaborate on three distinctive approaches to how resistance is treated in strategy research. These approaches are: the functionalist– managerialist approach that views resistance as a non-issue or an impediment to the implementation of strategies; the interpretative perspective that sees resistance as a part of the polyphonic and ambiguous process of strategy-making, although not usually focusing explicitly on resistance; and the critical perspective that focuses explicitly on power

and resistance in strategy-making. Table 10.1 summarizes the main characteristics of these approaches.

Functionalist–Managerialist Approach: Resistance as a Non-issue or Impediment to Implementation The conventional view on strategy research treats strategy-making as the task of topmanagement (Ansoff, 1965; Chandler, 1962; Hambrick and Mason, 1984). This view reflects functionalist and managerialist thinking by stressing the role of top management in strategy-making and management’s control over operations (Langfield-Smith, 1997; Kreutzer et al., 2014). According to this perspective, strategy is the outcome of rational planning and decision-making (Bower, 1970; Carpenter et  al., 2004; Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1996; Hambrick and Mason, 1984; Hart and Banbury, 1994), and the operational task of middle managers and employees is to implement this planned strategy (Bourgeois and Brodwin, 1984; Floyd and Wooldridge, 1992). This stream of research has been less interested in the social or organizational processes involved in strategy-making, and thus resistance has remained either as a non-issue or it has been treated as an impediment for strategic change.

Table 10.1  Three approaches to resistance in strategy-making View on resistance Functionalist–managerialist perspective on strategy

Focal questions

Resistance as a non-issue Strategy as rational planning Ansoff (1965) Resistance as an impediment and control Kreutzer et al. (2014) to implementation How to overcome resistance Bourgeois and Brodwin to change (1984) Dent and Goldberg (1999)

Interpretative perspective on Resistance as part of the strategy social processes of strategy-making

Strategy ambiguity Struggle over meaning

Critical perspective on strategy

Power effects of discourses The constitutive role of power and resistance in strategy-making

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Exemplary studies

Resistance as subjectivity

Abdallah and Langley (2014) Jarzabkowski et al. (2010) Kaplan (2008) Beech and Johnson (2005) Knights and Morgan (1991) Levy et al. (2003) Laine and Vaara (2007) Hardy and Thomas (2014)

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While most of the managerially oriented studies of strategy-making have left resistance as a non-issue, few studies have touched upon the issue. One of the founding fathers of strategic planning, Ansoff (1988: 207), defined resistance as a multifaceted phenomenon that introduces unanticipated delays, costs, and instability into the process of strategic change. This view on resistance in strategy-making resonates with the broader dominant tradition in management studies, according to which resistance is primarily looked either at as employee defiance (Vallas, 2006) or misbehaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). Consequently, seeing resistance as dysfunctional opposition that needs to be overcomes characterizes this stream of research (e.g. Govindarajan, 1988; Heide et al., 2002; Lorange, 1998). In the strategic change literature, resistance is seen as opposing management’s intentions to implement strategic initiatives. Thus, resistance is seen as conduct that serves to maintain the status quo as a response to management-led organizational change efforts (Dent and Goldberg, 1999; Kotter, 1985; Zaltman and Duncan, 1977). This has triggered a stream of studies that focus on the causes and solutions to overcoming resistance (Allcorn and Godkin, 2011; Bao, 2008). The role of the middle managers or employees has, however, remained limited in these studies. In fact, the recipients of strategic change are often viewed only as resistant, foot-dragging saboteurs rather than acknowledging their potential positive role or broader agency in these change processes (Balogun, 2006; Sonenshein, 2010).

Interpretative Approach to Resistance: Resistance as an Implicit Part of Ambiguity and Struggle Over Meaning The second approach to resistance in strategy-making draws on the interpretative paradigm in management and organization

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research. This stream of research on strategymaking has its roots in strategy process studies that examines the social aspects of strategy-making (Bower, 1970; Burgelman, 1983; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985; Pettigrew, 1973). More recently, these studies have been linked with the strategy-as-practice perspective that examines the activities and practices of organizational strategy-making (Golsorkhi et  al., 2015; Vaara and Whittington, 2012). These interpretative studies have drawn on theories and methods such as sensemaking (Balogun and Johnson, 2005; Balogun and Rouleau, 2011; Rouleau, 2005), framing (Kaplan, 2008; Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013), rhetoric (Jarzabkowski et  al., 2010), narrative analysis (Barry and Elmes, 1997; Fenton and Langley, 2011) and discourse studies (Kwon et  al., 2014; Mantere and Vaara, 2008) to better understand the socially embedded nature of organizational strategy. These studies characteristically conceptualize strategy-making as a process that involves multiple views and interpretations, and in this way acknowledge the inherent polyphony in strategy-making. Typically, these studies have elaborated on the ways in which actors then create shared understanding through complex social processes. Thus, the theme of resistance has remained implicit in this stream of research. Nevertheless, the insights concerning ambiguity and struggle over meaning deserve special attention as they are closely linked with resistance. A significant part of these studies have focused on the ambiguous nature of organizational strategy-making (Abdallah and Langley, 2014; Aggerholm et  al., 2012; Davenport and Leitch, 2005; Denis et  al., 2011; Jarzabkowski et al., 2010; Sillince et al., 2012). This ambiguity, or the existence of multiple interpretations, has been primarily understood as a problem for generating collective strategic action (Jarzabkowski et  al., 2010). The constraining effect of ambiguity has been manifested, for example, in on-going tensions over direction

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(Denis et al., 2011; Sillince and Mueller, 2007), competing political interests of different constituents (Fenton and Pettigrew, 2000), and means-ends ambiguities over how to pursue strategic goals (Middleton-Stone and Brush, 1996). However, also another kind of view has emerged in these studies. Ambiguity has also been seen to promote unified diversity or purposefully equivocal communication through which needs for cohesion and coordination can be reconciled in a way that flexibility and creativity are ensured (Abdallah and Langley 2014; Jarzabkowski et  al., 2010). Thus, ambiguity is seen as one of the defining characteristics of strategy and strategic change (Hendry and Seidl, 2003; Mantere, 2005; Mintzberg, 1978). For instance, in their study of a UK business school Jarzabkowski et al. (2010) examined how strategic ambiguity was both used as a discursive resource by different organizational constituents and how it was associated with collective action. They showed how agents in different rhetorical positions construct strategic goals according to the various constituents and interests. Based on this analysis they developed a conceptual framework that explains how ambiguity in strategy-making can serve as a resource for different organizational constituents to assert their own interests whilst also enabling collective organizational action, at least of a temporary nature. This is relevant in terms of resistance since Jarzabkowski et al. (2010) found that divergences both in interests and preparedness can co-exist and even enable collective action. In another empirical example, Aggerholm et  al. (2012) examine how ambiguity in strategy texts arises across multiple strategizing activities through the presence of multiple actors. In a single-case analysis of a medium-sized enterprise, they focused on the processes of authoring, translating and interpreting of strategy. Aggerholm et  al. (2012) found that the process of authoring strategy often results in a decontextualized

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and monovocal strategy paper where different managerial intentions become detached from the meaning. In the translating phase, Aggerholm et  al. (2012) showed that strategy text entails multivocality as an inherent characteristic, which leads to that strategy text being seen as temporal and subjective in nature. Third, in interpreting strategy text, they identified three main rhetorical positions among employees: acceptance, ambiguity and rejection. By taking a more critical stance, Abdallah and Langley (2014) examine the consequences of strategic ambiguity. Their study of a strategic planning process of a cultural organization provides an illuminating example of the paradoxical and double-edged nature of ambiguity. In their analysis they draw on de Certeau’s (1988) theory on practice to examine how the creative consumption of strategic ambiguity in strategy-making can lead to multiple and even unexpected interpretations among organizational members, resulting in internal contradiction and overextension. In other words, while ambiguity can lead to strategic unity through diversity, Abdallah and Langley (2014) show how ambiguity in strategic planning can play against itself and lead to the questioning of strategy texts. Other researchers have then more directly examined the ways in which actors may negotiate or struggle to develop organizational strategies (Beech and Johnson, 2005; Kaplan, 2008; Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013). This view implicitly entails the notion of resistance, because strategies are understood to emerge from various contests and struggles over meaning (Kaplan, 2008). In her study of framing contests, Kaplan (2008) focuses on the link between managerial cognition and politics in strategy-making. In particular, she examines political processes through which certain frames become predominant over others, as well as how these frames influence organizational strategy-making. In her view, strategy-making and adaptation to it occur in day-to-day interactions between

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individuals, and these interactions are conflictual and often associated with important choices where different cognitive frames come into play. She suggests that cognitive frames should not be understood as merely instrumental tools for justifying power-laden actions, but that they are inherent parts of the political processes that generate organizational decisions and strategies. Thus, conflicting and contesting frames are ways to influence strategies as well as existing power structures in the context of strategy-making. In another analysis, Mantere (2013) has proposed to view strategy-making as language games. He argues that strategy-making revolves around specific languages and their rules of the game. Thus, creating any shared understanding about organizational strategies requires knowledge and skills in the use of these languages. This makes strategy-making an inherently political affair. In yet another study, Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013) have viewed strategy-making as temporal work. In their analysis, it is essential to understand the continuous (re)construction of the past, present and future as part of strategic sensemaking. This involves struggles over meaning and politics, although they do not explicitly explore power and resistance in their paper. Still others have then focused on the practices of strategy meetings (Kwon et  al., 2004; Seidl and Guérard, 2015; Wodak et al., 2011), highlighting the discursive processes and strategies through which consensus may be achieved or shared views constructed. In an illuminating analysis of strategic change, Beech and Johnson (2005) in turn used narrative analysis to explore identity dynamics in the lived experiences of a strategic change over time. With their study they challenge the conventional notion of resistance as something to be overcome and suggest that rather than seeking uniformity, more focus needs to be placed on disjuncture, especially in terms of the dynamism of individual identities (Beech and Johnson, 2005). Thus, although mostly implicitly, some interpretative studies have started to challenge

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traditional views of resistance in the context of strategic change, thus paving the way for new studies. Consequently, even though the interpretative approach to strategy research has not explicitly dealt with resistance, these studies come close in focusing attention on polyphony, ambiguity and negotiation of meaning in strategy-making. However, the role of resistance in generating multiple interpretations or ambiguity has remained underspecified, and we still know relatively little of power–resistance dynamics in struggles over meaning in strategy-making – which may not always result in consensus or shared views.

Critical Approach to Strategy: Resistance as Subjectivity and Coping The third approach to resistance in strategy research is explicitly critical. This perspective builds mostly on poststructuralist thinking (Bourdieu, 2002; Foucault, 1969, 1972, 1979, 1980) and focuses on the relations of discourse, power and subjectivity in strategymaking (Dick and Collings, 2014; Ezzamel and Willmott, 2008; Hardy and Thomas, 2014; Laine and Vaara, 2007; McCabe, 2010; Samra-Fredericks, 2005). These studies view strategy-making as a process that is constituted in power relations and that is characterized by contradiction, inconsistency, uncertainty and inequality (McCabe, 2010). This critical approach to strategy research has often followed a Foucault-inspired view that has focused attention on the constitutive role of discourses and their power effects (Foucault 1972 [1966]). This is especially the case with Knights and Morgan’s (1991) seminal study of corporate strategy that raised the question of subjectivity to the front and centre of strategy research. Thereafter, other scholars have examined especially the power effects of strategy discourses (Ezzamel and Willmott, 2008; Kornberger and Clegg, 2011; Laine and Vaara, 2007; McCabe,

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2010). In this way, the critical approach to strategy research has started to unravel power–resistance dynamics in organizational strategy-making. In one of the empirical studies of resistance and subjectivity in organizational strategy-making, Laine and Vaara (2007) focused on the discursive construction of subjectivity in an engineering group. They examined discursive struggles about strategic change to better understand subjectification and the empowerment/disempowerment effects of strategy discourse. Their analysis shows how resistance becomes explicit through struggles between specific actors. In particular, they demonstrated how middle managers conducted their own strategies even though it was in opposition to the corporate management’s strategy discourse. Moreover, engineers tended to distance themselves from the corporate management’s strategy discourse, thus protecting their own autonomy and power as key decision-makers. In this way, their study showed how resistance is a natural counterpart to top management’s efforts to seize control by strategic planning. In their study of a retailing company, Ezzamel and Willmott (2008) focused on resistance as triggered by strategy discourses. Drawing on Foucault, they examine strategy and strategizing as a discursive practice, treating discourse both as an object of resistance and a means of its pursuit, and emphasize that social practices such as accounting are not only reducible to discourses. Instead, strategy and strategic agency are constituted through discursive practices that function both socially and within the self. McCabe (2010) has highlighted the role of resistance in exploring the context through which strategies emerge and what they serve and reproduce. He illustrated how power is exercised in ambiguous and contradictory ways, and how these ambiguities and contradictions open up possibilities for resistance. Hardy and Thomas (2014) have in turn examined how power–resistance relations shape the constitution of strategies. They

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demonstrated how multiple discursive and material practices produce objects and subjects that make up organizational strategies. In particular, they elucidated the role of different forms of resistance in the formation of strategies. Finally, in their recent study, Dick and Collings (2014) show how resistance is not only defined as a response to managerial strategizing. Their analysis demonstrates how resistance is inherent to the managerial strategy discourse in specific contexts, even though it is often manifested as a hindrance and stumbling block. Consequently, these critical studies have greatly advanced our understanding of the key role of resistance in organizational strategy-making. They have examined resistance both at a meta-level from the perspective of broader societal strategy discourses (Ezzamel and Willmott, 2008; Knights and Morgan, 1991) and at the organizational level, from the perspective of the effects of resistance on strategy-making (Laine and Vaara, 2007; McCabe, 2010). Through these studies we have also learned that resistance involves fundamental issues of agency and subjectivity. However, the focus has thus far been mostly limited to exploring the power effects of strategy discourses and the responses of organizational actors to these discourses and their implications. We know less of other important issues, as will be highlighted in the following section.

AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH In this chapter, we have identified three distinctive approaches to resistance in strategy research: the functionalist–managerialist approach that sees resistance as an impediment to effective strategy-making; the interpretative approach where analyses of polyphony, ambiguity and struggle over meaning implicitly deal with resistance; and the critical approach that has explicitly focused on resistance as a response to

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strategies imposed upon people and opened up important issues about subjectivity. We now argue that there is much more to the critical perspective and present ideas and directions for future research. In particular, we will focus on the mobilization of collective resistance, resistance as an inherent part of the dynamics of strategy-making, resistance and redefinition of subjectivity, the various modes and the role of sociomateriality in resistance, and ideological reproduction and resistance.

Mobilization of Resistance: Resisting Strategies and Forms of Strategy-Making One of the traditional views on resistance is to see it as a way to deal with organizational, social or societal problems – and to bring about change. While previous critical studies have highlighted employees’ responses to strategies imposed upon them, little is known how organizational members such as middle managers or employees are collectively mobilized to resist specific strategies or their implications. Even less is known about resistance movements that mobilize actors outside specific organizations. This may be due to the fact that strategy research has developed into a distinctive stream of research with little connections to more critical social studies, with the exception of the recent work noted above. There is a paucity of knowledge of how resistance may be successful in mobilizing actors and even reversing decisions or leading to better ones. Future research could draw from advances in other areas of management studies and social studies more generally. In particular, collective resistance can take the form of social movements where injustice or other apparent problems trigger reactions and lead to collective mobilization against these problems (Benford and Snow, 2000; Kaplan, 2008). Thus, future research in strategymaking could draw from more critical strands

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of social movement research to explore the various ways in which resistance might unfold and how this might engage actors outside a focal organization. These movements may thus arise from resistance, but a close analysis of such movements could also add to our understanding of counter-framing and the dynamics of framing contests in and around such movements. In addition, it would be of special interest to follow the responses of the organizations whose decisions and actions are criticized, as that may also entail the mobilization of social movements (Walker, 2014). Such resistance can also be mounted against the processes and practices of strategy-making more generally. For example, a lack of participation may be a problem characterizing many decision-making or strategic planning processes (Mantere and Vaara, 2008) that may trigger resistance and calls for change. Similarly, gender inequality may be a reason to oppose specific decisionmaking systems and how they are applied. It would thus be interesting to examine in more detail how discussions about specific strategic practices or forms of decision-making may be criticized as well as how this critical discussion may lead to calls for, or even to the development of, new practices. For example, while organizational strategy-making is traditionally seen as exclusive and conducted in secrecy, Whittington et al. (2011) call for strategy-making to become more transparent and inclusive. However, this does not mean that either transparency or inclusion would lead to the demise of resistance. Instead, the notion of ‘open strategy’ can be seen as an opportunity to re-evaluate the monopoly of corporate elites for strategy and to foster organizational competition for new strategic initiatives – thus building on productive resistance. This can enable new ways of strategy-making that stem from collective criticism concerning prevailing practices that are seen as inadequate or ethically questionable (Seidl and Whittington, 2014).

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Resistance as an Inherent Part of Strategy Processes: Historical Dialectics, Productive Resistance and Dialogical Dynamics A growing number of organization and management scholars have contested the predominant perspective of resistance as hindering change (Courpasson et  al., 2012; Cutcher, 2009; Thomas et  al., 2011). These studies have argued for taking the positive and facilitative aspects of resistance seriously as in productive resistance (Courpasson et  al., 2012), resistance as a resource for change (Ford et al., 2008), or negotiation of meaning (Thomas et al., 2011). In addition, a few studies have also spelled out such ideas in the strategy context (Cutcher, 2009; Halford and Leonard, 2006; Thomas et  al., 2011). Nevertheless, future research could go much further in elaborating on how resistance may be seen as an inherent part of strategy-making. One perspective is to view resistance as an integral part of the historical dynamics of strategy-making. That is, strategy-making may develop historically in and through dialectical forces and counterforces. For instance, Vaara and Lamberg (2016) point out that resistance may play a crucial role in how strategy-making unfolds over time. From this perspective, especially, middle managers’ autonomous strategy work may often involve resistance to dominant strategies and result in emerging strategies that can challenge and replace the previous ones (Mirabeau and Maguire, 2013). A wellknown example is Burgelman’s (2002) work on Intel that elucidates how the upper middle managers that did not agree with the formal strategy of the corporation succeeded in their autonomous strategy work, which eventually turned Intel into a microprocessor corporation. Similar dynamics may more generally characterize strategy-making, especially in the case of the tensions between the centre and the periphery of an organization (Regnér, 2003).

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Another perspective is to focus on the productive role of resistance in organizational strategizing involving alternative strategic ideas and discourses. In studies focusing on the facilitative role of resistance, both Ford et al. (2008) and Thomas et al. (2011) have argued that thoughtful resistance can play a much more important role in sustaining organizational change than unquestioned acceptance. Hardy and Thomas (2014) in turn provide a rare illuminating example in their Foucault-inspired analysis of strategymaking. Central to their analysis is to point out that resistance may result in the creation and mobilization of new strategy discourses that allow actors to emerge as strategists. Thus, their analysis exemplifies how resistance may be a fundamentally important positive force in the creation of new strategies. In a Foucauldian spirit, they break strategy discourses into objects and subjects, thus illuminating ways in which future research could examine the dynamics of resistance in various contexts. Yet another idea is to view resistance as a key part of the micro-level of strategy conversations and dialogue. There is an increasing interest in strategy conversations and meetings (Aggerholm et  al., 2012; Kwon et al., 2014; Seidl and Guérard, 2015; Wodak et al., 2011) that has illuminated their microdynamics. For instance, Kwon et  al. (2014) have elaborated on the discursive strategies that team members use to create shared views in strategy meetings, including re/defining, equalizing, simplifying, legitimating and reconciling. So far, however, little attention has been focused on the micro-dynamics of these discussions that most often involve resistance in the form of counter-arguments. In fact, most conversations, and especially those that lead to new ideas or create consensus or commitment, tend to involve dynamics where first ideas and arguments are challenged by others, which may eventually lead to compromises or new understandings. This does not need to follow the classical dialectic pattern of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but unravelling the

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role of resistance in these dynamics offers a major opportunity for future research.

Expanding the Roles and Identities of the Strategists: Employees as Strategists and Top Managers as Rebels An implicit theme in some of the critical studies is that of empowerment in terms of participation in strategy-making (Laine and Vaara, 2015). Consequently, scholars have explored the ways in which middle managers and employees could play active roles as strategists. This stream of work connects with the idea of resistance in that some forms of engagement and participation involve resistance, and sometimes acts of resistance may be important ways of exercising influence and participation in strategy-making (Dick and Collings, 2014; McCabe, 2010). While previous studies have highlighted important issues, one can go even further to challenge the prevailing conceptions of top managers as strategists and others as implementers of strategies. Prior studies have already pointed out that middle managers and employees may play strategic roles, and scholars have called for more engagement and participation (Laine and Vaara, 2015; Mantere and Vaara, 2008). It should be clear by now that assuming the role of a strategist may imply resistance to either the prevailing strategies or the very practices of strategy-making. While we already know of some examples of how this can happen (Dick and Collings, 2014; Laine and Vaara, 2007), there is a need for more analysis of these processes and dynamics in various contexts. Indeed, resistance can be linked with making one’s voice heard and exercising influence, and it would be important to examine in more detail how organizational members outside the top managerial ranks may adopt strategist roles and identities – and what kinds of struggles this may involve.

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Furthermore, top and other managers may resist prevailing practices or previous strategies or the roles and identities offered to them. In fact, most models of organizational or strategic change imply that change requires resistance to the previous state-of-affairs. Thus, it would be important to examine in detail the role that resistance plays in top managers’ strategic thinking and action. This could include nuanced analysis of their power and powerlessness and cases where top managers act as rebels (Courpasson and Thoenig, 2010) in processes of strategy-making.

Going Further with Modes of Resistance: Modes of Resistance, Multimodality and Sociomateriality Scholars have examined coping or resistance strategies in various contexts, and this is also the case with strategy-making (Dick and Collings, 2014; Ezzamel and Willmott, 2008; McCabe, 2010). However, future studies could go even further in exploring the various modes of resistance that range from more open to disguised, or active to passive resistance. One idea is to study in more detail resistance strategies such as direct opposition, counter-argumentation, distancing, irony or cynicism in strategy-making. It would be interesting to examine how specific modes lead to particular types of processes in strategy-making. For instance, it is likely that cynicism will be a passive form of engagement that may not lead to new ideas, creativity or mobilization of others (Fleming, 2005; Fleming and Spicer, 2003). In contrast, other modes may help to gather support for alternative ideas and engage people. Thus, it would be important to study in more detail the discursive or rhetorical forms of more open or disguised resistance or, for example, humour (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999) in them. In addition, non-discursive modes of resistance require special attention. Resistance is

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not only shown as rhetoric or discourse, but may also take other forms. In particular, visuality is an important part of strategy-making, and this is also in the case of challenging dominant ideas or presenting alternative ones. While organizational scholars have already studied embodied resistance in specific areas (Kachtan and Wasserman, 2015; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014; Tyler and Taylor, 1998), we know little of the embodied nature of resistance in strategy-making. Thus, it would be especially interesting to examine how resistance may be shown in gestures or bodily movements in strategy meetings or conversations. Focus on embodiment could also help to better understand the crucial role of emotions in resistance. Strategy-making takes places in sociomaterial contexts, and tools and technologies structure strategic decision-making (Dameron et al., 2015; Jarzabkowski and Kaplan, 2015. Tools and technologies are employed to promote specific strategies and in their implementation, but they may also be used to resist specific strategic ideas and in offering alternatives. Thus access to and ability to use these tools and technologies is likely to play a crucial role in resistance and how it may be manifested in organizational strategymaking. A special question for future research would also be to examine how organizational actors may resist particular frameworks, tools or technologies because they have implications for confidentiality, secrecy, participation or transparency. Yet another question would be to link resistance with spatiality and to elucidate the role of place and space in resistance.

Resisting the Ideological Assumptions: Reproduction, Critical Awareness and the Possibilities of Resistance Finally, resistance in strategy-making may be strongly ideologically motivated, and future research could explore the ideological underpinnings of resistance that are still only partially understood. As highlighted by Knights

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and Morgan (1991) or Levy et  al. (2003), strategic management coheres with and reproduces specific ideological assumptions. These are related, for example, to instrumental rationalism, neoliberalism and neocolonialism (Vaara, 2010). Such underlying assumptions easily pass unnoticed or are taken as granted without critical discussion – which indeed makes them ideological. Without going into the details of specific kinds of ideological analyses, it is obvious that the reproduction of specific assumptions on the one hand and resistance on the other is a topic that requires special attention in critically oriented strategy research. For example, Vaara (2015) has argued that a critical discourse analysis can be used to analyse how strategic discourses have evolved, how they have been spread, and what kinds of ideological assumptions are ingrained in specific strategy texts, and how these texts and discourses have constructed and reproduced specific kinds of ideological assumptions, identities and power relations. Thus, this kind of analysis can reveal how strategy discourses may be used to maintain and reinforce prevailing power structures. In addition to highlighting such reproduction of ideological assumptions, it would be important to focus special attention on the possibilities for and actual forms of resistance. For instance, it would be valuable to examine how awareness of the inherent problems of strategy discourses and practices may be created and how alternatives can be proposed. This may also involve us scholars in terms of critical reflection about our role in spreading commonly held ideas and assumptions in our teaching or research – and occasionally resisting them.

CONCLUSION This chapter has focused on the role of resistance in strategy research. In particular, we have identified and elaborated on three

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distinctive approaches to how resistance is treated and conceptualized in organizational strategy-making. First, the functionalist– managerialist approach treats resistance as a non-issue or an impediment to the implementation of strategies. Second, the interpretative perspective views resistance as a part of the polyphonic and ambiguous process of strategy-making, but these studies have not explicitly examined resistance. Finally, the critical perspective – which mostly draws on Foucault-inspired theories – has focused explicitly on power and resistance. These studies have greatly added to our understanding of the political dynamics of strategymaking and the ways in which this involves subjectivity. Thus, we have argued that there is a need to build on this nascent stream of work. In addition, we have identified specific areas for future research. These are the mobilization of collective resistance, resistance as an inherent part of the dynamics of strategy-making, resistance and redefinition of subjectivity, the various modes and the role of sociomateriality in resistance, and ideological reproduction and resistance. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of topics, but we believe that analysis of these and related themes can significantly advance research on organizational strategy-making. In conclusion, we argue that strategy research has largely developed into a body of work that has focused little attention on sociopolitical dynamics. Some new streams of research, such as strategy process and practice studies and the more critical analyses of strategic management, have created new discussions that have greatly advanced strategy research in this regard. They have even included a nascent stream of research dealing with resistance, and we believe that by extending this work to address other issues related to resistance, one can better understand what strategy-making is to a great deal about – although not all people are used to seeing it as such. This means not only taking a critical lens to the problematic aspects or

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implications of strategy-making in contemporary organizations, but also accepting and even embracing the role of resistance as a productive force in organizations and society.

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11 Prisons as Sites of Power/ Resistance Ta m m i A r f o r d

The rapid and unprecedented expansion of the US carceral system since the 1980s has resulted in the largest incarcerated population in the world, both in terms of the sheer number of people imprisoned and per capita. There were over 2.2 million adults incarcerated in local jails and state or federal prisons at the end of 2013, placing the imprisonment rate at 698 per 100,000 (Glaze and Kaeble, 2014). When we include those serving parole, probation, and other non-custodial sentences, the number approaches seven million, the equivalent of one in 35 adults in the country (Glaze and Kaeble, 2014). Rates of incarceration vary drastically by race/ethnicity for both women and men. The approximate male imprisonment rate per 100,000 is 487 for whites; 1,200 for Hispanics; and 3,161 for blacks (Sabol et  al., 2009). For women, the rates are smaller but comparably disproportionate: 50 for whites; 75 for Hispanics; and 149 for blacks (Sabol et  al., 2009). If we compare these statistics to those of other Western nations, we see a gaping disparity.

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For example, the total adult imprisonment rate per 100,000 is 148 in the UK and 93 in Germany; these differences are not an outcome of disproportionate crime rates, but rather of the ways that nation states employ systems of control (Bosworth, 2010: 3). It is not only the millions of individuals under direct control of the penal system that are affected by mass incarceration. Children, families, and loved ones of the incarcerated are directly impacted by psychological, emotional, and financial harms, as well as stigmatization and obstructed opportunities (see Braman, 2004; Comfort, 2007, among others). Additionally, entire communities – particularly poor black and brown communities – are subjected to a process through which they are systematically excluded from positions of political power, denied economic stability, and exposed to police, neighborhood, and interpersonal violence as part of everyday life (Richie, 2012). Mass incarceration affects everyone in the US – the billions of dollars and incalculable time and energy spent on

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criminalizing, surveilling, and caging black, brown, and poor white bodies could be used in myriad other ways, not only to decrease the harms caused by social inequalities (which have only been exacerbated by mass incarceration), but also perhaps to begin working toward healing a nation of people who suffer from the multifarious collective pathologies produced by living in a society with an entrenched legacy of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism. The dominant discourses surrounding prisons in the US have historically been, and are presently, reliant upon the essentialization of prisoners as a (marginalized and excluded) class of people who do not retain the same rights (or, indeed, even possess the same degree of humanity) as ‘law-abiding citizens’. However, individuals and organizations have always resisted both this definition of the incarcerated, as well as the policies, practices, and/or existence of the penal system. Given that the prison is arguably the most abhorred of all social institutions, containing the most dispossessed and excluded members of society, it is essential that we examine the ways in which individuals in this group affect and are affected by the decisions made by those in positions of authority and document the uses/abuses of power and the countless acts of resistance that occur not only as sensational events reported by the media, but perhaps more importantly, those that happen as part of mundane, everyday life. Resistance related to incarceration is enacted by individuals and groups both inside and outside of prisons, and although I will focus primarily on resistance that occurs inside prisons, it is crucial to recognize that prison walls are permeable – alliances are built among people who are incarcerated and those who are not, and millions of individuals (both prisoners and staff) cycle through the system every year (Gottschalk, 2006). Just as power is exercised in both formal and informal ways within and around prisons, so too does resistance take multiple forms. It is not only incarcerated people who

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enact resistance, but also those who work in carceral facilities. Though scholars have written a considerable amount about both prisoner resistance and workplace resistance in general, very little research has been dedicated to understanding the ways that prison staff engage in acts of resistance at work. Because of the uniqueness of the American carceral system, while I draw from broader theoretical work, the discussion of resistance will focus on prisons in the US. The chapter will provide a necessarily brief overview of some of the ways incarcerated people resist the innumerable attempts made by the state and its actors in the penal system to exercise power through various means of control. I will then discuss the complexities of power relations within prisons and address the limited literature on resistance among prison staff. Finally, I will illustrate how and why some prison workers engage in resistance by drawing upon my own research about censorship in prisons, focusing on prison librarians’ experiences with and resistance to censorship policies and practices.

CONCEPTUALIZING POWER/ RESISTANCE Before putting forth a working definition of resistance, we must establish what we mean when we talk about power, as the two are mutually constitutive. In his early work, Foucault (1977: 26–7) argued that power is something that ‘is exercised rather than possessed … it is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who “do not have it”; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them’. Power is inherent in social relations and ‘produces social reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (1977: 194). While he originally conceived of power as something that is embedded within social relations, Foucault would later shift his focus to emphasize the notion of power as an activity decontextualized

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from interactions (Rose et al., 2009). Power came to be understood as the ‘conduct of conduct’ – a deliberate attempt to direct either one’s own or another’s comportment (Foucault, 1982). Hornqvist (2010: 3) argues that to conceive of power only as an activity – as something decontextualized from social relations – makes it difficult to ‘separate what is power from what is not power’. He claims that, ‘[c] onceptually, power as an action presupposes power as a relation. Without inequality and relative positions of strength, there is no sense in talking about exercising power as opposed to exerting influence in general terms’ (2010: 3). Thus, it is the context in which the activity occurs that distinguishes power from ordinary practices that might affect others. It is Hornqvist’s definition of power that I use to discuss resistance within the prison context: Power is the activity that starts from and reproduces power relations. It comprises acts by a party superordinate in relation to another, to influence which acts are carried out by that second party, with the intention or the effect of reproducing the inequality between them …. [O]ne cannot assume that those who exercise power always share a specific intent; neither can one assume that all acts of power actually do reproduce such relations. (Hornqvist, 2010: 4)

Fundamental to this definition of power is the continual presence of resistance. As power constitutes activities performed within an unequal field of relations, just as the superordinate party may exercise power, so can the subordinate party exercise resistance. Following Foucault, Hornqvist argues that power relations are ‘unequal, contentious and unstable’, and therefore, always in flux, being vulnerable to disruptions, resistance from subordinate parties, and influence from processes or parties outside the direct relation (2010: 4–5). However, these mutable microlevel relations are simultaneously reproduced at the macro level in the social structure in a way that is relatively ‘permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing’ (Foucault, 1978: 93). This paradox – that power is ‘also

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collective rather than individual, stable rather than fragile, and structural rather than situation-dependent’ – is clearly evident in the prison context (Hornqvist, 2010: 6). While there have been countless academic debates about what constitutes resistance, many scholars draw upon (and oftentimes depart from, modify, transform, etc.) the definition offered by Scott (1985: 290): ‘Any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims … made on that class by superordinate classes … or to advance its own claims …. vis-à-vis those superordinate classes’. Scholars have argued for decades about what ‘counts’ as resistance, being primarily concerned with the intent of the actor and recognition by others of the act as resistance. Though I do not dismiss these debates as frivolous, as they deal with issues of power and control, which are central to social life, I concur with Hollander and Einwohner (2004: 547) that the concept of resistance is socially constructed and complex, and within scholarly debates, ‘resistance seems to be as much a symbol of the writer’s political stance as an analytic concept’. Hollander and Einwohner’s (2004) review of the literature concludes that ‘despite the variety and contradictory use there seems to be an agreement of resistance as an oppositional act’; it ‘involves agency’ and ‘is carried out in some kind of oppositional relation to power’ (Johansson and Vinthagen, 2014: 2). Thus, I adopt this ‘common ground’ conceptualization and leave the intricacies of this debate to others. Let me be clear in stating that my discussion of power/resistance here does not rely upon traditional notions of the subaltern and struggles against oppression or control that are commonly used in the resistance studies literature (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004). Rather, I am examining power relations within a specific context – the prison – which is, of course, embedded within larger social structures that irrefutably influence practices that occur therein (Hornqvist, 2010). As I will discuss in more detail below, power relations

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change in complex ways when people cross the threshold of the prison gate. Prisons are paramilitary organizations with multilayered hierarchies (administrators, custody staff, and ‘civilian’ workers all have their own place within this system, and prisoners occupy a subordinate position in relation to all employees). Thus, within the prison, a given act can simultaneously be an expression of power and one of resistance, as when COs (correctional officers) resist directives from their superiors by exercising power over prisoners (e.g. refusing to comply with policies that give prisoners certain protections). Thus, I examine resistance within a particular institutional structure, being aware that it is a context within a context. Additionally, though organizational models exist for prisons, there is significant variation among prisons due to multiple factors such as location, security level, wardens’ characteristics, and the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, and social class (among other statuses) of prisoners and staff (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001).

PRISONER RESISTANCE Within the context of the prison, exertions of power and resistance occur between human beings (i.e. individuals within the prison system make decisions and take actions that affect, or attempt to affect, other individuals); however, these relational acts are influenced by the organizational structure of the prison and the laws of the state, so that possible courses of action are constrained (though not determined) for individuals within the organization. The prison, as an institution, employs strategies that work to reproduce the inequalities that exist not only between prisoners and staff, but also between various staff members, who occupy ranked relational positions within a formal hierarchy, but simultaneously navigate the multidimensional, unstable, and entangled web of ‘ongoing negotiations of power’ (Bosworth and

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Carrabine, 2001: 501) that exist in prisons (Owen, 1988; Britton, 2003). The extreme positional differences between prisoners and staff are not generated within the prison without reference to historical context and social structure. They are rooted in longstanding (but flexible) notions of who prisoners are as a (racialized) group of people and how they deserve to be treated. These ideas center on the meaning and process of exclusion, such that prisoners are not considered full ‘citizens’, but rather, represent the Other that requires differentiation (Bauman, 2000). The long and turbulent history of the struggle for the rights and dignity of people who are imprisoned – an intrinsic part of the history of the modern prison – is replete with acts of resistance performed by prisoners, such as strikes, boycotts, revolts/riots, and lawsuits. Though, if we take a broader historical view and consider the carceral system as one incarnation in an assemblage of institutionalized efforts, along with slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and ghettoization, to ‘reinforce white authority’ (Thompson, 2014: 156), we must recognize Sundiata Acoli’s assertion that the ‘Afrikan prison struggle began on the shore of Afrika behind the walls of medieval pens that held captives for ships bound west into slavery’ (1995: 5). That struggle, and the countless forms of resistance encompassed therein, continues in contemporary prisons. However, many acts of prisoner resistance are not, and/or cannot be, intentionally situated as part of this account. The disproportionate number of black, brown, and poor white women and men who fill our carceral facilities regularly engage in individual and group resistance for an array of reasons (and perhaps without intention at all). According to Ross, ‘[m]ost prisoners direct a considerable amount of resistance toward the institutional conditions of incarceration, COs, and, by extension, the prison management’ (2009: 32). Resistance in prison takes innumerable forms; thus, the present review of some of the predominant or more visible methods is a necessary abridgment. However, references

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are made to several authors who provide more comprehensive discussions elsewhere. There are several types of resistance that take place within prisons that are often publicized by the media as spectacular or extraordinary events: escapes, revolts and riots, and hunger strikes. Although they make for compelling stories, often sensationalized by the media or romanticized by Hollywood, prison escapes are in fact quite rare. People may attempt escape (perhaps the definitive act of resistance for someone who is imprisoned), but the chances of actually succeeding in doing so are low. Useem and Piehl (2006) report that the rate of prison escapes in the US has decreased dramatically from its peak of 12.4 per 1,000 prisoners in 1981 to a mere to 0.5 per 1,000 in 2001 (the last year for which the data was available), likely due primarily to advances in security technology, changes in prison architecture, and increasingly repressive prison conditions. As the escape rate has declined over the previous three decades, so too has the rate of prison revolts and riots. Human beings have revolted and rioted as long as they have been imprisoned, but the number of incidents has decreased significantly over the last several decades, both in terms of the overall number per year and per capita rate (Useem and Piehl, 2006). When prisoners engage in revolts, they often do so as a last resort after having tried appealing to authorities multiple times through legal channels such as writing letters to prison administrators and politicians, filing lawsuits and grievances, and organizing work strikes. Riots are sometimes spontaneous, violent episodes sparked by some rather banal event. However, Ross (2009) argues that ‘disturbances, rebellions, and riots are typically protest actions against the administration’ (p. 31). Unlike revolts and riots, hunger strikes are a quiet and prolonged form of resistance. People in prison have little control over what they eat, but they can determine if and when they will eat. For example, in recent

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years, prisoners from California to Ohio to Guantanamo Bay have used hunger strikes as a means of resistance to the use of long term solitary confinement, capital punishment, and the illegal and indefinite imprisonment of people who have not been charged with any crime (Brown, 2009; Thompson, 2014). It is often the media attention given to these acts of resistance that leads to change, if any change occurs at all. Other forms of resistance within prisons may not gain as much attention but are of no less importance. Like workers around the world, prisoners resist labor exploitation. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which ostensibly abolished slavery, states: ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction’. Though the Supreme Court has since declared that prisoners are not considered slaves of the state, they occupy an ambiguous position with regard to legal rights, and most work for little to no compensation (Fliter, 2001). In prisons around the nation, prisoners have ‘resisted state efforts to force them to labor for a pittance’ by engaging in work stoppages, protests, strikes, and attempts to unionize as a way to engage in collective bargaining with the state (Thompson, 2014: 160). Use of the court system is another common form of resistance. Prisoners file lawsuits, writs, motions, and class action suits, sometimes with help from allies on the outside or ‘jailhouse lawyers’, incarcerated people who do not have law degrees but know the language and process of the court system (Ross, 2009). Black Muslims were at the forefront of juridical forms of resistance to the oppressive conditions of the carceral system when, in the early 1960s, they began using jailhouse lawyers to frequently file suits regarding religious and racial discrimination (Jacobs, 1980). The federal courts responded by granting incarcerated Muslims the freedom to practice Islam and access religious texts

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and spiritual leaders. In the following years, courts ruled in favor of prisoners in cases concerning issues such as access to medical care, provision of legal aid, ease of due process, solitary confinement, sexual abuse, and censorship (Law, 2009; Bosworth, 2010). Prisoners still frequently file lawsuits, but doing so has become more difficult since the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which requires prisoners to exhaust all other options (by attempting to resolve the issue within the institution) and pay for their own court fees. Though the process is difficult and the results are not often favorable, engaging in acts of resistance through the legal process is a way of ‘tying up the DOCs [Departments of Corrections] resources, intimidating and embarrassing the prison authorities … [and] communication with the outside world about the conditions of confinement’ (Ross, 2009: 34). Beginning in the mid-1960s, new forms of resistance emerged when black liberation groups such as the Black Panthers began flooding prisons with ‘contraband’ literature that provided a Marxist class analysis of crime and punishment; they formed reading groups, held informal discussions, and taught one another about radical politics (Gottschalk, 2006). These acts of resistance were strengthened by links to and support from non-incarcerated people, as prisoners appealed to larger political issues such as racism, colonization of people of color, and economic oppression (Acoli, 1995). As they engaged with radical political analyses of their circumstances, they not only demanded better treatment but also questioned the legitimacy of the prison system and the authority of its staff, which led to other forms of organized resistance such as the work strikes, revolts, and riots discussed above (see Jackson, 1994 [1970]; Shakur, 2001 [1987]; Davis, 2013 [1974], among others). Political education and consciousness-raising are still practiced as forms of resistance, despite prison staff’s relentless attempts to stop these activities (Law, 2009).

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Prison authorities attempt to censor both incoming and outgoing material, and prisoners resist these efforts in numerous ways. Writing itself can be an act of resistance; some people do this privately with no intention of sharing what they have written, and others take great effort to have their writing published (Vogel, 2009; Sweeney, 2010). Reaching out to the media and contacting publishers are other strategies of resistance, and prison authorities exercise power to stop completely, or control the nature of, communication between incarcerated people and those who are involved with the media or social activist groups (Cummins, 1994). This tactic is often used by well-known political prisoners, such as George Jackson and Mumia Abu-Jamal, both of whom have written extraordinary works of literature while incarcerated that have been read by millions (see Jackson, 1994 [1970]; AbuJamal, 1995). However, ‘everyday’ prisoners also write and attempt to contact the media in hopes of exposing issues such as violence committed by staff, medical neglect, and the wretched conditions in which they are forced to live (Law, 2009). Additionally, in ways other than the hunger strikes mentioned above, some people enact resistance in prison through the use of their own bodies, which are the one ‘thing’ they can truly control. People may engage in acts of self-harm, such as cutting or burning their bodies, and some also use their own feces or urine to cover themselves or their cells (Scott, 2008). Additionally, prisoners attempt, and sometimes succeed at, committing suicide through means such as selfsuffocation, hanging, or attempting to escape in a manner in which they expect to be shot (Scott, 2008; Ross, 2009). Beyond these more obvious forms of resistance, there are countless ways that incarcerated people enact what is commonly called as ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott, 1985). These are acts of resistance that are ‘quiet, dispersed, disguised or otherwise seemingly invisible … that exploited people

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use in order to both survive and undermine repressive domination; especially in contexts when rebellion is too risky’ (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013: 4). Some of the many tactics used to resist conditions of confinement are: breaking prison equipment; blatantly refusing orders; possessing or using illicit items such as cell phones, drugs, cigarettes, and/or alcohol; cooking food in cells; and procuring, reading, and trading censored materials (Matthews, 2009; Ross, 2009). Prisoners engage in these sorts of behaviors, which are focused on a ‘purely instrumental capacity to “get things done”’, but they also resist through ‘expressive gestures that try to “get things said”’ (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001: 511). Examples include acts such as amusing oneself at the expense of COs, winning arguments with staff, engaging in passive-aggressive behavior (e.g. responding slowly to, or pretending not to hear, COs); feigning agreement with prison programming ideologies; and exaggerating politeness in order to conceal other forms of resistance (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Crewe, 2007; Ross, 2009). Additionally, some incarcerated people enact gendered forms of resistance by defying prescribed gender roles and taking part in same-sex encounters or relationships (Law, 2009). So, in the context of the prison, where the state exercises power through both formal and informal strategies aimed at containing and controlling incarcerated people, both organized resistance and ‘expressive, everyday forms of subversion and dissent’ are inevitable and enduring aspects of prison life (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001: 511). Thompson (2014) argues that state officials who create prison policies often fail to recognize the fundamental notion that ‘prisoners are human beings and that, as such, they will always resist being treated like animals’ (pp. 170–1). Those who purportedly treat prisoners like animals – prison workers – may be employed by the state, but they do not necessarily follow orders and accept their position in the prison hierarchy. Many staff members

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resent the unequal power relations within the institution and, much like the prisoners they so often exercise power over, engage in multiple forms of resistance.

WORKER RESISTANCE IN THE PRISON CONTEXT Individuals who work in prisons engage in activities that uphold, circumvent, ignore, or resist the rules and regulations of the institution, and thus, exercise power and/or resistance from within the kind of unstable, unequal, and contentious power relations discussed above. While scholars have spent considerable time examining resistance amongst prisoners, very little research has been done about acts of resistance performed by prison staff (see Ross, 2013 for one such study). Though a number of researchers have conducted in-depth examinations of the lives of prison workers (see Owen, 1988; Conover, 2000; Britton, 2003; Rhodes, 2004), most research about prison staff is primarily concerned with job satisfaction and stress or relations with prisoners. Additionally, much of this work is concerned with ‘front line’ workers (COs), rather than other categories of prison employees, such as high-level administrators, middle managers, psychiatric and medical care providers, teachers, and librarians (Vuolo and Kruttschnitt, 2008). This section will first contextualize workers’ resistance by providing a description of the organizational structure of, and the multiple and overlapping power relations within, prisons before highlighting some of the ways resistance is enacted by prison workers. Despite the paramilitary framework of the prison, in which roles are formally defined, individuals’ positions within the constantly negotiated power relations of everyday interactions are not so clearly demarcated. Britton (2003: 223) notes that the prison structure ‘includes the distribution of power through hierarchical lines of authority, as well as

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institutional policies that have written form and unwritten rules that mandate normative practices’ (emphasis added). Additionally, the hierarchical and bureaucratic nature of the prison does not automatically produce compliance among employees, so administrators must ‘seek to maintain existing power relations through a number of official and informal ways’ (Owen, 1988: 15). As Weber (1968) pointed out long ago, bureaucracies are designed to run smoothly while simultaneously permitting some amount of resistance or non-compliance amongst workers. This is accomplished ‘thanks to both the implementation of channels of appeal that could marshal internal dissent into legitimate directions and a regulatory and ethical apparatus that include[s] a morality of compliance as well as organizational practices that supposedly prevent conflicting tensions from emerging’ (Courpasson et al., 2012a: 13). According to Goffman’s characterization of the prison as a ‘total institution’, while prisoners are ritually deprived of autonomy and dignity, staff are introduced to an ‘institutional perspective’ that ‘rationalizes activity, provides a subtle means of maintaining social distance from inmates and a stereotyped view of them, and justifies the treatment accorded them’ (1961a: 87). Given that prisons are, at least to some extent, beyond the view of the broader society, staff members often believe they can mistreat prisoners or refuse to implement policies designed for prisoners’ protection with impunity (Eckland-Olson and Martin, 1988). Though a dominant institutional perspective prevails in the prison, differences in perspective according to one’s position within the hierarchy, as well as personal beliefs about the purpose or appropriateness of regulations, often cause conflict among prison workers who inhabit different roles. As Owen (1988: 5) puts it: Social control is a product of relations among human beings, acting and reacting within the institutional context of the prison. This context is shaped by power and the expression of interests

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specific to the prison community. These interests flow from the prison administration and the central administration of the state and may not be identical to the interests of the line workers in the prison.

This kind of dissonance speaks to what Gilbert (1997) refers to as the ‘discretionary power’ of prison staff, which he claims is not actually curbed by formal rules and hierarchical organization, but rather, must be practiced more covertly than it is in a less rigid workplace environment. A worker’s decision about how to use discretionary power ‘often determines whether … programs or policies are implemented faithfully or subverted’ (Gilbert, 1997: 49). For example, in their study of prison staff’s compliance with court-ordered reforms, Eckland-Olson and Martin found that, when prison staff believe changes in policy or practice are being imposed upon them, these changes ‘will be resisted and morale among staff will be lowered. This is true not only for court-ordered reforms but also changes imposed contrary to staff wishes by reform-minded correctional administrators’ (1988: 378). While the prison, as an organization, has a set of prescribed goals and ideologies which are produced through various discourses and codified in rules and regulations, like any other organization, its rules and power relations are never fully realized or complete, and thus, there is space for multiple perspectives, interpretations of rules, and resistance. Because organizations are comprised of human beings with agency, unanimity is virtually unattainable. Clegg (1994: 170) states that ‘… organizational power, rules and domination never get irrevocably and automatically classified and framed in and by authority and authoritative relations. A certain indeterminacy, a certain openness, is always possible’. Rules, and the formal authority to enforce rules (or to make others do so), are a fundamental part of the organization, but as ruling is an ‘activity’, the rules must be interpreted by individuals (1994: 162). Owen (1988: 15) argues that ‘prisons

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are fundamentally contradictory institutions’, and although ‘rules and regulations are codified in written form … rules must be applied subjectively’. It is in these spaces of indeterminacy and openness that various kinds of resistance occur. If we conceptualize resistance in terms of unequal power relations, such that those in a superordinate position exercise power and those in a subordinate position engage in resistance, within the context of the prison, where domination and subordination are multilayered in ways that are overlapping and intertwined, certain actions that can be defined as resistance may simultaneously be considered an exercise of power. COs and other lowranking staff have extremely unequal power relationships with prisoners; however, these workers concurrently occupy a subordinate position within the hierarchical, paramilitary structure of the organization and, as such, also have unequal power relations with higherranking officers, prison administrators, and state lawmakers (who make and/or enforce the official rules). Thus, when staff engage in acts that resist administrative rules and regulations because they disagree with these rules or seek to gain autonomy, they are engaging in the type of resistance that prominent scholars of work and organizations describe among employees in a range of occupations (see Courpasson et  al., 2012b; Vallas, 2012, among others). Yet, at times, that very same act of resistance (to organizational superiors) amounts to an exercise of power (over prisoners). For example, a CO may use discretionary power to deny a prisoner access to the law library or recreational facility, despite official mandates that grant prisoners such access, because she or he does not believe the prisoner deserves the rights or privileges afforded by prison regulations or state law. In such a case, by engaging in resistance (refusing to comply with administrative orders), the CO is exercising power (denying the prisoner access to these spaces). This is certainly not to say that every time staff exercise discretionary power over a

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prisoner, they are intentionally doing so as a means of resisting the rules or orders set forth by their superiors. It does suggest, however, a need to eschew overly simplistic and/or romanticized conceptions of resistance that fail to address the complexities and contradictions of power relations in contexts where domination and subordination are interwoven in such a way that they are superimposed upon one another, where power and resistance are sometimes indistinguishable. Prison employees adopt informal strategies and tactics, many of which do not directly involve prisoners, in order to gain some measure of autonomy from administrative forces. A review of the literature on work stress among COs shows that workplace tension is ‘not so much a product of interactions with clients [prisoners] as it is a product of working in a bureaucratic, para-military organizational structure’ (Tewksbury and Higgins, 2006: 262). According to Ross (2013: 114–15), COs regularly engage in acts of everyday resistance by using prison equipment for personal needs; breaking or stealing prison property; abusing sick time; deliberately shirking duties by playing cards or other games, talking on phones, or taking longer breaks than they are given; and accepting gifts or bribes from vendors. Smuggling in contraband items, such as cigarettes, gum, censored magazines, and a host of forbidden other items, is another common form of resistance to institutional authority (Conover, 2000). COs also regularly exercise power over prisoners by engaging in acts of resistance such as frequently searching cells without probable cause, trashing letters or photos, tinkering with heating or cooling systems to create uncomfortable temperatures, or forcefully waking people in the middle of the night, in order to ‘remind a prisoner about who is in charge’ (Ross, 2013: 114–15). In her analysis of both women’s and men’s prisons, Britton (2003) discusses the ways that male COs resist administrative imperatives to hire women by making comments to other COs about women’s inability to

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perform the job, assigning women to ‘safer’ positions where they are less likely to interact with prisoners, adopting a ‘macho’ and ‘protective’ position that attempts to reinforce their beliefs that women do not belong in men’s prisons, and occasionally sexually harassing or assaulting female COs. She discusses a similar pattern of resistance to increased hiring of black COs amongst white officers. Rhodes (2004: 57) found that, in a maximum security prison, where COs are told to ‘adhere to policies and procedures’, they sometimes blatantly resist the administration’s attempts to limit the types of force they can legitimately use to control prisoners, and rather than try to deescalate violent situations, they intentionally accelerate them. While COs constitute the bulk of prison employees, there are numerous types of workers in the prison system. Yet we know little about their work experiences and even less about if, how, or why they might enact resistance. The case study presented below focuses on a specific kind of employee – prison librarians, demonstrating the various ways they resist censorship in their libraries and the prison more broadly. The formal and informal tactics they use to engage in resistance illustrate the complex nature of negotiating precarious and multifaceted power relations within the prison context. The material presented here is part of a larger research project about censorship in prisons and is based on 162 surveys and 27 in-depth interviews with prison librarians who work in state prisons across the US.

CENSORSHIP, POWER, AND RESISTANCE IN PRISONS Incarcerated people have repeatedly emphasized the importance of access to reading materials in prisons. In perhaps the most famous prison revolt in American history, the men confined in New York’s Attica prison, after taking hostages and control of the

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prison, issued a list of demands in order to ‘bring closer to reality the demise of these prisons, institutions that serve no useful purpose to the People of America but to those who would enslave and exploit the People of America’ (The Inmates of Attica Prison, 2000 [1971]: 490). Listed as the fourth of their fifteen proposals was an ‘end to all censorship of newspapers, magazines, letters and other publications …’ (2000 [1971]: 491). The demand has yet to be met, and prison administrators continue their efforts to colonize prisoners’ minds by limiting whom they can communicate with and what they can read, learn, and think about in the private moments that reading can provide. Turner v. Safley (1987) is arguably the most important case from the late twentieth century concerning censorship in American prisons. It set the standard that is followed today, namely that prison authorities are justified in curtailing prisoners’ constitutional rights if doing so is ‘reasonably related to legitimate penological concerns’ (Fliter, 2001: 155). Thornburgh v. Abbott (1989) set limits on and guidelines for what constitutes ‘justifiable’ censorship but upheld the Court’s previous decision in Turner to defer to prison administrators’ judgments by stating that any item may be censored if it is determined ‘to be detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution or if it might facilitate criminal activity’. The finding also ruled that prison authorities cannot reject a publication ‘solely because its content is religious, philosophical, political, social[,] sexual, or … unpopular or repugnant’. Nevertheless, this decision does not stop prison authorities from censoring any material they claim poses a threat to the safety and security of the institution, a phrase largely interpreted by prison authorities themselves. Jones’s (2001: xii) definition of censorship, a ‘variety of processes … formal and informal, overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, by which restrictions are imposed on the collection, display, dissemination, and exchange of information, opinions, ideas,

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and imaginative expression’, makes explicit the various levels at which censorship occurs. While prisons have official policies and procedures for censoring prisoners’ access to books, magazines, and other materials, these are inconsistent from one institution to the next. Moreover, where formal rules and regulations exist, it is the individuals working in the prison who interpret these rules, and thus, the application of codified guidelines varies depending upon who is engaging in the activity of interpreting the rules. While prisons have official policies that legitimize certain kinds of censorship (of particular materials through particular means), these policies are not applied with consistency, so that what appears on paper in the form of official policy often differs considerably from what happens in practice. For example, two prisons in the same state, which are both officially subject to identical regulations produced by the Department of Corrections, may in fact carry out censorship in significantly dissimilar ways, as the rules may be interpreted and applied quite differently by the people who work in these prisons. Censorship can take place through formal processes, wherein the state produces legally binding administrative regulations, prison administrators create guidelines for their institutions, or prison librarians develop collection development policies that outline what kinds of materials they will and will not have in their libraries. Censorship also happens in informal ways, when librarians engage in self-censorship or prison employees remove items without following regulatory procedures (although, depending how power is exercised, what begins as an informal act of censorship may eventually result in a change to official policy or procedure). There are two broad categories into which most censored items fall: (1) materials considered a threat to the safety and security of the institution; and (2) items containing subject matter that is deemed to conflict with the institution’s stated goal of rehabilitation. The former category includes, among others, such

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items as books that promote racial, ethnic, or religious intolerance and manuals about topics such as locksmithing or survival skills that might aid in escape. The latter category includes items such as urban fiction and true crime novels, which some administrators and staff claim promote a ‘criminal lifestyle’ and are therefore counter to the goal of rehabilitating the prisoner. Some of the most frequently censored items are those containing nudity or ‘sexually explicit’ material. When it comes to banning pornography or sexually explicit materials, prison administrators provide a number of justifications beyond threats to safety and rehabilitation, including the presence of individuals convicted of sex offences, compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act (which does not, in fact, even mention censorship), the claim that these materials constitute a form of sexual harassment, particularly for women who work in men’s prisons, and the argument that access to the materials will promote homosexuality and masturbation. Rules and regulations about what qualifies as sexually explicit material vary widely, and the Courts’ decisions on the topic are also inconsistent. As legal scholar William Collins (2001: 28) states, ‘An overly vague rule fails to tell those subject to it or those who enforce it what it actually bans, leading to inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement’. Thus, a wide array of materials is banned in an effort to control prisoners’ sexualities, and librarians must contend with the often egregious application of this practice by authorities. The prison library is often the main source of reading material for prisoners. It exists as a contested space within the prison, and beliefs about its purpose(s) vary widely and tend to be linked to the role an individual inhabits within the organization (administrator, custody staff, prisoner, librarian, etc.). Though the data here only allow for an analysis of librarians’ perceptions of the beliefs of others within the institution, they generally feel that administrators, custody staff, and prisoners understand the purpose of the library in

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ways quite different from most librarians. Of course, variation exists among each of these categories; however, if we view one’s role in an organization as something that defines, or at least influences, the knowledge one has access to and the socialization process one undergoes, we can see how one’s position ‘serves as a sort of interpretive lens’ through which staff members make sense of the world and assign meaning to things (Anspach, 1987: 217). Owen (1988: 11) argues that, in accordance with her or his position within the prison, an employee ‘becomes socialized into the prison community’ and ‘learns the culture of social control and its surrounding meaning-systems’, so that each individual ‘develops a worldview which serves as the motive force of his or her actions’. Looking through this lens or worldview, librarians have a unique perspective within the prison. Prison librarians have a wide range of educational and occupational experiences. Some states require that prison librarians hold a Master’s degree in library or information science, while others do not have any specified educational requirements. Librarians’ positions within the prison hierarchy are often tenuous, as they are frequently defined by administrators and custody staff as ‘civilians’ or ‘outsiders’ within the paramilitary organizational structure (Vogel, 2009). Many of the librarians I spoke with initially had only a vague understanding of where they fit within the structure of the prison or how others perceived them, but over time and through interactions, their roles became varyingly defined (Goffman, 1961a). The pluralistic nature of organizations and the contestability of hierarchical domination produce tensions among workers. Most librarians perceived distrust and a lack of respect from custody staff and/ or administrators. Other kinds of ‘civilian’ staff who work in prisons, such as mental health professionals and educators, report having the same sort of uneasy relationships with custody staff (Wynne, 2001; Berggren, 2009). The dualistic nature of the prison librarian’s role often produces role conflict,

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as they must simultaneously play contradictory roles (librarian and prison worker) that have contradictory demands (Merton, 1957). As Bemis (2011: 108) states, prison librarians ‘must walk a fine line. For most of us, it’s a natural inclination to be adamantly opposed to censorship, but in this situation, security trumps all’. There are a number of ways to think about how librarians make decisions about how they will address prison rules and regulations about censorship. One way is to think about them as actors who are members of a bureaucratic organization and accordingly, must make choices within constraints. Although they bring individual attitudes, values, beliefs, and experiences with them to the job, their role within the organization comes with expectations about job requirements, formal and informal norms, and so on, which they learn as they undergo a socialization process. The individual must learn to play the role of ‘prison librarian’ (adding it to the numerous roles she already plays), and so, this new role becomes an aspect of her ‘self’ (though individuals will embrace or resist the role inconsistently). As Goffman (1961a) maintains, total institutions attempt to change the people who work there by providing them with an ‘institutional perspective’ through which they can rationalize the ‘otherness’ of the inmate; however, staff members’ actions do not always coincide with their beliefs about what they ‘should’ do. Existentialist philosophers argue that making choices within constraints is fundamentally what we do every day as human beings. HardieBick and Lippens (2011: 2) explain that: … choice will never be unlimited. Never. In every possible instance of human existence choice will inevitably be restricted: only a limited number of avenues or courses of action will have been contemplated, and deemed possible or desirable by consciousness. But (and this is the point) choice there will be. Always.

So, it is not as if prison librarians are unique in their constrained decision-making; rather, the fact that they must constantly

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make choices about how to act ‘under difficult circumstances in alien and undesirable surroundings’ (Vogel, 2009: 193) makes the existentialist notion of choice within constraints an interesting lens through which to view their actions. While this perspective may initially seem incompatible with a Foucauldian definition of power (Foucault himself denounced Sartre, existentialism, and humanism [Hardie-Bick, 2011]), what is important to recognize is that Foucault, and later, Hornqvist (2010: 4), understand power relations as ‘unequal, contentious and unstable’, and therefore, vulnerable to disruptions and resistance from subordinates. Thus, the notion of the ‘freedom’ (to use Sartre’s term) to resist is always already present in all power relation, even as Foucault perceives them.

Librarian Resistance Librarians must choose if, when, and how to exercise power and resistance around censorship. As they occupy a position superordinate to prisoners, but subordinate to custody staff and administrators, these decisions are often made tenuously and have significant effects on how prisoners can access information. While some librarians support the administration’s policies without question, most experience a great deal of ambivalence about censorship, and while some engage in acts of resistance, others do not. Some librarians feel powerless, and others’ fear of retaliation inhibits them from taking action when they oppose the censorship they witness. Owen (1988: 14) argues that prison work is full of ‘conflicts and contradictions’ and ‘each worker must reconcile these contradictions in a way that allows the worker to get through the workday. The development of these personal perspectives may also contribute to the alienation of the worker’. At times, librarians employ ‘excuses’ or justifications for going along with the status quo despite believing it is ethically wrong to do so. This can result in

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what Sartre (1993 [1956]: 89) calls living in ‘bad faith’, which is a sort of ‘lie to oneself. To be sure the one who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth’. It is a state of being in which people deny that they have the ability to make choices (which are, of course, always limited) and convince themselves that ‘their actions were determined by forces beyond their individual control. These states of denial provide psychological props through which people seek to escape the anxieties provoked by their freedom and responsibilities …’ (Hardie-Bick and Hadfield, 2011: 18). In the case of the prison librarians discussed here, these ‘states of denial’ are related to their compliance with prison policies and practices about censorship even when they believe that doing so is ethically wrong. Hardie-Bick and Hadfield (2011: 32) claim that ‘Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions of bad faith, as well as Goffman’s observations of the performing self, show how human beings always have the capacity to question, doubt, access and stand back from themselves’. The remainder of the chapter provides examples of how and why librarians engage in such self-reflection and resist institutional rules about or practices of censorship. Even if they articulated some degree of ambivalence about it, many of the librarians expressed their opposition to censorship. Some are willing and able to act on their beliefs and challenge administrators or staff who attempt to censor materials, while others feel they cannot actively resist these actions and maintain their positions in the institution. There are several predominant reasons they oppose the censorship that occurs in their institutions. First, some librarians spoke about their opposition to censorship in ethical terms, with reference to an abstract ideal, as well as a concern for prisoners’ rights. Second, some librarians remarked that censorship is practiced in a capricious, inconsistent, and arbitrary way in their institutions, which they find unacceptable. And finally, they discussed prison administrators’ and

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staff’s refusal to recognize or respect their expertise as librarians and their profession’s stance on censorship. Some explained their ethical standpoint explicitly as a part of their identity as a librarian. For one librarian, his occupation comes with specific duties, one of which is to actively fight censorship: ‘To me, it’s a code of ethics. It’s this definition, and you can’t compromise yourself. It is your job. It is my job to challenge every single incidence of censorship …. And I think it also has to do with, why are you there? Why are you working there?’ Similarly, another librarian discussed his frequent attempts to resist censorship and the ethical and practical implications that accompany these actions: ‘The prison librarian has to make a choice. It’s a difficult choice. Either you stay and follow your philosophy as a librarian, which is the most difficult choice, or you have to basically do the minimum thing for prisoners and you get along better that way’. Here, he explicitly draws upon the notions of reflexivity and choice, and their connections to ethical action. While ethics can be understood as abstract ideals, connecting thought and action constitutes what Foucault (1997) calls ‘ethical practices’. Crane et  al. (2008: 304) note that, only in Foucault’s later work did he really begin to address what it means to ‘act ethically’. They argue that Foucault ‘advises us to create a critical ontology of our selves, which should be conceived … as ethical practices’, which requires ‘… an analysis of how we create ourselves, involving both a critique of what we are, and at the same time an “historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them”’ (Foucault, 1997: 319). Additionally, several librarians mentioned their frustration with outrageous administrative directives to remove books containing specific words in the text or title. For example, a survey responded said his supervisor told him ‘to remove any book that contained the words “penis”,

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“vagina”, or depicted a sex act’. Because he disagreed with this policy, rather than follow the order, he ‘handed her the keys and said, “Go for it”’. In making this sarcastic remark and gesture, he employs a particular type of role distance – or what could also be called everyday resistance – that Goffman (1961b: 114) describes as common among individuals who work in hierarchical institutions: [W]e often find that although the subordinate is careful not to threaten those who are, in a sense, in charge of the situation, he may be just as careful to inject some expression to show, for any who cares to see, that he is not capitulating completely to the work arrangement in which he finds himself. Sullenness, muttering, irony, joking, and sarcasm may all allow one to show that something of oneself lies outside the role within whose jurisdiction the moment occurs.

Whether through formal or legal channels, or by circumventing or subverting policies or orders, librarians engage in conscious acts of resistance, often at some personal or professional risk. As Scott (1990) points out, acts of resistance do not need to occur in the ‘public transcript’; oftentimes, resistance is subtle and happens in ways that are hidden or concealed from others. There are several formal channels librarians can take to resist censorship, including submitting paperwork to challenge an episode of censorship, appealing to higher authorities when a staff member attempts to confiscate an item, and trying to obtain a position that provides some input into decision-making processes. One librarian who regularly submits official challenges stated: ‘I try to challenge their findings on the basis of their not knowing the full story, having tunnel vision, etc. … I challenge censorship notices, even if I do not have the book in my library’. He explained that once an item is placed on the ‘restricted list’ (a list of books that are banned from carceral facilities) in his state, it remains there permanently, and thus, he believes it is better to be proactive with his challenges, since he has no say in the review process.

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The lack of librarian participation in publications review led several librarians to take action by repeatedly petitioning the DOC to include a librarian in the review committee: For years, librarians knew this disapproved publications list existed, and our thing was that we should have a representative there. I mean, they’re making decisions about these books. Why doesn’t the [library] department have a representative? And we worked and we worked, and it was like they didn’t want anybody from our agency to be on this committee, but finally we broke through …

The means of resistance employed by these librarians are done within the formal channels of the organization. However, librarians also shared stories about other means of resistance that were less formal and, at times, more controversial. Witnessing informal censorship by staff often prompts librarians to resist these attempts to exercise discretionary power. For example, a survey respondent described her reaction when she discovered COs were practicing informal censorship: ‘They [COs] remove books from [boxes of] donations without justifying removal and/or informing me. Now I count and presort all donations before allowing mailroom officers to see them’. Thus, she chose to clandestinely begin a process of counting books, so that when she found discrepancies, she could take the information to the administration, thereby turning over her own subordinate position in relation to the COs to an administrator, and placing the COs in the position of subordination. In addition to regularly submitting challenges to attempts at censorship, the librarian mentioned above also engages in various means of informal resistance, such as finding loopholes in the regulations, or what he describes as ‘tweaking their little policies’. His DOC does not permit R-rated films to be shown or held in the library, which severely limits his choices when he hosts ‘movie night’. Using creative means of resistance, he found ways to subvert these restrictions: So, because of them having this R thing, you can never show Schindler’s List, you could never show

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Saving Private Ryan, all of these films. So … I’ve been having fun, because a lot of films are from before the ratings came along. And so I showed even some of the silent films that have full frontal nudity and everything else! The one that I enjoyed playing the most was Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, which has the scene after they get married … and he’s totally naked. You see his butt and everything …. So I have fun tweaking their little policies.

Thus, he found enough of what Goffman (1961a) calls ‘elbow room’ in the constraining environment of the total institution to engage in this act of resistance. Another way he engages in this kind of everyday resistance is by subtly blurring the distinction between art and pornography. He said that the primary concerns for censors in his state are nudity and erotica, which he believes lead to grossly unjust censorship policies. So he uses the space of the library to make a statement about the ambiguity of the definitions of pornography and erotica: I can get away with the fact that one of the Michelangelo paintings that’s in the library is the one of the creation of Adam. So every day in this world around me now where they want to censor everything, there is Adam up there with his dick hanging out! … And … behind the counter, I have some Greek and Roman statues that I bought at a hobby shop, and … one of them is naked and her boobs are all right out there too. So I’ve got a dick at one end of the library and I’ve got naked breasts on the other end of the library! And yet Central Office brings people in here to show them on tours!

His statement draws attention to the inconsistencies in policies and practices that so many librarians find not only frustrating but also unethical. Other librarians discussed the ways in which they defied orders from custody staff who tried to have certain items removed from the library. Numerous librarians discussed the ways that COs and other staff members have practiced, or attempted to practice, censorship in ways that are not supported by administrative policies. One librarian explained how a CO’s attitudes, which she perceived as biased and unduly harsh, prompted her not only to

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resist his command to ban certain ‘sexually explicit’ materials, but also to use this situation as a way to increase prisoners’ access to the very books he wanted to ban: …[O]ne of the officers came to me and said, ‘Could you get rid of these Longarms?’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘These things are just disgusting. They call them Westerns, but they’re really nothing but pornography, and the guys are in the segregation cells and they’re just getting their…’I forgot his expression for it, but basically masturbating in the cells. And I thought to myself, ‘Wow, that’s great! Now I know what to do with all the books that are tantalizing!’ And that’s when I put the graphic novels, the comic books, all the visuals–because that’s a way for a person… to survive the lack of stimulation in segregation… So that’s the way to get your heart rate up. I think it’s healthy. It’s the only way to survive segregation.

So, rather than accept this officer’s definition of the books and attitude toward prisoners’ sexuality, she said that, as a librarian, she ‘recognized an information need’, which she then supplied to the fullest extent possible. Another librarian said a CO told her not to order a book on American Sign Language, which she perceived to be both illogical, since she had books about how to learn other languages, and a violation of prisoners’ rights. She resisted this order on principle: ‘I bought the book anyway and sent it [to the prison library], and so far I haven’t heard anything about it. That’s our approach sometimes, is buy it, send it, and if somebody calls us on it, we’ll deal with it’. While some librarians feel that COs’ attempts to censor whatever they so choose are inevitable and insurmountable problems, these librarians have learned to navigate the system in ways that allow them to perform these acts of resistance and retain their jobs. Librarians also discussed several ways that COs enact resistance by stealing and shirking their duties (as discussed in the section above) in ways that simultaneously exert power over librarians and, by extension, prisoners who use the library. One librarian provided an example of this type of behavior:

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They’ll come in and they’ll – I’ll go to look for a book and it’ll be gone, and I’ll know. The library hasn’t been open … so it has to be a staff member that ‘borrowed’ it …. In the other library, it’s kind of secluded, so I find that officers go in there and ‘borrow’ the books and don’t return them all the time, because they can go in there on break or something and just not be bothered. I always find trash in there, or chairs go missing. Things happen when we’re not here.

Additionally, another librarian discussed the egregious acts of vandalism and theft committed by COs in the library while she is gone for the night and the way this affects the library and her work life: They just sabotage the library. I’ve come in, you know, I’ll leave one night and everything was clean and all the chairs are up, and then I’ll come in the next morning and the chairs are down. And I have puzzles out, and they’ll take the puzzles and throw the pieces all over the floor. They’ll throw candy around. It’s gotten to be just a few doing it, because only a few have keys to the building. I came in yesterday and the mouse was missing from one of our law computers… . And they know that the inmates enjoy being in here, so it’s the only way that they can get at them.

She also said these officers both impede prisoners’ access to the library and destroy their books (thus simultaneously enacting resistance and power): We have a few officers who don’t believe that the inmates should have a library because it’s a privilege they don’t deserve, and they make it real hard for them to get down here… . If they lock somebody up in confinement, they’ll take library books and throw them in the trash. I sent many e-mails to the Assistant Warden about it, and she’s had meetings with them, but they still do it.

In this case, the administration is aware of these officers’ behaviors, and actions could be taken against the offending staff. In other cases, these types of behaviors happen without the knowledge of prison authorities, and thus these acts of power/resistance go unrecorded in public accounts of prison work even though they have serious and detrimental consequences for the millions of people imprisoned in American carceral facilities.

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CONCLUSION In prisons, where domination and subordination are integral not only to the organizational structure of the institution, but also to the ideological framework upon which their very existence depends, exceptionally unequal power relations are always already present, and thus, we can expect to find resistance everywhere. Prisoners engage in both formal and informal acts of resistance, using whatever means are available to them as viable options. There are few ways in which prisoners can successfully effect change using formal, organized resistance, as access to the legal system is intentionally made difficult and few lawsuits or grievances filed by prisoners are found in their favor. It is also challenging to expose concerns about the conditions of incarceration without the aid of sympathetic people on the outside due to the hidden nature of prisons. Thus, many prisoners engage in acts of ‘everyday’ resistance, whether by refusing to comply with orders, trading ‘contraband’ items, reading or teaching about radical politics, feigning belief in prison ‘program’ ideologies, or using one’s own body to engage in defiant acts of harm to self or others. Just as prisoners frequently engage in resistance, so too do prison workers. Though we know less about the complex ways in which prison staff enact resistance, some COs shirk their duties, refuse to follow rules they do not want to enforce (at times violating prisoners’ rights or dignity in the course of doing so), destroy prison property, and accept bribes or contraband items. Additionally, the case study of prison librarians presented above shows how and why some workers (librarians) resist policies and practices surrounding censorship by finding ways to ‘get around’ the rules, challenging institutional policies, and attempting to make custody staff who violate prisoners’ rights or impede access to reading materials accountable to their superiors. All prison workers make choices about if, when, and how they will

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enforce, ignore, avoid, or resist the rules and regulations of the institution, as well as the actions of other prison staff. In doing so, they act within the limitations of the total institution; some choose not to act upon their beliefs or emotions, either because they believe that doing so is futile, or they fear they will lose their jobs or suffer reprisal from other staff. Within the prison hierarchy, layers of subordination exist in such a way that an act of resistance (to a rule or command by a superior officer) can at the same time be an exertion of power (over the prisoners that such regulations or orders were intended to affect). Though prisoners often bear the brunt of the job stress, frustration, and anger that is so common among COs, it is the bureaucratic nature of the job and interactions with superiors that are the source of this resentment. This notion of ‘acts of power/resistance’ can be extended to other hierarchies and organizations, particularly paramilitary ones where people in low-ranking positions often feel they have something to ‘prove’ and can ‘get back at’ their superiors (whom they resent) by exercising power over their subordinates, oftentimes with impunity. However, we need not contain this analysis to paramilitary organizations, as it could extend to any workplace in which a hierarchical order exists (though arguably such acts have less injurious effects on others in these types of environments). Thus, the case of prison workers warns us to avoid overly simplistic or romanticized notions of resistance that fail to adequately address the full context in which power relations exist. Given the scarcity of literature on prison employees’ means of and motivations for resistance, scholars should extend this type of work to ask questions about power and resistance among a variety of people who work in prisons, such as administrators, case workers, teachers, medical and mental health staff, chaplains, and even volunteers. The choices each of these prison workers make around if and how they engage in resistance affect the lives of millions of incarcerated people who are subject to

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multiple forms of violence, degradation, and control on a daily basis. Given the importance of the links between incarcerated people and those on the outside (family members, loved ones, activists, etc.), resistance studies scholars should also think about the ways these relationships matter, as well as extend studies of resistance to include those who resist the carceral state’s project of punishment using both organized and everyday acts of resistance to dismantle the prison system.

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Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 1982. ‘The Subject and Power’, pp. 208–26 in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Translated by Robert Harvey. New York: New Press. Foucault, Michel. 1997. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984. Vol. 1, edited by P. Rabinow. Translated by Robert Hurley and Others. New York: New Press. Gilbert, Michael J. 1997. ‘The Illusion of Structure: A Critique of the Classical Model of Organization and the Discretionary Power of Correctional Officers’. Criminal Justice Review 22(1):49–64. Glaze, Laura E. and Danielle Kaeble. 2014. ‘Correctional Populations in the United States, 2013’. Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. Goffman, Erving. 1961a. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books. Goffman, Erving. 1961b. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. Gottschalk, Marie. 2006. The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hardie-Bick, James. 2011. ‘Total Institutions and the Last Human Freedom’, pp. 85–107 in Crime, Governance and Existential Predicaments, edited by J. Hardie-Bick and R. Lippens. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardie-Bick, James and Phil Hadfield. 2011. ‘Goffman, Existentialism and Criminology’, pp. 15–35 in Crime, Governance and Existential Predicaments, edited by J. Hardie-Bick and R. Lippens. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardie-Bick, James and Ronnie Lippens. 2011. ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–14 in Crime, Governance and Existential Predicaments, edited by J. Hardie-Bick and R. Lippens. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hollander, Jocelyn A. and Rachel L. Einwohner. 2004. ‘Conceptualizing Resistance’. Sociological Forum 19(4):533–54.

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Hornqvist, Magnus. 2010. Risk, Power and the State after Foucault. New York: Routledge. Jackson, George. 1994 [1970]. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Jacobs, James B. 1980. ‘The Prisoners’ Rights Movement and Its Impacts: 1960–1980’. Crime and Justice 2:429–70. Johansson, Anna and Stellan Vinthagen. 2014. ‘Dimensions of Everyday Resistance: An Analytical Framework’. Critical Sociology May 2014:1–19. Jones, Derek. 2001. Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Law, Victoria. 2009. Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Matthews, Roger. 2009. Doing Time: An Introduction to the Sociology of Imprisonment. 2nd edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Merton, Robert. 1957. ‘The Role-set: Problems in Sociological Theory’. The British Journal of Sociology 8(2):106–20. Owen, Barbara A. 1988. The Reproduction of Social Control: A Study of Prison Workers at San Quentin. New York: Praeger Publishers. Rhodes, Lorna A. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: UC Press. Richie, Beth E. 2012. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York: NYU Press. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde. 2009. ‘Governmentality’. Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09/94. Sydney, Australia: The University of Sydney Law School. Ross, Jeffrey Ian. 2009. ‘Resisting the Carceral State: Prisoner Resistance from the Bottom Up’. Social Justice 36(3):28–45. Ross, Jeffrey Ian. 2013. ‘Deconstructing Correctional Officer Deviance: Toward Typologies of Actions and Controls’. Criminal Justice Review 38(1):110–26. Sabol, William J., Heather C. West, and Matthew Cooper. 2009. ‘Prisoners in 2008’. Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. pp. 1–46 Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. Sartre, Jean Paul. 1993 [1956]. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on

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Ontology. Translated by H. E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Scott, David. 2008. ‘Creating Ghosts in the Penal Machine: Prison Officer Occupational Morality and the Techniques of Denial’, pp. 168–86 in Understanding Prison Staff, edited by Jamie Bennett, Ben Crewe, and Azrini Wahidin. New York: Willan Publishing. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shakur, Assata. 2001 [1987]. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. Sweeney, Megan. 2010. Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Tewksbury, Richard and George E. Higgins. 2006. ‘Prison Staff and Work Stress: The Role of Organizational and Emotional Influences’. American Journal of Criminal Justice 30(2):247–66. The Inmates of Attica Prison. 2000 [1971]. ‘Attica: The Fury of Those Who are Oppressed’, pp. 489–91 in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, edited by M. Marable and L.

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Mullings. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Thompson, Heather Ann. 2014. ‘Lessons from Attica: From Prisoner Rebellion to Mass Incarceration and Back’. Socialism and Democracy 28(3):153–71. Thornburgh v. Abbott, 490 US 401 (1989). Turner v. Safley, 482 US 78 (1987). Useem, Bert and Anne M. Piehl. 2006. ‘Prison Buildup and Disorder’. Punishment & Society 8(1):87–115. Vallas, Steven P. 2012. Work: A Critique. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Vinthagen, Stellan and Anna Johansson. 2013. ‘“Everyday Resistance”: Exploration of a Concept and its Theories’. Resistance Studies Magazine No 1:1–46. Vogel, Brenda. 2009. The Prison Library Primer: A Program for the Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Vuolo, Mike and Candace Kruttschnitt. 2008. ‘Prisoners’ Adjustment, Correctional Officers, and Context: The Foreground and Background of Punishment in Late Modernity’. Law & Society Review 42(2):307–36. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wynne, Jennifer. 2001. Inside Rikers: Stories from the World’s Largest Penal Colony. New York: St. Martin’s.

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Part III

Technologies of Power and Resistance

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12 Recasting Community for Online Resisting Work Felipe G. Massa

Online communities have become pervasive, increasingly sophisticated and culturally rich forms that support interaction and influence how individuals engage in several forms of ‘resisting work’ – activities that translate dissent into solutions that may lead to changes in power relations and social norms (Courpasson et al. 2011). These communities exist in computer-mediated space characterized by repeated user interactions and member-generated content (Hagel and Armstrong 1997) and allow for open engagement in the co-production of norms, practices, and objects that enable work that advances resistance efforts against the patriarchy (Correll 1995), racism (Daniels 2013), among other oppressive social structures. They upend many of the constraints that have belied traditional, bureaucratic organizations in the past (e.g., participation risks, organizational maintenance costs) and that prevent those in subordinate classes from advancing claims in societies dominated by powerful interest groups (Scott 1995). Online

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communities, as such, have been referred to as ‘voluntary collection[s] of actors whose interests overlap and whose actions are partially influenced by this perception’ (O’Mahony and Lakhani 2011). For over a decade, online communities have had the distinction of being the fastest growing category of Internet-based social phenomena (Wingfield and Hanrahan 1999). The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (2014) estimates that 74 percent of online adults participate in online communities where they provide and receive social support, engage in discussion of social and political issues, coordinate software production, exchange ideas for the sake of recreation or focus on the advancement of a cause. Indeed, the Internet and the online communities that populate it have become an important source and discussion platform for ‘things that matter’ to contributors (Wenger 1999), within and outside online environments. As such, they are a common site for a heretofore under-researched

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‘resisting work’ (e.g., Calhoun 1991; Earl and Kimport 2011). Scholars across several disciplines, most notably social movement and organizational theorists (see Brint 2001; Marquis et  al. 2011), have highlighted the importance of understanding the community form – whether online, offline, or as a hybrid that straddles online and offline environments – as a platform for collective resistance and as a source of economic, social, and political change. They posit that unlike bureaucratic modes of organizing, community forms need not attend to efficiency and predictability imperatives or become encumbered by fixed coordination and control structures (Adler 2001; Seidel and Stewart 2011). This distinction allows communities to preserve divergent goals and identities and produce innovation and countervailing solutions to social problems (Chen and O’Mahony 2009). Community-based collective action may serve as a catalyst for the formation of new organizing practices and a threat to existing modes of organizing that do not recognize and attend to community concerns (Marquis and Lounsbury 2007; Rao et al. 2000). Moreover, communities can be cradles of novel ideas and structures that both seed and sustain social movements and other counterweights to oppression (Calhoun 1998; Morris 1986). As such, they remain a fundamental source of resistance to or change in social practices, markets, and ideas that, until recently, have been relegated to the ‘shadow of organizations’ (O’Mahony and Lakhani 2011). As electronic communications have advanced, they have made it possible for communities to overcome time and distance constraints which stood as barriers limiting interactivity and interconnectivity (Castells 2003; Fulk and DeSanctis 1995). Extant studies show that resistance efforts that are supported by online community are organized in diverse but seldom explored ways (Earl and Kimport 2011; Wellman et  al. 2003). Bennett and Fielding (1999) have studied, for instance, how online communities and

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mobile media have enabled ‘flash activism’, a new form of activism in which organizers no longer need to engage in grassroots cultivation of support for a cause. Instead, activists find support in existing communities of mobile phone, Facebook, or online forum users, allowing for rapid and low-cost mobilization. Workers who might have gathered at water coolers and whispered in hallways about entrenched management practice can now, for instance, form coalitions and coordinate resources surreptitiously through Internet-based groups with reduced risk of exposure. Jennifer Earl and colleagues (Earl and Kimport 2011; Earl and Schussman 2003) label the enabling features of the online environment that make these differences tenable as ‘affordances’ of the Internet. These affordances provide opportunities for communities to engage in resistance to external threats and change in new ways and for individuals that contribute to a community to resist the influence of the community itself in new ways. The term community, instead of network or collective, is used to describe these groups, because they tend to adopt a social structure by which identification with the collectivity, rather than ties to specific individuals, tends to motivate cooperation and sharing of ideas and resources (Hertel et al. 2003). Self-organizing online groups, rapidly assembled ‘mobs’ of protesters, ‘meet ups’, new interest group structures, and ‘viral’ memes are all examples of collective behaviors observed by scholars investigating communities that have employed the Internet to engage in resisting work in innovative ways. These endeavors have stimulated debates and prompted questions of whether resisting work that is reliant on the Internet can be explained using theories conceptualized to understand traditional collective action (Bimber 2003; Norris 2001). Some scholars have focused their efforts on identifying aspects of collective action that can be conducted more cheaply or quickly online, as well as possible shortcomings of online

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organizing (McCaughey and Ayers 2003). For example, studies have shown that the perceived cost of contributing to collective actions using contemporary electronic tools is either relatively low (Fulk et al. 2004) or seen as largely immaterial by users (Yuan et  al. 2005). Other studies suggest that the well-established prediction that collectives will formalize to adapt to certain information exchange and coordination functions (Zald and Ash 1966), might not hold for online forms (Earl and Kimport 2011). In fact, Internet-based resisting work exhibits several types of loosely coupled informal structures that are noted for their high adaptability and lack of formal authority structures (Bimber 2003; see also ‘smart mobs’, Rheingold 2003). Without a clear understanding of how these and other changes alter online engagement in resistance, we will remain unable to understand how the advent and widespread use of the Internet, one of the largest engines and platforms for social and economic change (Melucci 1996), has produced challenges to organizational (e.g., O’Mahony 2003) and social movement (e.g., Earl and Kimport 2011) scholarship. In particular, work examining how communities engage in and coordinate resisting work will no longer reflect new, computer-mediated ways of organizing. The broad aim of this chapter is to provide scholars with the conceptual background that enables the informed study of online communities as distinct modes of engagement in resisting work (Courpasson et  al. 2011). It argues that to understand how and why online communities engage in any form of collective action we must first define the term community and how key dimensions that support how communities organize are instantiated differently online. Importantly, using contemporary illustrations, it examines how these dimensions play a role in the mounting of resisting work both by the community to external forces and by members of the community to social pressures present within the community. That is, it examines

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both how Internet affordances support externally facing collective action and individual action internal to the community.

RESISTING WORK IN GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT: FROM EARLY THEORIES TO RECENT DEVELOPMENTS The concept of community has had a long and intricate history in the social sciences, and is most often traced back to the work of Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies, who both sought to better understand communities and the relationships and interactions that sustain them (Durkheim 1984 [1893]; Tönnies 2001 [1887]). Tönnies formulated his theories in a time when the agrarian culture of his native Germany was being transformed by industrialization and a new money-economy. He found that two ideal types of community were useful for analytical comparison: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The first type, Gemeinschaft, refers to the families, tight-knit neighborhoods, and small villages that Tönnies observed in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Gemeinschaft describes associations in which individuals are oriented to the interests of a collective as much as, if not more than, their own self-interest. These individuals are typically regulated by closely held beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior instilled through powerful and stable socialization mechanisms such as family and religious rituals. These mechanisms ensure adherence to community norms, as well as a sense of responsibility to and trust in the community, its guiding principles and authority structures. As such, this form of community is marked by ‘unity of purpose’, not the autonomous pursuit of individual will (Wesenwille) (Tönnies 2001 [1887]: 22). Putnam’s (2001) descriptions of the idyllic American small towns of the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, evoke Gemeinschaft by

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portraying individuals deeply embedded in community through shared activities such as church meetings and bowling leagues. Individuals within the community who resist norms are often faced with ostracism and other social sanctions that are made more effective through peer supervision and socioeconomic reliance on a single network of people. At the same time, mounting resistance to threats external to this single network is simpler because of inherent trust built through shared experiences. In contrast, Gesellschaft describes associations in which individual self-interest takes precedence over the interests of the collective. Primary sentimental relationships predominate in Gemeinschaft while secondary associational relationships which are often ‘arms-length’ and based on ‘thin’ forms of interpersonal trust are typical of Gesellschaft (Hecksher and Adler 2007: 13). These associations are characteristic of the cosmopolitan forces of industry and markets faced by Tönnies and his countrymen: short-term relationships, individual accomplishments, and self-interests were crowding out personal ties, family connections, and lifelong friendships. Scholars often point to the ‘business community’, including markets characterized by legal-rational enforcement of contracts (Weber 1947), as reflective of Gesellschaft in that individuals are tied together by contracts and professional norms rather than friendship or kinship ties. Individuals are typically able to resist the norms characteristic of Gesellschaft and express heterogeneous opinions and ways of life with greater freedom than in village life. The coalition building required to mount resistance to external forces in the cosmopolitan context is more time-consuming and difficult given disparate goals and ways of life that characterize it. Durkheim, whose environment was beset by similar forces, suggested a different approach to the study of community and the resisting work that might arise in each type. Instead of attempting to identify ideal types of community, Durkheim focused on

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the nature of relationship ties that characterized community forms. While he cited Tönnies’ work and engaged with his ideas of community, Durkheim (1984 [1893]) and other sociologists (e.g., Wirth 1926) were critical of Tönnies’ focus on community as a holistic social structure or entity, deeming such an over-arching and complex construct un-amenable to systematic study. Instead, their focus was on extracting elements associated with communal relationships and positing that these would have a discernible and empirically testable influence on individual and collective behavior. Solidarity, one of these elements, is seen by Durkheim as integral to all forms of community because it supports the ties that bind individuals within the community together and allows for the sustained mounting of resistance against oppression. Durkheim suggests that mechanical solidarity describes the ties of Gemeinschaft, i.e., the lockstep connections between morally homogenous populations bound by similar values and beliefs. Organic solidarity is the result of Gesellschaft ties, i.e., the loose connections between diverse populations held together by interdependent roles (as in professional communities) as well as laws and contracts. Durkheim points to the web of interdependence made possible through organic solidarity as enabling people to build trust notwithstanding the absence of the traditional values enforced through Gemeinschaft ties. Both Tönnies’ and Durkheim’s theorizing, as well as the work of sociologists that built upon their work, echo the struggle to understand a world in transition from the easily comprehensible ties of village life to the perplexing world of fast-paced, urban living. Their experience of a world in which village ties were being dissolved prompted them to postulate that Gesellschaft were unable to sustain long-term human relations and a sense of moral order, producing anomie (Durkheim 1984 [1893]), among other social issues and sources of dysfunction. Some scholars noted that modern life had

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become ‘impersonal, transitory and segmental’ (Wirth 1926: 412). Others celebrated the advent of and sought to advance modernity, suggesting that Gemeinschaft was restrictive, stifling innovation, oppressing minorities and their voices, as well as lacking in flexibility to adapt to social change (Brint 2001). This tension between community types and the forms of association they engender has been a topic of discussion that has spanned disciplines for well over a century and remains important to our understanding of how and why resisting work can take place. In spite of the widespread notion that one form of community would clash with and ‘progressively corrode’ the other (Heckscher and Adler 2007: 14), scholars have continued to search for a form that resolves this tension, allowing for the efficiency of Gesellschaft while retaining the tight human relations that sustain Gemeinschaft. In effect, they seek to move away from nostalgically bemoaning the erosion of small village-like aggregations characterized by lifelong ties that protected them against external threats, to looking for new forms of community that allow for both high particularism (i.e., attachment to the interests and relations of one group) and universalism (i.e., attachment to interests that transcend single social groups) (Putnam 2001). In this search, they have suggested new definitions for community, made arguments for why one type of community form functions better or is more sustainable than another and even founded new disciplines (e.g., Community Studies) charged with studying new community forms. It is interesting and important to consider how the advent of the Internet and the online community as a form might influence this debate. Unfortunately, even though it is acknowledged as foundational to many social sciences, the concept of community has been intermittently abandoned and revived by scholars in sociology, geography, anthropology, and archeology over the past several decades. This volatility is often ascribed to frustration caused by thorny arguments over

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definition and growing convolution regarding what constitutes community brought on by scholarly efforts that were, ironically, striving to make the notion of community more accessible (Block 2009). According to Hillery (1955): ‘as an element in the sociological vocabulary, [community] has been used in so many ways that it has been described as an omnibus word’ (p. 112). A selection of definitions employed by several sociologists and community theorists is presented in Table 12.1. An important trend is immediately noticeable when definitions are placed in chronological order. Early definitions, including those proposed by Tönnies and Durkheim, place emphasis on location as a key dimension of community. After the review by Hillery (1955) notes the prominence of location in extant definitions, scholars turn to describing community in terms of the nature of interactions inherent in communal relationships (Freilich 1963) and, subsequently, the importance of symbolic boundaries in modern iterations of community (Cohen 1985). More recent definitions are diverse; some remain location-focused (e.g., Block 2009) and others that abjure location in favor of a more subjective view in which community is defined by how social actors perceive it to be bounded (e.g., O’Mahony and Lakhani 2011). Recent review articles and meta-analyses that strive to make this complexity manageable have categorized communities in a variety of ways and posited several dimensions that enable comparisons of community forms that don’t fit neatly into Tonnies’ and Durkheim’s original formulations (e.g., Brint 2001; Lee and Newby 1983). Concurrently, scholars have suggested that the term community is undergoing yet another recasting – one that embraces community as a fluid concept that is redefined in novel and often unexpected contexts (Wellman et  al. 2003), both symbolically (Cohen 1985) and well as organizationally (Marquis et al. 2011; Seidel and Stewart 2011). Instead of viewing the

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Table 12.1 Selection of definitions of ‘community’ in sociology and community studies Author(s)

Date

Definition

Tönnies, Ferdinand

1887

Durkheim, Emile

1893

Hillery Jr., George

1955

Mercer, Blaine

1956

Freilich, Morris

1963

Cohen, Anthony P.

1985

Hecht et al.

1993

Etzioni, Amitai

1993

Brint, Steven

2001

Gläser, Jochen

2001

Wellman, Barry

2001

Block, Peter

2009

O’Mahony and Lakhani

2011

‘All trustful, intimate and exclusive life together (we find) is understood as life in community. Society is the public sphere, the world. One is bound to community with one’s ilk from birth, with all the benefits and drawbacks. One goes into society as though one is going abroad’ (2001 [1887]) ‘The sharing of place, rules of conduct and a common compliance to rituals and interdictions that define … internal bonds of solidarity’ (1984 [1893]) ‘Persons in social interaction within a geographic area and having one or more additional common ties’ ‘A functionally related aggregate of people who live in a particular geographic locality at a particular time, share a common culture, are arranged in a social structure, and exhibit an awareness of their uniqueness and separateness as a group’ (p. 27) ‘People in relatively high frequency interaction, exchanging information at a set of related centers, and practicing and developing local interaction culture based on past information shared’ (p. 127) ‘A symbolically constructed system of values, norms and moral codes which provides its members with a sense of belonging within a bounded whole’ ‘A grouping of persons whose commonality is derived from shared identity and setting … a sense of membership stems from shared symbol use, meanings, norms, prescriptions, and history’ (pp. 29–30) ‘A web of affect-laden relationships and a measure of commitment to shared, values norms and meaning, and a shared history and identity’ (p. 127) ‘Aggregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who are bound together principally by relations of affect, loyalty, common values, and/or personal concern’ (p. 8) ‘An actor constellation that consists of individuals who perceive that they have something in common with others, and whose actions and interactions are at least partially influenced by this perception’ (p. 6) ‘… networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity’ (p. 228) ‘A place – geographically bound – where people are physically connected and have an enormous incentive to pursue a common interest’ ‘A voluntary collection of actors whose interests overlap and whose actions are partially influenced by this perception’

world in dualistic terms (e.g., Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft), scholars have taken to conceptualizing community as being multidimensional and often characterized by a complex web of relationships (Brint 2001) which produce various community forms. Heckscher and Adler argue that the breakdown of boundaries between individuals made possible by a technology-driven, globalized world has ‘stimulated significant progress towards a new form of community’ (2007: 12). They theorize a ‘collaborative community’ form that is neither Gemeinschaft nor Gesellschaft but a dialectical synthesis of these traditional opposites,

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calling for studies that examine forms not guided by markets or traditional authority structures, but by communitarian norms and values. The collaborative community is conceived of by the authors as transcending debates of tradition vs freedom, of Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft, universalism vs particularism, instead embodying many of the elements that make communitarian relations useful to individuals and generative of norms and values. A collaborative community is characterized by a shared ethic of interdependent contribution, some formalized set of norms for coordinating activities, and some sort of social identity

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(Heckscher and Adler 2007: 2). In theory, resisting work in a collaborative community is effective because it does not suffer from the small-mindedness of the village or the anomie of the city, thus allowing for solidarity without such encumbrances. Scholars have offered, however, few empirical examples that might compellingly illustrate this and other new forms of community and few definitions that attend to communities that are not location-bound, based on long-term personal relationships, or joined through some formalized organization. An emphasis on affect, loyalty, personal concerns, and other factors that support interpersonal trust can lead to the exclusion of communities that have a more instrumental orientation (e.g., Merton’s ‘scientific community’). In essence, communities that are not necessarily sustained by close-knit personal relationships (e.g., online communities of software developers or gamers) are excluded because the interactions that sustain the sharing of ideas, cooperation, and identity-building don’t fit what one would expect to find in village life (Earl and Kimport 2011). So, to be inclusive of different types of communities that engage in resisting work in the modern world, particularly online instances which are the focus of this chapter, I base my definition of community in part on O’Mahony and Lakhani’s (2011) modification of Jochen Gläser’s (2001) definition as, ‘a voluntary collection of actors whose interests overlap and whose actions are partially influenced by this perception’. I also argue, however, that a complete definition of community should include a collective or shared identity component that allows one to distinguish an interest group holding no shared bond beyond the pursuit of common interest, from a community. That is, community isn’t simply about common interests (as is the case for any interest group), but also about a shared identity, or a set of collective, self-referential meanings (Pratt 2003), that motivates cooperation and sharing of ideas and resources (Hertel et  al. 2003). I seek

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to integrate more traditional and modern notions of community by defining the form as a voluntary collection of actors bound together by a common social identity, space, and purpose, whose actions and interactions are influenced by these shared bonds. This definition has several advantages that support a more comprehensive understanding of how resisting work might take place within a community. First, it enables an understanding of variations between the social orders of various communities caused by what the members perceive to have in common and not by some pre-defined notion of what constitutes community. These commonalities and the variations within communities form the basis for solidarity that sustains resisting work. Moreover, by conceiving of communities as entities formed based on overlapping interests and a shared identity, the definition captures newer forms of community, such as online communities, that do not fit many established definitions but that have been a principal interaction space of modern resisting work (Wellman and Gulia 1999). By capturing ‘space’ rather than ‘location’, I allow for the inclusion of virtual or online forms of community that would have been excluded by definitions that consider geography as central to community interaction. Also, by restricting the scope of community to include only associations in which actors participate voluntarily, this definition does not need to rely on categories used by observers that are not part of a community (e.g., those based on visible ethnic traits) and enables comparison with other forms of voluntary association such as markets, organizations, and networks. Given the focus of this chapter is on online community engagement in resistance, I narrow the scope of discussion to examine dimensions in which online or Internet-supported communities might be instantiated differently from their traditional, face-to-face counterparts and how this might affect their engagement in resisting work.

