ANRV381-SO35-19 ARI 2 June 2009 7:44

Political Sociologyand Social MovementsAndrew G. WalderDepartment of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2047,email: walder@stanford.edu

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2009. 35:393–412

First published online as a Review in Advance onApril 6, 2009

The Annual Review of Sociology is online atsoc.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-120035

Copyright c© 2009 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0360-0572/09/0811-0393$20.00

Key Words

contentious politics, mobilization, collective action

AbstractUntil the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a di-verse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between socialstructure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explainingvariation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies,aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a break-away tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing thescope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups,whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruitadherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow andsucceed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, theformation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplificationof emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but thesealternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the prob-lem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest toexplain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchersin related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—haveretained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they of-ten view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theoriesabout the impact of social structure on movement political orientationwill require integrating insights from research on related but widelyscattered subjects.

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INTRODUCTION

From its inception the field of political sociol-ogy was about the relationship between politicalphenomena and social structure. Social struc-ture meant very different things in the handsof different theorists, and this served to definetheoretical camps: economic organization, classand status, community organization and socialties, formal organization and bureaucracy, orsmall-group interaction. In their considerationof social movements, political sociologists werepreoccupied with explaining their orientationsby reference to the experiences of the subpopu-lations from which movements drew members.The core intellectual puzzles were why politi-cal movements were reformist or revolutionary,secular or religious, pragmatic or ideological,nationalist or communist, peaceful or violent.These were the central questions that motivatedresearch on the subject through the 1970s. Theprocess of mobilization, if acknowledged at all,was usually an afterthought.

This changed more than three decades agowhen the core problem was restated: Given cer-tain motives (or grievances) in a subpopula-tion, under what conditions and through whatprocesses are these motives translated into ef-fective group action? This was an importantand neglected problem in influential theoriesthat traced movements variously to frustra-tions born of relative deprivation, class conflictanchored in modes of production, or sociallyand psychologically marginalized subpopula-tions. The new agenda began with a focus ona subpopulation’s organizational capacity andthe resources it could command. It later ex-panded to incorporate macropolitical circum-stances, or political opportunity structures, andthen to claims about the perceptions of partic-ipants and the framing of appeals, the sourcesof collective identities, or the amplification ofparticipants’ emotions. The increasing varietyof ideas about mobilization and the perennialcontroversies within the subfield has createda false sense of intellectual breadth, obscur-ing the enduring narrowness of the focus onmobilization.

THE ARCHEOLOGYOF A RUPTURE

Today the problem of mobilization is so centralto the study of contentious politics and socialmovements that few appear able to conceive ofa different question or ask why the field tookthe shape it did. Before the rise of current ap-proaches, research on political movements wasdriven by three broad traditions, all of whichwere deeply curious about the relationship be-tween social structure and politics. The oldesttradition was class analysis, ultimately Marxistin origin, and was committed to understand-ing the roots of radical politics in class conflictsinherent in different modes of production. Asecond tradition was based on the variety ofrole theory exemplified by Robert Merton andothers, which usually took the form of explana-tions based on role strain, status inconsistency,and relative deprivation. A third tradition, ul-timately Durkheimian in origin, was rooted inthe structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsonsand his students.

An early exemplar of class analysis isSeymour Martin Lipset’s first book, AgrarianSocialism (1950), which sought to explain theanomalous rise of a rural political movementwith ostensibly socialist aims in the Canadianwheat belt. The analysis looked closely atthe characteristics of wheat agriculture on theNorth American prairie, the close-knit natureof rural communities, and the inherent con-flict between producers and middlemen in com-mercialized smallholding agriculture. Lipsetwanted to understand why radical politics wasso rare in North America by studying this de-viant case, and he closely analyzed the reasonswhy this radical, seemingly anticapitalist move-ment moderated its ideology and policies onceit achieved regional political power and nation-alized key commercial sectors.

A later exemplar in this tradition is Jef-fery Paige’s Agrarian Revolution (1975), whichwas ultimately motivated to explain the originsof the tenacious revolutionary movement inVietnam that so preoccupied American politicsat that time. Building on Stinchcombe’s (1961)

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typology of rural enterprise, Paige offered anelegant theory that linked variations in the ide-ologies and aims of rural political movements—whether they were reformist or radical, so-cialist or nationalist—to the varied features ofagricultural enterprise in regions that exportedproducts on world markets. Both Lipset andPaige had something to say about the organi-zational capacity of the groups involved, buttheir primary interest was in explaining nothow these groups mobilized, but why thesemovements adopted varied aims and ideologies.Other examples of work in this tradition includeCalhoun (1982), McNall (1988), Schwartz(1976), and Scott (1976), all of which traceddegrees of political radicalism to features of eco-nomic organization and communities in histor-ical context.