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ONLINE COMMUNITY: FUNDAMENTAL DIMENSIONS AND DISTINCTIONS RELEVANT TO RESISTING WORK Until recently, studies have characterized the Internet as a culturally impoverished medium devoid of social cues and lacking the same richness as physical contexts (see Bordia 1997 for a comprehensive overview of research on the loss of social cues in online interaction). In many of these studies, online interactions are described as leading to low comprehension, as well as one-dimensional and more ambiguous impression formation (Hancock and Dunham 2001). Others suggest that online interaction provides either an escape from or a substitute for offline communities, implying that engagement in online community leads to the fragmentation of offline ties (e.g., Nguyen and Alexander 1996). In essence, these studies claim that online communities ‘encourage us to ignore, forget, or become blind to our sense of geographic place and community’ (DohenyFarina 1998: 14). In the late 1990s, however, scholars across various disciplines began to cohere around the idea that the Internet and the online aggregations (e.g., communities, game worlds, etc.) that populate it had moved beyond many of the limitations mentioned in earlier studies, pointing to the rich webs of interaction that have proliferated on the Internet as well as to their positive influence on offline communitarian activities (Center for the Digital Future 2004). In doing so, they countered the widespread view that the Internet was an impoverished source of relationships lacking a ‘human element’ (Kozinets 2009) with empirical studies that revealed that online interactions are not only multifaceted, but rich in cues and content (see Hine 2000 for a review). These scholars suggest that increased interconnectivity (i.e., the ability to reach out to anyone at any time) and interactivity (i.e., the ability to interface with others in ways that simulate real-world conditions) made time and space less onerous obstacles

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to communication, leading to a change in networks of relationships, boundaries within and between communities, authority structures, and other dimensions that enrich social life. That is not to suggest that all online communities share the same characteristics. In fact, extant studies highlight how online communities vary across these dimensions and are as diverse as traditional face-to-face communities (see Fayard and DeSanctis 2008 for a study that examines variance within the community form). This diversity is manifest as online communities serve to support resisting work both within the workplace and in broader social spheres. Below I discuss several of these dimensions and elaborate on how each exists differently in online environments. These dimensions will serve as sensitizing concepts supporting a nuanced assessment of online communities and their engagement in resisting work. Table 12.2 presents an abridged overview of the dimensions.

Geographic Location to Cyberspace A location is ‘a position or site occupied or available for occupancy or marked by some distinguishing feature’ (www.merriam-webster. com/location). Location has traditionally been conceived of as geographic – linked to place – or as connected to some abstract geometry in that it possesses distance, direction, size, shape, and volume (Gieryn 2000). Geographic location has been central to many scholarly discussions of community forms in the past and is often used as a way to differentiate between community forms. Marcia Effrat’s (1974) analysis of Hillery’s (1955) 94 definitions of community, found that the most commonly included component in definitions of community was a shared geographical area. Shared geography orients relationships between individuals and serves as an axis for commonalities to be cherished and perpetuated (Brint 2001). Okhuysen and

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Table 12.2  Key dimensions differentiating online and offline communities and their resisting work* Dimension

Offline resisting work

Online resisting work

Geographic location to cyberspace

Ties are bound to place, which influences rituals, Social media and other tech. allow users to boundaries, etc. (e.g., neighborhoods); maintain contact and create community with a large network of acquaintances, Geographic location of the some become dispersed over time (e.g., Romani, Jewish Diaspora). Resisting work kin, friends, and colleagues independent community or relative is often bound to a place where protest is of geographic distance (e.g., O’Neill location of members allowed by authorities and to individuals 2009, Facebook). Free from the physical that live close enough to participate in constraints of location, resisting work can demonstrations. include individuals dispersed across the world and that can collaborate on issues irrespective of national context. Physical to digital Involves commonality and inclusion, but also Difficult to regulate, porous, non-physical boundary contrast and exclusion. Non-members boundaries allow members to operate in a are excluded via symbolic and social number of specialized online communities Delineations that boundaries that may complement physical that rarely grab their undivided attention separate members boundaries. Impermeable physical and (e.g., Nardi 2010, game worlds). Resisting from external actors/ symbolic boundaries may restrict the work may involve individuals from influence and that participation of non-sanctioned community several communities and more permeable divides the community members in activities and may impede boundaries within communities may allow itself certain community members from for open self-expression. expressing counter-normative opinions. Personal to remote Interactions between members vary in intensity Individuals are free to devote as little or interaction with the demands of each particular as much time to community activities community and are typically synchronous through synchronous or asynchronous Nature of between(i.e., take place in real-time). Interactions contributions. Contributions to resisting member and with external audiences can be limited by work can be highly involved or ‘micro’ member-outsider physical distance, which constrains access (e.g., Benkler 2006, distributed communications to resistance activities. Personal interactions proofreading). Isolation from external allow for the formation of trust through audiences is difficult given the ubiquity of mutual dependence. the Internet. Stable to malleable Personal identifiers are often given names Use of pseudonyms and anonymity is typical identity and titles. Collective forms of identity as contributors adhere to norms of different take shape over time further integrating online environments rather than a single Names or pseudonyms the individual into community life. Identity community. Identification with a community used by individuals is stable and difficult to alter given born out of inhabiting a pseudonym/avatar to make themselves physical presence requirements. that exists within a community. Resisting recognizable to others Resisting work becomes riskier because work requires less personal risk because one’s real, relatively immutable identity identities can be easily changed and is at stake. reinvented depending on the situation. *Note: Although there are communities that exist solely online and communities that exist solely offline, many communities straddle both. The categories presented here are analytically useful archetypes that are, in many cases, not representative of the full spectrum of community forms in existence.

Bechky (2009) note that proximity breeds familiarity, allowing individuals to learn the norms and rules of a collective from each other without establishing formal commitments and relationships. Location-bound communities such as neighborhoods are sustainable because geographic proximity enables the creation and maintenance of common

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interests and activities which, in turn, strengthen community. This strength is illustrated by Marquis and Lounsbury’s (2007) study of the US community banking industry. They show how resistance to the acquisition of community banks by out-of-town banks was both enabled and sustained by relationships and logics built through a shared geography.

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Malinowski’s (2010 [1922]) ethnography of isolated tribes of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia exhaustively illustrates an instance of community where individuals are not only attached to their location, but in which geographic location, namely the island, becomes a protagonist in rituals and other religious rites. In addition to geographic location, the location of community members relative to each other (i.e., co-location) has been used to distinguish extant ‘types’ of community. Even though most traditional notions of community emphasize co-location or co-existence in shared physical space, many communities are dispersed or become dispersed over time. The Romani community (also known by the derogatory term ‘Gypsy’), who are widely dispersed, with their largest concentrated populations in Europe, especially the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe and Anatolia, followed by the Kale of Iberia and Southern France, are commonly cited examples. Much like the Jewish diaspora, the Romani self-identify as a community despite dispersion by referring to a shared experience or history of struggle. Histories of expulsion and disconnection from geographic location become themes that define the shared experience of these communities and are prominently featured in rituals that reinforce their continued relevance and that fuel their resistance to external influence. Although central to the formation and sustainability of Gemeinschaft forms that rely on face-to-face interactions to sustain social ties, a shared geographic location, in the traditional sense, is not vital to meaningful online interaction (Earl and Kimport 2011). Social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, for instance, allows users to maintain larger networks of acquaintances or ‘followers’ independent of geography through mechanisms such as instantaneous status updates. People in these online communities ‘can be considered to be members of the same symbolic community, even if they have never met in person or lived in the same country’

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(Calhoun 1991: 108) because they share ‘space’ (McLuhan 1974). In fact, metaphors related to ‘space’ have been used to understand the connections that sustain online community by scholar and practitioners alike. Cyberspace, for instance, evokes a social setting that exists within a three-dimensional construct of representation and communication. In his earliest descriptions of online community, Rheingold (2000) referenced cyberpunk writers such as Gibson (1984) as he conceived of cyberspace as using the metaphors of ‘rooms’ and ‘sites’. Gieryn (2000: 465) notes that ‘it is fascinating to watch geography and architecture become the means through which cyberspace is reckoned by designers and users’. These metaphors and the technologies that made them possible, gave rise to what computer-mediated communication scholars refer to as spatiality – a distinct sense of place and location – experienced by individuals as they figuratively ‘transport’ themselves into online software platforms. In important early ethnographic study about an online community, Correll (1995) examines an electronic lesbian bar, the Lesbian Cafe (LC). The café was created as a computer bulletin board system (BBS) on a major online computer service. She discovers that a community could be created and sustained through interaction restricted to the computer. Daily ‘activities’ at the LC were observed by computer, and patrons were interviewed privately and in groups via electronic mail, via telephone, and in person. Results show that the appearance of the LC is affected both by the appearance of real-world bars and by the computer as a communication medium, creating a unique location where experiences were shared and social bonds were built. These early iterations of online communities, as well as more recent online communities (see Nip 2004) allowed for the formation of cross-cultural communities divorced from physical geography and allowed the movement for Lesbian, and LGBTQ rights more generally, to gain ground in several countries.

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The online spaces became the pivots around which newly recognized identities were supported and in which global resistance to intolerance was ordered. The stoking and organizing of resisting work took place in these cyberspaces that was not subject to the unremitting rules of Gemeinschaft. This is not to say that geographic location is ignored by all online communities or considered immaterial by scholars. The Slow Food community founded by Carlo Petrini in 1986, for instance, which strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourage farming of local fauna and flora, uses Internet discussion boards to promote local cooking groups and lessons as well as to connect local farmers with customers. This effort often creates or strengthens ties between neighbors that share a passion for traditional and regional cuisines and disdain for fast-food (Petrini and Padovani 2006). Scholars continue to research the development of online communities within the context of geographical communities (Agre and Schuler 1997). Specific case studies such as Kuwaiti women’s uses of the Internet for political action (Wheeler 2001) continue to be relevant and important to theory development. As of yet, with the exception of reports by practitioners (e.g., Petrini and Padovani 2006), there is very little research that explores how these communities transition from being online aggregations to engaging in the ‘real world’ or straddling online and offline engagement in resisting work. As Agre (1999) suggests, research would benefit from examining online and offline aspects of community holistically instead of seeing them as either irreconcilable opposites or static states.

Physical to Digital Boundaries Boundaries that separate the community from others are also distinct across community types and are important determinants of how they engage in resisting work. Early

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definitions of community emphasized location and focused on physical boundaries as important determinants of who would be included in a community and who would be excluded (Effrat 1974) – a notion which made sense for agrarian communities and villages. More recently, emphasis has been placed on less tangible symbolic boundaries. Symbolic boundaries allow actors to ‘categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space’ (Lamont and Molnar 2002: 168). Actors in communities often struggle to define symbolic boundaries and compete to establish alternative systems and principles of classification. The notion of symbolically bounded community implies not only commonality and inclusion, but also contrast and exclusion; generating a sense of belonging, but also ostracizing external others. Symbolic boundaries can, once established, become social boundaries which create unequal access to resources and pattern social interactions to create constraint. The existence of a shared vocabulary (Loewenstein et  al. 2012) among community members implies that non-members are excluded via symbolic boundaries that may supplement physical boundaries (as in the case of location-based communities). In essence, community boundaries may ‘… be thought of, rather, as existing in the minds of the beholders’ (Cohen 1985: 12) but have very tangible consequences. Is entering and exiting the community as a member or nonmember easy? Are there barriers to entry and exit which make community boundaries more restrictive? Once inside the community are there additional boundaries to participation? To illustrate, one might examine Jewish Orthodox communities where entry and exit are particularly difficult. One must, for instance, not only obtain permission from a Rabbi, but also learn the language, rules, and rituals that guide worship and marry a Jew before being accepted into Orthodox Judaism. Only then might one become an active member of the community and gain access to the social and professional networks

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it provides. Within the community, male and female members have defined gender roles which remain part of community norms, both enabling and limiting interactions and advancement. Behavioral boundaries outlined in sacred texts also abound, restricting diet, among other practices. Altogether, boundaries create the experience of being an Orthodox Jew and distinguish the community from others, allowing the community to resist an influx of newcomers and the influence of broader technological changes and cultural norms. Online, markedly different social and symbolic boundaries from the well-delineated boundaries of Gemeinschaft communities have allowed individuals to turn their attention to and become embedded in different specialized networks. Instead of engaging and becoming socialized by a single community with distinctive social norms, people increasingly operate in a number of specialized online communities that rarely seize their undivided attention or require exclusive commitment to a single community (Wellman et al. 2003). As such, online communities’ boundaries tend to be more permeable – individuals come together in community and disperse more often, contributing as much or as little as they would like to multiple communities. This newfound flexibility has made increased demand for diverse outlets of interaction and communication possible and allowed individuals to engage in what Wellman and colleagues call ‘networked individualism’ (Wellman et al. 2003). Networked individualism refers to the notion that social actors are maneuvering through communities where kinship, neighborhood, and friendship contacts become more of a choice than a requirement (Wellman 1999). Rather than feeling a part of a single hierarchy or becoming immersed in a single community, people believe they belong to multiple, partial communities and polities. Developers in the Open Source software development communities, for instance, tend to participate in different

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communities simultaneously or sequentially, following the completion of a project, so that they can lend their expertise to different efforts and learn from varied sources (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). That is not to say that the boundaries of online communities are all similarly enforced. Strict merit-based gatekeeping, for instance, limits entrance into the Debian software development community to those with demonstrated programming skills (O’Neill 2009). In fact, technical boundaries such as passwords, difficult entry procedures, and other means of exclusion and delimitation using software programming can reduce permeability. Popular social media platforms (e.g., Facebook or Twitter) require passwords for entry, secure banking sites might require several passwords and a response to a predetermined question, and many communities where users are unfamiliar with each other (e.g., Habbo Hotel) require the creation of profiles using a unique username and verifiable e-mail address. Few studies (see Chen and O’Mahony 2009 for an exception), however, examine how the nature of community boundaries, whether symbolic or technical, can influence the purpose and related goals adopted by community members. This is the case even though the definition and management of boundaries is likely to be critical for any type of community that strives to remain open without jeopardizing the security and stability of their work (O’Mahony and Ferraro 2007). Resisting work at the individual level can take place more easily in one sense given the freedom to move from one community to the next with little to no consequence. Building a coalition out of individuals that are free to leave and shirk work at any time can, however, be problematic.

Personal to Remote Interaction Interaction, in particular social interaction, can be defined as ‘a dynamic sequence of social actions between individuals who

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modify and adapt their behavior according to those of others’ (Raducanu and Gatica-Perez 2012: 208). The nature of interactions between community members or between community members, allies, and other parties external to routine community activities also sets community forms apart. In some communities, members are engaged in constant interactions, taking place often and producing a membership experience that can be simultaneously stifling or exhilarating (Polletta 1999). In these cases the community becomes central to its members’ existence, requiring a great deal of time, effort, and intensity of interaction. In his description of ‘belonging’ in a small, rural community, Block (2009) notes that shopping in the same stores, having children that attend the same school, holding memberships in the same churches, as well as occasional run-ins made more likely due to proximity, can create a thick web of relationships that can prove excessively intense for urbanite newcomers used to greater personal privacy and compartmentalization of the different aspects of social life. Many communities require less of their members and are accepting of less persistent contribution. The ‘Burning Man’ community (Chen 2009), for instance, requires little of most of its members; organizers emphasize that members ‘create their own form of community’.1 Many Burning Man participants choose to limit interactions with community members outside of major gatherings while others become engaged in planning year-round. Finally, some communities require more service from higher status members, leaving lower status members to grow into responsibility. Many academic communities tend toward this model (Merton 1968). Interactions with groups that are not a part of a focal community such as bystanders, allies, supporters, antagonists, and others can also differentiate community types. Although some communities exist in relative isolation or remain closed to the scrutiny of external others (e.g., such as agriculture-based

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Kibbutzim in the Israeli countryside, Bok 2008), the shape communities take can be deeply influenced by the expressed expectations of those whose opinions they value or who have power over resources they need (McAdam et al. 2001). Attention from these external others is compulsory before, for instance, a community can engage in the sorts of behaviors that assuage social stigma and lead to broad-based legitimacy (Suchman 1995). Minkoff (1999) studies women’s and radical minority communities who adopted strategies in order to garner greater legitimacy from external, resource-granting audiences. She finds, however, that signaling conformity to dominant institutional orders can be maladaptive, particularly when those changes dilute the core beliefs of the community. Interestingly, some studies have suggested that conformity and differentiation can be balanced through perception management (Elsbach 2006). In their study of two social movement organizations, ACTUP and Earth First!, Elsbach and Sutton (1992) argue that activists used controversial activities to generate publicity and more conventional activities such as press conferences and workshops to gain legitimacy for themselves and their social goals. Ultimately, leaders in the two social movement organizations were able to decouple the actions of radicals within their organizations from external perceptions of the organization as a whole, thus allowing the groups to achieve legitimacy from external others even though they continually deployed means thought to be illegitimate. Communications-related developments have greatly influenced the nature of interactions, even prior to the advent of the Internet. Time– space compression, whereby increased speed of interconnection (whether by telegraph or by instant messaging) shortens the effective social distance between individuals, makes communication more immediate. Moreover, time–space distanciation, in which local times and spaces are melded into increasingly homogenous global units of measurement, make the coordination of activities by

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globally dispersed actors possible. Marshall McLuhan (1974) coined the term ‘the global village’ to explain how electronic media (radio and television in his time) made experiences more simultaneous and interactions more immediate, leading to a sense that someone across the world is more accessible and, for many purposes, ‘closer’. The Internet added greater interactivity and accessibility to this village and further enhanced a sense of co-location. These new interactions became diverse over time as programmers and hardware manufacturers continually enhanced user experience. Nowadays, interactions between users online range broadly in intensity, duration, and in how often they occur. Users in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), where virtual game worlds are simulated and inhabited by digital characters, can engage in intense experiences that last hours where they complete tasks and interact with other users and non-playable characters (NPC) that are programmed with responses to user queries (Nardi 2010). Alternatively, users can participate in online discussion forums by making ‘microcontributions’ – small or sporadic changes or comments – to ongoing discussion threads as often or as rarely as is their preference (Benkler 2006). Distributed Proofreaders, an open-source project that ‘allow[s] several proofreaders to be working on the same book at the same time, each proofreading on different pages’, is just one example of a community that relies heavily on microcontributions by casual or heavy users. Relatedly, communications between members may be synchronous (i.e., taking place in real-time) or asynchronous, whereby a user leaves a comment that is responded to at a later time. Asynchronous communication enables interactions that take place on a single topic by individuals in opposite ends of the world, extending the range of individuals that can play an active role in online community and further de-emphasizing the importance of physical proximity.

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The Internet has also made the communications of online communities more accessible to external observers, often blurring the boundary between members and external observers. Even though many communities create password-protected relational spaces where interactions can take place away from prying eyes, most adhere to open access policies that require anyone be allowed to interact with community members. In Correll’s (1995) study of a Lesbian Café online, the discussions of the community were viewable to anyone who wished to see them. This was a point of pride for members, but often led to nuisance comments by interested others. Hancock and Dunham (2001) suggest further that unless users are familiar with other community members, it becomes difficult to distinguish community communications from noise created or deception perpetrated by others. Notably, as I suggest in my descriptions of the boundary dimension, lack of familiarity makes technical boundaries, such as passwords, and linguistic boundaries, such as immersion in a shared vocabulary, more salient and pressing. Although I have catalogued and described the new types of interactions made possible with each online community form and interaction platform that surfaces, the influence of these interactions – both internal and with external others – on organizational processes and practices important to community resisting work remains largely unexplored. Individuals can interact with more people in a shorter amount of time across a larger chasm of time and space, which might mean that resources and ideas that support resisting work can be gathered from a broader swath of people. These interactions, however, might be ephemeral, not allowing for the depth required to build the trust required for resistance work. In short, Internet-based interaction can be a double-edged sword that might speed up and allow for greater support for resisting work that might, conversely, be short-lived.

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Stable to Malleable Identity In Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft community, an individual’s physical attributes (e.g., skin color) and the social category to which he or she belonged (e.g., rich, farmer) were easily ascertainable through face-to-face interaction. Just as in Putnam’s (2001) idyllic communities of the early twentieth century, everyone knew everyone else and often the family, ethnicity, profession, and social class to which that person belonged. In fact, the many ways in which different identities are enacted by social actors can help in the examination of communities. Although there are many ways to understand identity, in this chapter, I focus on three theorizations of the identity construct that I have found to be analytically useful in the context I explore: personal, social, and collective (Pratt 2003). Personal identities are ‘idiosyncratic attributes’ (Pratt 2003) or more complex assemblages of traits and tendencies such as smart, kind, and talented. Social identities, on the other hand, are that ‘part of the individuals’ self which derives from their knowledge of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance of that membership’ (Tajfel 1981: 255). Individuals develop and internalize a social identity based on experiences with social groups or categories. For instance, one might come to consider oneself an activist after taking part in a sit-in or see oneself as a soldier after undergoing basic training. One can even gain a social identity by being labeled as part of a group – an assumption critical to the minimal group paradigm. While personal and social identities are different in that the latter refers to group membership, they are alike in that both are held by the individual. Collective identities, by contrast, refer to what members of a collective (e.g., organization, community, or profession) feel are central, enduring, and distinctive about that collective (Albert and Whetten 1985; Pratt and Dutton 2000). Collective identities not only exist at a higher level of analysis than

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social identity, but reside within groups of individuals as ‘shared’ beliefs and meanings (Pratt 2003). As such, individuals are not the vessels of collective identities; collective identities are dimensions of organizations, communities, professions. Two processes are important in understanding how communities and identities are instantiated. First, identification can be viewed as the process whereby collective identities become transformed into social identities; that is, how individuals come to see themselves as being a part of a collective (Pratt 2003). The process whereby individuals identify with collectives can be managed through socialization practices. Socialization can be seen as a process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs, and ideologies, providing an individual with the skills and habits necessary for participating within his or her own community (e.g., Pratt 2000; Van Maanen 1975). This process often includes the transfer of identity-related information. Importantly, this process can take place through formal, hierarchical channels or via the influence of peers. Just as identities can be personal or social and influenced by the collective, identifiers or markers of identity – I argue – can be similarly viewed. Identifiers help individuals coordinate tasks, define roles, and enforce boundaries through the display of their social identities and signaling of membership in a particular community. Personal identifiers, such as names or pseudonyms, signify identities are useful in holding individuals legally accountable or in making status claims (Polletta 2004). In most communities, given names are used as personal identifiers, sometimes accompanied or preceded by titles denoting rank or other forms of status within a community. Morris (1986) describes how, in the southern African-American community around the time of the civil rights movement, clergymen held an important place as spiritual and moral compasses for adherents of Baptist and other popular denominations. They were often referred to by their titles (e.g., Reverend)

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or as ‘Doctor’, independent of whether they received formal education. I distinguish here between communities where personal identifiers are used and prominent and those that rely on pseudonyms to maintain some form of anonymity. Sissela Bok (2008) describes, for instance, several secret societies (particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) where pseudonyms were used by participants, enabling members of communities that might not approve of their commitment to these societies to remain members. In online communities, personal identifiers become more malleable: individuals can adopt new names, and create alternative identities or misrepresent their selves in the physical world. Scholars have suggested that individuals engaged in interactions on the Internet gain the ability to become ‘disembodied’, i.e., they can create alternative identities unbounded by physical constraints, social boundaries (e.g., race, social class). To put it another way, online identities are oftentimes not authentic, but performative; one is what one posts or communicates online, not what one is in reality. Gaming communities (Nardi 2010) encourage the use of creative usernames and the creation of avatars that reflect an alternate identity which is not manifest in the offline world. Personal identifier malleability enables users to experience, if they so wish, virtual worlds as devoid of reputational and status concerns inherent in workplace or school yard interactions and that can be a source of oppression worthy of resisting work. Some users, however, use pseudonyms as a means of creating an alternate self whose contributions and presence are highly valued by fellow contributors to community forums and projects. Over time, users ‘inhabit’ their crafted persona, making them a larger part of their own identity (Nardi 2010). Researchers also suggest that deindividuation can take place when individuals begin to lose their personal identities (Kiesler and Sproull 1992) and come to see themselves as tools of a collective consciousness. Le Bon (1947 [1895]: 57, as cited in Pratt

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2003) suggests that ‘[t]he individual, in becoming one of the crowd, loses in some degree his self-consciousness, his awareness of himself as a distinct personality, and with it goes something of his consciousness of his specifically personal relations; he becomes to a certain extent depersonalized’. Recent research building on the social identity model of deindividuation (Postmes et al. 1998) suggests that deindividuation can cause a shift from personal to social identities as the driving factor for behavior. If anonymity may be caused by the use of pseudonyms, and if anonymity leads to deindividuation, research would therefore suggest that deindividuation may be very likely in online communities, particularly those engaging in some form of risky resisting work. To illustrate, studies (see Hancock and Dunham 2001 for a review) have suggested that there are few ways to guarantee that individuals use given names or stable pseudonyms as personal identifiers in online interactions. They conclude that this makes the establishment of interpersonal relationships difficult. These studies, however, do not account for the growing variety of interaction spaces that online communities populate. Many online communities, such as those relying on Facebook as a platform for interaction for instance, are populated by users who use their given names in their posts and when creating online profiles, connect to their families and even make information that might be obscured in face-to-face interaction transparent (e.g., relationship status, age). In addition, few studies focus on how individuals can form a connection with a broad community of users as they begin seeing themselves as, for instance, a World of Warcraft player (Nardi 2010) or as a member of a hacker community (Levy 1994). Once users internalize this collective identity as a social identity, it can become a strong motivator for continued contribution to community life, whether online or offline. Importantly, users involved in online communities may exit interactions quickly and

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often, particularly in situations where there are no stable personal identifiers such as a username or pseudonym that accrue some form of reputation. This reputation, often reflected in statistics displayed to other contributors beside a permanent username, can serve as a means to ensure a user’s contribution is of high quantity and quality. The less attached to personal identification and reputation markers, the more likely it is that users will make micro-contributions typical of networked individualism (Wellman et al. 2003). Studies, however, have yet to draw attention to online communities in which personal identifiers are not used. That is, communities in which users contribute anonymously, much like in secret societies (Simmel 1906), to interactions and to the achievement of goals. The Anonymous Online community, a group of trolls, hackers, and pranksters that emerged out of the 4chan image boards (Massa 2011) provides an interesting example of how malleable online identifiers can be used to support resistance. Christopher Poole, the creator of the website where contributors to Anonymous interacted, designed the website to prevent users from posting proper names and garnering any sort of reputation for their actions. The lack of a personal identifier served a dual purpose: first, it enabled users to act with impunity when planning and attacking online targets because their true identities could not be traced; second, it encouraged individuals to act not as themselves, but as representatives of the collective. In short, a hacker attack by Anonymous would not be traced back to a single user, but would only take place for the glory of the community (Poole 2010). The mere existence of these communities challenges notions that all communities require interpersonal, relationship-based forms of trust. They suggest instead that a generalized sense of trust – the expectation, without suspending critical judgment, that individuals, institutions, and things will act in a consistent, honest, reliable, and appropriate way (Coleman 1980) – is present. This

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form of trust allows individuals to participate in a community without fear that community interests will be subsumed by rogue individualism and that their investment in the community will not come at a personal cost. In online communities where members don’t use personal identifiers, trust in other community members is not typically based on adherence to Gesellschaft-type contracts or, typically, Gemeinschaft-type kinship or friendship ties. Instead, users tend to base their trust on the presupposition that members share a commitment to a common purpose and in some cases to a general ‘ethic’ of liberalism (Norris 2001) that is widespread throughout the Internet. Many of the values and tenets of the free and open source software movement stem from the hacker ethics that originated at MIT and at the Homebrew Computer Club. Hacker ethics were chronicled by Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1994) and in other texts. Hackers are concerned primarily with sharing, openness, collaboration, and the assertion that information should travel freely. O’Neill (2009: 168) emphasizes that the ‘… primary tenet of the ideology of the Internet is that online networks are privileged sites for the flowering of freedom’. Adherence to this tenet is expected among the typically private and sometimes paranoid individuals who self-identify as hackers and avoid the pejorative term ‘cracker’.2

CONCLUSION I began this chapter by noting that resisting work has increasingly been taking place in online environments and, in particular, in social aggregations known as online communities. Online communities have become pervasive, increasingly sophisticated, and culturally rich platforms for interaction (Wellman et al. 2003) that impact how individuals engage in resisting work by upending many of the constraints that have belied

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organizations in the past. This chapter advances work that connects resisting work to online communities in several ways. First, by constructing a new definition for community that is amenable to modes of interaction that are computer-mediated, I open the possibility for a rich literature on community to be applied and extended to online collectives that have grown and become an influential building block of modern social life. Second, by outlining how dimensions that have been used to understand community life in the past exist in online environments the chapter revives important tools for understanding online experience. Finally, by connecting these dimensions to contemporary examples of resisting work and contrasting these with pre-Internet examples, the chapter adds nuance to our understanding of how resisting work taking place online differs qualitatively from what has transpired in the past. More specifically, I note that online communities allow for people across national boundaries, with identities that might not mesh in the ‘real’ world, to engage in complex, coordinated protests in relatively safe spaces where they can reinvent themselves as many times as they feel is necessary. All in all, I build on the work of others who seek to propel the study of unconventional contexts and forms in the search for new solutions to social problems (cf. Rao 1998) and sources of resistance. Opportunities for future research that stem from the limitations and insights of this chapter are plentiful. My elaboration of key dimensions of community and how they differ online can build on extant work that has reviewed the community construct (e.g., Brint 2001) and examined the involvement of communities in resistance (e.g., Calhoun 1991). By claiming that online collective action is qualitatively different across several dimensions rather than simply claiming that online interactions are cheaper or quicker, I build support for the work of previous scholars (e.g., O’Mahony 2003) that identify the online community as a unique

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form of organization. Other scholars could continue this work by providing additional dimensions that provide unique insight into how the form functions differently or add depth to these dimensions by conducting studies that compare how these dimensions vary in terms of their effect on communities that serve different purposes (e.g., more commercially oriented communities or communities that are formed by formal organizations). Comparative case studies that contrast these dimensions across multiple types of online communities might help us understand how different instances of online communities take different approaches to maintaining their boundaries or supporting user interaction. Ultimately, however, both organizational theory and social movement studies would benefit from a more developed understanding of the process underlying the formation of resisting activities within online communities and other types of online aggregations.

Notes  1  http://www.burningman.com/participate/ 2  The term ‘cracker’ refers to an individual that uses technical knowledge of information systems to engage in malicious activities while hackers are simply people with advanced understanding of computers and computer networks.

REFERENCES Adler, P. S. 2001. Market, hierarchy, and trust: the knowledge economy and the future of capitalism. Organization Science, 12(2): 215–234. Agre, P. E. 1999. The architecture of identity: embedding privacy in market institutions. Information, Communication & Society, 2(1): 1–25. Agre, P. E., and Schuler, D. 1997. Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Explorations of Computing As a Social Practice. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group.

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Albert, S., and Whetten, D. A. 1985. Organizational identity. Research in Organizational Behavior, 7: 263–295. Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. Bennett, D., and Fielding, P. 1999. The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the Political Landscape. Merrifield, Virginia: e-advocates Press. Bimber, B. 2003. Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Block, P. 2009. Community: The Structure of Belonging. Oakland, California: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Bok, S. 2008. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York, NY: Vintage. Bordia, P. 1997. Face-to-face versus computermediated communication: a synthesis of the experimental literature. Journal of Business Communication, 34(1): 99–118. Brint, S. 2001. Gemeinschaft revisited: a critique and reconstruction of the community concept. Sociological Theory, 19(1): 1–23. Calhoun, C. 1991. The problem of identity in collective action. In J. Huber (ed.), MacroMicro Linkages in Sociology. http://eprints. lse.ac.uk/42484/, April 14, 2013. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications Ltd. Calhoun, C. 1998. Community without propinquity revisited: communications technology and the transformation of the urban public sphere. Sociological Inquiry, 68(3): 373–397. Castells, M. 2003. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Center for the Digital Future. 2004. The Digital Future Report: Surveying the Digital Future,Year Four: Ten Years, Ten Trends. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School. Chen, K. K. 2009. Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press. Chen, K. K., and O’Mahony, Siobhán. 2009. Differentiating organizational boundaries. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 26: 183–220.

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Morris, A. D. 1986. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Nardi, B., 2010. My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Nguyen, D., and Alexander, J. 1996. The coming of cyberspacetime and the end of the polity. In R. Shields (ed.), Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, pp. 99–124. Nip, J. Y. M. 2004. The relationship between online and offline communities: the case of the queer sisters. Media, Culture & Society, 26(3): 409–428. Norris, P. 2001. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O’Mahony, S. 2003. Guarding the commons: how community managed software projects protect their work. Research Policy, 32(7): 1179–1198. O’Mahony, S., and Ferraro, F. 2007. The emergence of governance in an open source community. The Academy of Management Journal ARCHIVE, 50(5): 1079–1106. O’Mahony, S., and Lakhani, Karim R. (2011), Organizations in the Shadow of Communities, in Christopher Marquis, Michael Lounsbury, Royston Greenwood (ed.) Communities and Organizations (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 33) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 3–36. O’Neill, O. 2009. Ethics for communication? European Journal of Philosophy, 17(2): 167–180. Okhuysen, Gerardo A., and Bechky, Beth A. 2009. Coordination in organizations: an integrative perspective. The Academy of Management Annals, 3: 463–502. Petrini, C., and Padovani, G. 2006. Slow Food Revolution: A New Culture for Eating and Living. New York, NY: Rizzoli. Polletta, F. 1999. ‘Free spaces’ in collective action. Theory and Society, 28(1): 1–38. Polletta, F. 2004. Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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13 Between Grassroots and ‘Astroturf’: Understanding Mobilization from the Top-Down E d w a r d T. W a l k e r

Key to understanding the dynamics of resistance to power is the recognition of how strategies of resistance become incorporated or institutionalized into states, organizations, and markets. This, of course, is central to many theories of how institutional change is generated by those who have otherwise been excluded or ignored in processes of representation (e.g. Meyer and Tarrow, 1998; Meyer, 2007; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012); change can be identified, in fact, by the varying outcomes that follow, directly or indirectly, from the actions of those who engage in resistance. And, of course, even beyond these explicit outcomes, it is clear that even in apparently ‘failing’ efforts to create institutional change, there is evidence that strategies of resistance from earlier periods generate new ideas, repertoires, or other points of leverage for future activists and reformers (e.g. Clemens and Cook, 1999). An insight that follows from this is that strategies used in generating social change, as sets of tools, are not exclusively owned by

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the actors who first put them to use. Countermovements, elite incumbents, and rival causes are likely to learn from those who came before (Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996). And tactics, for example, regularly diffuse to new actors in differentially located social positions; such diffusion to alternative social spaces often requires a significant (or even total) reconfiguration of the meanings associated with their use (Chabot and Duyvendak, 2002). This chapter highlights the ways that elites engage in efforts to mimic or borrow the repertoire of grassroots participation typically favored by those who are politically excluded. In moments when elite actors feel sufficiently threatened by unwanted sociopolitical changes – and expect that such changes may, in fact, come to pass without a substantial intervention on their part – they frequently engage in (or support) mass participation. Importantly, these efforts range from forms of engagement that are relatively transparent and look similar to conventional social movement campaigns to those that involve

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covert elite support and a degree of political ventriloquism. Debates over the boundaries between these types of engagement often invoke the distinction between ‘grassroots’ and ‘astroturf’ (i.e. ersatz public participation, described in greater detail below). As a whole, this set of findings need not lead to a Marcusean interpretation of contemporary politics in suggesting that all resistance eventually gets incorporated: elite engagement in grassroots mobilization need not foreclose the possibility of alternative forms outside their orbit. However, it seems reasonable to recognize that a transforming advocacy sector, new technologies, and the increased political engagement of business are combining to facilitate a broader array of elite efforts to stimulate the (either real or merely apparent, as I explain below) engagement of the mass public. The chapter begins by offering a brief history of elite engagement in stimulating mass participation, focusing upon how strategies in the early and mid twentieth century helped to foster the broader diffusion of elite-backed mass engagement. The argument then shifts toward a more conceptual discussion of the distinction between ‘grassroots’ and ‘astroturf’, highlighting the three key factors of masquerading, incentives, and fraud; I note that such boundaries are inherently fuzzy because of the political capital that accrues to actors that can successfully exploit such ambiguity. The chapter continues by examining two cases in greater depth: ride-sharing firm Uber’s 2015 campaign to mobilize its users in New York City and the beverage industry’s less transparent effort in 2014 to organize stakeholders against soda taxes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Comparison of these cases highlights the importance of severe policy threats in motivating such efforts, and the cases also illustrate how differences in disclosure practices affect the way that members of the public interpret their authenticity. I conclude by underscoring the broader insights that this work reveals about forms of political ‘resistance’ facilitated by elites.

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BACKGROUND ON ELITES FACILITATING MASS PARTICIPATION The strategy by powerful actors to facilitate displays of either real or apparent mass participation in support of their interests is hardly new. As Sager (2009) pointed out, even in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brutus was influenced to kill Caesar on the basis of letters forged by Cassius ‘in several hands … as if they came from several citizens’. In the early twentieth century, actors connected to the Dixie paper company organized a campaign against the use of ‘common cups’ in public places like near water fountains, arguing (perhaps reasonably) that such shareduse cups were a threat to public health (Lee, 2010); of course, Dixie’s disposable cups would serve as the alternative and beneficiary of the common cup’s demise. And, as the twentieth century progressed, we would see the co-evolution of such strategies along with the appearance of new technologies: alongside the well-established practice of prompted letter-writing and petitioning, there came to be evidence of mass-telegraphs in the 1940s, mail-merged letters in the 1960s and 1970s, blast-faxing in the 1980s, mass-email in the 1990s and 2000, and, eventually, the deployment of social media, texting, and mobile apps in the present day (Walker, 2014a). Despite the fact, then, that these strategies have been available to elites and other organizational actors for as long as we’ve had representative politics, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that such practices became more formalized and widely available as a service. What changed was the formation of the field of public affairs consultants, otherwise known as ‘grassroots lobbyists’. These are firms that, for a fee, have the capacity to organize mass participation on behalf of their organizational clients, which are disproportionately firms and industry associations. Their work has helped to formalize such practices and make them a more established part of the organizational repertoires of many prominent

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organizations (Walker, 2014a). And although these strategies are often used by organizations even without the help of consultants – as in the cases compared toward the end of this chapter – studying their practices can offer a window into understanding the more general phenomenon of elite-initiated activism. Public affairs consulting emerged in the period following the massive expansion of the US regulatory state in the 1960s and 1970s, which facilitated, in turn, two major changes in the national political system: the ‘explosion’ of new citizen advocacy groups in Washington and around the country (Walker, 1991; Berry, 2015), and the dramatic expansion of business political advocacy in the period that followed thereafter (Vogel, 1989). For their part, the new citizen groups tended to be more focused on single issues, were more professionally driven, and depended more heavily upon distant members writing checks and political letters on their behalf (Skocpol, 2003; Walker et  al., 2011). And business found both the changes in government policy and the accompanying shifts in citizen politics threatening enough to stimulate a major corporate countermobilization in the period that followed after (Vogel, 1989; Akard, 1992; Walker, 2009; Mizruchi, 2013). Combined, these changes altered US politics such that business began to demand services that could allow them to have the same organized social power of the citizen groups, like the Naderites and public interest movement, who were challenging them so effectively. Given that corporations themselves are structured to generate revenue and not to mobilize political participation, it often made more sense for them to outsource their participation-recruiting efforts to consulting firms who could do it more effectively. A major spike in the founding of such consulting shops followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with continued growth in the field in the years that followed (Walker, 2009). Now a fully formed industry in their own right including hundreds of such firms across

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the US, the field of public affairs consultants can currently boast that they collectively retain almost 40% of the Fortune 500 as their clients, recruit millions of Americans annually into political activity, and command substantial revenues (at a consultant-level mean of $2.31 million/year) (see Walker, 2009: 100). For the median such consulting firm, a major campaign on behalf of a client will generate $175,000 in revenue; the largest campaign disclosed as part of this study generated $1.5 million to build and mobilize a major corporate coalition in support of President Obama’s recent overhaul of the health care system (i.e. the 2009 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act). Their strategies in mobilizing the public tend to be conventional grassroots political activities: recruiting petition signatures, encouraging letter-writing, identifying and amplifying the voice of those with an interest in the issue, and facilitating voter turnout. As might be expected, they generally do not recruit individuals to engage in more transgressive forms of engagement such as civil disobedience, walkouts, or strikes. Still, they regularly encourage participation in rallies, demonstrations, and other more established protest forms. The individuals that these consultants target for participation are those who are already over-represented in the political system: they are disproportionately the highly partisan, activists in political causes, those likely to turn out to vote in elections, and more educated. Somewhat troublingly, they report that the most common ‘secondary target’ in their campaigns are minority groups, suggesting that they seek out apparently more diverse participants on a token basis in their campaigns; many prominent cases sponsored by industry have followed this strategy, from the recruitment of former Civil Rights Movement leaders to lead the Working Families for WalMart campaign to the apparent recruitment of NAACP leaders to oppose IRS reforms on behalf of Intuit, Inc. (the creator of Turbotax software) (see Walker, 2014b).

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GRASSROOTS VERSUS ‘ASTROTURF’: SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES As is apparent in cases like those described above, when an outside sponsor – particularly a major business or industry – is the primary patron helping to support (either in part or in full) the mobilization of a public campaign, critical issues related to authenticity rise to the forefront. Authenticity can be understood as having the feature of being ‘true to oneself’, such that there is no discrepancy between the public claims an individual or organization is making and the true objective conditions underlying such claims. The particular kind of authenticity of interest here is what Carroll and Wheaton (2009: 255) refer to as ‘moral authenticity’, in which ‘the decisions behind the enactment and operation of an entity reflect sincere choices (i.e. choices true to one’s self) rather than socially scripted responses’. In advocacy politics, it is of utmost importance that an organization or activist’s claims-making is seen to be morally true to their own beliefs and preferences, given the moral value that is widely recognized as a defining ideal of such civil society groups (even if routinely violated in practice; see Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Prakash and Gugerty, 2010). But when there is major business or foundation funding behind an advocacy campaign, critical questions are often raised about the authenticity of the actors making claims. Although it is exceedingly rare that any advocacy campaign can sustain itself over a longer period entirely through the in-kind contributions of its regular participants and without any external patronage, concerns abound that substantial external funding (especially without an active constituent base) can facilitate illegitimacy concerns (McCarthy and Zald, 1977). Further, groups often face problems in that outside funding may generate a disconnect between leadership and rank-and-file members, or, for groups that started with only limited external patronage, there is the everpresent risk of ‘mission drift’ in which earlier

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concerns driving engagement get displaced by interests and activities more palatable to sponsors (Minkoff and Powell, 2006). In popular discourse, such concerns are often translated into concerns about the authenticity of a political actor, such that groups seen as independent of their sponsors (or which operate without them entirely) are considered ‘grassroots’, and actors who are seen as mere agents of external principals are subject to the pejorative label of ‘astroturf’, borrowed from the synthetic grass-like product. Taken originally from the creative play on words first attributed to former US Senator Lloyd Bentsen, the term ‘astroturf’ has come to refer to all advocacy campaigns in which participants appear to be voicing the concerns of their sponsors more than their own beliefs; the term elides the possibility, of course, that these two may be (and very often are) aligned. Of course, such an alignment of interest is highly sought-after by elite sponsors. A body of research has examined the issue of ‘astroturf’ (see e.g. Bodensteiner, 1997; Lyon and Maxwell, 2004; Fitzpatrick and Palenchar, 2006; McNutt and Boland, 2007; Zellner, 2010). In this body of work and in more recent studies (e.g. Walker, 2014a), there are three features of advocacy that have been used as criteria for what constitutes ‘astroturfing’: 1 Incentives: Participants in the campaign are offered incentives (especially material ones) for their participation, or threatened with consequences if they fail to participate. 2 Fraud: Participants either do not understand the claims they are making or perhaps even disagree with them. Alternatively, the campaign’s organizers may falsely attribute claims to individuals who never made them, or to fictional individuals. 3 Masquerading: The campaign has covert sponsorship and is masquerading as a mass movement (Walker, 2014a: 32–8).

As is plain, each of these criteria for ‘astroturf’ involves some violation of the expectation of moral authenticity: #1 in that publics

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often doubt the sincerity of social action when tainted with the instrumental value of commerce (Rossman, 2014), #2 in that the actor cannot be said to be the true author of the claims he or she is making, and #3, most subjectively in the minds of evaluators, in that the actor is operating in a less than transparent fashion (i.e. masquerading, which deceives the audience in seeming to misrepresent the source of the cause’s actions). As is clear, these distinctions are not crisp; ‘astroturf’ is indeed more of a category of practice than one of analysis (on such issues, see Brubaker, 2013). It is important to note that the practical charge of ‘astroturf’ – indeed, using many of the above criteria – is often leveled not only at firms and industry groups, but also at labor unions, foundations, government agencies, and other advocacy groups (especially those that are large and well-established), when questions about their moral authenticity are brought to the attention of critical evaluators. And these criteria hardly offer a clear dividing line between various types of participation. Indeed, incentives of various types are, of course, deployed by nearly all social movement organizations and interest groups (McCarthy and Zald, 1977). There may also be misunderstandings about issues and engagement that can appear fraudulent, especially in this age of fast-paced online issue activism. Beyond this, for many social causes, groups fail to disclose their funding for reasons that are not always nefarious (consider Rothman et  al., 2011); sometimes this is due more to a lack of organizational capacity for reporting their funding sources, especially given that advocacy causes are not typically required by law to make such disclosures. At the same time, this is not to deny that powerful elite actors often exploit these very real ambiguities in order to win in political battles. The very fact that it is hard to draw a bright line between authentic and inauthentic participation makes it such that elites can (and very often do) execute such strategies as

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the funding of front groups, co-opting social movement organizations, and otherwise manufacturing the appearance of public support for their policy goals. Such elite actors often hold a very narrow and self-serving definition of what counts as inauthentic participation. Consider the remarks of one of the public affairs consultants interviewed in my research, when asked about the distinction between grassroots and astroturf: I think it’s bullshit. And the reason why I think it’s bullshit is what matters is [whether] the person who comes forward [has] a legitimate, credible interest of why, say, farmers would care about this issue … And if they can articulate that in a credible way, then it’s a credible issue. Whether they found out about that issue from the back of a box of Rice Krispies or an article in the newspaper or somebody like me contacting them, I really … I don’t know that it matters so much as whether it’s their legitimate opinion. (Walker, 2014a: 85)

For this consultant – and for many others in similar positions I have interviewed – the two criteria of incentives (#1) and masquerading (#3) are not deemed relevant to judging the authenticity of participation, only that it is the recruited activist’s true belief and does not involve fraud (#2). Such a restricted definition suggests that it would be acceptable, for instance, for a major corporation to covertly pay protestors to turn out at a rally, so long as those protestors hold a basic level of agreement with the claims they are making in public. On the other hand, such actions would certainly violate Carroll and Wheaton’s expectation of moral authenticity in terms of ‘socially scripted’ participation. In sum, while the moral authenticity of public participation is always contested, contingent, and socially constructed, elitesponsored participation risks such a negative judgment when it involves heavy incentives, fails to be transparent, and/or misrepresents (or fabricates) the views of members of the public. To further illustrate these dynamics, I now turn to a comparison of two cases: one of which was relatively transparent about the

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sponsor’s role, and one that was much less so. A comparison of these cases reveals additional insights into the dynamics of public engagement sponsored by elite actors.

TRANSPARENCY AND DISCLOSURE IN ELITE-BACKED PARTICIPATION: A CASE COMPARISON Uber’s Mass Mobilization against NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio Ride-sharing firm Uber has witnessed staggering growth since its founding in 2009, expanding beyond its roots as a small startup to become a global corporate giant now valued at over $50 billion. The service has been seeking to upend the transportation model of the conventional yellow-cab taxis in many cities, by providing rides in a driver’s personal vehicle, hailed using (and paid through) an application on the customer’s smartphone. Drivers are considered temporary contractors rather than employees of the firm, and the company has consistently maintained that it is merely a technology service and not a transportation company. As such, Uber drivers are compensated only for their work when a customer has hired the car and the vehicle is en route. And the company does not control the locations where cars may pick customers up (except in places prevented by law, such as certain cities’ airports), but in order to meet demand, the service will occasionally enact ‘surge’ pricing in certain locations such that drivers will be more highly compensated for picking up in locations in need of their services. The expansion of the Uber service across US cities and in other global cities has set off a variety of socio-political struggles: the fierce organized resistance of taxi companies and their drivers, scrambles by local taxi commissions as their entire regulatory model is threatened by the service (and others like it, such as Lyft), critical questions

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from consumers about their own safety when riding (and the thoroughness of Uber’s criminal background checks on its drivers), and significant issues related to labor conditions and the privatization of risk for those who serve as drivers. On top of all of this, the firm has been incredibly aggressive in its political lobbying strategies to help the service win entry into local transportation markets; by one estimate (Weise, 2015), Uber currently retains more state-level lobbyists than WalMart by one-third, and of course this doesn’t count the firm’s army of municipal lobbyists. The firm’s recent battle in New York City offers an instructive case about how firms and industries mobilize public activism on their behalf. Uber has been active in New York since 2011, expanding dramatically enough that the firm now has an estimated 19,000 of its cars on New York streets as of July 2015 (Flegenheimer, 2015). This dramatic expansion had led some to worry that all of these new cars-for-hire on the road were exacerbating traffic congestion in the city, especially given that Uber has consistently been increasing its number of cars at a rate of 3% per month (ibid.). Responding in part to this concern and a Department of Transportation study showing that Manhattan vehicle speeds had dropped 9% between 2010 and 2014, in June 2015 the administration of NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio proposed new regulations that would enact a temporary cap on the growth of Uber and other ride-sharing services (Barkan, 2015). The cap would have been only temporary, such that the city would be able to investigate the impact of ride-sharing services on overall traffic patterns before it would enact a more comprehensive set of regulations governing the industry. Uber’s response to the proposed rules was staggering in its scope. As in its previous regulatory battles with other municipalities (Weise, 2015), the firm did not shy away from engaging the full range of their lawyers and lobbyists. In fact, looking only at the part of 2015 before the De Blasio fight was

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underway, the firm had already spent over $350,000 on lobbying in New York State (Nahmias, 2015). Former Obama strategist David Plouffe was a major player in the NYC campaign (Hartmann, 2015), backed by a powerful team of well-connected lobbyists in the city and state. The firm also blasted the airwaves with political advertisements against the De Blasio rules alongside large front-page banner ads on the New York Times homepage (Johnson, 2015). This was complemented with a set of prominent celebrity endorsements of the firm’s position in the city (Sifferlin and Basu, 2015). Beyond all of this, the firm repeatedly highlighted the close connections between the mayor and the incumbent yellow-cab taxi industry, calling attention to the lavish campaign funding the mayor had earlier received (Grynbaum, 2012); this was used in order to discredit the mayor’s proposed rules as little more than a give-away to his campaign contributors. But the conventional ‘air war’ strategies were only a part of the picture. What made the campaign much more powerful was the extent to which the firm’s political strategists were able to enlist the participation of the mass public as allies in the fight. In an ingenious move, the firm was able to weaponize its smartphone application – the same application used by riders to hail their cars – as a significant tool for mobilizing their user base (Tepper, 2015). Uber users are always able to select from among different types of Uber cars after logging on to the app, and these options vary by city. During the period of this battle, however, NYC users saw an additional type of ‘car’ option available: what they were calling ‘De Blasio’s Uber’. When users selected this option, they would see a message saying ‘NO CARS – SEE WHY’. For those who clicked the ‘see why’ message, they would be sent directly to the company’s online petition against the De Blasio proposal (Walker, 2015). And the fine print on the petition page revealed that by signing the petition, users were also consenting to receiving additional automated phone calls,

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text messages, and other political communications from the firm (Stempeck, 2015a). Beyond the smartphone-driven petitioning, Uber engaged in a number of other efforts to mobilize public participation. Perhaps most significant were the firm’s rallies and protests, which utilized the firm’s ride services to facilitate turn out. For the firm’s rally at New York City Hall in late June, the company offered free rides to anyone who would like to attend (Begley, 2015). Then, in another rally that sought to mobilize the firm’s outer-borough drivers a few weeks later, the company provided free lunches to thousands of Uber drivers, in the hope of building further solidarity (Badger, 2015). In the end, the firm was able to generate over 17,000 messages sent to the Mayor and City Hall, contributing to the demise of the proposal by late July 2015. By nearly all accounts, this was a stinging and unexpected loss for the Mayor. What is important to recognize about this case is not only that the firm was highly effective in mobilizing mass users of their service in order to gain a political edge; it is important to recognize that the firm did this in a way that generally avoided the charge of ‘astroturf’. The firm was relatively transparent about its support for the activism that was being generated – it was a far cry from cases like the widely discredited ‘Working Families for Wal-Mart’ campaign that maintained the false pretense that the firm was not its sole sponsor (Walker, 2014a: 169–78). Although some raised critical questions about the authenticity of the activists given the incentives (free rides, food) that were being offered to participants and because of the firm’s heavy hand in providing structures for public engagement, it was clear all along that the firm has many genuine supporters. As presaged earlier, this was a case in which the firm’s sponsorship was matched by a significant amount of public support for their services. As Stempeck (2015b) put it, ‘relative to the fleet of disposable non-profit astroturfing groups created by industry over the years, taking an Uber to a pro-Uber rally is refreshingly direct’.

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At the same time, the use of such strategies by firms like Uber undoubtedly further empowers the interests of well-resourced businesses and makes it such that legislators hear more about their concerns than they do other causes that lack these resources. In these cases, as much as the tactics they use appear to be similar to other types of resistance, a major consequence is, in fact, the expansion of corporate power in the public and political spheres.

The Beverage Industry’s Campaign Against Bay Area Soda Taxes Given rising social and public health concerns about the risks of obesity and their linkage to high levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, manufacturers of such drinks have been forced to launch a major counteroffensive. A number of analysts have noted a marked number of similarities between the politics of soda today and those of tobacco a generation ago (e.g. Bittman, 2010). This counter-offensive has involved funding of scientific research (O’Connor, 2015), national advertising campaigns to influence public opinion, and myriad local-level conflagrations over regulating or taxing the sale of sugarsweetened beverages. One such battle took place in the fall of 2014, when the cities of both San Francisco and Berkeley, California included new soda taxes on their November ballots. In San Francisco, Proposition E would have imposed a new municipal tax of $0.02 per ounce of such beverages sold within the city limits and the resulting revenues were earmarked for ‘nutrition, physical activity, and health programs in public schools, parks, and elsewhere’; in Berkeley, Measure D proposed to a similar tax, but at the rate of only $0.01 per ounce sold. In general, Proposition E faced a much steeper climb in order to secure passage, not only because of the higher tax but also because San Francisco ballot measures require a two-thirds majority in order to win passage. Measure D in Berkeley

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was a lower tax and only required a simple 50-percent-plus-one majority vote. The beverage industry did not take these measures lightly. According to one estimate, the beverage industry spent nearly $8 million battling Proposition E in San Francisco alone, not accounting for any spending on the Berkeley measure (Brodey, 2014). In so doing, the industry was mimicking the full-throated response it had taken in other cities, such as in the earlier successful defeats of the soda tax in Richmond, California and in its work against former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s restriction against large soda sales (Grynbaum, 2013). In each of these cases, of course, the concern is that a flood of other cities could follow the lead of the first successful municipal soda restriction, which made this a vast threat for the beverage industry at the national level. And, as in the Uber case, the soda industry sought to build a social movement to work on its behalf. But, in contrast to Uber, the beverage industry was much less transparent about its role in the campaign. Central to this effort was the creation of an industry front group calling itself Coalition for an Affordable City (Walker, 2014c). The coalition’s name was based around likening the soda tax’s cost to the skyrocketing rents and other costs of living in the Bay Area. The CAC website did, it is worth noting, disclose in small print that the group is ‘Paid for by No on E: Stop Unfair Beverage Taxes, Coalition for an Affordable City, with major funding by American Beverage Association California PAC’. However, at its rallies and in other public claims-making, the CAC often failed to disclose the role of the beverage industry in funding the campaign and providing other material support. And, of course, the very name of the group was found to be deceptive by many (e.g. Cook, 2014). The Coalition fought the two soda tax proposals on a number of fronts. The campaign recruited as purported members a substantial number – more than 720, according to Rodriguez (2014) – of local merchants,

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including local grocers, restaurants, support industries (e.g. distribution, bottling), and many other small and medium-sized enterprises. However, a number of investigators reached out to the groups listed as supporters, finding that many had no knowledge of the campaign or even actively opposed it (e.g. Jesko, 2014). For its part, a CAC spokesman claimed to possess signed records confirming the membership of all listed merchants (Jesko, 2014), implying that perhaps some had forgotten they signed it. Simon (2014) reported that ‘canvassers [recruiting merchants to sign on as members] presented a very biased view of the tax, not stating where the money would go, and then failing to inform owners they would be placed on an opposition list’. The CAC also hosted rallies against the soda taxes, including one that was revealed to have recruited paid protestors to turn out for their events, offering $13 per hour to those who responded to their online advertisements (Wright et al., 2014). Although it is uncertain whether the CAC’s efforts were ultimately consequential, the end result was that the soda tax was passed in Berkeley but failed in San Francisco. Again, recall that the San Francisco proposition required a much higher two-thirds majority in order to be enacted. But the point most worth emphasizing is that the CAC’s efforts faced much more significant public distrust and negative media coverage because of its deceptive framing, limited disclosure about funding, and questionable strategies to recruit coalition members. When following this playbook – as many other firms and industries have, from the for-profit colleges to major telecommunication firms – there always exists a considerable risk that the advocacy cause will be discredited by critical publics as inauthentic.

CONCLUSION This chapter discussed the phenomenon in which public participation – usually conceptualized as a vehicle for resistance that

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challenges institutional authority – is utilized as a tool to defend the interests of powerful actors (often those in private industry). Although such strategies are not new in the present period, their use has accelerated in response to new technologies, a transformed advocacy sector, the heightened political activity of business, and, notably, the rise of a field of consulting firms that have formed to turn public activism into a marketable service. Although elite-backed mass participation occurs both with and without the support of consultants, the consultants have been studied to develop more general understandings of these practices. The chapter also emphasized that a key issue surrounding top-down public participation is the question of the moral authenticity of activists, often discussed in public discourse as the boundary between ‘grassroots’ and ‘astroturf’. This boundary involves questions of transparency, funding, and integrity (i.e. avoiding fraud), and they can be applied not only to firms but also to actors in civil society and government. Examination of two cases in greater depth – Uber’s defeat of restrictions on ridesharing in New York City and the beverage industry’s partial success in stopping new soda taxes in the San Francisco Bay Area – revealed differences between campaigns that are more transparent versus those that engage in significant deception. Whether sponsors engage in such practices has significant consequences for politics and policy, as well as in how publics observing them make sense of the issue. The growth of what I have called ‘grassroots for hire’ campaigns is raising a number of questions about contemporary politics that require additional analysis. First, and most significant for this volume, the extent of their use is making it much more difficult to draw boundaries around observable practices of ‘resistance’, given that societal elites are increasingly using the strategies that are normally associated with social movements. Second, there is much circumstantial evidence that these cases harm public trust

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in advocacy overall, including advocacy in which there is relatively little external funding and/or full disclosure about funding sources. Policymakers are now facing challenging questions about whether and how to require such disclosure; it is not clear that this can always be done in an effective way that also restores public trust. Third, and finally, our theories of politics need a more sophisticated way of understanding the role of firms and industries in relation to civil society groups; too often analysts assume that firms focus primarily on the market and on insider lobbying and ignore the public entirely. We are seeing a lot of evidence that this leaves us with an incomplete account, and one that future scholars would benefit from scrutinizing carefully.

REFERENCES Akard, Patrick J. 1992. ‘Corporate Mobilization and Political Power: The Transformation of U.S. Economic Policy in the 1970s’. American Sociological Review 57(5):597–615. Badger, Emily. 2015. ‘Uber’s War with New York Is so Serious It’s Giving out Free Hummus’. Washington Post, July 21. Barkan, Ross. 2015. ‘Uber Pitches Carpooling to Cut Down on Manhattan Congestion’. Observer, September 17. Begley, Sarah. 2015. ‘Uber Offers Free Rides to Its New York Protest’. Time, June 29. Berry, Jeffrey M. 2015. Lobbying for the People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bittman, Mark. 2010. ‘Is Soda the New Tobacco?’. The New York Times, February 13. Bodensteiner, Carol A. 1997. ‘Special Interest Group Coalitions: Ethical Standards for BroadBased Support Efforts’. Public Relations Review 23(1):31–46. Brodey, Sam. 2014. ‘Inside the $7 Million Fight to Tax Soda in San Francisco’. Mother Jones, October 8. Brubaker, W. Rogers. 2013. ‘Categories of Analysis and Categories of Practice: A Note on the Study of Muslims in European Countries of Immigration.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(1):1–8. Carroll, Glenn R. and Dennis Ray Wheaton. 2009. ‘The Organizational Construction of Authenticity: An Examination of Contemporary Food and

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Dining in the U.S.’. Research in Organizational Behavior 29:255–282. Chabot, Sean and Jan Willem Duyvendak. 2002. ‘Globalization and Transnational Diffusion between Social Movements: Reconceptualizing the Dissemination of the Gandhian Repertoire and the “coming Out” Routine’. Theory and Society 31(6):697–740. Clemens, Elisabeth S. and James M. Cook. 1999. ‘Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change’. Annual Review of Sociology 25:441–466. Cook, Christopher D. 2014. ‘Big Soda’s False Populism’. Los Angeles Times, October 27. Fitzpatrick, Kathy R. and Michael J. Palenchar. 2006. ‘Disclosing Special Interests: Constitutional Restrictions on Front Groups’. Journal of Public Relations Research 18(3):203–224. Flegenheimer, Matt. 2015. ‘City Hall, in a Counterattack, Casts Uber as a Corporate Behemoth’. The New York Times, July 20, p. A21. Fligstein, Neil and Doug McAdam. 2012. A Theory of Fields. New York: Oxford University Press. Grynbaum, Michael M. 2012. ‘De Blasio Reaps Big Donations From Taxi Industry He Aided’. The New York Times, July 17. Grynbaum, Michael M. 2013. ‘Judge Invalidates Bloomberg’s Ban on Sugary Drinks’. The New York Times, March 11. Hartmann, Margaret. 2015. ‘Was David Plouffe the Key to Uber’s Deal With New York City?’. Daily Intelligencer, July 23. Jesko, Jacquelien. 2014. ‘Video: When Grassroots Protest Rallies Have Corporate Sponsors’. ABC News. Johnson, Lauren. 2015. ‘Uber Takes Over New York Times Homepage With Large Ad Calling Out the Mayor’. AdWeek, July 22. Keck, M. E. and K. Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Cambridge and New York: A Cambridge University Press. Lee, Caroline W. 2010. ‘The Roots of Astroturfing’. Contexts 9(1):73–75. Lyon, Thomas P. and John W. Maxwell. 2004. ‘Astroturf: Interest Group Lobbying and Corporate Strategy’. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 13(4):561–597. McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald. 1977. ‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory.’ American Journal of Sociology 82(6): 1212–41. McNutt, John and Katherine Boland. 2007. ‘AstroTurf, Technology and the Future of

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Community Mobilization: Implications for Nonprofit Theory’. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 34:165. Meyer, David S. 2007. The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyer, David S. and Sidney G. Tarrow. 1998. The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Meyer, David S. and Suzanne Staggenborg. 1996. ‘Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity.’ American Journal of Sociology 101(6): 1628–60. Minkoff, Debra C. and Walter W. Powell. 2006. ‘Nonprofit Mission: Constancy, Responsiveness, or Deflection’. Pp. 591–611 in The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, vol. 2, edited by W. W. Powell and R. Steinberg. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mizruchi, Mark S. 2013. The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nahmias, Laura. 2015. ‘Uber Lobbied Hard in New York before Cap Fight, Too’. Crain’s New York Business, July 28. O’Connor, Anahad. 2015. ‘Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets’. New York Times, August 9. Prakash, Aseem and Mary Kay Gugerty. 2010. Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rodriguez, Joe. 2014. ‘Kick the Can: Factchecking the Opposition to the Sugary Beverage Tax Reveals Misleading Claims’. San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 26. Rossman, Gabriel. 2014. ‘Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange.’ Sociological Theory 32(1):43–63. Rothman, Sheila M., Victoria H. Raveis, Anne Friedman, and David J. Rothman. 2011. ‘Health Advocacy Organizations and the Pharmaceutical Industry: An Analysis of Disclosure Practices’. American Journal of Public Health 101(4):602–609. Sager, Ryan. 2009. ‘Keep Off the Astroturf’. The New York Times, August 19. Sifferlin, Alexandra and Tanya Basu. 2015. ‘Kate Upton and Neil Patrick Harris Slam NYCk Mayor Over Uber Vote’. Time, July 22. Simon, Michele. 2014. ‘Big Soda’s Front Group Arrives Early in San Francisco.’ EatDrinkPolitics, February 26. Skocpol, Theda. 2003. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in

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American Civic Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Stempeck, Matt. 2015a. ‘Has Uber Pushed Corporate Activism in the Digital Age Too Far’. Civic Hall, July 22. Stempeck, Matt. 2015b. ‘Are Uber and Facebook Turning Users into Lobbyists?’. Harvard Business Review, August 11. Tepper, Fitz. 2015. ‘Uber Launches “De Blasio’s Uber” Feature In NYC With 25-Minute Wait Times’. TechCrunch, July 16. Vogel, David. 1989. Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America. New York: Basic Books. Walker, Edward T. 2009. ‘Privatizing Participation: Civic Change and the Organizational Dynamics of Grassroots Lobbying Firms’. American Sociological Review 74(1):83–105. Walker, Edward T. 2014a. Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Edward T. 2014b. ‘The Industry Behind Turbotax’s Astroturfing’. Cambridge University Press Fifteen Eighty-Four. Available: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2014/04/ the-industry-behind-turbotaxs-astroturfing/. Walker, Edward T. 2014c. ‘How Business Funded the Anti-Soda Tax Coalition’. Washington Post, November 24. Retrieved July 29, 2016 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/ blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/11/24/ how-business-funded-the-anti-soda-tax-coalition/). Walker, Edward T. 2015. ‘The Uber-Ization of Activism’. The New York Times, August 6. Walker, Edward T., John D. McCarthy, and Frank Baumgartner. 2011. ‘Replacing Members with Managers? Mutualism among Membership and Nonmembership Advocacy Organizations in the United States’. American Journal of Sociology 116(4):1284–1337. Walker, Jack L. 1991. Mobilizing Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professions, and Social Movements. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Weise, Karen. 2015. ‘This Is How Uber Takes Over a City’. Bloomberg, June 23. Wright, David, Jackie Jesko, and Lauren Effron. 2014. ‘This Protest Rally Is Brought to You by Big Soda’. ABC News. Retrieved from http:// abcnews.go.com/US/protest-rally-broughtbig-soda/story?id=26664314 Zellner, Jonathan C. 2010. ‘Artificial Grassroots Advocacy and the Constitutionality of Legislative Identification and Control Measures.’ Connecticut Law Review 43:357.

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14 From Digital Tools to Political Infrastructure Marianne Maeckelbergh

INTRODUCTION In this chapter I reflect on different ways in which movements have used digital technology, especially social media-type technologies as part of, and in relation to, mass mobilizations in the streets. The examples offered are not meant to be exhaustive of how movements can and do use technology. Rather, the examples are chosen for their ability to demonstrate just a few of the ways that technologies intervene in the minds and behaviors of people as they take political action. I compare two movements: the Platform for those Affected by Mortgages in Spain (the ‘PAH’) and Indymedia. These two movements are hard to fully understand without reference to the larger movements that they are connected to: the 15M movement in Spain and the alterglobalization movement transnationally. The 15M movement occupied squares in cities and towns all across Spain starting on May 15, 2011 (15M) and mobilized millions of people across the

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country. Although the PAH existed prior to the 15M and although the political scope of the PAH is different from the 15M, since 2011, the two movements have overlapped and the PAH has benefitted from the media infrastructure created by the 15M movement. Indymedia was a network of media activists who produced independent media reports as a counterweight to mainstream media and they were an important part of the alterglobalization movement – the movement that organized massive street mobilizations and blockades during the annual/bi-annual summits of multi-lateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund/World Bank (IMF/WB), and the Group of Eight (G8). These two movements, the PAH and Indymedia, or the 15M and the alterglobalization movement more generally, emerged under different circumstances and for divergent purposes, but they share some elements of a comparable ‘horizontal’ political practice and a networked organizational structure

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(Estalella and Jiménez 2013; Juris 2012; Maeckelbergh 2012).1 Both concepts of horizontality and the network are continuously linked to digital technologies, especially the Internet, from arguments that border dangerously on the claim that the technologies have produced such horizontal politics, to more careful arguments that claim that the underlying logic of today’s social media technologies match so perfectly to these principles of horizontality and networks that the movements and the technologies easily become extensions of each other. These two movements, the 15M and the alterglobalization movement, have different logics of organization and part of these differences lie in the way digital technologies are used, especially the Internet and social media. Indymedia and the alterglobalization movement (as a recog­ nized and labeled entity) began in 1999 at the anti-WTO summit protests. It is not clear when or if the alterglobalization movement has come to an end (this would depend on how you define the movement and how you might define ‘end’), but what is certain is that many Indymedia centers and websites are still active today. The PAH was founded in 2009, the 15M movement began on May 15, 2011; whether the 15M continues today is again a question of definition since the form of the movement has changed considerably since its start, but many people, groups, initiatives, and mobilizations stemming from the 15M continue to this day. While the alterglobalization movement and the 15M movement overlap with each other to some extent, a gap of roughly ten years divides the ‘start’ of the two movements – and many new digital tools were invented in that time period, changing dramatically the media context in which the movements operate. The two cases, the PAH and Indymedia, or the 15M and the alterglobalization movement more generally, can both be viewed as ‘success’ cases when it comes to the use of technology to pursue political aims – both groups were innovative in their use of the technologies available to them and both

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Indymedia and the PAH have been able to reach millions of people. Based on these two ‘success’ cases, I argue that in order to understand the impact of social media technologies on political action, we have to look at how the technologies are integrated into, and mobilized as part of, a larger political infrastructure, imbued with specific political values, that is intentionally created and maintained by the activists themselves. This approach allows for an analysis of how technologies are made useful as part of a political project that transcends and precedes the technology itself. In order to make this argument, I first explore the notion of ‘infrastructure’ to show how digital technologies can be understood to be part of complex material networks that ‘facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space’ (Larkin 2013: 328). Usually when the term ‘media infrastructure’ is used, or when the infrastructure of media is addressed, the main focus is on the material infrastructure that makes the technological device work in its technical sense – for example, electricity, computers, smartphones, internet cafes, servers, cables, cellular networks, signals, fiber optics, algorithms, coding, protocols, apps, compression techniques, among many other infrastructural elements and how these are negotiated and manipulated by the people who build or use the infrastructure (see Coleman 2010; Dasgupta 2002; Dourish and Bell 2011; Goggin 2011; Larkin 2008; Parks and Starosielski 2015; Sterne 2012; Wilf 2013). While this literature also views infrastructure as co-constructed by the user through complex social and political processes in which appropriation of the technology does and can occur, it differs from my use of the term here in that I do not address this ‘inherited’ infrastructure of wires, cables, algorithms, protocols, etc. written and designed or commodified (even when initially designed by movements) by people outside of the movement. Instead, when I invoke the term (media) infrastructure, I am referring to the meetings, the spaces

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(streets, houses, and squats), the connections between people and groups, and especially, the political values that are created and mobilized by the activists themselves in order to create activist media. Because my interest is in how these movements appropriate media technologies designed by corporations to serve quite anticapitalist purposes, I choose to frame the field of enquiry in this limited way. This choice is, as Larkin (2013: 330) writes, a categorical act. It is a moment of tearing into those heterogeneous networks to define which aspect of which network is to be discussed and which parts will be ignored. It recognizes that infrastructures operate on differing levels simultaneously, generating multiple forms of address, and that any particular set of intellectual questions will have to select which of these levels to examine.

My concern here is to show how infrastructures are not only built by states and corporations, but that those who resist states and corporations can and do build infrastructures as well, even if they can, for now, only do so by using the infrastructures provided for them by those very states and corporations. Despite the unfortunate association with state-corporate material infrastructure, I choose to refer to these practices as infrastructure because the term invokes a sense of intentional, structured, and material organization that is designed and implemented with a political aim and to a political effect. In my case, however, this political aim is not part and parcel of a state, colonial, or corporate project – it is instead a re-signification of these projects. In order to understand the differing ways in which this re-signification of technological infrastructure takes place, I draw on Pfaffenberger’s (1992) notion of the ‘technological drama’ which allows us to understand how, and under which circumstances, technologies designed within one social context to embody one set of power dynamics can be made to challenge those power dynamics. This challenge occurs not through the use of the technology, but through

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the use of the technology in combination with the creation of a social context that expresses different political values. My focus is on how the technology and the shift in the social context together make it possible to enact this symbolic inversion of meaning.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND TECHNOLOGICAL DRAMAS Larkin (2013: 329) argues that infrastructures ‘are things and also the relation between things. … the duality of infrastructures indicates that when they operate systematically they cannot be theorized in terms of the object alone’. Framing the question of technology in terms of infrastructure, therefore, allows us to shift the focus away from the object itself, the technological tool, towards the relation between the tool and its broader social context in terms of how the tool is used and what the tool comes to signify for those who encounter it. While infrastructure is used most commonly to refer to systems such as water, electricity, roads, and other large state-corporate constructed systems of what we might call service provision (Anand 2011; Gupta 2015; Star 1999), infrastructure can also be as expansive as the material built environment of streets, squares, offices and flats (McQuarrie et  al. 2013; Rubio, and Fogué 2013) and can include forms of knowledge (Elyachar 2012), performance (Larkin 2008), and communication (De Boeck 2015; Elyachar 2010; Kockelman 2010) that might not immediately be visible. While most studies focus on large infrastructures that are initiated through some form of centralized bureaucratic planning, my interest here is to add to the growing number of studies that explore how people themselves build infrastructure (De Boeck 2015; Elyachar 2010, 2014; Holston 2009; Simone 2004). Even in most ethnographies of centrally initiated infrastructures the focus still lies on how people appropriate and change the

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meaning of these technologies through the daily practices associated with creating, installing, administering, or using them. While a definition of infrastructure as ‘the institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense’ (Larkin 2013: 331) privileges the institutional origin of an infrastructure, ethnographic accounts show how infrastructure refers to the ‘totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectives’ (Larkin 2008: 6). This specific approach to infrastructure, minus the economistic logic built into the language of ‘goods’, is that which underlies my analysis of social movement use of media – in which media is simultaneously a technological tool and a cultural system. This approach makes it possible to understand how the meaning and use of the tool itself can change when the cultural system through which it is used is intentionally altered by the users. I choose to emphasize how social movements create their own media infrastructures to show how the meaning of technologies can change through their use in unintended ways. If infrastructures are both technical and cultural systems, then they necessarily ‘operate on multiple levels concurrently’ including ‘extextualized forms that have relative autonomy from their technical functions’ (Larkin 2013: 335–336). In order to develop this point I draw on Pfaffenberger who, while not referring to infrastructure per se, analyzes how technology gains its meaning in relation to ‘myths of unusual power’ – what Larkin might call ‘cultural systems’, or what Gürsel (2012) might call ‘infrastructures of representation’ and Anand (2015) calls ‘political technologies of rule’. Pfaffenberger invokes the term ‘technological drama’ to refer to ‘a discourse of technological “statements” and “counterstatements”, in which there are three recognizable processes: technological regularization, technological adjustment and technological reconstitution’ (1992: 285,

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emphasis original). The process begins with what he calls ‘technological regularization’, which is a process through which the maker/ designer embeds (not always intentionally) dominant power relations into the design of the technology itself in order to ‘fix social reality, to harden it, to give it form and order and predictability’ (Moore 1975: 234, cited in Pfaffenberger 1992: 309, n.1). He is careful to say that ‘it would be wrong to say that an elite’s value system necessarily finds its way into technological processes and artifacts’ and argues instead that ‘the elite’s political values are actively produced and defined in recursive interaction with the design process’ (Pfaffenberger 1992: 287). The same can be true for non-elite values – these too are developed in recursive interaction with the process of designing media infrastructure for protest. Technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, even the Internet, are usually part of a discursive system that reinforces elite’s values (corporate interests, entertainment, dominant notions of what is acceptable content and form and what is not, etc.), but that does not mean that if and when the technologies are used in recursive interaction with non-elite values (values carefully curated by the movement actors) that these technologies cannot be made useful for the subversion of elite interests. What is important in Pfaffenberger’s argument is that he shows that in order for a technological artifact to fulfill its role in perpetuating power relations, it must come coupled with an ideology that justifies those power relations, ‘all technical features embody a political aim … the technological processes or objects that embody these aims are cloaked in myths of unusual power, myths that justify regularization by portraying it as an activity fundamental to the preservation of civilization and human dignity’ (1992: 285). Pfaffenberger gives many of his own pre1992 examples, but for our purposes here, a more modern technology-cum-ideology is perhaps more useful: e.g. social media and its corresponding ideology/myth that

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technology is a path to democratic freedom through an ‘imperative to connect’ (Green et  al. 2005). As we shall see below, this is a powerful ideology that contemporary movements need to at once challenge and exploit to their advantage. What is significant about this observation of the way technology enacts power, is that if and when the ideology justifying the myth of unusual power is challenged or transformed, the use and meaning of the technology can also be reconstituted. Pfaffenberger’s discussion of the complex practices through which the power of technology is exercised, appropriated, and transformed might help shed some light on how political movements relate to the internet, as well as how the alterglobalization movement’s relation to the Internet was different from that of contemporary post-2011 movements, which operate in a context of ubiquitous computing. Pfaffenberger points out that ‘people who covertly or openly challenge technological regularization find ample areas of inconsistency and ambiguity which they can exploit to interpret technological artifacts and contexts in a different way’ (1992: 299). In Pfaffenberger’s schematic, there are two ways that this challenge can potentially emerge – through ‘technological adjustment’ and/or ‘technological reconstitution’. Technological adjustment is an attempt ‘to make life bearable in the face of regularization’, it is a ‘way of interpreting artifacts and contexts such that the invidious status implications of regularization are neutralized or eliminated’ (1992: 300), but it is not an ‘attempt to reshape artifacts of regularization’ (1992: 303). Technological reconstitution, by contrast, ‘openly attack[s] the foundations of technological regularization’ by ‘actively reshap[ing] technological production processes or artifacts guided by a self-consciously “revolutionary” ideology’ that creates a symbolic inversion he calls ‘antisignification’ (1992: 303–304). Antisignification is accomplished when people ‘craft not only

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counterartifacts but countercontexts as well, in which the counterartifact’s new social implications can become manifest’ (1992: 304). This framework is useful for an analysis of how social movements relate to digital technology because it acknowledges that a single technology can at once both reproduce dominant power relations and be used to challenge those power relations. Similar to Fanon’s (1965) account of the radio in Algeria, in which the radio, formerly ‘a symbol of French presence, as a material representation of the colonial configuration’ (1965: 73), becomes a tool for ‘challenging the very principles of foreign domination’ (1965: 69), Mohammadi and Mohammadi (1994) describe how various ‘small media’ made use of ‘preexisting cultural networks and communicative patterns’ to become vehicles for ‘an oppositional discourse’ during and before the Iranian revolution of 1979 (1994: xx). Here, the political difference lies not in the technology itself, but rather in whether or not a countercontext can be created to re-signify – to attribute new meaning to – the use of the technology. As I will show below, technologies become useful tools for social change when movements create new social contexts (‘countercontexts’) within which to use these tools. It is the transformation of the political values behind the technology that alters the power relations produced and reproduced through the use of the technological artifact. Understanding that the use of digital technology by activists can be an act of technological regularization, adjustment, or reconstitution – depending on the circumstances – is essential to assessing when and under which circumstances the use of these technologies can be understood to be part of social change. The technology itself does not automatically offer movements the potential for social change – quite the contrary: if and when elite values go unchallenged, technol­ ogies help to regularize existing power relations. The particular discursive dilemma for social movements, therefore, is to challenge

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the ‘myth’/ideology upon which these digital technologies rely so as to transform the social context and therefore the infrastructure. The irony, however, is that the particular myth upon which Internet and social media technologies are based is the idea that the technology itself embodies a liberatory, ‘democratic’ potential to generate social change. The idea that corporate technologies such as Facebook and Twitter can create radical social change in the form of ‘Facebook revolutions’ or ‘Twitter revolutions’ is itself a key part of the ‘myth of unusual power’ embodied in these technologies. This myth justifies dominant power relations by marginalizing the user in favor of emphasizing the power of the designers and creators of the technology. In this chapter I argue that it is politically important to understand that that these technologies only become useful to activists (i.e. only become tools for social change) when they are integrated and transformed by movement actors into a larger political infrastructure that generates not only the ability to access the technology, but also the ability to use the technology in a way that is different from how it was intended to be used. This political infrastructure only comes into being when elite values are openly challenged and alternative values are offered in their place. Social movement use of media is therefore much more than the use of technology; it is the creation of a set of social relations, spaces, and principles that together constitute a countercontext within which it becomes possible to use technological tools for the negation or transformation of political power, rather than its perpetuation.

15M and the ‘PAH’ The first example takes us to the streets of Madrid, in Spring 2014, almost three years after the start of the 15M movement. On May 15, 2011 the 15M movement, inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt during the wave of Arab revolutions from December

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2010 onwards, started to occupy public squares all across Spain. Within days hundreds, if not thousands, of squares were occupied. The occupiers initiated a large-scale experiment in assembly-based democratic decision-making involving thousands of people in an ongoing political process of planning actions and creating the necessary infrastructure to provide people with basic needs such as healthcare, food, and housing. Millions of people across Spain flooded to their local squares and started deciding together what they thought should be the future of their country (and the world). This emerging form of ‘horizontal’ politics included a full-scale rejection of politics as usual (Castells 2012; Estalella and Jiménez 2013). The slogan ‘no one represents us’ reverberated locally, nationally, and internationally as a growing disenchantment with representative democracy took hold in the wake of severe economic crisis. ‘We are not commodities in the hands of bankers and politicians’, the other popular slogan of the 15M movement, summed up the level of disempowerment people felt as well as the level of distrust they had in the ability of their representatives to make sound decisions on their behalf. After the rise of the 15M movement, the already strong Plataforma por los Afectados por la Hipoteca, known simply as ‘la PAH’, grew exponentially, becoming one of the largest and most well-known political campaigns in Spain.2 The PAH is a movement for and by people who cannot pay their mortgages, many of whom are facing eviction. The PAH creates a network of mutual aid in which each person who gets help fighting an eviction helps others who are fighting their evictions. The group creates a space in which people come to understand their personal situation not as an individual problem, but as a structural problem for which the banks, government, and economic systems are to blame. As one person actively involved in PAH put it: When the international crisis began and the Spanish housing bubble burst, we had a major

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process of layoffs where people were unable to materially afford their mortgage. Thousands of families started not paying, and the PAH, like its name indicates, served as a platform which attracted many of these people to understand what had happened with their mortgage and the legal terminology being used. The first thing people ask for is information, they are scared and they feel guilty. ‘What will happen? When will they take my home? Will they take my home? What can I do to prevent this from happening?’ The PAH is therefore an information and meeting point for people who have stopped paying their mortgage, for those who are unable to keep affording it, or for those who consciously don’t pay because they are aware of it being a fraud.3

The PAH uses many tactics to fight the mortgage crisis, from direct action to legislative measures and organizes in a decentralized structure of local chapters that each meet face-to-face in social centers, squats, squares, or homes. The network uses digital technology in myriad ways, but the following example shows one way these technologies were present on the street and how the presence on the street was made meaningful through the way technological tools were embedded in a larger political and social infrastructure.

If You Tweet it, They Will Come (2014) It’s a sunny afternoon in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas in Madrid, Spain. We are stood in a small side-street blockading the front door of a three-story apartment building that has just been reclaimed as part of a coordinated day of action in which three buildings across the city of Madrid have been repossessed by the PAH. The police are at both ends of the small street, seemingly waiting for orders, but have kept their distance so far. Despite a strong police presence the atmosphere is one of resolve and celebration. The movement is counting its victories and the people on the street feel strong. As one person from the social center La Villana de Vallekas told me: Right now in all of Spain there are 27 buildings that have been liberated, taken, occupied by the

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platform of those affected by mortgages [PAH]. It is working. This building, like the other 27, has been occupied by people and families who have been evicted.

When I asked her about the specific action happening at that moment in Madrid, she went on to say: This building is the property of Bankia, it was identified as such, it was squatted, families entered and we have groups supporting them. We are organizing an action that has been planned for a long time. We organize support groups so there are people who enter the building and there are people outside supporting them. We also have people watching the issue of the cops, negotiating with them, we have mediators who talk with the cops. We have lawyers who are ready to help for whatever may happen. The police are trying to make us leave right now, but the impulse is to resist, to stay here to keep the occupation going so that these families can live in these houses. … The police are trying to force us out but the feeling is that there are a lot of us. That is why it is important to have a lot of people, the police won’t dare to push us out.

I told her, in my most optimistic tone possible, that it didn’t really seem to me like we had enough people to resist the police successfully. After all, we only had about 100 people, most of whom were milling about and coming and going. She went on to tell me that if the police were to make a move, all she would have to do is send out a Tweet and thousands more people would come. She pointed up to a window across the street and told me that they had a media team keeping an eye on how things were developing, ready to mobilize more people if necessary. In this brief conversation and this small gesture towards the window across the street, she was invoking many layers of activist infrastructure: first the amount of time it took to plan the action, research carried out, the division of labor and allocation of tasks (someone to deal with police, to do legal support, to break into the building, to support outside, etc.). All of these are not unique to this one action but are structural characteristics of how the group operates. The nod to the

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window across the street is a reference to the media infrastructure that the group has developed – now located spatially in the room behind the window – but also embodied in the network of connections and channels that media activists across Spain have worked hard to develop. It is this infrastructure that provides the sense of empowerment in her statement. While it has long been clear that a sense of collectivity, of being a part of a larger group of people who will support you, is a key factor in determining people’s resolve in the face of oppression, the idea that the people on the other end of the smartphone, that these invisible people could be a source of such confidence, was striking. She felt she had a direct line of contact with a set of the invisible people who would receive her signal if she sent it out. But she was not the one who created this communication channel – it was developed over time by thousands of users and media activists and through similar street actions in the past around a set of shared beliefs that were also shaped collectively over time. This power of this hard-earned media infrastructure was impressed upon me the night before the action at a party hosted at the Villana de Vallekas social center, where I spoke with one of the media coordinators for the upcoming action. He told me about the plan for the next day’s action (at that time it wasn’t public what the exact plan was). He pulled out his smartphone. ‘Look’, he insisted, ‘look how many followers we have’. He switched quickly between Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, including the PAH Facebook page and the Twitter account of Ada Colau (at that time, the figurehead of the PAH nationally). He tells me how these Facebook and Twitter accounts are managed collectively. He then points out that the PAH in Vallecas only has 400 likes on Facebook, ‘but some of our posts’ he shows me ‘have 60,000 views. That’s because of the larger network – even small groups can have far reach’. He tells us this to show us how they had tens

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of thousands of people – literally – at their fingertips. He concludes, ‘we can create a trending topic anytime we want’. And indeed they could. Not only PAH, but the 15M movement more broadly has been exceptionally talented at using Twitter to create trending topics. The belief of the activist on the street in the movement’s ability to mobilize an invisible public was not the result of having Twitter installed on her phone. It was the result of knowing that there was a media team in the window across the street and knowing that if she sent out a Tweet an invisible public would become visible. That public would go from being represented only as numbers of followers, likes, shares, and re-tweets to physical bodies on the street. The ability to have Tweets and posts reach a large public was not a result of the technology itself. It was the result of years of mobilization and the work of highly skilled media activists. While other groups and movements have less success creating trending topics on Twitter, the 15M has been successful in part due to multiple collectives of media activists who actively create the ability to reach so many people through the manipulation of the technology. These collectives operate on principles guided by the horizontal politics of consensus decision-making (inherited from decades of movement organizing). As one member of the media collective in Madrid told me (paraphrased from an informal discussion in July 2012), ‘we have consensus meetings to decide which topics we are going to push. We can only push a few per day or else none will get attention, so we have to look at which actions are happening and then choose. We decide by consensus and try to make sure that if we pushed one group’s action today we do another group’s action tomorrow’. He continued, ‘We are not only limited by how many trending topics we can get per day, we also have a lot of people who have donated their accounts to us, but those accounts can only retweet one tweet per day, so we have to be selective in the information we put out there to maximize the impact every day’.

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I asked him how the ‘donate your account’ worked and he explained to me that people can donate their personal Twitter account to the collective and that allows for one tweet per day from the collective Twitter account to be automatically re-tweeted through each person’s personal Twitter account so that they can reach more people in much less time. This strategy collectivizes and maximizes the use of the technology in several ways (through collectives, meetings, and shared accounts) so that the use of the technology better reflects the political values of the group. The creation of these social networks, therefore, required an embodied collective of committed people who met in physical spaces – in the case of these collectives it was often a local squat, but sometimes media collectives met in people’s homes or, as during the occupations, they set up camp in the squares. The use of media by these movements, therefore, should be understood not as the simple ‘use’ of tools that already exist, but as a ‘social infrastructure of communicative channels’ in which infrastructure can be understood as a ‘set of channels’ actively created for a communicative purpose (Elyachar 2010). From this perspective, the tool itself almost disappears in a sea of activities that were intensely present not only online, but in squares, squats, and homes (sometimes turning people’s living rooms into media centers themselves) with multiple computer screens continuously tracking Twitter, Livestream, Facebook, the news, etc. that were inextricable from the continuous conversations that guided political choices made about what to include into the movement’s messaging and what to leave out, what to emphasize, what to share, what to ignore, what to delay.

INDYMEDIA AND THE ALTERGLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT The alterglobalization movement takes us back to a time before ubiquitous computing, before smartphones, and, at the beginning of

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the movement, to a time before most people in the US had any kind of mobile phone at all. The first Independent Media Center (IMC) was set up by activists during the mobilization for the now famous anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. At the time the idea that protestors and sympathizers should spread their own news about the WTO protests in order to pose a direct challenge to mainstream media to take back control of the media was a very radical idea. At the ‘start’ of the alterglobalization movement, the Internet was relatively new. For example, in the run up to the Seattle protests, I received hand-written letters from friends about the preparations underway for the anti-WTO protests, encouraging me go to Seattle as soon as possible. Twitter, Facebook, Livestream, Instagram, etc. were not even on the horizon when activists set up the first Independent Media Center in Seattle, USA. The IMC was set up with the explicit intention of creating activist-generated media content. The idea was for activists to ‘become the media’ themselves. The Indymedia center helped people to create their own news stories. During the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the IMC opened up an office space from which they could coordinate the dissemination of news through multiple platforms: the web, public access TV, community-based radio, and a daily print publication. Anyone who wanted, could turn up at the Indymedia office and sign up – as long as they agreed to some basic guidelines and principles. These multiple forms of media production were all crucial to shaping and controlling the narrative that came out of the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, but in retrospect the website was of particular importance. The website used Open Publishing code that set the model for social media-type communication long before Facebook or Twitter. The Seattle IMC created a platform for people to disseminate their own stories and to access stories directly from the people on the street. As Maqui from Indymedia London points out in a recent interview, ‘I don’t think that saying

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that Indymedia is the “mother of all blogs” is an exaggeration’ (cited in Milan 2010: 89) – a sentiment that I have heard many others reiterate over the years – and Wolfson (2014: 163) argues that ‘many of the social technologies that Indymedia activists and technologists pioneered became the forerunners to the social media revolution today, from blogs to Facebook, Twitter, and community journalism’.4 The Indymedia website was popular beyond expectations. According to Jeff Perlstein, one of the founders of the Seattle IMC, ‘even though [the website] came online [only] the day before [the WTO summit] and we didn’t have any prior advertising, it still got one and a half million hits on the site that week, which was more than CNN’s website that week’ (WTO History Project, October 15, 2000). Indymedia quickly spread around the world and today there are still 177 Indymedia websites around the world on every continent except Antarctica. When you visit any local Indymedia website, the left-hand column provides a list of all IMCs around the world in the form of hyperlinks to other IMC websites. The website becomes a centralized hub that connects all the many local media centers. Wolfson (2014: 157) summarizes the main spatial and organizational logic built into the Indymedia website as follows: Building on this vision [to make a network of communication among all of our struggles and resistances] the indymedia global-communications network aims to cohere a global social movement out of many singular fronts of resistance.

Wolfson (2014: 162) explains that this aim is embodied in three different aspects of Indymedia’s website with a simple three column architecture: On the left side was a geographical list and hyperlink to all of the different local IMC collectives. The center column contained editorial features, which focussed on stories of strategic importance. The right column housed the indymedia open-publishing newswire, where people were able to share their stories.

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These three different columns reflect the politics and infrastructure created through Indymedia. It was a single online space that connected geographically dispersed physical spaces, curated information about those places, and offered people the opportunity to be part of the conversation, or even start a new conversation, regardless of where they were physically located. However, it is not only the website that links. As Perlstein points out in his interview about the WTO planning, IMCs are ‘linked by the website and linked by our relationships with each other’ (WTO History Project, October 15, 2000). The relationships built between media activists is an essential part of the Indymedia project and is an aspect of media activism I often hear activists lament in the era of ubiquitous computing. One of the most important aspects of Indymedia was that it was much more than an online platform for exchanging information, communicating, and spreading news. The creation of Indymedia centers around the world meant that there was a physical infrastructure of people who considered themselves part of a single transnational project. The close relation between Indymedia and the alterglobalization movement reinforced the importance of the physical space of the Indymedia center not just for media activists but for all activists. As one media activist told me, reflecting on the different media landscape of the post-2011 movements compared to that of the alterglobalization movement, ‘I miss the Indymedia days when I could go anywhere in the world and know that I’d have a place to work and stay’. The Indymedia network was more than a way to produce and distribute news; it was a network of mutual aid, embodied in physical spaces as much as websites and guided by specific political values. The example of how Indymedia operated during the anti-G8 protests in 2004, is a small example of a small mobilization, but it shows how Indymedia operated not primarily as a news source, but as an essential infrastructure of the movement that provided channels

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of communication, physical shelter, and shaped the movement’s political practices and values.

Bring a Sleeping Bag (2004) I arrive by bus to the Atlanta greyhound station with a piece of paper in my hand that has the address of the Atlanta Indymedia center and a map of how to get there. I am coming to Georgia, USA to participate in the anti-G8 protests. The G8 will take place on Sea Island just off the coast of Brunswick, Georgia from June 5–10, 2004. I am arriving early, before the mobilization is in full swing, and as far as I know, Brunswick does not have an Indymedia center yet, so I come to Atlanta first. Besides, I am planning to attend the street medic training that will take place in Atlanta before heading down to Brunswick. I have a tent and a sleeping bag with me but otherwise no plan for accommodation or transport. I am armed with only the address of the Indymedia center and with the hope that they will remember the email I sent them telling them I am coming. I do not have a mobile phone, a computer, an iPad, or any other device that would help me ‘connect’ to them if for some reason the address or my navigation skills fail me. I probably did have 25 cents to make a pay-phone call if needed. I am not the only person who thinks that just showing up at an Indymedia center is a perfectly logical approach to joining a mobilization. Many others were using the Indymedia network not only as an information hub, but also as a physical infrastructure of spaces that we considered to be ‘ours’ and of which we could usually make use. Especially when there was a mass mobilization, activists would come from around the world and ‘plug in’ at the local Indymedia center. At around the time I was heading to Georgia, this was posted on the Atlanta Indymedia site: hey where is the g8IMC going to be located? does anyone know yet? I’m coming from AZ to

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help out and I need to know where to get plugged in when I get there! Also does anyone have 2 sleeping spaces free for some fun anarchists/indymedia folks? (posted to Atlanta IMC on May 22, 2004)

The poster doesn’t ask if there will be an Indymedia center, but where. They know that there will be one – it goes without saying. For them too, Indymedia is a logical place to ask strangers for a place to sleep. The poster also knows that this is a system of mutual aid for people who share political ideals. They mention that they are coming to ‘help out’ and that they are ‘fun indymedia/anarchist folks’. This was as mundane an interaction as possible for the alterglobalization movement – if you come to a transnational mobilization to help out, you get housing, food, and a place to ‘plug in’ to the action. This was not a practical matter, but a political one – otherwise only people with a lot of money for hotels, or with local, hospitable friends would be able to come to mobilizations. Usually a G8 mobilization would even have its own convergence center and mass accommodation for people coming to protest, but at the 2004 anti-G8 protests most people stayed with locals in their houses or in tents on their property. Still, despite a lack of an obvious place to go upon arrival, a local organizer in Brunswick posts a re-assuring message on Atlanta Indymedia: If you can make it down here, the G8 countersummit organizers can find you a place to stay. Contact [redacted email address], bring a sleeping bag, and come on down! (posted to Atlanta IMC on May 23, 2004)

Due to the small number of people organizing and the lack of other activist spaces near the G8 summit, in this mobilization more than others, the Indymedia center was functioning on multiple levels at once. As soon as I walked through the door of the old churchturned-Indymedia center it was obvious right away that this Indymedia was not just a place for the production of media, but was also a meeting space, a living space, an organizing

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space, and a hang out space. The woman who greeted and welcomed me was not only from Atlanta Indymedia, but was also one of the main organizers for the week of anti-G8 actions. Her role as both media activist and main organizer was perhaps more exaggerated than usual due to the small scale of the mobilization, but Indymedia activists were often part and parcel of the actions themselves. As Maqui, an Indymedia activist in London, puts it, ‘Indymedia is not about representation, it is about engagement. It is action’, referring to the collective production and circulation of information and the creation of a communication infrastructure ‘focussed on building grass-roots autonomy’ (cited in Milan 2010: 88). Or as one Indymedia activist once told me, exaggerating somewhat, but making an important point about the positionality of activist media, ‘first I help organize the action; then I film it’. Other Indymedia activists took more of a ‘distant’ approach, but the material connections between the movement and Indymedia were inextricable. At the Indymedia center in Atlanta I met many other activists who were coming to town for the mobilization. The Indymedia center became a place for us to watch films about past mobilizations (on a TV and a VHS recorder), to talk about how and why we got involved in politics, about the movement, the future, etc. – a place where we, as previous strangers, got to know each other. It was also a hub of constant organizing. The phone rang almost all the time with ‘problems’ that still had to be resolved before the mobilization. The various ‘roles’ that still needed to be filled were discussed – legal, medic, press, meeting facilitation, etc. – as well as the requirements to join each group. For example, some groups required you to get two other people to vouch for you if you wanted to join the group. The street medics required that you follow a street medic training. Many discussions and so much of the last minute planning happened at the Indymedia center.

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MATERIAL SPACE Although there are political communities that operate primarily online, with a set of political values which together are unique to and define that (primarily) online community, with perhaps the most famous one being Anonymous (see Coleman 2014), in the case of the two movements described here, the physical spaces of movement organizing were essential for the development and creation of the political values at the heart of the ‘countercontext’ being developed. As is clear from the description above, however, we should not think of these spaces as being ‘offline’. In the case of the PAH, nearly everyone present at either the street action or the social center of Vallecas would have had the ability to be online while in the physical space, and in the case of Indymedia, quite often the reason people would go to an Indymedia center would be for the purpose of getting online. At a time when people did not all have laptops, iPads, and smartphones in their pockets, the Indymedia center was often the only place where people who traveled to a mobilization could easily and freely access computers and an internet connection. The media that was at the activists’ disposal, however, was made useful not only by the nature of the media itself, but also, and perhaps primarily, by the politics that permeated the physical spaces in which the media was employed. The infrastructures created around the use of media, were imbued with specific political values. These political values, in turn, were what determined which ‘communicative channels’ (Elyachar 2010, 2014; Kockelman 2010) were created and which were not, and consequently these were key in determining the specific infrastructure that emerged. These political values were determined not online, but in meetings and physical spaces. Indymedia mapped directly onto a network of physical spaces where the media communications were carried out and these spaces reinforced the set of values that

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guided the alterglobalization movement as a whole. The media presence of the PAH and the 15M more generally, on the other hand, was made up of a variety of physical spaces where face-to-face meetings would happen – public squares, social centers, people’s homes and offices, squats, etc. The social center La Villana de Vallekas, for example, where the media activist showed me his phone to demonstrate the online power of the PAH, was a gathering space for organizing actions and socializing. What is significant about the way these media were embedded in physical spaces, therefore, is not just that these spaces are where the media is produced and disseminated, but that these spaces become the site of the enactment of the political values that come to challenge the elite values that are regularized in media technologies. The politics that define these organizing spaces is of essential importance to understanding how and why a technology that is not created for the purpose of political protest can be transformed into a useful tool for social change. Pfaffenberger shows that the power relations embodied in a technology require a justifying ‘myth’ to persist, and so in order to use the technology for emancipatory purposes this elite’s justifying myth needs to be challenged and an alternative interpretive framework needs to be presented. The real political project, therefore, is not using Facebook or Twitter in a savvy way to get many followers, but to do so as part of a political project that presents a different set of political values. There is no shortage of literature that shows the many ways in which physical space materializes power relations (De Certeau 1984; Foucault 1991; Harvey 1973; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Pfaffenberger (1992) includes architecture as a ‘technology’ in his analysis of how technology comes to embody elite values. Space, as a technology, however, refers to both a set of dominant relations and to ‘the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space’ (De Certeau 1984: xiv). When space is

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viewed as an experience, attention is directed to ‘how spaces are produced and manifest in the experiences of those who inhabit them’ (Taylor and Spicer 2007: 333). When space is viewed this way, we can understand how ‘different experiences of space give rise to radically different spaces’ (Taylor and Spicer 2007: 333). The importance of the creation of physical spaces in which people develop new radically different political ideals and values becomes clear when we consider that in order to create a different experience of a given media technology, the ‘foundations of technical regularization’ need to be attacked (Pfaffenberger 1992: 303). The latter value shift occurs primarily through the production and perpetuation of radical political values within the creation of physical spaces of movement organizing that are ‘autonomous spaces’. Pickerill and Chatterton (2006: 734) describe autonomous spaces as spaces that are ‘defined through personal freedom, a mistrust of power and a rejection of hierarchy, and the advocacy of self-management, decentralized and voluntary organization, direct action and radical change’. Polletta (1999: 20) uses the term ‘free spaces’ to refer to what seems to be a similar phenomenon.5 She argues that free spaces within social movements become political as a result of the ‘cultural frames’ associated with particular institutions, ‘what is crucial is the set of beliefs, values, and symbols institutionalized in a particular way’. Polletta (1999: 25) argues that it is not the space itself that creates the emancipatory value for movements, but it is instead, ‘the character of the ties that are established or reinforced in those settings’. In order to create autonomous spaces the dominant way that power operates has to be transformed and radically different beliefs, values, and symbols need to be institutionalized within these constructed spaces. The space created, however, is not singular and the institutionalization of values and beliefs occurs across settings in multiple physical and technological spaces at once. Indymedia

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was created with the explicit intention to provide activists with the tools and infrastructure they needed to transform power dynamics on the basis of a more horizontal theory of connection at all scales that was part and parcel of the alterglobalization movement’s principles (Juris 2005; Juris et  al. 2008). Even when this ideal was not realizable, the guiding principle remained important. The alterglobalization movement had strict anti-oppression principles and an anticapitalist ethos. Many of the more autonomous spaces and groups within the movement invoked the People’s Global Action (PGA) Hallmarks – which were a set of basic principles that defined and created a common ground for the ‘open space’ they were creating. The five PGA Hallmarks were: A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive globalisation; We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human beings. A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policymaker; A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism; An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy. (PGA Hallmarks, https://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/ agp/free/pga/hallm.htm)

Indymedia shared these basic values and in order to open an new Indymedia center the group had to adhere to these basic antioppression principles. There was, in fact, an elaborate process, called the ‘new IMC process (NIP)’, through which a new group became part of Indymedia. This process consisted primarily of helping new Indymedia

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centers to ‘come to learn and embody a range of specific political and organizational values that may not have been entirely shared before entering the network’ (Coleman 2004). It was the insistence on the organizational values that allowed the Indymedia website and network to become a powerful act of technological reconstitution in which activists continuously altered not only the technologies, but also the political context. With Facebook, Twitter, and many other corporate social media tools, this act of technological reconstitution becomes harder. These tools are not controlled by movements themselves. In as far as reconstitution is possible, it takes place in the meetings held by the media collectives, where they actively create complex interconnections between existing corporate tools and other tools of their own making. The structural limitations created by the internal logic of corporate tools, however, is not lost on movement actors who often view Facebook more as a necessary evil than an emancipatory tool. The reality that Facebook is not an emancipatory tool is made blatantly clear on the many occasions when Facebook alters its algorithms and changes which posts get seen and by whom, creating, for example, the option to pay to promote posts. Changes to Facebook’s algorithms impact the visibility of movements’ efforts. Indymedia was a space created, maintained, and controlled by activists. Facebook and Twitter are not – activists cannot determine what the beliefs, values, and institutional logic of the new online spaces will be. The principles that guide Facebook, Twitter, and related technologies are driven by profit and are not in sync with the ‘cul­ tural frames’ of the movement, and whether they intend it or not, they run the risk of perpetuating the process of technological regularization. Of this they are acutely aware. As one activist in the US put it recently, ‘when you post on Facebook, you are adding value to these corporate platforms’. There is also an acute awareness among activists that they are only able to use these

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technological tools as long as the service providers allow it. There are many examples of this lack of control impeding activists’ ability to organize. For example, during the 96 hours of actions organized in the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) in honor of the 2015 Martin Luther King day celebrations, and as part of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the US from 2014 onwards, one group planning an action to shut down the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) – the SFBA’s only trans-bay train transport – had their Facebook page taken down the day before the action. While the reason for the disappearance of Facebook pages remains a mystery, the timing in this case was crucial and the fact that these groups did not control the existence of these pages was a vulnerability. Much like the occupied spaces of buildings, squares, parks, and streets of the past four years, the online spaces used to mobilize are precarious. Unlike the buildings, squares, parks, and streets, however, it is harder to defend online space when providers decide to withdraw them. In a conversation I had with an activist who has been involved in many movement struggles since the early 2000s, this difference was important: ‘When we had Indymedia’, he said, ‘we controlled the site, we produced it, created it, managed it and protected it’. The initial impulse behind Indymedia’s use of Open Publishing was about the desire to let people control information, and Facebook and Twitter do this to a certain extent, but what Indymedia actually accomplished was giving activists control over the media production process – over how the information was shared – and not just over the information itself. In an attempt to create the potential for technological reconstitution, in order to make the technologies serve movement interests rather than those of the elite, media collectives meet online and in physical spaces to figure out how to leverage these tools so as to reach as many people as possible, but at the same time maintain the movement’s principles when using tools that

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are created with other, quite contradictory, principles. These media collectives determine how to manipulate digital media so as to get as much attention as possible (leverage the logic of the tool) while still maintaining and enacting a horizontal movement logic (resisting the logic of the tool). This is a difficult balance to strike. The maintenance of the principles is not purely ideological; it is based on an awareness that in order for the media technology to have the desired impact, a countercontext needs to be created based on radically different values – in other words, the movement needs to have as much autonomy as possible in creating its own political infrastructure around and with the technological tool – so that the meaning and potential use of the tool is determined by them and not corporate interests.

CONCLUSION The examples of the PAH and Indymedia, as well as the links these two movements have to the 15M and alterglobalization movements respectively, show some of the ways that digital technology can be made useful by and for social movements. The transformation of information as a message to be read or an image to passively consume into a call to action occurs not primarily through the digital tool itself, but through the process of signification and anti-signification that is enacted separate from and through the use of the specific tool. This process of signification creates new ‘communicative channels’ that should be considered ‘an outcome of practices of sociality on their own terms as a distinct object of inquiry’ (Elyachar 2014: 461), because these channels are the basis of what connects the ‘signer’ to ‘interpreter’ (Kockelman 2010) so that ‘such a sign can be expressed by the former and interpreted by the latter’ (Kockelman 2009, cited in Elyachar 2014: 462) so that new meaning can emerge. The act of creating meaning, of developing new political values, of creating a ‘countercontext’

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in Pfaffenberger’s terms, is what engenders the technology with a counter-power. The development of new political values is carried out in physical spaces such as media centers and by groups such as media collectives as part of a broader infrastructure that reflects the movements’ beliefs and values. These beliefs and values, as Polletta (1999) argues, are more important in determining the mobilizing potential of a space than the physical space itself, and as Pfaffenberger (1992) argues, they are more important, or at least as important as, the technology itself. The tools become powerful once they are integrated into this movement infrastructure of spaces, beliefs, and values. As Simone (2015) puts it, ‘Infrastructure exerts a force – not simply in the materials and energies it avails, but also in the way it attracts people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capacities’. However, ‘infrastructures are also more than human creations, and as such, their technonatures often trouble political projects’ (Anand 2015), Indeed, some tools are more easily integrated into movement infrastructures than others, and the extent of control that the movement has over the tool can be important for how reliable and valuable this integration can be over time. Upon integration, the tools can quite directly affect the dynamic between those trying to change the way power operates and those trying to maintain power.

 2 

 3 

 4 

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The writing of this article was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme and a portion of the field research was funded by the Democracy and Media Foundation.

Notes 1  The extent to which these spaces were ever actually horizontal is another matter. These principles

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were, of course, very hard to enact, especially when the groups and people involved either did not understand or did not support horizontality as a political goal. See Graeber (2002, 2009), Juris (2008), Maeckelbergh (2009, 2011), or Razsa (2015) for ethnographic discussions of how horizontality played out in practice in the alterglobalization movement. See Sitrin (2006) for more on horizontality as a principle and practice, specifically in the case of Argentina, where the term first became popularized internationally. While it is certainly possible that given the extent of the eviction crisis in Spain (in 2013, an average of 184 families were evicted every day in Spain) this movement would have grown to its current scale even without the 15M movement (as some activists insist), the 15M movement mobilized millions of people across the country, centralized people in public squares, and thereby increased the visibility of the movement. Throughout this paper in the discussion of the 15M movement, I am using interviews that were carried out as part of the Global Uprisings documentary film project (http://www.globaluprisings. org). Some of the interviews were carried out by me and my co-producer Brandon Jourdan, other interviews were carried out by him in my absence. In some cases, as is the case for this interview, I was not present during the interview. The discussion of the Indymedia case is based mainly on my own research prior to the Global Uprisings project, but is also informed by my co-producer’s experiences as an active participant in, and co-founder of, several Indymedia centers. I also draw on many informal conversations I have had with activists around the world who have lived through both the Indymedia days and the uprisings since 2011. Twitter too, came from TxTMob, developed by activists for anonymous mass communication during mobilizations. Retrieved from http://www. aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelgeeks/2015/11/ technology-steal-capitalists-151110150718814. html (accessed August 3, 2016) For our purposes here, the terms ‘autonomous spaces’, ‘free spaces’, and ‘open spaces’ can be considered synonymous.

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15 Resisting the New: On Cooptation and the Organisational Conditions for Entrepreneurship Daniel Hjorth

OPENING: HOW WE ARRIVE AT THE PROBLEM This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of resistance in organisations by shifting the focus of our approach. The irony is that such an understanding might itself resist my attempts to welcome it into the text. There is a fascinating withdrawnness in how we often understand resistance. Resistance shows itself in that presence hesitates and participation is held back. Resistance has this response side to it, as a reaction to an act. What resists does not come, at least not fully, when called upon; its intensity increases with reactive passivity. The dominant view on resistance in organisations prescribes that we place emphasis on how management initiatives (the call) are resisted ‘from below’ (the response). As someone interested in the organisational conditions for creativity and entrepreneurship – an interest that has become more central not only in organisations but in

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society as a whole – I find we need to better understand how initiatives ‘from below’ are resisted from ‘above’. But also how resistance can itself be creative, often by embedding a new call in the response. Such creative response becomes more and more common simply because creativity ‘from below’ in this ‘age of entrepreneurship’ gets more and more common. We have educational systems throughout almost the entire world that have offered students entrepreneurship education and training since at least the early 1990s (Brockhaus et al., 2001; for EU: EU-report, 2012; Martínez et  al., 2010). Employeebased entrepreneurial activity is increasingly stimulated (Bosma et al., 2013) and together this suggests that we will see more entrepreneurial activity from more entrepreneurially oriented graduates in future organisations of all kinds. This also means that creativity increasingly emerges in the context of organised conditions. Management, historically with strong emphasis on efficiency and

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control, handles this sometimes by affirming, but often by negating. Such negating, however, to be more effective, is often disguised in what seems like an agreement. Philip Selznick (1949) developed the concept of cooptation to understand such negation disguised as agreement. Understanding cooptation requires that we can analyse how forces and will makes resisting part of what it is to creatively manage for the purpose of securing control. Not simply as an act of stopping, but as a creative act that Nietzsche described as separating active forces from what they can do. This is a response that creatively snatches the vital seed from the hand of initiative only to plant it in infertile soil. Admittedly, this is a generalisation that needs to be qualified in relationship to empirical contexts. Not all management is cooptive and not all levels of management in organisations benefit from coopting creative initiatives from below. In this sense I am focusing here on a limited problem, which I still believe is indeed a problem, and one less often attended to in organisation studies. It is this problem of how management, which needs to secure control and economic efficiency, creatively handles newness emerging from below by seemingly agreeing with it by using cooptation. The way I attend to this less noticed problem of organisational creativity or organisational entrepreneurship (Hjorth, 2012) is by using Nietzsche’s concept of force – active and reactive – as a way to disclose how cooptation works. Selznick and Nietzsche are thereby placed in what I find is a collaborative relationship. Nietzsche’s idea of ‘negation’, operating as a separation of active forces from what they can do (Deleuze, 2006: 59–65), predates the concept of cooptation. In the face of newness, management is inclined to react according to a ‘will to nothingness’, a will to preserve ‘what is’ and so maintain control. This is a negative will to power (in Nietzsche’s terms), a negation. Dominant forces (higher in a hierarchy) achieve negation (the becoming-reactive of forces) when they separate active/creative forces from

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what they can do: ‘The affects of force are active insofar as the force appropriates anything that resists it …’ (Deleuze, 2006: 63). This seems to describe what Selznick (1949) calls cooptation, and I want to explore this understanding of cooptation in this study as I try to make a conceptual contribution, hopefully adding precisions to the study of the politics of resistance (to creativity or entrepreneurship) in the context of organisation. It is reasonable to conclude that too many innovation attempts in large organisations fail due to organisational politics (cf. Bailey, 1973; Frost and Egri, 1991; Engwall and Jerbrant, 2003). However, whereas the focus primarily is on how management initiatives meet resistance in the organisation, here we thus turn it around. Ever since the early writers on corporate entrepreneurship, corporate innovation and intrapreneurship – Burgelman (1983, 1984), Kanter (1983), and Pinchot (1985) – the theme of large organisations’ problem with maintaining creativity is recurrent. This focus and approach to organisational change/renewal/innovation/entrepreneurship is inaugurated by Machiavelli’s note that leadership of change is the most difficult of tasks (1992 [1513]). Such a focus has provided a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, organising knowledge-creation on organisational change for centuries: it is often the top’s struggle to find followers that frames change in organisations. In a post-industrial economy and society (Austin and Devin, 2003; Hjorth, 2003) innovation is based on creativity and entrepreneurship from ‘the many’ (Baldwin and von Hippel, 2011; Chesbrough, 2003; Kallinikos, 2004; Jarrar and Smith, 2014), which means we need to also focus on the way creativity from the multitude, innovation-attempts ‘from below’, are resisted by organisations’ dominant coalition or policy-making centre – top management. I will focus on entrepreneurship as a still rather dominant discourse on business creativity in organisations (McCabe, 2009). I distinguish between enterprise and entrepreneurship by stressing the importance of creativity

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for understanding the latter (Hjorth, 2003). Enterprise discourse has promoted a managerial and thus manageable form of enterprise, whereas entrepreneurship represents much more of a contestation of control and economic efficiency long held central by management. Management necessarily thrives on efficiency and control as secured by routines (this is why we invented management; Hoskin, 2004), whereas entrepreneurship ventures to operate outside ‘the pale of routine’ as Schumpeter (1949: 258) put it. My approach thus also exemplifies an attempt to not focus on top management’s resistance as a conventional form of domination and control. More alternatives for handling such resistance would come from a nuanced understanding of how such resistance works. One way to reach such an understanding would be to recognise top management resistance as itself creative. Management needs to handle the fact that most organisations today officially promote entrepreneurship (Drucker, 1985), wherefore resisting it would be politically difficult to defend. Management, however, wants the enterprising employee, not entrepreneurship. The former is manageable, the latter brings the organisation to the virtual fringe of its existing order, and affirms the leap. Beyond the leap there is openness and suspense of routine and templates. Resisting entrepreneurship thus has to find creative ways to achieve that end. This would also mean that more subtle forms of resistance are used, and this is why I turn to cooptation. Recognising this would mean we break with another long-standing ‘paradigm’, this time in critical management studies (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992), inaugurated by leaning on Harry Braverman’s (1974) influential study of labour and monopoly capital, namely to attribute creativity primarily to those that resist power ‘from above’. A key thesis in such work is Braverman’s idea of deskilling, which proposes that capital deskills labour and separates ‘mind and hand’ in order to maximise efficiency and

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control. Whereas Braverman focuses much on Taylor’s ideas, the centrality of deskilling and separation of planning and execution in the industrial economy work organisation is probably as much a question of Fordism (moving assembly line; Chandler, 1977: 280) and Elton Mayo’s ideas (counselling interview), than just Taylor’s (O’Connor, 1996, 1999a, 1999b). The effect of the recent (and partly on-going) harsh restructuring of mature industrialised economies since the 1980s means that competition from recently industrialised economies (primarily Asia), and the subsequent integration of billions of ‘new workers’ into the global economy, is met by a strong emphasis on knowledge-intense, creative work (Alvesson, 2000, 2004; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Maintaining control in such organisations does not rely on separating hand and mind, but rather on tightly linking the mind with an ICT-enhanced system architecture. Design parameters for such architectures focus on directing desire rather than controlling behaviour (Little and Ray, 2005). Thus I focus on organisational entrepreneurship as an increasingly common form of ‘creativity from below’. This also means I limit the study to the context of larger (mature) organisations. I recognise the fact that one way for management to handle the dilemma that they should welcome entrepreneurship yet need to maintain control, is to use external consultants as the ones that legitimately get to affirm creativity and entrepreneurship (e.g., Hislop, 2002). Being external and temporary releases them from the internal hierarchy that prescribes a certain relation of forces. Also, the small and growing firm, arguably the primary outcome of entrepreneurship in most mature, late-industrialised economies (Birch, 1979), precisely for being in the mode of becoming (Chia, 1996) rather than being, represents a context where entrepreneurship does not threaten a managerial order. The small and (rapidly) growing company lacks the level of formalisation, standardisation, and hierarchy alongside which

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management control systems co-emerge with various levels of managerial positions (Goodale et al., 2011; Whitley, 1999). In the growing, small firm, there is not so much an order to control, as there is a need to establish procedures and systems that can provide a sense of order (Davila, 2005). However, in the larger, mature organisation, the entrepreneurship- and innovation-focused postindustrial time represents a dilemma for top management. Entrepreneurship is officially important, but would bring the organisation to operate ‘outside the pale of routine’, which is the landscape where control hardly can be secured. Management would thus be put on hold, lose its dominant (hierarchically superior) status as a force directing other forces. To prevent this, creativity is appropriated, coopted and creatively resisted. With this opening we have arrived at the challenge this chapter takes on. It aims at providing a reconceptualisation of resistance, emphasising top management’s resistance to creativity ‘from below’, and top management’s resistance as itself a form of creativity. I proceed towards reaching such a reconceptualisation by first contextualising the problem in the time of enterprise discourse and post-industrialism. I then look closer at the background to top management’s resistance where I have found a precursor in Philip Selznick’s concept of cooptation, itself predated by Nietzsche’s analysis of negation as a will to power that makes active forces reactive. Having done so, I embark on fleshing out a more nuanced understanding of organisational resistance and relate this to previous studies to assess whether something new has been brought out.

RESISTANCE IN THE ENTREPRENEURIAL ORGANISATION The old model for the industrial organisation, leaning heavily on bureaucratic ideals of hierarchy, formalisation, specialisation,

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standardisation, division of labour, and impersonal operations, has been subject to severe critique (Josserand et  al., 2006). Bureaucracy, however, is seldom subject to proper critique. Rather, a popular kind of bashing typically refers all defects of large organisations to them being bureaucratic. Lately, bureaucracy critique has come mainly from new public management and enterprise discourse (du Gay, 2000). Central to the latter is its framing of the ‘commercial enterprise’ as the ideal form of organisation. This is also why it is important to distinguish between enterprise and entrepreneurship. The former is an ideological discourse carrying a program for societal change, whereas the latter describes creation processes on the level of the new venture. It operates beyond the organised condition, creating new orders, demanding new organisation (Hjorth, 2012). In the wake of enterprise discourse, emerging as one solution to the demands of the post-industrial, innovation-focused organisation, we are no longer hiring people into roles, neatly inscribed into the bureaucratic manuscript. Rather, the knowledgeintensive, creative organisation welcomes people in their full behavioural complexity (cf. Kallinikos, 2004). Creativity is likely to emerge from the idiosyncratic, affective or less tamed sides of our organisational selves. Building competitive advantages on knowledge-intensive, creative/entrepreneurial work has made mature, late-industrialised economies see post-bureaucratic forms of organisation emerge as a way to get as much of the creative mind as possible into the organisations’ innovation processes (Florida, 2005). We cannot afford to keep the Fordist mind–hand separation, the division of planning/analysing and execution, when knowledge-intensive work thrives on collective creativity and distributed leadership (Austin and Devin, 2003; O’Donnell and Devin, 2012). Management will favour the enterprising employee, rather than entrepreneurship, since it operates with control that benefits from individualised responsibility

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and normalisation to make measuring and comparison possible (McNay, 2009). There is no average in entrepreneurship (Gartner, 2008). Still, it has been difficult to show that the post-bureaucratic organisation is indeed less bureaucratic (Harris, 2006; Vie, 2010). One plausible candidate for explaining this is the thesis that it is related to the parallel development of information technology at work, with the subsequent ‘endless’ capacities for control placed quite literally in the hands of management (Bloomfield and Coombs, 1992; Dooling, 1998). Management is ambivalent here: more initiative and creativity from ‘all’ is needed, but an urge to control seems to persist and suggests resistance as the natural response to emerging newness (Mcdonald, 2004; Morris et  al., 2006). To the extent that post-bureaucracy has resulted in eliminating the middle management echelons of the traditional corporate organisational structure (Smith, 1990), this seems to have happened in parallel to a ‘responsibilisation’ and individualisation (Lemke, 2016) that is promoted as part of the enterprising employee (du Gay, 1997). The enterprising employee should organise her-/himself and take necessary initiatives to change/renew work, meaning middle managers are not needed since information and communication technology allow control to be maintained in a remote form (McCabe, 2009). If post-industrial economy and organisation means deskilling is less likely due to the need for knowledge-intensive, intellectual work to form the collective basis of dynamic innovation capabilities (Teece et  al., 1997), control and efficiency needs to be secured by different means. As noted above, since Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911), knowledge has been the core-legitimising source of managerial authority (O’Connor, 1996), and separation of conception and execution a central element of control (Braverman, 1974). Indeed, the deskilling-bureaucratic form of organisation was also most successfully applied

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in the industrial organisation where control and economic efficiency were married, and of course it rested on knowledge as the core of rationalisation: ‘It would be a question … whether in a socialistic system it would be possible to provide conditions for carrying out as stringent a bureaucratic organisation as has been possible in a capitalistic order’ (Weber, 1978 [1956]: 224–225). Weber also adds: ‘Bureaucratic organization means fundamentally domination through knowledge’ (ibid.: 225). Bureaucracy-furrows thus ran deep in the industrial organisation, indicated by what we have reported from studies of the information-systems supported, innovationfocused ‘post-bureaucratic’ organisation. Given Weber’s remark, it seems that to the extent that management can control knowledge via information systems, it can still ‘dominate’. Following Foucault (1977), we do not see power in negative terms, but (with Nietzsche: Deleuze, 2006) as a result of forces in relation to other forces. When forces are related, one force is dominant and others are dominated, and in such ‘applied form’ power can thus be constraining or freeing. The genealogical element of force is ‘will to power’, which is what creates forms that dominated forces need to follow (ibid.: 50–51), such as in a hierarchy. Force, power, and will are thus understood as also productive and even creative. Power has no essence; it is simply operational. It is not an attribute but a relation: the power-relation is the set of possible relations between forces, which passes through the dominated forces no less than through the dominating, as both these forces constitute unique elements: ‘Power invents [the dominated], passes through them and with the help of them, relying on them just as they, in their struggle against power, rely on the hold it exerts on them’ (cited from Foucault, with addition, by Deleuze, 1988: 27–28).

When post-industrial work calls upon the ‘whole human’, since it needs creativity and entrepreneurship, management moves from surveillance and discipline – directed at a role

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Resisting the New: on cooptation

performed in a hierarchy – towards administration and control (Deleuze, 1991) of that ‘whole human’. From an entrepreneurship perspective, this is why prorol (Hjorth, 2012), the opposite to control (contra-­rotulus, against what is rolling), is threatening as it accelerates movement rather than adjusts to regain predictability and stability. In knowledge-intensive organisations knowledge, new, specific and unique knowledge in particular, comes more and more from the minor, margin, or outside (Open Innovation) and from ‘below’, as a result of higher education and networking. It follows that the Taylor–Braverman–Weber thesis that managerial authority, legitimacy and domination is held by a knowledge-monopoly needs reconsideration. Following Nietzsche – as understood by Foucault and Deleuze – it is important we understand the concept of will to power (manifested as a capacity for being affected; Deleuze, 2006: 62) that can make one force dominate another. ‘What the will to power wills is a particular relation of forces, a particular quality of forces’ (ibid.: 85). No longer is this done through separating ‘mind and hand’, by deskilling in the traditional sense. Rather, and this follows Elton Mayo’s lead (O’Connor, 1999b), it is done through designing employee subjectivity and codification of ‘knowledge-work’ (Ball and Wilson, 2000). With seismic precision, Foucault anticipated this shift from discipline to control (Deleuze, 1988), a control that Deleuze identified as achieved through directing desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 1992). Given the work of enterprise discourse during the 1980s and 1990s (Miller and Rose, 1990), one of the dominant desires in today’s organisations would be to perform as an enterprising employee (McCabe, 2009), a subjectivity tightly associated with being valuable to the organisation (cf. Vallas and Cummins, 2015). It is not the ambition of this chapter to investigate the impact of informationtechnology on managerial control (Aneesh, 2001; Jian, 2008). Nor to focus on entrepreneurial

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ways to resist managerial control (Hjorth, 2005). Rather, I propose that newness/uniqueness has become such an important factor in innovation-focused organisations (Sofka and Grimpe, 2010), that resistance ‘from above’ is an increasing problem to understand and handle if we want to analyse the organisational conditions for creativity/entrepreneurship (Hjorth, 2012). We need to understand how promoting the enterprising employee operates as a cooptive force of control in organisations. It welcomes the entrepreneurial but integrates the enterprising employee. The former is a tactical player that prorols organising into creativity, whereas the latter fits management strategies for controlled innovation. If management resists prorol (loosening of the stable, accelerating movement, tactical art of creating organisation) coming ‘from below’ by coopting the entrepreneurial, what practices for handling such resistance would then be available, and how would this benefit organisational creativity?

MANAGEMENT’S RESISTANCE There is a long-standing analysis that suggests larger organisations struggle with a tendency to rest with the comfort achieved (O’Toole, 1995) or lose their capacity to dance (Kanter, 1989), which prevents sustained innovation (Drucker, 1985). In this literature, by management scholars writing for managers, the cure is something the manager should achieve by changing the organisation (critiqued by Dent and Goldberg, 1999; Ford et al., 2008). This way, change is re-inscribed as a result of active managerial intervention and focus is shifted from managers (managerial thinking) as sources of incapacity to dance. As critical studies of organisational change and resistance have shown (Courpasson et al., 2012; Thomas and Hardy, 2011), understood in this way, change is assumed to come from above and be resisted from below. Managers are thus an

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emblematic example of Nietzsche’s ‘higher men’ that are set to convert the reactive into the active. Without an understanding of the power and will involved, and how becomingactive is a result of a more complex and deeply seated process of affirmation of the active, creatively reactive forces will triumph in organisation. In addition to being the philosopher of force and will, Nietzsche is the genealogist that saves us from critical thinking that is still fettered to the reactive forces of dialectical labour (cf. Hoy, 2004). Rather than being outside in opposition, driven by negative will, Nietzsche and Spinoza stress difference and joyful speculation from inside. Previous studies of change and resistance include a problematisation of a more conventional, managerialist approach to resistance. Such approaches typically see resistance as reaction to change-initiatives coming ‘from above’, and something managers have to overcome (Dent and Goldberg, 1999). Dent and Goldberg are puzzled over the persistence of this ‘model’, and while they focus on showing that people generally don’t resist change (only what comes with it in terms of status and standing), and that ‘people in power will work toward maintaining the status quo’ (ibid.: 26), they lack a historical perspective beyond the Second World War times that would have informed them (see Bendix, 1956, and Barley and Kunda, 1992, below) of how resistance reflects its time and its dominant discourse. Today, as I have suggested, this is enterprise discourse. Ford et al.’s (2008) study of resistance to change partly continues Dent and Goldberg’s theme, noting that the prevailing view ‘… of resistance to change tell a one-sided story that favours change agents by proposing that resistance is an irrational and dysfunctional reaction located “over there” in change recipients’ (p. 362). What they add is a constructionist reading of how resistance is attributed to recipients actions, as a result of the change-agents’ interpretations. A more relational analysis allows them to point out

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further reflections missing from the dominant story on resistance to change in organisations: change-agents’ own actions might be what constructs resistance, and what is constructed and represented as resistance might also contribute effectively to change. This constructionist and relational view does indeed add to a more reflexive understanding of resistance. What still falls off the table, though, is attention to power. Thomas and Hardy (2011) bring power into their ‘reframing’ of resistance to organisational change. In a more critical, Foucauldian, tradition they see both demonising (they place Dent and Goldberg, 1999, here) and celebrating (they locate Ford et al., 2008, here) views of resistance as both lacking or operating with an inadequate analysis of the dynamics of power and resistance. It is inadequate, in their view, as it legitimises asymmetrical power relations between change agents and change recipients – ‘it is still the change agent who determines which responses constitute resistance and which do not’ (Thomas and Hardy, 2011: 324). They see change as a result of the dynamics of power and resistance, making the question of who resists and why into an obsolete one. Their argument is that previous attempts have practical, ethical and theoretical problems that their reframing addresses. Whilst their Foucauldian approach brings power into the analysis, and does so by viewing it in a dynamic relation to resistance, they describe previous approaches as having ‘contributed to a situation where asymmetrical power relations – and the privilege of change-agents – are taken for granted’ (ibid.: 325). By shifting focus from ‘who’ to the productivity of dynamic and multiple power–resistance relationships, Thomas and Hardy also say they contribute to a more processual conceptualisation of change. This is a welcome move, but leaves outside the analysis how change ‘from below’ is creatively resisted by those that benefit from defending status quo or maintaining the present order.

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Resisting the New: on cooptation

Selznick’s concept of cooptation helps us get a grip of this problem of management’s handling of creativity ‘from below’. When competition presses top management to become more innovative, Selznick suggests they respond by seeking to establish legitimacy, authority and control by ostensibly or substantively sharing power. It becomes necessary, Selznick points out, ‘… to insure that the coopted elements do not get out of hand, do not take advantage of their formal position to encroach upon the actual arena of decision’ (1949: 261). The result is creative resistance to creativity in the form of an official welcoming of change that means adaptation to novel circumstances – enterprising behaviour. Examples of cooptation would include integration of new elements into the formal power structure, such as appointing a chief innovation officer, or declaring that the board has someone with formal responsibility for innovation. We have seen this tendency within organisations’ board of directors who receive external pressure to do something about gender imbalance. Not seldom is this handled through electing a woman to the board, trusting this is not the actual start of a better gender balance, but an official recognition that one is indeed ‘working on it’, ‘aware of it’, i.e., ostensibly acting upon it (cf. Ahl and Nelson, 2015). Before we study Selznick’s concept of cooptation further, let us contextualise the entrepreneurship– management relationship.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND MANAGEMENT’S RESISTANCE To further specify and position this chapter’s interest in top management’s resistance as central to the organisational conditions for entrepreneurship (defined as organisationcreation; Gartner, 2012; Hjorth, 2014a), I will use Schumpeter’s distinction between adaptive and creative response to change/ newness (1934; 1947). In the context of

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today’s emphasis on innovation, I chose to understand newness in a Schumpeterian way. Schumpeter’s idea of ‘creative destruction’ also bears clear Nietzschean influences (Reinert and Reinert, 2006). Schumpeter focused on innovation as the creation of new resources or new combination of existing resources. He calls this entrepreneurship, and he does so in important ways: (1) he relates it to organisation; and (2) he identifies the problem we struggle with in this paper, i.e., that in the context of the formal organisation, entrepreneurship will be dominated by management as a negative-reactive force in the service of control (Schumpeter, 1947). Schumpeter said that it is ‘setting up’ and ‘organizing’ that stands out as what identifies the distinctly new/entrepreneurial. Together with Katz and Gartner (1988) and Gartner (2012), I define entrepreneurship as ‘organisation-creation’. Entrepreneurship creates organisation where this is lacking or only virtually present. By a Schumpeterian understanding of entrepreneurship I mean a force that disrupts equilibrium, loosens the organised conditions of the present and instils movement. The use of prorol, above, furthers this understanding into the context of organisations. In this sense, management in organisations, focused on economic efficiency and control, is inclined to seek equilibrium, whereas entrepreneurship is loosening of the stable, accelerating movement, a tactical art of making the new organisation necessary. Adaptive response makes use of known principles and practices, as served to you by habit and routine, and codified in the rationality of your profession. Creative response, however, requires that one moves beyond the ‘pale of routine’ and acts ‘irrationally’ as in risk-taking and improvisation (cf. Hjorth, 2014a; Moura, 2013; Schumpeter, 1949). Given the fact that mainstream management discourse has normalised enterprise behaviour as a rational part of the principles and practices of management, resistance against entrepreneurial creativity is politically

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problematic. There is an irreducible conflict in the management–entrepreneurship relationship in organisational contexts to the extent we define entrepreneurship as organisation-creation bringing action (and thought) to the virtual fringe of things (Hjorth, 2014a, 2014b). Since entrepreneurship prorols and management in the age of innovation officially embraces entrepreneurship, the response needs to be both politically subtle and creative in order to be effective and escape critique (being blameworthy). Control cannot be maintained beyond the virtual fringe of things, simply because that is the land of the loosened, fluid, ripe for newness (Smith, 2007). Beyond the virtual fringe of things, action is free movement since we have no concept in place that could prescribe the proper/efficient ways of making the new happen. We can thus understand the constant proliferation of management concepts as a race to get ‘definitional’ access to the land of newness, which is constantly entrepreneurially opened. Management wants newness but cannot stay in the open, where the entrepreneurial thrives. Following Bendix’s (1956) analysis of ideologies of management in the course of industrialisation, and Barley and Kunda’s (1992) study of ideologies of control in management discourse, we can locate the present in the post-industrial era. Barley and Kunda define ideology as ‘a stream of discourse that promulgates, however unwittingly, a set of assumptions about the nature of the objects with which it deals’ (ibid.: 363). Bendix (1956) shows how, in early industrialisation, an entrepreneurial class frees themselves as well as the workers from a rule based on a privileged landowner class, characterised by an autocratic and patriarchal style of managing. Bendix (1956) shows that the voice of the entrepreneurs in the history of running companies, has been for freedom and multiplicity (ibid.: 182–185). It was a ‘… movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and great proprietors of the soil …’ (John Bright, quoted by Bendix,

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1956: 188). Between the First and Second World Wars, there is an intense bureaucratisation of increasingly large corporations, and what we now refer to as the professional manager emerges as the dominant class (Burnham, 1941). The entrepreneurial function is de-centred and management emerges into its golden era. Bendix (1956: 422) writes: ‘The increasing size of industrial enterprises entail certain administrative problems which in each case require for their solution the addition of salaried personnel’. Post-industrialism breaks this as this is the first time in modern capitalism that the new problem is innovation and the solution is not adding salaried personnel, but instead the entrepreneurialisation of existing ones or collaboration according to the rational of open innovation: ‘… the proportion of entrepreneurs has sharply declined [from those born 1771–1800 to those born 1891–1920] in the course of American industrialisation at the same time that the proportion of “industrial bureaucrats” has increased’ (Bendix, 1956: 425). From having been placed into the margin during highindustrialism, the entrepreneur – now in the shape of the enterprising employee – in postindustrialism becomes the object of interest of managerial discourse. Barley and Kunda (1992) identify (with the help of Schumpeter, amongst others, as a theorist of business cycles) the years 1980–1992 as an era of contraction, characterised by normative ideologies labelled by them as ‘organisational culture’; the years 1992–2008 could perhaps be described as an era of economic expansion and enterprise, interrupted by the latest financial crisis, and characterised by ICT-driven rational ideology. However, with enterprise entrepreneurship necessarily sneaks in. Entrepreneurship is not only an object of interest to managerial discourse in the tamed form of an enterprising employee, it is also entrepreneurship as such. The return of entrepreneurship into organisations – given Bendix’s (1956) historical analysis – thus means a multiplication of entrepreneurship.

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Resisting the New: on cooptation

It returns as part of managerial enterprise discourse, and as such it makes the employee an object of managerialism (Deetz, 1992; Grey, 1996), now as the enterprising employee (du Gay and Salaman, 1992). But it also returns as a social force of creation, as a socially performed imagination of what could become. It brings action to the virtual fringe of things, and releases incipient newness (Hjorth, 2012). This is a new ambivalence, where management and entrepreneurship meet, facing the task of collective creativity in the service of innovation. Innovation can happen as a result of enterprise, or as a result of entrepreneurship. The former means it is planned and controlled. The result is what we describe as innovation management. The latter means it is emergent and eventful (Katz and Gartner, 1988; Gartner, 2012; Hjorth, 2014a, 2014b), and because the event cannot be prefigured, it cannot be controlled with reference to a model or routine (Massumi, 2002). Entrepreneurial organisation-creation is speculative and pragmatic and ‘… can only work itself out, following the momentum of its own unrolling process’ (Manning and Massumi, 2014: 89). It will thus breach internal templates and bring the need for organisation-creation. Management has few other means to handle such unpredictability other than ‘bringing it in’. Enterprise discourse has served this need, popularising the enterprising self as the most valuable employee subjectivity (Gordon, 1991). Cooptation is a way to ‘bring in’ so as to control without stopping.

COOPTING – CREATIVE WAY TO MAINTAIN CONTROL Selznick brought cooptation into the study of organisations, as one form of a politically subtle and creative form of resistance. He did so in a pioneering organisation studies piece – TVA and the Grass Roots – published in 1949. I will use this as an example that I try

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to update and develop given the impact of enterprise discourse that has hit work-life since the days of Selznick. Selznick’s concept is developed as a creative response that counteracts change in such a way that the power balance (often status quo) or control is maintained. Here is how Selznick describes the conditions that lead an organisation to resort to cooptation: When the legitimacy of the authority of a governing group or agency is called into question. Every group or organization which attempt to exercise control must also attempt to win the consent of the governed. Coercion may be utilised at strategic points, but it is not effective as an enduring instrument. One means of winning consent is to coopt into the leadership or organization elements which in some way reflect the sentiment or process the confidence of the relevant public or mass and which will lend respectability or legitimacy to the organs of control and thus reestablish the stability of formal authority. (1949: 13)

Prioritising control and equilibrium, and reestablishing the ‘stability of formal authority’, often means reestablishing the relevance of routine and structure, which now exposes management to legitimacy trouble in the dawn of enterprise discourse. However, unlike in Selznick’s time, when winning consent was the preferred option, today resisting creativity instead has to pass as a decision not against entrepreneurship but for enterprise. Going further back than Selznick, cooptation is a concept that is prefigured in the discussions on passion in earlier philosophy. Passion is a concept that brings force and will into the centre of our attention. Thinkers with focus on the role of passion include Spinoza and Nietzsche, both revitalised by Deleuze’s re-reading of them: The nature of the passions, in any case, is to fill our capacity for being affected while separating us from our power of acting, keeping us separated from that power. (Deleuze, 1988: 27)

There is no need to go into the discussion of action and passion in Spinoza. Suffice to note that action seems to be reserved for God

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or a complete understanding of oneself and God/Nature (Spinoza treats God and Nature as the same) so that an adequate idea is the source of action. Humans thus seem to be moving between sad and joyful passions. The former is characterised by an encounter with another body that does not agree with me, and which thus decreases my capacity to act. Joy, on the other hand, is characterised as an encounter with another body that agrees with me and thus increases my capacity to act. Now, Nietzsche adds an important theory of forces and will, one which helps us renew our understanding of how cooptation works as a way to maintain control in organisations when the dominant coalition – top management – faces potential actions taking the organisation beyond the virtual fringe of things: What Nietzsche calls an active force is one which goes to the limit of its consequences. An active force separated from what it can do by reactive force thus becomes reactive. (Deleuze, 2006: 66)

Reactive forces can separate active forces from what they can do if the former is allied with a negative will to power, a will to nothingness (stability, control, status quo) that is embodied by the dominant coalition, the ‘formal authority’ in Selznick’s language. Now back to Selznick, who seems to agree with Nietzsche and Spinoza as he notes: Cooptation reflects a state of tension between formal authority and social power. This authority is always embodied in a particular structure and leadership, but social power itself has to do with subjective and objective factors which control the loyalties and potential manipulability of the community. Where the formal authority or leadership reflects real social power, its stability is assured. On the other hand, when it becomes divorced from the sources of social power its continued existence is threatened. (Selznick, 1949: 15)

In order to prevent formal authority – top management – from being ‘divorced’ from the sources of social power, thereby losing its capacity to act or decide (dominate), it needs to separate entrepreneurial forces from what

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they can do. This is thus a reactive force that draws on the power of a will to nothingness to maintain control. Selznick calls this cooptation, which earlier I called a form of creative resistance: ‘Cooptation is the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy-determining structure of an organisation as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence’ (Selznick, 1949: 13). In order to understand the more precise relationship between force and will, a somewhat lengthy quote from Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche is instructive: The will to power is the genetic element of force, that is to say the element that produces the quality due to each force in this relation. […] The difference in quantity and the respective quality of forces in relation both derive from the will to power as genealogical element. Forces are said to be dominant or dominated depending on their difference in quantity. Forces are said to be active or reactive depending on their quality. […] active and reactive designate the original qualities of force but affirmative and negative designate the primordial qualities of the will to power. […] action and reaction need affirmation and negation as something which goes beyond them but is necessary for them to achieve their own ends. Finally, and more profoundly, affirmation and negation extend beyond action and reaction because they are the immediate qualities of becoming itself. Affirmation is not action but the power of becoming active, becoming active personified. Negation is not simple reaction but a becoming reactive. (Deleuze, 2006: 53–54)

How is this Selznickian cooptation done in our case? It is done by affirming ‘enterprising behaviour’ as a reactive force, one attentive to managerial strategies. This pre-empts the organisation’s need for entrepreneurship. In the logic of cooptation, this prevents formal authority from becoming divorced from social power: enterprise behaviour is aligned with managerial strategies. Entrepreneurship, which brings action to the virtual fringe of things, loosening the organised condition, brings action beyond ‘the pale of routine’(Schumpeter, 1947), and is as such a threat to control. Cooptation welcomes enterprise so as to exclude entrepreneurship.

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This is a creative form of resistance. This distinction between enterprise and entrepreneurship is thus important for an analysis of why entrepreneurship is difficult in organisations (Burgelman, 1983; Kanter, 1989; Zahra, 1991). Entrepreneurship – as active, creative force – is separated from what it can do (we learn from Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy of force and will) and coopted as enterprise (we learn from Selznick). Entrepreneurship, which in Schumpeter’s terms creatively responds to changes, thus meets with a dominant force, management. It exemplifies negation as a ‘becoming reactive’, a will that goes beyond force and is necessary for it to achieve its own end: control.

COOPTATION AS CREATIVE ORGANISATIONAL RESISTANCE As was shortly elaborated in the opening to this chapter, the nature of resistance is such that it responds to action. In our simplification we see management as the dominant force in organisations, and one that needs to maintain control. This would mean they operate in the genre of adaptive responses to new conditions in the environment (according to Schumpeter, 1947). Entrepreneurship, the dominated force in organisations, seeks to achieve newness/difference, meaning they operate in the genre of creative response (ibid.). Cooptation as elaborated by Selznick includes informal and formal cooptation. The former is explicitly described as part of ‘an adaptive response’ (Selznick, 1949: 35). Selznick suggests that informal cooptation describes when an actual sharing of power happens. However, the whole point with cooptation is to allow for a partial change in order to maintain authority and control over the whole. Formal cooptation, on the other hand, describes when only the responsibility for power rather than power itself is shared. This is thus more cosmetic, a ‘front’ is

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created – ‘the open incorporation of accepted elements into the structure of the organization’ (1949: 260). As part of cooptation this prevents change from happening, but allows for a sharing of responsibility, which helps to make authority more legitimate and thus control to be maintained. He hypothesises: ‘[C]ooptation that results in an actual sharing of power will tend to operate informally, and correlatively, cooptation oriented toward legitimization … will tend to be effected through formal devices’ (ibid.: 260). Formal cooptation ostensibly shares power (ibid.: 261), whereas informal cooptation substantively, but partially, shares power. Selznick inscribes both formal and informal cooptation in the ‘genre’ of defensive mechanisms. On a higher level they would thus serve a negative will to power seeking a status quo when it comes to power and control: ‘Cooptation is the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy-determining structure of an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence. This is a defensive mechanism …’ (ibid.: 34). Generally, cooptation serves the securing of legitimacy, authority, and thus control over the organisation. Selznick also points out the dilemma: if one ignores emergent creativity with implications for how things are run, the goal of coopting (i.e., neutralising forces that threaten to change power) is missed, and tensions can escalate. If, on the other hand, cooptation is based on an actual (substantive) sharing of power, ‘the continuity of leadership and policy may be threatened’ (ibid.: 261). Also informal cooptation, substantive sharing of power, thus needs to focus on long-term control. I would say management learnt that lesson (surely also from Selznick), but that the price might have been an additional dilemma: entrepreneurship is but a too ‘rare stranger’ to most organisations (Sciascia et al., 2007). I have related this to a theorisation of creativity in the context of an established order, one contemporary with Selznick’s

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1949 publication on cooptation, namely Schumpeter’s (1947) distinction between adaptive and creative response. Creative responses cannot be foreseen ex-ante as they generate unexpected outcomes, which induce uncertainty (Grazia, 2012: 5). Adaptive response is defined as: ‘whenever an economy or a sector of an economy adapts itself to a change in its data in the way that traditional theory describes’ (Schumpeter, 1947: 150). Reading Selznick as a Schumpeterian, interested in the organisational conditions for creativity or entrepreneurship, can further aid us in our ambition to better understand forms of resistance. We should recognise that there is a curious sense of timing here, where Selznick (1949) reads James Burnham’s (1941) The Managerial Revolution and Schumpeter publishes Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). Burnham and Schumpeter are both onto the same analysis – a worry that the rise of a new managerial class, co-evolving with large corporations and the dawn of business schools as we know them (O’Connor, 2012), would mean a new exploiting group is in place with detrimental impact on imagination due to action being increasingly based upon ‘the teamwork of specialists’ (Schumpeter, 1947: 157) and their need to plan. It is noted also amongst economists (see Papandreou, 1952; also in Foss, 2000) that Schumpeter and Burnham articulated a similar thesis describing how the rise of a managerial class within the context of a more centralised bureaucratic system will come to dominate.

CONCLUSION This chapter can be seen as partly aligned with the critique of conventional resistanceto-top-management studies as raised above. In particular, a more power-oriented and dynamic view of resistance is one that has animated this attempt to reconceptualise

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resistance to reach a more nuanced understanding. Emphasising entrepreneurship as organisation-creation, and thus something that withdraws from management’s domain of control, is one source of novelty in this analysis. Entrepreneurship does not call when management calls upon it. Whereas Selznick (1949) showed how management can maintain control by partly sharing power or merely sharing responsibility, our analysis is updated precisely with reference to a postenterprise-discourse world. Distinguishing between enterprise and entrepreneurship, or between managerial and entrepreneurial entrepreneurship, enables us to better understand creative managerial resistance. Whereas enterprise discourse allows management to control through directing desire – the desire to be an enterprising employee – the managerial subject-position is of course also an object of this same discourse. Cooptation would work to explain how the enterprising employee is made controllable by sharing managerial power or responsibility in the official organisation. The enterprising employee is playing on management’s playground and ultimately seeks to excel in being enterprising. Entrepreneurship, to the extent it creates organisation, withdraws from enterprise discourse as a minorising force (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Hjorth and Steyaert, 2006). Minorisation ‘… describes the transformative forces of the inferior, of the non-chosen, of a people characterized only by movement, by being re-composed by the entrance of every new member, a people beyond the possibility of resting on a position defining what they are (as with being majoritarian)’ (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2006: 69). Knowing that the majority (not necessarily quantitatively dominant, but forcewise dominant) will seek to resist creativity by bringing you in – this is the point with cooptation – the power of the minor language (the language of prorol, of action beyond the virtual fringe of the existing order) becomes more clear (cf. Vallas, 2003).

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Coopting attempts from the majority seek to bring the entrepreneurial into enterprise behaviour. It seems nurturing the ‘foreign language’ of the minor, made necessary by more extended journeys into the landscape of newness, is what will force the majority to coopt or creatively resist from positions further and further from the stable centre. The minor impacts like a transformative insinuation, step by step, act by act. For entrepreneurship, the plan must be to make free movement, in the loosened condition that follows organisation-creation beyond the fringe, attractive enough for others not to resist coming along. It is a nudging tactic, which does not so much resist how top management (majority) creatively resists entrepreneurial attempts to create but, rather, returns again and again as an active force, as a call upon a missing people, a people to come – a minorisation of the majority. And the lesson to learn? The lesson would be resonant with my previous use of Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the relationship between strategy and tactics (de Certeau, 1984, 1997): opposing the dominant organisational coalition, the strategy-makers with a strategic demand, a formal request will often generate a strategic reply, a formal adjustment. Then you get the formal cooptation Selznick has identified. Rather, what you would like to do is to tactically strike, blow by blow, and not demand strategic change, but be interested in informal cooptation that means a substantive sharing of power. If we have said, in this corporation, that creativity and innovation is of strategic importance, and there are intrapreneurial people that actually do something creative, we cannot but create space for play (Hjorth, 2005) for those. Had they requested strategic initiatives from top management, we could always have given them formal cooptation as ‘reply’, resulting in no substantive sharing of power, no new space for play, but formal integration of intrapreneurship into the decision-making authority or policy-making centre of the organisation. The majority would simply

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have gotten quantitatively more. Difference, however, would have been postponed.

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Part IV

Languages of Resistance

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16 Musical Style, Youth Subcultures, and Cultural Resistance Ryan Moore

Music and youth subcultures have become indispensable features of cultural resistance and social movements. This is both despite and because of the fact that music and youth subcultures have become immensely valuable aspects of the culture industry. As young people became a coveted demographic of consumers, music and other cultural forms rooted in the resistance of oppressed groups were converted into commodities for mass consumption. Nevertheless, commodification has had the contradictory consequence of extending the reach of subversive musical styles – which authorities have often vehemently tried to repress – into the lives of young people. These subversive musical styles are the foundational element of youth subcultures, whose symbolic expressions may be commodified but never fully contained by the co-opting forces of the culture industry. This chapter is organized as a social history of the relationship between music, youth culture, and resistance. I begin by sketching the

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most influential theories of resistance among subcultures, giving particular attention to the Birmingham School of cultural studies. These theories are then advanced by considering issues of race as they emerge from the exchange of black and white music, and in their relationship to the commercial culture which promotes an image of authenticity and coolness to young consumers. The rest of the chapter proceeds in a roughly chronological manner. After examining the contrasting ideas about music which emerged from Africa and Europe, the analysis continues to consider how urban migration and the development of the music industry shaped the foundations of popular music in the twentieth century. The 1960s represent a crucial turning point in the connection between youth, music, and resistance. The crisis and breakdown of the international political economy in the 1970s form another pivotal moment, as this social context shaped the development of punk and hip-hop. The latter half of this chapter follows the connections between

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protest movements and punk and hip-hop from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. The discussion ends with an examination of the role of punk and hip-hop in the contemporary social movements of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

YOUTH, SUBCULTURES, AND RESISTANCE The concept of subculture originated with the Chicago School of sociology in the first half of the twentieth century. These sociologists used the concept to describe the different cultures that emerged in a developing urban context, largely among immigrants and their children. Subcultures were characterized as deviant in relation to the core values of the American middle class (Becker 1973; Cohen 1955; Cressey 1932; Thrasher 1927). A more critical concept of subculture was developed by British scholars at the Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies, better known as the Birmingham School. In contrast to the Chicago School, the point of departure for the Birmingham School was Marxism, and they conceptualized subcultures as expressions of symbolic resistance from working-class youth against the dominant classes. The Birmingham School revised orthodox Marxism’s notion of a determining base and a determined superstructure, thus allowing them to theorize that culture could be a relatively autonomous means of resistance instead of just social reproduction. Their main idea was that subcultures take on a spectacular form by appropriating commodities and using them in innovative and unintended ways. Subcultures assign new, subversive meanings to commodities in the process of creating style (Cohen 1997; Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; McRobbie 1991; McRobbie and Garber 1997; Willis 1978). Birmingham School scholars argued that the subcultures of working-class youth

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maintained a complicated relationship with the ‘parent culture’ of the working class at large. The mainstream parent culture of the working class includes elements of resistance and hostility to authority, but overall it is more conventional and accommodating to hegemonic society (Hall and Jefferson 1976). Youth subcultures are never totally separate from this parent culture, as both are responding to the conditions of social life in the working class. The way that subcultures represent ‘imaginary’ or ‘magical’ solutions to the structural problems was exemplified by skinheads, who sought to recover a lost sense of working-class community by adopting a proletarian style (Cohen 1997). Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) was an especially influential study of youthful resistance that emerged from the Birmingham School. Hebdige argued that subcultures issue an indirect challenge to hegemonic power through the use of signs. Tracing the development of subcultures from the teddy boys and mods and rockers to the skinheads and punks, Hebdige presents their semiotic forms of stylish resistance in the social context of a breakdown of post-war Britain’s liberal conditions. Subcultures take banal objects which seem to have no symbolic meaning, like a safety-pin, and they appropriate those objects to give them new meanings and uses for which they were not intended.

MUSIC AND RESISTANCE Most of the musical styles which have upheld resistant qualities in the United States especially originated with African-Americans and African culture. These cultural forms managed to survive the intense repression of slavery, and during the twentieth century the urban migration of African-Americans and growth of the music industry enabled the sounds of jazz, the blues, rhythm & blues, and rock ‘n’ roll to emerge as popular music,

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albeit under conditions of continued racial hostility. The musicians associated with these styles formed subcultures defined by their inscrutable slang, eccentric style, and defiant demeanor. With the expansion of the music industry, mass media, and consumer culture, these African-American forms of music and culture began to attract an audience of disaffected white youth. The music of black Americans also merged with the populist styles of rural whites – particularly country & western and folk music – in the creation of hybrid genres like rock ‘n’ roll and folk rock. These musical styles provided the foundation for a youthful culture of opposition during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The expansion of the music industry, mass media, and consumer culture allowed these previously repressed forms of music and subculture to find large audiences, but at the same time they diluted their subversive impact. Various appendages of the culture industry quickly absorbed the language and iconography of the Sixties counterculture and incorporated them in marketing to young consumers. The counterculture’s discourses of self-expression, immediate gratification, and personal freedom were eagerly appropriated by advertisers, and ideologically they set the stage for a rightward turn to neoliberal capitalism. Since then, capital has systematically converted youthful innovation, cultural authenticity, and even rebellious disturbance into sources of exchange value and profit. This is exemplified by the gentrification of urban spaces, as difference and authenticity – expressed through music, fashion, and art – become catalysts for the transformation of deindustrialized neighborhoods into revalued spaces of capital. Nevertheless, resistance has continued to emerge from various musical styles and youth subcultures, despite the constant threat of co-optation. Since the 1970s, punk subcultures have not simply engaged in symbolic gestures of defiance but also created a network of alternative media and organizations by utilizing a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic.

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Whether in the form of urban squatting, culture jamming, computer hacktivism, or the occupations of Wall Street and other public places, punk subcultures and the DIY ethic have become an indispensable element of contemporary social movements. Yet resistance is not only continuing to develop in subcultures like punk, which subsists on the margins of popular music and mainstream culture, but also from styles of music and culture which operate in the industry’s center, namely hip-hop. Though plagued with contradictions and constantly vulnerable to co-optation, hip-hop is still unrivaled as a medium of self-expression available to disenfranchised urban youth. While thoroughly mediated by commercial culture, hip-hop music and style have become the basis for a language of resistance with global reach.

AFRICAN AND EUROPEAN ROOTS In the making of an economy based on slavery in the Americas, there was violent repression of the various expressions of African religion, language, kinship, and music. Nevertheless, some aspects of the culture that slaves brought with them from Africa did manage to survive. One vital space where African music and culture was able to endure was in the city of New Orleans, in a place that came to be known as Congo Square. In West African culture, music constitutes social relationships in which individuals have unique roles and opportunities for improvisation, but are nonetheless interdependent as they work together in the creation of an integrated sonic ensemble (Chernoff 1979). Music, dance, and religious worship are inseparable activities, while rhythm functions as an invitation to participate through singing, dancing, or drumming, or at the very least in clapping hands, stomping feet, snapping fingers, and nodding heads (Floyd 1996; Jones 1963; Small 1987; Southern 1997). When African slaves in the Americas or

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Caribbean islands engaged in open revolt against slavemasters, they often used drums and other musical instruments to communicate and maintain solidarity. Afterwards, the use or mere ownership of drums and other instruments by slaves was strictly forbidden in most of the colonies. European colonizers and Church authorities violently repressed this West African culture linking music, dance, and worship. Their predecessors had done the same to the festivals of the peasantry during the Middle Ages. The peasantry’s traditions of festivity gathered people in celebration through music, dance, costume, and numerous forms of bodily pleasure. Festivals offered a reprieve from work and disciplinary power, and they strengthened the social bonds within a community while temporarily inverting the hierarchies of the class society. In place of festivals, the Church superimposed a hierarchical symbolic order that suppressed the human body and collective joy. Religion supplanted the magic and mystery of country life, as the Church seized control of the rituals and symbols that constitute the culture of a community. Meanwhile, the aesthetic standards of European music devalued rhythm, which became associated with savagery and social disorder. In the dominant aesthetic of ‘classical’ music, there would be a clear divide between musicians and their audiences, musical works were supposed to be consumed in silence and stillness, and musical performances occurred in designated spaces and times separate from the routines of everyday life (Attali 1985; Bakhtin 1984; Ehrenreich 2006). Despite violent state repression, resistant forms of music and culture were able to endure in new forms. Sustaining West African tradition while responding to American oppression, the blues developed as the preeminent musical form of AfricanAmericans. The blues enabled music to mimic the emotions expressed through the human voice, particularly in the use of flattened notes that came to be known as blue

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notes. These blue notes are played or sung at a pitch lower than their corresponding notes on the major scale standardized by Europeans. Jazz developed as a purely instrumental form of the blues. Jazz musicians utilized brass instruments and emulated marching bands, but here again they played with a unique style that was arranged in syncopated rhythms and imitated the expressive sounds of human voices. Like the blues, jazz made use of spirituals and the music of the church, but musicians played them in a rough or ‘dirty’ style that differentiated them from church music and often led them to be denounced by the religiously devout (Cone 1972; Jones 1963; Murray 2000).

URBANIZATION AND THE GROWTH OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY The urban spaces of New Orleans, where different cultures interacted and confronted one another in street parades, funeral marches, outdoor parks, and elicit nightclubs, played a vital role in the development of jazz and several other musical styles. Beginning with World War I, the Great Migration of AfricanAmericans from the rural South into the rapidly industrializing cities like Chicago and Kansas City would have extraordinary consequences for music. In an urban environment, jazz became faster and louder, while blues musicians often sang about being lonely in the strange world of the city. Music frequently imitated the sense of movement and the sounds of an industrial city, especially trains, in the sound of what Albert Murray (2000: 117–18) called ‘locomotive onomatopoeia’. The early years of the Great Migration coincided with the development of radio and the recording industry. These media were deeply discriminatory – the recordings of black musicians were labeled ‘race records’ and white musicians were credited with inventing jazz – but they still offered an unprecedented opportunity to

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spread the blues and jazz to a wider audience. At least until the Great Depression decimated the recording industry, African-Americans constituted a significant niche market for musical recordings, and jazz and the blues had even begun to reach some white consumers, especially among the young. In response, jazz was widely condemned as ‘the devil’s music’, as mainstream magazines like the Ladies Home Journal warned its readers that young people were being morally corrupted while they danced along to ‘the abominable jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory center’ (quoted in Dumenil 1995: 135). The youth culture of the 1920s was made possible by an extension of public schooling and the targeting of young consumers in advertising, fashion, and the culture industry. The segregation of young people into a distinct social group enabled the formation of subcultures characterized by symbolic resistance to social norms. For instance, the flappers were a pioneering subculture which emerged in the 1920s, composed of young women who defied the dominant forms of femininity through their distinctive fashion and association with the hedonism of the ‘Jazz Age’. The flapper’s signature was a short, bobbed hairstyle, a modern and androgynous alternative to the long, flowing hairstyles which prevailed among Victorian women. Flappers were also associated with shorter skirts and the heavier use of cosmetics, stylistic markers which suggested more assertive attitudes toward sexuality and overall greater independence of self. Like all the other youthful subcultures which followed, flappers would be exposed to the larger public through the mass media, who invariably represented them through a prism of sensationalistic anxieties about changing gender roles and sexual behavior. Nonetheless, the 1920s were a decade of major changes among young people who were increasingly engaged in a range of premarital sexual activities and had begun the practice of going on dates without chaperones. Though sensationalized, the images of

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flappers in the mass media – dancing boisterously to jazz, smoking and drinking in public, etc. – were a reflection of significant changes in gender roles and sexual norms occurring in the 1920s (Dumenil 1995; Fass 1977; Latham 2000; Savage 2008). Jazz continued to be the predominant music of youth culture during the 1930s, though in a modified style that was known as swing. Youthful enthusiasts of swing formed a subculture known as ‘jitterbugs’. However, with the Great Depression and the radicalization of the labor movement and significant sectors of the American populace, some forms of music not only reflected the revolutionary spirit but became forces of social change in their own right. This was particularly true of folk music, which maintained an enduring connection with the labor movement. The folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan played key roles in traveling the country and recording music for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In 1940, Woody Guthrie emerged as the labor movement’s leading troubadour with the release of his Dust Bowl Ballads, an album which chronicled the economic hardships he encountered while traveling from Oklahoma to California. As folk musicians like Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, the Almanac Singers, and Josh White became major voices in the class conflicts of their time, theatrical musicals like Pins and Needles and The Cradle Will Rock also dramatized the conflicts involving garment workers and steelworkers, respectively. The struggles for racial justice were also expressed in Billie Holliday’s anti-lynching song ‘Strange Fruit’ and Duke Ellington’s musical Jump for Joy. These different musical forms were all included in the ‘cultural front’, a range of expressions which supported the multiethnic, multi-racial, working-class movements of the New Deal era, either through the commercial media or in the statesupported Works Progress Administration (Denning 1998; Eyerman and Jamison 1998; Lieberman 1995; Roy 2010).

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Swing was commercially popular during the 1930s, but a new style of jazz began to emerge in the early years of World War II. This new sound that would be called bebop was faster, more complicated and experimental, and less danceable than swing. As the era of big bands came to an abrupt halt during World War II, the sounds of bebop developed mainly among instrumentalists who gathered together for improvisational sessions in afterhours clubs. The music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk came to define bebop as a sound that was more challenging and difficult, seemingly composed to be appreciated by other musicians instead of a mass audience. The frenetic sound of bebop was complemented by the subcultural style of ‘hepcats’ or ‘hipsters’ who expressed an attitude that was aloof or subtly defiant in dress, slang, drug use, and a general opposition to the conventional lifestyles of ‘squares’. With its glorification of urban life, voluntary poverty, and outsider status in relation to mainstream society, the subculture of hipsters was an American counterpart to the artistic bohemia exemplified in nineteenth-century Paris. In the American jazz scene, bebop and the hipster subculture originated at a critical juncture for race relations, a time during World War II when the continuing oppression of African-Americans stood in glaring contradiction to the demands for their service and sacrifice in the war effort. In August of 1943, Harlem – where the bebop scene had largely originated in the neighborhood’s nightclubs – exploded into a riot that lasted for two days after a white police officer shot and killed an AfricanAmerican soldier (DeVeaux 1997; Erenberg 1998; Gitler 1985). The Great Migration accelerated during and after World War II, as the demand for labor in the defense industries fueled the exodus from the rural South into the cities. As the Great Migration brought blacks and the blues into industrial cities, there was a comparable movement of whites and the styles of country & western music that had developed

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across rural America. The mixture of these sounds that originated from working-class musicians in the South and Midwest enabled the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. Most of the early rock ‘n’ roll was recorded and released on independent labels, but this music was able to find a wider audience because a bevy of local AM radio stations needed programming to fill airtime, and the new format of 45 rpm records allowed singles to be more easily packaged and distributed. Rock ‘n’ roll was subsequently adopted by young people who enjoyed increased spending power in the affluent society of post-war America. Although rock ‘n’ roll did not directly address political issues in its lyrics, the music itself could be liberating for young people through an appeal to sexuality, leisure, and pleasure, particularly in the repressive, conformist atmosphere of the 1950s. Rock ‘n’ roll was therefore met with a moral panic (Cohen 1972) that was similar but more intense than the one levied against jazz, as various authorities from government, churches, parents’ groups, the mass media, and the music industry sought to repress the music while expressing deep anxieties about its supposedly corrupting influence on young people (Altschuler 2004; Gillett 1983; Martin and Seagrave 1993; Peterson 1990).

THE SIXTIES: MUSIC, YOUTH, AND THE COUNTERCULTURE The 1960s were a pivotal moment when young people brought about significant changes to the political systems and cultural norms of societies in many parts of the world. The student activism of the New Left and a broader counterculture grew in the US during the 1960s, and oppositional youth culture and student movements would become international phenomena during the chaotic events of 1968 and the turbulent years which followed. In the US, college students played a leading role in the Civil

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Rights Movement during the early 1960s, and opposition to the Vietnam War later in the decade incited the student movement’s expansion on an international scale. The counterculture’s influence proved to be more diffuse, as an anti-authoritarian style and sensibility spread among young people in search of personal liberation. Music was central to these symbolic acts of resistance and the most significant medium for expressing the emerging ideas of dissenting imagination. Although the individualism of the counterculture often conflicted with the collective efforts of the New Left, the youthful culture of opposition also significantly shaped the theatrical tactics and egalitarian ethos of those movements for social change. While the link to radical politics was largely severed after the 1960s, the antinomian culture which developed during that decade, particularly its music, would exert a lasting influence on various youth subcultures that followed. In 1960–61, college students activated a wave of protest with sit-ins and freedom rides that spread through the South and led to the formation of groups like the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During these years of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, the music of AfricanAmericans, in the form of rhythm & blues, doo wop, and ‘girl groups’, maintained a consistent presence at the top of the sales charts. Motown also developed as the largest black-owned corporation in the US at this time, as its founder Barry Gordy perfected a formula for writing and producing songs that could appeal to a mass audience of blacks and whites alike. Nevertheless, commercially successful black musicians conspicuously avoided addressing the political issues of their time. Music was an important element of the Civil Rights Movement, but the songs most often heard during its demonstrations were taken from gospel or folk, not commercial pop. In retrospect, the changing times were most evident in the increasingly unpopular form of jazz, where a new style of ‘free jazz’

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was embraced by instrumentalists like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler and subsequently incorporated in the pioneering music of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. Whereas jazz had previously been condemned, by the end of the 1950s it had reached new levels of legitimacy as an art form that was taught in thousands of American colleges and high schools. Free jazz, however, violated all of these musical conventions in the process of creating a new form of collective improvisation. As free jazz desecrated the solidifying orthodoxy, it foreshadowed the succession of cultural and political revolts against conventions and authorities throughout the social system during the 1960s (Anderson 2007; Monson 2007). Rock music came to the forefront of the resistance in the second half of the 1960s. As the original rock ‘n’ roll metamorphosed into rock, it came to be expected that music would be socially relevant and artistically innovative. Much of this change was caused by an aesthetic and political intersection between folk music and rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1960s, a cultural collision led by Bob Dylan and followed with the emergence of folk rock. Folk advocated the ideal that rock music could and should address the sociopolitical issues of its time. It also expressed a distrust of commercialism and the music industry while promoting the idea of community in which there is minimal separation between performers and audiences. At roughly the same time, the Beatles were setting new musical standards that advanced rock ‘n’ roll from entertainment for teenagers to a more serious cultural form. In the wake of these musical innovations, rock musicians aspired to the categories of high culture and an ideal of the auteur, and by the end of the 1960s new aesthetic standards claimed that rock could be a form of art. In this brief but pivotal time, an ethos of experimentation took hold within rock music, and the primary feeling expressed through rock music was optimism about the possibilities for social and political transcendence (Gendron 2002; Moore 2014).

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The counterculture of the 1960s was composed of college students and young people in the rock music and hippie subculture as well as the social movements of the New Left. Theodore Roszak (1969) was the first to argue that they should be grouped together as a ‘counterculture’, despite all their differences, because both were created by young people in opposition to the American ‘technocracy’ (also see Keniston 1968). The technocracy that developed from post-war forms of modernization provided this counterculture with its various targets for revolt: the heartless American war machine; the conformity of the organization man; intractable government bureaucracies; an atomized landscape of suburbs and highways; soulless consumer materialism and the standardization of mass culture; the rationalization of an educational system enmeshed with industry and the military. However, young people of the counterculture did not simply rebel in opposition to American society, but also to realize their promises of social and personal development. These were not simply movements of resistance but also experiments in renewal, growth, and possibility. The search for sources of personal and social transformation – and the confidence that they would eventually find those sources – characterized both the hippies and the New Left, even if they differed on what needed changing and how to realize those changes. The rebellions of the 1960s took shape in opposition to technocracy, but they were conceived in a maelstrom of flux and growth and nourished by the utopian vision of a post-scarcity society. Meanwhile, if music made by AfricanAmericans in the early 1960s had been intentionally non-controversial in an attempt to reach a mass audience, by the late 1960s it was absorbing and expressing the spirit of resistance which permeated black America. Whereas the movements of the early 1960s centered on the struggle for Civil Rights in the South, in the late 1960s they were roused by rebellion in the cities and affirmations of

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cultural pride. Urban uprisings spread from Watts, Newark, and Detroit and facilitated the formation of militant groups like the Black Panther Party, while at the same time black culture and its African roots came to be celebrated rather than suppressed through assimilation. This change was evident in music, especially in the sounds of music characterized by deeper, funkier rhythms and a greater willingness to address social issues; a cultural shift could be heard in the transformation of established artists like James Brown, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, or in the emergence of new groups like Sly and the Family Stone, War, Parliament, and Funkadelic. A comparable change shifted the focal point of black music from Motown, where hit songs were created through standardized methods of studio production, to Stax-Volt and Atlantic Records, which sought to maintain a less processed, more authentic sound. The late 1960s also brought significant changes to jazz, even though its commercial fortunes declined throughout the decade, with Pharaoh Sanders, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis adopting a more Afrocentric approach to their experimental music (Guralnick 1986; Neal 2003; Smith 2001; Werner 2006). The militancy of young dissidents increased during the late 1960s, culminating in dramatic confrontations in the streets and on college campuses during protests against the Vietnam War and American racism and imperialism. By 1968, student protests had become international phenomena, as major disruptions spread from Prague to Paris to Tokyo to Mexico City. A form of protest music had developed through the fusion of folk and rock music, producing anthemic songs like Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’ and Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ along with thoroughly politicized groups like the Fugs or Country Joe and the Fish. Bob Dylan had of course been the trailblazer in fusing folk and rock, but he became more reclusive and deliberately apolitical as the

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decade wore on and the social conflicts escalated. Conversely, the world’s biggest rock star, John Lennon, was increasingly politicized and eventually began associating with the Yippie radicals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin after relocating to New York City. Writing protest songs became de rigueur among rock bands, while the music itself grew louder and more cacophonous. The most explicitly political band to emerge was the MC5 from Detroit, where they maintained a close connection with countercultural guru John Sinclair and his White Panther Party. More generally, many people imagined that rock music, in combination with psychedelic drugs, could act to liberate bodies and expand minds, particularly at concerts and festivals which facilitated collective joy among people who felt elevated beyond their ordinary selves (Doggett 2007; Gitlin 1987). By the late 1960s, the style and rebellious sensibility of the counterculture had been absorbed into the cultural industries of advertising, fashion, film, and music, which processed the new look and sound for sale to a massive generation of young people. At the same time that the New Left was imploding while being attacked by state repression, the counterculture lost many of its resistant qualities and would become increasingly individualistic in the 1970s. The growth and decline of the counterculture coincided with pivotal changes in international political economy. During the 1960s, advertising had not simply followed but also anticipated the counterculture in its mockery of conformity, rejection of deferred gratification, and appeal to sensuality and pleasure (Frank 1997). The counterculture presented significant challenges to patriarchy and racism, and youthful dissent placed some constraints on American imperialism, but the pursuit of pleasure and nonconformity expressed through music and style were easily steered toward consumerism and the ideology of neoliberal capitalism. During the early 1970s, a global economic crisis signaled the exhaustion of the system which had prevailed since the end of World

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War II, provoking the reactionary insurgency of the ruling capitalist class to dismantle the welfare state and free capital from regulation (Harvey 2005). The turn toward neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s would be supported by an ideology which exalted freedom and individual liberty against the menace of government and bureaucracy. Countercultural ideals were easily recuperated and co-opted by capitalism during this transition to neoliberalism. Following the demolition of the Fordist system based on mass production and mass consumption, capital adopted new forms of ‘flexible accumulation’ which catered to a wider variety of consumer tastes and lifestyles while allowing for faster adaptation to new styles and trends (Amin 1994; Featherstone 1991; Harvey 1990).

PUNK AND HIP-HOP IN THE POST-FORDIST ERA Following the youthful insurrection of the 1960s and the crisis of Fordist capitalism, there was a proliferation of youthful subcultures and musical styles. Since the 1970s, punk and hip-hop have been the two forms of music and youth culture most commonly associated with resistance. The resistant elements of punk are rooted in its do-it-yourself methods of cultural production, which have nourished independent labels, fanzines, and other alternative media created in opposition to the corporate forces of the culture industry. The punk aesthetic of refusal and recombination is not only evident in music and style, it has also shaped the horizontal forms and confrontational tactics of many contemporary social movements. Punk emerged after the counterculture had lost most of its utopian spirit and rock had become the best-selling musical style in the rapidly expanding record business. The music and style of punk were based on negativity and confrontation, with a sound that was loud, crude, and disorderly and

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a look that was menacing and revolting. Punk style was thus conceived as the antithesis of the counterculture’s bright colors, carefree attitude, veneration of nature, and idealistic faith in peace and love; likewise, punk music was short and sloppy as rock had become increasingly complex and self-important. The scene that developed in the mid-1970s at CBGB in New York’s East Village was the product of subcultural interactions between music, art, and bohemian living in a city that was socially and physically deteriorating. Punk had a more overtly political meaning when it was adopted in Britain, where youth unemployment was skyrocketing, antiimmigrant violence was spreading, and society as a whole seemed to be on the verge of collapse. The Sex Pistols brought punk into the center of the national media after cursing on television and then desecrating the image of the Queen during her Jubilee in 1977. British youth formed a punk subculture that not only represented the chaos in society at large but also created symbolic disorder by combining and profaning various signs and styles. Punk’s initial impact was primarily made through style and semiotic disturbance, but in Britain it also began to link young people with movements for social change. In opposition to Britain’s turn to the political right, the Rock Against Racism campaign began with a series of interracial concerts which brought punk bands like the Clash together with reggae, rocksteady, and 2 Tone ska bands (Hebdige 1979; Heylin 2007; McNeil and McCain 1996; Savage 1993). Punk took new forms and meanings on the west coast. A stark contrast between the punk scenes in Los Angeles and San Francisco extended the divide that had emerged between the hippie and rock scenes of the two California cities in the 1960s. The San Francisco scene, led by the Dead Kennedys, was more political. Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, in the aftermath of the assassinations of mayor George Mascone and city supervisor and gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

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Biafra’s campaign combined the humorously absurd, like forcing businesspeople to wear clown suits, with the serious demands of San Francisco’s radicals, such as requiring elections for police officers. The Los Angeles punk scene was more nihilistic in a selfconscious sense, and its shows were plagued with violence. LA ‘snot-core’ or ‘brat-core’ bands like the Circle Jerks, the Adolescents, and the Dickies sang about boredom from the perspective of alienated suburban teenagers. They played short songs at furiously fast speeds, reflecting the spasmodic flows of television, video games, and commercial amusements in the everyday life of the white middle and working classes. The antisocial cynicism and violent masculinity of the punks in Southern California was as much a complement as a challenge to the Reagan era. Some political forms of punk did emerge from this scene, however, in Black Flag and especially in the Minutemen, whose working-class identity was linked to their do-it-yourself approach (Azerrad 2001; MacLeod 2010; Moore 2010). Both punk and hip-hop initially developed in New York City during the mid-1970s, at a time when the city was in the throes of fiscal crisis and working-class neighborhoods were being decimated by deindustrialization. Hiphop initially developed as a subculture in the Bronx as large sections of the borough were being burned down and economically abandoned. Beginning in 1973, the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc had been hosting dance parties which utilized his large sound system and focused on the instrumental breaks in funk records. Before long, Herc was moving his sound system outdoors into the streets and parks, plugging multiple extension cords into lampposts to generate power. The musical elements of hip-hop connected with the subculture of graffiti artists, who had been spray-painting colorful, elaborate murals on walls and subway trains across the city. African – American and Puerto Rican youth began forming crews who competed in displaying their graffiti or break-dancing skills,

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as DJs provided the musical accompaniment of beats, raps, and turntable scratching. DJs battled for supremacy over neighborhoods in the same way that street gangs had done. The most successful was the Zulu Nation, founded by Afrika Bambaataa to redirect young in the Bronx away from gang violence to hip-hop with an Afrocentric worldview. While hip-hop was developing as an ensemble of subcultural practices, rap music first entered the pop music charts in 1979 with the release of ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang (Chang 2005; Forman and Neal 2004; George 1999; Rose 1994).

HIP-HOP AND PUNK IN THE AGE OF REAGAN AND THATCHER During the 1980s, rap music and hip-hop style would ascend into increasing commercial success, while punks created and maintained a network of independent media that allowed their subculture to subsist underground. Punk’s do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic opposed the culture industry and recalled the spirit of folk in proposing that anyone can play music, there should be minimal separation between musicians and audiences, and lyricists should address significant social issues. The first wave of punk fanzines and independent labels – including Rough Trade Records, a shop which later became a significant record label and distribution network, and which operated as a co-operative with socialist ideals – emerged from the UK in the late 1970s. In the US, local punk scenes sprang up in bohemian urban enclaves and college towns, linked through a network of makeshift performance spaces, regional labels, zines, and college radio stations. The local scenes in Washington, DC and Berkeley, CA garnered special attention for their mixtures of DIY principles and radical politics during the 1980s. The DC scene, which developed around Dischord Records and the bands Minor Threat and Fugazi led by Ian

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MacKaye, became an archetype for the DIY ethic and a principled connection between music and political activism. Meanwhile, in Berkeley – an enduring haven for California’s radical youth – the zine Maximumrocknroll was founded in 1982, initially in connection with a college radio show, and punk shows were held in the co-operatively run Gilman Street club starting in late 1986 (Andersen and Jenkins 2003; Azerrad 2001; Moore 2010; Reynolds 2005). In the UK, the band Crass played a leading role in an anarcho punk movement that pushed radical politics and do-it-yourself culture in innovative directions during the 1980s. In 1982, Crass released the single ‘How Does It Feel?’ as a protest against the Falklands War. Crass further developed do-it-yourself methods in the creation of music, art, films, fanzines, posters, and other forms of media produced in the communal context of the group’s home in the English countryside, known as Dial House. Crass broke up in 1984, but by that time a large movement of anarcho punks had developed across England; the bands emerging from anarcho punk included Zounds, the Subhumans, Conflict, and Chumbawamba. Anarcho punks had a crucial part in the Stop the City carnivals of 1983 and 1984 in London, which interrupted business as usual with protests and direct action against capitalism and militarism (Glasper 2006; Rimbaud 1998). Meanwhile, hip-hop had originated as music for parties and dancing, but before long rappers had begun to incorporate realistic scenes from urban life into their rhymes. During the 1980s, hip-hop evolved into a powerful medium of protest for socially conscious artists growing up in an age of conservative reaction, increasing inequality, and resurgent militarism. In 1982, the hit single ‘Planet Rock’ crystallized the message of unity disseminated in the Bronx by the Zulu Nation and Afrika Bambaataa, whose crew ‘dressed like a wild cross between a band of New Orleans Marti Gras Indians and interstellar Afrofuturist

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prophets’ (Chang 2005: 170–71). During that same year, a song called ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five chronicled the social problems facing black people living in the decaying neighborhoods of New York; it too became a canonical song of old school hip-hop. ‘The Message’ established a shining example of how hip-hop could document the social environment and racial inequalities of urban America: rampant poverty and unemployment; negligent city services; drugs and gang violence; police harassment and brutality. Comparable statements about social conditions could also be heard in early rap songs like ‘The Breaks’ by Kurtis Blow, ‘Hard Times’ by Run-DMC, and ‘South Bronx’ by Boogie Down Productions. The early forms of rap music did not usually address social issues in a critical fashion, but the conventions of lyricism demanded that rappers address the realities of life in deindustrialized cities. In 1988, the group N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude) released their debut album Straight Outta Compton with the seditious song ‘Fuck Tha Police’, establishing a new style of gangsta rap originating from the West Coast. ‘Fuck Tha Police’ in particular confronted the harassment and violence experienced by black and Latino youth in the inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles during a time of increasing incarceration, the militarization of police, and the ‘war on drugs’. ‘Fuck Tha Police’ was met with ferocious reaction by police departments across the US as well as the FBI, eventually causing the members of N.W.A to be arrested in Detroit when they tried to perform the song at their concert. At the same time, the New York-based group Public Enemy was creating a new standard for the merger of rap music and radical criticism with the release of their second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 1988. Public Enemy had been chosen by the director Spike Lee to write a song for his movie about racial conflicts in Brooklyn, Do The Right Thing. Their song ‘Fight the Power’ figured prominently in

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the movie and quickly became as an anthem of resistance that expressed the burgeoning social consciousness surrounding hip-hop, and a protest march against racial violence was organized in Brooklyn for filming the music video. Following Public Enemy’s lead, many hip-hop artists in the early 1990s would begin to incorporate greater social consciousness in their lyrics while drawing inspiration from a wide variety of intellectuals and activists. The critical consciousness of hip-hop soon coalesced around the uprising in Los Angeles during the spring of 1992 after four white police officers were acquitted for the beating of black motorist Rodney King, resulting in six days of unrest which ended with over 11,000 people arrested and more than $1 billion in property damage.

THE COMMODIFICATION OF AUTHENTICITY IN THE NINETIES The media industries of music, fashion, and advertising made profitable use of both punk and hip-hop subcultures during the 1990s, recuperating their rebellion into two different styles of consumerism. By the 1990s, hip-hop had begun to rival rock for commercial dominance within the music industry and overall impact on popular culture at large. Hip-hop’s infiltration of popular culture and mainstream media began extending far beyond the music industry, into fashion, sports, advertising, movies and television, and the vernacular of daily life. Hip-hop has proven to be immensely valuable as the latest edition of the racial dynamic in American culture which exoticizes and commodifies blackness and the imagined authenticity of life on the gritty urban streets. The extreme materialism of some rappers who were reared in poverty has also been effortlessly appropriated by the corporate culture industry to promote a fetish for consumerism and wealth (Chang 2005; Charnas 2010). Nevertheless, the do-it-yourself ethic and

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anti-corporate attitude of punk would also be appropriated and commercialized in the 1990s, mainly for purposes of marketing to the newly discovered Generation X that was supplanting the baby boomers in consumer demographics. The spirit of punk was commercialized in the early 1990s with the breakthrough success of Nirvana and the Seattle grunge scene, followed by the use of ‘alternative’ as a marketing buzzword and the comparable unearthing of Californiabased punk bands like Green Day. The perceived authenticity of indie artists and local scenes was easily recuperated by corporations, who had learned how to profit from niche markets by appealing to their desire for difference, sincerity, and even resistance (Moore 2010; Yarm 2011). The DIY ethic facilitated the growth of independent media and underground networks while expounding a critique of the corporate system of cultural entertainment. Among the most powerful and influential products of the DIY ethic emerged from a mixture with feminist activism in creating the riot grrrl movement of the early 1990s. Riot grrrl initially developed in Olympia, Washington, a city which had a vigorous local scene that revolved around the college radio station KAOS and the indie labels K Records and Kill Rock Stars. In Olympia, riot grrrl coalesced as a social movement with an innovative approach to DIY cultural production (especially fanzines) to mobilize consciousness-raising and self-expression. Riot grrrl brought a sense of urgency to zine publishing, as young women used zines to write about their experiences and communicate with others about the personal and political problems they faced. The most influential band to emerge from Olympia’s riot grrrl scene was Bikini Kill, whose performances were distinguished by the feminist provocations of their singer, Kathleen Hanna. The riot grrrl scene in general and Bikini Kill in particular had a significant impact on Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana, who wrote the anthemic hit song ‘Smells

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Like Teen Spirit’ partly in response to the youthful rebellion and idealism he encountered in Olympia. Among the many female musicians who formed bands within the riot grrrl movement were the future members of Sleater-Kinney, who advanced to a successful career as an indie rock band while maintaining a respected voice on feminist issues (Gottlieb and Wald 1994; Kearney 1998; Leonard 1997; Marcus 2010).

HIP-HOP, PUNK, AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Although punk and hip-hop have been integrated into the corporate culture industry, their sounds and styles have been significant elements in recent anti-capitalist social movements. From the protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 to the Occupy movement of 2011–12, young people have been key actors in creating new modes of resistance directed against neoliberal forms of global capitalism. The protests against the WTO meetings in Seattle featured a band called the No WTO Combo which was composed of former members of the bands Dead Kennedys, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Sweet 75. Occupy Wall Street included important contributions from rappers like Immortal Technique and Lupe Fiasco, as well as rockers Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Jeff Magnum of Neutral Milk Hotel. Music continues to be a ubiquitous element of social protest, but the influence of punk, indie rock, and hip-hop is especially evident in the culture and style of the protesters. In particular, the prefigurative politics and horizontal decision-making of these contemporary movements maintain a close affinity with the egalitarian spirit and do-it-yourself ethic of punk. As young people are once again at the forefront of resistant social movements, we can expect that they will continue to draw inspiration and support from

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music and subcultural styles (Graeber 2009; Mason 2013; Schneider 2013). As the Black Lives Matter movement formed in 2014 following several shooting deaths of young black men at the hands of police, many hip-hop artists directly addressed the issues of racism and police violence in their music. For the recording of ‘Don’t Shoot’, The Game assembled a team of a dozen other rappers, including Rick Ross, 2 Chainz, and Diddy, and enlisted his young daughter to sing the chorus. On August 20, less than two weeks after Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, Lauryn Hill released an updated version of ‘Black Rage’ with a dedication to Ferguson, Missouri. Hill’s song is about racism and dehumanization sung in the melody of ‘My Favorite Things’. The rap duo Run the Jewels was playing in St. Louis on the night it was announced that Officer Wilson would not face charges, and before the show Killer Mike delivered an impassioned speech expressing fear for his two young sons. As a social movement was starting to take shape in August 2014, rapper J. Cole not only wrote a song but also visited Ferguson to talk with the protesters who had mobilized there. In December 2014, J. Cole was scheduled to perform on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote a new album, but instead of playing his latest single he delivered a stirring, dramatic performance of a protest song called ‘Be Free’. It was a week after a grand jury in Staten Island ruled not to indict an NYPD officer in the choking death of Eric Garner, and marches which blocked traffic and disrupted daily life had reached a fever pitch in New York and cities across America. Beyond hip-hop, no album released in late 2014 from any genre was more anticipated or celebrated than D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. This album had reportedly been in the making for many years, but then the events in Ferguson and New York City prompted D’Angelo to rush its release to just before the end of 2014. The picture on the cover of Black Messiah portrays a multitude of black-skinned arms

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outstretched with hands in the air, some with closed fists in a black power salute. Partly recorded at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios, the sound of Black Messiah recalls the mixtures of psychedelic and funk music which arose from the militant period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of its most raucous tracks, ‘1000 Deaths’, begins with music played against two lengthy vocal samples from Khalid Abdul Muhammad and Fred Hampton; one of its smoothest, ‘The Charade’, contains the tragic chorus, ‘All we wanted was a chance to talk/’stead we’ve only got outlined in chalk’. In rushing the album’s release, D’Angelo released a statement connecting Black Messiah with the radical and democratic movements of our time: ‘It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them.’

REFERENCES Altschuler, Glenn (2004). All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America. New York: Oxford University Press. Amin, Ash (ed.) (1994). Post-Fordism: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Andersen, Mark and Mark Jenkins (2003). Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital. New York: Akashic. Anderson, Iain (2007). This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Attali, Jacques (1985). Noise: An Essay on the Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Azerrad, Michael (2001). Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991. New York: Little, Brown. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Becker, Howard S. (1973). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, rev. edn. New York: Free Press. Chang, Jeff (2005). Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of Hip-Hop. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Charnas, Dan (2010). The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. New York: New American Library. Chernoff, John Miller (1979). African Rhythm and African Sensibility. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, Albert K. (1955). Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: Free Press. Cohen, Phil (1997). ‘Subcultural Conflict and Subcultural Community’, in Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (eds) The Subcultures Reader. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Stanley (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Cone, James H. (1972). The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Cressey, Paul (1932). The Taxi-Dance Hall. New York: Greenwood Press. Denning, Michael (1996). The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso. DeVeaux, Scott (1997). The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Doggett, Peter (2007). There’s A Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the ‘60s. New York: Canongate. Dumenil, Lynn (1995). The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang. Ehrenreich, Barbara (2006). Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York: Henry Holt. Erenberg, Lewis A. (1998). Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison (1998). Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fass, Paula (1977). The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Featherstone, Mike (1991). Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Floyd, Samuel (1996). The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Forman, Murray and Mark Anthony Neal (eds) (2004). That’s the Jount!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Frank, Thomas (1997). The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gendron, Richard (2002). Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. George, Nelson (1999). Hip Hop America. New York: Penguin. Gillett, Charlie (1983). The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. New York: Pantheon. Gitler, Ira (1985). Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press. Gitlin, Todd (1987). The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books. Glasper, Ian (2006). The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk, 1980–84. London: Cherry Red. Gottlieb, Joanne and Gayle Wald (1994). ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution, and Women in Independent Rock’, in Tricia Rose and Andrew Ross (eds) Microphone Fiends: Youth Culture and Youth Music. New York: Routledge. Graeber, David (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, MD: AK Press. Guralnick, Peter (1986). Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Dream of Southern Freedom. New York: Harper Collins. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson (eds) (1976). Resistance Through Rituals: Subcultures in Post-War Britain. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Harvey, David (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hebdige, Dick (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge. Hersch, Charles (2007). Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Heylin, Clinton (2007). Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge. New York: Canongate. Jones, Leroi (1963). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper Collins. Kearney, Mary Celeste (1998). ‘“Don’t Need You”: Rethinking Identity Politics and Separatism from a Riot Grrrl Perspective’, in Jonathan Epstein (ed.) Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 148–188. Keniston, Kenneth (1968). Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Latham, Angela (2000). Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Leonard, Marion (1997). ‘Rebel Girl You Are the Queen of My World: Feminism, Subculture, and Grrrl Power’, in Sheila Whiteley (ed.) Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. New York: Routledge, pp. 230–256. Lieberman, Robbie (1995). My Song Is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. MacLeod, Dewar (2010). Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Marcus, Sara (2010). Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. New York: Harper Collins. Martin, Linda and Kerry Seagrave (1993). Anti-Rock: The Opposition To Rock ‘n Roll. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Mason, Paul (2013). Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. New York: Verso. McNeil, Legs and Gillian McCain (1996). Please Kill Me: The Uncensored History of Punk. New York: Penguin. McRobbie, Angela (ed.) (1991). Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music. London: Macmillan. McRobbie, Angela and Jenny Garber (1997). ‘Girls and Subcultures’, in Ken Gelder and Angela McRobbie (eds) The Subcultures Reader. New York: Routledge. Monson, Ingrid (2007). Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Moore, Ryan (2010). Sells like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis. New York: NYU Press. Moore, Ryan (2014). ‘Break on Through: The Counterculture and the Climax of American Modernism’, in Jedediah Sklower and Sheila Whiteley (eds) Countercultures and Popular Music. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 29–43. Murray, Albert (2000). Stomping the Blues. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Neal, Mark Anthony (2003). Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. New York: Routledge. Peterson, Richard A. (1990). ‘Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music’, Popular Music 9(1): 97–116. Reynolds, Simon (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984. New York: Penguin. Rimbaud, Penny (1998). Shibboleth: My Revolting Life. Edinburgh: AK Press. Rose, Tricia (1994). Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Music in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Roszak, Theodore (1969). The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Roy, William G. (2010). Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Savage, Jon (1993). England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Savage, Jon (2008). Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875–1945. New York: Penguin. Schneider, Nathan (2013). Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Small, Christopher (1987). Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Suzanne (2001). Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Southern, Eileen (1997). The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Sublette, Ned (2008). The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to the Congo Square. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill. Thrasher, Fredric M. (1927). The Gang. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Richard Brent (2009). Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Werner, Craig (2006). A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Williams Evans, Freddi (2011). Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans. Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. Willis, Paul (1978). Profane Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Yarm, Mark (2011). Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. New York: Three Rivers Press.

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17 Graffiti As Infrapolitics: A Study of Visual Interventions of Resistance in San Francisco Guillaume Marche1

GRAFFITI, INFRAPOLITICS, AND SCHOLARSHIP Definitions of graffiti vary depending on how encompassing they are. In everyday parlance, ‘graffiti’ tends to refer to hasty scribbles, tagging, or defacement – three categories that largely overlap. Alternatively, graffiti may be defined broadly as any unsolicited inscription on the surface of a public or private property. The term ‘graffiti’ conveys the onus of illegality and vandalism, to such an extent that street artists seeking recognition often make a claim to legitimacy by vigorously rejecting the label (McAuliffe, 2012; Young, 2012). Yet, a loose definition proves useful in that it diverts attention from what makes an inscription valid or worthwhile, and instead places the focus on what it is that practitioners do when they make unsolicited inscriptions. Part of the hypothesis in this chapter is that being unauthorized and unwarranted enhances

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graffiti’s capacity to constitute what Hank Johnston (2005) calls ‘oppositional speech acts’. Thus, I suggest, being a less than licit form of intervention does not make graffiti less than political, but differently political – i.e. infrapolitical. Drawing from the work of James Scott (1990), Richard Fox and Orin Starn (1997), and Robin Kelley (1994), I regard as infrapolitics those practices which verge on being political, but lie below the threshold of what qualifies as such. As studied by Scott, Fox and Starn, or Kelley, infrapolitics refers to the makeshift ways in which subjects in subaltern positions enact their resistance, usually for lack of access to, or opportunities in, the legitimate political field. This chapter does not so much address the issue of graffiti authors’ subaltern status – which is in fact not always the case, as many of them are in fact artists with quite a high level of cultural capital – as the disqualified, improper status of their medium of expression. That is why, unlike studies that approach

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protest graffiti as a not-quite-political manifestation of otherwise full fledged social movements, I hypothesize that graffiti achieves a peculiar form of resistance due to its being infrapolitical. Scholarly attention to graffiti has not solely, or even mainly, been warranted by its being a form of resistance. As an ancient mode of expression, graffiti has, for instance, been valued by historians as material evidence of the availability of the techniques necessary to perform it, of the date when a tomb was violated, of the forms of popular or vernacular speech, or even of unrecorded social interactions (Tanzer, 1939; Lindsay, 1960; Reisner, 1971; Riout, 1990: 12; Benefiel, 2010). As such, graffiti serves as a palliative for the absence of more reliable sources – i.e. legitimately written documents. Graffiti is taken seriously as a protest medium in certain historical contexts, such as the May 1968 uprising in France, whose Situationist-inspired motto was to change life here and now without waiting for the Glorious Day (Riout, 1990: 61; B. J. Macdonald, 1993: 25–26; Harding, 2010: 133). It is thus customary for May 1968 graffiti to be analysed as the expression of unauthorized social and political aphorisms, such as the famous ‘take your desires for realities’ (No ©opyright, 1998: 10). Similarly, because graffiti on the Berlin Wall, from 1961 to 1989, and on the ‘Security Fence’ currently separating Israel from part of the Palestinian territories are on the side opposite the builders, they are viewed as expressions of protest against the building (Stein, 1989; Mayer, 1996; Drechsel, 2010: 11–16). It is worth noting, though, that graffiti on the Berlin Wall’s western side was occasionally protested by East Germans who felt the Wall’s transformation into a tourist attraction to be an affront, just as graffiti on the ‘Security Fence’ is often produced by Western visitors and resented by Palestinians who ‘see it as beautifying something that is essentially ugly and which must be torn down’ (Mayer, 1996: 222; Bishara, 2010: 75). Feversham and Schmidt likewise argue that graffiti transformed the

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Berlin Wall into ‘a screen which hid the GDR’ because, as a mirror of the West, the graffiti, ‘by reflecting the Western world, were, in effect, rendering the Wall invisible’ (Feversham and Schmidt, 1999: 154, quoted in Drechsel, 2010: 12; see also Mayer, 1996: 220–222). But even when identified as a vehicle of resistance, graffiti is usually approached as a supplement to, or a secondary manifestation of, the true struggle. For example, the ‘V’ signs on the walls of World War Two Spain after RAF bombings that signified support of the Allied forces or the letter ‘P’ written by anti-Franco activists as a call to protest are seen as a communication device to propagate censored information (Riout, 1990: 16). Thus, in the words of two archaeologists studying Soviet soldiers’ graffiti in an East-German military site, these imprints, ‘if harnessed correctly, can complement predominant site meta-narratives with the micronarratives associated with the authors’ daily lives’ (Merrill and Hack, 2012: 102; emphasis mine). On the contrary, in their analysis of the contrast between how graffiti is perceived by its writers and by subjects who hold positions of power, sociologists Toby Ten Eyck and Brette Fischer argue that, since ‘[t]he public is … told that all graffiti is a nuisance regardless of its content or style, and those creating it a scourge’, then a critique of a profit-driven, capitalist system ‘is at the heart of the act itself’ (2012: 832–833, 835). In this chapter, I propose, rather, to take graffiti seriously in itself – not as a harbinger of more serious things to come – but without focusing exclusively on ‘the act itself’ indistinctive of what its message or subject matter might be. Indeed, I suggest taking into serious consideration the relationship between visual form and expressive content.