Davies (1962) and Gurr (1970) exemplifiedthe relative deprivation tradition. The core ideais that it is not overall levels of hardship thatdrive groups to engage in rebellion, but theirdeprivation relative to socially conditioned ex-pectations. Although rarely explicit, this tradi-tion was ultimately rooted in conceptions de-rived from role theory, which viewed socialstructures as constellations of overlapping, so-cially constructed roles with assigned statuses,normative expectations, and varying degrees ofsocially structured role strain (Merton 1968a,b).One version of the theory is that individualswho experience status inconsistency or frus-trated upward mobility are the most likely tobecome radicalized. Another version is thatthose groups who experience a decline in sta-tus relative to others—either because of an-other group’s rise or their own decline—arethe most likely to become radicalized. The keymechanism in these theories is psychologicalfrustration, which breeds aggression and makesindividuals likely recruits for extremist move-ments. For both Davies and Gurr, protest andradical politics were conceived as political vi-olence, in contrast to more quiescent formsof routine politics. Other prominent examplesare Kornhauser’s (1959) analysis of mass so-ciety as the foundation of totalitarian move-ments, Gusfield’s (1955, 1963) analysis of the

temperance movement as a form of status pol-itics, and Lipset’s (1959a,b, 1960) later essayson right-wing extremism and working-classauthoritarianism.

The core idea of the Parsonian tradition wasthe familiar Durkheimian notion that a well-integrated and stable society is ultimately basedon a moral order in which normative expec-tations, based on widely held values, are in astate of equilibrium with the existing division oflabor. As societies grow and change, socialstructures become more differentiated andspecialized, necessitating adaptive changes innorms and laws that regulate the inevitable con-flict that change brings. Rapidly changing so-cieties are singularly prone to disruption, andthe individuals who are most affected by rapidchange experience forms of social and psy-chological strain that make them more likelyto join radical movements, whether secular orreligious. One emblematic contribution to thistradition was Smelser’s (1959) study of working-class radicalism in the English industrial revo-lution, which attributed it (contra Marx) to thedisruption of working-class families. His latertheory of collective behavior (Smelser 1962)traced qualitative variations in the aims and ide-ologies of social movements to the extent towhich a society’s moral order was disrupted bychange. The idea spread widely in the form ofmodernization theory into the field of compar-ative politics, where it became central to expla-nations of revolution in developing countries(Huntington 1968, Johnson 1966).

These traditions shared three essential fea-tures. First, they all sought to relate variationsin features of social structure to the characterof social movements. Second, they all were ulti-mately interested in explaining variations in po-litical orientations—why movements are liberalor radical, reformist or revolutionary, peace-ful or violent—not the capacity of groups tomobilize. Third, they all offered fairly specificpredictions about the structural circumstancesunder which different forms of politics wouldemerge.

These traditions differed in equally fun-damental ways. Their conceptions of social

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structure were very different, as were the mech-anisms thought to link social position to po-litical behavior. Class analysis and subsequentanalyses of economic enterprise and commu-nity structure offered a concrete conception ofsocial structure in which a rational awarenessof economic and political interest—sometimesreinforced by moral ideas embedded in com-munity traditions—played a central role. Rel-ative deprivation and collective behavior theo-ries offered more abstract conceptions of socialstructure indicated by aggregate social trends inwhich social marginality, psychological disori-entation, and frustration played a central role,but they shared a common goal of relating fea-tures of social contexts to the qualitative char-acter of political movements.

Whereas all three of these traditions havebeen largely relegated to the prehistory of re-search on social movements and contentiouspolitics, they all spawned theories that had thenow-rare virtue of yielding reasonably clear em-pirical implications. The observation that eachof these traditions repeatedly failed to predictthe outbreak of the kinds of movements theywere designed to explain contributed heavily totheir eclipse.

Class analysis, especially in its originalMarxist form, had long been dogged by itsoverprediction of radical working-class move-ments and the remarkable rarity of the revolu-tions in the circumstances that Marx and theearly Marxists had expected. This had alreadybred forms of neo-Marxism that emphasizedthe functions of the capitalist state (Miliband1969), the production of consciousness in thelabor process (Burawoy 1979, 1984), or the ex-tension of elite ideological hegemony over sub-ordinate classes (Thompson 1966). The historyof radical movements also made many observerskeenly aware of the role of organized repres-sion and violence employed by the forces of or-der. The reputation of such figures as Lenin,Trotsky, and Mao as innovative strategists whocould turn unfavorable circumstances into rev-olutionary situations suggested that the anal-ysis of organization, strategy, and the balanceof forces in political environments were the

ultimate determinants of the strength and suc-cess of radical movements.