THE (INFRA)POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF GRAFFITI Many types of graffiti in fact pertain to expressivism and are, as such, non-political.

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Tags and throw-ups, for example, are individual signatures whose main identifiable purpose is to resist anonymity. For Nancy Macdonald, ‘[f]ame, respect and status are not naturally evolving by-products of [the graffiti] subculture, they are its sole reason for being, and a writer’s sole reason for being here’ (2003: 68). Hedonistic gratification, rather than political contestation, is achieved by the large, elaborate usually multi-coloured pieces into which tags evolved in the 1970s and 1980s (Cooper and Chalfant, 1984; Fitzpatrick, 2009). These colourful pictorial graffiti are ‘obstinately devoid of meaning’, says art historian Denys Riout (1990: 92), while for Jean Baudrillard they ‘resist every interpretation and connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything. In this way, with neither connotation, nor denotation, they escape the principle of signification and, as empty signifiers, erupt into the sphere of the full signs of the city, dissolving on contact’ (1993: 78–79; emphasis in original). As Baudrillardian simulacra, elaborate colourful graffiti perform resistance to the excess of signification with which urban environments are saturated. But of course, they also achieve forceful claims for space (Ley and Cybriwsky, 1974; Nandrea, 1999: 113–115). For example, the amply documented ‘top-to-bottom’ pieces covering New York subway trains (Austin, 2001; Lange, 2009) enable their authors to vicariously haunt the whole city beyond their own, usually poorer neighbourhoods (Myre, 2003: 4; Ortiz, 2004). And even though tagging is far from being systematically gang-related (Ferrell, 1995: 84–86; MacGillivray and Curwen, 2007: 354, 366), gangs do use graffiti in order to claim territory (Ley and Cybriwsky, 1974; Milon, 1999: 109; Phillips, 1999).2 But graffiti can also convey explicit political meaning in various ways, ranging from the text of a slogan expressing social critique, to isolated words whose denotative meaning is more cryptic, to wordless graphics whose political intent is nevertheless unmistakable, as in satirical images deriding well-known

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brand names or icons. Still other inscriptions superimpose a critical message onto an actual advertisement. Because they are mimetic of advertising – proliferating on the same surfaces, using the same codes and imagery – such interventions call viewers to question their own opinions about a specific brand or advertisement, or about branding and advertising in general. In the United States, for example, this form of culture jamming is performed by the Billboard Liberation Front and Adbusters.3 In his analysis of the takeover of advertisement spaces by the billboard activists group BUGA UP in Sydney and the Street Advertising Takeovers in New York and Madrid, urban geographer Kurt Iveson characterizes these practices as a form of ‘doit-yourself urbanism’. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, he claims that urban systems, organized though they may seem, do leave some gaps that can be taken advantage of in order to foster social change. And drawing from Jacques Rancière, Iveson emphasizes the importance of a ‘politics of inhabitance’ that is ‘enacted … through collective (and contested) declarations of democratic forms of authority’ (Iveson, 2013: 947). Thus, Iveson insists that the capacity for ‘“micro-scale” tactical interventions’ to make a claim to an urban right of inhabitance must not be romanticized: this capacity is, in fact, dependent on interventions being collective, confrontational, and organized. In other words, for Iveson, a distinction needs to be made between, on the one hand, the affirmation of a right to the city which is the ‘performance critique’ expressed by ‘[a]ny individual who picks up a spray can or marker and writes unauthorized graffiti’, and, on the other hand, ‘a broader, political disagreement about the nature of authority in the city’ (2013: 951). But is graffiti to be taken seriously if there is no more to it than the inscription to be seen on a publicly or privately owned surface, and if it is not the reflection of an organized – albeit possibly invisible – collective endeavour and of a clearly articulated or identifiable

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set of claims? Following the insight of Ulrich Beck, it is indeed important not to ‘look for politics in the wrong place, with the wrong terms’ (1997: 99), but to resist ‘the fixation on the political system as the exclusive center of politics’ (1992: 187; emphasis in original) and instead be alert to the politics that exists elsewhere than among formal actors, activities, and structures. Beck invites us to pay attention to sub-politics, which he identifies as the political reality that lies concealed in practices and discourses that do not pertain to the political system. The rise of subpolitics, according to Beck, is characteristic of reflexive modernity and results from the displacement of politics away from the traditional, legitimate political system into the techno-economic realm which escapes political scrutiny and, when applicable, democratic deliberation. It is a system ‘in which the scope of the social changes precipitated varies inversely to their legitimation’ and, as a result, ‘the potential for structuring society migrates from the political system into the sub-political system of scientific, technological and economic modernization’ (1992: 186). What I suggest differs slightly from Beck’s concept of sub-politics, since I propose to envision graffiti as a type of action that fails to qualify as political in terms of goals, motivations, and operating-modes. Being infrapolitical, graffiti nevertheless warrants attention to how it operates in its own right, rather than regarding it simply as a stepping stone, or a preliminary, to politics. Of course, infrapolitics should not be fetishized, either by exaggerating its achievements (Reed, 2005: 3–4), or by reading as infrapolitical anything which is simply not political (Marche, 2012a: 13). For instance, even when it is the expression of a political intent, graffiti cannot be approached in the same way as organized forms of protest, such as public meetings, political campaigns, or institutional lobbying. Nor should it, at the same time, be conflated with mediated cultural expressions that more or less explicitly convey a form of resistance, like protest literature, underground cinema,

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or spoiled art. One of James Scott’s contributions to the understanding of infrapolitics is to suggest that it achieves effective outcomes for subordinate people, even short of translating into full fledged politics or social movement mobilization (Scott, 1990: 192–197). Part of why infrapolitics matters is that it can be a prefiguration of a movement to come (Worth and Kuhling, 2004: 35–36) and allows actors to retain, uphold, or perpetuate their capacity for agency when the political context precludes any serious chance of making tangible political gains (Chvasta, 2006: 5–6). But part of the reason why graffiti deserves attention as infrapolitics is that it allows us not to cast its merit, interest, or usefulness solely in terms of what it does or does not pave the way for (Marche, 2012a).

SAN FRANCISCO, GRAFFITI, AND LIBERAL URBANISM Graffiti’s disruptiveness can be measured by the costly removal policies it is considered to justify (Ferrell, 1995: 80–82). Since the 1990s many cities throughout the world and particularly in the United States have launched a ‘war on graffiti’. For example, while the yearly cost of removing graffiti in the United States in 2006 was estimated at 15 to 18 billion dollars (BBC, 2006), New York City’s municipal administration in 1998– 1999 spent 25 million dollars on graffiti removal and prevention (Segal, 1999; Dickinson, 2008; Kramer, 2010). These expensive public policies are justified with loose references to George Kelling and James Wilson’s ‘broken window’ theory (Kelling and Wilson, 1982) and a presumably truthful conviction that graffiti breeds more graffiti (Milon, 1999: 111; Myre, 2003: 4). The New York municipality has thus consistently applied ‘zero tolerance’ to graffiti since the 1990s (Rahimi, 2005; Chan, 2007) and several major US cities have followed suit since the 2000s. Yet, according to ethnographer

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Nancy Macdonald, ‘generating scandal and panic is graffiti authors’ goal, for that is the means to express their resistance – rather than a sanction that may prevent them from it’ (2003: 173). Similarly, for artist and art education scholar Janice Rahn, illegality is seen as a pivotal testament of the hip-hop graffiti subculture’s ethic of autonomy (Rahn, 2002). In this sense, enforced prohibition ironically reinforces graffiti’s resistance potential. San Francisco has been among the leaders in the international world-class metropolises’ war on graffiti. Its 1994 ‘Graffiti Removal and Abatement Ordinance’ (ordinance 29–94) was reinforced a decade later by the 2004 ‘Blight Ordinance’ (ordinance 263–04) and in 2008 by the ‘Community Preservation and Blight Reduction Act’ (ordinance 256– 08). This series of stricter and stricter regulations provide that property owners must remove graffiti at their own cost within 30 days of being notified by the Department of Public Works. If no steps are taken within 30 days the City removes the graffiti and charges the property owner an amount of up to 500 dollars plus an attorney’s fee. Property owners who fail to comply may request a public hearing to justify why and solicit a waiver. In practice, the city’s Department of Public Works alone spends more than 20 million dollars a year (Megler et  al., 2014: 63–64), while the Municipal transit system spends approximately 12 million dollars. It is no accident that these policies are concomitant with the skyrocketing value of real-estate in San Francisco since the 1990s, when the so-called ‘dotcom’ bubble led to the formation of what urban sociologist Ryan Centner terms ‘exclusionary places of privilege’ (Centner, 2008; see also Graham and Guy, 2002), a trend that has been reinforced since the early 2010s by the ‘tech’ bubble. San Francisco’s fight against graffiti is peculiar neither in its scope, nor in its intensity, but in its politics. Interestingly, the war on graffiti indeed relies in part on a ‘quality of life’ rhetoric whose strong neoliberal

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undertones – in line with what Iveson calls ‘the creeping militarization of everyday life in the city’ (2013: 116) – were famously exemplified by New York’s municipal administration under Rudolph Giuliani in the 1990s and which contrasts with San Francisco’s urban liberalism. Unlike New York’s marketoriented model of urbanism, San Francisco is known for being a haven of nonconformity, having a tradition of civic engagement, and hosting a decentralized, community-based municipal welfare system (DeLeon, 1991; 1992). San Francisco is thus a liberal city, both in the sense of an attachment to individual liberties such as freedom of expression, and of left-wing politicization. The city has therefore innovated with an original recipe of grassroots mobilization against graffiti which is a way to reconcile its resolute antigraffiti policy with its renowned liberalism, for example by encouraging other forms of visual intervention and by mobilizing civic engagement for graffiti removal (Marche, 2015: 244–246). This chapter focuses on the idiosyncratic forms of resistance performed in several visual interventions that were observed during fieldwork in San Francisco between October 2011 and August 2012 and some of whose authors were also interviewed.

GRAFFITI IN SAN FRANCISCO: AN EMPIRICAL CASE-STUDY Although it is happening in a larger neoliberal context that contrasts with the city by the Bay’s liberal welfarism, the on-going gentrification in San Francisco is in part supported by the municipal administration (McBride, 2009) and voting population. For instance, in the terms of Proposition L, approved by San Francisco voters in November 2010, sitting or lying on the sidewalk has been prohibited as of March 2011.4 Anonymous stencil graffiti that read: ‘A bench belongs here/reclaim public space’ or ‘Hello citizen: Assert your right. Sit on the sidewalk’ are to be seen on

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the city’s sidewalks, particularly in the Haight-Ashbury, a neighbourhood that is historically known for being a countercultural hub, and presently for having a fairly large visible homeless population. In a clear protest against the ‘sit-lie law’, these inscriptions seek to raise public awareness of homeless people’s experience and rights. The visual rhetoric is especially noteworthy since the purpose of the sit-lie policy is to make the homeless population less visible, but the graffiti make the issue more visible (Murphy, 2009: 321–323). And very aptly so, as the stencil was observable months after the ordinance’s approval, when it had all but faded from public notice and newsworthiness, so that the stencil messages operated as a reminder, maintaining a form of discussion, albeit discreet, even silent, about the use of public spaces. This instance of protest graffiti performs a type of what specialists of Brazil have called, after Paolo Freire, conscientização (Iddings et al., 2011: 7–8), raising critical consciousness about less-than-politicized issues in a less-than-political form, yet in a discourse that lays strong emphasis on the contested definition of urban citizenship. The stencil’s verbal rhetoric is indeed no less important than its visual rhetoric, especially in the second message: ‘Hello citizen: Assert your right. Sit on the sidewalk’. The addressee is identified as a ‘citizen’, hence presumably – or ostensibly – one whose citizenship is not subject to caution: the proverbial ‘man on the street’. Yet, those whose ‘right’ to ‘sit on the sidewalk’ is called into question are not your average passers-by, whose use of the sidewalk is legitimated by their normal participation in city-life, including the possibility – indeed the likelihood – of their engaging in consumerism in such a touristic and commercial area as the Haight-Ashbury. One of the weaknesses of graffiti as a political tool is its anonymity: addresser and addressee are often not clearly identified and presumably do not know each other. In this case, the weakness becomes an asset, since the very ambiguity of

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the addressed ‘citizen’s’ identity is part and parcel of the aimed conscientização: bridging the gap between legitimized and delegitimized sidewalk users by literally lumping them together under one label – ‘citizen’ – hence in turn symbolically transforming the allegedly disreputable, dirty-looking, foulsmelling, idle-acting and economically inept homeless person into a citizen just like you – whoever that is. In classic Jakobsonian terms, the anonymity of the addresser, the ambiguity of the addressee, and the political feebleness of the channel converge to make the message more effective. But graffiti does not always convey protest anonymously, at least facially: everyone knows who Banksy is (he’s a famous British street artist), yet no one knows who Banksy is – he has made a point of keeping his identity secret, even in the controversial 2010 film about him, Exit through the Gift-Shop. Indeed, the whole point of tagging is to apply a signature to surfaces in public urban spaces, though the names signed are always made up, both for reasons of legal liability and in order to create alternative, glamourized social identities (MacGillivray and Curwen, 2007; Young, 2012). Eclair Bandersnatch is the moniker of a San Francisco street artist who is basically a fixture of the Lower HaightDivisadero area, where most of her stencils are to be seen. To attentive viewers, she is known as a fluctuating signature – ‘E Clair’, ‘Eclair’, ‘Bandersnatch’, ‘Eclair Acuda Bandersnatch’, or ‘Eclair Bandersnatch’ – that is as enigmatic as it is pun-riddled and literary reference-laden (Kepka, 2013), and as a style: woman figures whose glamour is enhanced with overly feminine curves, long legs, high heels, and exaggerated colourful make-up – not unlike the author’s own dressstyle – messages that verge on the trivial,5 and the occasional hyper-eroticized halfnude male. While most of her work has been almost as self-referential as tagging pieces, with a focus on style if not on the figure of the artist, she has begun including increasingly

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explicit political content in her stencils. One of her very first such graffiti features elegant-looking female figures with the captions ‘Guantánamo has got to go’ and ‘Your mom said so’. The stencil was painted in early 2012 at a time when the topic of the high-security military detention centre on the US Navy base in Cuba had practically disappeared from the political debate; with a stroke of the air-brush, Eclair Bandersnatch aimed to resuscitate that public conversation in the minds of her viewers. As the theme has gone below the political radar, there is something almost ironically appropriate in that the infrapolitical vehicle of graffiti should seek to reactivate a political issue which has lost its topicality. But the medium is inseparable from the message: juxtaposing a derisive, childish-sounding comment to a serious, political one conveys some degree of comic relief, in a vein that is far from unusual in political graffiti. Yet it should not obscure the particular virtue of the rather anticlimactic second caption line: ‘Your mom said so’,

i.e. this is the bottom-line, there is no further discussing a higher order of necessity – constitutional principles, universal human rights, a form of public morality that reaches beyond considerations of law and order or political expediency. In another stencil with explicit political content, Bandersnatch portrays the boardgame Monopoly’s emblematic millionaire, here labelled as ‘World Bank’, holding a huge bag of money and urinating on the small figures of a woman, man, and child standing with their arms lifted in a helpless, imploring gesture. The piece was painted in the spring of 2012, while the Occupy movement had been a few months in existence and still enjoyed local news visibility in the Bay Area, a context which casts the image within a one per cent versus 99 per cent dynamic. As in the earlier anonymous ‘sit-lie’ stencil, the piece’s verbal rhetoric and visual rhetoric converge: on the one hand, its caption, ‘Trickle-down economics’, is of course to be read both in the sense that has been usual since the 1980s

Figure 17.1 Seat the Rich © Eclair Bandersnatch

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to describe neoliberal options in matters of political economy, and as a literal rendering of the one per cent’s utter lack of consideration for the 99 per cent’s needs and dignity. And on the other hand, it is worth noting that the design here is much more simplistic than in most of Eclair Bandersnatch’s stencils, whose graphic style is usually elaborate, ornate, verging on the baroque. Thus, this image’s relative lack of graphic sophistication seems to imply that the reality is indeed as simplistic, as crude and two-dimensional as this design looks. In other words, in this piece, as in the previous one, less is more. Yet another of Bandersnatch’s stencils lends itself to a similar analysis. It displays two stereotypical emblems of wealth – an elegantly clad woman and a cane-holding, top-hat- and monocle-wearing man respectively tagged ‘Wall Street’ and ‘World Bank’ in an old-fashioned cartoon way – leisurely standing slightly apart from a male figure in a bowler hat, necktie, and tails wielding a loudspeaker. The three figures on the left stand on either side of what looks like a column or a banner with the inscription ‘S.F. → Seat the rich, everyone else stand, sleep or sit outside city limits’ and loom over an encampment where children play under a tent that reads ‘Evicted by Ellis Act’, a dog lies near a pair of boots, a man plays music nearby a campfire, and a couple embrace surrounded by the jumbled words ‘Love alone don’t pay the rent’. Aside from the abovementioned sit-lie ordinance, the piece refers to the Ellis Act, a 1985 California state statute that allows landlords to evict all their tenants when going out of business without having to sell the property altogether and that is the motive for allowing all tenants’ evictions in rental-to-condominium conversions under San Francisco’s Rent Ordinance. The merits of the statute have been the subject of heated debate in California as the number of Ellis Act evictions has increased spectacularly since the early 2010s and some California lawmakers have attempted to amend it (Lagos, 2013; Gutierrez, 2015). In

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the stencil’s background, above the evicted people’s encampment, are featured a beach, the San Francisco Bay and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. The figure with a loudspeaker is also wearing eyeglasses that give him out as possibly representing Mayor Ed Lee under the guise of some maître d’ making room for rich diners6 whose patronage is far more lucrative than that of the carefree children of the Summer of Love – emblems of the city’s exceptional status among US metropolises being ousted by emblems of its changing face, not simply as a result of the workings of the proverbial ‘invisible hand’, but with the active assistance of the government, a sign that San Francisco might indeed be ‘losing its soul’ (Corbyn, 2014). The piece’s discourse is not a rational argumentation against the Ellis Act, but an emotional plea for what many still consider San Francisco’s ‘soul’, for instance among the artists who for long could afford cheap rental studios in the very neighbourhoods that are the most severely affected by gentrification, such as the Mission – one of the harshest battlefields in the confrontation between, on one side, proponents of a harmonious coexistence between low-income, immigrant households and artists with a cause, and, on the other side, proponents of ‘smart growth’, fashion stores and gourmet food restaurants. With its goodies and baddies, the piece is like a puppet-show whose lack of political elaborateness is a key component of its pictorial and dramatic elaborateness: it aims to trigger in the viewers a sense of identification with the endangered San Francisco and thus rouses emotions that lie below politics – both in the sense that they are not quite political, and that they are the stuff out of which politics is made. Following the insight of sociologist James M. Jasper, we may indeed consider that more or less permanent affects such as hate, loyalty or trust, and more or less transient emotions such as anger, shame or joy are not simply the subjective, less serious side of social movements whose real political

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substance is made of grievances, goals and strategies: they are indeed the backbone of why and how individuals or groups decide to commit, and remain committed, to a cause (Jasper, 1997: 103–129; 1998: 401–420). In this case, the pictorial rhetoric of Bandersnatch’s piece raises conflicting affects and emotions: empathy with, and loyalty to, the carefree evicted Bohemians, on the one hand, and anger and hostility – tinged with some degree of derision – at the arrogant newcomers and profit-seekers. The lack of nuance only enhances the contrast and hence the vividness of these emotions that can prove essential in raising an oppositional conscience (Goodwin et  al., 2001: 13–20). The stencil, in this sense, may seem no more than the street-level equivalent of a press cartoon. Yet, its unsought-for physical presence in an open public space makes a difference: it reaches an audience that, unlike newspaper readers, did not ask to receive the message, hence it catches them somewhat off their guard by presenting them with a visual design that will make them need to stop and think if they are to get the meaning. That the piece thus triggers viewers’ reactions in an aesthetic way is not just an extra touch of soul – a pretty addition to a message whose core is of a different nature. Instead, paradoxically, what makes it less than political is the substance of what makes it political. Whether this reading of her stencils was Bandersnatch’s intent or not is in fact inconsequential from the viewer’s standpoint. When asked about the politics of her works, unlike several other graffiti authors, she does not elaborate much (interviews, 2011–2012). One of the infrapolitical peculiarities of graffiti as a form of public intervention voicing dissent is that it generates indeterminate messages, whose meaning is not fixed, but open to interpretation, left out in public space to be appropriated by viewers. Or not: graffiti is indeed, at once, so glaringly obvious that it is regarded as blight, a highly offensive form of vandalism, and so elusive that it can and often does escape notice.

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But reaching fewer viewers can actually reinforce the potential for triggering an aesthetic emotion in the passers-by who do notice graffiti and are likely to reflect on its poignancy or cleverness (Marche, 2012b: 87–88). Jeremy Novy is a stencil artist in San Francisco who is mainly known for the colourful Japanese fish he paints on the city’s sidewalks. Among his favourite neighbourhoods are the Castro, home to San Francisco’s gay community since the 1970s, and South of Market (SOMA), which was once the site of workshops and warehouses in San Francisco’s industrial, port-oriented past, but was also home to much of San Francisco’s large transient population. This shady reputation was later perpetuated when it became the gay leather scene’s hub in the 1960s, that is to say when the Castro was still an Irish working-class neighbourhood and most of San Francisco’s gay life took place in the Polk and Tenderloin neighbourhoods. One of Novy’s recurrent stencils is the life-size design of an imprint of two pairs of sturdy-looking shoe- or boot-soles. What is not immediately noticeable is that the boots face each other and are not quite aligned, the tips of one pair extending beyond the ones opposite. As Novy intended it, it represents ‘two leather-guys making out’ (interview, 2011), but a viewer would have to be in the know in order to know: one who is not attuned to the gay leather subculture would be hard pressed to tell what is being featured and would, more likely, dismiss the piece as puzzling at best, if not utterly pointless. His work also includes US Mail stickers of less than four-by-six-inches featuring the stencilled shadow-puppet silhouettes of a man with his pants down, who is about to fellate the large erect penis of another man, whose police uniform is suggested by a hat and a white stripe on the side of his pants. Placed, in one instance, six feet above ground on a fence surrounding a construction site at the busy intersection of Market, Fifteenth, and Sanchez Streets in the Castro district, the sticker is likely to pass unnoticed or at least

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remain cryptic. But the piece’s discreetness makes the noticing and the deciphering all the more valuable: one who does get it will feel special and, if so inclined, amused or aroused. A queer viewer in favour of publicly asserting a sexualized queer identity – in contrast with the rather inoffensive collective identity that the LGBT movement has successfully deployed since the 1990s – may even feel a sense of exhilaration that will reinforce her/ his political conviction. The emotion stirred by the piece may thus cause a sympathetic viewer to feel moved by the recognition of an identification with the author. It is, then, the graffiti’s lack of instrumental purposefulness that endows it with this resistance-generating potential. But not every viewer is likely to be sympathetic. San Francisco’s gay community is indeed keenly amenable to the city’s strict anti-graffiti policy, which is far from surprising, given the objective link between gay urban communitarianism and gentrification (Bell and Binnie, 2004). For example, openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener represents District 8, which includes the Castro, and is also one of the Board of Supervisors’ most active promoters of initiatives to enhance a clean, graffiti-free city. Moreover, the image’s sexual crudeness is likely to rouse concern, and potentially generate hostility, which may even result in comforting the prevailing consensus that unsolicited painting, sticking, or posting are utterly undesirable, inappropriate forms of expression. Thus, in the municipality’s widely publicized view, ‘the difference between art and vandalism is permission’. Additionally, Novy has acquired a dubious reputation in San Francisco’s artistic and LGBT worlds, where some accuse him of repeated assault, to the point where a high-profile exhibition of his work that was to take place in the context of LGBT Pride celebrations was cancelled in 2015 (Curiel, 2015; Roberts, 2015). Such pieces therefore are caught in between two opposite risks: that of merely preaching to a choir of viewers who are already alert to the

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issues the stencils are intended to raise, and that of being counter-effective by galling viewers who are not supportive to begin with. The fact is, though, that his gay-themed images have earned him notoriety as a queer street artist in San Francisco and beyond (Curiel, 2011; Hemmelgarn, 2011). Among his most explicit stencils are also erotic images of shirtless muscular men, not quite ambiguous pictures of wrestlers grabbing each other’s flesh in risqué poses, and a series of very graphic faux gay sex-phone ads – complete with made-up telephone numbers, suggestive slogans, naked male flesh, and erect genitalia. Novy is indeed adamant that asserting a queer presence in street art is a worthy cause to fight for in order to lay claim to queer city-turf (interview, 2011). He thus has a series of famous gay gender nonconformers which includes both figures of the local gay bar-scene like Heklina, the leader of a renowned local drag-queen troupe, or Sister Roma, one of the most visible members of

Figure 17.2 Leatherline © Jeremy Novy

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graffiti seem particularly equipped to show that the convergence between these two phenomena is no accident, but the result of a political strategy. By being infrapolitical, in the sense that it resorts to a disqualified medium, graffiti thus achieves a peculiar form of resistance. In a rather de Certeauian way, it appears as a form of bricolage whereby politically low-key visual interventions – in other words, low-profile, grassroots everyday tactics – perform resistance to overarching political strategies (de Certeau, 1984).

CONCLUSION: WHAT DO GRAFFITI TELL US ABOUT RESISTANCE?

Figure 17.3 Heklina © Jeremy Novy

San Francisco’s chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and worldwide celebrities like the transgender actor Divine. Just as his explicitly erotic pieces assert identification with the more sexually adventurous and challenging side of LGBT culture, this series is meant as a tribute to, and a celebration of, the side of gay culture that resists the dominant assimilationist trend by failing to abide by gender norms. Since the addresser publicly identifies as queer, the transgressive channel – illegal inscriptions – combines with the provocative messages to make these pieces highlight the confluence between the sanitization of San Francisco’s public spaces and the normalization of mainstream LGBT culture. In this sense, Novy’s stencils ironically expose how, and express resistance to, the fact that both graffiti and a sex-positive queer culture get constructed as moral panics (Kramer, 2010: 303–306). Because it consists in unsolicited messages being brought out into the open,

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Graffiti are sometimes seen as politically significant only insofar as they represent scriptural manifestations of social movements whose actual existence does not depend on them. In this chapter, I have examined whether they can also be regarded as channels of a protest that is idiosyncratic to them. Part of the problem graffiti raise as a vehicle of resistance is that they can be essentially individual, a form of public exhibition that verges on solipsism (Riout, 1990: 14–15). As mentioned above, Iveson uses organization, collectiveness, and confrontationality to distinguish the politically insignificant knee-jerk reaction of one who merely writes unauthorized graffiti, from the more elaborate initiative of one who expresses broader political disagreement (2013: 951). Applied to the examples studied here, in fact, these criteria invite us to move beyond Iveson’s binary: though the pieces are not the result of an organized, collective initiative, they certainly are confrontational. Rather than a dual distinction between the political and the non-political, graffiti therefore invite us to take into consideration the infrapolitical. Paradoxically, that is in agreement with Beck’s conception of sub-politics, which he distinguishes from politics both in that ‘agents outside the political or corporatist

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system are also allowed to appear on the stage of social design’, and in that ‘not only social and collective agents, but individuals as well compete with the latter and each other for the emerging power to shape politics’ (1997: 103; emphasis in original). Beck, thus, does include the possibility that the roots of a different form of politics be individual. Another challenge posed by graffiti is that they are not always easy to understand, or even meant to be quite understood. Overly cryptic graffiti can sometimes be read as passwords rather than as rallying cries (N. Macdonald, 2003: 184; MacGillivray and Curwen, 2007: 358–362). Lack of clarity would thus seem to undermine graffiti’s effectiveness as a vehicle of resistance. The examples studied here suggest, rather, that anonymity, ambiguity, but also naivety and gross oversimplification can turn out to be infrapolitical assets. Scott, Fox and Starn, and Kelley have shown how discretion, disguise, surreptitiousness, sometimes even verging on invisibility, can turn hidden transcripts into effective tools of resistance. Hidden transcripts are indeed only hidden to those they are not meant to reach, but trigger in their participants and target-audiences a sense of empowerment, a sense that resistance is possible. Acts of lessthan-political resistance may seem to be so cathartic as to defuse the motivation to resist by making the causes of resentment more tolerable; but Scott famously denies this ‘safety-valve hypothesis’: petty acts of insubordination instead discreetly nourish the spirit of resistance (Scott, 1990: 188–191). In the cases studied here, although graffiti are anything but hidden, since their very essence is to be seen, they can be discreet or cryptic: the sense of recognition and identification between graffiti authors and viewers who have been able to notice or to decipher them may generate resistance-friendly emotions. For emotions play a crucial role in enabling infrapolitical performances and artefacts like graffiti to foster or sustain resistance. For example, Francesca Polletta

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(2006) has shown how lack of straightforwardness or even truthfulness can indeed make narratives all the more operative as emotional components of mobilizations. The language and metalanguage of graffiti, their verbal and visual rhetoric, and the way in which the relationship between addresser and addressee is embedded in a politically feeble channel conspire to create an indeterminacy that – in a somewhat paradoxical way – is anything but counterproductive. By being on broad display, yet open to the viewers’ interpretation, puzzlement, or indifference, graffiti are somehow ‘emerging “onstage” … in disguised [form]’ (Kelley, 1994: 8). Here again, personalization may appear to be the antithesis of politicization, yet the examples studied here suggest that it contributes to the effectiveness of protest graffiti qua infrapolitical resistance. So what do graffiti tell us about resistance? Studying graffiti as an infrapolitical forms of resistance invites us not to let our analysis be bounded by the notion that infrapolitics is merely a response to lacking organizational resources or political opportunities. Nor should a teleological or utilitarian bias lead us to measure or assess the significance of oppositional practices simply, or mainly, in terms of instrumental success. But saying that is not a way to discard the context by focusing on the discourse, or to minimize the social reality in order to fetishize the performances and the artefacts. On the contrary, while this chapter has obviously paid close attention to the discursive form of resistance produced by graffiti, it has done so in a way that enhances the social interactions – be they actual or virtual, in praesentia or in absentia – in which graffiti are embedded and to which they contribute.

Notes  1  IMAGER (Institute for the Study of English-, German-, and Romance Language-Speaking Cultures).

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 2  Tagging can even be a way of avoiding recruitment in gangs (MacGillivray and Curwen, 2007: 362).  3  Billboard Liberation Front: http://www.billboard liberation.com; Adbusters: http://www.adbusters. org.   4  San Francisco’s legislative municipal body, the Board of Supervisors, had earlier rejected a similar ordinance.  5  ‘It’s not my fault, my mama dropped me in a box of glitter and I’ve been shining ever since.’   6  This interpretation seems likely given the pun alluding to the title of the satirical, punk-inspired comedy Eat the Rich, directed by Peter Richardson in 1987, whose protagonist is a waiter at a high-end restaurant where he clashes with rich customers.

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and P. Jenkins (eds), The Berlin Wall: Representations and Perspectives (pp. 214–228). New York: Peter Lang. McAuliffe, C. (2012). Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the Moral Geographies of the Creative City. Journal of Urban Affairs, 34(2), 189–206. McBride, K. (2009). Sanctuary San Francisco: Recent Developments in Local Sovereignty and Spatial Politics. Theory and Event, 12(4). Online. Megler, V., Banis, D., and Chang, H. (2014). Spatial Analysis of Graffiti in San Francisco. Applied Geography, 54, 63–73. Merrill, S., and Hack, H. (2012). Exploring Hidden Narratives: Conscript Graffiti at the Former Military Base of Kummersdorf. Journal of Social Archaeology, 13(1), 101–121. Milon, D. (1999). L’étranger dans la ville. Du rap au graff mural. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Murphy, S. (2009). ‘Compassionate’ Strategies of Managing Homelessness: Post-Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco. Antipode, 41(2), 305–325. Myre (2003). Cope 2. ‘True Legend.’ Artistic Expressions, Development of an Urban Counterculture and Getting Fame: 20 Years of Graffiti in the Urban Ghetto. Paris: Righter. com. Nandrea, L. (1999). ‘Graffiti Taught Me Everything I Know about Space’: Urban Fronts and Borders. Antipode, 31(1), 110–116. No ©opyright (documents collected by Y. Pagès) (1998). Sorbonne 68 graffiti. Paris: Verticales. Ortiz, S. (a.k.a. BG183; as told to F. ServanSchreiber) (2004). 1904–2004; ‘I Wanted My Name to Travel Everywhere.’ New York Times, 28 March. Online. Phillips, S. (1999). Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in LA. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Polletta, F. (2006). It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rahimi, S. (2005). Cat-and-Mouse Game, With Spray Paint. New York Times, 15 August. Online. Rahn, J. (2002). Painting without Permission: Hip-Hop Graffiti Subculture. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Reed, T. V. (2005). The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Reisner, R. (1971). Graffiti: Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing. New York: Cowles. Riout, D. (1990). Le livre du graffiti. Paris: Alternatives. Roberts, C. (2015). SF Artist’s Pride Show Squashed by Foundation, due to Assault Claims. San Francisco Examiner, 31 May. Online. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Segal, N. (1999). From the Subways to the Streets. New York Times, 22 August. Online. Stein, M. B. (1989). The Politics of Humor: The Berlin Wall in Jokes and Graffiti. Western Folklore, 48(2), 85–108. Tanzer, H. H. (1939). The Common People of Pompeii: A Study of the Graffiti. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Ten Eyck, T., and Fischer, B. (2012). Is Graffiti Risky? Insights from the Internet and Newspapers. Media, Culture & Society, 34(7), 832–846. Worth, O., and Kuhling, C. (2004). Counterhegemony, Anti-globalisation and Culture in International Political Economy. Capital & Class, 28(3), 31–42. Young, A. (2012). Criminal Images: The Affective Judgment of Graffiti and Street Art Crime. Media Culture, 8(3), 297–314.

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18 Naming, Shaming, Changing the World Gay Seidman

Shame is often experienced as an intensely personal emotion, linked to individual emotions and personal mortification.1 But as activists and thinkers have long argued, shame is a deeply social sentiment, felt by individuals who have transgressed widely held morals, and deployed by communities to reinforce social norms. Public shaming rituals – like their milder version, individual confessions – have long reminded audiences of their social obligations, and warned potential sinners that there are real social penalties for failing to comply with communities’ rules. Observers of modern society have become increasingly interested in ‘shaming’ processes, both at the individual level, as social media make personal transgressions more visible to global audiences, and socially, as ‘shaming’ campaigns mobilize support for new global norms or stigmatize corporations. Historically, poor judgment or transgressive behavior might have provoked local gossip, condemnation, or humiliation, but

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in the internet era, humiliation can spread like wildfire. Shaming on social media – often with photos and critical moralizing about behaviors ranging from inappropriate humor to illegal lion-hunting – is often likened to the pillories or stocks of the middle ages: today, an un-erasable record may continue to spread, repeatedly humiliating individuals whose poor judgment or tasteless comments will be forever displayed before global audiences (Ronson, 2015). But shaming can also be used at a much broader level, to promote social change. While shaming rituals in many settings reinforce existing norms, the same emotions can be mobilized to promote new perspectives. By raising moral questions about previously unnoticed or unchallenged behaviors, activists have used shame to promote new moral visions, by stigmatizing long-accepted behaviors or powerful actors. Shame can be deployed to promote new norms and values, rather than simply to reinforce old ones: by forcing audiences to confront moral

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contradictions, activists can mobilize support for social change. Jean-Paul Sartre (2004 [1961]), for example, urged readers to confront the brutal history of European colonialism, for ‘in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment’. By prompting reflection about complicity, or about moral standards, shame can also shift opinions, reminding audiences about broad moral values, and sometimes, mobilizing them to support movements for social change. Social movement theorists, who have often focused more on collective mobilization and protest than on shaming, have perhaps been slower than activists to notice how campaigns use shaming strategically. But recently, as sociologists have begun to explore how social movements mobilize emotions (Goodwin et al., 2001), social movement scholars have begun to look more explicitly at ‘shaming’ as a mechanism through which movements promote new, often more universalistic, moralities – even adding a new category of movements to the theoretical lexicon. ‘Shaming’ has taken on new visibility in this era of globalization, when transnational movements often try reach out to global audiences, to persuade people around the world to pay attention, and to mobilize a sense of moral outrage about acts that might otherwise remain invisible. ‘Shaming’ campaigns have been used to mobilize pressure against repressive states, to call attention to environmental problems or to the rights of indigenous populations. By stigmatizing behavior, and publicizing acts that violate widely accepted norms, ‘shaming movements’ try to mobilize global publics against actors who seem to be operating beyond the power of existing governments or international agencies to regulate them – individuals, states, or multinational corporations. Building on the example of the human rights movement, many movements have turned to ‘naming and shaming’ strategies. In the twentieth century, as I suggest in the first sections of this chapter, most

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sociologists viewed shaming as either a community response to deviance, or as a tactic by activists trying to mobilize public support for new norms and values. In most of these examples, ‘shaming’ was only one part of a larger effort: most social movement activists also sought to enact new rules, often by changing laws – for example, by outlawing slavery or regulating alcohol consumption. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, ‘naming and shaming’ took on new visibility, as transnational movements looked for new ways to rein in powerful actors outside the reach of local faith communities or national legal systems. In the second half of this paper, I trace the growing emphasis on ‘naming and shaming’ to increased globalization, as sociologists as well as activists sought new tactics that might restrain repressive states or multinational corporations operating beyond the borders of any single nation. But even as ‘shaming movements’ have attracted a great deal of attention, questions abound. Under what conditions can shaming succeed in reconfiguring moral boundaries? And even where shaming succeeds, can such moral reframing suffice? How, precisely, can shaming be combined with structural efforts to implement the new norms that activists have advanced? Addressing these questions I draw on recent accounts of numerous shaming campaigns, including the anti-apartheid divestment campaign, the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Fossil Fuel divestment movement. The chapter concludes with some necessarily speculative suggestions regarding the moral components of activism generally.

SHAME AS A STRATEGIC TACTIC Until the 1960s, sociological discussions of shaming tended to reflect the discipline’s broad emphasis on the reproduction of moral frameworks, focusing on the use of public

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opprobrium to reinforce existing social norms. Often building on Durkheim’s insights into the way communities construct solidarity, sociologists’ interest in local practices of holding individuals up to scorn or punishment generally reflected their understanding of the way social pressures shaped individual behavior; public shaming can simultaneously punish those who transgress, and reminds other community members that they must comply. Kai Erikson (2004 [1966]), for example, argued that in seventeenth-century New England, the Salem Village witch trials reinforced community solidarity: public trials identified and ‘shamed’ deviants, and in the process, reinforced the community’s broader collective identity and social norms. Of course, through the first half of the twentieth century, sociology tended to focus more on reproduction of society than social change; ‘collective behavior’ raised images of threats to social order and unruly mobs, not conscious efforts to change society. By the mid-1980s, however, social movements scholars were looking very differently at social movements. Especially as social movements scholars who had themselves participated in the civil rights, feminist, or anti-war movements began to look anew at social movements, they began to reexamine activists’ efforts to promote new visions of morality, and new norms. With that shift, social movement theorists began to ask what makes movements work: how do communities construct, publicize, and enforce new moralities, stigmatizing or rejecting long-standing institutions or widely accepted behaviors? Emphasizing social movements’ efforts to build collectivities as bases for different kinds of collective solidarity, to embrace more universalistic and democratic values, and often challenging existing moral authorities, sociologists began to ask how movements emerge, mobilize support and resources, or challenge existing authorities. With this shift, sociological discussions of shaming would take on a very different tone: while shaming

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reminds audiences of moral lines, campaigns to stigmatize specific individuals – or, even more, specific kinds of behavior – need not simply reinforce old norms, or punish those who transgress an established moral line. Social movement activists use shaming campaigns to promote new moralities, to create new collective identities, and reinforce new cultural patterns, as part of a broader conscious effort to change society. Almost certainly, activists realized much earlier than sociologists did that social movements could promote alternative moral frameworks, and that shaming campaigns could publically indict the powerful actors who transgressed that new morality. An early, dramatic example comes from eighteenthcentury abolitionists, when, outraged by the British parliament’s refusal to ban slavery in 1791, British abolitionists began to refuse to consume sugar. because it had been grown by slaves on Caribbean plantations, sugar was abhorrent, an unacceptable link to an unacceptable social practice. Rejecting ‘the blood-sweetened beverage’ served as a tangible reminder to local communities that a morally problematic practice, slavery, persisted throughout the British empire; moreover, the sugar boycott reminded ordinary Britons that slavery continued, not because it was moral, but because it was profitable. Importantly, the abolitionists’ campaign predated the internet; in fact, it came long before the telegraph would be invented. Indeed, the campaign even predated the word ‘boycott’, which would not be coined until a century later, when Irish tenant farmers organized a community-wide shunning of their English landlord, Charles Boycott (Jasper, 1997). Yet, though they lacked either today’s social media or a label for their new strategy, the abolitionists’ shunning campaign quickly caught on. As Adam Hochschild (2005) writes in his masterful history of the campaign, ‘Everyone could understand the logic of the sugar boycott, even children’ (p. 195). Almost by accident, the boycott helped build support for the abolitionist movement in

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two ways. Drinking unsweetened tea served to remind participants and their companions of their shared outrage, creating and reinforcing a collective identity built on the rejection of slavery. At the same time, of course, the boycott stigmatized the British companies who continued to profit from slavery, and shamed Parliamentary representatives who voted against the abolitionists’ proposed law. But the sugar boycott did more than simply reduce demand for sugar from Caribbean slave plantations. The act of boycotting sugar, Hochschild concludes, gave ordinary people a way to demonstrate their commitment to this new morality, as ‘citizens took upon themselves the power to act when Parliament had not’ (Hochschild, 2005: 195) – and regularly reminded each other that behavior which long been considered acceptable could be challenged. Over the next two centuries, ‘moral crusades’ trying to change norms and collective moral framework have often involved efforts to stigmatize behavior once considered acceptable. Often, movements develop public rituals through which individuals can reaffirm and demonstrate their commitment to their community and its new culture and morality, including confessional performances in public spaces – rituals that are often experienced as individual emotions, but which can underscore individuals’ commitment to a collective identity and set of social norms. Today’s conservative Christian activists often use language of shaming and confession to enforce existing norms (Stein, 2001), but in public confessions also played an important part in the temperance movement, a ‘symbolic crusade’ that sought to reshape urban American culture. Public confessions – effectively, voluntary self-shaming rituals – allowed individual participants to demonstrate their commitment to the temperance movement’s norms, while simultaneously reminding their audience of the dangers of drinking and reassuring them that they could nevertheless be welcomed back into the fold. In these confessions, Young (2002: 661) writes, temperance

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activists ‘fused programs of personal transformation and national change’, mobilizing support for, and confirming individuals’ commitment to, new ‘cultural schemas’ in a period of rapid social and economic change. But like abolitionists before them, temperance activists sought both to change individual behavior, and to assert a collective set of norms. Temperance activists urged state authorities to ban and to punish behavior that had long been considered unexceptional, but which the temperance movements considered immoral, and dangerous. Across increasingly diverse cities, reformers sought to create an alcohol-free culture, to reject what they viewed as a sinful way of life, and to stigmatize long-accepted business practices. And, like the abolitionist movement before it, the temperance movement sought to stigmatize businesses that profited directly from sinful behavior. In a tactic that reappears in today’s ‘fair trade’ markets, temperance groups constructed in what Young describes as a ‘parallel society for reform advocates [including] temperance eating houses, hotels, steamboats and grocery shops’ – much as abolitionists earlier held ‘fairs selling goods untainted by the filthy lucre of a slave economy, generating funds for the cause and strengthening bonds of sociability’ (Young, 2002: 682; see also Tilly, 2002). Before temperance activists stigmatized drugs and alcohol, trade in both was widely accepted as ordinary and profitable; indeed, powerful corporations, aided by the British and American governments, actively promoted wider use of opium and other addictive drugs. But after the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade and the Women’s Anti-Opium Urgency Committee worked actively to stigmatize a once-legitimate trade, both governments began to regulate drugs and opiates, requiring companies to restrict the ‘indiscriminate use’ of addictive ingredients, and to limit their drug sales to controlled use under strict medical supervision (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2002). Temperance activists were less successful in their efforts to prohibit all use of

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alcohol, but they certainly managed to regulate sales, including during Prohibition. From the late nineteenth century, social change activists became increasingly adept at deploying shaming tactics in support of social change. In the context of rapidly spreading industrial capitalism and urbanization, an increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan urban population, and democratization, activists in many different social movements often used shaming tactics to reaffirm older norms and moralities, or to assert new ones. Activists in the labor movement – which, as Calhoun (2012: 278–9) notes, dominated the social movement field for much of the twentieth century – frequently deployed shaming tactics, both to assert new labor rights, and sometimes, to protect relatively privileged workers against newcomers. In the early twentieth century, Dana Frank (1999) writes, labor activists in the Pacific Northwest shamed strikebreakers and their families, and also urged union supporters to boycott exploitative companies – a tactic clearly aimed at publicly shaming recalcitrant employers, while perhaps also exerting real economic damage on businesses that failed to respect the labor movement’s demands for collective bargaining standards. In the same period, Eileen Boris (2003) describes broad national campaigns asking middleclass housewives to boycott companies which failed to pay adequate wages or to protect their employees’ health – again, publicly shaming those who ignored newly asserted norms, stigmatizing their businesses and threatening economic punishment. In the context of factory disasters – most notably, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, where easily preventable deaths after a factory fire provoked widespread condemnation – consumer boycotts, often promoted by upper-class reformers horrified by prevailing sweatshop conditions, mobilized growing moral outrage, gave members of the public a way to demonstrate their concern, and strengthened public support for new labor legislation (Greenwald, 2005).

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But it is worth noting, in passing, that American labor history also includes painful reminders that shaming tactics can be used as easily to enforce long-standing community norms, as to promote a more inclusive or democratic social order. As Frank (2003) reminds us, the uniquely American tradition of using ‘union labels’ to identify goods produced in union shops was first deployed in the late nineteenth century, as a part of a campaign to ‘protect’ white workers from competition from undercutting by more recent immigrants. In the 1870s, union members in a San Francisco cigar-rolling shop placed white paper bands around the cigars made in their shop, to indicate that these cigars were rolled by white workers – not by Asians; this campaign culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In the latter half of the twentieth century, after Gandhi’s campaign for India’s independence demonstrated the powerful moral force of nonviolent tactics, American civil rights activists raised shaming tactics to a central position in their repertoire. Peaceful protests and demonstrations promoted a new, nonracial morality, but at the same time, civil rights pickets reminded supporters to boycott local businesses that discriminated along racial lines, while sit-ins embarrassed both businesses and public officials who enforced discriminatory laws. However, activists clearly understood that public shaming was only a step toward a much larger goal. Relatively early on in his career, Martin Luther King (1957) wrote, The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness (p. 120).

Similarly, the farmworkers’ movement turned to shaming techniques in the 1970s

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to publicize a previously hidden problem and to stigmatize exploitive employers – but their larger goal was to mobilize political support for social and legal reforms. When Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers called on Americans to boycott grapes and lettuce, their aims were far broader than simply punishing major growers: by engaging audiences across the country in discussions about the boycott, they raised public awareness about the conditions faced by migrant farmworkers, and mobilized broad support for a new labor relations act extending collective bargaining rights to farmworkers, who had been explicitly excluded from New Deal labor legislation. As the Farm Workers’ national campaign spread across the country, national sales of grapes and lettuce were certainly affected, and some vintners were targeted; but equally importantly, the campaign gave ordinary Americans an easy way to demonstrate sympathy for the farmworkers’ cause. Individual consumers could express their support, and perhaps punish those who transgressed a rapidly changing norm; but these individual decisions were magnified by demonstrations and protests outside supermarkets, raising awareness even further – a campaign which ultimately prompted the passage of new labor legislation (Ganz, 2009; Wells and Villarejo, 2004). For most of the twentieth century, most social activists viewed their efforts to shame or stigmatize immoral behavior as a small step in a larger effort: most ‘symbolic crusades,’ as Gusfield (1963) called them, aimed to first change public opinion, and then change national rules to reflect a new moral understanding. But in an increasingly integrated world, the limitations of national legislation have pushed transnational activists to ask whether, and under what circumstances, shaming campaigns might provide a new way to rein in powerful actors around the world.

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SHAMING ACROSS BORDERS The path between framing, shaming, and the creation of new rules is often a tortuous one – especially, as eighteenth-century British abolitionists learned, when powerful forces ally to defend an existing set of behaviors. In the early twenty-first century, this path has perhaps become especially complicated. In an integrated global society – where issues of distance, sovereignty, geopolitics, and private profit complicate efforts either to assert traditional norms, or to construct new cultural understandings across diverse communities – transnational ‘symbolic crusades’ face perhaps an even more difficult road. For social movement activists, these challenges are perhaps magnified by the emergence of new powerful actors. As Calhoun (2012) points out, from the middle of the nineteenth century, increasingly powerful national states became the focus of social movement activism, as the franchise increased ordinary citizens’ sense of power, and as national states became central to industrial and economic expansion. But in an increasingly integrated global society – marked by rapid movement between countries, and by supply chains that spread across borders – activists, policy-makers, and scholars increasingly ask whether and how social movements might rein in powerful global actors – repressive states who reject international rules, or multinational companies, whose ability to threaten capital flight has weakened states’ ability or willingness to enforce labor and environmental protections. ‘Shaming’ has been central to transnational activism over the past thirty or forty years, as activists promoting new norms for human rights, gender, environmental concerns, labor rights, or access to medicine have tried to embarrass global actors who seem otherwise beyond the reach of national or international regulations. By engaging global publics in their efforts to stigmatize

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and punish multinational corporations or rogue states, transnational activists hope to stigmatize behavior while promoting broad moral values or a changing scientific consensus (Johnston, 2011; Smith, 2008). The international human rights movement, of course, offers the archetypal example of a strategy to ‘name and shame’ transgressors. Less than a decade after the United Nations was formed, most states signed onto the 1951 Charter of Human Rights. Within a decade, Amnesty International and other human rights groups began to ‘name and shame’ governments that failed to respect these rights, now officially considered universal and inalienable. Although they had had little real leverage over foreign governments, or even over their own, small groups of activists around the world began to shine a spotlight on individual cases of nonviolent ‘prisoners of conscience’, highlighting broad repression, attracting public attention, and offering a mechanism through which ordinary people around the world could shame repressive states, no matter how far away. As Keck and Sikkink (1998) point out in their path-breaking Activists Beyond Borders, the human rights movement’s ‘boomerang’ strategy became a new global model for transnational campaigns. Based on information provided by local human rights activists, transnational activists publicized human rights violations from around the world, in house meetings, church groups, city councils, and parliaments in democratic societies. Local church groups in New England might adopt a ‘prisoner of conscience’ in Chile, or in the Soviet Union; as they wrote letters to the repressive state, or to their own government officials and international agencies to call attention to the prisoner’s plight, those church groups were drawn into more general discussions of new norms around human rights. Over time, these campaigns – effectively, a ‘symbolic crusade’, simultaneously shaming repressive regimes, but also mobilizing broad public support for a new set of global norms,

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redefining global expectations for how states should treat their citizens – helped change American policy. By ‘naming and shaming’ human rights violators, advocates raised awareness of Soviet repression, but also of anti-democratic behavior in close Western allies. As ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns mobilized global support for new norms defining basic human rights, activists also pushed for the inclusion of human rights considerations in diplomatic efforts. National human rights records began to face global scrutiny; many authoritarian regimes faced growing criticism at home as well as abroad. Within democracies, the human rights movement began to raise new questions about the recipients of military and foreign aid; in the United States, for instead, new legislation required the government to cut off military aid to countries which violated basic human rights standards. While those restrictions were often applied more flexibly than human rights advocates might have wished, the fact that the law was passed reflected a remarkable shift, as policy-makers began to hold US allies as well as enemies accountable to new global standards. But while the human rights movement’s ‘shaming’ campaign marked an important shift in transnational activism, too often, social movement theorists overlook the way global human rights campaigns have shifted since the early 1990s, towards a focus on strengthening democratic institutions, rather than simply on shaming repressive states. Although activists still put a great deal of energy into publicizing egregious cases of human rights violations – both to alert global publics to far-off events, and to mobilize global efforts to push powerful states or international institutions to intervene – in most cases, ‘naming and shaming’ marks only one stage in what is today understood as a much longer effort to build strong protections for vulnerable citizens. Today, while efforts to attract global attention and create sympathy may be the starting

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point, most human rights workers have come to believe that in the longer term, only the construction of democratic institutions, with laws and due process, will provide reliable protection for citizens’ rights. While ‘shaming’ campaigns certainly help mobilize public pressure, and strengthen global solidarity around new norms for acceptable state behavior, most human rights advocates tend to look for ways to create more tangible pressures – from calling on international and powerful national actors to impose sanctions on (or, in extreme cases, to invade) repressive states, to focusing attention on how best to construct new institutions of democracy to protect citizens’ rights, or to actively punish human rights violators (Godoy, 2006; Hendrix and Wong, 2012; Massoud, 2006; Murdie and Davis, 2012). Transnational activists across many different issue areas – from feminism, to indigenous rights activists, to environmentalists – have tended to follow a similar trajectory. Initially, activists focus on shaming, to draw attention to a little-discussed global issue or social problem, often by publicizing extreme and egregious cases. But once they have attracted global attention to their concerns, most campaigners shift, looking for ways to enforce those new norms. Global shaming campaigns help mobilize attention and concern, but most campaigners then go on to try to institutionalize that attention, by demanding that authorities pursue more consistent or vigorous enforcement of existing rules, or by creating new rules to enforce a new moral consensus. Once the most extreme problems have been resolved, most advocates begin to focus on how to promote institutional change, calling on democratizing states to strengthen local protections, and on international allies and agencies to assist in that effort. Feminist activists around the world, for example, have worked hard to make gender inequality and gender violence visible to global publics; but once they have mobilized political support at home and abroad, feminist activists

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generally shift, demanding that their local governments pass new laws to protect women’s rights, often drawing on new model international conventions for their inspiration and model (Merry, 2006; Thayer, 2010). Similarly, indigenous activists demand that their national governments recognize indigenous land and cultural rights in national legal systems (Richards, 2013; RodríguezPiñero, 2006), while environmentalists focus on national states to strengthen and enforce environmental protections. The most recent example of this pattern, perhaps, comes from the relatively recent campaign to end ‘human trafficking’. As Alison Brysk (2009) describes it, global campaigns to end human trafficking first went through an initial ‘shaming’ stage, as activists publicized the plight of victims, framing previously hidden and widely ignored behavior as morally problematic. Here, activists sought to shame perpetrators and enablers, stigmatizing their behavior – and also prompting widespread discussion of behaviors that had previously gone unnoticed, creating a new moral consensus. Once that new moral vision had been widely accepted, activists called on national governments to put more resources into regulating behavior that was increasingly viewed as immoral, urging governments to pass new laws, and to punish transgressions. Thus, Brysk suggests, shaming campaigns form a step in a broader process of redefining norms, mobilizing public awareness and concern, and regulating social behavior.

SHAMING GLOBAL BRANDS: DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGNS VS CONSUMER BOYCOTTS In an increasingly integrated global economy, issues of distance, sovereignty, geopolitics, and private profit have complicated efforts to assert social norms and community solidarity. While ‘shaming’ has proved a

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successful way to draw attention to global issues, and to mobilizing support for new global norms by drawing attention to those who transgress them, ‘shaming campaigns’ been especially central to efforts to constrain multinational corporations, which often seem to have outgrown the power of national regulators. Much as the abolitionists of the eighteenth century or temperance crusaders sought to stigmatize businesses that profited from acts that were increasingly viewed as immoral, activists in the twenty-first century have often tried to stigmatize businesses that seem to contribute to – indeed, to profit from – persistent global problems. In the 1970s, a global ‘shaming’ campaign backed by a well-publicized consumer boycott forced Nestlé to change its marketing practices around selling infant formula to poor mothers, while in the 1980s, the anti-apartheid divestment movement helped bring democracy to South Africa. Since then, hoping to provoke new debates around the moral impact of private as well as public behaviors, many transnational activists have turned to tactics designed to ‘shame’ corporations as well as repressive states, hoping to engage local publics around far-away issues, to shame powerful actors and institutions, and to strengthen support for new global norms. The global anti-apartheid campaign’s trajectory between 1960 and 1990 is often cited as a model for building transnational pressure across borders – an ironic twist, since the anti-apartheid ‘shaming’ strategy came about almost by accident. In the early 1960s, anti-apartheid activists turned to shaming tactics primarily because their other efforts to end apartheid in South Africa had failed – and because Western powers continued to treat the white-minority regime as an ally in the Cold War, despite rhetorical objections to apartheid, South Africa’s strict form of racial segregation and white-minority rule. Precisely because they felt they were making little headway through ordinary diplomatic efforts, anti-apartheid campaigners

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looked for new ways to undermine support for white-dominated South Africa, calling for a worldwide sports boycott and a cultural boycott as well as an end to economic links. Nearly a decade later, frustrated by the failure of Western governments to impose meaningful sanctions on the apartheid regime, a handful of anti-apartheid activists in the New York area called on major American church denominations to discuss the ethical dilemma related to apartheid, arguing that church communities could not ethically continue to invest in companies linked to South Africa. Soon, American activists began to bring these questions to other institutions, especially universities, where more and more students objected to their schools’ financial involvement in a system that was built on white supremacy. As they attended teach-ins, debates, and protests, more and more Americans began to see South African-related investments as crossing clear moral lines, by linking their institutions to a system of racial oppression. By the mid1980s, as successful examples of institutional divestiture showed that universities or pension funds could sell off their South Africarelated stocks without significant financial damage, it became difficult for institutional investors to justify continuing business as usual, and even more difficult for corporate leaders to ignore the debate (Massie, 1997). Divestment offered a new tactic, one that has proved especially important in a globally integrated world, where private interests as well as governments may have a direct stake in foreign affairs. As early as 1983, the American Legislative Exchange Council – which worked closely with South African lobbyists through the 1980s to coordinate efforts to block divestment or economic sanctions – warned that the anti-apartheid divestment campaign might serve as a model for future transnational campaigns, arguing that ‘Although South Africa is the initial target it is not likely to be the last … If successful on the South African issue, these activists can be expected to broaden their disinvestment

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strategy. And, it will be increasingly difficult to contain because a precedent for it will have been established’ (ALEC, 1983). In retrospect, ALEC’s warning seems surprisingly prescient: activists have called for divestment around issues as diverse as tobacco production and Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories, demanding that local institutions reconsider their involvement in activities widely viewed as immoral. In a surprisingly visible recent example, environmentalists launched a global campaign around climate change in 2013. Calling on the world’s universities and religious denominations to divest from fossil fuel companies, activists argued that by profiting from fossil fuels, those institutions (and, even more directly, those multinationals) put their short-term private profits before broader social concerns about limiting carbon emissions to forestall further climate change (McKibben, 2013). By demanding that local institutions cut ties to global companies linked to far-off behavior, local activists ask people in different parts of the world to consider what relationship to far-off global processes might be acceptable – and in the process, they provoke debates and conversations about issues that might otherwise be considered outside the realm of local politics, strengthening social and political pressure in support of a new moral consensus. Of course, many transnational activists, frustrated with the failure of governments and international institutions, have looked for ways to focus more directly on corporations, and ‘shaming campaigns’ often urge wealthy consumers around the world to boycott corporations engaged in unacceptable behavior, from environmental degradation, to a failure to respect workers’ labor rights, or to protect workers’ health and safety. In her classic manifesto No Logo, Naomi Klein (2009 [1999]) argued that highly visible companies and corporate brands are uniquely vulnerable, precisely because their commercial success depends on cultural appeal. To protect their global image, or to stay off global boycotts,

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brands will respond quickly to any publicity that might tarnish that appeal – a logic which has persuaded activists around the world to see shaming campaigns as their best hope for pushing multinational companies to put moral values ahead of dividends. In the early 1990s, labor activists called on consumers to avoid Nike products over labor repression in Indonesia; human rights campaigners targeted Gap over conditions in Central America. Since then, labor activists have repeatedly called for boycotts, punishing companies they see as involved in what is often called a ‘race to the bottom’, by urging consumers to boycott companies which fail to respect labor rights, or to make sure their factories treat workers well. Facing the growing threat that global boycotts would permanently tarnish their brands, major clothing companies began to adopt codes of conduct, usually promising they would ensure that their subcontractors would respect local health, safety, and environmental regulations, as well as respect labor rights (Anner, 2011; Armbruster-Sandoval, 2004; Brooks, 2007; Rodriguez-Garavito, 2005). By the early 2000s, these commitments to fulfilling ‘corporate social responsibility’ had become so widespread that many analysts began to ask whether the approach might serve as the basis for a new kind of global regulatory pressure. Given the difficulty of regulating global corporations across many different countries and contexts, and the relative weakness of many local governments, increasingly dependent on foreign investors to keep their economies afloat, could the threats of potential consumer boycotts persuade major brands to adopt new ethical standards, requiring their sub contractors to comply with voluntary codes of conduct? Often incorporated into an approach known as ‘new governance’ emphasizing cooperation between regulators and private actors rather than strict state regulation and enforcement (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000; Fung et al., 2001; Ruggie, 2013), ‘shaming’ has sometimes been viewed as a potential global alternative, a new kind

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of enforcement mechanism that might protect vulnerable workers around the world. As Jane Collins (2003) points out, global supply chains make it easy for consumers in wealthy countries to ignore the conditions in which their clothes are made. By alerting global publics to the conditions in far-off factories, these transnational ‘shaming campaigns’ have drawn attention to egregious violations, prompting many companies – especially those whose iconic cultural status made them visible and vulnerable – to take real steps to improve conditions in their suppliers. Many companies have adopted corporate codes of conduct and required subcontractors to comply, often subjecting them to corporate monitoring programs or paying independent monitors to ensure compliance (Appelbaum, 2016; Bartley and Child, 2014; Potoski and Prakash, 2009; Soule, 2009). Some industries and companies have gone even farther, supporting the creation of special labels, with certification meant to assure global consumers that specific goods were produced under acceptable conditions – an intriguing echo to the ‘sin-free’ markets of the abolitionists and temperance movements. In reality, of course, consumer boycotts depend on individual consumers, who are easily confused by the profusions of labels and codes, and who may be more concerned about price and quality than about the conditions under which goods are made (Jasper, 1997). Moreover, even well-intentioned and engaged consumers often struggle to distinguish between ‘fair trade’ labels, or to know which monitoring programs and certifying schemes might be reliable – or even, whether the code’s priorities reflect those of local workers, or the concerns of privileged global consumers (Jaffee, 2014; Nooruddin and Wilson Sokhey, 2012; Seidman, 2009; Vallas et al., 2015). Today, after two decades of experimentation, how much have these voluntary schemes improved working conditions in factories around the world, at least for factories supplying the highly visible brands who

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are more vulnerable to boycotts? Empirical studies suggest that these programs may improve the behavior of some subcontractors, but voluntary monitoring processes alone seem unlikely to prevent the worst abuses (Braithwaite, 2002; Esbenshade, 2004; Seidman, 2007). Even in the clothing industry – perhaps more vulnerable than any other to public shaming, since companies will work hard to protect their brands’ cultural appeal – the evidence is mixed. Based on a careful comparative study of some of the world’s most highly regarded corporate supply-chain monitoring programs, Richard Locke (2013: 12–18) concludes that while private voluntary initiatives can sometimes work in the interests of both firms and employees, these happy outcomes are rare. ‘Moreover’, he notes, ‘because of the conflicting pressures facing both buyers and suppliers, where these mutually beneficial arrangements do exist, they remain unstable in the sense that each actor has a strong incentive to cheat or renege on whatever commitments underlie these collaborations.’ Locke suggests that voluntary schemes work best when public regulators work closely with private monitors, to ensure compliance with labor laws as well as private standards. But like other researchers who have examined voluntary schemes (Esbenshade, forthcoming; Shamir, 2011), Locke argues that as long as the underlying pressures of global competition push lower-tier suppliers to cut corners, voluntary programs will not improve the worst offenders. As widely respected labor activist Scott Nova points out, global shaming campaigns have prompted virtually all major apparel brands and retailers to adopt codes of conduct and set up factory monitoring programs, but most of these voluntary schemes leave decisions about monitoring and enforcement to the very same employers whose profit margins depend on cutting costs. Nova writes, These brands and retailers promise to ensure respect for worker rights and worker safety in their

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supply chains, but they make no binding commitments to any third party. Whether apparel corporations follow through on their pledges is at their sole discretion. The monitoring process is controlled and run by the brands and retailers; the inspectors work for them. The brands and retailers tell the inspectors what to look for, exclude those issues they choose to exclude, and act – or don’t act – on the inspectors’ finding as they see fit. Public pressure to live up to their official labor rights promises, can, in some circumstances, be brought to bear on brands and retailers, but the brands and retailers sharply limit transparency in order to minimize the ability of advocates to do so: inspection results are kept secret (from workers as well as from the public) and the only information that gets reported is what the brands and retailers choose to report (generally, glossy paeans to the great progress ostensibly being achieved, backed up by little to no hard information). (Nova and Wegemer, 2016: 30–1)

The deficits in several widely regarded global monitoring schemes were painfully revealed in 2012, when major fires tore through apparel factories in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Subsequent investigations revealed that in each of these fires, widely respected ‘independent’ monitors had recently certified factories as safe and compliant – despite clear evidence that the factories were ignoring basic fire safety rules (Walsh and Greenhouse, 2012; Yardley, 2012). Then in April, 2013, another scandal underscored the lesson: Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza, a building that housed several clothing factories, collapsed, killing 1,134 workers and injuring hundreds more. Many of the dead worked for less than a dollar a day, producing clothes for locally owned suppliers, who were working under contract for global brands from Europe and North America. Yet again, a major disaster revealed both the failure of global brands to really hold their suppliers accountable to voluntary codes of conduct, and the failure of a national government, dependent on exports to sustain its economy, to enforce local health, safety, and building codes. And the disaster also revealed, yet again, that the threat of a broad consumer boycott goes only so far: several global brands had been warned by

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their monitors that conditions in Rana Plaza factories were unacceptable. As in past campaigns, a global shaming campaign immediately began to publicize the labels on goods produced in the collapsed building, hoping to shame big apparel companies to contribute to funds for dead or injured workers and their families. But as evidence mounted that monitoring of factories in Rana Plaza had not prevented a tragedy – that monitors’ negative scores had not weighed heavily in brands’ sourcing decisions – labor activists around the world opened a new discussion. After two decades of global shaming campaigns and consumer-based pressure in the apparel industry, transnational activists began to search for new strategies: instead of relying on voluntary codes and monitors, can cross-border institutions be created to prevent yet another recurrence of this kind of disaster? As activists acknowledge the limitations of consumer boycotts as a way to ensure compliance with voluntary schemes to protect workers around the world, their strategic focus shifts to stronger enforcement mechanisms, often proposing ways to strengthen public as well as private regulation, bolstering public labor law enforcement, or strengthening workers’ unions (e.g., Anner et  al., 2016; Hermanson, forthcoming; Locke, 2013; Quan, 2016; Posthuma and Bignami, 2016).

CONCLUSION Sociology’s current discussion around ‘shaming’ movements parallels a lively debate among social movement theorists from the 1990s, revolving around whether and how social movements had changed as a result of the 1960s student movements. Were we seeing a profound shift in the central dynamics of mobilization, as movements shifted from advancing participants’ material interests, to new concerns about identity,

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community, and cultural change? In response, Craig Calhoun (1993) reminded sociologists that earlier social movement, too, had emphasized new identities as part of mobilizing support for social change: describing the nineteenth-century temperance movement, he argued that many movements mobilize support by creating new cultural identities through cultural and social practices. The crucial difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ movements, he suggested, lay not in movements’ central themes, but in their maturity, especially, in the degree to which they were institutionalized. First, he suggested, activists proposed a new social norm; after mobilizing support for social change, they sought to pass legislation and construct new institutions which reflected that norm. Once that vision of how society ought to function had been institutionalized, activists could shift away from mobilizing support and solidarity, toward implementation and regulation – shifting away from ‘shaming’ or other tactics designed to mobilize public support, to more routine, even bureaucratic activities. Along similar lines, perhaps the emphasis on ‘naming and shaming’ that seems so dominant in today’s transnational movements should be viewed not so much as a new kind of movement, but rather, as a new iteration of what has long been a tactical choice for movements seeking social change. Through shaming, social movements can simultaneously make a new norm visible, and create social pressure on private actors to comply with that new norm. Especially in the era of the internet, public shaming can taint an individual or an organization, punishing transgressions, and reminding those who watch the shaming process that they, too, might be vulnerable to social pressure if they should similarly transgress. In an ever-more integrated global society, activists raising new issues must appeal to global publics, persuading them to pay attention to behavior that was previously invisible or ignored – and new technologies like the internet give a global dimension to the kinds

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of ‘shaming’ tactics that were once limited to a congregation or a factory entrance. But as activists’ discussions since the Rana Plaza collapse remind us, shaming is rarely a movement’s defining characteristic, or its final goal. Like the seventeenthcentury sugar boycott, which was only a momentary tactic for a centuries-long effort to abolish slavery, most shaming movements have broader goals: generally, activists seek to mobilize moral outrage, change public attitudes – using ‘shaming’ campaigns not simply to punish bad actors, but as a step toward strengthening, and perhaps institutionalizing, new rules for behavior, in the global community as well as in congregations or countries.

Note  1  I am grateful to Steve Vallas, Mary Ann Clawson, and Raphael Gernath for very helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.

REFERENCES American Legislative Exchange Council. 1983. ‘Legislative Update: The States and South Africa: A Case Study of the Disinvestment Issue’, accessed at http://www.pfaw.org/ sites/default/files/83ALECsa.pdf, September 25, 2014. Anner, Mark. 2011. Solidarity Transformed: Labor Responses to Globalization and Crisis in Latin America. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Anner, Mark, Jennifer Bair, and Jeremy Blasi. 2016. ‘Jobbers Agreements in the US Apparel Industry: Binding Labor-Buyer-Supplier Contracts with Contemporary Relevance?’. In Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, chapter 13. Appelbaum, Richard. 2016. ‘From Public Regulation to Private Enforcement: How CSR Became Managerial Orthodoxy’. In Making Blue the Next Green: Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by

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Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, chapter 2. Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph. 2004. Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement and the Struggle for Social Justice. New York: Routledge Bartley, Tim and Curtis Child. 2014. ‘Shaming the Corporation: The Social Production of Targets and the Anti-Sweatshop Movement’. American Sociological Review, 79:4, 653–79. Boris, Eileen. 2003. ‘Consumers of the World Unite!’. In Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective, edited by Daniel Bender and Richard Greenwald. New York: Routledge, pp. 203–24. Braithwaite, John. 2002. ‘Rewards and Regulation’. Journal of Law and Society, 29:1, 12–26. Braithwaite, John and Peter Drahos. 2000. Global Business Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braithwaite, John and Peter Drahos. 2002. ‘Zero Tolerance, Naming and Shaming: Is There a Case For It With Crimes of the Powerful?’. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 35:3, 269–288. Brooks, Ethel. 2007. Unraveling the Garment Industry. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Brysk, Alison. 2009. ‘Beyond Framing and Shaming: Human Trafficking, Human Security and Human Rights’. Journal of Human Security, 5:3, 8–21. Calhoun, Craig. 1993. ‘“New Social Movements” of the early Nineteenth Century’. Social Science History, 17:3, 385–427. Calhoun, Craig. 2012. The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Jane, 2003. Threads: Gender, Labor and Power in the Global Apparel Industry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Erikson, Kai. 2004 [1966]. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Esbenshade, Jill. 2004. Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers and the Global Apparel Industry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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Esbenshade, Jill. forthcoming. ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: Moving from Checklist Monitoring to Contractual Obligation?’. In Making Blue the Next Green: Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein. Ithaca: NY Cornell University Press, chapter 3. Frank, Dana. 1999. ‘Where Are the Workers in Consumer-Worker Alliances? Class Dynamics and the History of Consumer-Labor Campaigns’. Politics and Society, 31:3, 363–79. Frank, Dana. 2003. Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Fung, Archon, Dara O’Rourke, and Charles Sabel. 2001. Can We Put an End to Sweatshops? Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ganz, Marshall. 2009. Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. 2006. Popular Injustice: Violence, Community and Law in Latin America. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press. Goodwin, Jeffrey, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (eds). 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Greenwald, Richard. 2005. The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive New York. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gusfield, Joe. 1963. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Champagne-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hendrix, Cullen and Wendy Wong. 2012. ‘When Is the Pen Truly Mighty? Regime Type and the Efficacy of Naming and Shaming in Curbing Human Rights Abuses’. British Journal of Political Science, 43, 651–72. Hermanson, Jeff, 2016. ‘Workers of the World Unite: The Strategy of the International Union League for Brand Responsibility’. In Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, chapter 14.

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Hochschild, Adam. 2005. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Jaffee, Daniel. 2014. Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, revised edition. Jasper, James. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johnston, Hank. 2011. States and Social Movements. London: Polity Press. Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. King, Martin Luther Jr. 1957. ‘Nonviolence and Racial Justice’. The Christian Century, February 6, 165–167. Klein, Naomi. 2009 [1999]. No Logo. New York: MacMillan. Locke, Richard M. 2013. The Promise and Limits to Private Power: Promoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massie, Robert K. 1997. Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years. New York: Doubleday. Massoud, Mark F. 2006. ‘The Influence of International Law on Local Social Movements.’ Peace and Change, 31:1, 3–34. Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McKibben, Bill, 2013. ‘The case for fossil-fuel divestment’. Rolling Stone, Feb 22, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone. com/politics/news/the-case-for-fossil-fueldivestment-20130222 (accessed on August 2, 2015). Murdie, Amanda and David R. Davis. 2012. ‘Shaming and Blaming: Using Events Data to Assess the Impact of Human Rights INGOs’. International Studies Quarterly, 56, 1–16. Nooruddin, Irfan and Sarah Wilson Sokhey. 2012. ‘Credible Certification of Child-laborfree Production’. In The Credibility of Transnational NGOS: When Virtue is Not Enough, edited by Peter Gourevitch, David Lake and

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Janice Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 62–85. Nova, Scott and Chris Wegemer. 2016. ‘Outsourcing Horror: Why Apparel Workers are Still Dying, 100 Years After Triangle Shirtwaist’. In Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichstenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, chapter 1. Posthuma, Annie and Renato Bignami. 2016. ‘Bridging the Gap: Public and Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Apparel Value Chains in Brazil’. In Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, chapter 6. Potoski, Matthew and Aseem Prakash (eds). 2009. Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Quan, Katie. 2016 ‘Labor Transformation in China: Voices from the Frontlines’. In Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, chapter 10. Richards, Patricia. 2013. Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rodriguez-Garavito, Cesar. 2005. ‘Nike’s Law: The Anti-sweatshop Movement, Transnational Corporations, and the Struggle over International Labor Rights in the Americas’. In Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito (eds), Law and Globalization from Below. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–91. Rodríguez-Piñero, Luis. 2006. Indigenous Peoples, Postcolonialism, and International Law: The ILO Regime (1919–1989). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ronson, Jon. 2015. ‘How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life’. New York Times Magazine, February 12. Ruggie, John Gerard. 2013. Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights. New York: W.W. Norton Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004 [1961]. ‘Preface’ to Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

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Seidman, Gay. 2007. Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism. New York: Russell Sage Press. Seidman, Gay. 2009. ‘Laboring Under an Illusion? Lesotho’s Sweat-free Label’. Third World Quarterly, 30:3, 581–98. Shamir, Ronan. 2011. ‘Socially Responsible Private Regulation: World-Culture or World-Capitalism?’. Law & Society Review, 45:2, 313–36. Smith, Jackie. 2008. Social Movements for Global Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Soule, Sarah. 2009. Contention and Corporate Social Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stein, Arlene. 2001. ‘Revenge of the Shamed: The Christian Right’s Emotional Cultural War’. In Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, edited by Jeffrey Goodwin, James Jasper and Francesca Polletta. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp 115–34. Thayer, Millie. 2010. Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil. New York: Routledge Press.

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Tilly, Charles. 2002. ‘Comment on Young: Buried Gold’. American Sociological Review, 67:5, 689–92. Vallas, Steven, J., Matthew Judge, and Emily Cummins. 2015. ‘Workers’ Rights as Human Rights? Solidarity Campaigns and the AntiSweatshop Movement’. In Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemma of the New Public Participation, edited by Caroline Lee, Mike McQuarry, and Ed Walker. New York: New York University Press, pp. 46–65. Walsh, Declan and Steven Greenhouse. 2012. ‘Certified Safe, a Factory in Karachi Still Quickly Burned’. The New York Times, December 7. Wells, Miriam J. and Don Villarejo. 2004. ‘State Structures and Social Movements: The Shaping of Farm Labor Protections in California’, Politics & Society, 32:3, 291–326. Yardley, Jim. 2012. ‘Horrific Fire Revealed a Gap in Safety for Global Brands’. The New York Times, December 6. Young, Michael. 2002. ‘Confessional Protest: The Religious Birth of US National Social Movements’. American Sociological Review, 67:5, 660–88.

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19 Contesting Authority in a Moralized Market: The Case of a Catholic Hospital Unionization Campaign Adam Reich

In January 2005, workers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital (Memorial) – one of thirteen Catholic hospitals operated by the St. Joseph Health System – prepared to vote on whether to form a union. According to one worker-leader, employees had come to recognize that they were paid ‘well below the market level’. Sixty-eight percent of workers in the service and technical units of the facility had signed a petition supporting the unionization drive; the campaign included an active organizing committee of worker-leaders and a community support committee; and two full-time labor organizers were committed to the campaign. Nevertheless, by the week before the scheduled vote, support for the union had declined so precipitously that the union withdrew its election petition rather than face certain defeat. More than four years later, in December 2009, workers at Memorial voted in favor of unionization despite a seemingly less promising organizing drive. The union had far fewer financial resources in 2009 than it had in

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2005. Furthermore, while the union had demonstrated support from sixty-eight percent of workers in 2005, it had been unable to garner petition signatures from more than fifty percent of workers in 2009. The one union organizer now assigned full-time to the campaign, who had also been on the campaign in 2005, was by 2009 an unsalaried volunteer. Finally, this time around, the election was contested by a powerful competing labor organization.1 Nevertheless, the union was able to win a narrow victory. Key to understanding the union’s 2009 success was the changing shape and tone of management’s anti-union campaign. In 2005, the St. Joseph Health System had hired The Burke Group, a union-avoidance firm, to coordinate its anti-union activities. Managers had threatened union supporters individually, had hosted weekly mandatory staff meetings to make the case against the union, and had offered raises selectively in the days leading up to the election. In 2009, however, the St. Joseph Health System did not use a

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union-avoidance firm, and managers were less concerted in their approach. The hospital administration did not host mandatory staff meetings, and it did not intimidate union supporters. The organizer who was a part of both efforts noticed how ‘the boss didn’t campaign [in 2009] in the same way that they did the first time’. Whereas there had been a clear and well-executed anti-union strategy in 2005, in 2009 they ‘never got strategic about it’. Scholarship has long observed how management anti-union tactics and strategies play an important role in explaining labor organizing successes and failures (Bronfenbrenner 1994; Bronfenbrenner and Juravich 1998; Clausen 2003; Getman 2010; Jacoby 1991). Kim Voss (1993) suggests that the relative weakness of the US labor movement as a whole can be understood as a result of the aggressive anti-unionism of US employers. What is surprising, then, is not the fact that changes in managers’ anti-union strategy led to different election outcomes, but rather that hospital leadership decided not to pursue a strategy that had worked so effectively four years before. In order to make sense of the deliberate absence of strategy on the part of hospital leadership in 2009, we must understand the constitution and motivations of this leadership. From the founding of the St. Joseph Health System (SJHS) until 2008, the highest level of decision-making authority within the system resided with a ‘Sponsorship Board’ consisting entirely of members of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange. Changes in the organization of American medicine, however, and the aging of the religious order, had put new sorts of pressures on the system. In recent years the Sisters had transferred daily operations of SJHS and its individual hospitals to lay business professionals. And as of 2008, the Sisters had, with formal permission from the Vatican, transferred ownership of the organization to a separate ‘public juridic person’. Nevertheless, this entity, consisting of three Sisters along with two lay

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leaders, preserved the Sisters’ majority hold on organizational decisions. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange – like many Sisters across the United States – were deeply invested in two distinct but overlapping fields: the field of the Catholic Church, and the field of hospital organizations. Women such as the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange had, historically, mixed personal sacrifice and vocational devotion with business sense and political acumen (Nelson 2001: 55; Wall 2005: 130–134). Historically, women’s subordination within the Catholic Church had actually made possible their entrepreneurship in health care. Their religious identity, sexual chastity, and relative anonymity allowed them the institutional space to build their own organizations within a broader patriarchal society, freeing them up to act ‘like men’ well before other women of their time (Nelson 2001: 13; Wall 2005: 42). Women’s decisions to join religious orders were often connected to considerations of economic power in a world of precluded possibilities (Ebaugh et al. 1996; Thompson 1986). When workers began to organize at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital in 2004–2005, the Sisters not only endorsed but actively participated in the system’s anti-union campaign. Sisters worried aloud that a union would ‘replace covenants with contracts’, eroding the trust between managers and workers on which the functioning of the hospital depended. One Sister cornered a worker leader to tell her she was ‘greedy’ for wanting a union. The director of ‘mission integration’ at the hospital, responsible for bringing hospital practice into alignment with Catholic values, led the mandatory antiunion staff meetings. By 2009, however, the Sisters’ interpretation of Catholic teaching had shifted. While the religious leadership still maintained that they ‘preferred a direct relationship with our employees’, they had pledged not to use outside union-avoidance firms, had pledged not to hold mandatory anti-union meetings, and had even expressed a willingness to negotiate election ground

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rules – steps well beyond what is required by US labor law. In 2005, the Sisters’ moral position on Catholic teaching was indistinguishable from their market interests – their moral argument against unions supported their economic interests as the owners of the hospital system. By 2009, the union had been able to move the Sisters’ moral position on unions slightly so as to create dissonance between their moral values and their market interests – dissonance that, in turn, created an opportunity for the union to win. This article explores how the union was able to create this dissonance, and the implications of the union’s strategy both for economic sociology and for labor struggle.

MORALIZED MARKETS OR MARKETING MORALS? Recent scholarship in economic sociology has demonstrated convincingly that market exchange does not necessarily corrupt moral values or corrode social relationships; indeed, forms of exchange can express values and solidify ties (Healy 2006; Zelizer 1997 [1994], 2007, 2011). Moreover, scholars have documented in rich historical detail changes in the boundaries between morals and markets – how, for example, life insurance came to be seen as expressive of moral values rather than corrosive of such values (see Zelizer 1978); or how childhood became sacred at the same time the child became economically useless (Zelizer 1994 [1985]). This literature has marshaled powerful evidence against the notion that ‘money and markets inevitably corrupt and undermine human relationships’ (Healy 2006: 201). Yet this same literature has tended to neglect the ways that economic actors may use, produce, or manipulate social values in ways that forward their own economic interests. The world described by those in the moralized markets school – of creative social actors bringing emerging markets into line with their own

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relationships and values – may be difficult to distinguish from a more dystopian world in which creative firms, playing on existing relationships and social values, bring social actors into line with market interests (see Steiner 2009: 105–106). In her earlier work on the development of the life insurance industry, for example, Zelizer (1978: 605) seems open to this idea that market actors may exploit social values towards their own ends. After all, it was the life insurance industry that helped drive the changing social valuation of insurance: ‘Death yielded to the capitalist ethos – but not without compelling the latter to disguise its materialist mission in spiritual garb’. But her early recognition of this instrumental manipulation of values, this ‘spiritual garb’, has given way in her recent work to a more harmonious world in which people ‘work hard to find appropriate matches between [their social] relations and economic transactions’ (Zelizer 2007: 1059). Kieran Healy (2006), in his compelling study of the markets for blood and organs, wrestles with this question more directly. He recognizes that the successful organ procurement organizations simultaneously create opportunities for giving and ‘sustain [these opportunities] by generating accounts of what giving means’ (p. 113). Such organizations, for example, tell potential donors (or their families) that a donation might allow the donor to live on through others (p. 33). Donors (or their families) are often not comfortable receiving cash in exchange for their organs, but are often comfortable receiving tax credits, or funeral benefits, or a hotel room during the donation procedure (pp. 36–37). Healy remains somewhat ambivalent as to whether this attention to culture is ‘just a flexible bit of marketing talk or … more like an institutional logic that has been built into the procurement system’ (p. 118). But either way, what is important to Healy is that ‘the most successful market advocates are also the ones most sensitive to sociological questions about the expressiveness of payment tokens and the meaning of the

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exchange relations they imply, even though they usually do not draw attention to this fact themselves’ (p. 18, emphasis added). The establishment of a ‘market’ for donations, he shows, depends both on actors’ awareness of the cultural content of exchange relations and on an obfuscation of this awareness. This is not necessarily nefarious, because market actors may have internalized these cultural accounts themselves. But the extent to which staff of procurement organizations actually believe these accounts is ‘an empirical question’. The successful organization deploys culture strategically and yet downplays this instrumentalism from potential donors (and in some cases from itself). Zelizer, Healy, and others in the ‘moralized markets’ school offer a robust account of the different ways and different depths at which markets and morals may coexist and reinforce one another. Problematically, however, this school does not offer a theory explaining when or under what circumstances ‘moral-market’ practices fail, or are considered illegitimate (Fourcade 2012: 1059; see also Turco 2012). This oversight seems due to a micro-interactional bias of the literature (see Zelizer 2012: 165). There is little analysis of the broader moral context or field within which moralmarket practices are embedded. As Marion Fourcade (2012: 1060) reminds us, ‘… if people produce meanings through the use of goods and money, they (to paraphrase Karl Marx) do so out of circumstances not of their own choosing’. The meanings that people create in relationship to their economic activities are likely constrained by the legitimacy with which these moral-market practices are regarded by the communities within which they are embedded (Johnston 2009; Polletta and Ho 2006; Snow 2004; Steinberg 1998, 1999).

BUILDING CREDIT Two important questions follow. First, under what conditions is ‘moral-market’ activity

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seen as legitimate and under what conditions is it seen as illegitimate? Second, how can social movement actors challenge the legitimacy of existing moral-market activity so as to tie their own economic interests to broadly accepted moral claims? Simone Polillo (2011) makes an important contribution to this line of questioning with his elaboration of the concept of ‘creditworthiness’. Adjudicating between a top-down model of money as a ‘means of commensurability enforced by the state’ (p. 438), on the one hand, and a bottom-up model of money as expressive of social relations and constrained by social values, on the other, Polillo demonstrates the critical role of bankers in legitimizing particular types of currency through the extension of credit. Bankers, in his analysis, are those with ‘moral authority’ (p. 438), who both evaluate the legitimacy of a form of currency (through the granting or withholding of credit); and who themselves are evaluated based on the perceived success with which they draw the distinction between those worthy of credit and those unworthy: ‘The more a bank succeeds in drawing an effective boundary, the more reputation it gains for itself, the less capital it needs as reserve, and the more profit it can gain’ (p. 444). The banker is thus the granter of moral authority (or creditworthiness) at the same time he or she is subject to evaluation on the basis of the distinctions he or she has drawn. Polillo focuses on moral authority within the establishment of currency, but his analysis can usefully be generalized to other kinds of moralized markets. Polillo’s work suggests the significance of moral spokespeople – the holders of moral authority in relationship to a moralized market – who simultaneously grant moral legitimacy to particular market practices and who themselves are evaluated on the basis of the distinctions they have drawn between moral and immoral practices. The legitimacy of an individual’s or organization’s practices may thus rest on the extent to which this participation is considered

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legitimate by these spokespeople – spokespeople who themselves exist in broader networks that may grant or withhold legitimacy to them to act as spokespeople based on the distinctions that they draw. A focus on spokespeople as the carriers of moral legitimacy (or credit – a word which derives from the Latin credere, or ‘to believe’) within moralized markets has implications for the process of building credit – understood as the establishment of moral-market legitimacy. First, a spokesperson’s legitimacy as the arbiter of moral-market activity likely derives from his or her drawing ‘correct’ distinctions between moral and immoral market activity before the field has reached broader consensus. Thus any particular distinction that the spokesperson draws involves some degree of risk, in that a ‘bad bet’ – a distinction between moral and immoral activity that comes to be considered incorrect – will make the spokesperson lose legitimacy in the eyes of other spokespeople. Legitimacy within a moralized market, then, is not just the result of top-down or bottom-up dynamics, but rather emerges as the result of ‘combinations and negotiations among actors and organizations operating on different levels’ (Polillo 2011: 447). Second, assuming that spokespeople are trying to build credit themselves, we can understand the spokesperson’s decision to endorse a third party as a function of the risks of being ‘wrong’ and potential rewards of being ‘right’ about one’s endorsement. Yet since the risks and rewards are determined in large part by the past and future positions of other spokespeople, the decision of any one spokesperson cannot be understood in isolation from the decisions (or anticipated decisions) of others. In turn, those in search of credit may be more likely to succeed to the extent that they have some moral legitimacy already, as this lowers the risk to which the moral spokesperson will be exposed (although it also may reduce the potential reward for the spokesperson’s own participation). A debtor often needs some credit in order to build more.

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Those without established credit must frame their desire for it within a broader claim about their being creditworthy. Importantly, then, someone seeking moral legitimacy for a set of moral-market practices must both make an argument about the legitimacy of their practice, and must articulate this argument in a way that conveys their own creditworthiness.2 Yet these two moments may be in tension with one another: creditworthiness within a moralized market may be inconsistent with the sorts of instrumental, strategic action necessary to build credit. In these situations we might expect strategy to be discussed (and perhaps even understood) in terms that downplay its strategic nature. Third, a spokesperson does not evaluate claims for legitimacy on the basis of the claimant’s moral worth alone (although this is important), but also on the basis of evidence that the claimant is a good bet in a particular case. And so while the claimant’s framing of oneself and framing of particular market practices is certainly important (McAdam et  al. 1996; Snow et  al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988), as important are the sets of practices on which this framing is based – practices that the spokesperson likely wants to see for oneself. Granted, the claimant can focus the spokesperson’s attention on some practices over others, and help the spokesperson to interpret these practices, but this interpretive work has outer limits. But some practices remain nearly impossible to reconcile with moral legitimacy. This sets (albeit shifting) boundaries on the types of moral-market practices that might be considered legitimate by moral spokespeople. In a struggle between two different moral-market positions, then, different sides may adjust their practices in order not to overstep these boundaries. Fourth, on a more macro level, the metaphor of credit highlights the interaction between discursive opportunities (i.e. opportunities for framing that exist within an existing repertoire of cultural norms and values) and political opportunities (i.e. opportunities

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that exist given an existing arrangement of economic and political power) (Ferree 2003: 307; Ferree et al. 2002; Koopmans and Olzak 2004; McCammon et  al. 2007). Exogenous changes in the organization of political or economic power may open up opportunities for new actors to build legitimacy within a moralized market precisely because these changes create dissonance between traditional actors’ market practices and their claims to creditworthiness.

THE CASE OF THE CATHOLIC HOSPITAL This chapter traces a campaign between 2005 and 2009, led first by the Service Employees International Union, United Healthcare Workers – West (SEIU-UHW), and then by the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), to organize the approximately 750 workers in the service and technical units of Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. I use this case to examine the processes by which different constituencies’ claims to legitimacy vis-à-vis a moral economy are contested; and to illustrate the central role of moral spokespeople in this process of contestation. Between 2005 and 2009, both labor representatives and managers sought to convince a broader field of religious leaders that their interpretation of Catholic social teaching on labor unions was more legitimate than the Sisters’ interpretation. The union was successful for two reasons. First, historically, religious sisters had had a relative monopoly over moral authority within the Catholic hospital – they were the most significant moral spokespeople in the field. But changes in the organization of health care and in sisters’ roles within their hospitals had already unsettled this monopoly. Paradoxically, I argue, the decision of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange to remain as the formal leaders of the system, and to frame this leadership in moral

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terms, created the opportunities for struggle over moral-market legitimacy. But if the Sisters’ ongoing leadership in the system created a terrain on which new forms of moral-market legitimacy might be built, the Sisters’ moral-market authority was still – in 2005 – greater than the union’s. The union was successful because it was able to build legitimacy incrementally around a new set of moral-market practices, first with a key priest, then within a key diocese, and finally among a broader coalition of Catholic leaders. The union ultimately was able to build a network of moral spokespeople whose legitimacy in relationship to the moralized market of the Catholic hospital was difficult to assail. Between 2006 and 2008 I was a participant-observer with the union, volunteering as a ‘religious and community organizer’ an average of fifteen hours per week. During this time I was responsible for recruiting religious leaders to support the union’s cause, and took part in strategy meetings with lead staff on the campaign. Over the course of this work I took detailed field notes, which I coded using the qualitative data software ATLAS.Ti. I complemented my fieldwork with several other sources of data. Between February 2009 and October 2010 I conducted open-ended interviews with fifteen workerleaders of the hospital ‘organizing committee’, six union staff-members involved in the organizing drive, six religious leaders who became involved in the campaign, and five hospital system executives. I also interviewed three administrators and two charge nurses at Memorial, making up a total of thirty-seven interviews. These interviews lasted between forty-five minutes and two hours. Using ATLAS.Ti., I undertook both open coding and focused coding in order to determine prominent themes among the interviews (Emerson et al. 1995: 142–144; Weiss 1994: 154–156). Finally, I made use of a rich body of primary documents produced over the course of the campaign. These included memos written by the union and hospital administration;

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public advertisements taken out by both union and administration in local media outlets; correspondence written to and from union representatives; and several ‘reports’ produced by the union intended to gain public support. Perhaps most useful of all was a union report produced at the culmination of the campaign intended to illustrate the campaign’s successes and failures (Purcell 2009). I begin the empirical section of this chapter by demonstrating the ways in which the Sisters historically had authority within the moralized market of Catholic health care, and the ways in which this authority had begun to fracture over the last forty years. I then discuss the ways in union leaders incrementally built credit among Catholic leaders and Catholic institutions on behalf of a different set of moral-market understandings and practices – a process that was, at first, contested by the Sisters and their associates, but which ultimately led the Sisters to mitigate their anti-union practices.

SISTERS’ DECLINING LEGITIMACY IN CATHOLIC HEALTH CARE Historically, at both the national and local levels, religious sisters held a great deal of authority within the moralized market of Catholic health care, which allowed them to advance their economic interests relatively unchallenged. In the 1930s, for example, the Catholic Healthcare Association struck an alliance with the American Hospital Association over the status of hospital workers in the newly minted National Labor Relations Act. Together these groups sought exemption from the act on the grounds that ‘low pay was a virtue, since it attracted staff who were motivated by the “right values”’ (Stevens 1999 [1989]: 164). The role of Catholic hospitals was essential to this argument because ‘it extended, by analogy, the dedicated service of Roman Catholic nuns to the jobs of all hospital workers’ (ibid.). As a

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result of the arguments made by and on behalf of the Sisters, workers in hospital were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act from 1947 until 1974. Several workers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital described the Sisters having a similar moral authority within the hospital. One unit secretary called the Sisters the ‘conscience of the hospital’, and said they would make sure that both workers and patients were cared for. Sisters would hold open meetings for workers to discuss the difficulties of their job – meetings that would often stretch several hours. According to a worker in Central Supplies, ‘people depended on [the Sisters] and they knew that they could go to them …. They actually honestly listened to you and tried to help, talk to you …’ A licensed vocational nurse recalled how a Sister had approached her after the first time she had experienced a patient’s death. The Sisters were both models of vocational subordination, exemplifying the self-sacrifice they expected among their nursing staff (Hochschild 1983), and human relations specialists, helping their workers to navigate the day-to-day difficulties of their jobs and offering informal mechanisms by which workers could voice grievances. By the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the sisters’ legitimacy in the moralized market had started to wane. Changes in the organization and financing of American medicine meant that all hospitals were compelled increasingly to engage in more explicitly profit-driven activities – reducing the amount of free care they provide, investing heavily in capital, increasing their provision of profitable services, negotiating more aggressively with insurance providers and physicians’ groups, and using staff more efficiently (Light 2004; Scott et  al. 2000; Stevens 1999 [1989]). Community donations continued a steady decline as a percentage of hospital revenue. And so while most hospitals remained putatively not-for-profit, health care was increasingly regarded as an industry rather than as a charity. At the same time, the Sisters were aging and their numbers were

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declining – in 2012, the average age of the American nun was 74 (Winerip 2012). They were no longer an active presence on the floors of their hospitals, and in many cases they had delegated managerial and administrative responsibilities to lay leaders as well. In 2007, the last two Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange in Santa Rosa retired and left the city. Given the changing market for hospital care, and sisters’ declining roles within their hospitals, some sisters felt they could no longer justify their ownership of Catholic hospitals. They would sacrifice their economic interests as hospital owners in order to retain their moral authority. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in the Twin Cities, for example, sold their hospitals, and used the proceeds to found several free clinics (Wall 2005: 193) – according to one union leader, these nuns believed that in the modern health care environment they could best live out their vocation by serving the poor. Likewise, in the mid-1990s, some sisters in the St. Joseph Health System had advocated for divestment. They approached a wellrespected Catholic scholar and asked him to produce an internal white paper for the Sisters in which he argued that the demands of the health care system ‘crushes those charismatic gifts [of the Sisters] for the sake of institutional survival’. While these Sisters were not successful in convincing the Order to divest, they demonstrate the inconsistency some felt within the Order about their moral commitments and market practices. Even Jack Glaser, an ethicist in the St. Joseph Health System who would become a central player in the system’s anti-union campaign, derided the commodification of medical care and wrote that ‘dysfunctional ethics on the societal level have cascaded down into our Catholic health care ministry in such a way that makes it almost impossible to carry out our ministry in any respectable manner’ (Jones 2004). According to many Catholics, market success in Catholic health care was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with moral authority.

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By drawing a distinction between Catholic morality and the health care market, the position of Orders like the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet diminished the significance of Catholic moral authority within the hospital care market. Other Orders of Sisters embarked on an opposite strategy with a similar result, aligning themselves more closely with market actors in health care and downplaying the Catholic dimensions of their systems (see Rau 2012). In juxtaposition with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, these Orders traded their moral authority within Catholic health care for their economic gain. But they too reinforced the idea that health care and Catholic morality were inconsistent. What was significant, then, about Orders like the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange was that they both retained ownership over their hospitals and continued to understand this ownership as consistent with their moral authority as Catholics. They did not trade one for the other. Indeed, the Sisters justified their anti-unionism in terms of their Catholic beliefs. For example, one of their system ethicists, Jack Glaser, had developed a theological justification for the system’s anti-unionism, which he had turned into a PowerPoint presentation and presented at other Catholic health care systems. Glaser suggested that a workplace is ‘a community, a network of systems and structures that serve sacredness of dignity’; that work is ‘an essential way that holy and sacred dignity grows to fullness’.3 The starting-point for evaluating a workplace should be whether it makes dignity possible. He went on to elaborate what distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ workplaces, as well as ‘good’ from ‘bad’ unions. A good workplace, he implied, may justly work to keep out a ‘bad’ union. This idea was echoed by SJHS’s CEO Deborah Proctor, who argued that ‘what’s most important, what Catholic social teaching starts with – it doesn’t start out talking about unions, it starts by talking about the dignity of the person. That’s the primary principle of Catholic social teaching’ (Galvin 2007).

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Yet this combination of economic and moral investment, in the face of a changing health care market, allowed for new constituencies to contest the legitimacy of the Sisters’ moralmarket position regarding unionization. For example, in 1998, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) convened a ‘subcommittee on Catholic Healthcare’, which brought together labor leaders, hospital administrators, sisters, and bishops to discuss recommendations for Catholic hospital systems facing unionization drives.4 Over the course of the next year, the committee would hold a series of meetings. The result, issued in May of 1999, was a ‘working paper’ entitled A Fair and Just Workplace: Principles and Practices for Catholic Healthcare, which stated the value of unions as reflected in Catholic social teaching, and recommended the adoption of mutually agreed upon ground rules – or ‘Fair Election Agreements’ – by labor unions and hospital leaders at the front end of organizing campaigns. And while the process leading to the working paper included sisters and administrators from Catholic hospitals, and did not lead to any formal guidelines, the committee and working paper signaled a changing era in which new spokespeople – such as the Bishops – might challenge the authority of the Sisters with regard to the legitimacy of moral-market practices in Catholic health care. It was thus the Sisters’ dual investment in their economic position (as owners of the St. Joseph Health System) and their moral position (as having authority in relationship to Catholic values) that created opportunities for the union to challenge the Sisters’ moral position on unionization within their hospitals. Had they been less invested in either, this sort of challenge would have been irrelevant.

LABOR BUILDS LEGITIMACY A union leader and one of the chief architects of the St. Joseph Health System campaign,

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Eileen Purcell, observed, ‘The sisters’ greatest strength – their legacy in favor of social and worker justice – was also their greatest vulnerability, given the serious, documented disconnect between their words and deeds at SJHS’. Union leaders recognized the opportunity presented by the Sisters’ dual investment in their market position and moral authority. The Sisters’ cared deeply about their legacy as adherents to Catholic social teaching, as advocates for justice. They had supported the United Farm Workers in the 1960s, and the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles in the 1990s. In recent years they had campaigned against human trafficking (see Figure 19.1). Rather than question this legacy, the union would highlight it. As Eileen said, We bent over backwards and were quite intentional about elevating what was precious and good and extraordinary about the women religious and their health care ministry …. We talked about their treatment of their own workers as a contradiction …. This was their contradiction, we all have them, but we were appealing to them to sit down.

This contradiction gave the union leverage. If the union could build credit for their interpretation of Catholic values and union campaigns among religious leaders whom the Sisters respected, and thus threaten the Sisters’ moral authority, they might successfully mitigate the Sisters’ anti-union practices. Beginning in 2006, then, the union began to focus on persuading the Sisters to agree to the sort of ‘Fair Election Agreement’ supported in the Bishops’ working paper. The problem confronting the union, however, was the perception within the religious world that the union itself was not creditworthy. Despite the fact that there is a long history of Catholic social teaching supporting the rights of workers to organize, few union leaders themselves are religious. And for union leaders explicitly to make a moral argument – that the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange were not being good Catholics in

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Figure 19.1 Sisters of St. Joseph gather at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange on October 8, 2010, to demonstrate for an end to human trafficking. (Photo by Ginger Hedstrom, [email protected])

their hospitals – smacked of instrumentalism, which was itself inconsistent with creditworthiness within much of the Catholic world. As an organizer with the union put it, ‘One of the great critiques of union organizers in the religious community is we parachute in, we “rent a collar”, [religious leaders] come to the action, and that’s it’. Conversely, those Catholic leaders who were willing to show up for any sort of social justice event – who were willing to be used instrumentally by various campaigns – were not considered as having much legitimacy within the Catholic community given their failure to draw distinctions between those efforts worthy of endorsement and those unworthy. The perception of the union as using religion instrumentally (‘renting a collar’) was a powerful one within and without the St. Joseph Health System. An ethicist within the St. Joseph Health System argued that unions tended to use church teachings as ‘battle quotes’, which were ‘simple; brief;

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[and] narrowly focused’. He suggested that this body of teaching was actually ‘layered; elaborate; and expansive’. The point was that the use of this teaching in order to advance a particular cause corrupted this teaching – an idea that had resonance with Catholic leaders outside the system as well. A priest whom I came to know through the campaign was supportive of workers’ rights but was skeptical of the union’s strategy, criticizing it as being too instrumental. He said that he had a problem with all community organizers (failing to mention that I was there as a community organizer) because they were too ‘agentic’, meaning their relationships were used for ends other than the relationship itself. One example of the tension between strategy and moral legitimacy occurred over the USCCB’s Fair and Just Workplace working paper, described above. Soon after the union’s defeat at Memorial in 2005, union leaders in the Memorial campaign published a pamphlet version of the working paper, which

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they brought to meetings with religious leaders in order to help garner religious support for a ‘Fair Election Agreement’ at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. In 2006, however, Sisters and St. Joseph Health System leaders traveled to Spokane, Washington, to meet with Bishop William Skylstad, the national chair of the USCCB at the time of the working paper. Upon return, they reported to union leaders that Skylstad had said the guidelines were not the official policy of the council, but rather a series of guiding principles. Moreover, they emphasized that the working paper was explicitly not intended to be used as ammunition in particular campaigns. In contrast, when confronted with allegations of anti-unionism in the summer of 2005, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange committed themselves to a process of ‘discernment’, which Katherine Gray – a Sister and Chair of the Board of Directors – identified as a ‘traditional Catholic’ process of decision-making. Indeed, unlike almost any hospital executives or owners in the country, SJHS leaders had sat down with SEIU representatives on several occasions. An organizer recognized the rarity of this willingness: ‘You’re dealing with genuine soul searching and struggling. And I have to say what set [Katherine Gray] apart is that she was willing to engage and dialogue’. But over the course of the SJHS campaign it became clear that system leaders were using dialogue itself as a strategy – ‘dialoguing to death’, as one union leader put it, without changing its practices. A Catholic process of ‘discernment’ became the system’s ongoing rationale for inaction. In order to build credit for the union’s position within the Catholic world, the union turned to Eileen Purcell and Fred Ross Jr., two long-time community organizers charged with the development of SEIU’s Catholic strategy. Fred and Eileen had longstanding relationships with Catholic leaders from their work on human rights in El Salvador, as well as with leaders in organized labor. They had the sort of ‘borderland’ experiences, the enmeshment in different institutional worlds,

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that scholars have suggested is conducive to creative strategy (Ganz 2000). Most importantly for the campaign, they were able to act strategically on behalf of union goals in terms that were comprehensible and respected among Catholic leaders. As Eileen put it, ‘We used their language. We’re multilingual, right?’. Key to Fred’s and Eileen’s organizing efforts was the idea that the relationships they established with religious leaders were ‘lifelong’, involving commitments and obligations that transcended any specific campaign and was ‘not going to end the day after the [union] vote’.5 Rather than focus widely, then, they focused intensively on developing relationships with key Catholic leaders whose opinion might influence the Sisters. One example of such a leader was Monsignor John Brenkle, a priest in the Santa Rosa Diocese who was close friends with Sister Katherine Gray and others in the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange (a banner hanging in his office had been given to him by another member of the Order, one of his ‘best friends’). Brenkle was also one of the most highly respected religious leaders in the area, a trained canon lawyer and an ardent supporter of farm worker rights. He was a trusted advisor of the local bishop and sat on a community outreach board at Queen of the Valley Hospital, a Napa hospital owned by SJHS. Brenkle had long had the respect of other priests in the diocese, and became even more indispensable when several priests in the diocese were charged and convicted of sex-abuse crimes in the 1990s. The bishop at the time was charged with both abuse and embezzlement, having funneled diocesan contributions into payments to abuse victims and legal fees. By 2000 the diocese was in disgrace, and almost bankrupt. Brenkle not only served as financial officer for the diocese in the aftermath, but also chaired a review board to help rebuild congregants’ faith in the church. Having been introduced to Brenkle through a priest who was a mutual friend, Fred and

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Eileen started visiting him in 2001, four years before the SJHS campaign had even begun, anticipating that he might become an important ally in future Catholic campaigns. As they expected, Brenkle did not want to get involved. Eileen said, ‘He did not want to get involved initially because he had close ties with these sisters’. In fact, back in the 1980s, nurses from Queen of the Valley Hospital had tried to organize, and a union leader had reached out to Brenkle. But Brenkle demurred, ‘because I just didn’t want to incur other people’s anger or wrath’. Despite Brenkle’s hesitancy, Fred and Eileen kept Brenkle informed about the ebbs and flows of the Memorial Hospital campaign, regularly driving the ninety minutes from Oakland to St. Helena. Brenkle would not endorse the campaign, but he agreed to ‘dialogue’ privately with small groups of Memorial Hospital workers. And Eileen recalled, ‘I just kept writing him. I would write him. Christmas notes. We’d go up and have lunch, we’d say, “We know you don’t want to get involved.” We were tenacious’. In early 2006, five years after Fred and Eileen had begun meeting with Brenkle, the union began a more concerted campaign for a Fair Election Agreement. Brenkle was still unwilling to get involved. Nevertheless, Deborah Proctor, CEO of SJHS, heard that Brenkle had been meeting with Fred and Eileen, and called Brenkle to set up a meeting with him along with the diocese’s bishop, Memorial’s CEO George Perez, and the system’s theologian. The Bishop, still reeling from the diocese’s sex scandal, told the three SJHS executives, ‘What I don’t need is another controversy. I want to see this settled quietly and out of the public’. Brenkle remembered George Perez responding, ‘Well, bishop, it’s not a problem because I can’t think of more than 20 people who would even care about a union’. Unbeknownst to the executives, however, Fred had armed Brenkle with a petition recently signed by eightyseven union supporters (which the union had also sent to Perez). Brenkle asked Perez, ‘Do

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these eighty-seven people work for you?’ and left the meeting thinking the hospital leaders ‘[didn’t] know [their] people’. In retrospect, Brenkle treated this meeting as the key turning point in his support for the Fair Election Agreement – a moment at which the dishonesty of system leadership was revealed. But this moment was contingent on the relationship that Brenkle had developed with Fred and Eileen. This relationship was the reason Proctor had called Brenkle in the first place; and this relationship meant that Fred and Eileen could prepare him for the meeting with Proctor, could prime him to see the system’s dishonesty. In Brenkle’s words, he regarded Fred and Eileen as ‘classy people, just good people’. As Brenkle recalled, ‘I felt very comfortable in espousing their efforts’. Significantly, Brenkle’s relationship to the campaign was mediated through his trust for Fred and Eileen – the campaign was ‘their efforts’. Brenkle’s involvement in the campaign must be understood also in relationship to concerns about his own moral authority. Brenkle had ‘always felt a little guilty’ about not getting involved in the union campaign back in the 1980s. And he was at a time in his career when he was particularly sensitive to his own reputation as a moral leader. As he explained it, ‘When you’re young you kind of want to be friends with anybody, but the older you get you don’t care’. Another way of interpreting this sentiment, however, would be that his concern for preserving social ties – their emotional value and potential usefulness as resources – had declined in relationship to his concern with his legacy: ‘Relations are strained [with the Sisters]. But it’s the price you pay for following your conscience … and I think people in the long run will respect you for that’. Just as Fred and Eileen had engaged Brenkle in a process of ‘dialogue’ that led to his support for the Fair Election Agreement by the Fall of 2006, Brenkle in turn was able to encourage the priests within his diocese to support a similar process between 2006 and

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2007. And just as Fred and Eileen had mediated between union activists and Brenkle, Brenkle mediated between Fred and Eileen and the other priests in the diocese. Brenkle’s critical role was made clear during a Priests’ Council meeting that Fred and Eileen attended in Brenkle’s absence. The priests had informally endorsed the Fair Election Agreement in Brenkle’s presence, and so in January 2007 – while Brenkle was on vacation – Fred and Eileen decided to meet with the priests to formalize their statement. But during this meeting, according to a second priest who attended, two other priests (out of eleven on the Priests’ Council) ‘sabotaged’ Fred and Eileen. Instead of signing off on an endorsement, then, the diocese decided to invite representatives from the St. Joseph Health System to present their case. Yet when representatives from the system presented their case, in March 2007, Monsignor Brenkle was present. During this meeting, system representatives assured the priests that they were not anti-union, at which point Monsignor Brenkle presented the group with anti-union videos that the system had shown along with anti-union memos that the system had sent. System representatives, unfamiliar with Brenkle’s high standing among the other priests, began to question Brenkle’s moral authority by asking whether he was speaking for himself or on behalf of the union. According to a previously neutral priest, Monsignor Daniel Whelton, the system ‘nailed their own coffin’ by going after Brenkle. In an effort to undermine Brenkle’s moral authority, the system had isolated itself from the priests, for whom Brenkle’s moral authority was unassailable. The diocese voted 10–1 to adopt the USCCB working paper guidelines (endorsing the Fair Election Agreement) as diocean policy, becoming the first diocese in the country to do so. I have detailed the process by which the union generated the support of the Santa Rosa Diocese because it exemplifies an approach – led by Eileen and Fred – that was, paradoxically, strategically noninstrumental.

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It was a strategy that depended on longlasting relationships, in that these relationships referenced a shared past and looked towards an indefinite future of collaborations. And it was one that was conducted on terms understandable to Catholic leaders – a campaign in which religious leaders could maintain independence from the union while simultaneously supporting union goals through an appeal to dialogue and mutual understanding manifested in the Fair Election Agreement. Moreover, it depended on an incremental process, based on worker experiences, by which Fred and Eileen were able to build credit with Monsignor Brenkle, and – in turn – Monsignor Brenkle was able to win support among his colleagues. Fred and Eileen would repeat this process several times with other key leaders over the course of the campaign. As a result of these efforts, for the first time in a Catholic Hospital campaign, several Orders of Sisters and the National Coalition of American Nuns came out in support of the union’s call for a Fair Election Agreement. Other Sisters, who were not publicly supportive of the union, agreed to speak privately with leaders of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange. And these sorts of meetings, according to Eileen, ‘gave those women exposure to the virulence of the antiunion position’. Ultimately, there were many Sisters around the country who ‘broke rank’, who said to the Sisters, ‘We’re concerned. We love you, but because we love you, we’re telling you there’s a problem here’. The process by which the union gained support from the Santa Rosa Diocese thus depended on the union’s investment in relational strategy that was both resource-intensive and precluded other sorts of strategic action. It was a consistent struggle for Eileen and Fred to convince union leadership to invest – both financially and strategically – in the kind of ‘multi-year, relationship-oriented approach, organizing campaign’. For example, Fred and Eileen could spend an entire workday driving to and from Monsignor Brenkle’s parish in St. Helena, California.

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Eileen joined an anti-human trafficking campaign in which the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange played a leadership role, and convinced the Service Employees International Union to donate money towards this effort. That Fred and Eileen would invest so much time and money in activities without clear payoffs was anathema to a union culture focused on short-term, quantifiable outcomes. Moreover, the St. Joseph Health System strategy depended on the active involvement of workers as evidence (both quantitative and qualitative) on which Fred and Eileen could draw when they engaged Catholic leaders. On several occasions between 2006 and 2008, organizers for the union collected signatures among workers for no other purpose than to demonstrate this support to religious allies. According to Fred, ‘We’d have no credibility if the workers had not gone out and gotten a new majority’. Worker stories also became of central significance as organizers sought support from religious leaders. For instance, as I was preparing to bring a worker to meet with a religious leader, an organizer instructed me to make sure the worker told a particular story – one in which a supervisor told her that the union ‘wanted to sink their fangs’ into the hospital. The organizer was worried that the priest might not understand the worker’s Spanish accent, however, and so wanted me to ‘make sure [the priest] hears the “fang” part’. As Eileen wrote in an internal memo, ‘Workers’ participation granted the campaign moral authority in the face of “corporate campaign” charges and St. Joseph Health System management and sponsors’ claims that workers did not want or need a union’. Eileen and Fred advocated among the local and international unions for intensive, concentrated investment in Santa Rosa, which would make possible both their ongoing relational work and the ongoing development of worker-leaders to legitimate Fred’s and Eileen’s claims. This kind of investment was unfamiliar to the local and international unions. These unions had more experience

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with ‘scorched earth’ strategies that leveraged the union’s political and economic power against an employer, bending the employer to the union’s will. As Eileen put it, ‘At the national level there were those that advocated a totally top down [model], total leverage, that that was the way to go … and that relationships didn’t matter’. These topdown strategies were not centered on workerexperience, and did not prioritize the kind of relationships Fred and Eileen were developing. Moreover, they would likely have undermined the St. Joseph Health System campaign by destroying the union’s credibility in the Catholic world. For example, at one point in the campaign union researchers were looking into whether St. Joseph Health System overcharged its patients, a strategy that made Fred nervous: ‘If we overplayed it we’re the bully, we’re the big labor. It would have flipped the whole story. That would have been the danger’. A strategy premised on building the union’s credibility in the Catholic world constrained the kinds of practices in which the union could engage. Even Fred and Eileen’s participation in the campaign was contingent on the union being morally legitimate in their eyes. They did not feel they could make a case for the union within the Catholic community if ‘relationships didn’t matter, and… workers’ stories didn’t matter’ for the union. And so, when it seemed as though the union might move away from the Catholic strategy for which Fred and Eileen had advocated, Fred and Eileen threatened to resign: ‘We have no credibility coming in to help you because you’re not invested in workers’, Fred remembered saying to SEIU leaders. Fred and Eileen therefore must be understood not only as strategic actors but also as spokespeople themselves. Just as Monsignor Brenkle had built credit among the priests in the Santa Rosa Diocese, and Fred and Eileen had built credit with Monsignor Brenkle, union leaders had built credit with Fred and Eileen that the union’s strategic decisions had the potential to jeopardize.

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By the summer of 2008, because of the work done by Fred and Eileen, and in coordination with local worker organizers responsible for maintaining worker leadership and support, the campaign for a Fair Election Agreement became a national story. Between 2007 and 2008, as a result of intensive organizing work by the local union, workers from other St. Joseph Health System hospitals had begun to join workers from Santa Rosa in advocating for a Fair Election Agreement. In the Spring of 2008, four prominent California Bishops – Gerald Barnes from San Bernardino, Jaime Soto from Sacramento, Daniel Walsh from Santa Rosa, and Stephen Blair from Stockton – sent a letter to workers in support of a mediated settlement. The campaign reached crescendo in July 2008 with a weeklong vigil in front of the Sisters’ motherhouse in Orange County during the Sisters’ annual gathering. Reporters from the New York Times, the LA Times, and NPR made the campaign a national story. Throughout the campaign there had been signs that SJHS was feeling the pressure. In late 2006, as the campaign for a ‘Fair Election Agreement’ began to escalate, SJHS issued a unilateral ‘Code of Conduct for Third Party Representation Discussions’. This document outlined the steps it would take to insure a fair election short of negotiating with the union. In the code of conduct the system committed to providing ‘factual’ and ‘honest’ information with employees; and promised it would not ‘hold mandatory meetings for the sole purpose of discussing our views on third-party representation’.6 In 2007 and 2008 the system went further, pledging not to use union-avoidance law firms, and promising not to use one-on-one meetings instigated by supervisors to discourage unionization. Nevertheless, the system consistently refused to negotiate such ground rules with the union; refused to outline steps it would take to provide union supporters access to workers; would not discuss any process by which public materials might be reviewed by the other

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side; and – most importantly – refused any sort of outside or third-party enforcement. And then finally there was breakthrough. On July 15, 2008, a group called the Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice – led by Manhattan College professor Joe Fahey – issued a public letter to Sister Katherine Gray calling on SJHS to negotiate election ground rules. In August 2008, Sister Katherine responded to the scholars and expressed for the first time a willingness to negotiate ground rules once thirty percent of eligible workers had expressed interest in unionization – not only at SRMH, but at any SJHS hospital. The St. Joseph Health System explained their changing position on unionization as a result of their ongoing process of ‘discernment’. This kind of evolution was possible, Eileen explained, because the union had ‘honored [the Sisters’] history … and invoked that to invite a conversation to bridge the divide on this contradiction’ rather than ‘demonize, demonize, demonize’. And so rather than appearing (to themselves and others) to be buckling to union pressure, St. Joseph Health System leaders could frame their concession as consistent with a process of dialogue. One system executive explained, ‘I honestly believe the reason we got to the point was we had dialogue and we learned a whole lot more about each other ….’. He suggested that because he and union leaders were able to talk ‘as people’, instead of ‘shouting from buildings five miles apart’, union leaders and system executives were able to find common ground. When I responded that the change in the system’s position seemed to correspond with the crescendo of the union’s campaign, he demurred: ‘We didn’t respond to that because it’s not in our tradition to do that. But we also had dialogue during that period of time …. Not that we were forced because of this campaign, because we were stalwart in that campaign, and we were going to continue with our values regardless ….’. The trusteeship of the local SEIU-UHW in February 2009, and subsequent formation

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of NUHW, is outside the scope of this chapter. But for the campaign at Memorial this internal dispute had two implications. First, worker-leaders at Memorial – who had now chosen to organize with NUHW – would get little or no financial support in their organizing efforts; and second, since SEIU-UHW contested the election and would not agree to a fair election agreement, the St. Joseph Health System’s willingness to negotiate ground rules was never formalized. Nevertheless, the Sisters followed through with their expressed commitments not to engage in anti-union tactics. And so despite the relative weakness of the organizing drive in 2009 compared to 2005, and despite an internecine union battle that likely reinforced any preexisting anti-union sentiments among workers at Memorial, employees at the hospital voted in favor of unionization during the vote in December 2009.

CONCLUSION One might understand the campaign to organize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital as one in which Catholicism was little more than a patina, masking both labor’s and management’s more narrow instrumental goals. This would contain an element of truth, and yet it would fail to explain the success of the union’s moral strategy. If Catholic ideas were merely convenient justifications for preexisting economic commitments, we would not expect to see moral struggle have any independent effect on the campaign. And yet the Sisters modified their anti-union practices because of the moral pressure they felt. Scholars like Viviana Zelizer and Kieran Healy have shown how economic strategy and moral values are not mutually exclusive. Healy (2006: 66), for example, describes an organ procurement organization’s decision to distinguish between the role of the person who comforts families over the loss of a loved one and the person who asked about

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organ donation, ensuring that ‘the person providing families with information about brain death (and helping them manage for the day in the hospital) would not be perceived as having an ulterior motive’. He concludes, ‘The way the [organization] manages the process is therefore inevitably strategic, but this does not make it immoral. A commitment to the principle of informed consent cannot by itself answer detailed questions about how the consent process should be managed’ (p. 120). But on what criteria should we base an evaluation of the morality of this process? Or perhaps more importantly, under what circumstances is it seen as a manipulation versus being seen as a sensitive response to the needs of its clientele. In this chapter I have elaborated on Simone Polillo’s concept of ‘creditworthiness’ in an effort to explain the process by which union representatives, led by Fred Ross Jr. and Eileen Purcell, were able to win legitimacy in the moralized market of Catholic health care, and so persuade the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange to soften their system’s anti-unionism. The opportunity for such contestation existed, I have argued, because of exogenous changes in the organization of hospital care, which began to diminish the Sisters’ moral authority; and because the Sisters themselves continued to claim both market power and moral legitimacy. In turn, Fred, Eileen, and others who worked on the campaign were able to capitalize on this opportunity through an incremental process of credit building, through which they appealed to moral spokespeople for credit at the same time they ensured their own (and the union’s) creditworthiness. What are the implications of this case for the labor movement more generally? Despite some recent signs of life, the unionization rate has been declining steadily for the last half century (see Aronowitz 2014; Geoghegan 2014). As of 2014, barely more than one in ten wage and salary workers (11.1 percent) were union members. If the labor movement is to move again, it likely will have to engage

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in new sorts of struggles on somewhat unfamiliar terrain. It will have to convince parents and students that teachers’ unions are essential to quality schools; it will have to make the case to patients that hospital workers’ unions are integral to quality care. The labor movement will have to link workers’ rights to broader conceptions of the public good, establishing the legitimacy of new moral-market practices in the process. While the unionization of Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital may seem somewhat idiosyncratic, the strategies illustrated in the campaign – and problems posed by it – are instructive for labor resistance in all of those settings in which the market is understood in moral terms, from the halls of the hospital to the aisles of Walmart (Massengill 2014).

Notes  1  In 2005, workers at Memorial organized with United Healthcare Workers – West (SEIU-UHW), the second largest healthcare union in the country. In February 2009, however, the international SEIU placed SEIU-UHW in trusteeship, firing its leadership. These leaders quickly formed an opposition union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which workers at Memorial would vote to join in 2009. SEIU-UHW, now made up of an entirely different staff, contested the 2009 election.  2  Schumpeter argues that the banker ‘must not only know what the transaction is which he is asked to finance and how it is likely to turn out, but he must also know the customer, his business, and even his private habits, and get, by frequently “talking things” over with him, a clear picture of his situation’ (Schumpeter 1939: 166, in Polillo 2011: 444).  3  Power Point Presentation delivered on September 6, 2005.   4  This committee had been requested by Sister Mary Roch Rocklage – then president and CEO of the Sisters of Mercy Health System in St. Louis – in the midst of the contentious Catholic Healthcare West campaign (Purcell 2009).  5  Now several years after the campaign at Memorial Hospital, Fred and Eileen no longer work for the health care union but continue to work with many of the religious leaders they came to know

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during the Memorial Hospital campaign, including Monsignor Brenkle.  6  Fax sent to Eileen Purcell on January 10, 2007. ‘SJHS Code of Conduct for Third Party Representation Discussions’.

REFERENCES Aronowitz, Stanley. 2014. The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement. New York: Verso. Bronfenbrenner, Kate. 1994. ‘Employer Behavior in Certification Elections and First Contracts: Implications for Labor Law Reform’, in Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, eds Sheldon Friedman, Richard Hurd, Rudy Oswald and Ronald Seeber. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. pp. 75–89. Bronfenbrenner, Kate, and Tom Juravich. 1998. ‘It Takes More Than House Calls: Organizing to Win with a Comprehensive Union-Building Strategy’, Articles and Chapters, Cornell Institute of Labor Relations, Paper 187. Clausen, Dan. 2003. The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ebaugh, Helen Rose, Jon Lorence, and Janet Saltzman Chafetz. 1996. ‘The Growth and Decline of the Population of Catholic Nuns Cross-Nationally, 1960–1990: A Case of Secularization as Social Structural Change’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35(2):171–183. Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ferree, Myra Marx. 2003. ‘Resonance and Radicalism: Feminist Framing in the Abortion Debates of the United States and Germany’. American Journal of Sociology 109(2):304–344. Ferree, M. M., W.A. Gamson, J. Gerhards, and D. Rucht. 2002. Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fourcade, Marion. 2012. ‘The Moral Sociology of Viviana Zelizer’. Sociological Forum 27(4):1056–1061.

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Galvin, Andrew. 2007. ‘Stalemate at St. Joseph: Union is Trying to Organize Hospital Workers, But Won’t File for an Election Until Management First Agrees to Ground Rules’. Orange County Register, October 31. Ganz, Marshall. 2000. ‘Resources and Resourcefulness: Strategic Capacity in the Unionization of California Agriculture, 1959–1966’. American Journal of Sociology 105(4): 1003–1062. Geoghegan, Thomas. 2014. Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement. New York: The New Press. Getman, Julius G. 2010. Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Healy, Kieran. 2006. Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hochschild, Arlie R. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jacoby, Sanford. 1991. Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers. New York: Columbia University Press. Johnston, Hank. 2009. ‘Protest Cultures: Performance, Artifacts, and Ideations’, in Culture, Social Movements, and Protest, ed. Hank Johnston. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. pp. 3–32. Jones, Arthur. 2004. ‘Center Plans Dialogue on Health Reform’, National Catholic Reporter, September 10. Koopmans, Ruud, and Susan Olzak. 2004. ‘Discursive Opportunities and the Evolution of Right-Wing Violence in Germany’. American Journal of Sociology, 110(1):198–230. Light, Donald W. 2004. ‘Ironies of Success: A New History of the American Health Care “System”’. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 45:1–24. Massengill, Rebekah. 2014. Walmart Wars: Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New York University Press. McAdam, Doug, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds. 1996. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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McCammon, Holly, Courtney Sanders Muse, Harmony Newman, and Teresa Terrell. 2007. ‘Movement Framing and Discursive Opportunity Structures: The Political Successes of the U.S. Women’s Jury Movements’. American Sociological Review 72(5):725–749. Nelson, Sioban. 2001. Say Little, Do Much: Nurses, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Polillo, Simone. 2011. ‘Money, Moral Authority, and the Politics of Creditworthiness’. American Sociological Review 76(3): 437–464. Polletta, Francesca, and M. Kai Ho. 2006. ‘Frames and Their Consequences,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, eds Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 187–209. Purcell, Eileen. 2009. ‘St. Joseph Health System Workers’ Organizing Campaign’, S.E.I.U. Campaign History. Rau, Jordan. 2012. ‘In Quest to Grow, Catholic Hospital System Pares Religious Ties’. Kaiser Health News. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1939. Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. New York: McGraw-Hill. Scott, W. Richard, Martin Ruef, Peter J. Mendel, and Carol A. Caronna. 2000. Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations: From Professional Dominance to Managed Care. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Snow, David A. 2004. ‘Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields’, in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, eds David Snow, Sarah Anne Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. pp. 380–412. Snow, David. A., and Robert D. Benford. 1988. ‘Ideology, Frame Resonance and Participant Mobilization’. International Social Movement Research 1:197–219. Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. ‘Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation’. American Sociological Review 51:464–481.

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Steinberg, Marc. 1998. ‘Tilting the Frame: Framing From a Discursive Turn’. Sociological Theory 27:845–872. Steinberg, Marc. 1999. ‘The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertories of Discourse among NineteenthCentury Cotton Spinners’. American Journal of Sociology 105:736–80. Steiner, Philippe. 2009. ‘Who is right about the modern economy: Polanyi, Zezlier, or both?’ Theory and Society 38:97–110. Stevens, Rosemary. 1999 [1989]. In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore, OH: Johns Hopkins Press. Thompson, Margaret. 1986. ‘Discovering Foremothers: Sisters, Society, and the American Catholic Experience’. U.S. Catholic Historian 5: 273–290. Turco, Catherine. 2012. ‘Difficult Decoupling: Employee Resistance to the Commercialization of Personal Settings’. American Journal of Sociology 118(2):380–419. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1999. ‘A Fair and Just Workplace: Principles and Practices for Catholic Health Care’. Voss, Kim. 1993. The Making of American Exceptionalism: the Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Wall, Barbra Mann. 2005. Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865–1925. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. Weiss, Robert S. 1994. Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies. New York: The Free Press. Winerip, Michael. 2012. ‘The Vanishing of the Nuns’. The New York Times, December 2. Zelizer, Viviana. 1978. ‘Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in 19th-Century America’. American Journal of Sociology 84(3):591–610. Zelizer, Viviana. 1994 [1985]. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zelizer, Viviana. 1997 [1994]. The Social Meaning of Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zelizer, Viviana. 2007. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zelizer, Viviana. 2011. Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zelizer, Viviana. 2012. ‘How I Became a Relational Sociologist and What Does that Mean?’. Politics & Society 40(2):145–174.

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20 Organizational Change and Resistance: An Identity Perspective Sierk Ybema, Robyn Thomas and Cynthia Hardy

INTRODUCTION A classic term in popular and scholarly literature on change management is ‘resistance to change’. It understands resistance in terms of opposition to managerial strategies for organizational change. Since change is generally viewed as reasonable and desirable within this literature, resistance to change promulgates the image of employees digging in their heels, refusing to offer support, and hindering a natural and necessary course of events (e.g., Kotter and Schlesinger, 1979). More recently, some change management scholars have embraced a more positive framing of resistance by viewing it as an opportunity to generate ‘conversations’ about change by involving employees, although ultimately with the aim of securing support for change (e.g., Ford et  al., 2008). Resistance according to this view becomes instrumental to the strategies pursued by management. Critical

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scholars challenge both these views of resistance by rejecting a managerialist agenda. Instead, they are sceptical of managerially imposed change and conceptualize resistance as legitimate attempts by employees to repudiate initiatives that may benefit organizational interests, but which will impact negatively on their interests and working conditions (e.g., Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). In this chapter, we use a discursive approach to identity to interrogate these three approaches to resistance, and identify the different identities constructed in the different literatures – the ‘change agent’, the ‘change recipient’ and the ‘resistant subject’. Whether framing them in positive or negative terms, these different literatures tend to reify identities by categorizing individuals as either advocates or adversaries of change. We suggest that instead of fixed categories, identities are situationally constructed: organizational actors struggle

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to establish, maintain or disrupt particular notions of who they are and who others are in the process of negotiating organizational change and resistance. In this way, change, resistance and identity are intricately and dynamically connected. By reviewing how popular and critical literatures of change conceptualize resistance and identity, this chapter provides new insights to inform, and perhaps unsettle, received wisdom regarding resistance. Specifically, we aim to show how through the discursive enactment of identities in relation to change and resistance, organizational actors author different versions of self and other. The chapter is organized as follows. We start by introducing the concept of identity as discursively constructed. We then examine the literature on organizational change and identify three distinct ways in which resistance has been conceptualized in this literature. We then discuss the specific identities that are typically constructed in and by the different literatures. We critique the reified nature of these identities, analysing how each of these literatures engages in forms of discourse that abstract, objectify and fix actors’ identities, classifying them in terms of, for instance, active champions, passive recipients, poor victims, smart resistors, etc. Using a short vignette of a change workshop, we show how in discursive struggles over organizational change and resistance, organizational actors construct reified versions of change resistors, change agents and change recipients through self–other talk. We also show how this reification of identities obscures a more fluid process insofar as participants switch from one type of self– other talk to another during discussions, resulting in actors ‘becoming’ – or laying variable claims to ‘being’ – resistant and compliant at different points in time. Finally, we discuss some of the analytical, practical and ethical implications of our analysis as well as a few limitations, in an attempt to offer directions for future research and practice.

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THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES Identity refers to ‘subjective meanings and experience, to our ongoing efforts to address the twin questions, “Who am I?” and – by implication – “how should I act?”’ (Alvesson et  al., 2008: 6). It can be understood as a reflexively ordered narrative that is ‘stimulated by social interaction and ordered by institutionalized patterns of being and knowing’ (Thomas, 2009: 168–169). Viewing identity in this way means eschewing the suggestion that it is an objective fact, a deeper essence, or the sum total of an individual’s character traits. Instead, identities are conceived of as discursive constructions that are articulated, resisted, embraced, maintained and modified on an ongoing basis. Such a perspective frames identity as constituted through the ways in which people present their ‘selves’ in talking about and presenting themselves in relation to others (Jenkins, 2004), as well as how these others audit, applaud or reject those selves (e.g., Czarniawska, 1997). Individuals position themselves in relation to particular audiences (Garcia and Hardy, 2007) as identities are constructed ‘in between’ the communicator(s) and their audience(s). There is a ‘dynamic interplay between internal strivings and external prescriptions, between self-presentation and labeling by others, between achievement and ascription and between regulation and resistance’ (Ybema et  al., 2009: 301). Everyday discourse of ‘self’ and ‘other’ or ‘self–other talk’ (Ybema et  al., 2009) is one domain where we see this dynamic interplay ‘in action’. The enactment of identities involves the discursive articulation of sameness and otherness. We (and others) understand who we are by signifying who we are not. The social construction of identity is thus a matter of establishing, preserving, challenging and disrupting a sense of similarity and difference which imposes

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seemingly arbitrary boundaries to create and define ‘identity’ through ‘alterity’ (Ybema et  al., 2009). Whether in wider sociocultural scripts and normative prescriptions, or actors’ own definitions of themselves and others, such distinctions are usually accomplished through a process whereby ‘self’ is positioned against ‘other’ often in crude categorical alternatives – good versus bad, rational versus emotional, willing versus unwilling, etc. Far from being neutral or benign, such discursive positioning is invariably coloured by moral judgements, emotional involvement, and political or economic interests. It implicates social manoeuvring and power games, and serves to establish, legitimate or challenge the prevailing relationships of power and status (e.g., Ybema and Byun, 2011). This approach to identity highlights the role of individual agency, interactional dynamics and organizational politics, as well as emphasizing how particular socio-historical settings and wider discourses script, categorize and shape people’s identity constructions. It also emphasizes how identity constructions, in turn, shape those settings, since ‘selves and sociality are mutually implicated and mutually co-constructed’ (Ybema et  al., 2009: 307). Individuals present their selves to – and in – a particular context, conforming to or deviating from particular prescriptions in processes of negotiation between self and others, and between ‘inner’ desires and strivings and an ‘outside’ world. So, for example, professional and organizational scripts for appropriate or desirable behaviour, attributes, and aesthetics provide disciplinary persuasions as to how individuals can act ‘normal’, play ‘the part’ or express ‘appropriate’ opinions, to which individuals may or may not conform. The concept of discourse is particularly important in understanding these processes of identity construction. It helps to explain the socio-historical context in which identities are constructed, the resources available in crafting identities, as well as the

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limits that individuals face in constructing self and other. We use the term discourse to refer to interrelated sets of practices and texts that ‘systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972: 49). Discourses constitute the social world by bringing certain phenomena into being (Parker, 1992), including objects of knowledge, categories of social subjects, forms of self, social relationships, and conceptual frameworks (Fairclough, 1992). Insofar as discourses are ‘historically and culturally variable ways of specifying knowledge and truth’ (Meriläinen et  al., 2004: 544), they do not merely identify pre-existing objects, they help to constitute them. A discursive approach to identity also brings power relations into view. Power lies at the heart of forming, sustaining and constraining understandings of who we are and who we might be (McNay, 2000), with different discourses offering possibilities for sustaining identities, as well as regulating them (Kondo, 1990). Discourses constrain the construction of identities through their normalizing effects on the individual, marking out the range of possibilities for sustainable and legitimate selves. However, discourses can never fully constrain or determine identities: there is always indeterminacy within any individual discourse and individuals also operate within multiple discursive fields where different discursive elements come into play. Agency and discourse thus intersect as individuals are subjectively motivated to reproduce and transform the power relations that underpin the way in which they are categorized and constituted. In sum, individuals are both the site and subjects of discursive struggles around their identity (Beech and Johnson, 2005). A discursive approach emphasizes the processual nature of identity formation, recognizing that identities are actively negotiated, reproduced and changed on an ongoing basis, as medium and outcome of power relations (Holmer-Nadesan, 1996; Thomas and Linstead, 2002).

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Organizational Change and Resistance: An Identity Perspective

IDENTITY, CHANGE AND RESISTANCE In this section, we present three views of resistance that feature in different literatures. First, we discuss what might be described as the ‘traditional’ approach to organizational change, which tends to demonize resistance as a result of its unequivocal managerialist orientation. Second, we introduce a somewhat different view of resistance that retains a managerialist approach, but sees resistance in a more positive light. Finally, we discuss critical approaches to change and resistance. Within each approach, we use our conceptualization of identity to reflect on how it constructs and positions two distinct, fixed identities – the change agent and the change recipient.

Promoting Change; Demonizing Resistance The literature on managing organizational change is extensive and diverse, starting with the Organization Development approach (e.g., Cummings and Worley, 1997; French and Bell, 1990) through to more processual and political approaches (e.g., Pettigrew, 1987; Quinn, 1980). The bulk of this literature explicitly acknowledges that resistance to change is likely to arise and managers interested in bringing about organizational change should therefore give careful thought as to how to avoid or defeat it. This work takes a clearly managerialist view: change is a ‘must’ for organizations. Competitive pressures, global trends, new technologies and unexpected events all require organizations to engage in change initiatives. Resistance from employees cannot therefore be allowed to interfere with organizations’ attempts at renewal. Resistance is thus conceptualized in ‘negative terms, as a sign of failure … or as a problem to be eliminated or minimized’ (Giangreco and Peccei, 2005: 1816). The causes of resistance are primarily attributed to the shortcomings of employees,

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such as self-interest, a lack of tolerance for change, cynicism or fear, i.e., inappropriate attitudes and behaviours on the part of employees gives rise to resistance which, in turn, impedes the change initiative (Piderit, 2000). Occasionally, managers are criticized for failing to communicate the advantages of change adequately to their employees but, most of the time, it is their subordinates who bear the blame for causing resistance (Dent and Goldberg, 1999). Solutions therefore revolve around improved communication, education and participation (Furst and Cable, 2008; Giangreco and Peccei, 2005). However, if employees still fail to respond in a satisfactory manner – i.e., by ceasing to resist – managers are justified in using more coercive methods to force through the change. The aim is to stamp out resistance and ‘correct’ those intransigent individuals who engage in it (Thomas and Hardy, 2011) because it is a dysfunctional response of subordinates against change (Dent and Goldberg, 1999). Accordingly, this literature problematizes and demonizes resistance by framing it as negative and harmful to organizations; a pathology that obstructs change attempts, and which needs to be eradicated (see Piderit, 2000; Sonenshein, 2010; Thomas and Hardy, 2011; Hon et al., 2011). The work that demonizes resistance constructs the identities of change agent and change recipient in a fixed and predetermined way. It privileges the change agent – the identity assumed to be responsible for and committed to the change in question. The change agent has sole responsibility for identifying the need for change, creating a vision of the change that is to come, specifying desired outcomes, and then making it all happen. Change agents are ‘change strategists’ (Kanter et al., 1992) – an identity that is accessible usually only to senior managers and consultants whose authority, status and expertise make them suitably responsible for, and capable of, formulating and leading the change project. As the need for change is seen as self-evident, the change agent’s position,

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plans and policies automatically gain significance as being rational and legitimate. Change agents are clearly distinct from change recipients, on whom the change is to be inflicted. If the change agent is ‘self’ then the change recipient is ‘other’, with an equally fixed identity. Cast as responsible for adopting or adapting to change (Ford et  al., 2008), their acquiescent, if not enthusiastic reception is integral to successful outcomes. Those who question the taken-for-granted rationality of change are viewed as problems that need to be ‘managed’ by the change agent as part of the change process. To account for such an unwarranted, irrational and detrimental response to change efforts, this literature often assumes change recipients suffer from fears and anxieties, psychologizing resistance as an inevitable and natural reaction and/or pathologizing it as irrational and unnatural. Resistance is triggered because human beings – change agents not included – have resistant personalities (van Dam et  al., 2008). They display innate conservatism and fears of the unknown, or possess a disloyal character that aims at preserving the status quo to meet personal ends. This literature thus ‘places the change agent on the side of the angels, and the people being changed as mulish and obstinate, resisting innovations that have proved successful elsewhere’ (DoboszBourne and Jankowicz, 2006: 2030). This type of self–other talk sets change agents apart from change recipients in terms of supporters versus opponents of change. In its theorization of resistance to change, it implicitly invokes a series of binary oppositions – rational and determined versus fearful and insecure; pursuing offensive, forward-looking strategies versus defensive, backward-looking strategies; being dedicated to a common cause versus cynically pursuing private interests; and, ultimately, heroically conquering resistance versus stubbornly holding on to the status quo. Empirical studies of organizational change show that self-proclaimed champions of change frequently adopt such

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self-serving and other-diminishing identity talk (e.g., Symon, 2005). It allows change agents to avoid blame for any delays or failures in the change process by shifting it on to others. Labelling a response to change as ‘resistance’ frames any act as obstructive and the actor in question as obstructionist, disqualifying the ‘other’ and, implicitly, exonerating the ‘self’. The speaker’s own intention and dedication to bring about change need not be questioned. Psychologizing the ‘other’ by assuming change recipients suffer from fears and conservatism has the additional advantage of reframing substantive concerns and critique as mental deficiencies, releasing ‘change agents’ from entering into conversation or negotiation with so-called change recipients because the problem is psychological, not substantive. It is not the change plan, but the change recipients’ attitudes that need changing. And so, the two identities only cross paths when the change agent is required to act on change recipients who lack the motivation or willingness to improve their receptiveness to change – to bring themselves on board so there is no resistance (Armenakis et al., 1993; Oreg and Sverdlik, 2011). In the event that resistance does arise, then the change agent’s duty is to exercise their managerial prerogative to deal with such insubordination (Hardy and Clegg, 2004). This literature thus places the change agent in a privileged position of managing a psychologically deficient or recalcitrant change recipient. This brings us to yet another ‘nihilating’ effect (Berger and Luckmann, 1991 [1966]) of depicting change agents as ‘doing the right and proper things while change recipients throw up unreasonable obstacles or barriers intent on “doing in” and “screwing up” the change’ (Ford et al., 2008: 362; see also Dent and Goldberg, 1999). Constructing a ‘resistant’, ‘poorly motivated’, ‘conservative’, ‘fearful’ change recipient warrants a legitimate identity for champions of change. By creating the other as in need of training, coaching or guidance, they become the

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Organizational Change and Resistance: An Identity Perspective

ideal targets for those wishing to be trainers, coaches, experts or leaders. Training, coaching and even coercion then become appropriate actions. Framing resistance as a negative response grants change agents the right – if not the duty – to use whatever means necessary to prevent or overcome resistance (Hardy and Clegg, 2004), fighting and beating the ‘enemy inside’ (Diefenbach, 2007: 130). Ironically, the identity of the change agent hinges on the existence of resistance, despite all the protestations that it impedes organizational functioning and threatens managerial prerogatives. Without ‘villainous’ resistance to overcome, there is no legitimate reason to use power against employees, and no ‘heroic’ change agent to win the battle.

Promoting Change; Celebrating Resistance More recently, some organizational change scholars have advocated a different approach to resistance, pointing out that demonizing it has done little to ensure successful change. While still prioritizing the need for organizations to engage in change, they suggest that resistance might have a role to play in ensuring such initiatives are successful. Resistance may be prompted by legitimate concerns that existing change plans are problematic in some way and, by resisting them, more effective measures may be put in place (e.g., Dent and Goldberg, 1999; Furst and Cable, 2008). Resistance can therefore aid the organizational change initiative (Ford et  al., 2008). Middle managers, in particular, can make an important contribution to organizational change by questioning the claims and understandings of senior – and possibly out of touch – managers (Lüscher and Lewis, 2008; Woolridge, Schmid and Floyd, 2008). Similarly, participation by employees and other stakeholders can enhance change initiatives by challenging taken-for-granted assumptions (Van Dam et al., 2008).

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This work conceptualizes resistance as a process whereby change agents make sense of the responses of change recipients. It suggests that what change agents interpret as ‘resistance’ may, in fact, be novel ideas for different kinds of change (or different ways of implementing it) that could benefit the organization and its members (Piderit, 2000). According to this view, ‘resistance’ is conceptualized as a ‘counter-offer’ to proposals for change. In making this counter-offer change recipients are seeking some form of accommodation from their superiors (Ford et  al., 2008). This form of resistance is not adversarial and can be resolved ‘through the negotiation of mutually sensible meanings’ (Dobosz-Bourne and Jankowicz, 2006: 2030). The role of change agents is to harness resistance; not eradicate it. Resistance is no longer a form of dysfunctional behaviour, but a pool of alternative ideas to be explored and negotiated through interactions between change agent and change recipient. During this process, the former makes sense of the reaction of the latter – is it resistance or not. Specific actions are not ‘in and of themselves, resistance, and they do not become resistance unless and until change agents assign the label resistance to them’ (Ford et  al., 2008: 371). If change agents can only avoid being defensive and labelling behaviour as resistance and, instead, make accommodations by changing aspects of the change initiative, behaviours may never be labelled as resistance – rather they become contributions to an improved change process (see Thomas and Hardy, 2011). This literature recasts the identities of change agents and change recipients, although somewhat ambiguously. The managerial variant of this perspective reflexively evaluates the counterproductive effects of diminishing and demeaning others as recalcitrant, which, argue Ford et  al. (2008), is self-fulfilling because it produces the recalcitrant change recipient. Demonizing resistance also fails to tap into potentially productive ideas for bringing about change.

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Turning the spotlight onto the change agents’ own views and actions in relation to resistance, and recasting change recipients as well-informed, thoughtful and motivated by rightful concerns, grants the latter rationality and legitimacy. Change recipients have the potential to become change agents (subject to the agreement of the change agent, as we explain below) – heroes who overcome the recalcitrance of formally designated, but short-sighted and narrow-minded, change agents by resisting in ways that enhance the change initiative (Ford et al., 2008). Here, it is not only the official change agent who is the architect of the change; change recipients can also contribute to it. Does this mean that the demarcation and status differential between change agent and change recipient breaks down? Can change recipients become change agents by strategically resisting? Not according to Ford and his colleagues (2008). These authors continue to accord privilege to the change agent, who is privileged in being able to decide on whether to label certain acts and behaviours as resistance. In fact, this identity talks it into existence: it only exists if labelled as such by change agents. Equally, it is only within the purview of the change agent to ‘accommodate’ resistance, appropriating apparently resistant actions into a successful change initiative. This change agent is now responsible not only for the change, but also for the construction of the change recipient as resistant or compliant (Thomas and Hardy, 2011). So, although the work celebrating resistance revisits and revalues it, it remains located within the same ideological framework, securing the interests and identities of selfappointed change agents. The template for conceptualizing change agent–change recipient roles and relations remains firmly intact. Without a corresponding change in power relations, change recipients remain dependent on change agents (Courpasson et  al., 2012; Thomas et al., 2011). A particular type of reifying self–other talk undergirds this perspective – in pursuing

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change without questioning its rationality or desirability, a self-proclaimed agent of change grants reluctant change recipients the right to speak up, to translate their reluctance into critical engagement, and thus to contribute ‘positively’ to the change process. Instead of blaming, critiquing, psychologizing and pathologizing others for being resistant, it adopts a more benevolent strategy as change agents approach change recipients in an amiable way. It is a prelude to a happy ending – successful change – by building on the expectation that the latter returns the favour by benevolently contributing to the change process. The underlying assumption is that empowering so-called change recipients to participate actively in the change process turns out to be a more productive self-fulfilling prophecy, producing an ‘other’ that is compliant and critically involved. In fact, being kind to others makes it more difficult for them to resist, subtly pushing them into willing compliance. Ultimately, it is in the interest of change agents to be able to present a collaborative staff, because a grudging staff reflects badly on them, making them look incompetent. So again, change agents construct an ‘other’ that suits not only their purposes, but also their own preferred identity as an expert in overcoming resistance to change.

Challenging Change; Celebrating Resistance Critical researchers challenge both these approaches to resistance by rejecting a managerialist agenda. Instead, they adopt a more sceptical view of organizational change and the broader industrial regime in which employees are situated. This research emphasizes the oppressive nature of contemporary work practices – from the relentless pressure of the assembly line through to the electronic surveillance of the modern call centre. Rather than accept the managerial case that organizational change is necessary and desirable, these researchers are more likely to consider

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Organizational Change and Resistance: An Identity Perspective

its effects on lowering wages, deskilling employees, intensifying work practices, undermining unions, and stacking the deck in collective bargaining negotiations. With roots in industrial sociology and labour process theory (e.g., Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1986), and adopting the vantage point of the dominated, this work is interested in – and supportive of – the methods used by workers to ‘get by’ and to ‘get back’ at management (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). Consequently, resistance is both legitimate and desirable: ‘the expression of an irreducible opposition between workers and management’ (Courpasson et  al., 2012: 802), and ‘the inevitable result of the objective exploitation of labour by capital’ (Spicer and Böhm, 2007: 1669). Like the demonizing approach, resistance is seen in the form of entrenched and inevitable opposition between employers and employees, although what is important here is the interests of the latter rather than the former (cf. Agócs, 1997). Moreover, the employee is not framed as a willing change recipient but as a ‘resistant subject’ – expected, even obligated to resist the changes imposed on her or him. The empirical focus of this critical work has tended to be in deliberate, collective resistance to change initiatives that threaten employee interests and working conditions, ranging from Luddite protests to guild-based syndicalism and, particularly, the trade union movement. It includes unofficial strategies such as wildcat strikes, ‘go-slows’, occupations and ‘working-to-rule’ (Spicer and Böhm, 2007), as well as informal practices such as ‘banana time’ (Roy, 1958) and ‘making out’ (Burawoy, 1979). In all these cases, resistance is organized – coordinated, collective and deliberate. There are those who decide change and those who are at the receiving end of it; and these positions are fixed (Courpasson et al., 2012). Resistance is an inevitable, adversarial response to power: the roles are allocated, the script is written, and the power relations are established.

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Some critical writers have sought to redress the emphasis on collective, organized forms of resistance by introducing the notion of ‘subjective’ forms of resistance (Thomas and Davies, 2005). Building on the work of Foucault, these researchers examine more idiosyncratic, uncoordinated forms of resistance (e.g., Fleming and Spicer, 2008; Knights and McCabe, 2000; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994). With Foucault, the emphasis shifts from structural, class-based analysis of power and resistance, which are the focus of many labour process analysts, such as Braverman (1974), to discursive dynamics of the construction of subjectivities and the epistemological and ethical complexities this entails. Hence, the Foucauldian response to traditional labour process theory is one that emphasizes the expansion of our understanding of the organization of power and resistance beyond the narrow conceptions of economic class antagonisms in the workplace. (Spicer and Böhm, 2007: 1670)

According to this view, resistance and power are not separate, opposing forces. They are intertwined – transversal, iterative and adaptive responses to each other (Ezzamel et al., 2001). Resistance involves an ongoing process of adaptation and subversion as individuals reflect on their situation, and engage in identity work to shift meanings and understandings (Thomas and Davies, 2005). Thus poststructuralist approaches have emphasized moving away from viewing resistance as an expression of class-consciousness by economically and environmentally determined actors, to recognize the situated discursive construction of resistance subjectivities and practices. Nonetheless, there is still the tendency in this work to assume relatively fixed identities as a result of the subject positions they occupy as, for example, with ‘managers’ positioned in the discourse of Total Quality Management (Knights and McCabe, 2000), ‘professionals’ situated within the discourse of New Public Management (Thomas and Davies, 2005), or ‘workers’ located in the discourse of ‘lean manufacturing’ (Ezzamel et al., 2001).

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The critical literature, in sum, reclaims the legitimacy of resistance by identifying with those who stand up to the reigning powers. The resistant subject becomes ‘self’ and change agents become ‘other’, turning the tables on the privileged change agent. Whether informed by labour process theory or Foucault, it demarcates change agents and change recipients – in a radically different way than the other two approaches, but in an equally fixed and deterministic manner. Change agents are seen as representatives of capitalists’ interests, intent on appropriating surplus value of labour or as managers increasing their control through practices of new public management and enterprise. Either way, a series of oppositional categories sets up a moral hierarchy, placing employers’ oppression and exploitation in opposition to employees’ rightful resistance and rebellion. By demeaning change agents and embracing resistance, it resists, reverses and upends managerialist views, but it still typecasts and ascribes fixed identities to organizational actors, promoting deterministic and dualistic thinking. Distributing ‘good’ and ‘evil’ unequally and painting a black-and-white contrast romanticize the resistant change recipient, who can do no wrong, while dismissing the change agent. In other words, this body of work is still locked into essentialist understandings and reified categories of identity, preconceiving organizational actors as victimized subjects, subtle resisters, exploitative managers, etc. In summary, these three views of resistance each work with an assumption of fixed identities for those involved in the change process. By celebrating change and demonizing resistance, researchers construct an heroic change agent championing change, to which an ignorant or fearful change recipient responds in a compliant or obstructive manner. Celebrating change and resistance still involves conceiving of the change agent– change recipient relationship in a fixed and unproblematized manner, with the change agent empowered to determine whether the

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recipient’s response is compliant or oppositional. Finally, demonizing change and celebrating resistance may allow researchers to reject a managerialist agenda but it still portrays fixed identities: labour process-inspired work views resistant identities as expressions of class consciousness, while Foucauldian research is concerned with resistance as arising from how subjects are positioned in discourse. Regardless of whether viewed positively or negatively, therefore, each of the three approaches reifies identities, fixing actors as either advocates or adversaries of change (see Table 20.1).

RESISTANCE AND THE REIFICATION OF IDENTITIES As we have noted above, the majority of the work on organizational change, regardless of its theoretical position, tends to reify identities in relation to resistance. This seems at odds with current work on identity construction, which emphasizes the fluidity of identity. Moreover, the work on subjective resistance has started to incorporate an understanding of the ebb and flow of power– resistance relations, and research on change has also shifted attention away from a focus on ‘monological’ accounts of change towards an analysis of its ‘dialogic’ (Gergen et  al., 2004), ‘plurivocal’ (Brown, 2006: 734) and ‘multi-authored’ nature (Buchanan and Dawson, 2007). Accordingly, both change and resistance can be understood as continuous processes of organizational ‘becoming’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002): [Resistance is] an ongoing social and material accomplishment, something to achieve, constituted and sustained by the work of actors who overtly engage in a given struggle. (Courpasson et al., 2012: 816)

Thus change and resistance have to be brought into being – they are both constructed and contested in a process of discursive

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Ignorant, fearful or difficult

Ethical issues

Practical issues

Authorized action

Power relations

Knowledgeable, willing

Illegitimate Rational, knowledgeable, heroic

Status of resistance Change agent subject position Change recipient subject position Positioning

Senior management defensiveness

Change agent is privileged insofar they decide whether or not actions and identities are resistant Unitarist: wider capitalist framework taken for Unitarist: wider capitalist framework taken for granted granted Managerial prerogative – coercion by senior Managerial prerogative – managers decide who managers and what are resistant practices and identities Demonizing resistance has not resulted in its Change agents may not have the expertise eradication; change agents are likely to ignore to assess accurately whether the change ‘good’ ideas from subordinates if they deviate recipients’ response will ‘improve’ the change from their vision for the change effort Assumes change is for the good and change Changes are vulnerable in that if they do not agent is doing the right thing. Fails to take resist, change recipients risk being penalized into account that changes may be detrimental for not contributing to the change effort; if or exploitative they do offer different ideas, they may get labelled as resistant

Change agent is privileged as champion of change and serving everyone’s best interests

Legitimate Defensive, misguided, partial knowledge

Employee intransigence

Cause of resistance

Ford et al. (2008)

Kotter and Schlesinger (1979)

Key proponents

Microsociology, interpretivism

Organizational Development (OD)

Celebrating change and resistance

Theoretical foundations

Celebrating change; demonizing resistance

Change recipient is privileged insofar as they act reasonably under provocation and act against exploitation Radical: wider capitalist framework directly challenged Strikes, sabotage by employees/assertion of alternative identities/discourses Assumes change is bad when it may create more/ better employment or be necessary to protect conditions; subjective resistant may have little impact Those who don’t resist are labelled as failing in some way

Knowledgeable, heroic

Labour Process Theory, Foucauldian post-structuralism Thompson and Ackroyd (1995); Knights and Vurdubakis (1994) Changes that threaten employees’ interests, working conditions and identities Legitimate Evil, exploitative

Demonizing change; celebrating resistance

Table 20.1 General characteristics of three views of resistance to change that feature in different literatures Organizational Change and Resistance: An Identity Perspective 395

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VIGNETTE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES IN A CHANGE WORKSHOP1 A change initiative is underway to replace the old engineering focus with a customer orientation at UTel, a European telecommunications company previously part of the much larger GlobalTel. Since being spun off from GlobalTel, the company is no longer selling phones to end-users. Instead, it is selling software and knowledge to mobile phone manufacturers. The change program involves 80 workshops across the company, and in different countries, bringing together around 30 senior management, local management and employees. The aim is to secure involvement and input from employees and to bring about agreement on what the nature of the new culture should be and how it should be implemented from across the company. In one workshop in a UK plant, a senior UK manager starts the session by welcoming participants, saying: We need to get a common understanding between all of the sites so that we have things in tune in terms of going forward. The idea here is to have a workshop with the line managers, where you can hopefully carry this message through to the rest of the organization and we can develop that going further so that we can take that right down to the engineers and hopefully feed back any concerns and issues that may crop up as a result of the discussions going forward. He then introduces the head office managers, one of whom provides an overview of the outline and goals of the workshop. Another UK manager makes a presentation describing his interpretation of the local culture and its strengths and weaknesses, which is followed by a discussion about whether this interpretation is accurate. Following a coffee break, UTel’s mission statement is discussed and a video featuring the CEO is shown. The participants then complete a ‘stop/ start/continue’ exercise to identify one behaviour that has been hindering cultural change and needs to be stopped, one new behaviour that needs to be started, and one existing behaviour that should be continued. The workshop concludes with a discussion of how to implement the cultural change. A number of discussion points feature during the course of the three-hour workshop. In one thread, the meaning of a customer focus is debated. A senior UK manager introduces the need to achieve a ‘common understanding’ of customer focus. A head office manager then puts forward a number of suggestions on how customer focus might be understood in terms of the relationship with the customer. A senior manager then seeks clarification on who the customer is and whether they are talking about the end-user (the person who buys and uses the phone) or another business (i.e., the customer is another company that manufactures and sells phones). This comment triggers a lively debate concerning who the customer is. One of the participants then challenges the assumption that the UK site is not already customer focused: I believe that we’re [local site] customer-oriented. I think we are customer focused as an organization and we have been all the way through even in our history. I think we’re a customer-focused organization. A new debate then ensues over whether or not the UK site is more or less customer focused compared to head office. The discussion shifts away to the nature of the relationship with the customer, but returns to claims that the UK site is already customer focused. This claim is disputed by some employees, but supported by others. The discussion then returns to who the customer is and the claim that the UK site is already customer focused reemerges. At this point, the importance of a customer focus is challenged at a more fundamental level as a participant argues that there is a need for a commercial focus: We are very driven by engineers and the technology … people do get caught up with developing incredible products that are fantastic with loads of features but from a commercial focus aren’t really needed … as an organization we’re not necessarily as commercially and business focused as we need to be. This comment is followed by a long silence. A manager attempts to shift the emphasis away from the accusation that the company lacks a commercial focus by arguing that it is sales and marketing staff who are responsible for the customer, but the discussion quickly returns to the need for a commercial focus. The point is made that while engineers may be close to the customer, this is not helpful unless they have a commercial focus. This discussion returns once again to who the customer is – the end-user or the business that sells the phone. Throughout this discussion, the claim that the company is already customer focused reappears, as does the need for a commercial focus. During this discussion, a gradual consensus develops regarding what a commercial focus would mean, e.g., being financially aware and helping the company to be profitable:

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Commercial … to me means … UTel profitability. And it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot about customer profitability, customer on time, customer this, customer that and customer the other. By the end of the discussion, the group comes to an agreement that a customer focus is less important than the need for a commercial focus. A second discussion item concerns the meaning of implementation, i.e., how the culture change is to be implemented. At the start of the workshop, a head office manager specifies that one of the objectives is to arrive at a collective identification of the actions necessary to implement the change at the local site. Some time later, an employee picks up the issue of implementation, suggesting that it requires a clear direction, which is currently lacking: ‘we need to know where we’re going … how we fit in, making sure the whole thing hangs together’. Another employee then suggests that, rather than a lack of direction, the issue is a lack of information, although this is countered by yet another employee who complains about the lack of direction. At this point, a head office manager tries to divert the debate by arguing that it is difficult to establish a clear direction. An employee attempts to press the head office manager to define implementation in terms of the need for direction, but to no avail. Participants then debate what implementation should entail, with divisions arising between employees, who want more direction and tighter timeframes, and senior managers, who want to see more workshops rolled out. At this point, an employee draws attention to the power of head office to decide what implementation is, rather than employees through the workshops. The head office manager reinforces this point by, first, defining implementation in terms of further workshops rather than direction and timelines, and then invoking the CEO to reinforce his point: [The CEO] is very interested … in this work. We have been running culture workshops now in [the various sites] and he has gone through the material with myself and sometimes with [another head office manager]. Now he really wants to see what kind of culture you have here and that’s the first step [through the workshops]. Another head office manager backs up this statement. Following the video, employees return to press the point about implementation needing direction and timelines, but they are ignored when a head office manager returns to implementation as requiring further workshops. Other senior managers start to issue directives concerning subsequent workshops requiring participants to be involved in them. Employees try to return yet again to the need for a road map, milestones and action plans as part of successful implementation, rather than more workshops: [We need] some plan going forward rather than being an isolated activity… the bit that’s missing to my mind is what the next steps are? We do this but then what’s the next step? A head office manager then says that the next implementation step will be decided by head office, contradicting an earlier argument that actions are to be collectively identified. An employee returns to the need for a timeline, while a head office manager returns to the need to conduct further workshops. The same manager refers to possible job losses if the change initiative does not go well, implying a possible threat to employees. Again, an employee raises the need for road maps and, yet again, a head office manager defines implementation in terms of a set of activities decided by head office. There is another attempt to define implementation in terms of timelines by employees, which is directly refuted by a head office manager, who says, ‘that’s not [what] you should be doing’.

struggle over alternative and competing views (cf. Smith and Graetz, 2011). It may be, therefore, more useful to talk of changing and resisting to allow for understanding how ongoing processes become stabilized into particular sedimented meanings at particular points in time (Hardy and Thomas, 2014). Instigating–implementing–resisting– negotiating change in organizational settings is a working process, a project, and a struggle between participants in specific

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organizational relations. As we demonstrate in the vignette, self–other talk about change may appear to lock individuals into reified identities in relation to the change, but as this talk shifts so, too, do these identities with the result that individuals ‘become’ change agents, recipients and resistors at different points in time. This vignette shows instances of identity talk in discursive struggles over the organizational change which, by the end of

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the workshop, has resulted in attempts to fix and reify ‘self’ and ‘other’ in relation to the change. Particularly when employees criticize the ‘lack of direction’ and press for a road map, milestones and action plans, head office managers, who prefer to see implementation evolve through the culture workshops, take up a defensive position. Provoked by employees’ oppositional voice, their talk emphasizes directives, reminds participants of head office’s discretionary powers, and suggests possible job losses. Senior managers systematically ignore or refute employees’ requests for direction and timelines, dismiss alternative suggestions, and draw on their position in the hierarchy to silence their subordinates. The use of coercive communicative practices to discredit the suggestions of employees escalates. The talk of senior managers draws them into an authoritarian– oppositional dynamic, presenting ‘self’ as the only rightful agents of change in opposition to ‘resistant’ voices. Meanwhile, employees are cast as the other – in a submissive recipient role. Despite the way in which this talk appears to have ‘locked’ participants into particular identities, the analysis also shows how subject positions dramatically shift throughout the workshop as the self–other talk changes. The workshop starts with attempts to bridge self–other divides. Engaging in inclusive identity talk (Ybema et  al., 2012), participants initially construct a shared identity of change agents working together on articulating a joint UTel identity, such as when the senior UK manager introduces the session by saying that idea is for the line managers to ‘carry this message through to the rest of the organization’. In the case of a customer focus, both employees and senior managers regularly build on earlier interventions by ‘self’ and ‘other’ as the two categories blur. Senior managers take up ideas from their subordinates, instead of rejecting them as ‘resistance’. The resistant subject is absent as senior managers and employees build on

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each other’s meanings during the workshop, even though it reappears by the end. The resistant identity is thus in a situation of ‘becoming’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) throughout the workshop. Sometimes, managers label their subordinates as change agents or as ‘resistant’ in a positive way, as in the case of customer focus. Sometimes they label them as resistant in the more traditional way, i.e., as impeding the change effort, as in the case of implementation. Sometimes, employees take on a resistant identity, in challenging what is being proposed, while at other times they are more compliant or pro-change. At times, they were willing to challenge hierarchy and question the ideas coming from their superiors; at other times they invoked hierarchy by demanding actions from their superiors that were commensurate with them leading – and taking responsibility for – the change. Accordingly, resistant identities are brought into being through the communicative practices of the different actors. Moreover, as the resistant subject both forms and dissolves so, too, does the change agent identity. Thus resistant subject and change agent are continually becoming through diverse self–other talk – sometimes becoming more evident and sometimes less; and sometimes melding and at other times distinct.

DISCUSSION We have sought to make the case that identity is a useful perspective for studying resistance to organizational change. To demonstrate its contribution, we critically discussed how scholarly texts on resistance to change, as well as participants in a change workshop, routinely construct participants in the process either as agents of change or (willing or resistant) recipients of change. A first insight stemming from our analysis is that discourse on resistance to change tends to fix and reify ‘self’ and ‘other’, invoking a rather simplistic binary opposition. While critical identity

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theorists tend to theorize identities as fluid, constantly constructed and reconstructed in people’s sayings and doings, the manner in which organizational actors and scholars of resistance to change construct and reconstruct resistant identities frequently serves to produce or perpetuate essentialist notions of self and other. The main characters in change and resistance are cast in oppositional roles, engaging in talk that promotes a particular ‘self’ (e.g., a heroic agent or resister of change) and degrades an ‘other’ (e.g., an exploitative change agent or a stubbornly resistant change recipient). Even when organizational actors switch their positioning from one situation to another (as shown in the vignette), they nonetheless draw clear-cut self–other distinctions and engage in ‘essentializing’ talk. Self-proclaimed champions of change tend to cast themselves as active agents in control of the process, while others are either passive recipients in need of direction or they are resistant users who ‘are basically just a little frightened’ (head of the organization quoted by Symon, 2005: 1650). By actively voicing the ‘resistor’ as if referring to an abstract category, the manager does not talk about particular persons, but about a broader ‘type’ of ‘unreasonable diehards’ (Symon, 2005: 1651). Ascribing such fixed identities to oneself and to others allows the speaker to place, or perhaps to push, ‘self’ and ‘other’ into particular roles. A second, somewhat contradictory insight from identity studies is helpful for understanding change and resistance as process, struggle or accomplishment, also shown in our vignette. Here we see that identities, as they are constructed in everyday organizational life are not clear-cut and fixed, but are constructed differently across time and space as a result of particular situational dynamics and issues. A processual view shows how identities are constructed differently over time in the ebb and flow of shifting circumstances, power constellations, economic conditions, etc. This is also what recent identity studies show. For instance, organizational

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actors make situational and strategic shifts in their identifications (Ybema and Byun, 2011): they may switch from change agent to change recipient or back in their social identification (Thomas et al., 2011), position themselves in-between two identities (e.g., Ellis and Ybema, 2010; Iedema et al., 2003; Zabusky and Barley, 1997), or present themselves as bridging categorical alternatives (Ybema et  al., 2012). In a similar vein, the supposedly clear-cut dichotomy of change agents and change recipients may be more ephemeral and convoluted in day-to-day practice. In a process of change, the selfelected change agent may also be a change recipient – every senior manager is as much a subject and object of change (albeit in different ways), as are shop floor employees. Due to their position in the organizational hierarchy, middle managers in particular may epitomize this double subjectivity, being targeted as object and implementer of change policies, and spanning these two identities in their self-presentation. Those who start out as defenders of change can become its opponents; and those who oppose it can come to support it (e.g., Kellogg, 2009; Thomas and Hardy, 2011). In sum, actors have more opportunities than limited positioning within the unilateral sender–receiver model currently popular in literatures on resistance to change (and also evident in, for instance, the popular distinction between sensegiving and sensemaking). Instead of fixed essences and clear-cut distinctions between producers and consumers of change, the identities of change agents, change recipients and resistant subjects should be seen as transient constructs, negotiated between actors involved in the process (cf. Ybema et al., 2009). So, identity research may describe the overtly dynamic moments of change and resistance, capturing identity in flight, as well as the apparently stable patterns when organizational actors attempt to secure a particular status quo, catching identity in slumber or, perhaps, kept in slumber (van Hulst et al., forthcoming).

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CONCLUSION So, what might be identity’s contribution to the study of resistance? Analytically, an identity perspective offers a vantage point from which to analyse how scholars and practitioners engage in discourse of selfhood and otherhood when negotiating change and discussing resistance. A fine-grained identity analysis shows how essentializing, selfcongratulatory self–other talk creates ‘locked in’ identities that privilege a preferred version of the ‘self’ while simultaneously confining others to a socially, politically or morally marginalized position. Subsequently, showing the shifts and slides in self–other talk helps us to appreciate the dynamics of negotiations over change and resistance to change. Inadvertently or unreflexively, scholarly literatures on resistance to change tend to engage in reifying identity talk that makes them moralize rather than theorize resistance, blocking their view of the actual ebb and flow of organizational actors constructing ‘change’ or ‘resistance’, changing their positioning, and stepping in and out of ‘championing’ or ‘resisting’. Practically, such an identity perspective allows us to deconstruct actors’ and scholars’ sensemaking efforts in relation to change and resistance and opens up a window upon alternative ‘realities’, potentially redirecting efforts to bring about or resist change. Ethically, it demonstrates how both marginal and dominant actors make use of representational strategies that denigrate and diminish the other whilst empowering the self. ‘Others’ are not asked to construct their selves in their own codes and categories, but are instead abstracted and reified in negative terms to establish, sustain or challenge power asymmetries. Others may politically manoeuvre in ways that resist such colonizing identity talk by offering alternative versions of self and other and, through such discursive struggles, not only self and other, but also change and resistance,

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become contested and morally tainted categories. In using identity to shed light on resistance, we have concentrated on the discourse about and of change agents and change recipients. By doing so, we have ignored other aspects of identity that may also be relevant for analysing resistance. Future identity research may therefore take different directions to explore resistance. One such direction concerns collective identities. The vignette shows participants identifying the UK subsidiary’s collective identity vis-à-vis the company’s headquarters. Accordingly, constructions of national identity (e.g., AilonSouday and Kunda, 2003), organizational identity (e.g., Carlsen, 2006), social movements (e.g., Gongaware, 2003) and other forms of collective identity (e.g., Symon, 2005; Ybema, 2014) may be powerful vehicles for the exercise of hegemony and resistance, producing or opposing power. Koot (1997) illustrates how employees use their national or ethnic identities situationally and strategically in their struggles against management: Curaçaoan employees working in a Shell plant on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao in the 1960s and 1970s resisted by claiming a Latino identity. This changed, however, in the 1980s when the refinery was rented out to a Venezuelan company: the same Curaçaoan workers started to dissociate themselves from Latino culture and, instead praised the old Shell culture and called upon their Dutch roots (for similar studies, see, e.g., Ailon-Souday and Kunda, 2003; Ybema and Byun, 2011). Thus, we see both the use of self–other talk to create an alternative collective identity, as well as how this collective identity changed over time. We also focused on relational identity talk of selves and others, ignoring another rich resource for constructing hegemonic and resistant identities: the temporal construction of identity (e.g., Bryant and Wolfram Cox, 2004; Sonenshein, 2010). While relational identity talk constructs selfhood in relation to other actors, temporal identity talk derives a sense of self

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by drawing on the collective or individual past, present and future. Temporal invocations are relevant for studying processes of change and resistance, as both utopian ideals and nostalgic renderings of a common past may serve as a source of inspiration and orientation (e.g., McDonald et al., 2006; Ybema, 2014). There are, then, different ways in which an identity perspective can contribute to the future study of resistance to change. We also see scope for further work on the analysis of discourse in relation to change agents and change recipients. Rather than abstracting and reifying accounts of resistance to change – as we have shown a range of literatures do – researchers might take greater advantage of the insights gained through the study of identity construction by empirically grounding their analyses in organizational actors’ articulations of their and others’ identities – in policy reports they write, meetings they hold, gossip in which they engage or in banter they exchange – that help us to understand the complex dynamics of change and resistance. It is unhelpful to simplify identities in terms of fixed dichotomies between change-minded managers and resistant recipients of change. By analysing the discursive positioning being undertaken vis-à-vis change and resistance, we can see how identities, change and resistance are talked into (and out of) existence. This process of identity construction is dialogic, contextual, precarious, and conflicted: organizational actors seek to establish, maintain or disrupt particular notions of who they are and who others are in discursive struggles over organizational change. In this process, identities are situational constructions and temporary accomplishments instead of fixed categories or deep essences. This, we believe, holds promise for future analyses of change and resistance.

Note  1  Adapted from Thomas et al. (2011).

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Roy, D. (1958) Banana time: job satisfaction and informal interaction. Human Organization, 18(1): 158–161. Smith, A.C.T. and Graetz, F.M. (2011) Philosophies of Organizational Change. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Sonenshein, S. (2010) We’re changing – or are we? Untangling the role of progressive, regressive, and stability narratives during strategic change implementation. Academy of Management Journal, 53(3): 477–512. Spicer, A. and Böhm, S. (2007) Moving management: theorizing struggles against the hegemony of management. Organization Studies, 28: 1667–1698. Symon, G. (2005) Exploring resistance from a rhetorical perspective. Organization Studies, 26(11): 1641–1663. Thomas, R. (2009) Critical management studies on identity: mapping the terrain, in M. Alvesson, H. Willmott and T. Bridgman (eds), The Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 166–185. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (2005) Theorising the micro-politics of resistance: new public management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organization Studies, 26(5): 683–706. Thomas, R. and Hardy, C. (2011) Reframing resistance to organizational change. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 27(3): 322–331. Thomas, R. and Linstead, A. (2002) Losing the plot? Middle managers and identity. Organization, 9(1): 71–93. Thomas, R., Sargent, L. and Hardy, C. (2011) Managing change: negotiating meaning and power-resistance relations. Organization Science, 22(1): 22–41. Thompson, P. and Ackroyd, P. (1995) All quiet on the workplace front? A critique of recent trends in British industrial sociology. Sociology, 29(4): 615–627. Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2002) On organizational becoming: rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5): 567–582. van Dam, K., Oreg, S. and Schyns, B. (2008) Daily work contexts and resistance to organisational change: the role of leader-member exchange, development climate, and change

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process characteristics. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 57(2): 313–34. van Hulst, M., Ybema, S. and Yanow, D. (forthcoming) Ethnography and organizational processes, in A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (eds) Handbook of Process Studies of Organizations. London: Sage. Wooldridge, B., Schmid, T. and Floyd, S.W. (2008) The middle management perspective: contributions, synthesis and future research. Journal of Management, 34: 1190–1221. Ybema, S. (2014) The invention of transitions: history as a symbolic site for discursive struggles over organizational change. Organization, 21(4): 495–513. Ybema, S. and Byun, H. (2011) Unequal power relations, identity discourse and cultural distinction drawing in MNCs, in C.

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Dörrenbächer and M. Geppert (eds), Politics and Power in the Multinational Corporation: The Role of Interests, Identities, and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch.12, pp. 315–345. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N. and Sabelis, I. (2009) Articulating identities. Human Relations, 62(3): 299–322. Ybema, S., Vroemisse, M. and van Marrewijk, A. (2012) Constructing identity by deconstructing differences: building partnerships across cultural and hierarchical divides. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 28(1): 48–59. Zabusky, S.E. and Barley, S.R. (1997) ‘You can’t be a stone if you’re cement’: re-evaluating the emic identities of scientists in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 19: 361–404.

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Part V

Geographies of Resistance

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21 The World Social Forum and Global Resistance: The Trajectory of an Activist Open Space Giuseppe Caruso

INTRODUCTION This chapter is about a specific social movement organisational form, the open space. I discuss how (and if) the open space contributes to shaping and sustaining the World Social Forum’s (WSF) resistance against the neoliberal inflection of globalisation. At the same time, I consider how (and if) it does so (as claimed by its funders and advocates) by providing an arena to engage and work through the differences, conflicts and ambivalences at play in large instances of collective resistance. WSF’s organisers endeavour to frame their work within a coherent set of principles enshrined in WSF’s Charter of Principles (World Social Forum 2001) while, at the same time, keeping themselves and their organisational architecture open in order to both share knowledge and build collaborative experience, and address controversial issues and conflict among its hugely diverse membership. This understanding of the creative organisational set-up afforded by

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the open space builds on the conviction that contemporary global social and political alliances for social justice, because of their size and reach, the multiple issues they involve themselves with, their constitutive diversity, and the dynamics this diversity engenders, cannot function like more localised social movements. The open space approach to global social and political organisation is rooted in the recognition that diversity is not only inevitable at the scale engaged by WSF activism (the global polity), but that to embrace it constitutes also a strategic strength for global activists as it increases their political scope, their incisiveness, and their ability to inspire multiple and continuously responsive transformative actions. In other words, such alliances gain strength and clout not only because of the numbers allowed by their inclusive formula, but also by the depth and the breadth of the issues they engage and, ultimately, by the possibility they afford their participants to contribute to shape the global society.

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The World Social Forum (WSF) is the largest global civil society initiative to date. Its local, national, regional, thematic and global events, from Brazil to India and Finland, from Paris, London and Dakar to Lusaka, Detroit and Melbourne, have gathered since 2001 millions of activists and tens of thousands of civil society organisations and activist networks. The WSF has been variously considered in the literature as the core of a nascent global civil society (Pleyers 2008); as a manifestation of a counter-hegemonic civil society (Santos 2006); as an advocate for a new ethics for global development and against religious fundamentalisms (Hernandez 2010); as an anti-systemic movement able to challenge the domination of the capitalist system (Wallerstein 2002); as a constituent section of the global justice movement and harbinger of a more just globalisation (Waterman 2004a, 2004b); as the constituent force of a global party (Pätomaki and Teivainen 2004); as a transformative global public sphere (Glasius and Timms 2005); the place where the multitude develops a global common project (Hardt 2002); or a laboratory in which social movements can explore emancipatory forms of collective democratic practices (della Porta 2009). This illustrative, and by no means complete, list suffices to testify to the great interest that the WSF has generated not only among activists but also among social and political analysts and to the range of debates it has contributed to. Democracy, justice, emancipation and a better world for all are among some of the most pressing and timeless issues of human concern that WSF activists committed themselves to address in and with the open space. In its Charter of Principles, the WSF introduces itself as an: open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a

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planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth. (World Social Forum 2001)

Its organisational innovation, the open space, an unmanaged space of self-organisation (Whitaker 2005), allows activists from different backgrounds to work together, and share knowledge and experience in a convivial atmosphere. Activists in the open space could be able, therefore, to both resist the expansion of neoliberal globalisation and prefigure a more just global society. Its events are bustling conventions in which local activists meet and are met by international partners and potential collaborators. Seminars, workshops, exhibitions and cultural events of all kinds, from theatre and dance to music and art installations, celebrate the values of unity in difference, justice and equality. Each event has a unique character but all share a recognisable family resemblance. Poverty, inequality and justice, alternative and sustainable development, climate change and war, self-determination of all peoples and emancipation are some of the recurring themes discussed during WSF’s events by union members, environmentalists, peace activists, feminists, rural activists, academics, community activists, NGO (non-governmental organisation) officers and development practitioners often from very different and sometimes even conflictual backgrounds. The potentialities of the open space became evident very early on in WSF’s history. It not only succeeded in replicating the success of the oceanic anti-neoliberal globalisation demonstrations at the turn of the millennium against the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and G8, but also succeeded in strengthening a global movement that brought together activists who hadn’t previously managed to work together: workers and peasants, unions and environmentalists, and LGBT and religious activists. The success of this open organisational formula became

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The World Social Forum and global resistance

particularly striking on 15 February 2003. Participants at the first European Social Forum in Florence and later at the third WSF in Porto Alegre organised and staged a global demonstration against the war on Iraq. It was the largest demonstration in history, involving about 20 million participants in 60 different countries. In the New York Times, Patrick Tyler referred to the ‘power in the street’ as the world’s second superpower (2003). This was a dramatic reversal of the perspective of only a few months before, as in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers the Financial Times (2001) had declared the anti-globalisation movement dead. The Nation (2001) did the same shortly after. The global movement against neoliberal globalisation had been declared dead as the need for a civilisation-wide alliance was deemed necessary to defeat the threat to its very existence posed by Islamic terrorism. A new wedge was driven by the rhetoric of the war on terrorism into the world population. If the global justice movement stressed the hiatus between the world’s rich and poor and advocated for justice and an egalitarian planetary society, a new ideological clash set allegedly enlightened and modern communities against backward and obscurantist ones. The latter gave life to terrorism and its hateful crimes against humanity, the former would use whatever means to oppose it including pre-emptive war. The reaffirmation of the scale of world activism and the activists’ will to resist all forms of domination confirmed and strengthened a space of dialogue in which the world’s activists could fight together the roots of both terrorism and imperial wars. Whereas a comprehensive review of the WSF process, of its 15 years of mobilisation and organisation across five continents, would need more space than that available here, in what follows I reflect on some of the debates around WSF’s organisational form, the open space, in relation to its theory and practice of resistance and change, and on its present and possible future trajectory. I start by introducing the context in which

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the WSF took shape at the turn of the millennium as resistance against the ideological paradigm, the corporate practices and the institutional set-up of neoliberal globalisation. WSF’s open space was opposed to the space of neoliberalism defined by its closure, dominant power relations and its devouring monoculture. I will discuss the open space and WSF’s understanding of global resistance in the following section. Later, I sketch the current trajectory of WSF’s open space and speculate on its future. I conclude with some reflections on the theoretical opportunities afforded by the open space’s framing and its actual practices as described in this chapter. I find that, in the debate among activists and commentators around issues of organisational management and leadership or, conversely, self-organisation, WSF’s political ethics offer innovative potentialities for collaborative activism towards set goals. These potentialities are particularly evident as activists negotiate some of the most intractable conflicts that plague contemporary societies, including war, terrorism and the alleged clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. Although located within the broader theoretical debates on social movements’ organisational forms (see below), this piece’s main objective is to provide a densely ethnographic account of some of the workings of the WSF open space. I highlight in the following pages the internal tensions and the opportunities for mediation and creativity offered by the open space form. I claim that the open space affords such a space of mediation and creativity by, on the one hand, providing a strategic space of convergence for a broadening political alliance and, on the other, by offering a space of prefiguration of the cosmopolitan global society that the actors in the open space advocate and struggle for. I have been involved in the WSF since 2002. This chapter is based on material collected through participant observation in four continents complemented by extensive virtual ethnography and unstructured interviews.1

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THE HISTORY OF THE WSF The WSF was born in Brazil in 2000 (Whitaker 2005), but the necessary conditions were of much broader scope than the Brazilian milieu and were determined by the global political dimension of the protests against imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism, dictatorship and war with roots in the 1960s (Santos 2006; Sen 2005; Whitaker et al. 2006) and earlier (Wallerstein 2004).2 Much of the experience built in those struggles contributed to generate the context from which the WSF developed. Although it is not possible here to discuss all the conditions that led to the WSF,3 it is useful to briefly mention four different traditions (Glasius and Timms 2005) that converged in the WSF: anti-colonial struggles; socialist and communist movements;4 parallel NGO forums to the UN conferences of the 1990s;5 and the more recent alter-globalisation movement (Conway 2013; Correa Leite 2003; Seoane and Taddei 2002). These streams converged in a moment of crisis of neoliberalism (linked, among other things, to the Asian financial crisis) to generate a global movement (Biccum 2005). A crucial role in shaping the anti-neoliberal global imaginary was played by the Mexican Zapatistas (Conway 2013; Nail 2013; Shor 2010). They provided global activists with a set of discursive tools and an organisational vision, largely used later in the WSF and in the global justice movement to the present day, distilled into a set of striking maxims that inspired activists the world over such as ‘lead by obeying’, ‘asking we walk’ and several others. Moreover, and crucially, the proximity of their discourse to the Latin American milieu in which the WSF developed and to that of European activists who contributed to initiate the WSF, made the Zapatistas’ uprising a sort of mythical ancestor of the WSF and, more broadly, of the global justice movement.6 The Zapatistas have endowed the movement that converged in the WSF with three fundamental

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conceptual pillars about the actor, the strategy and the objective of resistance against neoliberalism: the proposition of the fundamental importance of ‘the community’ as the space in which individuals develop through reciprocal responsibility in a radically different way from the individualism of neoliberalism; the conception of the struggle against neoliberalism as an epistemological struggle (Santos 2005) against the annihilation of the fundamental diversity that sustains the global cultural and social ecology; and a different understanding of power – an understanding according to which, in Holloway’s framing, ‘once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost’ (Holloway 2002: 17). The Zapatistas’ political objective, therefore, is not the conquest of power, but the fight for the freedom of choice of all people. One further strategic formulation, widely embraced in the WSF context, refers to the complementarity of social and political struggles constructed by the Zapatistas. According to them, the possibility to replicate their struggle everywhere does not exist. Each subaltern group must develop their own organisational dimension and strategy beyond the pretension – or hope – of a universal revolutionary agent and strategy. Differences between peoples and groups are more relevant than their social position as oppressed, their struggles must therefore reflect those differences rather than the uniformity of their social position.7 As a comparison, consider the following formulation from WSF’s Charter of Principles: The World Social Forum will always be a forum open to pluralism and to the diversity of activities and ways of engaging of the organisations and movements that decide to participate in it, as well as the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles. (World Social Forum 2001)

Zapatistas’ proposals are for a movement as a network of local struggles against

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neoliberalism in its local instantiations. These concepts were not new, but they achieved global political resonance thanks to the Zapatistas’ formidable computermediated communication strategy.8 In Chiapas in 1996 the Zapatistas organised the First Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism. Thousands of participants from about a hundred countries discussed visions and strategies to free the planet from neocolonialism, neoliberalism and US unilateralism. The Zapatista experience placed itself at the heart of the global justice movement. One of the most influential actors of the global justice movement, People’s Global Action (PGA), developed out of the Intercontinental Meetings9 (Juris 2008a; Routledge 2005). Contemporary to PGA, in 1998 another organisation playing a seminal role in the WSF was founded in France in the framework of the protests against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Reporting a thorough work conducted on the MAI by the lawyer Lori Wallach, associated to the ‘Public Citizen’ movement led by Ralph Nader in the USA, Le Monde Diplomatique, in June 1998, gave the initial input to create the Action for a Tax on Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens (ATTAC). Its main objective was to campaign for a drastic slowing down of the liberalisation and deregulation of financial markets because of the disastrous 1997 Asian crisis. The newly created networks called for a massive demonstration against the WTO to take place at the end of 1999 (Halliday 2000; Juris 2008a; Scholte 2000; Seoane and Taddei 2002). Between 30 November and 3 December 1999, approximately 40,000 people protested in Seattle. The demonstration was the biggest in the US since the protests against the Vietnam War. The response from grassroots, direct action activists and the most important trade unions created a formidable alliance. The WTO meeting had to dissolve without concluding its agenda.10 Beyond the contingent success, it was remarkable that social and political

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actors with different backgrounds managed to make a strength of their differences. The uniqueness of this social and political blend created WSF’s foundations. After Seattle, every following demonstration against the global institutional framework of neoliberalism gathered growing numbers of activists, including traditionally moderate sectors of civil society. The protests followed in rapid succession: in Washington in April 2000 against the World Bank (WB) and IMF; Okinawa in July 2000 against the G8; Prague in September 2000 against WB and IMF; and Nice in 2001 against the EU Summit (Juris 2008a; Lipschutz 2006; Seoane and Taddei 2002). But the symbolic target that the movement chose in forming the WSF was the World Economic Forum (WEF), which was indicated as the place where the theory and ideology of world domination by capital met their implementers.11 The WEF was targeted as the symbol of unjust globalisation, of the global extension of markets and profits over solidarity and common welfare. Globalisation, perhaps the most written about and discussed topic in those years, as a political project and as a category of social analysis, was critically assessed by global activists and its neoliberal excesses became the target of their resistance. The compression of time and space at the heart of the theories of globalisation predicted social convergences able to generate a new sense of being in the world and to provide opportunities for the development of an inclusive and emancipatory cosmopolitan project (Caruso 2012). As this planetary vision prevailed, its uneven effects on the global population became evident. The enforcement of a historically and geographically uprooted monoculture marginalised and excluded indigenous cultures and alternative social arrangements. Organisational and institutional restructuring challenged the viability of previous forms of government and resource management. Globalised consumption ignited further cultural changes as Nike, McDonald’s, Apple and H&M became not only household

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brands but determined global aspirations and collective behaviours. To the narratives of a global unity built on free markets and creative competition extolled in the WEF, WSF’s promoters opposed compelling analyses of the increased inequality and exclusion generated by free trade and the free circulation of capital. The double movement of action and reaction at the core of global social change (Polanyi 1957) produced a counterhegemonic (Gramsci 1971) global justice movement, of which the WSF became one of the key elements (Hadden and Tarrow 2007; Waterman 2004a). In January 2001, parallel to the Davos WEF, in Porto Alegre, 15,000 participants from 122 countries met for the first WSF. But the season of the enormous demonstrations was not yet over: in April, the representatives of 34 American countries met in Quebec to discuss and establish a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and over 30,000 protesters took part to the ‘March of the People’. In June, violent clashes occurred in Gothenburg during the EU summit. Police reaction against the 25,000 demonstrators caused three demonstrators to be wounded by gunshots. Ten days after the clashes in Gothenburg, the meeting of the World Bank in Barcelona was cancelled due to the threat of demonstrations. In July, the meeting of the G8 was held in Genoa in an almost deserted city oppressed by security measures. This escalation of anxiety and frustration lead to the killing of Carlo Giuliani by a Carabiniere: he was marching with 250,000 activists. In January 2002, 50,000 participants met in Brazil for the second WSF: its Intercontinental Youth Camp (IYC) was named after Carlo Giuliani. This brief chronology traces some of the currents leading to the WSF: the local protest in Chiapas and their global networking leading to the formation of PGA, the creation of ATTAC, the demonstrations of late 1990s and early 2000s. What has not yet been discussed is the thrust exerted by the Brazilian activists. It was Oded Grajew and Francisco Whitaker who had the idea to hold a convention against

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the WEF (Peña and Davies 2014; Whitaker 2005). They discussed, in February 2000, their idea with Bernard Cassen, then Director of Le Monde Diplomatique and president of ATTAC, who gave his support. Back in Brazil, Grajew and Whitaker organised a meeting in Sao Paulo, where delegates of eight organisations signed a Cooperation Agreement to organise the first WSF.12 These organisations represented the backbone of Brazilian civil society, which in decades of struggles against the dictatorship had learnt to set aside ideological differences when fighting a ruthless enemy. That experience constituted the shared culture and the organisational foundations of the first WSF. As a next step, the representative of the Brazilian organising committee discussed with the authorities of Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul (Whitaker 2004) the possibility to organise the event in the Brazilian South. Both the mayor of Porto Alegre and the governor of the state were members of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers Party) to which the majority of the activists involved in the WSF organisation were looking for representation (Hayden 2004; Peña and Davies 2014). The next move, suggested by Cassen, was to send a delegation in late June to Geneva where a large number of organisations were attending the Copenhagen +5 summit (Whitaker 2005). From that moment the logistics of the first edition of the WSF were tackled with the support of the Brazilian local authorities. The success of the first WSF went beyond the initiators’ expectations. As a consequence of that success they decided to give the forum a more stable structure. In the following months, the International Council (IC) was constituted and a Charter of Principles approved to define the boundaries of the WSF open space, its values and its vision of a better world. The following year, the organisational structure was further consolidated and a move towards the globalisation of the WSF was made through the expansion of the WSF to the regional, national and local

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levels, and through thematic forums on issues crucial to the movement including education, migration and the environment among others. Following those decisions, continental meetings were held in Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, Florence, Cartagena and Hyderabad. In Florence, in November 2002, 60,000 people participated in the activities of the first European Social Forum, and an astonishing million marched to protest against the war on Iraq. Confirming the expanding trend of the WSF global events, the third edition of the WSF in 2003 in Porto Alegre attracted 100,000 participants from 131 countries. WSF2003 marked a crucial moment in the evolution of the WSF. It was then that the decision to move WSF’s global event to India was taken to fully legitimise its global identity. The decision taken in January 2003 started a thorough process of negotiation of ideology, organisational culture and political expectations with the Indian organisers, and deepened the process of reflection among Brazilian and European activists on the scope and potentialities of the forum (Caruso 2007). Since its Indian experience, WSF’s global events have travelled back to Porto Alegre and further on to Caracas, Bamako, Karachi, Nairobi, Belem, Dakar and recently to Tunis in two consecutive instances in 2013 and 2015. As its process extends geographically, its vision and practices take advantage of the local histories of activism and their local idioms. In the next section I illustrate the process by which the original formulation of WSF’s vision has been communicated, shared, appropriated, enacted and enriched by activists in the four corners of the world. I use the example of the 2004 Indian forum to introduce what I consider a crucial contribution offered by the WSF to civil society actors to negotiate deeply diverse and often conflictual political, social and cultural visions. I then introduce the experience of the WSF in the Maghreb-Mashreq around issues of secular and Islamic activism to illustrate the

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compelling conversations taking place in the WSF on issues of religion and social justice. I find that, in the circumstances mentioned, WSF’s open and loose organisational structure has contributed to the establishment of parallel and alternative conversations that may have been prevented by more structured organisational arrangements. The presence of a wealth of alternative conversations on a conflictual issue such as religious and secular activism, for instance, enhances the quality of the negotiations and increases the chances of creative outcomes. I begin by introducing WSF’s conception of global resistance and its vision of a better world.

GLOBAL RESISTANCE AND WSF’S VISION OF A BETTER WORLD In April 2001, the representatives of over a hundred organisations and movements met in Sao Paulo to draft the Charter of Principles that would, in a few short years, inspire the work of millions of activists around the world. In its first chapter its signatories state that WSF’s activists were ‘opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism’. The spring that propels the WSF is rooted in resistance and powered by dissent. The structures of global domination that WSF’s activists resist include imperialism (chapter 1), capitalism and market domination by multinational corporations (chapters 1 and 11), racism, patriarchy and ‘all subjection of one person by another’ (chapter 10). This formulation aims at spelling out the sites and the scales of global domination and resistance. The scales of domination include the international system of nation states, global markets, societal structures and group dynamics, ideology, identity, religion and subjectivities. WSF’s scope of action and sites of resistance have been objects of intense negotiations since the drafting stage of its Charter of Principles and were further specified in the

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subsequent interpretations of the Charter aimed at reflecting the local histories of resistance and mobilisation of the places where the global event took place. For instance, when the WSF first travelled out of Brazil to India, its Charter of Principles was extended and adapted to the Indian context by including religious fundamentalism and casteism among the forms of domination that WSF’s activists denounce (WSF 2003). While making resistance against all forms of domination WSF’s main political objective, its participants also have a creative task in mind. They are ‘committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth’ (chapter 1) and to do so they commit themselves to ‘concrete action at levels from the local to the international to build another world’ (chapter 8). Chapter 11 of what came to be known as the Porto Alegre Charter (to distinguish it from the forms it took later on along the WSF process) further clarifies WSF’s nature and introduces its main strategy in the following terms: the WSF is ‘a movement of ideas that prompts reflection, and the transparent circulation of the results of that reflection, on the mechanisms and instruments of domination by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome that domination’ (chapter 11). Knowledge and its collective creation and socialisation are the relationships on which WSF’s resistance and dissent are constructed. Resisting the naturalisation of knowledge dynamics of domination and exclusion on which neoliberalism is predicated constitutes therefore the core of WSF’s strategy (Santos 2005).13 By stressing the role of politics and resistance in (re)establishing social and political relationships guided by a knowledge drive, WSF’s activists aim to achieve their immediate goal to ‘strengthen and create new national and international links among organizations and movements of society, that – in both public and private life – will increase the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization the world is

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undergoing and to the violence used by the State’ (chapter 13). WSF’s activists’ three-pronged approach to social change can be summarised thus. The first pillar is resistance against all forms of domination and subjection. The second is the identification of the nature and dynamics of domination in order to reverse them. The third is constructive action to build a planetary society based on fruitful knowledge relationships between individuals and groups, and between them and the environment. WSF’s approach to change is built on resistance, knowledge and purposive action. On this three pillars rests WSF’s strategy and its organisational form. In fact, WSF’s activists’ main strategic approach to global change is WSF’s open space itself. Put differently, vision, strategy and organisation converge in the open space and find in it their realisation. By converging in an open space (both physical and virtual) set against the spaces of neoliberal globalisation, activists both set the terms of the global confrontations and, more importantly, are afforded the possibility to instantiate their alternatives by exchanging experiences, building trust and lasting solidarities, planning common actions and developing alternative human relations between autonomous human beings. WSF’s objectives and values on the one hand and organisational structure on the other converge to the point that the latter pre figures the former (Maeckelbergh 2009; Tormey 2005). The instantiation of alternative knowledge dynamics sets activists on the path of emancipation through creative iterations from the individual to the collective and from the local to the global. This ethics of politics is constantly negotiated and struggled for within WSF’s open space (Conway 2013; Vargas 2005). Issues of strategy of resistance and change are crucial to the WSF. Its original goal was indeed to create a context where activists could devise shared practices and common political actions. In the following section, I provide some illustrations of how open spaces represent some of the global

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activists’ ambition and how they can be useful to debate the most difficult issues afflicting world societies.