Theories of relative deprivation andParsonian theories of collective behaviorsuffered from a similar problem. The evi-dence adduced to confirm them was oftenimpressionistic, yet the clarity with which theywere stated invited quantitative tests of theirpredictions. Efforts by skeptics to test theirunderlying propositions often failed to confirmtheir predictions (e.g., Paige 1971).

The most ambitious early study to under-mine the reigning theories was Tilly’s (1964)dogged empirical pursuit of the social originsof the Vendee counterrevolution in westernFrance in the 1790s. To test explanations de-rived from two competing sociological tradi-tions, Tilly looked intensively at the transfor-mation of western France’s social structure onthe eve of the revolution. Class analysis, rep-resented by the French historians who inter-preted their revolution in classic Marxist terms,portrayed the counterrevolution as the reactionof social classes rooted in precapitalist modes ofproduction: nobility and peasants in noncom-mercialized agriculture. Modernization theory,in contrast, predicted that the counterrevolu-tion would have occurred in those communitiesmost disrupted by the penetration of capitalisteconomic relations.

Tilly found that neither theory fit the evi-dence he collected from archival sources aboutthe region’s economic development and com-munity organization. The counterrevolutiondid not emerge in the regions most transformedby capitalism, as predicted by modernizationtheory, nor did it originate in the regions leasttransformed, as predicted by Marxist class anal-ysis. More importantly, the groups that led theinsurgency and participated most actively in itwere not those that either theory would predict.There was, in fact, no consistent group patternto the conflict at all: Each of the major socialgroups in the region, including the merchantsand urban bourgeoisie who were thought tobe most favorable to the bourgeois Frenchrevolution, were divided against one anotherand found themselves on both sides of a new

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political cleavage. The driving wedge was therequirement that the Catholic clergy take a loy-alty oath to the new revolutionary governmentand repudiate papal authority. The local clergywere split by this demand, and those who re-fused were driven into opposition, taking manyof their parishioners with them—splitting thesocial structure along what Tilly called “verti-cal lines” that did not obey the logic of eitherclass analysis or modernization theory.

This research convinced Tilly that it wasultimately more short-term processes of mo-bilization that shaped the formation of politi-cal movements. In subsequent empirical work,which pioneered the application of quantita-tive techniques to historical data on collectiveaction, he and several collaborators testedpropositions derived from relative deprivationtheory and collective behavior-modernizationtheory, finding that these theories failed to pre-dict rates of collective violence or collectiveprotest, and that rates of collective protest failedto covary with other measures of social disrup-tion (Lodhi & Tilly 1973, Snyder & Tilly 1972,Tilly 1973). Other work (Shorter & Tilly 1974)examined the evolution of the size, duration,and frequency of strikes in France that showedthem to be highly influenced by the scale ofeconomic enterprise, the rates of unionization,and the timing of national political events. Allof these pointed to a more political focus onthe organizations and processes that influencegroup mobilization.

MOBILIZATION STUDIES

Others who were dissatisfied with the portrayalof political protest as an expression of emotionalfrustration and violent impulses had already of-fered a different view. For them, protest was apolitical activity that was as rational and goal-directed as routine politics. Gamson (1968)characterized the relative deprivation and col-lective behavior traditions as one-sidedly con-cerned with problems of social control fromthe perspective of authorities, and neglectfulof problems of authority, influence, and con-

flict from the perspective of those in subordi-nate positions. He drew on long-standing po-litical science traditions in the analysis of in-fluence, interest groups, and political parties(Easton 1953, Key 1952, Lipsky 1968, Tru-man 1951) and on sociological conflict theoryand elite theory (Dahrendorf 1959, Mills 1956)to argue a different proposition: “Discontentis viewed as an opportunity or a danger forparticular subgroups, not as a problem of so-cial control. It is important because of its con-sequences for mobilization of political influ-ence” (Gamson 1968, p. 10). Gamson (1975)followed with an empirical study of Ameri-can protest groups that focused on their strate-gies and organizational forms, relating them totheir levels of success. One important depar-ture was his treatment of unruliness (includ-ing violence) as a strategy designed to furthera group’s goals, not as an emotional reaction tofrustration.