THE OPEN SPACE AS ORGANISATIONAL FORM, STRATEGY AND PRACTICE OF RESISTANCE AND TRANSFORMATION What are the issues at stake in strategymaking in the WSF? What are the strategic choices available to WSF activists within the terms of its Charter? What tensions do these contexts generate? According to WSF’s Charter of Principles, strategic action is devised in the open space and pursued by activists individually or in networks and alliances developing in the political, social and personal spheres from the local to the global dimension. These alliances and articulations take shape in WSF’s open space and involve activists according to their own will and to the extent of their chosen commitment. This very open organisational formula attracted many participants in the WSF but at the same time, it soon became contested as too tight to suit all needed purposes. The same criticisms were directed at the Charter’s vague marking of the boundaries of the open space, precluded to political parties and government officials, to armed groups and religious organisations. As the WSF travels around the planet, interpretations of its charter develop, clarify and adapt its content. In the Indian charter, for instance, the commitment to non-violent resistance was replaced by an expression barring access to the open space to ‘organisations that seek to take people’s lives as a method of political action’ (WSF India 2002). The participation of elected individuals to national and local offices is formally allowed and stress is put on achieving ‘self reliance based on local resources’ (WSF India 2002). Finally, four extra chapters (11–14) are added in order to frame the unique features of the Indian

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WSF. Chapter 13 states, for instance, that ‘[t]he language of dissent and resistance … will have to be informed by local idioms and forms’. In a similar way, WSF’s promoters in the Maghreb (where two global events, in 2013 and 2015, and dozens of local, national and regional forums have been organised in over a decade of engagement) framed their own principles giving the Porto Alegre Charter a distinctive regional grounding (WSF Maghreb 2012). In a recent interview an activist from the Maghreb reflected on the adaptation of WSF’s Charter of Principles to the region: it is not too different to the charter of the WSF, but with our thinking about our local reality …. For example … one thing in the Charter is the identity of the Maghreb. … We have the problem of Sahara … we put Sahara in our Charter. … There are a lot of people who don’t understand how we work …. In the same committee we have people who don’t agree with the Saharahui but we sit at the same table, we discuss, we have problems, we solve them and we continue to work …, but when you speak, in the Charter of Porto Alegre, that the people who are representing armed groups are not allowed in the forum … at the same time Polisario is an armed group. [INT 10]14

The tensions between the original Charter and its following instantiations show, on the one hand, the fallacy of a universalist approach based on pre-established values and programmes and, on the other, the creativity mobilised by activists in different regions of the world to develop shared values and programmes within the broader ethos set by the Porto Alegre Charter. It also shows the suitability of the open space organisational structure for such complex negotiations, as a largely unmanned space in which influence is negotiated without formal structures of authority. On the possible limitations of such organisational arrangements I return below. This is the way such negotiations are approached in the Maghreb according to the quoted interviewee: We discussed it with the Saharahui … having a group like a women’s group, not representatives of

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Polisario, but representative of the civil society of the Saharauis and we are working on that. Do you understand? You find a way to put everybody at the same table.

As dialogue continues, transformation is sought for and can, therefore, be achieved. A stricter implementation of WSF’s Charter and of its organisational structure may prevent these conversations from taking place. As seen, issues of local strategy and idioms of resistance are in tension with WSF’s global Charter of Principles and at the same time these tensions provide WSF activists with opportunities to devise creative solutions and to keep the conversation going. With reference to some of the most pressing issues currently troubling global societies, for example violent radicalisation and terrorism, WSF activists in the Maghreb and Mashreq have been practising forms of negotiation across cultural, organisational, religious and ideological cleavages that could provide successful examples to be pursued more widely even beyond the sphere of engagement by social movement activists and global civil society organisations. What follows is an extract of the conversation with the same interviewee from the Maghreb on their experimentations with expanding the WSF open space: [INT 10]: [we] would begin to open to the Islamist movements, the grassroot associations … Muslim associations, and we are now trying to open the discussion with them … to have meetings with them. It is in this way that we are trying to work. It’s to accept every ideology that we have. Giuseppe: … the Charter says it is not confessional… [INT 10]: Yes but Caritas … what is it if not confessional? … and the World Council of Churches? All the Christians are there (smiles) …. Giuseppe: … there are not only Christians now … [INT 10]: Yes that is the new thing and you see what happened in [the 2013 WSF event in] Tunis, there were a lot of [Islamic activists], from Iran, from Turkey from Bahrain, from Maghreb, from everywhere. Giuseppe: How was it being in the same space for the first time?

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[INT 10]: A little bit … it was really hard but everybody respected the other. There were no fights you know, between Islamist movement and the others. Everybody had their workshops and participated. … We were very surprised that it was like this, nothing happened. Giuseppe: Because you thought that something might happen … [INT 10]: Yes we thought about it, we had security and we talked about it in the [organising committee]. Giuseppe: But nothing happened. [INT 10]: (smiles) Luckily …

Another case reported by the same interviewee stresses further the extent of the negotiations with Islamic activists extending WSF’s inclusion beyond the boundaries set by its Charter and with an eye to the local historical, social and cultural specificities. In this case, specificities that have global resonance. Giuseppe: And [the national forum] is open to everyone [INT 10]: Everyone, individuals, groups … Giuseppe: And you said also people from the government? [INT 10]: Not people from the government, near the government. Because the Islamist party is in power, there are some people with us, a group that are near the [ruling party], they are not from the government. But when we took decision we took against their party, in the forum … We participated with them in Tunis. They participated with us in the women things, without any animosity but their ideology is their ideology outside the forum. Giuseppe: And it really works in practice … [INT 10]: Until now it works (laughs).

One of the original members of the WSF International Council, and among WSF’s most influential figures, reflects on issues of democracy, creative engagements between sections of society, organisational openness and different political commitments to emancipation: In the preparation of Tunis, I was engaged with our Tunisian friends and Maghrebians. [We] had very very hard discussions including battles on the

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question should we have a discussion between Islamic associations and other associations in the forum. And we were completely divided over this. And I think that the forum of Tunis … one of the reasons to be proud of it, is that we had the possibility to have public discussions between Islamists – not only Islamic, but Islamist forces – and, I don’t know how to call them, secular forces. So you see this was a question of democracy, internal democracy. It was a very hard discussion. Many people said but these Islamists they are out of their mind, they are out of the forum, they are conservative, reactionary, we don’t want to have them in here. And others say that if you are not able to discuss with a part of the society how would we be able to build something new or will we do it against them, ignoring them? So you see, this is what I want to say. It is that for me the internal democracy is the ability, the capacity, to have real discussion of social movements in the world and to have a possibility to have renewal on this question. That’s why I think that we had some progress in the forum and this is one of the examples. [INT 9]

WSF’s ability to negotiate differences among activists around issues of domination, resistance and social justice is closely related to its open organisational form and loose guidelines. A stricter, more driven and tighter organisational structure, as well as a leadership with stricter enforcement of ideological and constitutional principles, may prevent some of the flexibility necessary to negotiate the enormous differences (in number and extent) converging in the WSF. Moreover, the open space is not only a strategic tool to create the opportunity for wider convergences and eventually political alliances. The open space is in itself a statement of achievement, a freer context carved up from the space of neoliberal domination. The open space is a declaration of independence, an advanced outcome of confident resistance, the possibility to frame conflict within a context that allows it to develop without challenging the continuation of a (potentially fruitful) conversation between radically different positions. The case reported above of the negotiations between WSF and Islamic activists (and between WSF’s activists on the very possibility to have such negotiations) is

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not only an illustration of WSF’s possibility to be a context for the negotiation of conflicts between activists. It shows also the role that WSF’s open space can have in the broader planetary society. Negotiating Dignity and Rights (the title of the 2015 WSF event in Tunis) in the open space could replace wars, military interventions of all kinds, and counter-terrorism and its impingement on individual liberties and human dignity the world over. This, at least, is WSF’s activists’ wish and hope.

THE FUTURE OF THE WSF After the 2004 Indian event, the WSF returned to Porto Alegre in 2005 where it gathered 150,000 participants. The enthusiastic growth in size and participants of WSF’s events had also raised some issues. Inclusion was predicated on the ability to travel often large distances to attend WSF’s events. The resources required were affordable only by a minority of the participants the forum wished to reach. A possible solution seemed therefore to bring the forum closer to its participants. In 2006 the WSF continued its experiments in expansion by organising a multi-site event in Caracas, Bamako and Karachi. However, 2006 was the year that marked the beginning of a new phase in WSF’s development. A phase of uncertain growth, a phase in which hard questions were asked about WSF’s trajectory – inclusion was perhaps the most evident, but issues of impact were increasingly raised – and about the ambivalences and conflicts that had become apparent among its organisers and participants. In 2007 the forum was organised in Nairobi, Kenya. Here the issues of inclusion and exclusion that had animated heated debates among organisers and participants came to a head and forms of direct actions were staged against WSF’s space by those kept outside by the unaffordable registration fees (Conway 2009). It was not only

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that participants had to mobilise scarce resources to attend the forum but it had become evident that even local participants – in this case the slum-dwellers residing around the forum venue – were kept beyond the fences of WSF’s allegedly open space. WSF’s pretences of openness met in Nairobi their reality of partial inclusions and dramatic exclusions. Was the WSF losing direction and missing its objectives by focusing all its energies on organising large yearly convergences? Shouldn’t activists develop instead coherent agendas for action? These questions ran through the WSF process from its inception and constitute its leitmotif. But there were also external factors influencing global activism’s trajectory and, in turn, activists’ investment in the WSF. A new phase in WSF’s trajectory began in 2009 in Belem. In the aftermath of the 2008 global crisis a new momentum grew around the WSF as global activism entered a phase of intense effervescence. The following edition in Senegal, in 2011, celebrated the overthrowing of the Tunsian and Egyptian dictators by popular revolts and instilled further energy into the WSF process. However, as Occupy-like movements spread through the planet in what seemed a wave of protest similar in character if not in objectives to the protests at the turn of the Millennium, WSF’s activists questioned its relationship with the broader field of global activism (Caruso 2010). WSF’s latest editions mark the recognition that a strong dynamic social transformation is taking place in North Africa and the Middle East, the effects of which have planetary relevance. The 2013 and 2015 WSF events were, therefore, organised in Tunis. At the same time, as the post-2009 wave of protests seem to have subsided, at least in their street form, the WSF remains a useful meeting place for global activists (Caruso and Teivainen 2004). During its history, the WSF has generated a wealth of both enthusiastic and critical analyses. The WSF was initially thought of as a space where new and innovative

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understandings of living together and managing the common could be democratically discussed by those with stakes in the outcome of the deliberations (Whitaker 2004). Criticism of the WSF targeted its unrealistic promises of radical change or its portraying itself in idealised terms. As a consequence of promising, as its slogan claims, that ‘Another World Is Possible’, and for claiming to be an open space of universal inclusion within the boundaries of global civil society, both non-confessional and separated from states and markets, the WSF has been described as a court jester (Worth and Buckley 2009), or indeed as a global depoliticising process dispossessing its participants of the political ability for radical resistance (Peña and Davies 2014). At the same time, increasingly sophisticated analyses show how simplistic declarations of openness deny power imbalances and the fact that certain WSF actors and networks wield both privileges and power beyond the reach of democratic checks and balances. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, class and religion among others play a considerable role in WSF’s decision-making processes (Teivainen 2004). The WSF has enlightened conversations on political strategy and social change just as much as it has contributed to conversations on social and political structures, agency, inequality and global social justice – the nature of globalisation, for instance, its winners and losers, the opportunities and the consequences of global economic and political dynamics, the promotion of and the resistance against social dynamics increasing elite privileges and enslaving the majority of the world’s citizens. At the same time, WSF’s events and its overall process have reproduced exclusive dynamics and prevented the participations of precisely the very people it purports to struggle for. Issues of class, gender, race and physical ability among others are still at play within the open space. At the same time global activists seem to organise more locally and withdraw from the global stage preferred by WSF’s initiators.

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Acute ambivalences are at play both within and about the WSF that have made activists claim that the WSF may soon reach its conclusive phase. A WSF activist involved in organising world and regional WSF events has recently told me that, given the vastly changed global outlook especially after the global financial crisis, I don’t think anyone would really say that globally you can change the political situation, you have to do that in your own situations in your own countries, so beyond the point the ability of such a space to be able to even think of giving some kind of political direction or some kind of political leadership is not really something that will happen. So I think [the WSF] has a shelf life. [INT 1]

The enthusiastic analyses and the disappointed criticisms of the WSF are rooted in different and often incompatible understandings of the meaning of resistance and change, and about the demands of strategic thinking and organisation to achieve set goals. The scholarship on resistance has advanced both the understanding of actual forms of resistance and inspired activists. The open space organisational form itself is an expression of a long process of activist and intellectual engagements. Debates on the WSF about issues of strategy and organisation have often concentrated on the so-called space versus movement tension (Conway 2013; Santos 2005). On the one hand, the advocates of the WSF as an open space stress the importance to leave freedom of arrangements and political organisation to WSF participants. In this way, they claim, social change can be pursued where it can influence social structures and cultures, that is at the local and micro level including at the level of (inter)subjectivity. On the other hand, the movement advocates suggest that a coherent organisation and an incisive strategy around set political objectives would best advance ­ the interests of WSF’s participants and world activists. Organisation and political goals would allow activists to develop a legitimate and resilient front against neoliberal globalisation. Anything less incisive

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would be a momentary nuisance to global elites and easily dismissed. In this tension alternative and conflictual understandings of power and resistance are represented. The substance of power and the target of resistance are framed differently. Strategic and organisational considerations depend on those understandings.15 The variety of conceptions on these issues often generate creative engagements in the WSF. At the same time, conflicts have tainted, for some, WSF’s convivial atmosphere and, for others, fragmented its political strength. WSF’s events developed over the years in size and participation, in methodology and programme. In the ebb and flow of global resistance against neoliberalism and war, the WSF remains a point of reference, if one among others. Its organisational experiments in openness and its inclusive vision centre on extolling the creative potentialities of difference and strive to provide a space of convergence for diverse and sometimes conflictual actors. Given its background, its organisational structure and its vision, the WSF continues to offer a useful space for deliberations on some of the most important global issues of social and environmental justice. Consider, for instance, the wave after wave of dubious or outright failed attempts to contain global terrorism, arguably spurring instead renewed and more enraged manifestations hitting mostly unarmed civilians. Opportunities for alternative negotiations may reside away from official diplomacy and armed interventions in forums and spaces of the global civil society among which is the WSF as shown above.

CONCLUSION In the extensive literature on the organisational forms developed by the global justice movement, arguments are made (often transgressing the boundaries between analytical, normative and prescriptive considerations) in

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favour of its more or less structured or more or less hierarchical features. In this context, these debates follow on from critical engagements on social movement organisation traceable to the civil rights, feminist, peace and student movements of the 1960s mainly, but by no means only, in the US and in Western Europe. One seminal piece, frequently quoted in both academic and activist spaces, is Jo Freeman’s indictment of the alleged structurelessness of some parts of the feminist movement in the US. She claimed that arguments that emphasised the openness of social movement organisations (like, today, in the open space) disregarded power differentials among movement activists and facilitated the creation of alternative but opaque power structures that reproduced the inequalities the movement fought in the first place. She suggested instead that clear organisational structures allowed transparency, accountability and therefore democracy. Her argument is compelling and can easily be applied to the global justice movement as the issues she discussed are often framed, as noted above, in very similar terms by contemporary activists. In the case of the WSF, complex and often very sophisticated debates revolved since its inception around the following questions: is the open space, inclusive, diverse, messy at times but fluid, responsive and generally inspiring, the best organisational form to achieve WSF’s activists’ vision of a global cosmopolitan society? Or is the open space, instead, a naïve attempt to build a loose but eventually uncommitted and therefore weak alliance of individuals and groups that concentrate on collective meditative navel gazing and shy away from mounting direct challenges to the power structures that generate inequality and injustice in the world? Freeman contended that structurelessness, which in the last decade and a half has often been referred to as horizontality, does not allow inclusion and participation, the two main goals of political and social organisation then, over the decades since, and

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currently. Instead, Freeman maintained, the lack of clear and transparent organisational structures favour the establishment of power dynamics that eventually exclude all from the decision-making process managed by a small group of insiders often organised around an informal yet clearly identifiable leadership. Such tyranny of structurelessness, as Freeman called the outcome of the opacity of structureless organisations, is contrary to the vision and the values claimed by the participants of these movements themselves, it alienates new membership and, most importantly and as a consequence, cannot but fail to achieve the activists’ emancipatory goals. The conversations on the relationships between organisational forms, strategies, values and goals in social movement studies is as old as the discipline itself and they intersect crucial questions of human intentionality, motivation, meaning and action. Recent debates on the currency and usefulness of horizontal organisational forms in the globalising social justice movements have been significantly influenced by Castells’ seminal work on networks (1997, 2012). According to Castells and the scholars (and activists) he inspired, political and social activism had been organised until roughly the 1960s around the strict framework of the party and the union, hierarchical and with close leadership and strategic outlooks, and this responded to both the goals of the union and the party and to their wider social environment (especially the Fordist model of production and of social organisation, and the State). In an increasingly post-modern world instead, where production was made flexible and had been decentralised away from the large factory into small workshops, where the core of human productivity resided in the myriad centres of the new creative and immaterial economy, and where the State was only one component in a growing global governance system, emancipatory organisations themselves had to and, indeed, did reformulate their operations around the more flexible, responsive and creative organisational form provided by

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the network. Flexible strategically, the network was also more responsive to its nodes than more hierarchical organisations were to their members (Diani and McAdam 2003). In other words, networks were both more suitable to achieve their members’ emancipatory goals while at the same time they prefigured, represented in their practice, a more emancipated form of organisation among their participants which was free from centralised control of and direction over individuals’ and groups’ creative relationships. The discourse of the network was embraced and extended to global activism for the first time by the global justice movement towards the end of the past millennium as seen in the brief excursus presented above. In this context, at the same time, and notwithstanding the apparent, exhilarating, yet contingent success of this movement, the shortcomings of such networked organisation was often challenged as ultimately weak and destined to, by its eventual political defeat, confirm the dominant reach of the neoliberal adversaries. In this context, and with the inevitable ‘doldrums’ (Rupp and Taylor 1987) recurrently experienced by social movements and by the global justice movement as a whole, the largely complex debates on forms of resistance, social organisation and organisational dynamics have been sometimes reduced to stark simplifications along horizontal/vertical, hierarchical/anti-authoritarian and such like oppositions. In the WSF this has often taken the form of the space/actor debate as discussed above: does (or should) the WSF work as an arena of convergence whose only mandate is to organise meetings and events for activists to meet? Or, rather, should the WSF act as a coherent organisation with political goals (Conway 2013; Juris 2008a; Santos 2004, 2006; Teivainen 2004)? The social movement studies, anthropology, sociology, political science and international political economy, among other literatures referred to here, engage issues that often overlap and rest on shared foundations. How can social movement organisations, groups

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and individuals work together towards individual and collective emancipation? In other words, what is the best way to acknowledge and work through the difficulties, the ambivalences and the conflicts of working together towards the shared goal of universal emancipation and a cosmopolitan society? The key idea of this paper is that the WSF has represented, and could still do so in the future, a possible way to find solutions to the complexity of collective resistance especially at larger and global scales. Such large-scale exercises of multi-issue collective resistance generate conflicts and tensions among allies along class, religion, race, and several other fault lines. The presence of these lines of tension and conflict require the creation of specific spaces in which expressions of internal dissent can be voiced and worked through. Such spaces, like the WSF’s open space, can help to engage conflict and allow resistance to continue in continuously changing and, perhaps, more creative and adaptive ways. Key reflections around the questions raised by this debate are found in Teivo Teivainen’s seminal work on the tensions between the two constitutive energies in the WSF: those considering the open space as an arena of multiple engagements and those identifying it as an actor of political militancy against a recognised adversary (see especially 2004 and Jeff Juris 2008a, 2008b) on the networked and intentional features of the WSF open space. This literature sinks its roots in decades-long debates on organisational structures and cultures of resistance in social movements, especially since the 1970s, as mentioned above and influenced by feminist scholars like Freeman. On the other hand, this literature on the WSF as an open space shares contiguous spaces with, and indeed often overlaps, the burgeoning literature on ‘free spaces’, ‘heavens’, ‘safe spaces’ and others (see Polletta 1999 for a thorough review of the literature until then; Polletta 2005 for an update of the debate on democracy and organisational structures in social movements; and Polletta and Kretschmer

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2013 for a recent and comprehensive review of the state of the art of the debate). Here, however, the open space is, differently from many free spaces, not the prerequisite or political opportunity structure for mobilisation but a deliberate convergence of activists into a prefigurative space of political engagement. The open space as understood by the WSF’s founders is the location from which intentional political activities are organised, actions designed, mobilisations sparked. The open space is in itself a political statement. It is the outcome of a deliberate mobilising effort and it is the place from which networked and concerted political action can be mobilised. Moreover, it is a place that founds its vision and its daily practice on the realisation that such global open space (and the global society it envisions) must devise ways to include diversity, embrace difference and manage the conflict engendered by the encounters of those differences. In this sense, the open space is the outcome of an activist mobilisation and, at the same time, the origin of a configuration of multiple, networked and changing identities. At another level, the open space suggests and encourages multiple political engagements with social and political conflicts in the global society at large. To these it offers not solutions or developmental blueprints, but rather a frame of engagement and negotiation in which alternative visions can be negotiated and articulated so as to replace the prevailing injustice, inequality and domination by the stronger over the weaker. Finally, the difference between free as in free spaces and open as in open space is perhaps best described as the difference between a static – free as in the realisation of an ambition referring to human relations and the role of the individual in them – and a dynamic context of which difference and conflict are constitutive. In an open space no heavenly rest in place is assumed (expected or even hoped for), but a continuous negotiation of the differences that are welcomed in it, the inevitable conflicts that those differences

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give origin to and their political, social, cultural and emotional underpinnings. If the free space is a place of refuge and perhaps even of compliance or unconscious collusion, the open space is potentially a space of deliberate, continuous and radical struggle towards the realisation of a vision of autonomy, dignity and justice. The open space is not meant to be a space of comfort and perhaps oblivion of the conditions of subordination and injustice, but it is a place of discomfort, analysis, transformation and action. It is in this sense that the open space is, potentially, a space for resistance and change. Let me conclude by quoting Sherry Ortner from a 1995 work on the role of activists’ ambivalence in resistance movements. Reflecting on the internal politics of the subalterns, she wrote that ‘individual acts of resistance, as well as large-scale resistance movements, are often themselves conflicted, internally contradictory, and affectively ambivalent’ (1995: 179). She also noticed the many reasons for subaltern ambivalence towards the dominant agents (who always have something to offer, if only to retain their domination). Understanding fault lines and conflicts, ambiguities and ambivalences in collective acts of resistance can best be appreciated through a textured ethnography (Caruso 2013). A carefully situated ethnography of resistance can reveal not only the nuances of the differences extolled by WSF’s organisers, but also the constitutive ambiguities and ambivalence of resistance itself: These ambivalences and ambiguities … emerge from the intricate webs of articulations and disarticulations that always exist between dominant and dominated. For the politics of external domination and the politics within a subordinated group may link up, as well as repel, one another; the cultures of dominant groups and of subaltern may speak to, even while speaking against, one another… In short, one can only appreciate the ways in which resistance can be more than opposition, can be truly creative and transformative, if one appreciates the multiplicity of projects in which social beings are always engaged, and the multiplicity of ways in which those projects feed on as well as collide with one another. (Ortner 1995: 191)16

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These deep webs of relationships and broader resonances well apply to the WSF. Facilitating a space of convivial engagement and (self-)organisation, building on the acknowledgement that ambiguities and ambivalences exist also among (potential) allies and among WSF activists, was the original intention of WSF’s initiators (Whitaker 2005). Difference as a value, as stated in the Charter of Principles and in all such documents since, is not only a descriptive acknowledgement of social, cultural or individual variation, but the recognition that such variation is both political and inherent to human nature. This variation extends into the ambivalences and ambiguities that Ortner mentioned in the quoted passage. The awareness of these ambivalences allows for the full flourish of resistance as more than opposition. Being more than merely oppositional is the contribution that the open space organisational formula (in the WSF or elsewhere) can offer to planetary social transformation. On the other hand, strong and recursive reality checks should prevent analysts and activists from expecting that within any open space the new just world society will be shaped shielded from the political struggle with what lies within and without its boundaries.

Notes  1  Prominent attention is given in this chapter to a recent set of interviews which includes 28 conversations conducted in the autumn of 2013. These interviewees have an in-depth experience of the WSF process. Seventeen of them have organised at least one regional or continental social forum in five continents, eight of them have organised at least one edition of the global WSF in three continents, all have histories of activism, in some cases going back decades. The 17 men and 11 women interviewed come from all continents except Oceania, and they range in age from the late 20s to the mid 70s.   2  It is possible to draw a direct line from the nineteenth century to the WSF: this connection is not only genealogical, but refers to the features

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of the spaces created. Hayden writes that WSF’s heritage ‘lies in the solidarity movements originally created by Karl Marx long before Marxism was institutionalized’ (2004). Marx and Engels helped form a transnational network, the ‘Society of Fraternal Democrats’. They next formed the Communist Correspondence Societies. Finally, they wrote the Manifesto and formed the League of Communists, in 1848. ‘These first networks were premised on discussion rather than explicit programs, so that space would exist for participants to “clear things up among themselves” as Marx wrote’ (Hayden 2004).  3  For Sen (2005) we will have to go as far back as the French revolution and its formulation of universal rights.  4  Seoane and Taddei consider the WSF an international convergence that follows the trend of the past Internationals (2002: 117).  5  See Pianta (2005).  6  The Zapatista lesson was not fully embraced by all in the WSF. Its contradictory role is exemplified by the following passage from Stedile (2002: 273), leader of the MST and member of WSF’s Brazilian Organising Committee: ‘Our relations with the Zapatistas are simply those of solidarity. Their struggle is a just one, but its social base and its method are different to ours. Theirs is, at root, a struggle of indigenous peoples for autonomy and if there’s a criticism to be made of their experience, it would be that the slowness of their advance is due to their inability to broaden it into a class struggle, a national one. They have accepted the terms of fighting for a specific ethnicity, within a particular territory – whereas ours is a farmers’ movement that has been transformed and politicized as a result of the advance of capitalism, of neoliberalism.’  7  Consider the resonance of some of these themes with the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Derrida (1978).   8  The Internet contributed vastly to establishing global networks of activists (Castells 1997; Juris 2008a; Waterman 2003, 2004b).   9  The second meeting was held the following year in Spain. The third took place in Brazil in December 1998.  10  However, Scholte (2000) considerably curbs the activists’ enthusiasm about their success.  11  Mount Pelerin, where the foundations of neoliberalism as a political philosophical doctrine were set by Hayek and his associates, is not far from Davos.  12  Brazilian Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (ABONG); ATTAC; Brazilian Justice & Peace Commission (CBJP); Brazilian Business Association for Citizenship (CIVES); Central Trade Union

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Federation (CUT); Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Studies (IBASE); Centre for Global Justice (CJG); Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST).   13  On regimes of truth and resistance see also Foucault (1978, 2007).  14  INT here and later indicates the identity of the interviewee quoted.  15  This is not the place to review the literatures in the growing field of resistance studies (Amoore 2005; Vinthagen and Johansson 2013); it suffices to say that current resistance scholars’ analyses of power and resistance frame usefully the field of global activism in a way that can help map the WSF terrain (Vinthagen 2009).   16  Amoore (2006), Gills (2005), Gould (2009), Smelser (1998) and Biccum’s (2005) work on the WSF differently engage ambivalence with a specific attention to social movements as some of its privileged locations and as the spaces for its creative negotiation. The root of this work lies in Freud’s discovery that ambivalence is at the heart of human nature and that social transformation is a struggle between the will to freedom and the will to domination (1968 [1933]).

REFERENCES Amoore, L. 2005. ‘Introduction. Global Resistance – Global Politics’. In Amoore (ed.) The Global Resistance Reader. London: Routledge. Amoore, L. 2006. ‘“There is no Great Refusal”: The Ambivalent Politics of Resistance’. In De Goede (ed.) International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. pp. 255–274. Biccum, A. 2005. ‘The World Social Forum: Exploiting the Ambivalence of “Open” Spaces’. Ephemera Theory & Politics in Organization, 5(2): 116–133. Caruso, G. 2007. Organising Global Civil Society. The World Social Forum 2004. Doctoral Thesis, University of London. Available at http:// giuseppecaruso.files.wordpress.com/2008/ 08/organising-global-civil-society.pdf Caruso, G. 2010. ‘“Their crises, our solutions!” The World Social Forum and the 2008 Global Crisis’. Available at https://giuseppecaruso. wordpress.com/2010/06/22/“their-crisesour-solutions”-the-world-social-forum-andthe-2008-global-crisis/

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Caruso, G. 2012. ‘Toward an Emancipatory Cosmopolitan Project: The World Social Forum and the Transformation of Conflicts’. Globalizations, 9(2): 211–224. Caruso, G. 2013. ‘Transformative Ethnography of the World Social Forum: Theories and Practices of Global Transformations’. In Juris and Khasnabish (eds) Insurgent Encounters. Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 229–249. Caruso, G. and T. Teivainen. 2014. ‘Beyond the Square. Changing Dynamics at the World Social Forum’. In Open Democracy, 7 December 2014. Available at https://www.opendemocracy. net/giuseppe-caruso-teivo-teivainen/beyondsquare-changing-dynamics-at-world-socialforum Castells, M. 1997. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. The Power of Identity (Vol. II). Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Castells, M. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope. Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity. Conway. 2009. ‘Reading Nairobi: Place, Space, and Difference at the 2007 World Social Forum’. Societies Without Borders 3(1): 48–70. Conway, J. 2013. Edges of Global Justice: The World Social Forum and Its ‘others’. London: Routledge. Correa Leite, J. 2003. Forum Social Mundial A Historia de Uma Invencao Politica. Sao Paulo: Fundacao Perseu Abramo. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Della Porta, D. (ed.) 2009. Democracy in Social Movements. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Derrida, J. 1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Diani, M. and D. McAdam 2003. Social Movements and Networks. Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Financial Times, 2001. ‘Clamour Against Capitalism Stilled’, 10 October. Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. 2007. ‘What is Critique’. In The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). pp. 41–81.

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Freeman, Jo 1972. ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17: 151–164. Freud, S. 1968 [1933]. Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition. London: Hogarth Press. Gills, B. 2005. ‘Empire versus Cosmopolis’. Globalizations, 2(1): 5–13. Glasius, M. and J. Timms. 2005. ‘The Role of Social Forums in Global Civil Society: Radical Beacon or Strategic Infrastructure?’. In Anheier, Kaldor and Glasius (eds), Global Civil Society 2005–6. London: Sage. pp. 190–248. Gould, D. 2009. Moving Politics. Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hadden, J. and S. Tarrow 2007. ‘Spillover or Spillout? The Global Justice Movement in the US after 9/11’. Mobilization, 12(4): 359–376. Halliday, F. 2000. ‘Getting Real About Seattle’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29(1): 124–129. Hardt, M. 2002. ‘Porto Allegre: Today’s Bandung?’, New Left Review, 14 (March–April). Hayden, T. 2004. ‘Post-Marx From Mumbai’. Available at http://www.alternet.org/story/ 17675/ Hernandez, A. 2010. ‘Challenging Market and Religious Fundamentalisms: The Emergence of “Ethics, Cosmo-visions and Spiritualities” in the World Social Forum’. In McMichael (ed.), Contesting Development: Critical Studies for Social Change. New York: Routledge. pp. 215–229. Holloway, J. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto. Juris, J. 2008a. Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Juris, J. 2008b. ‘Spaces of Intentionality: Race, Class, and Horizontality at the United States Social Forum’. Mobilizations, 13(4): 353–372. Lipschutz, R. D. (ed.) 2006. Civil Society and Social Movements. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Maeckelbergh, M. 2009. The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy. London: Pluto.

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Nail, T. 2013. ‘Zapatismo and the Global Origin of Occupy’. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 12(3): 20–35. The Nation 2001. ‘Signs of the Times’, 22 October. Ortner, S. 1995. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37(1): 173–193. Patomäki, H. and T. Teivainen 2004. A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions. London: Zed Books. Peña, A. and T. Davies, 2014. ‘Globalisation from Above? Corporate Social Responsibility, the Workers’ Party and the Origins of the World Social Forum’. New Political Economy, 19(2): 258–281. Pianta, M. 2005. ‘UN World Summits and Civil Society. The State of the Art’. UNRISD, Civil Society and Social Movements Programme, Paper Number 18. Pleyers, G. 2008. ‘The World Social Forum, a Globalisation from Below?’. Societies Without Borders, 3: 71–89. Polanyi, K. 1957. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Polletta, F. 1999. ‘“Free Spaces” in Collective Action’. Theory and Society, 28: 1–38. Polletta, F. 2005. ‘How Participatory Democracy became White: Culture and Organizational Choice’. Mobilizations, 10(2): 271–288. Polletta, F. and K. Kretschmer. 2013. ‘Free Spaces’. In Snow (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Routledge, P. 2005. ‘Grassrooting the Imaginary. Acting Within the Convergence’. Ephemera, 5(4): 615–628. Rupp, L. and V. Taylor. 1987. Survival in the Doldrums the American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press. Santos, B. 2004. ‘The World Social Forum: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Globalisation’. In Sen, Anand, Escobar, Waterman (eds), Challenging Empires. New Delhi: Viveka Foundation. Santos, B. 2005. O Forum Social Mundial. Manual de Uso. Sao Paulo: Cortez. Santos, B. 2006. The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond. London: Zed. Scholte, J. A. 2000. ‘Cautionary Reflections on Seattle’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29(1): 115–121.

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Sen, J. 2005. ‘Interrogating the WSF and its Culture of Politics’. In Sen and Saini (eds), Talking New Politics Are Other Worlds Possible? New Delhi: Zubaan Books. pp. 10–22. Seoane, J. and E. Taddei. 2002. ‘From Seattle to Porto Alegre: The Anti-Neoliberal Globalisation Movement’. Current Sociology, 2002(1): 99–122. Shor, F. 2010. Dying Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance. Abingdon: Routledge. Smelser, N. 1998. ‘The Rational and the Ambivalent in the Social Sciences’. American Sociological Review, 63: 1–16. Stedile, J. P. 2002. ‘Landless Batallions: The Sem Terra Movement of Brazil’. New Left Review, 15(3): 76–104. Teivainen, T. 2004. ‘The World Social Forum: Arena or Actor?’. In Sen, Anand, Escobar, Waterman (eds), Challenging Empires. New Delhi: Viveka Foundation. pp. 122–129. Tormey, S. 2005. ‘From Utopian Worlds to Utopian Spaces: Reflections on the Contemporary Radical Imaginary and the Social Forum Process’. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisations, 5(2): 394–408. Tyler, Patrick 2003. ‘A New Power In the Streets’. New York Times, 17 February. Vargas, V. 2005. ‘Feminisms and the World Social Forum: Space for Dialogue and Confrontation’. Development, 48(2): 107–110. Vinthagen, S. 2009. ‘Is the World Social Forum a Democratic Global Civil Society?’. In Blau and Karides (eds), The World and US Social Forums. A Better World is Possible and Necessary. Amsterdam: Brill. pp. 131–148. Vinthagen, S. and A. Johansson 2013. ‘“Everyday Resistance”: Exploration of a Concept and its Theories’. Resistance Studies Magazine, 1(1): 1–46 Wallerstein, I. 2002. ‘New Revolts against the System’. New Left Review, 18: 29–39.

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Wallerstein, I. 2004. ‘The Dilemmas of Open Space. The Future of the WSF’. International Social Science Journal, 182: 629–638. Waterman, P. 2003. ‘Cyberspace after Capitalism: Cyber-Utopianism without Cyber-Illusionism’. Paper for the Cyberspace Panel, Life after Capitalism Programme, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 23–28 January. Waterman, P. 2004a. ‘Globalization from the Middle? Reflections from a Margin’. In Sen, Anand, Escobar, and Waterman (eds), Challenging Empires. New Delhi: Viveka Foundation. pp. 87–94. Waterman, P. 2004b. ‘The Global Justice and Solidarity Movement and the World Social Forum: A Backgrounder’. In Sen, Anand, Escobar, and Waterman (eds), Challenging Empires. New Delhi: Viveka Foundation. pp. 57–66. Whitaker, F. 2004. ‘World Social Forum. Origins and aims’. Available at www.forumsocialmundial.org. br/main.php?id_menu=2_1&cd_language=2 Whitaker, F. 2005. O Desafio do Forum Social Mundial. Un Modo de Ver. San Paolo: Fundação Perseu Abramo. Whitaker F., B. Santos and B. Cassen. 2006. ‘The World Social Forum. Where Do We Stand and Where are We Going?’. In Glasius, Kaldor, Anheier (eds), Global Civil Society Yearbook 2005/6. London: Sage. pp. 37–42. World Social Forum, 2001. Charter of Principles. Available at http://memoriafsm.org/ page/carta World Social Forum, 2002. World Social Forum India, Policy Guidelines. Available at wsfindia.org/downloads_docs/39.rtf World Social Forum, 2003. Who We Are. Unpublished. Worth, O. and K. Buckley 2009. ‘The World Social Forum: Postmodern Prince or Court Jester?’ Third World Quarterly, 30(4): 649–61.

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22 Back to Work: Resisting Clientelism in a Poor Neighborhood of Buenos Aires Pablo Fernández

Introduction A long-standing question in social sciences is how is it possible for disfranchised and powerless people to get organized and create the conditions to bring about change for them and their communities (Gaventa, 1992; Scott, 1990)? Also, how can communities rise from social fragmentation and anomie (Durkheim, 1997)? Apart from the scholarly interest that these questions might have, today, finding their answers has become an urgent matter for millions of people across the world. Indeed, we are living in an age in which a divide in society is growing. And this divide is not only about more poverty and more inequality, but also about having the capacity to act (and to act together). In developed and underdeveloped countries, we see people suffering the ‘expulsion’ from life projects and livelihoods, a process that started at the margins of the system but is generalizing across societies (Sassen, 2014). We observe the ‘precarization’ of work (Standing, 2011)

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consisting in more and more uncertain, unpredictable, and unsecure jobs (Kalleberg, 2009), the extension of different forms of underemployment such as zero-hours contracts, temporary work, or freelance relationships, and long-lasting unemployment (Vallas, 2012). The consequences of the ‘precarization’ of work are well known: more poverty and inequality (Mishel et  al., 2007); eroded identities (Sennett, 1998); physical, psychological, and emotional distress (De Witte, 1999), and change in family lives (Coontz, 2005). Added to the situation in the labor market, we see the dismantling of welfare institutions, the growing discontent towards (legal and illegal) immigrants (McLaren, 2003; Menjivar and Abrego, 2012), and the disenchantment with politicians and (traditional) political parties (Stoker, 2006). It is puzzling that people do not react when facing such situations. As James C. Scott (2012) has argued in Two Cheers for Anarchism, while different forms of informal

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cooperation, coordination, and action that embody mutuality without hierarchy are the quotidian experience of most people, people seem to have lost the capacity to act in concert to challenge state law, multilateral organizations, and some of the dominant institutions that contribute to their drama. Perhaps, the explanation of this incapacity to act together is that our society has become anomic. Anomie, according to Durkheim (1997), is a generalized feeling of passivity born from despair. Sociologists have pointed out that the urban poor normally turn to kinship and family when facing hard times (Desmond, 2012). However, those ties seem to be stretched to exhaustion, particularly in underdeveloped countries (Deneulin, 2014a, 2014b) and in the European South (see Marti and Fernandez, 2015 for the case of victims of the mortgages crisis in Spain). Also, associative projects of change are not easy to maintain, as people ‘show up to help, work awhile, then disappear’ (Gessen, 2011: 200), and internal and external conflicts, financial difficulties, frustration, and loss of hope tend to become insurmountable obstacles (Summers Effler, 2010). When living hard times and under anomie, what are the chances that the poor and powerless organize in enduring projects of change? What are the ‘weapons’ left to them to resist? As David Courpasson put it: ‘We scholars are sometimes late: the street goes ahead of academia.’1 It is thus, with those questions in mind that I looked for ‘stories of resistance’ (Ewick and Silbey, 2003), stories that irrupt into normalcy, as it might be in those stories that we find the answers (even if tentative or exploratory) that scholars, and people in the street, are looking for. Nevertheless, to find something new, we might also need new lenses. As Courpasson et al. (2012) have recently argued, we need to study resisting: resisters’ activities and objective productions over time rather than resistance, that is, who resists to what and why. Their argument is that focusing on resisters’ work, what they do, and

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on their objective productions (what they call ‘objects of resistance’) might enable scholars to develop a view of resistance as a process that better accounts for its status, not as an event or identity-shaping phenomenon, but as a set of skillful acts that can significantly transform organizations – and societies – over time (Courpasson et al., 2012). A fundamental underlying element in Courpasson and colleagues’ view is that resistance might be seen as a productive and creative process rather than one inherently adversarial and antagonistic. Thus, adopting a creative and nonantagonistic view of resisting, I have studied the case of Cooperative La Juanita, a workers’ cooperative created after the Argentine social and political crisis of 2001. Interestingly, the story of the cooperative centers on work, as aforementioned, a problem these days. The protagonists of this story aimed for (dignified) work, and – as I will try to illustrate in this chapter – work was their way of resisting. But, can work be resistance? Work and power are constitutive elements of organizations (Kallinikos, 2003; Vallas, 2012) and as such have been the object of numerous inquiries since the emergence of organization studies. The relationship between these elements is nevertheless problematic as there are different ontological, epistemological, and ideological understandings of them (Ailon, 2006). Normally, work and power are seen in a rather simple (and simplistic) way: work and power are understood as different and distinct elements and the relationship between them is that of power trying to control work, to organize, rationalize, and render it efficient (Clegg et al., 2006). However, critical scholars with a different approach about power, drawing mainly on Foucault, problematized that simplifying view by bringing in the idea that work and its organization are created by power; in fact, they are an effect of power (see Townley, 1993). This critical turn implied a whole ontological change. In effect, critical scholars have pointed to the fact that work and power are not different things, as

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Back to Work: Resisting Clientelism in a Poor Neighborhood of Buenos Aires

work, and most importantly the worker, is produced by power. This novel conceptualization thus shifted the scholars’ attention to more subtle ways of controlling the worker. Now, we know about the attempt of managers and management systems to define the identity of the worker (du Gay, 1996; Kunda, 1992; Miller and Rose, 1990); and of workers resisting, struggling to define themselves, (re)affirming their own identities (Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Fournier and Grey, 1999) and dignity (Hodson, 2001). But what can an organization created by unemployed people tell us about work? What happens when unemployed workers self-organize to work? How do self-management and self-organization affect the nature of work? This chapter, far from offering a finished, complete, and general framework about how excluded people can (re)gain their capacity to act, offers instead a ‘small story’, one centered on work, showing how it helped a specific group of people to escape from clientelist networks to attend their needs and to solve some of the shortcomings of the context in which they live. Clientelism has been identified as a generalized form of political domination in poor neighborhoods in Argentina, basically consisting of a continuous relationship of exchanging aid for votes (Auyero, 2001; Zarazaga, 2013). This chapter is organized as follows. I begin with a brief description of the fieldwork and research methods where I introduce Cooperative La Juanita, showing how they resisted clientelism and started a process of self-organization. Then I show how the members of the cooperative work, how work is organized, and what it means to them. Finally, I discuss the notion of work using Arendt’s insights about human agency, particularly her distinction between labor, work, and action. Building on Arendt’s (1958) conception of vita activa and drawing on what I observed in my fieldwork, I argue in this chapter that work could be conceived and lived as political action, and thus it might constitute a way of resisting. This is not always the case. To

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be political action, as Arendt would suggest, work needs to be open, revelatory, and done together. In this sense, when work is (or becomes) political action it is productive and creative power, it is what scholars call power with (Allen et  al., 2014); it is emancipatory, unleashing the capacity of human agency to transform their lives and societies.

Fieldwork Data for this chapter was collected through an inductive study (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2010) conducted between May 2012 and September 2014 in Cooperative La Juanita, a workers’ cooperative situated in a poor neighborhood of Buenos Aires. I used both ethnographic tools to access the day-to-day lives of the members of the cooperative and archival and retrospective accounts to study its origins. I visited the site six times, spending around 250 hours total in the cooperative. Additionally I talked to ‘outsiders’ who were important in the origins of the cooperative or that collaborated with it afterwards. I tape-recorded and transcribed 17 interviews, but many other conversations were just spontaneous and could not be recorded. Interviews ranged from around half an hour to more than two hours. Each evening, after leaving the site, I wrote down ideas and field notes with my impressions of the day. Regarding archival sources, I was able to collect 23 press articles and seven video documents of Cooperative La Juanita. Among the written material, two books edited by Toty Flores (2005, 2007), about La Juanita’s founders and its most charismatic leader, were useful in developing my understanding of the evolution of the cooperative. Finally, I followed the cooperative’s Facebook page as well as those of many of its members.

Research context Cooperative La Juanita is a workers’ cooperative situated in Gregorio Laferrere, La

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Matanza, a marginalized, semi-rural district of Greater Buenos Aires. The cooperative was officially founded in 2001. However, its origins go back to mid 1996 when a group of unemployed workers mobilized and created the MTD (Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados – Unemployed Workers Movement), a mobilization that together with some other social movements of unemployed people gained political force vis à vis traditional worker unions during the last years of the 1990s. At that time neoliberal policies led to an increase of unemployment and poverty. These organizations of unemployed people had important presence on the streets, voicing their grievances mainly through pickets.2 They were called piqueteros (picketers) and were criminalized by the state, repressed by the police and resisted by the urban middle classes as they ‘disturbed normal life’, blocking routes and streets, sometimes violently (Svampa and Pereyra, 2009). The government responded to the mounting protests with the distributions of subsidies in the form of monetary compensations called first Plan Trabajar and then Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar. While many picketer movements accepted these plans,3 the MTD refused them, as they saw those subsidies as a perpetuation of their condition of unemployment and dependence. Toty, a member of the MTD and then one of the founders of the cooperative, explains the decision: We rejected the plans to stand up for our dignity. We felt that the plans would destroy the culture of work in which we had been educated. Most of us had come from the countryside to Buenos Aires to progress. (…) We used to think that if you had a good job, you could quickly ascend and become a middle-class family. (…) I mean, even if you were illiterate, you had a job in the factory and your son could finish secondary school, go to University, and become a professional. That was our belief. But the great unemployment killed all those possibilities. The state, with subsidies, broke that culture of work and created a culture of survival, of absolute dependency. Against that we want to fight. We

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want to rebuild the culture of work. We’ve never lost sight of this: to work is to transform the world; it is your say in society.

Marta puts it simply and emphatically: Why should they [the government] have to give me anything when I have two hands, a head, and still a body to work? They should give jobs, not 150 pesos.

Jorge, explains how he lived under this culture of survival: When you don’t have a job, I mean, a normal job, you end up doing what you can, you offer your help here and there, but sometimes it’s hard, and nothing happens. You get tired, you argue with your wife about how to pay for the food. So you start a pilgrimage, first to the church to get a box of food, then to the Unidad Básica [local of the Peronist party], where the puntero give you milk or medicines, and to the municipality to see if you can get a subsidy.

As the quotes cited above express, the problem for the poor in Argentina was – and still is – political clientelism (for detailed accounts on Argentine clientelism see: Auyero, 2001, and Zarazaga, 2013). In a poor neighborhood like Gregorio Laferrere, almost nothing could be accomplished without the mediation of punteros. Punteros are party brokers that, while claiming to represent communities and neighborhoods, make profits from such alleged representation. Miriam’s case serves as an illustration of how clientelism works. Miriam, aged 31, is the mother of three children, two boys of 15 and 10, and a girl of 6. Miriam could not finish school. She told me that some years ago she was beneficiary of a ‘plan’ consisting on the monthly amount of $150. When she received the subsidy, the puntero who gave it to her retained $50, as a ‘contribution for the party’. Besides, she was told that she was expected to be ready to participate in marches or support the local candidate in meetings and political parades. Miriam explains: if you want to keep the plan, you need to do what they say. I don’t know much about politics, I am not interested, I don’t care. But at that moment I needed the money. So, if there is a march you

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Back to Work: Resisting Clientelism in a Poor Neighborhood of Buenos Aires

need to go, or if the city mayor has a parade, you have to go to applaud him.

Similar stories abound: During the last electoral campaign in the neighborhood, they tried to buy some of us, especially those that were the most involved in the movement; they offered them a lot of money. (Interview, Marina)

For the MTD, the refusal of the plans was a conscious break with forms of clientelist politics. Rejecting the plans, the MTD distanced themselves from other picketers’ organizations eager to accept the state subsidies and moved back to the neighborhood as the privileged place for their actions and interventions, leaving behind the pickets. Such a move was based on the conviction that they were (or wanted to become) full members of society, resisting institutional pressures to silence and dominate them. In Toty’s words, this should be accompanied by ‘other ways to relate’ in a context in which ‘traditional institutions do not offer any answers’. Thus, in 1999, after leaving the pickets, members of the MTD occupied an abandoned school in order to start with a very basic bakery. Then, they borrowed two sewing machines and started a small textile workshop. Both projects remain today and constitute the cooperative’s main productive activities. In 2004 they launched a school that is attended by more than 150 children today. They teach kids at pre-primary level (2 to 5 years) and primary level (6 to 8 years).

Work in Cooperative La Juanita The history of Cooperative La Juanita, especially in its origins and first years, reflects a political response to a situation of oppression and social exclusion. Since its foundation, the cooperative has aimed to resist the ‘culture of survival’ created by clientelism to

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(re)develop a ‘culture of work’. Silvia explains: Work is what allows us to become full members of society. I tell you more, it allows us to build the society in which we want to live. That’s why I don’t like when people talk about social inclusion. I don’t want to be ‘included’…. I want to be part of the construction of that new space.

In the following pages I will focus on the culture of work in La Juanita, what it means for them, how they organize their work, and what they do through it. To do so, I will focus on four elements observed during my visits to the cooperative that characterizes how they work: openness, togetherness, future orientation, and embeddedness in the neighborhood.

Openness The warehouse that hosts the cooperative is a meeting point in the neighborhood. It was an abandoned building bought in 2011 to host the productive activities when space in the school was needed for the students. Being in the warehouse, it is difficult to know who is a cooperative member, who is a visitor, or a friend. The front doors are always open and people come in freely. They could be there asking for one of the 18 courses the cooperative is offering, or could be visiting a friend, bringing a PC to be repaired, or collaborating with a donation campaign for a family in need. Despite the fact that 52 cooperative associates formally constitute the cooperative, some of the listed members do not work in the cooperative. For instance, Lita is now working at a chocolate factory; Marta and Ariel work for a bank (established there at the invitation of the cooperative). Besides, some of the workers in the cooperative are not formal members of the cooperative. To be a formal member means to be listed in the members list after being accepted by the assembly. But the list is opened only once a year, and new associates are accepted when there are vacancies. Toty explains that they did not want to grow, to

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keep the size manageable, ‘to preserve the spirit’. He adds,

A few weeks later, a post on La Juanita’s Facebook page celebrates the opening:

In fact, if we grew we would need a real manager. It would be difficult to organize… we don’t know much about it. Our aim is to receive people, help them to recover, to regain confidence then they can go and develop their own projects, create their own cooperatives.

We are happy to present the enterprise created by Marcelo and Gabriel, two former students of the PC Recycling course in La Juanita. We are proud of these men who show that neither age nor context where you are born matter. Thank you for your exemplary life, we wish you the best in this new stage. Thanks also to another entrepreneur, our friend Angel Flores, for his great support, the best signboards in La Matanza!

Laura’s case illustrates what Toty meant about recovering people. Aged 33, Laura leads the textile team. She joined the cooperative in 2011 after being unemployed for some time. Previously, she had worked in a textile workshop where conditions were extremely tough. She thinks that those conditions led her to depression and eventually to quit the job. One day, she accepted the invitation of a friend, Mirta, to go and visit the cooperative. She was offered a job in the confection of packaging boxes. Sometime later, as there was need for extra hands at the sewing machines, she volunteered and became, as she says, ‘reconciled with a work that she loves’. Marcelo’s, 55, is another case where the aim of the cooperative seems accomplished. He explained to me on my first visit to the site: When I first came here I found myself comfortable. I could spend my day talking to people that became my friends, while I could help with some small work and I could learn a new profession [PC repair]. I used to work as a taxi driver, a very solitary work, not good for my mind nor for my health, it is a very stressful profession. So, after being here for some time, I started to work in the PC workshop, and little by little taking responsibility. Now I am thinking of starting my own business, having also a social end, like La Juanita.

Three months later, Marcelo told me about his project: I’m starting my new business with a friend. I am happy, it is happening. We have all the support from Fabian [in charge of PC repair in La Juanita] and Silvia. I am a bit anxious but, excited.

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Like Laura, or Marcelo, many of those working in La Juanita are not formal members: people participate in different activities such as courses, craft practices, or just volunteer for some particular events. Interestingly, no one is treated differently regarding membership. Indeed, it seems that to be listed as an associate is seen as a mere formality; what counts for them is to be involved, and involvement, in a way, depends on the participants, on how close they feel to the cooperative, on how much they participate in the projects. A second element regarding openness is that the cooperative is intended to be open to the neighborhood. They organize different open activities that range from guitar classes for kids on Saturday morning to citizenship participation workshops, PC maintenance courses, craftsmanship, or a youth group called Espacio de Jóvenes where adolescents participate in different activities like recycling, painting or designing and placing signposts in the area. This openness means that La Juanita’s warehouse serves as a space to socialize, to spend time, to learn new things, to find friends. For instance, Ariel, working at the Bank office nearby, usually shows up at 4 pm when he finishes his work, to have some mates (a local infusion) before going home. And like Ariel, many others just go there to see friends or family, to ask about activities, or simply to spend some time. Graciela, talking about a young girl who was doing some crafts, explained to me: She has been coming to the cooperative since a month or so. She has just lost a baby, and she is only sixteen. We don’t ask for anything,

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Back to Work: Resisting Clientelism in a Poor Neighborhood of Buenos Aires

we give her something to do, and the possibility to talk if she wants.

Togetherness With openness comes the possibility of experiencing togetherness, facilitated also by the frequency and proximity of their interactions. The lack of clear boundaries, both physical and regarding tasks, their cooperation when there is a need, and the moments of conviviality tend to strengthen their relationships, ties of building solidarity between them. In the warehouse the space is not clearly divided, except for the bakery, which occupies one of the sides and has a wall separating it from the other parts; the other activities do not have clear boundaries: the sewing machines are located opposite the bakery; the printers for serigraphy, in one corner; the PC maintenance in another. Everything there looks disorganized and chaotic with piles of old PC parts, fabric rolls and unfinished clothes strewn all over the floor. There is a central table where they have meals, meetings, or where they dole out materials to work with. One wall holds a huge banner they used to use in demonstrations that says: MTD – ‘UNIDOS GENERAMOS TRABAJO’ (‘United we create work’). Next to the sewing machines, on another wall, there are two work coats designed by Churba – a wellknown fashion designer in Buenos Aires – and produced in the cooperative together with some models of what they have produced. At the entrance, there is a board where they display the courses offered in the cooperative. In the textile workshop, tasks are varied – they produce t-shirts, aprons, bags, dresses, etc. – as they receive all kinds of demands. Usually, they accept whatever they are asked to do, disregarding whether they have done it before, or whether they know a priori how to do it. On these cases, everyone pulls together to imagine ways of doing things. A field note reads: Today Silvia arrived with six bags full of uniforms: they were from a company that changed its brand

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and asked Silvia whether they could be recycled. While Graciela, Silvia and I were considering different possibilities, Marcelo, who works on the PC workshop, joined us. We spent almost an hour discussing what could be done, as the uniforms were in perfect condition and in Graciela’s words ‘it would be a crime to send them to the trash’. (Field note, May 17, 2013)

Even though each worker has his or her own occupation in one of the productive projects – the bakery, serigraph, textile, and pc workshops – it is common to see them walking around and joining another sector when there is a need. The ambience in the warehouse is relaxed and friendly. They share mates (a local infusion) and meals. People work, but while working they talk about family, friends, and their children, or occasionally about a new project. Something striking you notice in Cooperative La Juanita is that their discussions about new work are never about ‘markets’, and rarely about ‘clients’. Instead, they talk about projects that serve them to accomplish something else, like paying back the credit they took out to buy the warehouse, or to complete the school facilities, or to prepare a terrain for practicing sports. Their clients are called ‘an entrepreneur from INICIA’, or ‘Ricardo’, or ‘Drimmer, the Chocolate Factory’. I met some of them during my fieldwork. A field note reads: Today I met Mariana, 35. She is an architect from San Isidro. Middle-upper class. Posh school. She started a new business project four months ago. She designs portraits that are selling well, but can’t be produced in time to meet the growing demand. She came to visit the cooperative after a friend told her about it; she found that the people of La Juanita might be able to produce the frames. Graciela received Mariana, showed the warehouse, introduced her to the workers, and explained the history of La Juanita. I went with them to the school. In the school, Mariana was deeply touched by the story and by the kids. I saw her struggling not to cry. They agreed that Graciela would tell Mariana about the price in two or three days. When Mariana left, Graciela called Lita to talk about the frames and how much work they could take. They said they would talk with Silvia and Fabian to decide the price.

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Later I talked to Silvia about Mariana’s visit. I asked her if they always do the ‘tour’. Silvia told me that they never accept a project without knowing the person. They first ask them to come to La Juanita, so the person can know the cooperative, what they do, where they are. She thinks that this helps a lot: they would know that they are tight in the warehouse; that on a rainy day the street is full of mud and water can leak in. Silvia says that those who come to La Juanita can also realize what the cooperative is for. I feel Mariana felt what Silvia tried to explain to me. [Field note from May 12, 2013]

Cooperation between workers reaches its maximum once a year, when they have the Panettone Christmas campaign. The campaign is one of their most lucrative projects and it is sponsored by Maru Botana, a highly popular woman on Argentine television, and by Martin Churba, a wellknown fashion designer. Everyone pulls together during the three months of the campaign: the textile workers produce the packaging designed by Churba, those in the bakery produce the Panettones following the recipe offered by Botana, whilst the rest of the workers concentrate on the commercialization and distribution of the cakes. Togetherness is also expressed in solidarity and care. A field note reads: Eight of us were having lunch. This time it was pizza prepared by Martin and Vanessa, the guys from the bakery. At 2 pm I heard the beep of an alarm. It was Graciela’s watch. She put it off and told Manuel that it was time for the medicine. Later that day, when I asked, Silvia explained to me: ‘Manuel has epilepsy. It is great he can work. Doctors had said he would not be able to work anymore, but you see, here he is. We try to keep his workload light and take care of him’. (Field note, Sept 2012)

Embeddedness The decision to leave the pickets and to come back to the neighborhood imprinted the cooperative’s culture: its embeddedness and belonging to the neighborhood is marked. Soledad recalls a party they had a few

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months after being back in La Juanita to obtain funds for the projected school: We organized a party in January 2002. Everyone said that we were crazy; but 600 people attended, a lot of them coming from the neighborhood. And they stayed late into the night. We realized that, in fact, people needed to get together, to talk, to be listened to, to share a good moment and to experience that not everything was a defeat or a disaster.

Today, the cooperative opens almost all their activities to their neighbors and they work to change the neighborhood, particularly through education and through their courses. Fabian explains: We need to educate and create jobs in the neighborhood, make people capable of working. It is the only way to part with clientelist networks.

In the school they intend to be as close as they can to the kids and their families. For that reason they accepted the proposition of two psychologists who volunteered to conduct studies about the family situation of the kids. A field note reads: Silvia and I went to the school today, as she wanted to talk to the psychologists who were interviewing some of the children. One of the psychologists complained that some of the kids were leaving the interviews after one or two sessions. She told Silvia that they couldn’t do anything, but consider the treatment as abandoned. On the way back to the warehouse, Silvia said to me: ‘I will have to talk with them again; unfortunately they see the kids like the patients they treat in their clinics in Buenos Aires. They treat them distantly. They do not realize that when someone abandons the treatment, there is a problem there. They need to understand what is the problem, what is going wrong. (Field note, 25 Sept 2013)

Despite the fact that the bank is not really a part of Cooperative La Juanita, its presence in the neighborhood is due to the cooperative. In 2011 Toty Flores met the president of International Bank (a pseudonym) and convinced him to open a branch in the neighborhood. At that time, there were no banks in the area, and people had to travel more than two miles to find one, in Gregorio Laferrere

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Back to Work: Resisting Clientelism in a Poor Neighborhood of Buenos Aires

downtown. Moreover, as Toty had argued, the bank would be a way to integrate the people from the neighborhood into normal society, accepting them as full citizens. After some discussions, the bank settled in the neighborhood hiring two members of the cooperative: Ariel and Marta. The branch was a kind of experiment, as it was the first branch to be located in a poor area. It offers basic banking services, it has two ATMs and, as a curiosity and something completely unusual in Argentina, has a toilet for the public requested by the cooperative. At the beginning, the performance of the branch was outstanding, and the Bank considered replicating the experience in other poor districts. The two bank officers participated in several workshops organized for managers in the bank to explain their experience. Nevertheless, in the last few months there have been some problems with credit cards issued at the office, as people in the area were not used to using them and delays in the payments started to be problematic. Ariel and Marta, the two employees working in the office, tried to solve the problem by visiting the debtors, but because of bank policies concerned with employees’ safety, they were not allowed to leave the office. Ariel explains: I had to explain to my boss in the bank that we are part of the neighborhood, we know the people, they know us, we cannot just send a letter, we need to talk to them and to explain the consequences of not paying. So they agreed that we can go and visit the houses, but we were not allowed to ring the bells or clap hands [in Argentina, some houses do not have doorbells, the custom is to clap hands to call]… all because of the insurance as employees… we insisted and they gave us the authorization. Finally, we could start meeting the people to find out what happened. The situation is better now.

Despite the lack of public services, the difficulties they face every day in the neighborhood, people from La Juanita feel they belong there. Evelyn’s words illustrate this feeling: I am from La Matanza; this is my neighborhood. I don’t want to move. I want it to change.

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Future Orientation Finally, the fourth element that emerged in the data is La Juanita’s members’ orientation to the future. The continuous (re)creation of projects – for instance, finishing the school, then dreaming about having a university, arranging a terrain to build a sports field, creating a center to help drug addicts, paying back the credit for the warehouse – keeps them working towards the future. This future orientation does not mean they disregard the past or the present. On the contrary, the past is constructed through stories of resisting and affirming their dignity. The central piece in these stories is the refusal of state subsidies and the self-organization as a cooperative. Other stories, such as those of exporting work coats to Japan and T-shirts to Italy, are recounted with pride, expressing that they managed to work with international standards. These recollections of achievements serve to reinforce their identity, highlighting the importance of being a worker and resisting the political use of poverty by means of clientelism. Secondly, this orientation to the future is expressed in their day-to-day talk about their children. While working and when having lunch, it is frequent to hear them talking about how their children are doing at the school, whether they have a job, and so on. Lita told me one day: I had my son when I was fifteen. Raising him was hard, but I am proud of it. Today he is sixteen, I am proud of him as a person. He… as a person. So now what I think as a mom is about his future, I hope he will be a good man, and he could have a better life than mine.

Diego, a loquacious man in his late fifties, used to work in a factory and is happy now to be in La Juanita. On many occasions, I shared conversations about his family: I grew up in a family of low income, my wife too. Thus, we always wanted a better future for our children. I have three daughters. As they were growing, finishing first the primary school, then the secondary school, we encouraged them to

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study, to pick a university degree. The eldest is studying medicine, I am happy to see her reaching what I could not.

Finally, the future orientation of the cooperative is manifested through their care for future generations, notably expressed in the creation of the school. The school’s activities started in March 2004, with 55 children in kindergarten. Since then, they have added new classes every year and now accommodate 150 children up to the third level of primary schooling. Alejandra, who is the principal of the school, explains: We realized that no definite change could be possible without developing a school focused on the culture of work. This is important, because it is in childhood that you understand that through work and solidarity you can be dignified. The school is a central project for us.

Something striking and unusual for a school is that in one room there is a serigraph printer operated by Jorge. He explained to me that the idea behind it is that kids can become familiar with the life of work. He says that it is good that they can smell the ink, hear the noise. In Jorge’s words: Some of the kids don’t see their parents working. How can we educate them in a culture to be of a work if they see mom and dad do nothing?

The school facilities, even though they are not yet finished, surprise in their contrast with the majority of the buildings in the neighborhood. Silvia explains that even when it takes longer and it is more expensive, they try to get the best materials they can. The reason seems straightforward to her: We don´t want a school for the poor, because it would create poor people, we want it to be of a good level, with nicely decorated interiors.

Soledad, Raquel, and Alejandra, all members of the board of directors of the school, take the opportunity in their board meetings to discuss better ways to transmit the values they maintain. These discussions help them to be critical and reflective. For instance,

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discussing the problems of education, Soledad explains: I think there is something we lost as a society, which is the capacity to wait, something that was normal in the past. This was accomplished by the way in which our society was structured. Everything helped in that you were able to wait. For instance, If you were the son of a worker and you asked your father to buy an LP of a band you liked, and your father said ‘alright, but I can’t do it now; when I receive the Christmas box I’ll buy it’ - and this happens to you and to the whole neighborhood - by this you learned to wait. It was a kind of work you did, without noticing it, but you were learning something. What happens today? If I told this to a teenager, by the time I could be able to buy the LP, the band would have already disappeared. This is very serious. If you do not know how to wait, you cannot create a future. I think our society destroyed its own project for the future. We try to be careful about this, to learn how to wait, and how to keep hope alive.

CONCLUSION I started this chapter with two broad questions: 1) How do the powerless come to organize themselves to change their situation and enhance their opportunities? 2) How can communities rise from social fragmentation and anomie? Despite the broadness of these questions, they have served as heuristic guides for my research of the day-to-day lives of a group of former unemployed picketers now organized in a workers’ cooperative. Day-to-day lives, being mundane or banal, are what in the end produce and reproduce the organization (Silverman, 1970). The day-to-day lives of the members of Cooperative La Juanita only make sense when looking at their personal and shared trajectories: the cooperative was created by people who had suffered the social exclusion that comes with unemployment, those trapped in clientelist who ultimately have resisted them. The story of the cooperative shows that in some cases work could be resistance. In what remains of the chapter, I will elaborate on the conditions in which this could be

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the case. To do so, I build on Arendt’s understanding of vita activa, particularly on her notion of (political) action.

Work as Political Action, (A Productive Way of Resisting?) Work is a central claim and occupation for the members of Cooperative La Juanita and a core concept in organization studies. In my study of the cooperative, I have observed that work is not only an ‘occasion’ for political action, or the mere ‘object’ of political action and contestation, but seems to be political action ‘itself’. Indeed, for the members of the cooperative, work not only means obtaining the means for subsistence but also expresses their convictions about society, their situation in it, and their intent to contribute to it. As we have seen in the cooperative’s case, its members did not withdraw from politics when they left the pickets to create the cooperative, but they transformed their own work into politics. As Toty Flores lucidly says: ‘to work is to transform reality, to have a say in society’. Work, as they organize it, manifests their aspirations of an equal, caring, and solidary society. The way the members of the cooperative live and work echoes Hannah Arendt’s (1958) conception of action, one of the activities of the vita activa. According to Arendt, vita activa is constituted by three activities: labor, work and action. ‘By laboring’, she explains, men produce the vital necessities that must be fed into the life process of the human body (…) the laboring activity itself must follow the cycle of life, the circular movement of our bodily functions which means that the laboring activity never comes to an end as long as life lasts, it is endlessly repetitive. (Arendt, 2000: 170–171).

In Arendt’s view, labor stands under the sign of necessity, the necessity of subsisting, and the product of labor exhausts in the reproduction of life. Labor, accordingly, is inherently private and then ‘apolitical’ in the sense that it accounts for the individual’s survival.

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Work, ‘as distinguished from the labor of our bodies, fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice, the world we live in’ (Arendt, 1958: 136). Work thus follows an instrumental logic as human fabrications are destined to be used, and through use, to decay. But fabrications last, they are durable, and it is this durability that bestows objectivity and stability to the world while securing human life against nature. Finally, Arendt defines action as the distinctive human activity that sets things in motion that starts something new. According to her, action and speech – which is intimately connected to action – are profoundly political as these are the only activities that take into account that they are performed in a world with others: ‘action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be in isolation is to be deprived of the capacity to act. Action and speech need the surrounding presence of others’ (Arendt, 1958: 188). Action is performed in the presence of others, those equal to him or her who acts and speaks, and yet distinct from them. In Arendt’s terms action recognizes plurality: being together and yet being distinct from others. In Arendt’s words: ‘speech and action reveal this unique distinctiveness. Through them, men (sic) distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men’ (Arendt, 1958: 176). Action and speech reveal the actors, they ‘show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world’. To Arendt, action never has a predictable outcome as it enters a web of other actors’ actions; rather, it is unpredictable and irreversible, it opens up possibilities, it is all about beginnings. As beginnings, actions are free from motive on one side and from a concrete goal on the other. As aforementioned, action is inherently political as ‘[t]he revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are

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with others and neither for nor against them – that is in sheer togetherness’. (1958: 180) As action enters history, it transcends the limited nature of personal biographies, allowing actors to contribute to the construction of the polis, a polis that outlasts the individual and that is the task of the community. Building on Arendt’s conceptualization of vita activa and drawing from my research in La Juanita, I argue that work could be conceptualized as the Arendtian ‘action’, potentially making it an inherently political phenomenon. Certainly, work in La Juanita means making a living, and it means as well producing t-shirts, bags, or bread and pastry; but it also means to be able to participate in society, expressing certain values such as caring, solidarity, and cooperation that imprint the organization of work in the cooperative: for instance in its openness to the neighbors, their neglect of members’ categories, or when trying to build solidary relationships and integrate different communities (for example through baking Challah bread for the Jewish community in Buenos Aires). Work as action is not a prerogative of Cooperative La Juanita, as the cases of Ariel and Marta working for the bank illustrate. Certainly, political action can be concerned about the Arendtian work and labor, as it was, for instance, for the picketers movements organized when the means of subsistence were at peril. Furthermore, political action can take ‘occasion’ of work, or make it its ‘object’, as several studies have already demonstrated, notably the vast and rich literature on managerial control and workers’ resistance (Fleming and Spicer, 2007; Lawrence and Robinson, 2007; Roscigno and Hodson, 2004). Nevertheless, how work ‘itself’ could be transformed or understood as political action seems a neglected area of study and yet a promising camp for extending our understanding of work (and of resistance). As Vallas (2012) recently put it, work is a central issue for organizations and societies, and it is through work and in the workplace where many social inequalities

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based on race, gender, age, religion, or education are produced and reproduced. Also, he argues that work needs to be considered at the center of politics, especially when we witness all over the world an increasing ‘precarization’ of labor caused by the flexibilization of work and new forms of underemployment, such as part-time jobs, freelance working, temporary contracts, students’ internships, or agency work (Vallas, 2012). As Vallas points out, the ‘precarization’ of labor – or we should say the precarization of life itself – waits for political answers. It is along these lines that I argue that work itself could be part of the answer. But to be part of the answer it needs first to be transformed into political action. I suggest that a possible lead to study how work can be conceived and lived as action – to be itself political action – is to study the conditions that enable this transformation. Far from being conclusive, the case of Cooperative La Juanita suggests that when work is (self-)organized in ways that allow the individual to be oriented towards the future; when relationships are not just instrumental but personal, and then revelatory; when the working community is open; and when work processes are not fixed but allow learning and experimentation, work could be conceived and, more importantly, lived as inherently political action. As aforementioned, according to Arendt (1958), action is characterized by three elements: the fact that it is performed in the presence of others in a sheer togetherness, being unpredictable, and being revelatory. When these elements are granted, the sheer togetherness becomes the polis, the life in common. In the case of Cooperative La Juanita, I suggest, the organization of work and the cooperative’s culture allow these elements to be present. In effect, togetherness is granted through the fact that the cooperative is open and welcoming, to others; it is also achieved through convivial moments that help to create solidary relationships among them and with others. Unpredictability is somehow secured by its openness and also

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emphasized by learning and the future orientation. What’s unusual about the case of the cooperative is that there was never a clear and definite plan of what they wanted to become. It was from their being together, and from their encounters with others that new opportunities arose. Finally, the revelatory nature of action is possible by neglecting instrumental market-like relationships in favor of building and nurturing them in a personal and solidary manner: explaining their projects, telling their story, and inviting others to join. Interestingly, openness allows this revelatory nature to remain personal (contrary to a unified and monolithic account, or monolithic culture) as people who do not share it can leave the cooperative, or can become less engaged. I should note that I do not argue that any kind of work is action; on the contrary, work tends to be – intentionally or unintentionally – organized and structured in ways that impede it becoming (political) action; and thus (political) action can only be around work, making work the ‘object’ or the ‘occasion’ for political action, but not the action ‘itself’. In effect, organizing efforts (and workers’ resistance) can target each of the three characteristics of action. Togetherness can disappear by the ‘social distance’ created by the division of labor and by dehumanizing workers and customers (Marti and Fernandez, 2013). The revelatory nature of action can be jeopardized when workers’ identities (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002), emotions (Hoschchild, 1983), and even esthetics (Leidner, 1993) are ‘managed’ to conform to organizational images, discourses, and standards. Moreover, the revelatory nature of action is forfeited when work is only meant to be instrumental, reduced to the object produced, commodified (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]) and when work is ‘neutralized’ from morality (personal and collective values) to sustain a regime of efficiency and profitability, emptying work of political considerations to ensure mere instrumentality (see Bauman, 1989). Finally, unpredictability is

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compromised through the attempt to fix outcomes, scripts, routines, and roles, by setting targets and incentives to secure them (Roy, 1952, 1960). As studies of resistance have shown, workers contestation could target the same three elements to affirm action and thus humanity. Some of these responses have been well documented: workers’ resistance to managerial discourses that attempt the colonization of their identities (Casey, 1995; du Gay, 1996; Kunda, 1992), the creation of ‘cynical distance’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2002, 2003), the affirmation of alternative identities (Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Fournier and Grey, 1999; Knights and McCabe, 2003; McCabe, 2008; Whittle, 2005); workers’ attempts to challenge targets (Mars, 1982; Prasad and Prasad, 1998), to reinterpret scripts and roles (Roy, 1952; Sallaz, 2009; Scott, 1990) or workers affirming part in a wider community to sustain their contribution to the polis (Mangan, 2009). I argue that by looking at the different mechanisms through which these three elements of action are affirmed or neglected, we can determine how they become the object of contestation, and how they motivate organizational practices which can enrich our understanding of agency in organizations. By these means, we might be able to think of organizational forms and institutional settings that allow, even facilitate, work to become action. Moreover, by having a better understanding of how these elements fit together we can prevent a fragmented view of resistance. As Huault et  al. (2014) suggest, this allows us to think about emancipation beyond either micro or macro accounts to explore how collective struggles can transform what is sensible and possible. When work becomes action it becomes powerful, it unleashes the power of human agency. The outcome of this (re)gained agency was a workers’ cooperative that was created to work and through work; it is in these terms that I suggest that its constitution, its fabric, is political. Interestingly, in Cooperative La Juanita they are conscious

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and reflective about power and politics. I quote Soledad’s here, not to bring new data, but to share her reflections about power: I understand power, not as power over another, but as the power of transformation, of constituting… To me, power is a verb, not a noun.4 Of course, you can exert it as if it was one [a noun]. But this has brought us to…. In the end, this is what I want, not the stupid happiness of being rich, I want the fulfillment of the human being. The right to create, to exert my creative potentiality… but when you are totally subjugated, alienated and impoverished, how can you exert that?

As Soledad lucidly expresses, power – in their case achieved by work – is transformative and constitutive; it is, as Courpasson and colleagues proposed, not antagonistic and oppositional, but creative. It is work which allows them to (re)create a community, to transform their lives and open opportunities, offering an alternative to clientelist dependency. By considering work as political action, we are able to reassess the moral consequences of unemployment and the precarization of work (Standing, 2011; Vallas, 2012). Depriving people of labor means depriving them of what constitutes the means of subsistence, impeding the satisfaction of the basic needs of life. At the other end, unemployment and the precarization of work could mean as well silencing people, expelling them from the life in common, and depriving them of a possible means to build one. In Arendt’s words: ‘a life without speech and action is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men’ (1958: 176). To conclude, the examination of the case of Cooperative La Juanita has allowed us to think in new terms about how powerless and disfranchised people can bring about change for themselves and their communities. The story of Cooperative La Juanita, its practices, and the day-to-day lives of its members show people who regained control of their lives, who recovered their capacity to act, and to do it collectively. The cooperative they managed to create gave them

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the space to find each other, to open a dialogue between themselves and others, and to encounter, this being together allowed them to do new things breaking the ties of clientelist politics and to become actors. Their story reminds us of Whitehead’s (1929: 8) proposition: ‘the function of reason is to promote the art of life’, that is, ‘the three-fold urge: (1) to live, (2) to live well, (3) to live better’. In the case of the members of the cooperative, to live better is not about the material conditions, but to be full members of society, with their own voice(s) and contributions: it’s about being able to express their dignity.

Notes  1  David Courpasson, personal conversation.  2  Pickets became the new form of social protest in Argentina: between 1997 and 2000 there had been 775 roadblocks; in 2002, when the crisis reached its most dramatic momentum, there were 2,336 (Massetti, 2009). It is difficult to know the exact figure of how many picketers there were in Argentina in the late 90s and beginning of the 2000s, but estimates establish that the number was between 250,000 and 300,000.  3  One hundred thousand work plans were distributed during Menem’s government (1989–1999), 90% of them through local governments. During de la Rua’s government (1999–2001), the number of plans doubled. After the fall of de La Rua, Duhalde’s government extended the distribution up to 2.3 million plans that were called Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar. At that time almost half of the Argentine population lived below the poverty line.  4  In Spanish, ‘poder’ could be used both as a verb (in English, can) and as a noun (in English, power).

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of Worker Resistance. American Sociological Review, 69: 14–39. Roy, Donald (1952). Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop. American Journal of Sociology, 67(2): 427–42. Roy, Donald (1960). ‘Banana Time’: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction. Human Organization, 18(4): 158–68. Sallaz, Jeffrey (2009). The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sassen, Saskia (2014). Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, James C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Ann Arbor, MI: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. (2012). Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sennett, Richard (1998). The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of the New Capitalism. New York: Knopf. Silverman, David (1970). Theory of Organizations: A Sociological Framework. New York: Penguin Books. Standing, Guy (2011). The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Stoker, Gerry (2006). Explaining Political Disenchantment: Finding Pathways to Democratic Renewal. The Political Quarterly, 77(2): 184–94. Summers Effler, Erica (2010). Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Svampa, Maristella and Pereyra, Sebastián (2009). Entre la ruta y el barrio. La experiencia de las organizaciones piqueteras. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Townley, Barbara (1993). Performance Appraisal and the Emergence of Management. Journal of Management Studies, 3(2): 221–38. Vallas, Steven (2012). Work. A Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The Function of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whittle, Andrea (2005). Preaching and Practicing Flexibility: Implications for Theories of Subjectivity at Work. Human Relations, 58(10): 1301–322. Zarazaga, R. (2013). Brokers Beyond Clientelism: A New Perspective Through the Argentine Case. Latin American Politics and Society, 56(3): 23–45.

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23 Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China X u e g u a n g Z h o u a n d Yu n A i

We shall know that a new era has begun not when a new elite holds power or a new constitution appears, but when ordinary people begin contending for their interests in new ways. (Charles Tilly 1986: 9)

People all over the world pursue their interests and resist what they see as social injustice. The specific forms they take in their pursuit and resistance vary across institutional contexts and over time, where different bases of governance – or power regimes – set different constraints and opportunity structures, and provide different repertoires of strategies for their collective action. In this light, an inquiry into changes in the specific forms of resistance over time sheds light on variations in the link between mobilization for resistance and the bases of governance in a society. In this chapter, our primary focus is on the relationship between the two in the context of rural China in the post-Mao era. Specifically, we examine changes in the forms of resistance and their implications for

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the evolving bases of governance in rural China since the late 1970s. China provides a distinct case for the study of resistance because of its diverse and rapidly changing contexts. Most studies tend to focus on a society with relatively stable and/ or coherent bases of governance, such as the traditional society in James Scott’s Malaysian village, or specific episodes or events in a historical era, such as the Civil Rights Movements in the US or large-scale popular contentions in the former Soviet Bloc. In China, rapid institutional changes since the 1980s have generated the coexistence of multiple and often competing institutions as the bases of governance – authoritarian vs liberalization, planning vs markets, traditional values vs post-modern rhetoric. As a result, patterns of resistance tend to be multifaceted, sometimes parallel to, sometimes interrelated with, and sometimes at odds with, one another. Needless to say, the vast size and diversity within China have added

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more complexities in the contrasting and interactive patterns of resistance within as well as across regions. Another interesting aspect of the case of China is that the evolution of governance in the country over the last three decades represents a pattern distinct from other parts of the world in modern history. Tilly’s (1986) work focused on the long historical process of the expansion of the central authority in France, in light of transitions from segmented local interests to the rise of a modern state and a capitalist economy involving highly interdependent and coordinated activities. His emphasis was on the gradual receding of the former and the expanding role of the latter. In contrast, institutional changes in China in general, and in rural China in particular, have undergone a grand trend of change in the opposite direction, i.e., moving from a singular center of authority to more diverse and multi-centered governance. New patterns of resistance provide clues to understanding the direction and extent of institutional changes in China. A central theme of this chapter is to make sense of the patterns of resistance arising from disparate bases of governance, and how they are interconnected and interact with one another. We argue and demonstrate that the observed patterns of resistance suggest fundamental changes in the bases of governance rather than the resilience of the authoritarian state in the course of China’s ongoing institutional changes. This chapter is organized as follows. We begin with a brief introduction to the institutional context – rural China in transformation – to familiarize the reader with the stable institutional structures and to identify the key issues for discussion. We then outline some relevant theoretical insights that help understand patterns of resistance in a comparative perspective. Our main focus is on the discussion of different forms of resistance in rural China, interactions among them, and their relationship to the bases of governance in China today. We conclude this chapter by considering

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the implications of these observed patterns for understanding the extent of institutional changes versus that of authoritarian resilience in China.

INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: RURAL CHINA IN TRANSFORMATION China has witnessed great transformation in the post-Mao era, in which rural China occupies a particular position. It is not exaggerating to say that rural China has been both the barometer and the catalyst of these changes. Between the establishment of the People’s Commune in the late 1950s and the late 1970s, rural China entered an era of collective farming where major decision rights were taken away from villagers and put in the hands of the centralized authority and their local agents – those officials at township and village levels (Chan et  al. 1992, Friedman et al. 1991, 折晓叶、艾云 2014). The collectivization process was accomplished with effective political organization and mobilization (Liu 2006). Governance based on the centralization of authority suppressed open resistance of any form through a series of political campaigns, class labeling, and persistent political control. As a result, individuals had to resort to ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985) in everyday resistance, often shown in the form of ‘collective inaction’ (Zhou 1993). That is, instead of open protests, villagers used those forms of resistance characteristic of small-scale, lowkey, informal and individual-based actions, such as passive participation, noncooperation, and the lack of enthusiasm toward state policies. The land reform in rural China in the late 1970s initiated China’s reform era, when collectively owned land was de facto privatized in the form of long-term lease to the villagers’ households. Along with the decollectivization process, rural governance was fundamentally altered, as the collective

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governance in villages dwindled and villagers gained greater autonomy in farming activities and everyday decision-making processes. This does not mean that the village collective or Chinese government has retreated from the scene. Despite great variations across regions, the village collective, in the form of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee and village administrative committee, still exists and functions in managing collective assets and serving as the institutional link between the village and the government. During this period, the government made various attempts to hold on to its control over villages in order to collect agricultural taxes and fees, implement state policies such as family planning and, more recently, infuse state farming subsidies and land seizure for urban development (折晓叶、艾云 2014). Over the past three decades, along with the various forms of governance practiced in rural China, relationships among villagers, the village collective, and the state evolved, often in turbulent twists and turns. These changes are important contextual information for us to make sense of different forms of resistance in rural China (Perry and Mark 2003).

The Historical Trajectory of Change These changes did not take place in a linear trajectory. Instead, they have evolved as part of interactions among changes in the institutions and in governance practice, shifts in state policies, and responses from the villagers in the decollectivization era. In the Mao era, as is well known, villagers were organized into the People’s Commune, villages became production brigades. The historically unprecedented extent of organization in rural areas disrupted the traditional ways of problem solving and conflict resolution in rural China and directly linked peasants with the state (Oi 1989). Consequentially, forms of resistance were also transformed. Under the tight political control and organizational

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weapons of the state, open protests became rare and villagers adopted a variety of hidden forms of resistance, such as the evasion of public duties, a lack of motivation in their work, and the pursuit of self-interests in quasi-market activities, such as disguised private farming and underground market transactions (Zhou 1993, 高王凌 2006). In the early stage of the decollectivization era, between the late 1970s and early 1990s, an impressive rise in agricultural productivity greatly lifted the living standards of the rural population. Along with decollectivization, to a great extent the Chinese state, as represented by its local governments, withdrew from rural areas, which in turn reduced tensions and conflicts in the rural areas. This was a relatively peaceful period in rural China, with a low degree of tensions or conflicts, which tended to be isolated and small in scale. Between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, as the central government increased its pressure to extract resources from rural areas, there was a sharp rise in agricultural taxes and fees, which instigated strong, often violent, resistance from the villagers. There was large-scale resistance to tax collection and other related government policies (周雪光、艾云 2010). Since the abolition of agricultural taxes in the mid-2000s, rural China entered a new era of relative loose coupling between villages and the state; as a result, the tide of resistance also receded. New forms of village governance, especially village elections, also directed villagers’ grievances and complaints into institutionalized channels of conflict resolution. However, this era has been disrupted again in recent years as the pace of urbanization quickens and activities such as land seizure and migration fuel tensions and conflicts between villagers and the Chinese state. To sum up, relationships among the state, local governments, and villagers have evolved considerably over time in the post-Mao era, exhibiting multifaceted processes and directions of institutional changes. Patterns

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of resistance in rural China provide glimpses into and shed light on the evolving bases of governance and power relations in China’s great transformation.

BASES OF GOVERNANCE AND FORMS OF RESISTANCE: THEORETICAL ARGUMENTS In studying four centuries of popular struggle in France, Charles Tilly (1986) developed a line of theoretical arguments that link forms of resistance with the larger institutional context. He argued that the rise of a capitalist economy and the modern state in the nineteenth century produced the ‘proletarianization’ of society, engendered widespread discontent, and transformed disparate, isolated, and local conflicts and revolts to the macro, national level. Specific forms of resistance came from the repertoire of strategies in mobilization and collective action in the institutional context. Birnbaum (1988) focused on relationships between types of regimes and variations in collective action and empirically examined this causal model in different societies. His findings demonstrate that collective action cannot be fully understood without incorporating the state into the theoretical models. In a similar light, the importance of institutional contexts has been emphasized in the literature on social movements and other forms of resistance (McAdam et  al. 1996, Migdal 2001, Tarrow 1989). This line of argument has been explicitly or implicitly echoed in other studies as well. James Scott (1985), in his study of the weapons of the weak, made a similar argument. Social groups who lack resources or organizing capacities have to resort to other means of resistance, such as gossip and passive noncooperation to voice their complaints and resist what they see as social injustice. Drawing on Lukes’ (2005) conceptualization of power, Gaventa (1980) situated his study of

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‘quiescence and rebellion’ in an Appalachian valley to examine ‘how power shapes participation patterns of the relatively powerless’ (p. 13). In other words, we need to pay attention to specific institutional contexts, in particular the power relations and repertoires of the weapons of the weak, in order to make sense of different forms of resistance, and interpret them meaningfully. Research on China in this area followed two somewhat discernable lines of research. One line tends to focus more on the specific institutional context and make sense of the variety of resistance on the bases of local knowledge. Many studies in Chinese belong to this category, as we will review and discuss below. Another line tends to use some theoretical frameworks – such as models of collective action or arguments about governance based on the rule of law – to interpret different forms of resistance. Political scientist Yongshun Cai (2010) examined the conditions under which collective resistance takes place and the likelihood of success and failures in popular contention. In his analytical framework, he distinguishes the central and local governments and sees them as having different preferences and costs, leading to different response strategies toward popular contention. Social movement organizers may exploit these differences and gain leverage by appealing to the higher authorities. In this light, the presence of various forms of resistance has been interpreted as the resilience of the authoritarian state, which ‘allows its citizens to use conflict-resolution mechanisms while preventing [them from using] … non-institutionalized or illegal modes of action to pursue their interests’ (Cai 2008: 89). O’Brien and Li (2006) interpret waves of popular contention in recent years as inspired and mobilized on the bases of emerging legal weapons for the weak (Li and O’Brien 1996, 2008). This line of argument was also consistent with patterns of resistance in the form of consentful contention in the former Soviet-style regimes (Straughn 2005).

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Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China

In the Chinese context, Zhou (1993) developed an institutional argument that emphasized how the institutional structure of the authoritarian state in China shaped the forms and directions of individual actions as well as the opportunity structures, and consequentially systematically transformed unorganized interests into collective action. He proposed that the centralization of authority shaped similar life chances, sharing experiences among different social groups, and thereby lowering group barriers for mobilization. The centralized authority also cultivates similar grievances at different localities and work units, and channels these grievances toward the same target – the state and their local representatives. In addition, shifts in state policies and state-initiated political campaigns often provide opportunities for the outbreak of collective action. He also pointed out, in the spirit of Scott’s concept of ‘weapons of the weak’, the role of ‘collective inaction’ in Mao’s China in which individuals adopted noncooperation and passive response to state advocacy in their resistance to political pressures, where the authoritarian state prevailed and institutionalized collective action suppressed. The state still plays a central role in the making of resistance in the post-Mao era (黄冬娅 2011). In an ironic twist, the same theoretic logic also sheds light on the changing patterns of resistance in rural China in the post-Mao era, but in the opposite direction. Simply put, the economic reform in the post-Mao era has greatly altered the institutional bases of governance. For example, the abolishment of collective institutions led to the weakening of political authority in rural areas and the revival of traditional organizations; new institutions of rural governance such as village elections and other forms of coops provide new mechanisms of mobilization. Large-scale migration of peasant labor to urban areas also adds an important role in shaping resistance in rural areas, as it provides an exit option and at the same time imports new means of mobilization into rural

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areas. As the bases of governance evolve and are intertwined with elements of centralization and decentralization, power relationships between the powerful and the powerless have changed, which has reshuffled the repertoire of social protest, making some weapons of the weak more accessible and effective, thereby inducing new forms of resistance. All these changes have been taking place along several fronts at the same time, and they often interact with one another. We now turn to outline these key aspects below. First, in light of the main theoretical arguments on social mobilization and collective action, institutional changes in China have altered several key parameters for collective resistance in terms of the availability of resources and opportunities for mobilization. Along with economic development and greater mobility, there is a great differentiation of social groups and heightened class awareness. For example, the flow of migrant workers gives rise to or strengthens the formation of interest groups based on their hometown origins, worksites, or sectors where they have shared experience. The weakening of the hukou registration system1 opens doors to broad association and spatial mobility among social groups, and significantly enhances their mobilizational capacities. The gradual relaxation of political repression and control in the post-Mao era has steadily reduced the cost of political participation and participation in social protests. With the weakening of political control, opportunities for collective action have also opened up (Solinger 2000). For example, the widespread practice of IOUs – delays in payments – in those sectors where migrant workers concentrate often triggers large-scale social protests demanding payment. Abuse by government officials also triggers social protests, large and small, some spontaneous and some well organized. Over time, opportunities for collective action have also changed, with the past four decades seeing significant variations. In the

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early post-Mao era of the late 1980s, the policy of decollectivization greatly reduced the presence of the political authority in rural life; as a result, tensions between villagers and the state also decreased. The era of resource extraction between the 1990s and early 2000s saw intensive interaction and even confrontation between the central authority, its local government agents, and the villagers, inducing large-scale, open resistance during this period, often in the form of refusal of tax collection and other acts of noncooperation toward government advocacies. Such interactions and tensions have become intensified in the recent era of urbanization over issues related to land seizure, public goods provision, and conflict resolution. Second, the bases of governance have been transformed significantly, inducing new forms of resistance. The single most important reality is that the state is no longer able to play an encompassing role of control over every aspect of the social life. In rural areas, with decollectivization, land was returned to villager households, giving the villagers the decision rights in what to grow, whom to sell to, and at what price. This also freed millions of surplus labor into the pool of migrant workers that flowed to cities near and far. Along with this grand trend, the village collective authority – the village committee and the village party secretary – also played a significantly lesser role than in the collective era, creating alternative venues and social space for interest articulation and mobilization (Zhou 2011). An important consequence is that traditional institutions were revived and new institutions emerged in this era. Traditional institutions such as kinship organizations and informal social networks have revived and expanded. They interact with formal institutions and play a central role in rural governance (Tsai 2007, 杨嵘均 2014, 肖唐镖 2006, 肖唐镖等 2001, 贺雪峰 2009). As new institutions emerged or existing institutions were revived or refurnished into new functions, they have greatly widened the

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venues and alternative mechanisms to voice complaints, to solve problems, and to seek conflict resolution. For example, the emergence of village elections since the late 1980s has gradually become an effective institutional channel, enabling villagers every three years to elect village leaders to represent their interests and to replace those they no longer trust. The increasing importance of xinfang (信访), an official petition mechanism, provides another institutional channel for individuals to have their complaints heard by the higher-level officials. These new institutional mechanisms and forms provide alternative bases of interest articulation. Third, the role of local governments, such as that of township governments (equivalent to the People’s Commune in the Mao era), has also undergone major changes. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, local governments were pressured to extract resources from villagers in the form of agricultural taxes and fees, and to effectively implement state policies such as family planning and taxation. These efforts led to widespread open protests. Since the early 2000s, with the abolition of agricultural taxation, local governments have played a more diverse role across regions and areas, inducing distinctive patterns of popular contention accordingly. Despite these significant changes, one thing is obvious: the state and local governments are still at the center of the solution space, inducing a variety of grievances, conflicts, and challenges in its direction. For example, to meet the goals of ‘social stability maintenance’, the Chinese government adopted multifaceted strategies, including economic incentives, to resolve or cover up social conflicts, or to diffuse conflicts in different directions (Cai 2010, Lee and Zhang 2013). The variety of dispositions and response tactics by local governments in turn have induced multifaceted forms of resistance and mobilization. To sum up, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly China has witnessed a shift from political power-based governance to multicentered governance. This shift is especially

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Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China

evident in rural China, where the grip of political authority has loosened and multifaceted processes have developed to a greater extent than in urban areas. With these changes in the distribution of resources for social mobilization, in opportunity structures, as well as in the changing role of governments as their potential targets, it is not surprising that forms of resistance have evolved significantly in the recent decades. The proceeding discussion provides several lines for us to trace and identify patterns of resistance in rural China. We now turn to empirical observations made over the last four decades. In our discussion below, we first catalogue different forms of resistance and then interpret the interconnections among them.

Forms of Resistance in Rural China: Continuity and Change At the risk of oversimplification, we characterize the following general trends of changes in forms of resistance in rural China in the post-Mao era, in contrast to the forms of resistance in the Mao era. First, there is a shift from hidden, small-scale resistance to more open, large-scale protests; second, there is a rise of new forms of resistance, reflecting the availability of new resources and channels of mobilization. Both trends result from the significant changes in the bases of governance – and power relations – over the last three decades. Below, we take a closer look at several salient forms of resistance in rural China and discuss the relationships between these forms of resistance and the larger context of institutional changes in rural China.

Open, Social Protests The most significant change in forms of resistance in rural China in the post-Mao era is the rise of open, social protests. In the collective era, open protests rarely surfaced in rural China. Violence and conflict

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occasionally erupted (Perry 1985), but more often than not they were not directed at the government authority, and seldom made the news. Since the 1980s, however, open protests or other open forms of protest, such as ‘sit-ins’ in front of local government headquarters, have become a routine phenomenon all over China. Because of the lack of reliable statistics on social protests, it is impossible to make a comprehensive estimate of the extent of open protests in China, especially in rural areas where official records have never been systematic or accurate. But a general, rising trend of open protests over the years is unmistakable. In his study of mass protests including both urban and rural areas, Chen (2009) observed that ‘public protests, officially labeled “mass incidents” (群体性 事件), have accelerated dramatically since the mid-1990s, growing almost fourfold in the period between 1993 and 1999, and tenfold between 1993 and 2005’ (p. 88).2 In the Mao era, social movements outside the institutional channels were rare because of tight political control as well as positive incentives for compliance in the webs of organizations (Walder 1986). In this light, the presence of large-scale open protests signaled a significant departure from Mao’s power regime. As we noted before, the rise of open social protest has resulted from the confluence of several grand trends in China. The relaxation of political repression has greatly reduced the costs of participation in social movements. Rapid, large-scale social changes cultivated grievances in all corners of society, from family planning and tax collection, to land seizure, and especially the widespread abuse of power at local levels. At the same time, the emergence of a civil society and the availability of social resources provide greater mobilizational capacities for the powerless. We should be cautious in interpreting the nature of these episodes of open protests. They tend to be more spontaneous, temporary, and short-lived. Often, they take

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the form of ‘riots’, or ‘the participation of those who do not have direct stake in the incidents’ (于建嵘 2010). For example, in the ‘Weng-an incident’ in Guizhou Province in 2008, a female student’s death was ruled ‘suicide’ by the local police. But the suspicion of the abuse of power and a police cover-up triggered a large-scale demonstration. Within half an hour of walking to the county government compound, the demonstration of a few dozen grew to more than a thousand; within the next few hours, more than 20,000 gathered, which led to confrontations and riots.3 Similar episodes took place in many other areas as well. Clearly, the form of such local protests reflects less the legitimation and institutionalization of social movements as an effective means of resistance; rather, they erupt from time to time largely as a result of the weakening power of political control. Village election If open protest is at one end of the spectrum along which forms of resistance are distributed, at the other end is the institutionalized form of village election. Since the late 1980s, a new form of governance has emerged on the horizon of rural China – the institution of village election. The central government adopted the new governance form of village election to allow villagers to elect the members of their own village committees to govern village affairs. Historically, village affairs were governed by the CCP committee appointed from a top-down process, and the village committee played a subordinate role in village governance. The 20 or so years of village election have gradually changed the landscape of rural governance (O’Brien and Han 2009). Of course, the process was by no means a linear one of progress toward democracy. There were frustrations, chaos, and setbacks over the course of the development of village election. We draw on our own study to illustrate this process. In one township of 27 villages in Northern China, village election has evolved in three phases over the last

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20 or so years (Zhou 2009, 周雪光、艾云 2010). In the early years of village election, the party committee’s dominance still prevailed and village election was at best an act of window dressing that no one took seriously. In the second phase, especially in response to the increasing taxation burdens of the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when widespread large-scale rural protests erupted, village election became a ground for social mobilization in resistance to topdown resource extraction. Villagers organized themselves to elect their own leaders and spokesmen, and in this process challenged the CCP authority in the rural areas. In one village, a villager proclaimed that, if he were elected, he would lead the village to resist the government effort in tax and fee collection; he was duly elected as the village head, despite the township government’s manipulation and intervention. In other cases, conflicts within villages disrupted the village election process. Over the years, peasants have learned to use village election as an institutional channel to pursue their own interests and to voice their complaints. In the third phase of the process since the mid-2000s, along with the abolishment of agricultural taxation and with the village election as an institution firmly in place, villagers gradually learned to make use of village elections to select those cadres that could best represent their interests. In one village there used to be severe tensions between two kinship factions. One faction tried numerous times to disrupt the village election process so as to prevent the opposite side from being elected as the village leader. However, with the institutionalization of village election over time, the majority of the villagers organized themselves into a stable coalition to ensure that village election was carried out and their voices heard. Gradually, village election became stabilized, disruptions disappeared, and the pursuit of interests evolved ‘from disruptive confrontation to ordered competition’, as one township government official observed.

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Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China

The evolution of village election reflected the larger processes of institutional change in rural governance in China, and corresponding changes in forms of resistance. Since Mao’s collectivization era of the late 1950s, rural China had been under the repressive political control of the state (Friedman et al. 1991). As a result, open protest was suppressed and only tacit resistance (collective inaction) was involved. In the post-Mao decollectivization era, villagers gained autonomy in agricultural activities, and the political grip on rural life has been gradually loosened. The emergence of village election provided a legitimate channel for villagers to voice their interests and concerns. These changes in the bases of rural governance have generated new forms of resistance through new institutional channels.

Negotiating the Boundaries: Alternative Forms of Resistance Between the extremes of open protest and institutionalized village election, there lie a variety of activities that villagers use to voice grievances and resist injustice in their everyday life. Along with the decentralization of rural governance, the abuse of power at the local level has become rampant. In response, the central authority has gradually allowed greater room for contention against the local abuse of power, and new legal institutions, rules, and regulations have gradually become accessible to the rural population, leading to different forms of collective action (Cai 2010, O’Brien 2002). Villagers make use of these symbolic as well as other resources to resist what they see as injustice; in so doing, they renegotiate the boundaries between the powerful and the powerless. Below, we discuss a few forms that are well documented in the literature.

Rightful Resistance: The Case of Xinfang (信访) As the basis of social protests varies significantly, so do scholars’ interpretations of them.

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One line of argument emphasizes the use of legal rights to challenge the abuse of power (O’Brien and Li 2006). According to O’Brien (1996: 33): Rightful resistance is a form of popular contention that (1) operates near the boundary of an authorized channel, (2) employs the rhetoric and commitments of the powerful to curb political or economic power, and (3) hinges on locating and exploiting divisions among the powerful. In particular, rightful resistance entails the innovative use of laws, policies, and other officially promoted values to defy ‘disloyal’ political and economic elites. It is a kind of partially sanctioned resistance that uses influential advocates and recognized principles to apply pressure on those in power who have failed to live up to some professed ideal or who have not implemented some beneficial measure.

Note that the very presence of resistance independent of the officials indicates a significant departure from the Mao era, when all symbolic power was tightly controlled by the government officials and their representatives. This is indicative of the great dispersion of symbolic resources in the postMao era that become available to individuals and social groups for mobilization and contention. We now focus on one particular form of rightful resistance, the so-called xinfang (or shangfang 上访), or ‘letter petition’, which is a distinct form of grievance resolution beyond the boundary of local work units. Individuals are allowed to write their petition and grievances to the higher authority. This has been an institutionalized form of grievance procedure since the early days of the People’s Republic of China, and official xinfang bureaus were set up at different levels of public administration to receive and process such grievances. But it did not play a prominent role in the Mao era, because the strong organizations of workplace often dealt with these grievances before they arose beyond local boundaries. But situations have changed significantly in the reform era. With the weakening of the work units under official control, and the weakening of local authorities in rural areas,

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problem-solving capacities at the local levels have declined drastically. As a result, xinfang has become an increasingly popular strategy of filing complaints in China. Moreover, individuals go beyond merely writing letter petitions; many spend much of their life visiting these xinfang bureaus at different levels day after day, up to the highest xinfang bureau in Beijing, generating visible and tremendous pressures upon the political authority. Although there is a noticeable shift from covert action to more vocal, open resistance, weapons of the weak are still widely practiced in rural areas. Partly because of the difficulty of organizing for resistance and partly because it is less costly nowadays to engage in individual-centered resistance, we observe more instances of individual-based but persistent resistance. Xinfang has merged as a popular strategy in this context. This trend has accelerated in the last decade as the Chinese leaders emphasized that ‘stability maintenance’ (维稳) was the priority of the local governments. In this light, xinfang activities have often been treated by governments at all levels as a threat to social order, or the coded words ‘stability maintenance’. As a result, local governments spent tremendous time and energy to silence grievances by all means (吴毅 2007, 欧阳静 2011). In one township in the mid-2000s, one third of the staff of the township government worked on xinfang-related issues (申端锋 2010). There is a sizable literature on xinfang in rural areas. Earlier studies focused on the rightful resistance or weiquan (protecting one’s rights), in particular those weak groups that resorted to rightful means such as xinfang to voice their grievances and protect their rights. Yu Jianrong (于建嵘 2006) provided a case of rightful resistance in rural areas of Hunan Province. In this case, the leaders of popular contention aimed at the larger goal of protecting the villagers’ rights in voicing their opinions as well as their interests, and engaged in mobilization to challenge local cadres. To do this they made use of the legal rights and procedures and drew from cultural

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resources such as those role models of resistance in history. These instances of resistance are not only rightful but also tactical. That is, villagers use both ‘reason’ and ‘law’ and other tactics in their interactions with authorities so as to gain an upper hand in their ‘negotiations’ (覃琮 2013). In this sense, xinfang is an intriguing, or one may say, twisted form of resistance. That is, it seeks solutions within the bounds of institutional rules by violating these rules. The main strategy is to draw the attention of the higher authorities to intervene into local problems. Since the institutional channel of xinfang was not intended to solve problems and is not capable of doing so, the best one can hope for is to draw the attention of the higher authorities to the local issues beyond the xinfang channel. For many who resort to xinfang, it provides a legitimate channel to get one’s voice heard, a weapon of the weak to defy and challenge the local authority, with or without local problems solved or justice done. As a result, more symbolic actions such as large-scale public petition and repeated appeals are used to move beyond the boundary of xinfang in order to get the attention of, and induce interventions from, the higher authorities. Since xinfang is one of the very few legitimate channels of voicing grievance, there are variations of xinfang activities for other purposes. In recent years, scholars have paid attention to so-called interests-driven xinfang; that is, an increasingly large number of individuals use the grievance procedure as ‘hostage taking’ to force local authorities to give in and provide better terms in problem solving (郭伟和 2014). Since the early 2000s, the central government leadership has put a great emphasis on ‘stability maintenance’. Xinfang has been used as the barometer of the effectiveness of stability maintenance to evaluate local officials’ performance. That is, a higher level of xinfang incidents was viewed by the higher authority as the ineffectiveness of local officials in governance, which may negatively affect

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Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China

their career advancement. As a result, some individuals used the act of xinfang as a threat in their bargaining with local authorities, to gain material compensation and job opportunities, among other benefits. Xinfang became a strategy to generate political pressures upon local authorities to pursue private interests (田先红 2012).

Neither Rights Nor Interests: The Logic of Appropriateness Legal rights and interests are not the only bases of resistance. Another important source of resistance is lunli (伦理), a Chinese expression of the social norms and expectations associated with one’s social roles. Violation of these norms and expectations arouses resentment and grievances, and provides a basis for popular contention. This line of argument resembles the logic of appropriateness in everyday life and contention in response to injustice, which is different from either rightful or utilitarian orientation. In a series of studies (应星 2007a, 应星 2007b, 应星 2009), sociologist Ying Xing explored grassroots mobilization and advocated a line of argument that focused on lunli (伦理), or the logic of appropriateness, which is embedded in the local cultural and moral context. He emphasizes the repertoire at the grassroots level, especially the role of the socalled grassroots leaders, who do not fully accept elites or unorganized grassroots individuals. Instead, they have their own goals and logic of action. Their grassroots mobilizations are characteristic of expediency in interest expression, duality in organization, and ambiguity in political orientation. His case studies revealed that collective action often arose spontaneously without careful organization. The grassroots leaders do not fit the typical ‘elite’ label in that (1) they do not have upward mobility opportunities; and (2) their identity is not always clear, some overlapping, some independent of, the official sphere of power (e.g., village committee).

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Their logic of political action is carefully disguised to avoid directly challenging the political authority that may induce political repressions. The importance of the logic of appropriateness in social mobilization and resistance is also echoed in other studies. Sociologist Zhe (折晓叶 2008) discussed what she called ‘the resilient weapon of the weak’, i.e., those moral claims and justifications, in the mobilization of nonconfrontational resistance. Some scholars also proposed similar ideas of noncontentious politics (陈锋 2014). For example, when implementing government policy on road construction, a village incurred heavy collective debts and led to the depletion of collective assets. These public projects, poorly managed, aroused strong resentment among the villagers, who engaged in noncooperation by refusing to take part in the payment of collective debt. When the village leader attempted to sell collective land on which an abandoned temple was sited to alleviate collective debts, the villagers voiced their grievance and resistance by calling for the restoration of the temple, and gathered a total of over RMB30,000 in donations overnight from all over the village, defeating the village leader’s efforts (Zhou 2012). It is interesting to note that lunli-based norms and expectations have always been part of everyday life in the Chinese culture, but its role in mobilizing for popular contention has become significant and salient only in recent years. Its effectiveness is related to the larger processes of institutional change, especially the shift from political power-based to multicentered governance, where norms, expectations, and noncooperation have become increasingly important. Varied as these different forms and motivations may be, their behaviors share a salient characteristic; that is, they are all directed toward the state and its local representatives, either in contention or in search for solutions. This recognition highlights the distinctive institutional context of China, where the central government is seen as the

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center for problem solving and conflict resolution. This also points to another key feature of the larger institutional context, that is, relative to other social groups or institutions, the governments and their local representatives still hold considerable authority and resources in addressing various social and economic issues at local levels.

Other Forms of Resistance: The Role of Social Media and Technology In recent years, the advance in communication technology and social media has introduced new dynamics in state–society interactions and in forms of resistance. On the one hand, new communication technology greatly extends the reach of the state in advocating its policies and political communication, and broadens its legitimate bases for governance. On the other hand, these officially stated claims and rationale may be at odds with the actual implementation processes and local adaptations. Moreover, communication technology and social media can also become the weapons of the weak by allowing their voices to be heard and their complaints coordinated (Yang 2013). Of course, relative to urban China, rural China is considerably less wired and has less access to the communication technology. But if urban China is indicative of the general trend, the significance of new communication technology and social media no doubt will play an increasingly critical role in new forms of resistance. Indeed, communication technology and media have already been playing an important role in the organization of resistance in rural areas. The Wukan case below provides an excellent example in which both official media and international media played their salient roles in instigating, mobilizing, and perpetuating popular contention. Even in everyday life, media are now playing a larger role than before. In our fieldwork, we often heard local officials complaining that the villagers knew too much about their civil and legal rights, making it difficult for local

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officials to implement policies in a flexible way and to get things done at will. On the occasion of village elections, defiant villagers often held a copy of the village election law to challenge local officials’ manipulation of election procedures. On those occasions involving negotiations between local officials and villagers over issues such as the public use of private property (e.g., site of electricity tower in one’s field), or government subsidies to villager households, villagers became informed of the specific policies and regulations through the Internet, and they used this knowledge to challenge those behaviors of the local officials that are at odds with state policies.

An illustration: the Wukan case In the proceeding discussion, we have touched a range of issues, from state policies, local governments, to traditional organizations at the village level. To put these different pieces together, we now take a closer look at a major case of collective action in one village against the abuse of power by village cadres. This episode has been widely published in the Chinese social media. The main materials below are drawn from an elaborate investigative report by the research group from the School of Public Administration at Tsinghua University (清华大学公共管理学 院社会管理创新课题组 2012). Wukan is an administrative village in Guangdong Province. In April 2009, an anonymous flier circulated that charged the village cadres with corrupt behaviors. It triggered waves of discussions and mobilization among the villagers. Social media was used for self-organization under the official radar. The problems and issues had been accumulating over the previous two decades, as collective land was contracted or sold out without proper compensation to the members of the village. Another set of issues was related to an inappropriate village election through which the current cadres were put into office.

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Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China

As some of the land leases neared their expiration dates, interested parties wanted to take part in sharing the benefits of future land use. Disputes over the use of collective land resurfaced as a result. The mobilization led to a series of xinfang between June 2009 and March 2011, and these collective efforts proved to be unsuccessful in resolving the problems. Frustrations then turned to an effort to organize collective protest among the dissatisfied villagers. In September 2011, the villagers took to the street charging the village officials with corruption and abuse of power in land development, and held their protest in front of the city government. The demonstration erupted into violence, causing damage to the properties of the developers. Local police intervened and four organizers were arrested. The arrest led to more protests and confrontations between the villagers and police the next day, with more injuries on both sides. The popular contention led to the paralysis of the village government and the emergence of new leaders in village self-organization, operating independently of the local government. During this period of time, self-organized village representatives negotiated with local officials to resolve corruption cases, but the responses from local government were seen as being far short of meeting the key demands of the villagers, especially regarding land development. In response, the protest leaders organized a new round of protest events, which led to another collective xinfang on November 21, 2011. The demonstration was well organized, peaceful, and orderly. But the official news report was so biased that villagers were outraged, and they decided to organize their own media conference a few days later in their village, which was attended by a large number of nonofficial media, including international media. These events gave the local government an excuse to claim that the protest was manipulated by the ‘enemy forces’ outside China and the local government took confrontational measures by arresting the protest’s organizers. The arrests, and a

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subsequent death in detention, led to more confrontations between the villagers and local authorities. In December 2011, the provincial government finally intervened and sent a delegation, which resolved this episode by penalizing those involved in the corruption. In the subsequent, open village election, a new group of village leaders were elected, formally closing this dramatic episode that involved extensive as well as intensive interactions between the villagers, and local and provincial governments, as well as involving both domestic and international media. The Wukan episode involved a multitude of events of resistance, confrontation, negotiation, and crackdown. The resistance took different forms, from the weapons of the weak such as gossip and complaint in the early years, to spontaneous organizing, to effective self-organizing, coordinated demonstrations, and negotiations with the governments, to the use of formal institution of village election to reach the final resolutions. These different forms of resistance coexist in the reform era, reflecting the broad, multiple bases of governance in rural China in particular and in China in general. These forms and strategies are already available in the repertoire of response strategies, but their legitimate use and activation are contingent on the evolving conditions that emerge from the interactive processes among the villagers, local elites, and the governments at different levels. It is also worth emphasizing that, although the central authority was not directly involved in this episode, there is no doubt that it has been the central target of social mobilization, either as the direct target or as the implicit, indirect one. However locally situated these actions of resistance were, the reaction of the higher authority, especially that of the top leaders, is the single most important factor on the minds of both those local elites initiating resistance and those local officials dealing with such resistance. Finally, the boundaries among these forms and strategies are fluid and variable, again

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depending on interactions between the participants and the political authorities. Such dynamics of interaction induce different forms of responses in future interactions. To a great extent the use of specific forms of resistance depends on the constraints imposed by the governments. Indeed, as some studies have shown, local governments’ tactics in absorbing local residents into the system of social welfare may mute the rightful resistance (Chuang 2014). The dynamic, interactive process may give rise to different conditions that induce variable, and at times multiple, forms of resistance.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have surveyed different forms of resistance in rural China in the postMao era. In a comparative perspective, there is a large literature on the variety of ways in which the powerless resist the powerful – from social movements, collective action, and riots, to noncompliance and gossip, as illustrated here and in other chapters in this Handbook. How do we locate the varied forms of resistance in rural China in this larger landscape? Forms of resistance provide an insightful lens through which to understand larger issues about power relations between the powerful and the powerless and to make sense of the evolving bases of governance. A central argument developed here is the reciprocal relationship between bases of governance and forms of resistance in rural China: the former provides stable channels of interactions, a repertoire of strategies, and solution spaces, which shape and induce forms of resistance; at the same time, resistance of various forms in turn contribute to changes in the bases of governance in a society. In this light, the various forms of resistance reveal equally various bases on which the political regime governs. These multiple bases shape the

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various venues by which the state comes in touch with the citizens, and the powerful with the powerless, and induce different forms and intensity of resistance. For example, the rightful resistance noted by O’Brien and Li (2006) and consentful contention by Straughn (2005) indicate that, even in a repressive regime, the officially proclaimed rhetoric and rules may serve as a basis for individuals to articulate interests and engage in effective, often open, resistance. At the other extreme, the significance of infrapolitics, or hidden transcripts (Scott 1990), in the forms of gossip and noncompliance implies that these informal, small-scale acts carry political meanings in defiance of the domination of the powerful. Research on the forms of resistance greatly broadens our understanding of the relationship between the powerful and the powerless. Social movement theories tend to focus on overt, organized protests and various tactics. Such strategies and actions are appropriate in a literal, democratic context where the articulation of interests from the bottom up is legitimate, and formal channels are readily available. However, in those contexts where the relationship between the powerful and the powerless is asymmetric, other forms of resistance become more meaningful and less risky that deny or weaken the legitimacy of the political regime, and constrain the arbitrary power of the powerful. This is an important insight, for it directs our inquiry into those areas that are often hidden from the official gaze, those hidden forms of resistance, whose meanings need to be interpreted and whose actions need to be made sense of. By the same logic, an inquiry into the bases of governance helps us identify causal mechanisms that give rise to different forms of resistance. Different bases of governance shape different repertoires of strategies for resistance, as well as attach different costs and returns to these strategies, thereby affecting the likelihood that a strategy is activated.

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The presence of the repertoire, or the specific ‘tools’ available in it, does not necessarily mean that they are equally available for activation. Indeed, in a given space and moment of time, there are different benefits and costs associated with these options; hence the critical importance of opportunity structures. And it is worth noting that opportunity structures are not ‘out there’. Rather, they emerge and evolve as a function of the interactions among the parties involved. Empirically, as we have observed in this chapter, large-scale but uneven institutional changes have led to both temporal and spatial variations in forms of resistance. If the rise of the modern state in European liberal democracies has led to the grand trend of larger, more centrally oriented social movements, the varied forms of resistance in China seems to indicate an opposite direction. Seen in this light, there have been considerable changes in the bases of governance in rural China as reflected in the forms of resistance over the last three decades. Historically, rural China was governed by the so-called minimalist state, and historically a variety of local mechanisms and institutions were in place for problem solving (Huang 2008). In the People’s Republic, the Mao era witnessed the imposition of highly organized collectives as the bases of governance in rural areas, which hence greatly constrained and reshaped the repertoire of strategies for resistance. In the post-Mao era, in contrast, the sheer volume and the variety of forms of resistance in rural China have increased significantly, an indicator of the general relaxation of political control and the emergence of a civil society. Moreover, a variety of institutions have emerged or revived for conflict resolution, ranging from bilateral negotiations, local authority intervention, and arbitration, to lawsuits in the courts, indicating fundamental changes in the bases of governance in rural China. Michelson (2007) found that, most of the time, conflicts are resolved during bilateral negotiations (47%), and only a very small

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minority of the cases will reach the institutional channels of court, judicial offices, or administrative offices. Interestingly, economically distressed regions are more likely to resort to the legal justice system. He proposed a model of the ‘dispute pagoda’ along which both grievances and appeals, and forms of resistance gradually climb up. This model seems sensible in describing conflict resolution in the daily life of rural China, and is corroborated in other studies of conflict resolution in everyday life. Broadly speaking, these diverse paths of institutional channels may have succeeded in diffusing pressures of social inequality and distributional injustice (Whyte 2010). Nevertheless, we have observed, from time to time, large-scale resistance and contention challenging the abuse of power as in the Wukan episode. To return to the issue in Tilly’s quote at the beginning of this chapter: in what ways do the forms of resistance indicate continuity and changes in the bases of governance in China? Political scientist Andrew Nathan (2003) developed a line of argument on ‘authoritarian resilience’ to account for the capacities of the authoritarian state in China to adapt to changing conditions so as to survive crises and challenges. His discussion almost entirely focused on the strategies and tactics of the authoritarian state, with remarkable capacities in learning, in flexible adaptation, in institutional building, and in engineering economic growth; in so doing, the authoritarian state was able to gain legitimacy from the citizens through its economic performance. Following a similar logic, Cai (2008) also sees the emergence of the variety of resistance as an indicator of the capacities of the authoritarian state in accommodating political diversity while effectively maintaining its control. Our preceding discussions suggest an alternative interpretation. We argue that the new forms and the larger scale of resistance reflect fundamental changes in the bases of governance in rural China. These changes have compromised and weakened the traditional

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governance of the authoritarian state. In this sense, rural China has witnessed a quiet revolution from below. Take for example the new institution of village election. As the Wukan episode showed, this simple form of participatory democracy became the ultimate basis for conflict resolution among the villagers and between villagers and the political authority. In other instances, e.g., ‘taking hostage’ of local governments through the xinfang mechanism, the widespread resistance to agricultural taxes and fees of the 1990s, and tensions arising in land seizure in the process of urbanization, all these new forms of resistance and contention indicate considerable changes in the bases of governance, and the considerable extent to which the authoritarian nature of the state has been transformed, despite the familiar authoritarian power and even harsh, repressive measures often exercised even today. Instead of the resilience of the authoritarian state, we emphasize the extent to which the authoritarian state is being transformed, as reflected in the extent of change in the diverse bases of governance, and in the patterns of resistance in the everyday life experiences of its villagers and citizens. A focus on patterns of resistance and their implications for the evolving bases of governance direct our attention to substantive social science research, to make sense of how China is governed not only on the basis of the official rhetoric or formal institutions but also, more importantly, on those micro events, dynamics of interactions, and considerable diversities at local levels. In this light, patterns of resistance have far-reaching implications for understanding power relationships and bases of governance, across spaces and over time, in a comparative perspective.

Notes  1  The ‘hukou’ registration system, adopted in the early 1950s, divided the population in China into ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ categories, and prohibited, without official permission, mobility between

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the two categories. The large-scale flow of the migrant workers from rural to urban areas since the 1980s, although on a temporary basis, has greatly weakened the hukou system.  2  See also the unpublished working paper by Chen, Chih-jou Jay. ‘Policing Protest in China: Findings from Newspaper Data’.  3  http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%93%AE%E5% AE%89%E9%AA%9A%E4%B9%B1 (accessed August 4 2016).

REFERENCES Birnbaum, Pierre. 1988. States and Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cai, Yongshun. 2008. ‘Social Conflicts and Modes of Action in China’. The China Journal 59:89–109. Cai, Yongshun. 2010. Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chan, Anita, Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger. 1992. Chen Village under Mao and Deng. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chen, Chih-jou Jay. 2009. ‘Growing Social Unrest and Emergent Protest Groups in China’. Pp. 87–106 in Rise of China: Beijing’s Strategies and Implications for the AsiaPacific, edited by H.-H. M. Hsiao and C.-Y. Lin. London and New York: Routledge. Chuang, Julia. 2014. ‘China’s Rural Land Politics: Bureaucratic Absorption and the Muting of Rightful Resistance’. China Quarterly 219: 649–69. Friedman, Edward, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden. 1991. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gaventa, John. 1980. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Huang, Philip C.C. 2008. ‘Centralized Minimalism: Semiformal Governance by Quasi-Officials and Dispute Resolution in China’. Modern China 34(1): 9–35. Lee, Ching Kwan and Yonghong Zhang. 2013. ‘The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China’. American Journal of Sociology 118(6):1475–508.

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Li, Lianjiang and Kevin J. O’Brien. 1996. ‘Villagers and Popular Resistance in Contemporary China’. Modern China 22(1):28–61. Li, Lianjiang and Kevin J. O’Brien. 2008. ‘Protest Leadership in Rural China’. The China Quarterly 193:1–23. Liu, Yu. 2006. ‘Why Did It Go So High? Political Mobilization and Agricultural Collectivization in China’. The China Quarterly (September) 187:732–42. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View (2nd edn). London: Palgrave. McAdam, Doug, John D. McCarthy and D. Meyer, eds. 1996. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movement. New York: Cambridge University Press. Michelson, Ethan. 2007. ‘Climbing the Dispute Pagoda: Grieviences and Appeals to the Official Justice System in Rural China’. American Sociological Review 72:459–85. Migdal, Joel S. 2001. State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nathan, Andrew. 2003. ‘Authoritarian Resilience’. Journal of Democracy 14(1):6–17. O’Brien, Kevin. 1996. ‘Rightful Resistance’. World Politics 49(1):31–55. O’Brien, Kevin J. 2002. ‘Review: Collective Action in the Chinese Countryside’. The China Journal 48:139–54. O’Brien, Kevin J. and Rongbin Han. 2009. ‘Path to Democracy? Assessing Village Elections in China’. Journal of Contemporary China 18(60). O’Brien, Kevin J. and Lianjiang Li. 2006. Rightful Resistance in Rural China. New York: Cambridge University Press. Oi, Jean C. 1989. State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Perry, Elizabeth J. 1985. ‘Rural Violence in Socialist China’. The China Quarterly 103:414–40. Perry, Elizabeth J. and Mark Selden eds. 2003. Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (2nd edn). New York: Routledge. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Solinger, Dorothy. 2000. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Straughn, Jeremy Brooke. 2005. ‘“Taking the State at Its Word”: The Arts of Consentful Contentions in The German Democratic Republic’. American Journal of Sociology 110(6): 1598–650. Tarrow, Sidney. 1989. Struggle, Politics and Reform: Collective Action, Social Movements and Cycles of Protest. Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, Cornell University. Tilly, Charles. 1986. The Contentious French. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tsai, Lily L. 2007. ‘Solidary Groups, Informal Accountability, and Local Public Goods Provision in Rural China’. The American Political Science Review 101(2):355–73. Walder, Andrew G. 1986. Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Whyte, Martin King. 2010. Myth of Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yang, Guobin. 2013. The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. New York: Columbia University Press. Zhou, Xueguang. 1993. ‘Unorganized Interests and Collective Action in Communist China’. American Sociological Review 58: 54–73. Zhou, Xueguang. 2009. ‘Can a Falling Leaf Tell the Coming of the Autumn? Making Sense of Village Elections in a Township,…, and in China’. in Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China’s Tranformation, edited by J. Oi, S. Rozelle and X. Zhou. Stanford, CA: APARC, Stanford. pp. 167–188. Zhou, Xueguang. 2011. ‘The Autumn Harvest: Peasants and Markets in Post-Collectivist Rural China’. China Quarterly (December) 208:911–29. Zhou, Xueguang. 2012. ‘The Road to Collective Debt in Rural China: Bureaucracies, Social Institutions and Public Goods Provision’. Modern China 38(3):271–307. 于建嵘. 2006. ‘当代中国农民维权抗争的行动 取向’. 复旦政治学评论 (4):45–59.

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于建嵘. 2010. 抗争性政治. 北京: 人民出版社. 吴毅. 2007. 小镇喧嚣：一个乡镇政治运作的 演绎与阐释. 北京: 三联书店. 周雪光、艾云. 2010. ‘ 多重逻辑下的制度变迁 ： 一个分析框架’. 中国社会科学 4: 132–150. 应星. 2007a. ‘草根动员与农民群体 利益的表 达机制’. 社会学研究 (2):1–23. 应星. 2007b. ‘ 气’ 与中国乡村集体 行动的再 生产’. 开放时代 (6):106–20. 应星. 2009. ‘气场’ 与群体性事件 的发生机 制’. 社会学研究 (6):105–21. 折晓叶. 2008. ‘ 合作与非对抗性 抵制 ：弱者的’ 韧武器’’. 社会学研究 3: 1–28. 折晓叶、艾云. 2014. 城乡关系演变的制 度逻辑和 实践过程. 北京: 中国社会科学出 版社. 杨嵘均. 2014. ‘ 论正式制度与非正式制度 在乡村治理 中的互动关系’. 江海学刊 (1): 130–37. 欧阳静. 2011. 策略主义：桔镇运作的逻辑. 北 京: 中国政法大学出版社. 清华大学公共管理 学院社会管理 创新课题 组. 2012. ‘ 乌坎事件 始末’. 中国非营利评论 10:1–67.

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田先红. 2012. 治理 基层中国－－桥镇信访 博弈的叙事, 1995–2009. 北京: 社会科学文 献出版社. 申端锋. 2010. ‘ 乡村治权与分类治理：农民上 访 研究的范式转换’. 开放时代 (6):5–23. 肖唐镖. 2006. ‘ 当前中国农村宗族及其与乡村 治理 的关系’. 文史哲 295(4):156–63. 肖唐镖等. 2001. 村治中的宗族：对九个村的 调查与研究. 上 海: 上 海书店出版社. 覃琮. 2013. ‘ 农民维 权获得的理 法抗争及其 理 论解释’. 社会 33(6):93–121. 贺雪峰. 2009. 村治的逻辑－－农民行动单位 的视角. 北京: 中国社会科学出版社. 郭 伟和. 2014. ‘ 作为总体性 社会事 实的农 村社会上访 研究’. 思想战线 40(3):50–8. 陈锋. 2014. ‘ 从抗争政治、 底层政治到非抗 争政治：农民上访 研究视角的检视、 反 思与拓展’. 南京农业大学学报(社会科学 版) 14(1):20–7. 高王凌. 2006. 人民公社时期中国农民’ 反行 为’ 调查. 北京: 中共党史出版社. 黄冬娅. 2011. ‘ 国家如何塑造抗争政治－－关 于 社会抗争中国家角色的研究评述’. 社会 学研究 2:217–42.

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24 Resistance and its Pitfalls: Analyzing NGO and Civil Society Politics in Bangladesh Lamia Karim

To what extent can non-governmental and civil society-based organizations (NGOs/ COs) transform the political landscape when the political sphere is closed to oppositional political parties and other forms of traditional political struggles? This is a difficult question to answer with any empirical certainty given that the existing literature on NGO studies is still in a nascent state (Bernal and Grewal 2014; Kamat and Ismail forthcoming), and social conditions across space provide variable outcomes about the informal political process. What is clear though is that NGOs and COs (often called people’s organizations or POs) are becoming actively engaged in the political process, sometimes explicitly through elections and demonstrations, and at other times, implicitly through programs aimed at silently restructuring the political landscape. This has resulted in the banning of some NGOs in Afghanistan, Russia, China, and Venezuela for example (Carothers and Brechenmacher 2014) and in

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Bangladesh, increased surveillance on foreign-funded NGOs since the late 2000s. NGOs have been conventionally theorized as providing essential goods and services to poor farmers, indigenous people, women, and other marginalized groups. Yet, the role of the NGO in reshaping the political has remained under-analyzed. This paper fills this lacuna. In order to answer the question on the role of NGOs and COs in engaging with the political process through non-traditional avenues, I have relied on two case studies from Bangladesh, a country that was hailed as the heartland of the NGO microfinance movement in the 1990s. Bangladesh is home to some of the most famous NGOs in the world, including the 2006 Nobel Prize winner, the Grameen Bank, and BRAC, the largest NGO in the world. Given its vibrant NGO sector and close connections between NGOs, western donors, and multinational corporations, Bangladesh serves as an exemplar of NGO studies.

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These two case studies span the early and midterm years of democratization in Bangladesh that began in the 1990s. In the first case, I analyze the efforts of the NGO Gono Shahajjo Shangstha (GSS, now virtually defunct) to mobilize poor people to run for public office, which led to conflict with the newly democratizing Bangladeshi state. The second case is an analysis of a movement to prevent open-pit mining by the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Port against the UK-based Global Coal Management Resources (GCM, and formerly known as Asia Energy). Taken together, these two case studies show the spectrum of political action, one undertaken by an NGO at the lowest rung of political office, and the other by a CO/PO against a mining corporation. While GSS failed to achieve its political objective, the National Committee was successful in preventing open-pit mining by GCM. Together, these two cases show how activists organize against a predatory state and corporate power, and the circumstances under which their actions may succeed or fail. In that respect, this paper offers activists interested in resistance studies different modes with which to think of political action across space. The paper is juxtaposed between two theoretical approaches to the study of the nonformal political process: social movements and resistance studies. In South Asia, social movements have resurged in recent years due to the failure of the state to alleviate poverty and the lack of viable alternatives to neoliberal development policies and economic globalization. These movements arise due to a variety of reasons, but they are often linked to issues of inequality and marginality and are a rallying cry against the incursion of capitalist forces that have displaced people, endangered species, and natural habitats. Nash’s comment ‘Social movements in a global ecumene show themselves in a diversity of cultural ways as new social actors invent novel expressions of their causes’ is instructive for this analysis because it shows the multiple ways that activists have to organize, educate, and agitate against

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corporate and state interests (Nash 2005: 1). In analyzing the potential of social movements, it is important to underscore that a social movement is constrained by the power dynamics at work in a society. Non-governmental organizations play a pivotal role in the social movement arena, often mobilizing people and resources against environmental degradation, maintaining people’s access to resources, ensuring women’s rights, and protecting indigenous people’s lands. In many societies, political parties and NGOs are regulated by the state whereas a social movement as a civil society organization (CO) or People’s Organization (PO) falls often outside the framework of state regulations. In those societies, members are usually organized under the rubric of COs/ POs instead of NGOs to bypass legal restrictions (Clark 1998). While my analysis falls within the analytic rubric of a social movement, the idea of resistance is inextricably embedded in it. Chandra reconceptualizes resistance ‘as the negotiation rather than negation of social power’. Subaltern subjects act ‘in pragmatic terms, they act as rational agents with sufficient intention and purpose’ to try and control their circumstances which may not always be progressive politics (Chandra 2015: 1). In analyzing resistance, it would be prudent to remember that resistance can often take extremely retrograde features as recent events in 2015 against Syrian refugees in Europe show. My analysis moves away from ‘ambiguous or ambivalent acts in everyday life’ of foot dragging (Scott 1990) to a site where resistance meets political action for actualization. In order to be a political subject one has to resist domination and subordination, but for resistance to be actualized, it must be grounded in an effective political process.

THE POLITICAL SPHERE Unlike neighboring India, Bangladesh does not have a history of a robust social

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movement. This is due to its long history of military dictatorship, first under Pakistan (1958–1971) and later under Bangladesh (1975–1990), which resulted in the persecution of political dissidents, and the splintering of the left as a viable political alternative. Between 1947 and 1971, Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) was an internal colony of Pakistan. The major political movement during this phase was the 1952 Language Movement (Bhasha Andoolon) that eventually culminated in the independence of Bangladesh. The movement for independence was founded on bourgeois notions of Bengali language, heritage, and cultural forms, and it excluded issues of class, differences between urban and rural society, and landlessness and sharecropping that characterized Bangladeshi agrarian society. During this time, there was a range of left political parties that identified with variations of communist/socialist ideologies (Leninist/Trotskyist/ Maoist for example), but they were largely underground due to persecution by the military regime, and internally fragmented by philosophical disagreements within the top leadership. Consequently, the left was weakened as a collective political force vis-à-vis the centrist political party, the Awami League (AL) that became the face of the liberation movement (Van Schendel 2005). When independence occurred in December 1971, the Awami League government of Bangladesh faced an ‘infrastructural vacuum’ as the country was devastated by nine months of war (Karim 2001). Western donor agencies stepped in with aid, and they preferred the fledgling NGO sector as a dedicated service mechanism to reach people in rural areas. Focusing on NGOs allowed the donors to bypass what they saw as a corrupt and inefficient Bangladeshi state, and directly reach the rural population through a streamlined NGO sector (Kennedy et  al. 1999). Within four years of its independence, Bangladesh was under military rule that ushered in a new era of political repression and economic liberalization.

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Facing persecution, many former left party members and leaders joined the NGO movement to help the poor. The new idiom that entered the political consciousness was that one could work for the poor through alternative routes, such as the conscientization NGO built on Paolo Freire’s ideas of social change through informal group discussions and the formation of oppressed people into groups that would fight for wages, water, and land rights at the local level (Freire 1970). The idea of conscientization or consciousness-raising was based on the notion that illiterate and poor people had the ability to understand and fight for their rights, but they lacked proper awareness of the causes of their deprivation, and an organizational structure through which to address those concerns. Using the model of group training – coming together to discuss issues in a non-hierarchical setting – conscientization taught people about the rural power structure that deprived them of their rights, and how to collectively fight for their entitlements. It was a grassroots approach to collective organization among people who had previously lacked a venue to come together and occupy a shared identity as landless farmers, women, and indigenous people. The three largest NGOs in Bangladesh that were started in the early 1970s (BRAC in 1972, Proshika in 1973, and Grameen in 1976) all had founding documents with similar goals. These NGOs were led by charismatic cult-like figures such as Nobel laureate Yunus of Grameen Bank, Sir Abed of BRAC, and Qazi Faruque of Proshika. These NGO leaders were invested in remaking Bangladesh into a modern society. Their stated objective was to change rural society by transforming its power structure. Interestingly, none of these documents addressed the role of the state as the final guarantor of the rights of its citizens: Poverty was seen by each organization not just a result of income differentials but the whole structure of rural society. The language of the founding documents speak of targeting such structures

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through ‘consciousness-raising’ so that the marginalized population of the villages could be organized into self-reliant groups capable of wresting control of their destinies from the oppressive class structure. (Kennedy et al. 1999: 494).

The transition to military rule in 1975 had a positive effect on the growth of NGOs. In the 1970s, small-scale radical left activities began to occur in rural areas. In neighboring India, the Naxalite movement was gaining strength, and its effects were visible in rural Bangladesh. In an effort to neutralize the left, the military rulers allowed the resource-rich NGOs to work with rural people without hindrance. This had a devastating effect on left political parties since rural people preferred the NGO that gave them loans or other forms of assistance, whereas left parties preached a liberation ideology minus resources, and wanted them to join in a left movement without a clear message of how their enlistment would change their economic lives for the better. The incursion of the NGO into rural politics also increased friction between the conscientization NGOs and the left who fought over rural subscribers, and they viewed each other as potential enemies as opposed to comrades working against the economic oppression of the poor. In the fight between the resource-rich NGO and the left political parties, the left lost out. According to a left activist who was active in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘We would go to the villages and find out that the NGO workers had urged villagers to not come to our meetings. NGOs did anti-left propaganda. Thus, instead of fighting the military state, we fought the NGOs who we saw as depoliticizing our work’ (Karim 2011: 16). Another area of contestation in rural society was between NGOs and the clergy. In 1992–1993, there were nationwide attacks on NGOs by the clergy, who accused the NGOs of bringing rural women out into the public sphere to work with non-kin men, teaching unIslamic values to children, and proselytizing Muslims. The clergy saw the work of

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NGOs as threatening their authority as the moral guardians of rural society and they fought back with devastating consequences for poor women, several of whom were accused of adultery and stoned or burned to death (Shehabuddin 1999). As a consequence of these attacks Grameen Bank and BRAC withdrew from openly challenging rural authorities, and began to work in development activities by accommodating the views of the rural elites. For example, under pressure from the clergy, BRAC removed from its primary school textbooks negative portrayals of the clergy and village headman as oppressors of poor villagers (Karim 2004, 2011). By the 1980s, NGOs had proliferated in Bangladesh, and the NGO lobby was also bifurcated with the more activist NGOs (GSS, Proshika) who saw development work as transforming rural society, and the mainstream NGOs (Grameen Bank, BRAC) that saw development work as bringing capitalism to the poor. However, in the rhetoric of the activist NGOs (Proshika, GSS), the role of the state as the final protector of citizens’ rights was obscured by the lone figure of the evil rural headmen and clergy as the ultimate enemies of the poor. This was compounded by the fact that the headmen and the clergy often came into conflict with the NGOs in their work with rural women. The military preferred the NGO as its development partner in the rural sector. While the NGO focused on in developmental activities, the military consolidated its power base among the middle class in urban areas. In 1990 Bangladesh transitioned to democracy and accelerated market reforms that were originally initiated under military rule in the 1970s. The traditional political parties of Bangladesh, the Awami League (AL), which was associated with the country’s freedom struggle, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), started by the first military dictator, became the key players in this newly democratizing environment. The AL was considered more secular in its ideology and aligned more with India, which had

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helped Bangladesh gain its freedom in 1971, whereas the BNP was seen as more Islamic and representing an anti-Indian stance. But beyond that, the two political parties were similar in their promotion of free market ideology, and in their failure to address the rural power structure that kept resources in the hands of the rural elite (the village headmen). Democratization also had the effect of bringing many people into the public sphere, from fringe religious groups, women’s groups, proliberation forces, and left political parties, all of whom made claims on the ideology of the state – will it be secular or religious, pro-India or anti-India? In this new environment, less attention was paid to the economic framework of a country that was 80 percent rural, largely illiterate, and based on a subsistence economy for the majority of its population. Questions of poverty were placed under the banner of a pro-poor advocacy conducted largely by activist NGOs (GSS, Proshika, Nijera Kori). These NGO leaders advocated democracy by promoting poverty alleviation and organizing their existing rural clientele to lobby for their rights. The left continued to agitate for a greater redistribution of wealth at the national level but they were too small in numbers to make a difference. NGOs also became active in monitoring parliamentary elections, which raised questions about their role in politics. Who were these resource-rich institutions supporting? Would they transfer some of the funds to their chosen candidates (White 1999)? In some local elections, candidates were directly or indirectly funded by NGOs (Hashemi 1990). The removal of the military dictatorship in 1990 brought government bureaucrats who had risen through the ranks into conflict with NGO leaders. These civil servants complained, ‘NGOs command resources that are not available to the state; their scale of operations at times coequal that of the state, … NGOs are largely autonomous in Bangladesh’ (Kennedy et  al. 1999: 493). NGO leaders’ advocacy in state matters created resentment among government officials who saw

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the ‘state’ as their authoritative domain. Government bureaucrats felt that NGO leaders should be subordinated to their authority, and they began to tie up NGO funds in bureaucratic minutiae (Karim 2011: 22–25). In turn, NGO leaders accused the state machinery of holding up project approval and fund disbursements, thereby making it very cumbersome for them to operate. Donors that supported these NGOs voiced similar concerns to the state (ibid.). It was in this climate of tense government–NGO relations that activist NGOs began to enlist their rural subscribers to run in local elections. Simultaneously, activist NGOs (Proshika, Nijera Kori, GSS) began to advocate the government for the redistribution of government land (khas) to the poor and called for a pro-poor budget that would be at least 50 percent reserved for the underclass (Proshika 1998).

NGO GSS AND NATIONAL POLITICS: THE FAILURE TO CHANGE POLITICS In this newly democratizing environment, the activist NGO Gono Shahajjo Shangstha (GSS) moved to a frontal assault on local government and mobilized its members to run in village-level elections to overthrow the rural power structure. In 1992, GSS had contested in five constituencies in Nilphamari District, one of the poorest districts in northern Bangladesh. Initially, government officials and national party leaders had ignored the activities of GSS in organizing the poor to run for public office. But when the first election results came in, it was evident that the GSS members would win all the seats. In one contest, a local day laborer had unseated a middle-class incumbent (Kennedy et  al. 1999: 495). It was at that point it became evident to the local elites and the government that NGOs were no longer providers of services to poor people; they had the resources and the organizational capabilities to defeat

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national party leaders. Local elites and party candidates organized attacks on GSS members, GSS schools were burned, their offices vandalized, and GSS members were prevented from going to the polls, and many of them were arrested on false charges. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) was in power at that time, and it ordered an investigation into GSS’s activities. The final report, entitled ‘A Survey of NGO GSS’s Nilphamari Activities’, stated that GSS was engaged in teaching an anti-state philosophy to its organizational groups. The report also alleged that NGOs were siphoning off large sums of money meant for poverty-related activities toward staff and administrative costs: NGOs show unconditional loyalty and subjugation to donor agencies which is a threat to the state and the present government … They give political statements from time to time, participate in local elections, publish newspapers with political propaganda, carry on religious activities and proselytization by taking advantage of illiterate and poor people. Besides they are engaged in embezzlement, irregularities, corruption and anti-state activities. (Karim 2011: 23)

Following these reports, the government revoked the operating licenses of some of the major NGOs (BRAC, CARITAS, GSS, and Proshika). The NGO Affairs Bureau (NGOAB) also filed police charges against several foreign nationals and NGOs for financial irregularities. These actions of the government were met with severe criticism from US and Scandinavian embassies in Bangladesh, and through internal pressure they forced the government to reconsider its decision. Within 48 hours, the government had to remove all police charges against the individuals, and reinstate the NGOs. From this incident it became evident that in 1992, the state was a client of these western governments and their local partners, the NGOs. The state did not have the power to exercise control over the activities of these leading NGOs who had vast resources, member rolls into the millions that translated into vote banks during elections, and deep donor pockets.

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The conflict gave rise to a series of high-level meetings between government officials and NGO leaders facilitated by the ambassadors of western countries. As a consequence of these meetings, the role of the NGO Affairs Bureau (NGOAB) was changed from an oversight institution to one that was a clearing-house for NGO projects and funds. Consequently, the state’s relationship to NGOs changed from an adversarial one to that of governance, collaboration, partnership, facilitation, and dialogue. Thus, at the beginning of democratization, the state had formed a subordinated relationship to NGOs. The leading NGOs were seen as the positive face of an otherwise failed state. At the local level, GSS had to moderate its rhetoric in order to continue its development activities (Hashemi 1997: 8). The key factor in the demise of GSS as an institution was the decision made by its primary donor, Germany. The German donors did not fully agree with the approach of GSS in its rural activities, and by the late 1990s, the funds were withdrawn during a sexual harassment case against its founder. Without external resources, GSS virtually ceased to exist. GSS’s fate was a lesson for other activist NGOs, who withdrew to a secondary position, and used their subscribers as vote banks during elections, choosing instead to work more closely with one of the mainstream political parties, AL or BNP. It became clear to activist NGO leaders that an associational relationship with a mainstream political party might be a more viable route to conducting politics and working for social change. The apex organization of the Association of Development Agencies in Bangladesh (ADAB) was closely linked with the AL government and helped to bring them to power in 1996. During my visits to rural areas during the 1996 elections, I met people who mentioned that their NGO fieldworkers had told them to vote for candidate X because X was favorable to NGO activities. The fact that some NGOs had become associated with politics under the rubric of ‘conscientization’

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or ‘non-party political process’ was not lost on the mainstream political parties, and as the state began to mature, repression on more activist NGOs and their leaders increased (Karim forthcoming).

NATIONAL COMMITTEE: A NONPARTY CENTERED APPROACH TO POLITICS In this section, I turn to the second case analysis of a new political process in Bangladesh known as the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Port that is organically linked to issue- and locality-based activism. An economics professor, Anu Muhammad, and a retired professional engineer, Sheikh Muhammad Shahidullah, are two of its major players. Both are former members of left political parties. The National Committee is a group of concerned scholars, journalists, and left and human rights activists who have organized a citizens’ watchdog group to protect the country’s natural resources from predatory capitalist forces. The movement is place-based, that is, it addresses the human cost and environmental specificities to mobilize people against environmental degradation and the ‘theft’ of resources by rich corporations and powerful people. I first discuss the causes for the birth of the National Committee (based on an interview with Anu Muhammad, October 4, 2015), and then its successful campaign against open-pit mining in Bangladesh. On June 14, 1997, there was a massive gas explosion in the Magurchara gas field in the Sylhet district of Bangladesh. The media coverage of the explosion was extensive, and it was reported that US-based oil company Occidental was engaged in a gas exploration and production sharing contract with the Bangladesh government. Until that time, these production sharing contract negotiations between multinational corporations and

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the Bangladesh government were below the radar of the public at large, and even the left political activists were unaware of the content of these negotiations. The Magurchara oil explosion made this process a public issue, and Anu Muhammad and several other left political activists began to investigate this process more carefully. What concerned the activists was the inaction of the government that enabled Occidental to leave the country without compensating the people of Magurchara for the gas explosion, and that Occidental was able to transfer its contract to Unocal to export gas from the Magurchara gas field to India with little or no benefits to the local people. According to Anu Muhammad, this was a ‘frightening project detrimental to the economic future of Bangladesh’. Following their findings, left political party leaders organized a convention to discuss the protection of oil and gas resources of the country from outright theft by multinational corporations. The outcome was the formation of the National Committee to Protect Oil and Gas. Between 1997 and 2002, the National Committee largely concentrated on academic research and debates with pro-mining advocates in different public venues, and launched long marches to educate people about these secret deals between the government and multinational corporations. The next big push came in 2003, when the Bangladesh government wanted to lease Chittagong Port, the nation’s largest port, for 199 years to a US company. This resulted in 22 workers’ unions protesting against the lease for fear of loss of jobs and privatization of the nation’s largest port facility. They formed an alliance with the National Committee, which added the protection of ports to its agenda, and renamed itself the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas and Port. Following this, the Indian multinational company Tata (a major manufacturer of steel) began to negotiate for a 30-year contract with the Bangladesh government to extract gas resources in Boropukuria (near Phulbari) in the northern part of the country. If signed,

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the contract would give Tata exclusive rights to open a power plant that would produce gas-based products such as steel for export to India. Tata also wanted to open a steel mill in Bangladesh. The price of gas to Tata was set at $1 (the cheapest at that time), while the government bought the same amount of gas at the rate of $3. It was at this time that 10–12 smaller steel mills formed an alliance with the National Committee to prevent Tata’s takeover of prime national resources, steel and mining. It is noteworthy that a year prior to Tata’s entry into Bangladesh, the country’s largest steel mill, Chittagong Steel Mill, was closed. Thus by the early 2000s, the National Committee had become a recognized national lobby advocating for transparency by the government on major deals between the state and multinational corporations, and bringing to national attention issues of environmental degradation caused by large-scale development activities. In 2006, the National Committee faced its biggest challenge with the open-pit mining proposal of Global Coal Management (GCM, formerly Asia Energy) in Phulbari. The proposed mining area covered a densely populated area of 59 square kilometers with a very low water table and more than a hundred villages, thousands of acres of agricultural lands, and the township of Phulbari. The Santal community, an indigenous group in Bangladesh, is largely settled in the area. Alongside the Santals, there are Bengalis who have historically lived in the area known as adi or long-term Bengali settlers. In recent years, Bengalis have migrated to the area in search of land and employment. The township of Phulbari is a thriving hub with many brick dwellings, colleges, schools, and local businesses. The coal exploration in Phulbari in the Dinajpur district of Bangladesh began in 1998 with an Australian company called Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP). The Bangladesh government signed a contract with BHP through an open tender. In 2004, UK-based mining company Asia Energy (now GCM) bought

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the open-pit mining contract from BHP. Asia Energy (AE) was floated in 2003 with heavy financing from its investors, and the Phulbari coal deposit was shown as its major investment, although it had not received clearance from the government of Bangladesh to conduct open-pit mining. GCM Resources, PLC is a UK-registered company incorporated in 2003 under the name Asia Energy PLC. It changed its name in January 2007 to Global Coal Management PLC, and in December 2007 to GCM Resources, PLC (www.dhakatribune. com). According to its website (www.gcmplc. com/corporate), GCM Resources PLC … has identified a world class coal resource of 572 million tons (JORC compliant) at the Phulbari Coal Project (the Project) in NorthWest Bangladesh. GCM is awaiting approval from the Government of Bangladesh to develop the project.

Additional information on the website notes that: GCM under its former name, Asia Energy PLC, was incorporated in England and Wales as a public limited company on 26 September 2003. Asia Energy PLC was admitted to the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange on 19 April 2004.

According to GCM, the open-pit mining project would displace about 50,000 people living in Phulbari and surrounding areas. The company offered to compensate the displaced people with cash buyouts. The government of Bangladesh gave GCM environmental clearance in an area that was densely populated and was already low in water resources. In return, GCM entered into an agreement with the Bangladesh government that would give the government $7 billion as direct benefits through taxes, and in 2005 it would add one percent to its annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) annually over the 30-year life of the mine. The company also pledged to bring 17,000 jobs, both direct and indirect, to an extremely poor

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area of Bangladesh and invest $250 million in building schools and hospitals for local people (GCM website; Durdesh 2006). In addition, after the final extraction of coal, GCM offered to make a freshwater lake from the pit for the use of local residents. According to GCM officials, the lake would be a source of fresh (potable water) water, fish, and recreation for local residents. However, scientists who had examined the proposal warned that the pit would be a potential source of toxic substances from mining, and these toxins would in all probability infiltrate underground. Apart from that, the air pollution that would be caused by the burning of coal for electricity, and the dynamiting to break up the rocks would have serious effects on health and natural resources in an area that was already densely populated. Scientists estimated that the mining project would displace over 250,000 people, and cause irreparable damage to soil and water. Open-pit mining would also require the mine area to be completely dewatered during the 30-year life of the mine. Mining experts cautioned that dewatering would dry up the natural aquifers causing widespread desertification in northern Bangladesh. Furthermore, GCM had recommended that they would remove the topsoil while open-pit mining was in process in one area. Once the mining was completed, the reserved topsoil would be laid over the mined area allowing farming to take place. But scientists cautioned that the overlaid topsoil may not be cultivable because of the toxins that would be released into the ground during mining. All these reports were available to the government. In November 2005, following submission to the Government of Bangladesh of the Phulbari Coal Project’s Feasibility Study and Scheme of Development, the Company placed seven million shares on the stock exchange and raised £33 million. It is important to note that GCM floated shares on the UK stock market prior to receiving permission to mine for coal in Bangladesh from the

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government. This raised questions in activist circles that there was already a ‘golden handshake’ between the government and GCM.

THE CONFLICT The conflict with open-pit mining centered around two issues. Local residents were concerned about the long-term degradation to the environment from open-pit mining that would be conducted over 30 years. The second issue was that, contrary to GCM’s claim that only 50,000 people would be displaced, local residents countered that the number was somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000. The resettlement of a quarter of a million people was an enormous problem in a densely populated country. In response to the open-pit mining project, local activists organized the Phulbari Raksha Committee (Committee to Protect Phulbari), which was connected to the National Committee. The Phulbari Raksha Committee organized meetings and processions against open-pit mining in their area. These meetings became the source for the dissemination of information about open-pit mining and environmental degradation, and led to an increased awareness among local residents over corporate land-grabbing tactics. In this respect, the National Committee was very effective in their teach-ins about the degradation of the environment (http://ncbd.org/bd.) We heard there is a coal deposit in this area. But the people engaged did not let us know that the method of mining would be open cut, which necessitates eviction and destruction of our homes, schools, colleges, and all other establishment in the mine footprint. All of us, irrespective of party affiliations, are against it. (Khurshid Ahmed, principal, Women’s Degree College, Gain 2007)

On August 26, 2006, an estimated 50,000 farmers, laborers, indigenous people, women, teachers, students, and politicians gathered in Phulbari to evict GCM from their town. Many of the demonstrators came armed with

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sticks. Members of the Santal community came with bows and arrows. Although the local government officer in charge of Phulbari had assured the demonstrators that GCM leaders would heed to their demands and leave town, GCM officials were still holed up in their headquarters. At a distance from GCM Headquarters, the demonstrators came under fire by the police. Six protesters were killed and over 200 were injured. The news of the killings led to a 59 percent plunge in GCM’s stock prices in one day amidst rumors that the government of Bangladesh had cancelled their mining contract. At this time, the final approval of the mining project was still pending with the government. Following this incident, Phulbari was under continued strike for four days. During this time, negotiations took place between the leaders of the National Committee and the BNP-led government. On the fourth day of the strike, the government met all the demands of the protesters that included: (a) the eviction of GCM from Bangladesh; (b) agreement to ban open-pit mining in Bangladesh; (c) compensation for the people killed and hurt in police brutality; (d) compensation for local businesses damaged in the clash; and (e) to stop the filing of false charges against the protesters. The National Committee brokered the agreement with the government. It is rare for the Bangladeshi government to cede to such demands from a citizen’s group. After this agreement, the country went into a major political crisis over the political rivalries between the two national parties. On January 1, 2007 Bangladesh faced a military coup that installed a caretaker government. The caretaker government suspended all civil rights and banned political protests. Street politics had to retreat to enclosed spaces such as press clubs and community halls. The caretaker government did not implement the agreement signed in Phulbari. Instead, between 2007–2010, the movement went largely underground. In a cable leaked by WikiLeaks, it was revealed that in 2010 the US Ambassador to

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Bangladesh Moriarty had urged the energy adviser Tawfiq Chowdhury of the caretaker government to authorize open-pit mining in Phulbari. Moriarty is noted to have said in the cable ‘Asia Energy (now GCM), the company behind the Phulbari project, had sixty percent US investment’. According to WikiLeaks, the energy advisor had admitted that the coal mine was ‘politically sensitive in the light of the impoverished, historically oppressed tribal community residing on the land (read Santals)’. However, the advisor agreed to build support for the project through the parliamentary process. Of the five demands made by the National Committee, the government fulfilled all except the eviction of GCM from Bangladesh and the prohibition of open-pit mining projects in Bangladesh (www.sourcewatch.org/index. php/Phulbari_Coal_Project).

Analyzing the Sociality of the Conflict This was a major victory both for the people of Phulbari and the National Committee of conducting place and issue-based politics outside of conventional political parties. To this date, the Phulbari Movement is an iconic event for left and people-centric politics in Bangladesh, and members of the National Committee go to Phulbari annually to remember that fateful day in 2006. In the following segment I analyze the major causes of this victory. GCM targeted very poor people who, in their estimation, were poor subjects who had everything to gain by selling their land. Agents of GCM offered local people an amount that was twice the value of the land. This approach of ‘buying off the poor’ created unease among the local community who were used to being tricked by external buyers to sell their land under various guises. Furthermore, the inability of GCM officials to read rural dynamics led to their strategy backfiring, and made people extremely distrustful of their intentions. GCM also misread

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how sociality operated among the people in the community. In the district where Phulbari is located, there has been very little out-migration, and people maintain strong kinship ties. If they were evicted or forced to sell their land and relocate elsewhere, then their social ties and incomenetworking structures would be disrupted. As one college professor turned activist said, ‘If we get evicted from our homes, we will lose our traditions, social organizations, and businesses. These losses are beyond compensation’ (Gain 2007: 4). Moreover, the presence of the indigenous group, the Santals, was an important aspect in this movement. The Santals have a long history of dispossession by the state, first under British colonial rule, then under Pakistani and Bangladeshi governments. The fear of being continually dispossessed by the state has created an acute sense of communal solidarity among the Santals. They depend on community ties to survive and overcome many of the challenges that they face as indigenous people. Additionally, they view the land as an extension of their indigenous identity. The ashes of their ancestors have mixed with the soil that in turn has nurtured generations of Santals by providing sustenance. Land and identity are inextricably linked for them. To be forcibly removed from their land, is to disrupt their ties with their ancestors and a destruction of their identity. The Santals refused to abandon their ancestral graves. For GCM officials, land was an economic unit devoid of any affective or social ties, and to be used for productive purposes primarily. The people residing on the land were seen as poor subjects who could be bought with money. GCM officials failed to comprehend land as a source of meaning and identity that was clearly in excess of any monetary compensation (Parvez Alfat, personal communication, 2007). There were three groups of people living in Phulbari – the Santals, Bengalis who had lived there for many generations, and the new migrant Bengalis. There were conflicts between the Santals and the more recent Bengali migrants over land because

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the migrants had settled on land considered as historical Santal lands. However, when GCM offered to buy land, the Santals and the recent Bengali migrants formed an alliance that made an otherwise fringe group stronger in number. The Santals did not want to move for the reasons cited above, the more recent migrants did not possess land deeds since they had settled illegally, and without the land deeds they could not sell their land to GCM even if they wanted to (Manzurul Mannan, personal communication). Equally important was the role of family and gender in the people’s mobilization against GCM. When news of open-pit mining began to circulate, Santal women were the first to organize. If evicted from their lands, women were the ones who would be most at risk. Indigenous women are often trafficked into the sex trade by procurers because these communities are too marginal to have the resources with which to resist their vulnerability. Relocation would mean that many of these Santal families would become isolated from the larger community, and would have to fend for themselves in a society that is indifferent to indigenous people. Facing dislocation, individual Santal women faced the prospect of rape, organ and sex trafficking, or being forced into domestic work. Santal women were aware of the potential risks that they faced, and they organized to fight their displacement by GCM. Notions of faith and honor also operated in the community that was tight-knit and gave the local people an identity rooted in honesty against the bribes offered by GCM. According to Anu Muhammad, a local agent working for GCM had offered a villager Taka 50,000 (exchange rate of Taka 63=1 USD in 2005) for his 16-year-old daughter’s dowry in exchange for the man’s agreement to speak in favor of GCM to fellow villagers. The agent offered Taka 25,000 at the signing the contract, and the remainder was to be paid at a later date. In exchange, the man was asked to attend anti-GCM meetings and inform the agent about strategies being discussed by

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the Phulbari Raksha Committee organizers. The man’s wife who was inside the house overheard this exchange and came out with a broom and chased the agent away saying ‘You think you can buy us’. The poor may not have wealth or power, but they have faith and honor and that was their covenant with god, and that sense of self-worth was not for sale. This notion of honesty empowered the poor to fight against what they saw as ‘evil, debased and moneyed’. In an effort to gain leverage with local elites to sway votes in favor of the mining project, GCM officials had given them expensive gifts of color television sets, motorcycles, refrigerators, etc. When it became known that this was happening, the local people became even more cynical of GCM’s intentions. Local residents associate the elites with dishonesty and indifference to the welfare of the poor. Hence, in the eyes of the local residents, this close association between GCM officials and elites proved to them that GCM was a ‘corrupt’ institution that they should not trust.

ANALYZING THE POTENTIALS FOR NON-PARTY POLITICS The idea of a decentralized non-party-based political process came out of the anti-military dictatorship struggle against the rule of General Ershad in the late 1980s on the one hand, and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 on the other, which made left political parties re-analyze the global political situation. During this time, a range of scattered political activities began in Bangladesh, the most famous being the Nirmul Committee to try those who had collaborated with the Pakistan military against the independence of Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) in 1971. These activities brought together a diverse group of people, many of whom were not political activists but who nonetheless wanted to see a change in the existing political

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structure. These groups organized themselves under various platforms that took on the label ‘committee’ to differentiate themselves from mainstream political parties. The 1990s anti-Ershad movement and its aftermath showed that ordinary people were enthusiastic to join movements when they saw the corruption of the government and corporations, but they were reluctant to join left political parties because these party leaders have traditionally aligned themselves with mainstream parties to gain political advantage. During the 1997 elections when the Awami League, the founding party of Bangladesh that had taken secularism as a core value, made an alliance with Ja’maat-iIslam that had fought the independence of Bangladesh, people in many circles were extremely troubled because it exposed the moral bankruptcy of mainstream political parties. This made it evident to the public that mainstream politics, whether right or left, was about cutting deals for political advantage. Taking an organic and situation-based approach to politics, Anu Muhammad and several other members of left political parties began to rethink how to engage more people in the political process. Several issues became evident to them. First, this new political process had to be de-linked from existing political parties, and it had to represent the interests of the general public. Thus, they had to focus on issues of national importance such as the protection of the country’s resources. Second, the process had to be decentralized and not based on a vertical political structure with a leader. Third, it had to be issueand place-based, which would create links between activists at local and national levels, where one group would not be subordinated to another. This form of open political format gave them a framework with which to engage people in the political process without being identified with any orthodox viewpoint. In this movement, political organizing had emerged as a structure of Escobar’s ‘meshworks’ that brought together a range of dissimilar actors from farmers, women, Santals,

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scholars, mining experts, human rights activists, students, trade unionists, miners, and local politicians, to protect their land against corporate encroachment (Escobar 2001). While the movement replicates theoretical concepts raised by Escobar, the leaders of the National Committee had not read his work. Similarly, they were not inspired by the work of Partha Chatterjee on ‘political society’. Their inspiration came from experience and learning to read the social conditions ethnographically through organic links to locality, and long-term observation of what works in the political context of Bangladesh. Its politics is rhyzomic and circumstantial, it draws people from different zones based on the movement that they are currently advocating for. What is important to underscore is that the National Committee was able to create a viable form of politics, which responded to local conditions, without the hegemony of western intellectual political thought (Chatterjee 2004; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Escobar 2001; Scott 1990). This is not to say that western intellectual thought is not valid in postcolonial situations, but the lesson is that people in different situations can creatively think about what works in their context, and can come up with solutions. In this respect, the architects of the National Committee acted as ethnographers of national and local politics, carefully outlining a framework that would work within the constraints that they found themselves in.

CONCLUSION I have discussed at length two types of non-party political processes in Bangladesh, the NGO GSS-based politics and the National Committee, with divergent outcomes. One worked, the other didn’t, and the question is why. What became clear from the 1990s NGO-led politics is that the state will tolerate the NGO as an institution that will work in development activities, and it may even accept mass mobilization efforts because

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these efforts have the added benefit of aiding in areas like literacy, healthcare, and disaster management, and bring in development dollars to the country, but the state will not tolerate the NGOs or their leaders as a political force outside of conventional political parties. NGOs are primarily development institutions, and while they are political insofar that development work is political in reshaping conduct, ideologies, and identities of people, the NGO as a non-political party is restricted in its ability to transform mainstream politics. The relationship between the NGO and the state has shifted during the last two decades as the state has become stronger as an entity and less dependent on donor assistance. Most importantly, a strong state will regulate NGOs because they have huge membership rolls, especially in Bangladesh where Grameen Bank and BRAC have millions of members, and these NGOs are strongly supported by western powers. In a society that is dominated by two-party politics as in Bangladesh, the sustainability of a social movement faces many hurdles. But nonetheless, the National Committee has evolved into a movement that is dedicated to locality, and has brought a place-based imagination to the fore, so a conversation could take place between the people of Phulbari and other locations, breaking some of the boundaries between the urban and the rural. The movement has taught people how to govern themselves as political subjects, the Phulbari school teacher who now speaks out in public, the Santal woman who comes out to demonstrate, the Bengali housewife who chases away the GCM agent from her house. These acts have helped the margins to organize as place-based, circumstantial activists (Marcus 1995). But not all of their activities have yielded similar results. The National Committee has failed to mobilize local people against the coal-fired power plant in Rampal in the Sunderbans, The Sunderbans is not densely populated, and many people are migrants to the area unlike the Santals of Phulbari, and these migrants may be willing

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to relocate in exchange for cash incentives. Rootedness in place is an essential marker of place-based politics. Given the rising need for energy by both China and India, neighboring countries of Bangladesh, the National Committee remains active in bringing these issues to the public, but their politics do not translate into policies at the national level because they are external to the mainstream political process, nor do they pose a direct threat to national politics. Issue and place-based imagination determine the grounds of this activism, and it would be erroneous to expect that these subjects would continue to act politically beyond their localized stakes.

REFERENCES Bernal, V. and I. Grewal. 2014. Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminism, and Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Carothers, T. and S. Brechenmacher. 2014. Closing Space: Democracy and Human Rights Support Under Fire. New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Chandra, U. 2015. ‘Rethinking Subaltern Resistance’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(4): 563–573. Chatterjee, P. 2004. Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: New York University Press. Clark, G. 1998. ‘Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) and Politics in Developing World’, Political Studies, XLVI: 37. Comaraoff, J. and J. Comaroff. 2006. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Durdesh, Bangla newspaper, September 6, 2006. Escobar, A. 2001. ‘Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalization and Subaltern Strategies of Location’, Political Geography, 20: 139–174. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Gain, P. 2007. Phulbari, Asia Energy and Grassroots Revolt, March 17. Dhaka, Bangladesh: SEHD Publications.

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Global Coal Management Resources, PLC website. URL accessed October 1, 2015. www. gcmplc.com/corporate Hashemi, S. 1990. ‘NGOs in Bangladesh: Development Alternative or Alternative Rhetoric’. Mimeo, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Hashemi, S. 1997. ‘NGOs and Popular Mobilization in Bangladesh’ in The Role of NGOs: NGOs Between States, Markets and Civil Society, Fernando, F. and Heston, A. (eds). Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 554. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Kamat, S. and F. Ismail (eds) NGO Futures, Critical Sociology (forthcoming). Karim, L. 2001. ‘Politics of the Poor: Grassroots Political Mobilization and NGOs in Bangladesh’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 24(1): 97–107. Karim, L. 2004. ‘Democratizing Bangladesh: State, NGOs and Militant Islam’, Cultural Dynamics, 16(2/3): 291–318. Karim, L. 2011. Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Karim, L. ‘Reversal of Fortunes: State, NGOs, and Civil Society Politics in Bangladesh’, in NGO Futures, Kamat, S. and Ismail, F. (eds). Critical Sociology (forthcomin). Kennedy, C. et. al. 1999. ‘Reconsidering the Relationship between the State, Donors and NGOs in Bangladesh’, The Pakistan Development Review, 38(4): 489–510. Marcus, George. 1995. ‘Ethnography in/off the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117. Nash, J. 2005. ‘Social Movements and Global Processes’, in Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader, Nash, J. (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. National Committee Website. URL accessed October 1, 2015. http://ncbd.org/bd Phulbari Coal Project URL accessed August 4, 2016. www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/ Phulbari_Coal_Project Proshika Publications. 1998. Towards a Poverty-Free Society, Proshika Five-Year Plan, 1999–2004. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Proshika, a Center for Human Development. Rasel, Aminur Rahman. 2014. ‘Phulbari Mining Firm’s Human Rights Record Okayed’, Dhaka Tribune, November 22, 2014. URL accessed

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October 1, 2015. www.dhakatribune.com/ bangladesh/2014/nov/22/phulbari-miningfirm’s-human-rights-record-okayed Scott, J. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shehabuddin, E. 1999. ‘Beware the Bed of Fire: Gender, Democracy and Ja’maat-i-Islami in

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Bangladesh’, Journal of Women’s History, 10(4): 148–171. Van Schendel, W. 2005. A History of Bangladesh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, S. 1999. ‘Civil Society and the State in Bangladesh: The Politics of Representing the Poor’, Development and Change, 30(2): 307–326.

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25 Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument Sandrine Baudry and Emeline Eudes

The idea of resistance through gardening may seem preposterous. Gardening is not only a very ancient practice, it is also one that is found in many countries and cultures, whatever the social and political context might be. It is an everyday practice associated with the home and the private sphere (Alexander, 2002) and as such seems an unlikely candidate to oppose the going social order. And yet, gardening has proven throughout history to be a tool of rebellion (McKay, 2011). Precisely because it is accessible and attractive to all kinds of people, whatever their gender, age, religion, socioeconomic status might be, once it is brought into the public sphere – involving public space, community participation, public opinion – gardening can serve to question and reinvent human interactions, and in particular power relations. And because it is spatialized and literally takes root, it is a particularly powerful tool to claim one’s right to the city (Lefebvre, 1972; Schmelzkopf, 1995; Smith and Kurtz, 2003).

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Indeed, in addition to books focusing on the political implications and transformative potential of urban gardening (McKay, 2011; Reynolds, 2008; Wilson and Weinberg, 1999) quite a few others, which explore a broader range of social resistance, everyday utopias, and tactical urbanism, include urban gardening among the current practices challenging the capitalist order which primarily presides over the making of our cities, as well as our consumer society and its catastrophic environmental consequences (Carlsson, 2008; Credland et  al., 2003; Hou, 2010; Shepard and Smithsimon, 2011). Most of the examples provided by these books are set in the United States, arguably one extreme representative of the neoliberal management of cities and their inhabitants, but also a country with a long tradition of grassroots activism. Yet, Michael Hardman and Peter J. Larkham (2014) inform us that illegal and informal forms of urban gardening and agriculture are on the rise globally and thus may very well offer a globalized resistance to capitalism,

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Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument

food and environmental injustice, and the general feeling of having no say in one’s fate. But another characteristic of urban gardening as opposed to other forms of resistance, besides its large appeal and its capacity to address a wide range of environmental, social, and economic issues, is that in the last decade or so, it has started to coincide with the mainstream political agenda. Not only is it in keeping with the growing interest in sustainable development, local food production, and urban biodiversity, it can also support the general disinvestment of public funds, compensated by an ever-growing reliance on the private sector, including the volunteer work of citizens themselves. As such, collective urban gardening is now part of the dominant ideology and runs the risk of hiding, or even perpetuating, existing power relations in the city. Urban gardening is not immune to the ‘local trap’ (Purcell, 2006), the false belief that entrusting local groups with issues such as food production or urban design is necessarily beneficial to the community (Hardman et al., 2011), and some projects prove to be designed specifically to prevent certain uses of public space and displace certain kinds of users deemed inappropriate. The analysis developed in this chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. The goal is not here to provide a cultural comparative analysis, but to build on field data gathered over the course of several years in order to propose a critical analysis of the difficult relationships between selfmanaged gardening initiatives and public policies, from tension to cooperation and mutual instrumentalization. We believe that such data is indispensable to truly understand the motivations of urban gardeners, and thus how they view their practice in relation to the social order. It is also the only way for us to gauge the reaction of the public to such initiatives, and hence their actual impact on the community. Judging from what our historical hindsight shows us today, there is no doubt that this critical analysis is bound to keep

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developing as both gardeners and researchers evolve in their own practice. The first part of the chapter will provide a quick historical overview of the use of gardening as a tool of resistance, in particular to the privatization of public land and the denial of ordinary citizens’ right to the city. We will then present what we perceive as a number of currently happening distortions, by governments, corporations, but also urbanites, of the subversive potential of urban gardening in a context of widespread approval of such practices. Finally, we will focus on two case studies which seem to us suitable to still represent actual forms of resistance, albeit quite different from one another, and try to understand why these work and not others.

A HISTORY OF DISSENT Despite some media and activist claims1 that urban greening and environmental stewardship are brand new, revolutionary ideas, that is far from being the case. It is necessary to provide some historical hindsight in order to better comprehend the tensions and contradictions within the current movements.

Protesting the Privatization of the Commons In the seventeenth century, the English Diggers demonstrated the political potential of occupying land to cultivate it as ‘a deliberate challenge to existing and familiar patterns of property holding’ (Gurney, 2007: viii). Deeming themselves the ‘true levelers’ of class inequalities, they intended to actively fight domination as embodied by the enclosure of the commons by the rich and powerful. Thus, by rejecting the privatization of the commons and advocating for the sharing of resources, they were doing more than simply demanding the right to cultivate the land, they were effectively challenging the existing

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social order and ‘aimed at complete social and economic revolution’ (James, 1941: 7). In the second half of the twentieth century, this same rejection of the classical notion of private property and the desire to create new commons inspired politically minded Americans to squat under-utilized urban land and turn it into gardens. At the time, occupying was an important tool in the arsenal of all groups expressing their discontent with mainstream society: the occupation of segregated lunch counters by African Americans in the South; the occupation of Alcatraz or Wounded Knee by Native Americans to demand recognition and the renegotiation of treaties; a variety of sit-ins, lie-ins, occupations of universities or other institutions, etc. UC Berkeley was at the forefront of such tactics. 1964 was a time of social turmoil with the Civil Rights movement and other protests of minorities asking for equal rights (women, Native Americans, homosexuals, Chicanos, etc.), the anti-war sentiment, the refusal to live in a society based largely on consumption and conformity, and the rise of the New Left. This is when the short-lived Free Speech Movement was created by UC Berkeley students involved in civil rights campaigns, in reaction to the university’s limitation of their right to express political opinions freely on campus. It involved the occupation of administrative buildings to demand – successfully – the end of restrictions on the content of speech on campus (Cohen and Zelnik, 2002). In 1969, another battle was waged between the University’s administration and its students, still somewhat related to issues of free political speech, but this time over a plot of land purchased by the University to build student housing and athletic fields, but in fact left undeveloped for lack of funding. Local residents, store owners, and students decided to turn the site into a public park, against the University’s will. The project had direct links with radical elements of the counterculture such as the then-defunct Free Speech Movement or the theatrical Yippies, and aimed both at transforming an abandoned plot into public space and providing an arena for

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political speech away from campus control – the University having instituted ‘free speech zones’ to facilitate such control (Mitchell, 1995). By doing so, they were, much like the Diggers, proposing a vision of land as a ‘common property resource’ (Ostrom, 1990: 23), which should not be part of the market economy, but rather cater to the needs of the many instead of the elite few. By using tactics similar to that of other protest movements, such as occupation, teachins, and direct action, People’s Park was truly part of a radical protest of society as it was at the time. Indeed, it stood at the meeting point between radical political engagement and a shift in environmental activism from the conservation of wilderness and natural resources as encouraged since the end of the nineteenth century by powerful advocates such as Theodore Roosevelt, to a rising awareness of the social implications of environmental issues in the wake of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Those were the years when the Environmental Protection Agency was created, when the first Earth Day was organized, bringing environmental concerns to the front and center of socio-political discussions. Pamphlets and teach-ins produced by the People’s Park’s advocates insisted on the relationship between issues of private property and of uses of the land as a common resource which should not be commodified (Gottlieb, 2005). When the University decided to defend what it considered as its rights as official owner of the land by fencing it off (and ultimately asking Governor Ronald Reagan to send the National Guard to keep the squatters away), the park’s advocates expressed their discontent in rather colorful terms: ‘The earth is our Mother the land/ The university put a fence around the land – our Mother/The university must stop fucking with our land/The university must stop being a motherfucker’ (Roach, 2003: 109). This poem insists on the relationship to land as Mother Earth in a way that seems to transcend any particular political agenda and to tend towards universalism.

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Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument

Community Gardening and the Transition to Institutionalization What happened in New York City in the 1970s, considered as the birth of the contemporary community gardening movement, was also a syncretism between a critique of the capitalist conception of urban land and the search for an enhanced quality of life, including a closer relationship to nature (an ‘agrarian romanticism’ otherwise expressed at the time by communal experiments outside ‘the depravity of urban life’ – Miller, 1999: 152). The early researchers on community gardening have indeed insisted on the radical nature of the movement, which offered an alternative to the exchange value of urban land by providing it with incommensurable use value, including community building and quality of life. One major difference with the People’s Park was that, in most cases, the landowners had fled the city – or the land was owned by the City itself, close to bankruptcy and thus more than willing to allow volunteer citizens to care for the occupied plots as well as get rid of unwanted users.2 This is why when Liz Christy and her friends started throwing ‘seed bombs’ – a symbolic counterpart to the most radical tools of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s – into closed-off vacant lots before pushing civil disobedience to the point of cleaning up and occupying public land to turn it into a garden, instead of having to face the National Guard they found an easy compromise with the City in the form of renewable leases for a dollar a year. These guaranteed physical insurance for the gardeners, as well as the legalization of their status, but in turn granted the City the right to control what was happening in the gardens – although the City’s limited resources did not allow for anything close to strict surveillance. Green Thumb, the municipal program in charge of managing these lease agreements and ensuring that the land was indeed used for gardening, was (and still is) federally funded. It benefited from Community

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Development Block Grants, a program aiming at eradicating urban blight by empowering local communities (Lawson, 2005); thus, from the start and despite its place in a more general protest against American society, community gardening was officially recognized as a valid alternative at a time when federal and municipal policies failed to address all the issues raised by urban blight. There were notable exceptions to this immediate compromise with authorities in the name of safety, lawfulness, and peace of mind, which probably allowed many New Yorkers to engage in urban gardening, when the dangers – physical, legal, emotional – of breaking the law would have been a strong deterrent. One of these exceptions was the Garden of Eden created and tended by the Purple People – Adam and Eve – a vegetable work of art built in concentric circles and fertilized by horse manure and ‘night soil’ – a mixture of kitchen scraps and human excrement. Quoting Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Purple lived by the credo ‘Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine’ (Green, 1979: 65). He explained the purpose of his garden as a way to denounce ‘the cavalier poisoning of the air, earth, and water with smoke and aerosols, radioactive refuse, deadly chemicals, and sewage’. Squatting in an abandoned tenement building, advocating a vegetarian, money-free lifestyle and believing ‘there’s gotta be a better way to motivate society than profit’ (ibid.), the Purple People were trying to reinvent a social and urban model by, as they put it in one of their pamphlets, ‘[liberating] this land that was stolen from the Manhattan Indians’ and proving that ‘abandoned bulldozed lots (in even the most “depressed” ghetto) can be converted into abundantly fruitful and beautiful open-space without necessitating any government or private funding’ (Purple, 1985: n.p.). This is why Adam Purple never signed an agreement with the City; even though it might have saved his work in the long term, it would have contradicted his belief that it necessitated no government support, and that

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the City had lost all right to the land when it let it turn into rubble (Ferguson, 1999). The Purple People did try to enlist the help of neighbors for the Garden of Eden, as well as encourage other New Yorkers to transform their living environment and habits along this model, but the politico-spiritual rhetoric attached to it seems to have been a deterrent to most people (Green, 1979). Thus, the Garden of Eden was part of a larger project including all aspects of one’s life; the addedvalue of the garden was, beyond providing food for its vegetarian caretakers, to question the relationship between cities and nature, and more broadly between humans and their environment, campaigning for a more balanced relationship rather than the destructive domination which characterizes capitalist societies. The garden was eventually razed in 1986, but in the struggle to come some 15 years later, this same environmental perspective on urban gardening would save hundreds of cultivated plots. Other urban gardeners who steered away from governmental recognition were the Puerto Rican creators of Casita gardens designed to recreate the socio-spatial structure of the rural villages on their island of origin. Intent on speaking their own language, growing and cooking their traditional food, playing their music, etc., Puerto Rican urban gardeners had no interest in attracting the kind of social control which would inevitably stem from signing an agreement with the City (Baudry, 2013; Sciorra and Cooper, 1990). Without any of Purple’s rhetoric of social and spiritual change, these gardeners were resisting uprooting and integration and thus, albeit unwittingly, circumventing the pitfalls of a successful citizen action: instrumentalization and control. Their’s was closer to what James C. Scott (1989) has called ‘everyday resistance’, by which those who are resisting avoid calling attention to themselves, as any form of open conflict would be too dangerous. Ironically, this is what made them primary targets when Rudolph Giuliani’s administration decided to raze community gardens, as

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their illegal status and their near invisibility made it easier to make them disappear without causing a popular uproar. For years, the thousand or so community gardens of the city seem to have encountered nothing but anecdotal criticism, until the economic boom of the 1990s highlighted for the first time the financial loss the gardens represented for the City. It is important to note that the battle between gardeners and Rudolph Giuliani’s administration that ensued is what sparked scholars’ interest in the phenomenon and an analysis of the gardens in terms of right to the city and use value vs exchange value (Schmelzkopf, 1995, 2002; Smith and Kurtz, 2003; Staeheli et al., 2002). Until then, the supposed virtues of community gardening for community building, physical and mental health, and food production (all arguments used to defend the threatened gardens) had not been investigated.

THE CURRENT STRUGGLE WITH INSTRUMENTALIZATION AND NORMALIZATION In the 1970s and 1980s, there was already a tension between the need for official recognition in order to be able to garden in peace and propagate the practice, and a resistance to all forms of control, either as a political statement or as a survival mechanism. This tension may be even more palpable today since, through the environmental argument, governments at various scales – including the global – not only accept urban gardening as a valid use of land, but encourage, claim, and use it. Today, practices which are known as community gardening, urban greening, urban agriculture, environmental stewardship, etc. take on many different forms. The projects vary in size, purpose, longevity, and subversive power. These variations are informed by local or national policy, economic and social context, climate, urban forms, and the types of individuals engaged. We do not propose

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Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument

to offer a classification of all these forms of urban greening which would somehow give clues as to which are more or less resisting or giving in to the going order. Rather, this reflection on the contemporary state of citizen gardening on public – or trespassed private – space is an attempt to decipher the impact, actual or intended, which seemingly comparable practices can have on the aforesaid going order, and on the relationship between ordinary citizens, the powersthat-be (political, economic), and the current societal project.

URBAN GREENING AS A TOOL OF SOCIAL CONTROL As mentioned earlier, what ultimately saved New York City’s community gardens in 2002, after a long and painful battle against Rudolph Giuliani’s administration, which pitted – not always in good faith (Golden, 1999) – the gardens against the undeniable need for affordable housing, was the environmental argument. The State of New York put a moratorium on the razing of gardens because no proper environmental impact study had been ordered before said destructions. Similarly today, at least in Western cities, it is because of the increasing use in the media, research, or political arenas of concepts such as resilience, sustainable development, green networks, and climate change, that the engagement of city dwellers on public space through gardening has become not only acceptable, but encouraged. Indeed, it fits a number of ‘green’ policies which governments cannot always afford to implement for lack of financial and human resources – as well, sometimes, as innovative ideas. Even if the economic situation is not as drastic as that of 1970s New York, volunteer, enthusiastic and often creative citizens are a welcome help for municipalities struggling with their own ambitions. While this can most definitely be read as a victory, not only

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in environmental terms, but in the critique of the logic usually presiding over the building and management of cities, the fact that such practices are now part of the dominant urban ideology makes them highly susceptible to distortions, instrumentalization, and commodification, to the point of turning them into weapons of domination. By their own admission,3 cities or social housing landlords contend that while community gardens in housing projects or the flowering of tree beds and traffic islands are encouraged as a way to enhance the quality of life for inhabitants, it is also a way to minimize the cost of maintaining such spaces as well as a – supposed – guarantee of civil behavior. They aim as much at empowering as using and policing urbanites, in line with a more general – and socially acceptable – program for a greener city. Thus, many cities advertise the greening efforts of their citizens on their webpages as a crucial element of the quality of life: New York City integrates the ‘revolution’ of user-generated gardens as part of the history of its public park system,4 while Seattle boasts an increasingly successful 40-year-old program,5 etc. But they also use the appeal of urban gardening to supplement ambitious environmental policies such as New York City’s goal of planting one million new trees or making sure every New Yorker lives within ten minutes of a public park, or Paris’s Plan Biodiversité, which aims at increasing green surfaces to fight the urban heat island and enhance biodiversity. This goes as far as the control of social uses of public space: much like the ‘sadistic street environments’ described by Mike Davis (2006), designed specifically to prevent ‘undesirables’ from dwelling where they are not wanted, potted plants can be used as what we could call soft deterrents (Pellegrini and Sandrine, 2014). They offer a more consensual and less obvious way of normalizing uses of public space, thus more acceptable to most city dwellers – who sometimes even participate in their installation. One telling example is that of

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the City of Rennes. A neighborhood association started a program called ‘gardening our streets’, promoting depaving6 along individual houses to plant flowers and create a unique local landscape. Because of the technical difficulties of such an endeavor (the physical work involved in breaking the pavement, as well as the risk of hitting a gas main, for instance), the association sought, and received immediately, the support of the municipality. After a few years, the latter took over the project and renamed it ‘Beautifying our walls’, shifting the focus from street greening to covering whole buildings. The reason for this shift was that greening was perceived as a way to prevent graffiti; in this manner, while supporting one grassroots initiative in keeping with a broader urban policy (Rennes is well-known for its environmental policies, such as prohibiting the use of pesticides in the management of urban flora), the local government effectively fought another, deemed as inappropriate. This involvement of city governments in originally grassroots activities also leads to over-determination, homogenization, and the weight of bureaucracy. In Paris, a government employee whose job it is to approve requests for flower planters to be maintained by residents reveals that when she does so, because of the aesthetic and safety criteria as well as the bureaucratic channels which have to be followed, the price doubles and the time-frame goes from days to months compared to cases when residents act without asking for permission and either build the planters or buy cheaper models. Similarly in New York City, residents who adopt a tree7 are encouraged to provide a tree guard as protection from cars, bikes, and dogs. The suggested model costs upward of $2000,8 which seems hardly a reasonable expectation from volunteer caretakers. Because of this, the City does turn a blind eye on makeshift tree guards, but this still means that the volunteers will be held responsible in case of an accident. Besides being an added burden in time, money, and normalization, these rules

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open the door to corporate investment as an alternative solution to obey regulations.

CORPORATE INVOLVEMENT IN URBAN GREENING Urban greening is indeed subject to processes of commodification of nature, public space, and creativity (Harvey, 2012). Private corporations are now investing in such projects; they can sponsor a community garden or a tree guard, or even bankroll research on urban agriculture. This provides them with cheap publicity – by adding their logo or their name to a garden gate – and the image of a ‘green’ corporation. This may seem anecdotal, even beneficial for urban gardeners struggling to fund their projects, but besides being an obvious tool of greenwashing, it participates in the omnipresence of advertising in public space, another foe of activist groups trying to reclaim the streets from cars, unwelcoming furniture, and other forms of privatization and control. The current focus on food production, receiving extensive media coverage thanks to Michelle Obama among others, is in part aimed at solving issues of food injustice and health, especially among poorer communities, but the idea of locally grown has also become a trendy marketing tool for high-end restaurants advertising their roof gardens or even large food distributors such as Walmart, which highlight their local produce as a marketing strategy. Such produce is attractive to consumers because it is supposedly healthier, in season, with a lower carbon footprint, and good for the local economy (Roininen et al., 2006; Weatherell et al., 2003). The fact that the corporation’s actual commitment to these issues seems more than questionable (Godelnik, 2012) does not stop it from benefiting from the current interest, on the part of a certain category of consumers, in the provenance of their food. To be fair, cities too are sometimes quick to apply their name and

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Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument

logo to grassroots greening in order to get a greener, more democratic, and thus more attractive image. For instance, one arrondissement of Paris contends that its inhabitants should be allowed to plant flowers in street tree pits without having to sign binding agreements, which tend to act as a deterrent; but it does list those efforts and, whenever possible, hangs a poster with its logo on the tree in question. Officially, this is a way to protect the mini-gardens, which might not be identified as such by municipal cleaners, for instance, but the correlated effect is that the arrondissement government effectively rebrands the work of city residents as government initiatives which can provide some added-value in times of elections.

PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC SPACE However, it would be wrong to blame only local authorities and corporations for the instrumentalization and normalization of urban gardening. A study in Paris has shown that individual and associative greening initiatives on the public right-of-way are being actively encouraged, and have indeed multiplied in the last three years. In some cases, interviews and field observations have shown that part of the motivation to plant trees and put planters on the sidewalk is to prevent unwanted uses such as sleeping, urinating, parking cars or motorcycles, depositing large objects, etc. In one case, a whole public square has been turned into an unfenced community garden, as an experiment. It is taken care of by the manager of the adjacent café, who refuses to put benches in the garden for fear that ‘youngsters’ will dwell there and bother the clients, litter the square, etc. The consequences are two-fold: the garden itself lacks space to rest and socialize, normally prominent features of such community spaces, and the café’s terrace – at which you can sit only if you buy a drink – becomes the only comfortable spot from

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which one can enjoy the beauty of the trees and flowers. This tendency shows that individuals can foster a sense of ownership towards public space adjacent to their homes or working places, which would entitle them to decide which uses – and users – are appropriate. It just so happens that given the current emphasis on environmental issues, the conception of propriety of these individuals coincides with that of public authorities. And so appears the mirror image of the instrumentalization of citizen greening by governments: some urbanites are aware of the political popularity of greening and the potential funding that ensues, and take advantage of it in order to further their personal agenda and claim public space as their own, much in the way that governments take advantage of the popular interest in greening to devolve their environmental responsibilities onto volunteer citizens. The result is that governments end up outsourcing to citizens not only environmental stewardship, but also the control, surveillance, and normalization of public space. And it turns out that Jane Jacobs’ (1961) ‘eyes on the street’, though those of the community, are not necessarily less oppressive than state surveillance. Another notable distortion of the notion of ‘generous urbanism’ (Merker, 2010) applied to right-of-way greening in Paris is the reaction to theft and/or degradation. Even if the people engaging in greening the street do it out of civic sense rather than to beautify what they perceive as a prolongation of their private space onto the public right-of-way, the responses to their work might prove challenging and inform their tolerance to uses and misuses of their projects. Because those greening projects take place on the street and not behind the gates of a community garden, they are more susceptible to vandalism which, even if a few gardeners can accept it as the price to pay to act on public space, is hard for most to face without getting discouraged. Before giving up entirely, they try and devise protection strategies which can range from communication to enclosing even a

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single flower box behind chicken wire or choosing plant species which are less likely to be stolen because they are less attractive than bright flowers, or even because they are thorny and thus dangerous to steal. This certainly puts a damper on the notion of creating a new common, a different way of sharing urban and natural resources. This difficulty to accept that one’s volunteer work might be unappreciated – either ignored, as interviews on the streets of Paris of passersby not involved in greening projects have revealed, or outright abused – by the public is of course not unique to urban greening, but might be compounded by its very nature as the caring for living organisms. This is why, for instance, some particularly successful community gardens have multiplied rules and prohibitions to preserve the work of the gardeners from overuse by the public, thus becoming as normative as Rudolph Giuliani was when he rejected community gardens as an improper and disorderly use of public space.

CONTINUING PATTERNS OF DOMINATION Equally questionable is the paternalistic attitude of some promoters of urban gardening, which present it as a panacea for all social and economic ills for the disenfranchised. Urban agriculture programs, coupled with a rhetoric of individual responsibility, can be used as a justification for the rolling back of social welfare (McClintock, 2014). The same type of rhetoric – often with the addition of a moral imperative to enjoy gardening and to find pleasure and pride in being able to grow one’s own food – is used by well-meaning middle-class Americans who run community gardening programs aimed at helping out the less fortunate and empowering them. Yet, as pointed out by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, there is little that is truly empowering about a small minority of

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white educated youngsters coming into a vastly predominantly African American city to run those programs. These Detroiters do not reject urban agriculture as a valid option for the shrinking city and its economically and socially bereft population, far from it, but demand the right to self-determination (White, 2011). Otherwise, such programs run the risk of resembling their ancestors from the Progressive Era, through which wealthy white women steered the poor – mostly immigrants – towards what they deemed to be a moral and healthy path by encouraging them to garden (Lawson, 2005). And indeed, it has been shown that urban gardening sometimes ends up replicating existing power relations: gardeners with the highest social and economic capital are better equipped to raise funds, receive grants, obtain political and media support for their projects, so that their gardens are better equipped, better funded, and better protected (Reynolds, 2015). Researchers are also increasingly denouncing processes of green gentrification, defined as ‘urban gentrification processes that are facilitated in large part by the creation or restoration of an environmental amenity’ (Gould and Lewis, 2012: 121). If an economic study published in 2008 could argue that the rise of property value around community gardens should be a positive argument for protecting them as ‘catalysts for economic redevelopment of the community’ (Voicu and Been, 2008: 241), it is now argued that green infrastructures in general, and community greening in particular, can participate in the displacement of poor populations from areas targeted by urban renewal programs. A silver lining, Guillaume Marche (2014) argues, based on San Francisco case studies, is that community gardens can equally act as rooting elements through which neighborhood residents can resist gentrification. The impact on local populations and neighborhoods has less to do with the gardening gesture itself than with the organizational structure of the gardening project.

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Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument

TENSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE MOVEMENT Even within one particular activist group, or for one particular individual, resolving the tension between the desire to subvert the going order so as to present alternative possibilities, and the satisfaction of seeing one’s actions gain popularity in mainstream society, is not always easy. The example of guerrilla gardening is rather telling in this regard. The group observed in Paris is quite attached to the term ‘guerrilla’ itself, and the type of tactics it involves: transforming public space without asking for permission, in the hope of transforming the relationship to those spaces and to the city itself. They are more or less faithful to the cloak-and-dagger this entails – preserving one’s anonymity, dodging law enforcement, etc. – but they do not escape the entanglement of activism, research, media, and politics which is the inevitable result of the fantastic popularity of urban greening. Thus, members of the group participate in official conferences and roundtables, they know, and are known by, elected officials, they advertise their actions through their website, for instance. They are regularly solicited by journalists for interviews and to demonstrate their activities and tactics, and show the sites they have worked on. Private corporations sometimes ask to associate them to their advertising campaigns. If the latter type of proposal is clearly rejected by guerrilla gardeners – whereas researchers disagree on the matter of accepting funding offered by corporations trying to repair their reputation as environmentally unfriendly – they struggle much more with their relationship with the media, which fosters tensions between individuals. For instance, as the group was participating in the first ‘festival of urban agriculture’ organized by the Festival of Concrete Utopias in 2013, the guerrilla gardeners offered a tour of one of their illegal sites to the public, as well as to movie and TV cameras invited by the organizers of the Festival. This is in keeping with

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the professed desire to educate and spread the practice of bringing life back into the concrete city, but exactly how subversive can such publicized actions, endorsed by local authorities – who, one can assume, would not have been so lenient towards another type of use of that illegal spot, as was later proven by the eviction of a family of squatters – really be? What are they resisting? Vinthagen and Johansson (2013) point out that everyday resistance is inevitably entangled with power, which makes it ‘heterogenic and contingent’, but does not equal a necessary loss of its transformative potential.

CASE STUDIES: WHAT ARE THE INGREDIENTS OF RESISTANCE? In this last section, we would like to focus on two very different case studies which can offer perspectives on what it means to use gardening as a form of resistance. The case of the ZADs shows that the apparent consensus on the importance of nature and of rethinking our relationship to the environment does not always hold up in the face of (perceived) imperatives of economic development so that conflict around environmental issues is not a thing of the past. As for Incredible Edible Todmorden, it presents a case of resistance without conflict aiming at challenging our understanding of property and food production by reinventing the urban common.

The Zones To Defend – or ZADs (Zones À Défendre) In the last few years, a new contestation movement has appeared in France, using the occupation of land by gardening or agriculture, sometimes raising a few animals, to challenge various urbanization projects. In most cases, the goal is to save agricultural lands from urban expansion and paving, which not

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only waterproofs the soil and makes the evacuation of rain water harder, causing inundations, but also seriously raises the question of our future ability for food self-sufficiency. The program of the ZADs, these Zones To Defend which have been emerging since 2007, is to resist the capitalistic consumption of space, by cultivating vegetables. The phenomenon goes back to the early 1970s, when people living around NotreDame-des-Landes, 30 kilometers from Nantes, in Western France, learned through local newspapers about a project to build an international airport in this area. Some 1,200 hectares of arable land, until then the cradle of a traditional local agriculture, were decreed Zone of Deferred Planning (Zone d’Aménagement Différé, or ZAD) in 1974 by the Region. A long-term contestation of this project started then, with the constitution of associations of local residents, farmers, and ecologists, who wished to preserve these natural and cultivated areas, in a time of growing concern for the exhaustion of fossil fuel stocks, upon which industries such as aircraft transport rest. What is the point of building a new airport, if this economy is bound to collapse in the coming decades? Wouldn’t it make more sense to support local agricultural production, which helps feed the region at a lower environmental cost? Here are the issues raised by this conflict, which has strengthened year after year, has gone through multiple legal proceedings, and led in 2007 to squatting a first patch of land, to prevent leveling work from starting: Our wishes, by living on the forbidden site of the airport, are multiple: living on a contested site, which helps being close to people who have been opposing it for 40 years and taking action during the construction; taking advantage of discarded spaces to learn to live together, to cultivate the land, to be more autonomous in relation to the capitalist system.

The Zone of Deferred Planning – or Zone d’Aménagement Différé, an acronym produced by the administrative management of the land – is renamed Zone To Defend (or Zone À Défendre) by the occupiers, who

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must from then on organize their survival on the site by building shelters and growing their own food. In response to the Declaration of Public Utility (or DUP) of the airport project (2008), squatters, who were soon called ZADists, organized a Climate Camp on the site in August 2009. Since 2011, various militant actions have been undertaken: the ZAD has become a meeting and debate place, which attracts participants from all over the country, bike protests regularly take place so as to make the hands-on conflict visible to the locals, and free toll actions as well as mass-protests are organized to report the growing discontent regarding the project. At the core of the ZAD are agricultural lands and natural spaces to be protected; but also a vegetable patch to feed, literally, the squatters of the zones immediately threatened by construction. Because building an airport requires first the creation of a road network to serve it, this usually represents the first threat to be fought. This is why ZADists inquire about the outline of the roads to come and start planting along them trees, fruit trees, and vegetable fields, which thereby turn into tools of resistance to concreting. Living things against minerals settled thanks to a tremendous amount of petrol – ‘Vegetables and not asphalt!’, as heard on another ZAD. Since 2013, the ZAD in Notre-Damedes-Landes has been emulated: the dam at Sivens, in the Tarn region; the erection of dozens of Center Parcs cabins in Roybon, near Grenoble; the site of Sainte-Colombeen-Bruilhois on the future high speed rail line between Bordeaux and Toulouse; the extension of a shopping mall in Montesson, in the Ile-de-France region, have all been declared Zones To Defend. A total of 30 urbanization projects spread throughout the country are being contested by organized groups, some since almost 10 years ago. These other sites, which have so far not been declared as ZADs because of organizational and/or political statements, nonetheless pertain to a more

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general movement rising up against what the militants have named ‘the Great Useless and Imposed Projects’ (les Grands Projets Inutiles et Imposés). If it is well established that the ZAD phenomenon is about resisting for and through the vegetable, it is nevertheless important to note that the illegal land occupation by gardening comes together with a whole range of other militant actions, from awareness campaigns targeting local inhabitants to legal proceedings, which require good knowledge of the legal framework enabling the urbanization process to gain ground. Thus the ZADist is on the road to professionalization, both gardener of the extreme facing bulldozers and improvised legal practitioner bringing his or her ecological expertise to public inquiries.