Tilly (1978) later contributed to this emerg-ing resource mobilization perspective by defin-ing a new focus on how discontented groupsmobilized for political action. Tilly introducedideas about repression and facilitation by thestate and other powerful actors that wereextended further by McAdam (1982) in hisstudy of the American civil rights movement.McAdam placed even greater emphasis on thebroader political environment within which in-surgent groups mobilized, and labeled his ap-proach the political process perspective. An-other important contribution that paralleledMcAdam’s was Skocpol’s (1979) state-centeredanalysis of revolution, which shifted atten-tion even more into the political environment.Skocpol argued that mass mobilizing revolu-tionary movements achieve their aims onlywhen they occur in conjunction with a statethat has alienated the ruling class and thatis pressured to the point of crisis by the in-ternational system. These works were all de-cisive departures from earlier traditions anddefined a new field that focused on the mobiliza-tion of groups—their ability to organize, recruitadherents, deploy strategy, gain strength, and

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achieve their aims—within the limits of existingpolitical opportunities.1

One concise and influential early statementof this perspective was by McCarthy & Zald(1977), who articulated what they called the new“extreme” assumption, quoting Turner & Kil-lian (1972, p. 251): “There is always enough dis-content in any society to supply the grass-rootssupport for a movement if the movement is ef-fectively organized and has at its disposal thepower and resources of some established elitegroup.” They added, “For some purposes wego even further: grievances and discontent maybe defined, created, and manipulated by issueentrepreneurs and associations.” McCarthy &Zald emphasized that this was a partial theory;it ignored the social conditions that generatedpolitical motivations.

These contributions initiated a pronouncedparadigm shift in political sociology in whichthe study of social movements and contentiouspolitics diverged from the field’s foundationsinto the subfield that exists today ( Jenkins1983). In a way that very few appear to have rec-ognized, the emerging resource mobilizationtradition did not simply offer a different per-spective on social movements; it changed thequestion that was being asked, radically nar-rowing the intellectual horizons of the field.The puzzle that had long preoccupied politi-cal sociology rapidly receded from view—howto explain the political orientation of mobi-lized groups and the aims and contents ofmovements.

Along with the decline of interest in thisquestion was a parallel decline in curiosity aboutthe relationship between social structure and

1Skocpol was inspired by Moore (1966), and her workwas generally received as a contribution to his varietyof comparative-historical scholarship. Note, however, thatMoore’s puzzle was rooted in the earlier tradition of po-litical sociology. He deployed class analysis to explain thesubstantive character of national politics: democracy, fas-cism, and communism. He was not interested in explain-ing levels of mobilization or the success or failure of move-ments, but their political orientations. In this sense, Paige’s(1997) analysis of the different political trajectories of CentralAmerican regimes is more firmly within Moore’s tradition ofmacrosociology.

politics, something that defined the sociolog-ical tradition. Social structure, if invoked, wasimportant only to the extent that it promotedor impeded the capacity of groups to mobi-lize. Questions about the political character ofgroup aims were implicitly set aside as a sep-arate matter—preconditions (viewed narrowlyas unspecified grievances) that provided theraw material for mobilization, but were outsidethe scope of the theoretical problem. Analyti-cally speaking, the action was in the process ofmobilization, not in the formation of politicalorientations. The leading exponents of this per-spective excelled at describing the changes insocial structure and political institutions thatwere the backdrop for major episodes of po-litical contention (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1986,1995). These accounts, however, simply pro-vided a historical backdrop for the main event:an analysis of the means through which groupsmobilized and movements grew. The theoryfocused on processes of mobilization, not theformation of political orientations. The puz-zle was not why a mobilized group adoptedthe political orientation it did—that, presum-ably, was given by historical circumstances—but how it was able successfully to mobilize andemerge. We have ended up with a subfield thataims to explain the conditions under which amovement—of any type—can grow and suc-ceed, but we no longer have explanations tooffer about variation in the substantive con-tent of a movement—the type of politics that itrepresents.

The shift in the definition of the problemwas heavily influenced by other disciplines—borrowings from political science and reactionsto challenges from economics. The unacknowl-edged intellectual foundation of the resourcemobilization perspective is the American po-litical science tradition of interest group theorythat viewed politics as a continual contest for in-fluence by groups with different levels of power.This tradition offered a more palatable view ofpolitical conflict and protest as part of the nor-mal influence processes of a pluralistic society.However, unlike the sociological tradition, ithad never shown interest in the formation of

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political orientations or why they might vary. Inthe distinctive American political science tradi-tion that traced its ancestry to Arthur Bentley’s(1908) treatise on politics as a constant struggleby interest groups, the emphasis was on howgroups pursued their interests and used exist-ing political opportunities to achieve their aims(Easton 1953, Key 1952, Truman 1951). Theexistence of groups with conflicting interestswas assumed as a given starting point of thesetheories; the central problematic was how polit-ical institutions channeled the clash of intereststo produce political outcomes. This focus onpolitical process and lack of curiosity about theformation of political orientations is the endur-ing and largely unrecognized contribution ofAmerican political science to the resource mo-bilization and political process perspectives insociology.

This tendency was strongly reinforced bythe field of economics: Olson’s (1965) power-ful critique of the group political theories thatinspired resource mobilization theory. From arational choice perspective, Olson revealed aserious logical flaw in group theory—the con-flation of individual with group interest. Hepointed out that logically it would not be inindividuals’ interests to contribute to collectiveaction if they could benefit from group gainswithout personally bearing the costs of collec-tive action. For Olson, this free rider problemwas at the core of the puzzle of collective action.Therefore the central challenge of any theoryof collective action was to specify the selectiveincentives for individuals to contribute to groupgoals.

Olson’s solutions to the collective actionproblem—and those of the intellectual tradi-tions in economics and political science that hisideas spawned—were limited primarily to therational calculation of individual benefits andcosts. This was viewed as a direct challenge tothe discipline of sociology, and resource mobi-lization theorists responded with a wide rangeof alternative solutions to the collective actionproblem (another term for the problem of mo-bilization). In many ways the field of socialmovements and contentious politics has been

a prolonged effort to establish a sociologicalalternative to the more parsimonious theo-ries of economics. The increasing insistenceon the subjective dimensions of mobilization—collective action frames, the formation of col-lective identities, the role of emotions—is es-sentially motivated by a feeling that the ini-tial emphases on organization, networks, andpolitical opportunity structures were not suffi-ciently different from rational choice models tooffer a fully sociological alternative (Goodwin& Jasper 1999, 2004; Klandermans 1984, 1992;Mueller 1992; Ferree 1992).

Another shaping influence was methodolog-ical: The outcomes of mobilization are observ-able and readily quantifiable. Counts of events,rates of protest, the formation and membershipof unions, political parties, movement newspa-pers, and the scale of protests were all readilymeasurable and analyzable with increasingly so-phisticated multivariate techniques. The shiftof attention to mobilization coincided with therise of systematic quantitative research in po-litical sociology. Those who were interestedin testing theoretical propositions and demon-strating the utility of their theories of mobiliza-tion had strong incentives to focus on this setof outcomes.

For more than two decades debates in thissubfield have been about the role of organiza-tion, political opportunity, resources, strategy,collective identity, cognitive frames, and emo-tions, all of them defined as complementary orcompeting approaches to understanding groupmobilization. Since the mid-1990s one of theprimary intellectual activities in the field hasbeen to negotiate competing claims and for-mulate integrative syntheses among the differ-ent perspectives (Aminzade & McAdam 2001,Gamson & Meyer 1996, Goodwin & Jasper2004, Goodwin et al. 2001, McAdam 1996,Meyer & Minkoff 2004, Meyer et al. 2002,Polletta & Jasper 2001). The extraordinary va-riety of answers to questions about recruitmentand commitment to social movements and totheir broader societal reception gives the ap-pearance of intellectual breadth and vitality.All of this breadth and vitality, however, has

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remained within the narrowed boundaries ofthe defining question—how groups mobilize,or why social movements emerge.

ALTERNATIVE DIRECTIONS

While the puzzle of political orientation haslargely dropped out of theoretical discoursein the subfield of social movements, it is stillpursued by students of political sociology inrelated fields: ethnicity and nationalism, revolu-tion, and labor unions, and in a range of histor-ical and comparative case studies. For obviousreasons it is a central concern in the recentlyrevived interest in political violence and terror-ism. Although these studies often address sub-jects that can be conceived of as social move-ments, they have been largely ignored in thatsubfield because they address a question that isno longer part of its central focus. As we shallsee, however, the emphasis on mobilization hasinfluenced many of these studies as well, andpolitical orientation is often treated as a by-product of successful group mobilization.

Mobilization is a centrally important pro-cess in movement emergence and growth, butthis is not the same thing as explaining why amovement adopts a certain kind of political ori-entation. To take an extreme example, suicidebombing may be a tactic suited to certain kindsof political opportunity structures, but this begsthe question of how populations of potentialsuicide bombers are formed and how, once re-cruited, they are molded into agents of destruc-tion. Is there a systematic relationship betweenthe political orientation of movements and thecharacteristics of their adherents, their socialexperiences prior to joining a movement, ortheir experiences afterwards as members of asocial movement organization?

These questions inevitably lead us back toa sustained examination of the relationship be-tween social structure and politics, by revivingthe field’s former curiosity about the social livesof movement participants and nonparticipantsalike. The range of possible conceptions of so-cial structure is very broad. The older genera-tion of structural analyses did not come close

to exhausting the range of potentially usefulones. Social structure can be conceived con-cretely or abstractly, as an empirical descrip-tion of a historically situated setting, or as anaggregate measure of some dimension of sociallife. It can be conceived in terms of categoriessuch as status, class, gender, or occupation, oras relationships such as kinship, authority, socialnetworks, community, or small-group interac-tion. It can be considered at the macro level ofnational polities, at the meso level of organiza-tions or communities, or at the micro level ofsmall groups. There are few prior constraints onthose who want to understand the social sourcesof political orientation.