The Case of Montesson’s (Ile-de-France) Potato-ZAD Potato-ZAD started in 2013 in a Parisian suburb, and is occupied without the authorization of the owner. On this patch of land of about 300 m2, 100 m2 are used as vegetable gardens along with a zone occasionally used as pasture for sheep. This ZAD, small as it may be, allows us to highlight a number of aspects found in the broader movement, and thus to get a glimpse of the politics that are negotiated through its actions. To question the usefulness of official projects of spatial planning and local development, ZADists are brought to produce their own evaluation of the quality of the project. This implies an immediate and thorough knowledge of the cultural and natural wealth of the land, a wealth that is threatened by urbanization: ancient agricultural lands (as in Montesson, part of a wide marketgardening zone that developed around the capital-city through the centuries); wetland with fragile ecosystems, the last refuge for a number of protected species (as in Sivens); the irreversible modification of landscapes.

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In the hope that this information will be taken into account when assessing the ecological impact of the project, activists then add these studies of the fauna and of other patrimonial values – studies which have been put aside by the public authorities, as has happened in many sites that became ZADs – to the record of public inquiries the commune had requested. A ZAD often emerges when this information is not taken into account by political representatives and planners, despite being reported by associations through official channels. Elected representatives, to avoid prevarication in dealing with activists, often forcefully issue a decree of Declaration of Public Utility (Déclaration d’Utilité Publique)9 with the support of the very companies commissioned for the construction work. This specific kind of text, a legal diktat of the territorial administration, allows them to bypass the potential threats posed by the information the activists have revealed. Thereafter only two options remain: physical occupation of the land and appeal to the courts. The illegal gardening in Montesson fulfills many goals. Stuck in-between a car park, a feeder road, and one of the biggest shopping centers in Ile-de-France, it aims at making the agricultural and ecological potential of these threatened lands visible to consumers. This is how, as the ZADists write, ‘Potatoes grow between roads and shopping centers; the “American-Indian trio” (corn, squash and beans) is experimented; soon a few sheep should graze here. Trees were planted; and why not imagine a few film screenings so as to make this, over time, a place for encounters, for debates, for concrete actions!’ It is also about getting – and maintaining – a foot on the ground, a very real and public experience in confrontation the ZADists claim, as opposed to decision-makers, locked inside their offices: Here we can talk about what we see, what we feel and what we practice. By planning, bringing all this out, and gardening here and there, on this badly-considered land, we demonstrate that these

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are not mere ‘blank spaces’ on a map, useless wastelands that should at all cost be urbanized to become profitable. We show everyone that these lands provide a thousand, unquantifiable interests, more essential to our survival than what shopping centers could offer. We also get a grip back on our food autonomy: learning to cultivate, transform and appreciate what we eat. We take our own needs into account and learn to organize collectively to answer those needs.10

Regarding the future of shopping centers, it is disturbing to hear someone like Pascal Madry (2015: 8), director of the ‘Institut pour la Ville et le Commerce’ (the institute for city and trade, whose aim is to imagine tomorrow’s trade), explain: ‘All mediumsized towns have such a project (as developing a shopping center). Except that more are being constructed and opened than what consumption could absorb. […] What is most disturbing is that this logic lives on.’ He adds: ‘By 2020, if E-commerce endures at the same rhythm, if the rhythm of centers opening stays the same, and if consumption doesn’t progress, 25% of the real estate will be unjustifiable economically and will probably turn into wasteland. When we say that, we are not heard’ (Madry, 2015) – especially not by the elected representatives who, he says, are only ‘playing for time’, with vast amounts of government funding, against the foretold death of large urbanized spaces. Which logic to endorse then? The illegal one, by which militants occupy someone’s property for purposes of vegetalization, a process we know is reversible? Or the official one, which seems hard put to consider any future more distant than any upcoming election poll? When occupying the ground is not enough to get heard, when vegetables and fruit trees fail to communicate their subversiveness, comes the appeal to justice. There, also, ZADists have to prove themselves knowledgeable and rigorous so as to help the lawyer filing the legal documents. In Montesson’s case, the documents notably point to repeated inconsistencies in the discourse of elected representatives, at several levels. On the one

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hand, for instance, the region of Ile-de-France invests government funds in public campaigning for urban agriculture, and on the other, it sells unbuilt parcels of land to the commune of Montesson, to build a road on some of the few remaining grounds where agriculture could be integrated into the city. The ZADists, by exposing the inconsistency of public management, attempt to remind, in their ‘agricultural’ way and through legal channels, that there are other ways to manage the territory, its use and economy. But how are these activists of a new type perceived by the administration and local representatives, those in charge of space and its uses? Since the autumn of 2014, ZADists have been regularly featured in news bulletins, because of the frontal resistance they offer to the communes’ projects and the companies commissioned. It is therefore quite interesting to notice the Public Works Department start to worry about the occupation of the sites to be built, as is apparent from a report published in Le Moniteur des travaux publics et du bâtiment (the Monitor of Public Work and Building). Entitled ‘How to protect a building site from activists’, the report features a sociologist explaining, among other things, that the ZAD militants advocate a conception of Nature associated with ‘purity’, in which ecology tries to get itself heard against ‘space-consuming projects’ (Kiraly, 2015). Besides, it turns out that most of the ZADists are urban, college-educated, and do not live in the commune under threat. As urban dwellers, they suffer from the absence of nature in the dense urban fabric, and turn up ready to bring together their knowledge and knowhow to defend a – sometimes symbolic, if not idealized – representation of natural and agricultural spaces. The companies, the planners and representatives, faced with these anti-capitalist, ecologist militants, are now developing responses, some of which are either surprising or frightening. Le Moniteur thus gives the following advice to the Public Work and Building sector: to inquire about the history of the place

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before accepting the commission, in order to know if there is any active militant network in the region concerned, to avoid ‘rekindling the protesters’ movement’; to turn the public inquiry and debate into a true exchange with residents. The Public Work and Building sector and the French administration thereby admit that ‘resident participation’, a common boast of every urbanization project, is not a reality in practice. They usually produce a ‘ready-made’ project whereas ‘they should […] be able to hear the remarks of residents and provide it as feedback to the management, take it into account and adjust the project accordingly’ (Kiraly, 2015). Lastly, since 2013, the obstinacy of ZADists, occupying the grounds, demonstrating in ever growing numbers, and setting up local material economic networks to sustain their struggle, has led prefects (state representatives) in the regions to launch police force deployments, progressively more numerous and more offensive. This is how Flash-ball shots have hit and wounded four people in the eyes; and a grenade of military type accidentally killed a 21-year-old demonstrator. Police forces have banned grenade use since the young man’s death, but the State appears, de facto, outrun by this activist movement, and helpless to deal with it other than brutally, by mobilizing disproportionate armed forces.

Incredible Edible Todmorden The ZADs are obvious cases of the power of resistance of urban gardening, but they also raise the question of whether gardening – or any other type of citizen action – can remain true to the spirit of resistance only when targeting a specific ill, in the presence of confrontation and an identifiable enemy. We would like to look at another ongoing experiment, which is non-confrontational and does not reject media and political attention, and still seems to remain true to its original purpose. The Incredible Edible project

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started in 2008 in Todmorden, a small town north of Manchester. It used to be a booming industrial town but is currently suffering from a severe economic crisis. The idea behind Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) is two-fold: reclaim public space in a way which questions the use of the commons, and grow free food to turn those commons into veritable sites of solidarity. In and of itself, a project in which participants willingly tend vegetable gardens knowing they will not be the ones – or not the only ones – to harvest the produce and will not even, in most cases, know who benefits from their work, is not only a subversion of the notion of private property, but a way of letting go of the need to have control over the fruits of one’s toil. This is a radical response to street gardeners who choose to grow thorny or unattractive plants, and to community gardeners who insist on erecting locked gates to prevent theft and degradation. Obviously, since everyone is welcome to pick up fruit and vegetables as they please, there can be no such thing as theft, and according to the interviews on site, the only degradations occur when people harvest too early for lack of knowledge rather than a propensity for vandalism. IET challenges the notion of public space not only by proposing an alternative way of using it, but by redefining it, independently from actual ownership, as any space which is visible and accessible to the public. Private yards or church land adjacent to the street thus qualify as public land. In our Western cities, picking up fruit and vegetables from someone’s yard would normally constitute not only theft, but trespassing; IET contends that both notions can lose their meaning through daily acts of solidarity. By focusing on self-reliance, the project also offers an opportunity to resist the feeling of not having control over one’s life issues (Clarke, 2010; Thompson, 2012). This is not to say that IET is a perfect project of resistance to the dominant order: it accepts donations from private corporations; the City uses its notoriety to obtain grants

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for municipal greening; and it attracts tourists from all over the world who would otherwise never have heard of Todmorden. But, despite the lack of data regarding the number of residents actually involved, it does seem thus far to offer an alternative model for the commons. And, given the tremendous worldwide success of IET, it raises the fundamental question of the reproducibility of such a model. Todmorden is a fairly small town (big cities, suburbs, rural areas cannot be expected to foster, or even tolerate, the same types of activities or social organization) with a climate adapted to food production. Moreover, it is far from a booming town, and it is fair to wonder what would happen to IET if, as was the case in New York City in the 1990s, economic growth reconfigured the relationship to private and public land. But most importantly, IET is a polymorph endeavor. Planting carrots and apple trees on public land is only one facet, which serves as propaganda – the term used by the project’s initiators – to invite the residents of Todmorden to reflect on their own daily practices. They can decide to join those public vegetable gardens, or start one of their own. They can even, thanks to IET signs, identify food vendors who sell local products, and choose to patronize them rather than one of the several supermarkets. The general idea is to change the relationship to food and consumption in general through education – school gardens are an integral part of the project – rather than purport to feed a whole town through those gardens. Interestingly, this pretension is spread by urban gardeners elsewhere who, fascinated by the potentiality of IET, wildly exaggerate the concrete outcomes in terms of food production and throw around breathtaking data with no ground in reality during conferences, activist events, etc., in order to galvanize – successfully – the audience. This need for heroes and myths in the urban gardening movement is reminiscent of Howard Zinn’s (1985: 167) remark: ‘To use Karl Mannheim’s distinction, while ideology is the tendency of those in power to

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falsify, utopianism is the tendency of those out of power to distort’.

CONCLUSION How, then, to reach a shared and democratic management of the landscape, nature, space, and territorial cultures? This is a question that should become a real key issue in the coming years, along with the worsening of environmental challenges. Beyond the specific cases studied here, these situations are good illustrations of the problems encountered by Occidental political systems in integrating the growing expertise and the demand of environmental justice from their citizens. The ‘distribution of the sensible’, as coined by Jacques Rancière (2000: n.p.) – this sharing exercise of the right to free speech, the right to express one’s own personal experience and interpretation, the formulation of a value system tied to these and of a way to manage the world stemmed from these – is being performed through friction thus far. The vegetable, at first glance harmless and still widely associated with a decorative function in urbanites’ life, is being transformed into a new resistance tool through its use by activists. But not only this: beyond resistance, a new way of expression by this cultivated nature is negotiated, whereby the notions of life and survival try to impose themselves on the political agenda. It remains to define, as for many other struggles, the point at which these notions can be considered as legitimate. Thus, the recent emergence of the term ‘agricultural colonization’, in very different cases, reveals all the ambiguity of this nature from the very moment it is claimed by human communities. In Paris, agricultural colonization is assumed by the Special School for Free Spaces (École Spéciale des Espaces Libres, or ESEL), an informal collective of gardeners and artists who cultivate an organic vegetable patch, claimed as a selfmanaged conservatory for biodiversity, on an abandoned railroad track. In other words, a

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squat which legitimates its existence through an ethical attitude towards living things and a will to act where authorities have long been expected to, in vain. At the opposite end of the spectrum, on the West Bank, Since 1967, agriculture has become the principal tool of colonization. This agricultural colonization, official and non-official, is not only committed by isolated persons. It stems from a long-term strategy, designed and supported by the successive governments. The Israeli Agricultural Colonization as an appropriation tool of the land in the West Bank, a 2013 report based on fifteen years of observation by the expert Dror Etkes, demonstrates it. (6 mois, 2014–2015: 125)

This is only one extreme example of the ways in which cultivated nature can be instrumentalized by various discourses and political goals. Indeed, the ethnographic fieldwork highlights the great variety of urban gardening projects, in particular in their intent and perception. It supports the rather obvious fact that the act of gardening in itself does not carry the seeds of resistance: it can be very effectively used by activists or ordinary citizens to redefine a societal project, but it can just as easily be an instrument of the perpetuation of the social order and the power relations it entails. As David Harvey (2000: 159) put it: ‘[a]s we collectively produce our cities, so we collectively produce ourselves. Projects concerning what we want our cities to be are, therefore, projects concerning human possibilities, who we want, or, perhaps even more pertinently, who we do not want to become’. Urban gardening, inasmuch as it participates in the (re)definition of our cities and most importantly of urban human interactions, does indeed play a role in imagining ‘human possibilities’. But what our historical hindsight also points out is that, whatever the original intent may have been, changes in circumstances inside and outside the project can drastically impact its relationship to the dominant ideology and political agenda. Indeed, ‘most realized Utopias of spatial form have been achieved through the agency of either the state or capital accumulation, with both

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acting in concert being the norm’ (Harvey, 2000: 173), which explains their failure as an attempt to subvert the world order. In the case of resistance through gardening, it can be argued that, if the approval, sometimes assistance, of governments and corporations does indeed facilitate some projects, it might also be the reason why ‘ideals […] become frozen and reified’ (Zinn, 1985: 167), not to mention normalized and commodified. We should then heed Harvey’s call for dialectical Utopias, and pay attention as much to the processes as to the materialized form: a spatio-temporal perspective is needed to disentangle the full meaning of urban gardening as resistance. In order to avoid the reification of this form of resistance, it might be essential on the part of urban gardeners to accept distortion, reclaimings, changes, etc. in order for their project to survive; in other words, accept Adam Purple’s notion of ‘radical transformation’ as the only way to endure without being absorbed and used by the dominant ideology to perpetuate existing social forms. This would require them to truly detach from any notion of ownership, which, seeing how urban gardeners who initially fought against the notion of private property and exchange value of land then came to defend ‘their’ garden against all sorts of perceived improprieties, is far from being an easy task. In some cases, the limit between the occupation of land to turn it into a common resource and its effective privatization by a small group of people is quite blurry. But if it succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls of normalization, urban gardening could very well participate in the ‘open city’ (Sennett, 2006: 8), by offering ‘unresolved narratives of development’, and thus avoiding ‘the over-determination both of the city’s visual forms and its social functions’.

Notes  1  One of the distinguishing features of the more political urban gardeners is their awareness of a historical heritage.

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 2  Interestingly, this is a fact which has mostly been treated in literature as a tale of victory over urban decay rather than the displacement of unwanted uses and users.  3  During interviews in both New York City and Paris.   4  http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/ community-gardens (accessed August 4, 2016)  5  http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/p-patchcommunity-gardening/about-the-p-patchprogram (accessed August 4, 2016).  6  A practice by which one breaks away the surface of the sidewalk and replaces it with soil.  7  To help care for those of the million new trees which are planted on the street, the Parks Department has started a program through which residents can adopt a tree and receive training and tools to water and protect it.  8  http://milliontreesnyc.org/downloads/pdf/tree_ guard_donation_table.pdf (accessed August 4, 2016).  9  This has been the case in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Montesson, and Sivens.  10  Self-published leaflet by the ZADists of Montesson.

REFERENCES 6 mois (2014–2015) ‘Israël, le piège’. 6 mois, le XXIe siècle en images no. 8: 42–125. Alexander, Catherine (2002) ‘The Garden as Occasional Domestic Space’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27.3.: 857–871. Baudry, Sandrine (2013) ‘Les casitas de Porto Rico à New York City: migration et adaptation d’un espace de sociabilité’. In Bénédicte Deschamps and Isabelle Richet (eds), Immigration et travail aux États-Unis. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 139–154. Carlsson, Chris (2008) Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and VacantLot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Clarke, Paul (2010) ‘Incredible edible: how to grow sustainable communities’. FORUM: For Promoting 3–19 Comprehensive Education 52.1: 69–76. Cohen, Robert, and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds (2002) The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Credland, Tony, et al. (2003) We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-capitalism. New York: Verso.

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Davis, Mike (2006) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New Edition). New York: Verso. Ferguson, Sarah (1999) ‘A brief history of grassroots greening on the Lower East Side’. In Peter Lamborn Wilson and Bill Weinberg (eds), Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City and the World. New York: Autonomedia, pp. 60–79. Godelnik, Raz (2012) ‘How local is Walmart’s local produce?’, Triple Pundit: People, Planet, Profit.www.triplepundit.com/2012/09/walmartlocal-produce/ Golden, Howard (1999) ‘A garden grows in Brooklyn’. Washington Post June 6: B6. Gottlieb, Robert (2005) Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press. Gould, Kenneth A., and Tammy L. Lewis (2012) ‘The environmental injustice of green gentrification’. In The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, pp. 113–146. Green, Norman (1979) ‘The purple people’. New Yorker Magazine August 27: 64–72. Gurney, John (2007) Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hardman, Michael, et al. (2011) ‘Considering the impact of illegal food cultivators: a critical exploration of guerrilla gardening and the local trap’. Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC). Hardman, Michael, and Peter J. Larkham (2014) Informal Urban Agriculture: The Secret Lives of Guerrilla Gardeners. New York: Springer. Harvey, David (2000) Spaces of Hope, Vol. 7. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Harvey, David (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso. Hou, Jeffrey, ed. (2010) Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. New York: Routledge. Jacobs, Jane (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books Edition. James, Margaret (1941) ‘The political importance of the tithes controversy in the English revolution, 1640–60’. History 26.101: 1–18.

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Kiraly, Barbara (2015) ‘Comment protéger les chantiers des activistes’. Le Moniteur des travaux publics et du bâtiment, 5800, Paris, 23 janvier: 22–23. Lawson, Laura J. (2005) City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lefebvre, Henri (1972) Le droit à la ville suivi de Espace et politique. Paris: Éditions anthropos. McClintock, Nathan (2014) ‘Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture’s contradictions’. Local Environment 19.2: 147–171. Mckay, G. A. (2011) Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism & Rebellion in the Garden. London: Frances Lincoln. Marche, Guillaume (2014) ‘What can urban greening really do about gentrification? A casestudy of three community gardens’. Communication at the European Association for American Studies conference, ‘America: Justice, Conflict, War’, The Hague, 3–6 April, 2014. Merker, Blaine (2010) ‘Taking place: Rebar’s absurd tactics in generous urbanism’. In Jeffrey Hou (ed.), Insurgent Public Space: Guerilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities. New York: Routledge, pp. 45–58. Mitchell, Don (1995) ‘The end of public space? People’s Park, definitions of the public, and democracy.’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.1: 108–133. Miller, Timothy (1999) The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ostrom, Elinor (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascal, Madry (2015) ‘En 2020, 25% des surfaces risquent de devenir des friches’. Interview in Urbanisme no. 391: 7–8. Pellegrini, Patricia, and Sandrine Baudry (2014) ‘Streets as new places to bring together both humans and plants: examples from Paris and Montpellier (France)’. Social & Cultural Geography 15.8: 871–900. Purcell, Mark (2006) ‘Urban democracy and the local trap’. Urban Studies 43.11: 1921–1941. Purple, Adam (1985) ‘The Garden of Eden: an environmental “radical transformation”’. In S. Klein, R. Wener, and S. Lehman (eds),

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EDRA 16/1985 Environmental Change/Social Change. New York, pp. 101–113. Rancière, Jacques (2000) Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris: La fabrique Editions. Rancière, Jacques (2013) The Politics of Aesthetics. London: A&C Black. Reynolds, Kristin (2015) ‘Disparity despite diversity: social injustice in New York City’s Urban agriculture system’. Antipode 47.1: 240–259. Reynolds, Richard (2008) On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Permission. London: Bloomsbury. Roach, Catherine M. (2003) Mother/Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Roininen, Katariina, Anne Arvola, and Liisa Lähteenmäki (2006) ‘Exploring consumers’ perceptions of local food with two different qualitative techniques: laddering and word association’. Food Quality and Preference 17.1: 20–30. Schmelzkopf, Karen (1995) ‘Urban community gardens as contested space’. Geographical Review 85.3: 364–381. Schmelzkopf, Karen (2002) ‘Incommensurability, land use, and the right to space: community gardens in New York City’. Urban Geography 23.4: 323–343. Sciorra, Joseph, and Martha Cooper (1990) ‘“I Feel like I’m in my country”: Puerto Rican Casitas in New York City.’ TDR 34.4: 156–168. Scott, James C. (1989) ‘Everyday forms of resistance’. The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 4.1: 33–62. Sennett, Richard (2006) ‘The open city’. Urban Age: 1–14. Shepard, Benjamin, and Gregory Smithsimon (2011) The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces. New York: SUNY Press. Smith, Christopher M., and Hilda E. Kurtz (2003) ‘Community gardens and politics of scale in New York City’. Geographical Review 93.2: 193–212. Staeheli, Lynn A., Don Mitchell, and Kristina Gibson (2002) ‘Conflicting rights to the city in New York’s community gardens’. GeoJournal 58.2–3: 197–205. Thompson, John (2012) ‘Incredible edible – social and environmental entrepreneurship in the era of the “Big Society”’. Social Enterprise Journal 8.3: 237–250.

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Vinthagen, Stellan, and Anna Johansson (2013) ‘“Everyday resistance”: exploration of a concept and its theories’. Resistance Studies Magazine 1: 1–46. Voicu, Ioan, and Vicki Been (2008) ‘The effect of community gardens on neighboring property values’. Real Estate Economics 36.2: 241–283. Weatherell, Charlotte, Angela Tregear, and Johanne Allinson (2003) ‘In search of the concerned consumer: UK public perceptions of food, farming and buying local’. Journal of Rural Studies 19.2: 233–244. White, Monica M. (2011) ‘Sisters of the soil: urban gardening as resistance in Detroit’. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 5.1: 13–28.

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Wilson, Peter Lamborn, and Bill Weinberg, eds (1999) Avant Gardening. New York: Autonomedia. Zinn, Howard (1985) ‘What is radical history?’. In Stephen Vaughn (ed.), The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 158–169. École Spéciale des Espaces Libres/venueofmeet. wix.com/esel The Incredible Edible Todmorden/incredibleedible-todmorden.co.uk Grands Projets Inutiles et Imposés/stop-gpii. org Potatoe-ZAD of Montesson/zadpatate.wordpress. com ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes/zad.nadir.org ZAD of Sivens/tantquilyauradesbouilles.wordpress. com

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Index Page references to Figures or Tables will be in italics, whereas those to Notes will be followed by the letter ‘n’ and Note number. Abdallah, C., 212 abolitionist movement, eighteenth century, 353–4, 359, 361 absence from work, 129–30, 132 Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 229 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 34, 55 Academy of Mixed Martial Arts (Mark Sharder), 128 Accad, Evelyne, 87 accumulation, logic of, 102 Acoli, Sundiata, 227 Action for a Tax on Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens (ATTAC), 411, 412 activism “ends” of, 13–14 ‘flash activism,’ 248 networks, 31, 59 Activists Beyond Borders (Keck and Sikkink), 357 ACTUP (social movement organization), 259 adaptive response, 305–6 and creative response, 305, 310 Adbusters, 338 Adler, P. S., 252 aesthetic surgery, 144–5 affect, 58, 99, 113–14 affective solidarity, 60 Afghanistan war, 81 African-Americans music and resistance, 320–2 women, 141, 142, 143, 158 Afrika Bambaataa (Lance Taylor), 329 AFTURD (l’Association des femmes Tunisiennes pour la récherche et le développement), 87, 88, 90 agency prefiguration, 59–60 and social media, 65 uprooting of, 58 Aggerholm, H. K., 212 Agre, P. E., 257 Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, 125 Ah Kwon, Soo, 64 Ain’t No Makin’ It (MacLeod), 187 Almanac Singers, 323 Al-Nahda see Ennahda (Islamist group), Tunisia al-Qaeda, 80, 81 Al-Shabab, 80

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 495

alter-globalization protests, 56, 69, 72n8, 294 and Indymedia, 281, 288–91 prefiguration, 59, 60 see also globalization, resistance to alternative approaches to resistance Foucauldian inspired, 98, 99–100, 108–9 in rural China, 451 Althusser, Louis, 187 ambiguity, resistance as implicit part of, 209, 210, 211–13 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 359, 360 Amnesty International, 357 amoebic subjects, 65 Anand, Nikhil, 283 anarcho punk, 329 Anglo-American workplaces, resistance in, 99 Anonymous Online community, 19, 63, 66, 67, 263, 291 Ansoff, I., 211 anthropology of prefiguration, 59 of protest, and social movement, 56–7, 71 of resistance, 53, 57 studies, 68 and subjectivity, in protest, 32, 55 anti-apartheid campaign, 359–60 anti-immigration protests, 68–9 anti-signification, 284 anti-sweatshop movements, 13 appropriateness, logic, 453–6 Arab Spring uprisings (2011), 16, 38, 151, 152n9 and Islamism, 79, 81, 83, 87, 94 subjectivity, in protest, 61, 62, 65, 66, 69 see also Islam/Islamism; Tunisia, Islamism versus feminism in Archive of American Folk Song, Library of Congress, 323 Arendt, Hannah, 429, 437, 438, 440 Arfaoui, Khédija, 95n24 Argentina, 35, 40, 48–9n13 clientelism in, 430, 431 Cooperative La Juanita see Cooperative La Juanita, Buenos Aires Corrientes region, defense of land in, 44–5 La Famatina mountain, prevention of strip mining, 44

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496

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Malvinas Argentina town, action against Monsanto Company, 43–4 ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’ formula, 41 pickets, 440n2 recuperated workplaces in, 42 sustainable development projects, 45 see also Buenos Aires, resisting clientelism in armed movements, resistance associated with, 78 Asia Energy (now GCM), 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 473 Asian crisis (1997), 411 Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL), 64 al-Assad, Bashar, 82 assemblages, 58, 67 assemblies General Assemblies, #Occupy encampments, 39, 40, 48n10 horizontal, 41, 42, 45 Association of Development Agencies in Bangladesh (ADAB), 466 ‘astroturfing,’ 20 criteria, 272 definitions, 13 versus grass-roots, 272–4 practical charge of, 273 see also grass-roots movements asynchronous communication, 260 Ataturk, Kemal, 82 ATFD (‘lAssociation Tunissienne des Femmes Démocrates), 87, 88, 93 Atlanta Indymedia, 290, 291 ATLAS.Ti (qualitative data software), 372 authenticity, 13–14 authentic strategies of resistance, 171–2 commodification of, in the Nineties, 330–1 autonomous spaces, 292 autonomy, 34, 60 autonomous spaces, 292–3, 295n5 Awami League, Bangladesh, 463, 464 Ayler, Albert, 325 baby boomers, 331 Bains, Gurnek, 123 Bandersnatch, Eclair, 341, 342, 343, 344 Bangladesh, NGO and civil society politics, 461–75 conflict with open-pit mining, 469–72 Gono Shahajjo Shangstha (NGO), and national politics, 465–7 military dictatorship, 463 National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Port, 23, 462, 467–9, 473, 474 non-party politics, analyzing potentials for, 472–3 and Pakistan, 463 political sphere, 462–5 role of NGOs, 461 sociality of conflict, analyzing, 470–2

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 496

Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), 464, 466 Banks, Ingrid, 142 al-Banna, Hassan, 80 Barducci, Anna Mahiar, 95n20 Barley, S. R., 306 Barnes, Gerald, 381 battered women’s shelters, 159, 160–6 gender essentialism, 162–3 Recourse, 162, 164, 166, 167 Baudrillard, Jean, 338 Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), 294 Bayat, Asef, 34, 35, 48n4, 48n7, 78 Beasley-Murray, Jon, 71n1 Beatles, 325 beauty, feminine, 141–4, 152n2 bebop, 324 Bechky, Beth A., 255 Beck, Ulrich, 14, 339, 346 Beech, N., 213 Belaid, Chokri, 91 Belhaj, Ahlem, 92 Belkin, L., 130 Bemis, Michael, 235 Ben Ali, Zein El-Abedine, 88 Ben Hamida, Bochra, 95n14 Bendix, R., 306 Benkirane, Abdelilah, 87 Bennett, D., 248 Bennett, Jane, 57 Bennoune, Karima, 90, 95n22 Bensman, J., 127 Bentham, Jeremy, 9, 140 Berkman nursing home (pseudonym), 173 attitudes to coworkers’ rule violations, 178, 179 nurses at, 174, 176 nursing assistants at, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179–80 time off, need for, 175 Berlin Wall, graffiti on, 337 Bernal, Kathryn A. Hardy, 149 Berrey, Ellen, 199 Bettie, Julie, 2, 187, 203n2 beverage industry, campaign against Bay Area soda taxes, 276–7 Biafra, Jello, 328 Bikini Kill (female band), 331 Billboard Liberation Front, 338 biocracy, 14 bio-power, 104 bio-regulation, 124 Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, UK, 33, 319, 320 Birnbaum, Pierre, 446 Black Bloc, 35, 37, 67, 70 Black Feminist Thought (Collins), 156 ‘Black Latinos/Latinas,’ 200 Black Lives Matter movement, US, 68, 159 music, 21, 320, 332

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Index

Black Messiah (album), 332 Black Panthers, 229, 326 Black Power movement, 143 Blair, Stephen, 381 Block, P., 259 blockades, Prague (2000), 35–8 blogs, 289 Bloomberg, Michael, 276 ‘blowback,’ 81 Blue March, 35, 36 blues, 320, 322, 323 Blum, Linda, 17–18, 190–3, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201 body hair, 142 body projects, 144 body/bodies affects, 58 African-American women, 141, 142, 143, 158 beauty, 141–4, 152n2, 158 binaries, beyond, 151–2 bodily knowledge, 53 breaking down of, 128 cosmetic surgery, 144–5 dieting, 141, 142 ‘docile,’ 140 dress, 146–9 hair/hairstyles, 142–3, 158 harms perpetuated against women’s bodies, 158–9 marginalization of minorities, 147, 148 micro-regulation at work, impacts on body, 123–4 modification, 144–6 and oppression, 139 protest, 149–51 and resistance bodies in resistance, 58 body as site of resistance, 17, 139–55 and power, 140–1 western white ideals, 141 and workplace, 123–4, 128 Bok, Sissela, 259, 262 Boko Haram, 80 Bollywood films, 141 Bordo, Susan, 152 Boris, Eileen, 355 Boston, T-station, 38 boundaries physical to digital, 257–8 symbolic, 189, 257 technical, 258 see also boundary-work boundary-work, 189, 192, 193, 195, 201 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 4–5, 8, 53–4, 166, 188, 200 Bourguiba, Habib, 79, 87 Bowles, Samuel, 186–7 Boycott, Charles, 353 BRAC (NGO), 461 Brahmi, Mbarka, 92, 93, 95n30 Brahmi, Mohamed, 91, 92, 95n30

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497

Braun, Virginia, 146 Braverman, Harry, 101, 106, 300 Brazil, Landless Movement in see Landless Movement in Brazil (MST) Brenkle, Monsignor John, 377, 378, 379, 380, 383n5 bricolage, 7, 346 Bright, John, 306 Britton, Dana M., 230–1, 232–3 Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP), 468 ‘broken window’ theory, 339 Brown, James, 326 Brown, Michael, 332 ‘brown-out,’ in workplace, 130 Brysk, Alison, 358 Buenos Aires, resisting clientelism in, 22, 427–42 Cooperative La Juanita, work in, 431–6 fieldwork, 429 research context, 429–31 work as political action, 437–40 see also Cooperative La Juanita, Buenos Aires BUGA UP, Sydney, 338 bulletin board system (BBS), 256 Burawoy, Michael, 172, 181n1 bureaucracy, in workplace, 110, 123, 302 critique, 301 industrial bureaucrats, 306 in inter-war period, 306 Burgelman, R. A., 216, 299 Burnham, James, 310 ‘Burning Man’ community, 259 burqa (head to toe covering, Muslim women), 147 Butler, Judith, 61, 64–5, 140 Cai, Yongshun, 446 Calhoun, Craig, 355, 356, 363 capillaries system, visual metaphor of, 140 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter), 310 capital–labor paradigm, organization studies, 98–9, 101, 102 Carroll, Glenn R., 272 Carson, Rachel, 478 Casanova, Erynn Masai, 17 Cassen, Bernard, 412 Castells, Manuel, 48n2, 420 Castro, San Francisco, 344, 345 Catholic Healthcare Association, 373 Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, 381 CBGB, New York, 328 CEDAW see Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) Cederström, C., 132–3 censorship, prisons, 229, 233–9 Centner, Ryan, 340 Chaabane, Nadia, 90, 95n17, 95n23 Chainworkers, Italy, 126 Chambers, Julius, 199

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498

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Chandra, U., 462 change, organizational see organizational change Charlie Hebdo attacks, Paris (2014), 81 Charter of Human Rights (1951), 357 Chatterjee, Partha, 473 Chatterton, Paul, 292 Chavez, Cesar, 356 Chékir, Hafidha, 87–8 Chen, C. J., 449 Chiapas movement (1990s), 4 China, rural, 23–4, 443–59 alternative forms of resistance, 451 appropriateness, logic of, 453–6 bases of governance and forms of resistance, 443, 446–56 collectivization era, 451 comparative perspective of resistance and governance, 456–8 continuity and change, 449–51 decollectivization era, 445 historical trajectory of change, 445–6 institutional context, 444–6 land reform, 444–5 Mao era, 445, 447, 449, 451 mass incidents, 449 minimalist state, governed by, 457 open, social protests, 449–51 People’s Commune, 444, 445, 448 post-Mao era, 447, 448, 449 rightful resistance, 451–3 social media and technology, 454–6 in transformation, 444–6 village elections, 450–1 Wukan case (social media), 454–6 xinfang, case of, 451–3, 455 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 445, 450 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 355 Chittagong Port, Bangladesh, 467 Chowdhury, Tawfiq, 470 Christianity, 80 cisgender women, 145, 152n1 Civil Rights Movement, 157, 167, 478 students, role in, 324–5 Working Families for Wal-Mart campaign, 271 civil society-based organizations (COs), 461, 462 Clark, Septima, 157 class reproduction, consequences of resistance for, 198–201 Clegg, Stewart, 231 clientelism, in Argentina, 430, 431 Coalition for an Affordable City, 276, 277 Cobain, Kurt, 331 Colau, Ada, 287 Cold War, 80–1 end of, 88 Cole, J (rapper), 332 Coleman, Gabriella, 63, 66, 67 Coleman, Ornette, 325

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 498

collaborative analysis, 189 Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité, 86, 88, 89, 95n13 collective action, community-based, 248 collective bargaining, 100 collective identities, 56, 261, 400 Collings, D. G., 209, 214 Collins, Jane, 361 Collins, Patricia Hill, 156, 173 Collins, William, 234 Colombia, communidades negras in, 56 Coltraine, John, 325 Committee to Protect Phulbari, 469 commodification, 319, 330–1 commodity activism, 13 commons, protesting privatization of, 477–8 communities collaborative, 252–3 community gardening and transition to institutionalization, 479–80 definitions, 252, 253 Jewish Orthodox, 257–8 key dimensions differentiating online and offline, 255 online see online communities relationship ties, 250 scientific, 253 Community Development Block Grants, 479 complexity theory, 71–2n8 conceptualizing resistance, 33–5, 56 in prisons, 225–7 Connell, R. W., 82, 159 consciousness-raising, 160, 163 consent/participation, resistance through, 107–8 consumers consumer boycotts, versus divestment campaigns, 358–62 consumer-citizen, 13 and production process, 108 social movements, 126 Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies see Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, UK Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 85, 90, 95n12 Cooper, Anna Julia, 156 Cooperative La Juanita, Buenos Aires, 22, 428 bank, 434–5 clientelism, resisting, 429 culture of work, 431 day to day lives of members, 436 description, 429–30 embeddedness, 434–5 future orientation, 435–6 location, 429–30 openness, 431–3 and power/politics, 439–40 resistance of clientelism in, 431, 435 togetherness, 433–4 video documents, 429

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Index

work in, 431–6 see also Argentina; Buenos Aires, resisting clientelism in; Latin America cooptation concept, 20, 299, 301, 305 as creative/creative organizational resistance, 308, 309–10 examples, 305 formal, 311 informal, 309 and maintaining control, 307–9 organization studies, 104 see also entrepreneurship coping, resistance as, 213–14 corporate social responsibility, 360 correctional officers (COs), 227, 232–3, 238, 239 Correll, S., 256, 260 cosmetic surgery, 144–5 Council of the European Union, 69 counter-conduct, 55 counterculture, 1960s, 324–7 counter-hegemonies, 52, 57, 63 counter-revolution, 62, 69 country & western music, 321 courage of truth, 110 Courpasson, David, 11, 115, 428, 440 covert to overt axis of resistance, 33 CPS (Code du Statut Personnel), Tunisia, 87 ‘crackers,’ 263, 264n2 The Cradle Will Rock (musical), 323 Crane, Andrew, 237 Crary, J., 122, 132 Crass (British band), 329 creation, and resistance as struggle, 99 creativity, in workplace, 298, 299 ‘from below,’ 300, 301, 305 see also organizational change credit, building, 370–2 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 159–60 critical approach, strategy research, 209, 210, 213–14, 219 critical management studies, 300 critical realism, 106–7, 114 critiques of resistance literature, 33–4 Crocker, Jillian, 17 Crossley, Nick, 53 cultural capital, 199, 200, 336 cultural systems, 283 culture jamming, 338 cyberpunk, 256 cyberspace geographic location to, 254–7 space metaphors, 256 D’Angelo, 332 Davidson, Arnold I., 55 Davis, Mike, 481 De Blasio, Bill: Uber’s mass mobilization against (NYC), 274–6, 277

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 499

499

de Certeau, Michel, 7, 48n6, 212, 311, 338, 346 Dead Kennedys, 328 Deaf communities, 146, 152n3 decentralized actions, Prague (2000), 36 Declaration of Public Utility (DUP), 486 deindividuation, 262 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 58, 59, 302, 303, 307, 308, 423n7 Delgado, Denise A., 143 democracy consent through, 108 direct, 61 Dent, E. B., 304 Departments of Corrections (DCs), prisons, 229, 234 Derrida, J., 112, 423n7 Descartes, René, mind-body separation, 34 deskilling, 101, 300, 302, 303 Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, 484 Dewey Square (Boston), #Occupy Boston encampment at, 38, 39 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 131 dialectical Utopias, 491 Dick, P., 209, 214 dieting, 141, 142 Diggers, English, 477, 478 digital technology, 10, 57, 280–97 alter-globalization movement and Indymedia, 288–91 15M and the ‘PAH,’ 285–6 horizontality, 281, 294, 295n1 infrastructure and technology, 281, 282–5 material space, 291–4 networks, 281 see also 15M movement, Spain; Platform for those Affected by Mortgages in Spain (PAH) digital tsunami, 69 Dines, Gail, 158 Direct Action Network, 47 direct democracy, 61 Direct Social Work, 61 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 104 discourse analysis, 105, 388 dispossession, accumulation by, 31 dissatisfaction, employee, 126, 129–30 distancing, mental, 103 distributed person concept, 58 ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière), 490 Distributed Proofreaders (open-source project), 260 divestment campaigns, versus consumer boycotts, 358–62 dividuals, 58, 59 Dixie paper company campaign, 270 do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic, 321, 329, 330, 331 domination legitimacy, 4 masculinity, 111 and resistance, 7–9, 56, 78 urban gardening, 484 see also masculinity

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500

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Scott), 3 ‘dotcom’ bubble (1990s), 340 Douglas, Gabby, 142 down-shifting, 130 dress, 146–9 ‘Duluth Model,’ 161 Dunham, P. J., 260 Durkheim, Emile, 11, 249, 250, 251, 353, 428 Dust Bowl Ballads (Guthrie), 323 Dylan, Bob, 325, 326–7 Earl, Jennifer, 248 earrings, gender-conforming, 145 Earth First! (social movement organization), 259 Eckland-Olson, Sheldon, 231 economic instrumentalism, 102 Edelman, Marc, 68 Effrat, Marcia, 254 Egypt counter-revolution, 69 Islamic women in, 55 martyrdom, 62 Muslim Brotherhood, 82–3 New Egypt, 62, 63 pietic movement, 62 veiling, 147 see also Arab Spring, 2011; Tahrir Square, Cairo Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECRW), 83 Einwohner, Rachel L., 5, 226 Ekman, S., 128 El Massar party see Tajdid (communist party, Tunisia) El-Ghobashy, Mona, 83 Eliasoph, Nina, 12 elitism and digital technology, 283, 284 elites facilitating mass participation, 270–1 organization studies, 104 transparency and disclosure in elite-backed participation, 274–7 Ellington, Duke, 323 Ellis Act (1985), 343 Elsbach, K. D., 259 Elyachar, Julia, 65, 66 e-mails, workplace, 122 emergence concept, 71, 71–2n8 emotions, role in resistance, 218 employment/workplaces absence from work, 129–30, 132 ‘brown-out,’ 130 bureaucracy in, 110 changing employment relations, 122–5 creativity in, 298, 299, 300, 301 deskilling, 101, 300, 302 dissatisfaction, employee, 126, 129–30 drinking/drug taking during shift, 132 employees as strategists, 217 escapism, 131–2, 133

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 500

exit see exit Fordism, 123, 127, 301, 327 identities, 103, 105 industrial and workplace conflict, resistance through, 100–1 micro-regulation, impacts of, 123–4 micro-resistance, 99, 122, 127–8 personalization of employment, 122, 123–4 presenteeism, 130–1, 133 recuperated workplaces, 40, 41, 42 resisting 24/7 work ethic, 125–8, 132 self-management and neoliberal capitalism, 122, 124–5 social movements, 126–7 stress, 128 surface acting, 131 top managers as rebels, 217 unionism see unionism work as political action, in Buenos Aires, 437–40 workplace resistance and family life, 170–84 data and methods, 173–80 literature review, 171–3 workplace sociology, 102–4 see also organization studies; organizational change empty signifiers, 338 Engels, Friedrich, 52 English Diggers, 477, 478 Enlightenment, 8, 80, 111–12 Ennahda (Islamist group), Tunisia, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 enterprise, versus entrepreneurship, 299–300, 301, 310 entrepreneurship cooptation, 307–10 definitions, 305, 306 versus enterprise, 299–300, 301, 310 large corporations, 300–1 and management’s resistance, 298, 299, 300, 305–7 resistance in entrepreneurial organization, 301–3 see also organization studies; organizational change Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 478 Erhardt, Moritz, 122 Erikson, Kai, 353 Eriksson, L.M., 103 escape escapism, 131–2, 133 and resistance as struggle, 99 Escobar, Arturo, 48n1, 49n16, 51–2, 56–7, 58, 72n8 ethics ethical practices, 237 hackers, 263 as resistance, 112 ethnographic research, 32, 45, 128 collaborative, 189–90 ethnographies of everyday resistance, 48n1 fieldwork, 52, 429, 491 healthcare occupations, 173–80 lack of ethnographic “thickness,” 33–4

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Index

online communities, 256 schooling, 187 subjectivity, in protest, 52–3 urban gardening, 477, 491 Euro Business School (EBS), pseudonym, 121, 133 Europe anti-immigration protests, 68–9 recuperated workplaces, 41 refugees entering, 68 ‘Eve of Destruction’ (McGuire), 326 everyday resistance, 3, 15, 32, 33, 171, 172, 181 at Berkman nursing home, 177, 179 prisons, 229–30, 232 urban gardening, 480 existentialism, 235 exit (24/7 work ethic), 122 absence, 129–30, 132 whether can be theorized as a mode of resistance, 128–32 early retirement of medical staff, 128–9 escapism, 131–2, 133 presenteeism, 130–1, 133 reasons for, 129 see also employment/workplaces; 24/7 work ethic Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Hirschman), 16 exodus concept, 133 expulsion, logic of, 14 Eyck, Toby Ten, 337 Ezzamel, M., 209, 214 Facebook, 11, 248, 256, 262, 283, 287, 288, 289, 294 algorithms, changes to, 293 ‘Facebook revolutions,’ 285 ‘Twitter revolutions,’ 285 factory deviance, resistance as, 104 Fahs, Breanne, 143 Fairclough, N., 107 Falklands War, protests against, 329 false consciousness, 52 family ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting, 185 group solidarity, 177–80 ‘intensive mothering,’ 173 motherhood and schooling, 188–202 navigating work–family tension, 174–5 as repoliticizing, 180–1 responsibility for as individual constraint, 175–7 role in workplace resistance, 172–3 see also Berkman nursing home (pseudonym); workplace resistance and family life Fanon, Franz, 284 fantasy, 132, 133 fanzines, punk, 329 fatness, 142 female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS), 146 feminism and battered women’s shelters, 160, 161

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 501

501

and the body, 140 contemporary movements in Middle East and North Africa, 84 feminist movement versus women’s movement, 84 first-wave, 84 Islamic feminists, 84 versus Islamism, 85–6, 94 in Tunisia, 16, 87–93 Islamist versus feminist resistance, 93–4 movements, 79 posthumanist, and Foucault, 98, 99, 106, 109–14, 115 post-structural, 55 resistance and change, 84–7 riot grrrl movement (1990s), 331 second-wave, 188 women’s rights organizations, 86–7 Ferguson, James, 55, 70 festivals, 322 Festival of Concrete Utopias, 485 Feversham, P., 337 Fielding, P., 248 15M movement, Spain, 46, 280, 281, 294, 295n3 and Platform for those Affected by Mortgages in Spain (PAH), 285–6, 292 Fine, Michelle, 187 First Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism, 411 Fischer, Brette, 337 Flanders, A., 100 flappers, 323 ‘flash activism,’ 248 Fleming, Peter, 14, 16, 99, 107, 108, 109, 124, 132–3 Flores, Toty, 429, 434, 437 folk music, 321, 323 and rock ‘n’ roll, 325 foot-binding, 159 ‘For What It’s Worth’ (Springfield), 326 force, concept of, 299, 302, 307 Ford, J. D., 304, 392 Fordism, 1, 123, 127, 301, 327 post-Fordist era, punk and hip-hop in, 327–9 Foucault, Michel, 6–7, 13, 14, 32, 48n5, 70, 214, 302, 428 alternative Foucauldian inspired approaches to resistance, 98, 99–100, 108–9 and the body, 140 Discipline and Punish, 104 Foucauldian turn, subjectivity, 54–6 and liberalism, 62, 64 and posthumanist feminism, 98, 99, 106, 109–14, 115 as post-structuralist, 106 on power, 34, 53, 55, 209, 225, 226, 236, 304 refusal to make grand narrative claims (organization studies), 98, 109–10, 114 foundations of resistance, 15–16 Fourcade, Marion, 370

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502

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

Fox, A., 100 Fox, Richard, 336, 347 Framing Dropouts (Fine), 187 France arrondissement government, 483 banning of headscarfs by, 147 May 1968 uprising, 337 Plan Biodiversité, Paris, 481 right-of-way greening, Paris, 483 Special School for Free Spaces (ESEL), 490 Zones to Defend (ZADs), 486, 487–9 Frank, Dana, 355 Frankfurt School, 1 Franklin, Aretha, 326 fraud, ‘astroturfing,’ 272 free and open-source software (F/OSS), 63, 66 free jazz, 325 free speech movement, 63 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), 412 freedom, 63 Freeman, Jo, 420 Freire, Paolo, 341 French resistance, Nazi occupation, 32, 33 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), Algeria, 80 Front Populaire, 96n36 assassinations of political figures, 91–2 ‘Fuck Tha Police’ (seditious song by N.W.A.), 330 functionalist-managerialist approach, strategy research, 209, 210–11, 219 Gabriel, Yiannis, 132 Gal, Susan, 53 Garden of Eden project, New York, 479, 480 gardening, urban, 24, 476–94 case studies, 485–90 coinciding with mainstream political agenda, 477 community gardening and transition to institutionalization, 479–80 dissent, history of, 477–80 domination, continuing patterns, 484 historical heritage, awareness, 491n1 instrumentalization, current struggle with, 480–1 New York City, community gardens, 479, 480, 481 normalization, current struggle with, 480–1 privatization of public space, 483–4 privatization of the commons, protesting, 477–8 rejection of classical notion of private property, 478 tensions and contradictions within a group, 485 Zones to Defend (ZADs), 485–90 Garner, Eric, 332 Gartner, W. B., 305 gastric bypass surgery, 146 Gaventa, John, 12, 446 Gaye, Marvin, 326 GCM see Asia Energy (now GCM) geeks, 66, 71n6 Gell, Alfred, 58

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 502

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, 257, 258, 263 balancing, 250–1 distinctions between, 249–50 relationship ties, 250 resisting work in, 249–53 types of relationships, 250 see also communities; online communities gender analysis, 82, 105 gender confirmation surgery, 145 gender essentialism, 162–3 see also feminism; masculinity; women Generation X, 331 ‘generous urbanism,’ 483 Gengler, Amanda, 17 genital mutilation, 159 geographies of resistance, 22–5 Gerver, I., 127 Gesellschaft see Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft Gezi Park, Istanbul, 60, 61 Ghannouchi, Rachid, 83, 88, 89, 95n8 Gibson, W., 256 Giddens, Anthony, 14 Gieryn, T. F., 256 Gilbert, Michael J., 231 Gintis, Herbert, 186–7 ‘girl groups,’ 325 Giroux, Henry, 186, 187 Girth and Mirth Clubs (social organizations for big men), 142 Giuliani, Carlo, 412 Giuliani, Rudolph, 481 Glaser, Jack, 374 Gläser, Jochen, 253 Gledhill, John, 56, 61 Global Coal Management Resources (GCM), UK, 462 global financial crisis, 41 global justice movements, 46, 47, 420 subjectivity, in protest, 59, 60 Global North, 47, 60, 145 global resistance, 31–2 vision of a better world, 413–15 and World Social Forum, 407–26 see also resistance Global South, 60 Global Uprisings documentary film, 295n3 global village, 260 globalization, resistance to, 31–50 conceptualizing of resistance, 33–5 global movement against neoliberal globalization, 409 land defense, 43–5 Occupy movement see Occupy movement Prague blockades/color-coded zones (2000), 35–8 recuperated workplaces, 40, 41, 42 and World Social Forum, 411 see also alter-globalization protests Goffman, Erving, 3, 146, 231, 235, 236, 237, 238

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Index

Goldberg, S. G., 304 Gono Shahajjo Shangstha (GSS), NGO in Bangladesh, 23, 462, 465–7 Gordy, Barry, 325 GothLoli (G & L) movement, Japan, 149 Gotschall, Jonathan, 128 Gouldner, A., 127 governmentality, 104 graffiti, 22, 336–50 contributions to resistance, 337, 346–7 definitions, 336 Heklina figure, 345, 345 hidden transcripts, 347 infrapolitical significance, 337–9 Leatherline figure, 345 liberal urbanism, 339–40 micro-scale tactical interventions, 338 oppositional speech acts, constituting, 336 as a protest medium, 337, 339, 341 in San Francisco, 339–46 scholarship, 336–7 Sister Roma figure, 345–6 stencil, 340, 341, 343, 344, 345 tags, 338, 341 unique nature as form of protest, 339 war on, 339, 340 Grajew, Oded, 412 Grameen Bank, 461 Grami, Amel, 90–1, 92, 93 Gramsci, Antonio, 1, 4, 12, 32, 52–3, 57, 187 grand narrative claims in organization studies, Foucault’s refusal to make, 98, 109–10, 114 see also organization studies ‘grassroots lobbyists,’ 270–1 grass-roots movements, 20, 31, 34–5, 125 versus ‘astroturf,’ 270, 272–4 ‘grass-roots for hire’ campaigns, 277 Gray, Sister Katherine, 377, 381 Great Britain see United Kingdom Great Depression, 323 Great Migration, US, 322, 324 Great Recession, 14 Greece, 15, 35, 40–3 Green Thumb, 479 Gregg, M., 124 Gregorio Laferrere, La Matanza, Buenos Aires, 429–30, 434–5 see also Argentina; Buenos Aires, resisting clientelism in; Cooperative La Juanita, Buenos Aires Griffith, Alison, 188 Grosz, Elizabeth, 144 Group Islamique Armée, 80 Group of Eight (G8), 31, 280, 290, 412 anti-G8 protests (2004), 289 grunge scene, Seattle, 331 Guattari, Félix, 15, 58, 423n7

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 503

503

Guha, Ranajit, 34 Gulalp, Haldun, 83 Gulen movement, 84 Gupta, Akhil, 55, 70 Gürsel, Zeynep Devrim, 283 Gusfield, Joe, 356 Guthrie, Woody, 323 Habermas, Jurgen, 13 habitus, 8, 53, 54 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 263 hacking, 63, 66–7 online communities, 263, 264n2 Hacking, Ian, 70, 71 Hadfield, Phil, 236 hair, 142–3 Hamas, 81, 89 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 157 Hancock, J. T., 260 Hanna, Kathleen, 331 Hardie-Bick, James, 235, 236 Hardman, Michael, 476 Hardt, Michael, 57 Hardy, C., 209, 214, 216, 304 Harlem riot (1943), US, 324 Harvey, David, 491 hate crime, 152n5 Hawthorne experiments, 103 healthcare occupations, ethnographic research, 173–80 Healy, Kieran, 369–70, 382 Hebdige, Dick, 320 Heckscher, C., 252 hedonism, 323, 338 hegemony, 53 counter-hegemonies, 52, 57, 63 masculinity, 82 neoliberal, 124 post-hegemony, 71n1 Hendrickson, Katie, 187 Hendrix, Jimi, 332 Herc, Kool, 328 Hezbollah, 81 Hickel, Jason, 63 hierarchies, 42, 237 high culture, 325 hijab (headscarf worn by Muslim women), 147, 149, 152n4 Hill, Lauryn, 332 Hillery, Jr., G. A., 251, 254 hip-hop, 320, 321 in age of Reagan and Thatcher, 329–30 and contemporary social movements, 331–2 development of, 319, 328 in post-Fordist era, 327–9 hippie subculture, 326 hipster subculture, 324 Hirschman, A.O., 16, 128

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504

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

Hizab-e Tahrir, 80 Hochschild, Adam, 353, 354 Hodson, Randy, 17 Hoffman, Abbie, 327 Hollander, Jocelyn A., 5, 226 Holliday, Billie, 323 hoodies (hooded sweatshirts), 148, 149 horizontal assemblies, 41, 42, 45, 47 Hornqvist, Magnus, 226 human rights movement, international, 21, 357 human trafficking, 358 humor, resistance as, 103, 104 Hussein, Saddam, 81 hyper-masculinity, 82 Ibrahim, Yousaf, 53–4 identifiers, 261, 262 identities assigned to a subject, 70 collective, 56, 261, 400 contributions to resistance study, 400 cultural-political, 56, 57 discursive construction of, 387–8 gender analysis, 105 intersectional, 139 masculinity, 103 permutations of, 140 personal, 261 reification of, 397–8 relational, 400 self–other talk, 387, 390, 398, 399 social, 261 stable to malleable, 261–3 and subjectivity, 105–6 temporal identity talk, 400–1 workplace, 103, 105 implementation, resistance as impediment to, 210–11 incentives, ‘astroturfing,’ 272 Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) project, UK, 485, 489–90 Independent Media Center (IMC), 288, 289 indeterminacy of labor, 102 India Pink Chaddi (Pink Underwear) campaign, 17, 148, 152n7 SlutWalks, 17, 148, 152n6, 158 white, thin ideal, 141 individualism, 63 and therapeutic culture, 163–4 individualized education programs (IEPs), 194, 201 industrial action, collective, 100, 125 industrial and workplace conflict, resistance through, 100–1 industrial relations theorists, 100 Industrial Revolution, 80 industrial sabotage, resistance as, 104 Indymedia movement, 280, 288–91 Atlanta center, 290, 291 websites, 289

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 504

inequality, resisting or reproducing, 157–60 infrapolitics, 4, 52, 336 and emotions, 347 graffiti, infrapolitical significance, 337–9 infrastructure(s), 19 centrally initiated, 282–3 definitions/uses, 282, 283 digital technology, 281, 282–5 inherited, 281 media, 281–2, 283, 287 of representation, 283 state-corporate material, 282 inherited infrastructure, 281 innovation, 299, 307 see also creativity, in workplace; entrepreneurship; organizational change Instagram, 288 Intel, 216 intentions, and resistance, 33, 48n3 workplace resistance and family life, 171, 172 interactions definitions, 258–9 online communities as platforms for, 263 personal to remote, 258–60 see also online communities Intercontinental Youth Camp (IYC), 412 International Alliance of Women, 85 International Council of Women, 85 International Monetary Fund (IMF), resisting, 31, 35–8, 280 Internet, 63, 131, 247 affordances of, 248 resisting work, 249 use for political action, 257 interpretative approach, strategy research, 209, 210, 211–13, 219 intersectional perspective, 17, 156–69 battered women’s shelters, 159, 160–6 de-gendering violence against women, 164–6 feminism, 139 feminist theories, 173 inequality, resisting or reproducing, 157–60 Iran dress, 147 rhinoplasty practice, 141–2 Iraq war, 81 Islah of Yemen, 82 Islamic Revolution, Iran (1979), 147 Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), 80, 81, 82 Islam/Islamism, 15–16, 79–84 Black Muslims and prison system, 228–9 Egypt, Islamic women in, 55 emergence of Islamists in 1970s, 88 versus feminism, 85–6, 94 in Tunisia, 16, 87–93 fundamentalism, 69, 80, 94n2 grievances, 81 Islamic Revival, Cairo, 62

9/2/2016 5:02:18 PM

Index

505

Islamist versus feminist resistance, 93–4 and liberalism, 62 militant Islamists, 80 moderates and democrats, 82–4 movements, 78–80, 81 Muslim family law, problem of, 86–7 political Islam, 94n2 resistance to Islamism, 90 Sharia law, 80, 85, 87 televangelism, 62 terminology, 94n2 see also Arab Spring, 2011; Egypt Islamist Welfare Party, Turkey, 84 Islamophobia, 62, 68 Iveson, Kurt, 338, 346

King, Martin Luther, 151, 355 King, Rodney, 330 Klein, Naomi, 360 Kleinman, Sherryl, 157, 159 Knights, David, 16, 218 knowledge bodily, 53 knowledge-intensive organizations, 303 Power–Knowledge–Subject trinity, 54 Komsan, Nehad, 95n10 Krøijer, Stine, 60, 64, 69, 70 Kunda, G., 306 Kurik, Robert, 15 Kurnik, Andrej, 61, 68 Kwon, W., 216

Jackson, George, 229 Jacobs, Jane, 483 Jafar, Afshan, 17 jahiliyya (age of darkness), 80 Jamiat-e Islami, 80 Janeway, Elizabeth, 166 Jarzabkowski, P., 212 Jasper, James M., 343 jazz, 320, 322, 323 free, 325 Jebali, Hamadi, 89 Jeffreys, Sheila, 158 Jermier, John, 131 Jewish Orthodox communities, 257–8 Jihad, 80 jilbab (veils), 147 ‘jitterbugs,’ 323 Johansson, Anna, 485 Johnson, P., 213 Johnson Reagan, Bernice, 157 Johnston, Hank, 336 Jones, Derek, 233–4 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 270 Juris, Jeffrey, 15, 32, 38, 59, 60, 61, 68, 421 Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey, 82, 84 Justice for Janitors campaign, Los Angeles (1990s), 375

La Famatina mountain, prevention of strip mining, 44 La Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, Spain, 68 La Villana de Vallekas (Madrid social center), 286, 292 labeling theory, 71 labiaplasty, 159 Labor and Monopoly Capital (Braverman), 101 labor movement, 173, 323, 355, 382 labor process theory, 101–2, 106, 109, 114 Ladies Home Journal, 323 Lahelma, Elina, 189 Laine, P. M., 214 Lakhani, K., 253 Lamberg, J. A., 216 Lamont, Michele, 17 Land, C., 124 land, defending, 43–5, 46 Landless Movement in Brazil (MST), 41, 45 Langley, A., 212 Langman, Lauren, 82 languages of resistance, 20–2 Lap-Band surgery, 146 Lareau, Annette, 188, 203n3 Larkham, Peter J., 476 Larkin, Brian, 282, 283 Latin America, 35, 41, 44, 46, 141 see also Argentina; Brazil; Buenos Aires, resisting clientelism in Le Bon, G., 262 Le Monde Diplomatique, 411 Le Moniteur, 488 Leadbelly, 323 League of Human Rights, 92 Learning to labor (Willis), 187 Leblanc, Lauraine, 5 Lee, Ed, 343 Lefebvre, Henri, 338 Lennon, John, 327 Lesbian Cafe (LC), online community, 256, 260 Letaief, Samia, 95n32 Levy, D. L., 218 Levy, Steven, 263 LGBTQ rights, 256, 345

Kallianos, Yannis, 64–5 Kanter, R. M., 299 Kaplan, S., 212, 213 Kapur, Ratna, 148 Karim, Persis, 141–2 Katz, R M., 305 Kayawardena, Kumari, 85 Kazdaghli, Habib, 91 Keck, Margaret, 357 Kelley, Robin, 336, 347 Kelling, George, 339 Kelty, Chris, 63, 65, 66, 67, 71n6 ‘kettling situations,’ 60, 71n2 Kibbutzim, Israel, 259 Kimelberg, Shelley, 17–18, 189–99, 202

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 505

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506

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

Li, Lianjiang, 446, 456 liberal urbanism, San Francisco, 339–40 liberalism, advanced, 62–4 liberation management, 123 liberation theology, 84 Libya, 81, 82 National Transitional Council, 87 life insurance industry, 369 Lingis, Alphonso, 144 Lippens, Ronnie, 235 Livestream, 288 location, geographic (cyberspace), 254–7 Locke, Richard, 361 locomotive onomatopoeia, 322 logic of accumulation, 102 logic of expulsion, 14 Lomax, Alan, 323 Lomax, John, 323 looping effects, 70, 71 Lopez, Steven Henry, 172 Los Angeles punk scene, 328 Los Angeles uprising (1992), 330 Loseke, Donileen R., 160, 165 Lounsbury, M., 255 Lucas, Rob, 124, 128 Lukes, Steven, 166–7, 446 Macdonald, Nancy, 338, 340 Machiavelli, N., 299 MacKaye, Ian, 329 MacLeod, Jay, 187 Madry, Pascal, 488 Maeckelbergh, Marianne, 19, 59, 72n8 Magurchara oil explosion, Bangladesh (1997), 467 Mahmood, Saba, 55, 56, 62, 69 Making of the English Working Classes (Thompson), 2 Malinowski, B., 255–6 Malvinas Argentina, action against Monsanto, 43–5 management, resistance of, 303–5 and entrepreneurship, 298, 299, 300, 305–7 top management, resistance to initiatives from below, 300 The Managerial Revolution (Burnham), 310 managerialism, 123, 124, 307 Mannheim, Karl, 490 Mantere, S., 213 Marche, Guillaume, 22, 484 marginalization of minorities, 147, 148 Marquis, C., 255 Martin, Steve J., 231 Martin, Trayvon, 147–8 Marx, Karl/Marxism, 51, 52, 54, 104, 181, 352 crime and punishment, 229 ‘cultural Marxism,’ 203n1 neo-Marxism, 106, 109, 114 youth subcultures and music, 320 Mascone, George, 328

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 506

masculinity hegemonic, 82 organization studies, 103–4, 110–11 stereotypes, 145 masquerading, ‘astroturfing,’ 272 mass media, 323 Massa, Felipe, 19 massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), 260 materiality, 57 digital technology and material space, 291–4 subjectivity, 57 Mawdudi, Abul Ala, 80 Maximumrocknroll, 329 May Day protests, 126 Mayfield, Curtis, 326 Mayo, Elton, 300, 303 MB see Muslim Brotherhood (MB) McCabe, D., 209 McGuire, Barry, 326 McLaren, Margaret, 149 McLuhan, Marshall, 260 mechanical solidarity, 250 media infrastructure, 281–2, 283, 287 mental distancing, 103 Michel, A., 123 Michelson, Ethan, 457 micro to macro axis of resistance, 33 micro-resistance, 99, 122, 127–8 militant activism, Prague (2000), 35–8 Milk, Harvey, 328 mind-body separation, subjectivity, 53 Mingus, Charles, 325 Minkoff, D. C., 259 Minutemen, 328 Mitchell, Timothy, 53 Moaddel, Mansoor, 80 mobilization of resistance beverage industry, campaign against Bay Area soda taxes, 276–7 De Blasio, Bill: Uber’s mass mobilization against (NYC), 274–6, 277 elites facilitating mass participation, 270–1 grassroots versus ‘astroturf,’ 270, 272–4 strategy making, 215 from top-down, 269–79 transparency and disclosure in elite-backed participation, 274–7 modernity, Islamist view of, 80 modes of resistance, 46 whether exit can be theorized as a mode, 128–32 organizational (strategy making), 217–18 see also resistance modes of subjectivation, 54–5, 62 mods and rockers, 320 Moghadam, Val, 15–16 Mohammadi, Ali, 284

9/2/2016 5:02:18 PM

Index

Mohammadi, Annabelle Sreberny, 284 Moll, Yasmin, 62, 63 Molotov cocktails, 35–6, 37 Monden, Masafumi, 152n8 Monsanto Company, shut down of genetically modified seed processing plant, 43–5 Moore, Ryan, 21 moral spokespeople, 370 moralized markets, 369–70 Morgan, G., 218 Morris, A. D., 261 Morris, Douglas, 82 Morsi, Mohamed, 66, 83 Motown music, 325, 326 MTI (Ennahda), Tunisian Islamist group, 83, 88 Mubarak, Hosni, 62, 63, 66, 83 see also Arab Spring, 2011; Egypt Muhammad, Anu, 472 Muhammad, Prophet, 80, 93 mujahideen, Afghan, 81 Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), 411 multitude concept, 57 multivocality, in strategy text, 212 Murphy, Wendy J., 158 Murray, Albert, 322 music and youth subcultures, 21 blues, 320, 322, 323 commodification of authenticity, in the Nineties, 330–1 country & western music, 321 do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic, 321, 329, 330, 331 folk, 321, 323 ‘girl groups,’ 325 jazz, 320, 322, 323, 325 music and resistance, 320–1 protest music, 326, 327, 329, 330 punk and hip-hop, 327–32 rap music, 329, 330 rhythm & blues, 320, 325 rock ‘n’ roll, 320, 321, 324 Sixties counterculture, 321, 324–7 swing, 323, 324 urbanization and growth of music industry, 322–4 youth subcultures and resistance, 320 see also twentieth century music Muslim Brotherhood (MB), 80, 82–3 Youth Forum, 83 Muslim family law (MFL), problem of, 86–7 Muslim Sisters’ Group, 83 Nader, Ralph, 411 Naderites, US, 271 al-Nahda, 83 Námêstí Míru Square, Prague, 36, 37 Nash, Diane, 157 National center for Fair and Open Testing, 203n1 National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, US, 160

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 507

507

National Coalition of American Nuns, 379 National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Port, Bangladesh, 23, 462, 467–9, 473, 474 National Constitutional Assembly, Tunisia, 90, 91 National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), 372 negation concept (Nietzsche), 299, 301 negative resistance, 5 Negri, Antonio, 57, 71n7 neoliberalism/neoliberal capitalism, 2, 71n4, 327 changing employment relations, 122–3 education (neoliberal), paradoxes of resistance in era of, 185–207 ideology, 133 resistance to, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 48n2 and self-management, 122, 124–5 Nestles, global ‘shaming’ campaign concerning, 359 networked individualism, 258 networks, 31, 59 digital technology, 281 New Deal era, US, 323, 356 New Left, 326, 327 New Orleans, music industry, 321, 322 new social movements, 126 NGO Affairs Bureau (NGOAB), Bangladesh, 466 NGOs see Bangladesh, NGO and civil society politics Nidaa Tounes (secular political party, Tunisia), 93 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 299, 301, 303, 304, 308, 309 9/11 terrorist attacks, 81 ‘war on terror,’ post-9/11, 62, 69 niqab (veil covering whole body), 147 Nirmul Committee, Bangldesh, 472 Nirvana (band), 331 No Child Left Behind Act (2001), 185 No Logo (Klein), 360 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) see Bangladesh, NGO and civil society politics non-issue, resistance as, 210–11 Nova, Scott, 361–2 Novy, Jeremy, 344, 345–6 N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude), group, 330 Obama, Barack, 271 Obama, Michelle, 482 obesity, 142 O’Brien, Kevin J., 446, 451, 456 ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’ formula, 41 Occupy movement, 21, 38–40, 46, 331, 342 General Assemblies, 39, 40, 48n10 Occupy Boston, 15, 38, 40 Occupy Everywhere, 38 Occupy Slovenia, 60–1 Occupy Wall Street, 38, 40, 63, 126 subjectivity, in protest, 60, 68 Oekonux group, 66 Office of National Statistics, UK, 130 Okhuysen, Gerardo Q., 254–5

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508

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

O’Mahoney, S., 253 O’Neil, O., 263 Ong, Aihwa, 6, 55 online communities, 19, 247–68, 249–53 collective action, community-based, 248 ‘community,’ 252 definitions, 247, 248, 252 fundamental dimensions and distinctions relevant to resisting work, 264 geographic location to cyberspace, 254–7 personal to remote interaction, 258–60 physical to digital boundaries, 257–8 stable to malleable identity, 261–3 Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, resisting work in, 249–53 key dimensions differentiating online and offline, 255 self-organizing online groups, 248–9 time and space constraints, overcoming, 248 online insurgency, 67 ontological turn, 57, 58 Open Publishing, 288, 294 Open Source software development, 258 open space innovation (WSF), 408–9, 412, 415–17, 421 opportunity hoarding, 196 oppositional speech acts, 336 ‘opt out revolution,’ 130 Orders of Sisters, 379 organic solidarity, 250 organization studies alternative Foucauldian inspired approaches to resistance, 108–9 boredom of routinized labor, 103 capital–labor paradigm, 98–9, 101, 102 critical realism, 106–7, 114 drudgery, work seen as, 108 dualist analysis, 107, 110 entrepreneurship see entrepreneurship industrial and workplace conflict, resistance through, 100–1 initiatives from below, resistance from top management, 298, 299, 300 labor process theory, 101–2, 106, 109, 114 literature review, historical, 100–4 masculinity, 103–4, 110–11 posthumanist feminism, 98, 99, 106, 109–14, 115 post-structural turn, 104–8 refusal methods, 128 refusal of Foucault to make grand narrative claims, 98, 109–10, 114 teamwork, 105 workplace sociology, 102–4 see also employment/workplaces; organizational change organizational change challenging, 392–4, 395 change agents, 389, 390 change recipients, 390, 392 ideals of workplace transformation, 172

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 508

identities, discursive construction of, 387–8 promoting, 389–91 and resistance, 386–404 celebrating, 391–4, 395 demonizing, 389–91, 393 and power, 304 reification of identities, 394, 397–8 see also organization studies Orlan (French performance artist), 145 Orlikowski, W., 213 Ortner, Sherry, 5, 32, 34, 55, 56, 422 output indicators, workplace, 123 Owen, Barbara A., 231–2, 235, 236 OWS (Occupy Wall Street), 38, 40, 63, 126 youth subcultures and music, 320 see also Occupy movement PAH see Platform for those Affected by Mortgages in Spain (PAH) Palm, G., 103 Panopticon model, 9, 140 Pargeter, Alison, 83 Parker, Martin, 121, 122, 133 Parla, Ayse, 61 Parti de la Justice et due Développement (PJD), Morocco, 82 participation and media, 108 Pascoe, Cheri J., 187, 203n1 passive to active axis of resistance, 33 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2009), US, 271 peasantry, 4, 52, 53, 322, 450 Pence, Ellen, 161 People’s Global Action (PGA), 31, 411 Hallmarks, 293 People’s Organizations (POs), 461, 462 People’s Park, US, 478, 479 Perez, George, 378 Perlstein, Jeff, 289 persistence, resistance through, 103, 110 personal identities, 261 personalization of employment, 122, 123–4 Petrini, Carlo, 257 Pew Research Center, Internet & American Life Project, 247 Pfaffenberger, Bryan, 282, 283, 284, 292, 295 Phulbari, Bangladesh, 469–70 Phulbari Movement, 470 Phulbari Raksha Committee, Bangladesh, 469, 471 Pickerill, Jenny, 292 piece-rate, 103 Piehl, Anne M., 228 piercing, 145 Pile, Steve, 33, 48n4 Pinchot, G., 299 Pink Chaddi (Pink Underwear) campaign, India, 17, 148, 152n7

9/2/2016 5:02:19 PM

Index

Pink March, 35, 36, 37 Pins and Needles (musical), 323 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 12 Plan Biodiversité, Paris, 481 Platform for those Affected by Mortgages in Spain (PAH), 280 and the 15M movement, 285–6, 292 Facebook page, 287 founding of (2011), 281 la PAH, 285 tactics, 286 Plouffe, David, 275 Podemos movement, Spain, 68 Polanyi, Karl Paul, 32 Polillo, Simone, 370, 382 political versatility, 65 Polletta, Francesca, 292, 295, 347 polymaths, 71n6 Poole, Christopher, 263 post-bureaucratic organization, 301, 302 post-Fordist era, punk and hip-hop in, 327–9 post-hegemony, 71n1 posthumanist feminism, 98, 99, 106, 109–14, 115 post-industrial economy, 299, 302 post-structural turn, 104–8 post-structuralism, 48n7, 55, 104, 105, 106 Potato-Zad (Montesson), France, 487–9, 492n10 power as collective, 226 as conduct of conduct, 226 definitions, 226 discretionary, 232 Foucauldian approach to, 34, 53, 55, 209, 225, 226, 236, 304 negative will to (Nietzsche), 299, 301, 308 ‘power-to/power-over’ distinction, 32 prisons as sites of, 224–43 and resistance see power and resistance responsibility for, sharing, 309 unequal relations, 232 unusual, myths of, 283 see also will to power power and resistance and body as site of resistance, 140–1 Foucauldian approach to, 55, 109, 209 organization studies, 105 resistance from ‘above,’ 300 strategies of power, versus tactics of resistance, 48n6 Power–Knowledge–Subject trinity, 54 Powers of the Weak (Janeway), 166 practice-based approach, 59 Prague, blockades in as resistance to World Bank/IMF (2000), 15, 35–8 Pratt, M. G., 262 ‘precarization’ of work, 427 prefiguration, 46, 59–62, 68 presenteeism, 130–1, 133

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 509

509

Primitive Rebels (Hobsbawm), 2 Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 302 Prison Litigation Reform Act (1996), 229 Prison Rape Elimination Act, 234 prisons, 18 acts of resistance, 227–8, 237, 240 case law, 233 censorship, 229, 233–9 conceptualizing power and resistance in, 225–7 conditions of incarceration, 240 correctional officers (COs), 227, 232–3, 238, 239 and court system, use of, 228–9 Departments of Corrections (DCs), 229, 234 escape attempts, 228 hunger strikes, 228 mass incarceration, 224–5 political prisoners, 229 prison library, 234–6, 240 librarian resistance, 236–9 prisoner resistance, 227–30, 240 rates of incarceration, 224 revolts and riots, 228 as sites of power/resistance, 224–43 suicide attempts, 229 as total institutions, 231, 235 US carceral system, 224, 225, 227 work as prison metaphor, 107 worker resistance in context of, 230–3, 240 see also Panopticon model Proctor, Deborah, 374 productive resistance, 32, 216–17 productivity, and revolutionary redemption, 63 profit, 101, 108 protest alter-globalization, 56, 59, 60 anthropology of, 56–7, 71 direct action, 46 distribution of, 64–7 embodied, 149–51 graffiti as medium for, 337, 339, 341 open and social, in rural China, 449–51 privatization of the commons, 477–8 student activism, 325, 326 subjectivity in see subjectivity, in protest protest music, 326, 327, 329, 330 see also folk music; punk pseudonyms, 261, 262 see also Berkman nursing home (pseudonym); Euro Business School (EBS), pseudonym; Recourse (battered women’s shelter) (pseudonym) psy sector professionals, 197, 204n9 public affairs consulting, 271 ‘Public Citizen’ movement, 411 Public Enemy (New York-based group), 330 public interest movement, US, 271 punk, 320 in age of Reagan and Thatcher, 329–30

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510

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

and contemporary social movements, 331–2 development of, 319, 328 in post-Fordist era, 327–9 subcultures, 321 punteros (party brokers), Argentina, 430 Purcell, Eileen, 375, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383n5 Purple People, US, 479, 480, 491 Putnam, R. D., 261 Qatar, 81 quiet encroachment, 35, 78 Qur’an, 84, 90 Qutb, Sayyid, 80 Rachidi, Khaoula, 91 radical habitus, 53 radical transformation, notion of, 491 radio, Algeria, 284 Rana Plaza factories, Bangladesh, 362, 363 Rancière, Jacques, 338, 490 rap music, 329, 330 Razsa, Maple, 61, 68 Reagan, Ronald, 329–30, 478 Reay, Diane, 199 rebellion, 104 recognition, and resistance, 171 Recourse (battered women’s shelter) (pseudonym), 162, 164, 166, 167 recuperated workplaces, 40, 41, 42 Reformation, 80 refusal classic methods, 128 and resistance as struggle, 99 total, 4–5 see also grand narrative claims in organization studies, Foucault’s refusal to make refusal of resistance, 11–13 Reger, Jo, 146–7 Reich, Adam, 21–2 relationality and resistance, education context, 190–2 Rennes, City of, 481–2 resistance alternative approaches to Foucauldian inspired, 98, 99–100, 108–9 in rural China, 451 anthropology of, 53, 57 and bodies see body/bodies celebrating, 391–4, 395 class reproduction, consequences for, 198–201 comparative perspective of resistance and governance, 456–8 conceptualizing see conceptualizing resistance demonizing, 389–91, 393 deterrents against, 108 and domination, 7–9, 56, 78 everyday see everyday resistance foundations, 15–16

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 510

geographies, 22–5 global, 31–2, 407–26 historical literature review, 99, 100–4 and intentions see intentions, and resistance languages, 20–2 micro-politics of, 109 modes of see modes of resistance non-discursive modes, 217–18 and organizational change, 386–404 and power see power and resistance refusing, 11–13 and reification of identities, 394, 397–8 sites, 16–18 spaces of see spaces of resistance in strategy making see strategy making targets, 195–8 technologies, 18–20 virtual, 10–11 working definitions, 171–2, 209–10 see also individual topics Resistance Studies Network, 25 Ressler, C., 123 Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), US, 123 revolution/revolutionary redemption, 62, 63, 66, 285 Rheingold, H., 256 rhinoplasty (nose job), Iran, 141–2 rhizome concept, 15, 58 Rhodes, Lorna A., 233 rhythm & blues, 320, 325 Rida, Rashid, 80 ridicule, resistance as, 103 riot grrrl movement (1990s), 331 riot police, Prague (2000), 35–6 riots, 60 Riout, Denys, 338 Roberts, Hugh, 80 Robnett, Belinda, 157 Rock Against Racism campaign, UK, 328 rock ‘n’ roll, 320, 321, 324 and folk music, 325 Romani community, 256 Roosevelt, Theodore, 478 Rosenfeld, J., 125 Ross, Fred, 377–8, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383n5 Ross, Jeffrey Ian, 227, 232 Roszak, Theodore, 326 Rothenberg, Paula, 158 Rough Trade Records, 329 routine resistance see everyday resistance Routledge, Paul, 48n3, 48n6, 48n7 Roy, Donald, 102, 127, 172 Rubin, Jeffrey, 171 Rubin, Jerry, 327 ruling class, 52 Rushdie, Salman, 81, 94 Sabea, Hanan, 69 ‘sadistic street environments,’ 481

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Index

Sager, Ryan, 270 Salafists, 80, 91 Samuel, Chris, 54 San Francisco, California Bay Area see San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) Blight Ordinance (2004), 340 Community Preservation and Blight Reduction Act, 340 Department of Public Works, 340 Ellis Act (1985), 343 gay community, 344, 345, 346 gentrification, 340, 343 graffiti in, 340–6 Graffiti Removal and Abatement Ordinance (1994), 340 Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, 341 liberal urbanism, 339–40 punk scene, 328 stencil graffiti, 340 see also United States San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA), 343 Bay Area Rapid Transit, 294 liberal welfarism, 340 soda taxes in, 270, 276–7 Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital (Catholic), 21–2 building legitimacy, 375–82 credit, building, 370–2 Fair Election Agreement campaign (2008), 379, 381 labor, 375–82 moralized markets, 369–70 organization of workers at, 368–9 Sisters’ declining legitimacy in Catholic health care, 373–5 St. Joseph Health System (SJHS), 367–8 unionization, 383 urbanization campaign, 367–85 Santals (Bengalis), 470, 471 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 147 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 352 Sassen, Saskia, 14 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 81 Saud, Muhammad Ibn, 80 Saudi Arabia, 80, 81, 82, 95n6 Savat, David, 59 scale of resistance, 33 scarification, 145 Schmidt, L., 337 Scholl, Christian, 64 schooling and neo-liberal education, 17–18 affluent mothers, 193, 194, 195, 198–9, 200 boundary-work, 189, 192, 193, 195, 201 brain-based disorders, children with, 192 cases, 189–90 children of color, 191 children with disabilities/special needs, 190, 192–8 class reproduction, consequences of resistance for, 198–201 collaborative analysis, 189–90

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 511

511

competition, emphasis on, 185 hallmarks of 21st century schooling, 186 ideal resistor, 190 individual resistance on behalf of vulnerable child, 191, 195–6 insiders, outsiders and perceived threats, 192–5 media analysis, 198 and motherhood, 188–202 paradoxes of resistance, 185–207 potential for resistance, 188–9 public schools, 190, 191, 194, 197, 199 relationality and resistance in context of, 190–2 school as a site of resistance, 186–8 stigma, experiences of, 192, 196 targets of resistance and disciplinary social norms, 195–8 Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles and Gintis), 186–7 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 300, 305, 306, 309, 310, 383n2 scientific management, 101 Scott, James C., 3, 4, 15, 33, 34, 52–3, 54, 57, 78, 171, 172, 178, 180, 237, 339, 347, 427, 446, 447, 480 Scott, Joan Wallach, 147 Sea Island, Brunswick (Georgia), 290 Second International, 85 secularization, 80 security, and liberalism, 64 Security Fence (Middle East), graffiti on, 337 Sedaka, Malaysian village, 52 Seeger, Pete, 323 Seidman, Gay, 21 self technologies of, 54, 55 transgression of, 60 self-care, 112 self-discipline, employee, 105 self-management, and neoliberal capitalism, 122, 124–5 Selznick, Philip, 299, 301, 305, 309–10, 311 Seoane, J., 423n4 sequestration of experience, 14 Service Employees International Union, United Healthcare Workers – West (SEIU-UHW), 372, 380, 381–2 Sex Pistols, 328 sex-change surgery, 145 SFBA see San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) Shah, Reza, 147 shame/shaming movements, 21, 351–66 abolitionist movement, eighteenth century, 353–4, 359, 361 anti-apartheid campaign, 359–60 borders, shaming across, 356–8 clothing industry, 361 codes of conduct, 361, 362 corporate scandals, 362 definitions, 351 divestment campaigns versus consumer boycotts, 358–62

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512

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

global brands, shaming, 358–62 global supply chains, 361 labels on goods, 361, 362 monitoring programs, 361, 362 moral crusades, 354 ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns, 351, 353, 357, 359, 361, 362, 363 public confessions, 354 safety rules, ignoring, 362 shame as a strategic tactic, 352–6 social movement analysis, 352, 353, 355 sociologists on, 353, 362 sugar boycott, UK (eighteenth-century), 353–4 temperance movement, 354–5, 359, 361 transnational activism, 356–7, 358 uses, 351–2 visible brands, vulnerable to boycotts, 361 voluntary schemes, 361 Sharder, Mark, 128 Sharia law, 80, 85, 87 Sharp, Joanne P., 34 shopfloor workers, 100, 102, 103 Sikkink, Kathryn, 357 Silent Spring (Carson), 478 Silver Bloc, 36, 37 Simmel, Georg, 4, 7 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 295 Simone, Nina, 326 Singerman, Diane, 78 Sisters in Islam (SIS), Malaysia, 84 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco, 346 Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, 374 Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, 368, 369, 372, 377, 379, 380, 382 declining legitimacy in Catholic Health Care, 373–5 see also Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital (Catholic); St. Joseph Health System (SJHS) sites of resistance, 16–18 Sitrin, Marina, 15, 32, 40, 48–9n13 Sixties counterculture, 324–7 Sjørslev, Inger, 60 skinheads, 320 sleep, study of, 124, 128 Slow Food community, 257 SlutWalks, India, 17, 148, 152n6, 158 Sly and the Family Stone, 326 Smith, Dorothy, 188 Snowden, Edward, 19 social anthropology, 53, 72n8 social housing landlords, 481 social identities, 261 social media and technology, 283, 454–6 online communities, 248, 256, 258, 262 see also online communities social movement analysis, 2–3, 32, 151 China, 446 family life and workplace resistance, 173

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 512

feminist movements, 84 hip-hop/punk, 331–2 infrastructures, creation of, 283 new social movements, 126 online communities, 259 shame, 352, 353, 355 social movement unions, 125 in South Asia, 462 workplace, 126–7 Socialist International, 84–5 societies in movement, 32, 35, 46 solidarity, 250 Solidarity Initiative (Vio.Me community support group), 40, 41 Soto, Jaime, 381 South Africa, and anti-apartheid campaign, 359–60 South Asia, social movement analysis in, 462 South of Market (SOMA), San Francisco, 344 space/space metaphors autonomous, 292, 292–3, 295n5 controlled and uncontrolled space, 9 experience, space viewed as, 292 material space, 291–4 online communities, 256, 257 open space innovation (WSF), 408–9, 412, 415–17, 421 physical, 292, 295 public space, notion of, 489 spaces of resistance, 9–10 spatialized nature of resistance, 34 spectacular use of, 9 time-space compression/distanciation, 259 Spain 15M movement see 15M movement, Spain Platform for those Affected by Mortgages in Spain see Platform for those Affected by Mortgages in Spain (PAH) ‘V’ signs on walls following World War Two, 337 Vallecas, Madrid, 286, 291 Sparato, Emilio Patané, 45 Special School for Free Spaces (ESEL), France, 490 Spicer, A., 16, 99, 107, 109, 130–1, 132 Spinoza, Baruch, 307, 308, 309 squatting, 478, 479 St. Joseph Health System (SJHS), 21–2, 367–8, 374, 375, 376, 380, 381, 382 see also Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange Starn, Orin, 336, 347 state-of-the-art, contemporary, 59–67 advanced liberalism, 62–4 distribution of protest, 64–7 prefiguration, 59–62, 68 Stempeck, Matt, 275–6 stencil graffiti, 340, 341, 343, 344, 345 strategy making, 18 approaches to resistance in critical approach to strategy, 209, 210, 213–14, 219

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Index

functionalist-managerialist, 209, 210–11, 219 interpretative approach, 209, 210, 211–13, 219 resistance as a non-issue or impediment to implementation, 210–11 resistance as an implicit part of ambiguity and struggle over meaning, 211–13 resistance as inherent part of strategy processes, 216–17 resistance as subjectivity and coping, 213–14 authentic strategies of resistance, 171–2 conversations and dialogue, 216–17 defensive and proactive strategies, failure of resistance studies to distinguish between, 34 defined, 208 embodied nature of resistance in, 218 forms, 215 future research agenda, 214–18, 219 dialogical dynamics, 216–17 employees as strategists, 217 expanding roles and identities of strategists, 217 historical dialectics, 216–17 mobilization of resistance, 215 productive resistance, 216–17 resisting strategies and forms of strategy-making, 215 top managers as rebels, 217 historical dynamics, 216 ideological assumptions, resisting, 218 managerial cognition and politics in, 212–13 micro-level, 216 modes of resistance, 217–18 organizational, 203–23 shame as a strategic tactic, 352–6 sociomateriality, 218 strategies of power versus tactics of resistance, 48n6 visuality, 218 and working definition of resistance, 209–10 World Social Forum, 415 Strathern, Marilyn, 58, 59 Straughn, Jeremy Brooke, 456 Straw, Jack, 147 Street Advertising Takeovers, New York and Madrid, 338 strike action, 100, 125 struggle, resistance as, 99, 107, 108, 109 student activism, 324 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 325 subalternity, 34, 53 Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Hebdige), 320 subcultures body modification, 145 concept, origins, 320 dress codes, 147 hippies, 326 masculinity, 103 youth see youth subcultures subject formation, 54–5 subjective turn, 60

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 513

513

subjectivity, 15 affects, 58 anthropology of protest and social movement, 56–7 assemblages, 58 concept of subjectivity, 51 decentered, 34 dividuals, 58, 59 dominating and resisting subject, 51–4 emerging collective subjectivities, 61 emerging tasks, 68–71 Foucauldian turn, 54–6 and identity, 105–6 insurgent subjectivity, 68 Marxist thought, 51, 52 materiality, 57 mind-body separation, 53 modes of subjectivation, 54–5, 62 networking, 59 in protest, 51–77 resistance as, 213–14 state-of-the-art, contemporary, 59–67 subjugation, struggle against, 110 subordination, 52, 53, 57, 104, 201 prisons, 232, 240 subordinated women, 157–8, 368 sub-politics, 339, 346 sugar boycott, UK (eighteenth-century), 353–4 superalternity, 53 surplus value (profit), 101, 108 surveillance, in workplace, 105 Sutton, Barbara, 150 Sutton, R. I., 259 swing music, 323, 324 symbolic boundaries, 189, 257 symbolic crusades, 356, 357 symbolic resistance, 320, 323, 325 symbolic taxes, 6 symbolic tribalism, 14 symbolic violence, 54 Syria ,81, 82 SYRIZA movement, Greece, 68 tactics of resistance, 78 versus strategies of power, 48n6 Taddei, E., 423n4 Tahrir Square, Cairo, 9, 10, 61, 62, 63, 285 Tajdid (communist party, Tunisia), 88, 90 Taliban, 80, 81 talk shows, 108 Talukdar, Jaita, 141 Tamarod movement (2013), 66 targets of resistance, 195–8 Tata (Indian multinational), 467–8 tattoos, 145 Taylor, Cecil, 325 Taylor, F. W., 300, 302 Taylor, S., 124

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514

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

Taymiyyah, Ibn, 80 Tea Party, US, 69 teamwork, 105 tear gas, 36 technocracy, American, 326 technological adjustment, 284 technological dramas, 282–5 technological reconstitution, 284 technological statements/counterstatements, 283 technologies of power/government, 54, 55 technologies of resistance, 18–20 technologies of self, 54, 55 teddy boys, 320 televangelism, Islamic, 62 temperance movement, 354–5, 359, 361 terrains of resistance, 35 territories of difference, 49n16 territories of resistance, 47 terrorism, 69 see also ‘war on terror,’ post-9/11 Thatcher, Margaret, 329–30 ‘The Message’ (protest song), 330 Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios, 53, 69, 71 Thessaloniki, Greece, 15, 35, 40–3 thinness, 141 Thomas, R., 209, 214, 216, 304 Thompson, E. P., 2 Thompson, Heather Ann, 230 Thompson, J., 123 Thompson, P., 101, 102 Thornburgh v. Abbot, 233 Tiananmen Square, 33 Tibbals, Chantal, 158 Tilly, Charles, 443, 444 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 249, 250, 251, 261 top management, 217, 300 total institutions, 231, 235 Total Quality Management (TQM), 393 Touraine, Alain, 126 tourism industry, 131 trade unions see unionism transformation rural China, 444–6 World Social Forum, 416 see also organizational change transgression of the self, 60 transhumanists, 71n6 transnational activism, 356–7, 358 transsexuality, 145 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 355 ‘trickle-down economics,’ 342 Trobriand Islands, Melanesia, 256 Tuan, Y. F., 131 Tunisia, Islamism versus feminism in, 16, 87–93 feminist activism, contemporary, 92–3 feminist movement in Tunisia, 90 Front Populaire, assassinations of political figures, 91–2

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 514

Manouba University, contention at, 90–1 reasons for focus on Tunisia, 79 Turkey, 81 Turner v. Safely, 233 TVA and the Grass Roots (Selznick), 307 twentieth century music 1960s, 324–7 1970s, 327–9 1980s, 329–30 1990s, 330–1 24/7 capitalism, 16, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132 24/7 work ethic, 122, 125, 127, 132 exit strategy see exit (24/7 work ethic) Twitter, 11, 256, 283, 287, 288, 289, 293, 294, 295n4 Two Cheers for Anarchism (Scott), 427 Tyson, Mike, 144 UAF (l’Union d’action féminine), Moscow, 87 Uber, mass mobilization against Bill De Blasio (NYC), 274–6, 277 UC Berkeley, 478 UGTT (Tunisian General labor Union), 92 UN climate summit, Copenhagen (2009), 64 Unemployed Workers Movement, Argentina, 430 Ungdomshuset (Copenhagen center), 60, 71n3 Union of Citizens Assemblies, La Rioja (Argentina), 44 unionism, 100, 122, 125 decline in US, 170 versus new social movements, 126 teachers’ unions, 186 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 81 United Farm Workers (UFW), 125, 356, 375 United Kingdom abolitionist movement, eighteenth century, 353–4, 359 anti-capitalist milieu, 54 Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, 33, 319, 320 early retirement of medical staff, 128–9 Falklands War, protests against, 329 Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) project, 485, 489–90 punk, 328 Rock Against Racism campaign, 328 United States American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 359, 360 battered women’s shelters/safe-house programs, 160 Black Lives Matter see Black Lives Matter movement, US carceral system, 224, 225, 227 Civil Rights Movement see Civil Rights Movement Constitution, 13th Amendment, 228 global justice movements, 47 Great Migration, 322, 324 Harlem riot (1943), 324 ideologies of motherhood in, 188–9 labor movement, 173 large corporations, 123

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Index

LGBT identity in, 54 liberal ethics, 62 neoliberal educational policies in, 187–8 New Deal era, 323, 356 New Orleans, music industry, 321, 322 Occupy movement see Occupy movement racism and imperialism, opposition to, 326 Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), 123 San Francisco see San Francisco, California strike action, 125 technocracy, 326 transsexuality and healthcare system, 145 Uber, mass mobilization against Bill De Blasio (NYC), 274–6, 277 union decline, 170 Vietnam War, opposition to, 325, 326, 411 ‘workers centers’ movement, US, 125 Works Progress Administration, 323 see also Argentina; Buenos Aires, resisting clientelism in; Latin America; San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA); San Francisco, California; specific topics affecting US United States Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 375 urban gardening see gardening, urban urban greening corporate involvement in, 482–3 as tool of social control, 481–2 Useem, Bert, 228 use-value, 101 Vaara, E., 214, 216, 218 Vallas, S. P., 105, 438 Vallecas, Madrid, 286, 291 Valley of the Dolls (film), 198, 204n10 veil, use of, 33, 147 Vietnam War, opposition to, 325, 326, 411 village elections, rural China, 450–1 Vinthagen, Stellan, 485 violence against women battered women’s shelters, 159, 160–6 consciousness-raising, 160, 163 de-gendering, 164–6 individualism and a therapeutic culture, 163–4 patriarchal justifications, 160 Recourse, 162, 164, 166, 167 terminology, 167n1 Vio.Me (collectively-run Greek workplace), 40, 41–2, 48n11 virtual resistance, 10–11 visibility of resistance, 33 voice and resistance as struggle, 99 right to be heard, 108, 121–2 Wade, Lisa, 54 wage-effort bargaining power, 102 Wahhabism/Abd-al-Wahhab, Ibn, 80

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 515

515

Wallach, Lori, 411 Walsh, Daniel, 381 ‘war on terror,’ post-9/11, 14, 62, 69 water cannons, 36 Weapons of the Weak (Scott), 3 Weber, Max, 4, 123, 231, 302 weight-loss surgery, 146 Weitz, Rose, 143–4, 158, 167, 171 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 156 Werbner, Pnina, 62 Western, M., 125 Wheaton, Dennis Ray, 272 Whitaker, Francisco, 412 White, Josh, 323 White Overalls, Italian, 35, 36 Whittington, R., 215 Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (Ressler and Thompson), 123 Wiener, Scott, 345 WikiLeaks, 89 Wiktorowicz, Quintan, 81 will to power, 302, 303 negative (Nietzsche), 299, 301, 308 Williams, J., 5, 33 Willis, Paul, 2, 187 Willmott, H., 209, 214 Wilson, Darren, 332 Wilson, James, 339 Wingfield, Adia Harvey, 159 Wolfson, Todd, 289 women African-American, 141, 142, 143, 158 cisgender, 145, 152n1 of color, 141 empowerment of, 17, 161–2 harms perpetuated against bodies of, 158–9 Islamism, 62 subordinated, 157–8, 368 violence against see violence against women see also feminism; gender analysis Women Living under Muslim Laws, 84 Women’s International Democratic Federation, 85 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 85 Wonder, Stevie, 326 ‘workers centers’ movement, US, 125 working-class subcultures, 320 workplace resistance and family life, 17, 170–84 data and methods, 173–80 defiance and family, 174–5 everyday resistance at work, 172 family, class and group solidarity, 177–80 family responsibility as individual constraint, 175–7 literature review, 171–3 making sense of resistance, 171–2 research setting, 174 role of family in workplace resistance, 172–3 time off, need for, 175

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516

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

work-family tension, navigating, 174–5 see also Berkman nursing home (pseudonym); family workplace sociology, 102–4 workplaces see employment/workplaces; workplace resistance and family life; workplace sociology Works Progress Administration, US, 323 World Bank (WB), resisting, 35–8, 280 World Economic Forum (WEF), 411 World Social Forum (WSF), 4, 23, 24 Charter of Principles, 407, 408, 410, 413–16, 423 conventions, 408 events, 408, 419 future of, 417–19 and global resistance, 407–26 history, 410–13 International Council, 416 open space innovation, 408–9, 412, 415–17, 421 opening assembly (2013), 92 political objectives, 414 in Porto Alegre, 409, 413, 415, 417 significance of, 408 strategy making/strategic choices for activists, 415 transformation, 416 World Trade Organization (WTO), 31, 280 anti-WTO summit protests, Seattle (1999), 4, 21, 281, 288, 331, 411 Wroe, David, 95n9 Wukan, Guangdong Province, 454–6

BK-SAGE-COURPASSON-160199.indb 516

xinfang, rural China, 451–3, 455 Xing, Ying, 453 Yellow March, 35 Young, Michael, 354 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 85 youth subcultures, 320–2, 324 see also music and youth subcultures Zapatistas, 38, 410–11, 423n6 Zelizer, Viviana, 369, 370, 382 Zengin, Asli, 60 zero-tolerance disciplinary practices, 187–8 Zhou, Xueguang, 447 Zibechi, Raul, 35, 47 Zinn, Howard, 490 zones of resistance, color-coded (Prague), 35–8 Zones to Defend (ZADs), 485–90 in France, 486, 487–9 Incredible Edible Todmorden project, 485, 489–90 origins, 486 Potato-Zad (Montesson), 487–9, 492n10 ZADists, 486, 487, 488, 489, 492n10 Zone of Deferred Planning, 486 see also gardening, urban Zuckerberg, Marc, 148 Zulu Nation, 329

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