Moreover, social structures need not be con-ceived as static. Most of the early studies ofpolitical movements were premised on grad-ual or abrupt changes in social structure. Thecollective behavior tradition identified individ-uals who were most affected by disruptive socialchange as likely recruits for protest movements,but the idea was not limited to them. Ar-guments about the moral economy of tradi-tional communities—for example, peasant vil-lages in subsistence economies (Scott 1976) orcraft organization in early industrial economies(Calhoun 1982)—traced the origins of radi-cal movements to the decline of communitiesand the violation of their moral codes. Thesestudies balanced a concern to explain politicalorientation (anticapitalist radicalism) and orga-nizational capacity (densely networked commu-nity ties). They also balanced recognition of theways that compelling economic interests inter-acted with, and were reinforced by, outrage atthe violation of culturally rooted moral codes—a defense of tradition that ironically was trans-muted into anticapitalist radicalism.

To examine possible links between socialstructure and politics does not mean that onewill find them. One of the primary reasonsfor examining social structural sources of po-litical orientations is to uncover circumstanceswhere the expected relationships fail to appear.Cases in which the posited social structuresfail to explain are just as useful as the reverse,and provide new intellectual puzzles. The only

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convincing way to develop alternatives to struc-tural explanations is to show how they can ac-count for outcomes where a structural explana-tion falters.

Several studies have already addressed theseissues, although they fit uneasily with the dom-inant focus on mobilization. Perhaps the mostfamiliar is Gould’s research on social networksand political mobilization. Networks in socialmovement research are primarily understoodas mechanisms of micromobilization throughwhich individuals are recruited into movementorganizations or episodes of collective action(McAdam 1986, McAdam & Paulsen 1993).Gould’s work focuses on mobilization, but hiscareful reconstruction of the role of networksin the revolutionary insurgencies of nineteenthcentury Paris and the 1794 Whiskey Rebellionin western Pennsylvania were not motivated toexplain how insurgents mobilized. Gould’s ac-tual problem—similar to Tilly’s in The Vendee(1964)—was to accurately identify the interestsand collective identities of the participants bydelineating the social networks through whichthey mobilized. His core finding, which contra-dicted the assumptions of generations of histor-ical scholarship, was that the revolutionary mo-bilization behind the Paris Commune of 1871was based on neighborhood networks and com-munity solidarities, not the working-class iden-tities that had defined insurgent mobilization in1848. Gould’s conclusions were as much aboutthe identities and motives of the participantsas they were about their capacity to mobilize(Gould 1991, 1993, 1995). Similarly, his net-work analysis of the Whiskey Rebellion wasmotivated to understand its actual social basis,which he identified as a cross-class insurgencyled by local elites who were cut out of fed-eral patronage networks that were expandingwestward beyond the Appalachian Mountains(Gould 1996). Gould’s aim in both these stud-ies was to show how the interests and identitiesof participants in revolutionary mobilizationswere defined by evolving social networks.

A second set of examples looked closely atthe social foundations of well-known politicalmovements and found that prevailing structural

explanations failed to accurately identify the in-terests and identities of the participants. Tilly’sanalysis of the Vendee counterrevolution—discussed above—is an outstanding early exam-ple. He described a process in which Catholicclergy were forced to renounce loyalty to thepope or lose their parishes, a demand that splitthe priests and in turn divided all the majorsocial groups in the community (Tilly 1964,pp. 227–304). This was a short-term process ofidentity formation touched off by rapid changesin political institutions—and deep splits in thecommunity that were not predicted by the pre-existing social structure or by its long-termchanges as capitalism advanced. Tilly’s findingshad profound implications for theories aboutthe relationship between social structure andpolitics—implications, we have already seen,that he did not subsequently pursue.

Remarkably similar processes are describedin Walder’s (2006, 2009) analysis of the for-mation of student Red Guard factions duringChina’s Cultural Revolution of 1966–1968. Hefound that none of the interest group or net-work explanations long employed to accountfor Red Guard factionalism withstood close ex-amination, and found instead a pattern in whichuniversity political networks were split and theiroccupants turned against one another by forcedchoices similar to those in revolutionary Francedescribed by Tilly.

Another example is Traugott’s (1980, 1985)analysis of the class origins of the Parisianworking-class insurgents of 1848 and of themilitia that suppressed them. Contrary toMarx’s analysis of these events and subsequentMarxist historiography, Traugott found that theactors on both sides of the barricades came fromvirtually identical working-class backgrounds,and both initially had revolutionary orienta-tions. The political orientations of the two sidesdiverged over a year during which they partici-pated in differently organized militias, only oneof which was able to build cohesion and solidar-ity among its members. Similarly, Markoff andShapiro have shown empirically that levels ofconflict in the aims of different social classesvaried by context in revolutionary France, and

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that outcomes were the process of repeatedpolitical interactions through time that fullyrepresented the original aims of none of the par-ticipants (Markoff 1985, 1988, 1997; Markoff &Shapiro 1985; Shapiro & Markoff 1998). Thecommon thread in these studies is a curios-ity about the relationship between social struc-ture and politics and unexpected findings thatpointed the authors to short-term processesthat altered the political orientations and out-comes that were otherwise presumed to comefrom social structure.

A third group of examples are from stud-ies of ethnic mobilization, a field that has leda largely separate existence from social move-ment research, overlapping with it only occa-sionally. A central problem in this field is to ex-plain why ethnic identity becomes salient as acause of conflict—instead of class, occupation,or some other collective identity. This makes itdifficult to limit the question narrowly to that ofmobilization or to ignore the social structuralsources of identity and conflict. One strand oftheory explains ethnic antagonism as a prod-uct of competition in labor markets (Bonacich1972, 1976; Olzak 1992). Another attributespersistent ethnic identity to a cultural divisionof labor in which immigrant, language, or reli-gious groups are concentrated in occupationalniches (Hechter 1974, 1975, 1978). Researchin this area tests the implications of competingtheories in explaining ethnic political mobiliza-tion (Belanger & Pinard 1991, Medrano 1994,Okamoto 2003). It is more common in this sub-field to balance a concern with identity forma-tion with that of group mobilization. Olzak,for example, has examined competing theoriesabout the labor market and other social originsof ethnic antagonism, and she has examined theproblem of mobilization as conceived in socialmovements research (Olzak 1989, 1992; Olzak& Shanahan 1994).

A fourth example is studies of labor unions—a field that has often sought to explain levelsof labor militancy or the prevalence of radicalor reformist ideologies in trade unions (Conell& Voss 1990, Stepan-Norris & Zeitlin 1989,Voss & Sherman 2000). Perhaps the clearest

example is Kimeldorf’s (1989) comparison oflongshoremen’s unions on the East and Westcoasts of the United States. In the West theywere dominated by communists, whereas in theNew York region they were dominated by laborrackets and organized crime. Kimeldorf ’s expla-nation was a rare melding of social structuraland political process explanations. It includedboth a careful analysis of the varied structureand organization of the industries on the twocoasts and differences in the origins and compo-sition of their labor forces and of the varied po-litical opportunity structures of New York andSan Francisco at the time the unions formed.

Finally, some have sought to explain polit-ical orientation by reference to the structureof the national polity—but not through the fa-miliar concept of political opportunity struc-ture. Swanson (1960) argued that the domi-nant religious ideas in a society varied withthe extent to which it had a unitary authoritystructure. He applied this classification scheme(Swanson 1971) to the outcomes of the rebel-lions that accompanied the Protestant Refor-mation in Europe, and claimed a close cor-respondence between prior regime type andProtestant versus Catholic outcomes (Swanson1967). Subsequent authors tried to identify the-oretical mechanisms behind some of these asso-ciations (Paige 1974) or challenged Swanson’sfindings (Wuthnow 1985). Bergesen (1977) ap-plied these ideas to the explanation of politi-cal witch hunts. In a different vein, Hechterdrew a distinction between indirect and di-rect rule by the center of a national polity toexplain the paradoxical eruption of nationalistmovements in modern nation-states. Nation-alist movements emerge as a reaction to cen-tral government attempts to shift from indirectto direct rule over ethnically distinct regions(Hechter 2000). Similarly, the shift from classpolitics to cultural politics in capitalist democ-racies is a reaction to the intrusion of welfarestate legislation and direct administration intoareas of social life formerly left to families andlocal communities (Hechter 2004).

All of these studies explore the social struc-tural sources of political orientations, and all

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of them consider phenomena that can readilybe translated into generic questions aboutsocial movements. Their lessons have beenlargely lost on theories about social movementsbecause these theories have been concernedwith a separate question—mobilization. Therenonetheless exists a foundation for a more sys-tematic effort to understand the social rootsof movement political orientations, should thisonce again become a major intellectual concern.

POLITICAL ORIENTATIONAS BY-PRODUCT

One obvious approach to the question ofmovement political orientation falls completelywithin the field’s current intellectual limits: thatit is explained by relative organizational capac-ity, strategic advantage, or the structure of polit-ical opportunities. This approach sees politicalorientation as a by-product of successful mo-bilization within a given political environment.The kind of movement that emerges dependson which groups have organizational capacity,and which movements grow depends on thestructure of political opportunities in relationto other groups’ political preferences.

Political process models imply that opportu-nity structures shape the orientations of move-ments by selectively repressing groups withcertain political orientations and facilitating theactions of others. A familiar example is the U.S.civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.McAdam (1982) emphasized the broad appealof nonviolent, church-based activism in build-ing national support for the movement outsidethe South and the weakening of support forthe movement after the rise of more threaten-ing expressions of activism such as the BlackPanthers and urban rioting. Militant organiza-tions and tactics led to police repression andwhite backlash, whereas moderate and nonvi-olent strategies generated sympathy and exter-nal support. McAdam was primarily interestedin the effects of strategies on the overall fate ofthe struggle for civil rights; he was not attempt-ing to explain the specific political orientationsof the various submovements that were working

toward civil rights for African Americans. How-ever, the overall impact of these circumstancescan be conceived as a kind of environmental se-lection that shaped the orientations of a move-ment by permitting some kinds of movementorganizations to grow and suppressing others.

Similar observations have been offeredabout repressive and violent regimes and oth-erwise treacherous political environments. Insuch circumstances secretive movements thatwork underground and exercise strong inter-nal discipline have a competitive advantage overorganizations that are open, loosely organized,and less hierarchical. To operate successfully insuch circumstances a movement often adopts aradical ideology, uses violence as a strategy, anddeals harshly with internal dissent. Movementsthat do not are more easily suppressed, clearingthe field for organizations with a more radicaland authoritarian cast. A corollary of this ideais that the more disciplined and violent move-ment organizations have a competitive advan-tage over rival movement organizations that areless disciplined, more open, and democratic.

This is the agenda implied by McAdam(1996) when he called for explaining “move-ment form” by reference to political oppor-tunity structures, especially those outside ofliberal democratic settings. Boudreau (1996) ar-gued that political opportunity structures havesteered democratic movements onto a revo-lutionary course in a variety of authoritarianregimes. Almeida (2008), analyzing waves ofprotest over eight decades in El Salvador, ar-gued that a shift to state-sponsored repressionpushes democratic movements into revolution-ary and violent forms of resistance. White(1989) argued that the turn to violence of theIrish Republican Army was more a responseto government repression than an expressionof the intensity of group grievances. This ap-proach to explaining the features of politicalmovements views political orientation as a by-product of group mobilization or a response tothe structure of political opportunities.

Recent attempts to address the neglectedquestion of collective violence have fol-lowed a similar path. Tilly (2003) offered an

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explanation that remains firmly within the in-tellectual tradition that he helped establish,in effect an elaboration of the “polity model”sketched in his early work (Tilly 1978). Violencehere is seen as a product of the organization ofthe regime and the strategies and organizationalcapacities of the two sides. The explanation fea-tured a new emphasis on the social mechanismsthat are activated as part of these contextual-ized conflicts—a theme elaborated in separatework (McAdam et al. 2001). The mechanismsinvoked represent a more careful elaboration ofelements of familiar mobilization processes.

Goodwin’s (2006) theory of insurgent move-ment terrorism against noncombatant popu-lations differs from Tilly’s approach primar-ily by reintroducing social structural elementsinto the perceptions and calculations of move-ment leaders. He views terror as a product ofmovement strategy, in particular judgments bymovement leaders about the support that thesepopulations offer either to the targeted statesor to the movement itself. Elements of socialstructure are introduced in the form of barriersto interaction and cooperation between move-ments and populations that might be presentedby language, religious differences, and territo-rial segregation. They are not introduced to ex-plain the motivations and perceptions of thoseleading or participating in the movement itself;motives and organization are a given startingpoint of the analysis.

Whereas much of the recent literature onrevolutions resonates strongly with the mainthemes of the political process perspective, thestudy of that subject has moved steadily awayfrom its former preoccupation with politicalmovements. Essentially, the study of revolu-tion declared its independence from the studyof social movements several decades ago. Inthe Marxist, relative deprivation, and Parso-nian traditions, revolution was conceived as astraightforward outcome of the strength of thesocial forces fueling the movements that top-pled regimes. Skocpol’s (1979) state-centeredanalysis liberated the study of revolution fromthese earlier voluntarist perspectives and, ex-tending the logic of political process models,

shifted attention to the capacity of states to re-spond to challenges from below. The central in-sight is that revolution is not a straightforwardoutcome of the political orientation of mobi-lized populations, but a contingent outcomeof a state’s organizational capacity, its relation-ship to other powerful social groups, and influ-ences that operate in the international politicalsystem. Therefore, whether a democratic, na-tionalist, or revolutionary socialist movementthrives and achieves success depends on a con-figuration of political circumstances and his-torical legacies that are beyond the control ofmobilized populations (Goodwin 2001; Parsa1989, 2000; Wickham-Crowley 1992). In thistradition the study of revolution can readily betranslated into a question of state capacity andregime survival (Goldstone 1991). The study ofrevolution, then, is inherently concerned withexplaining how certain political orientationstriumph as macrohistorical events, but it hasshifted its attention away from the formation ofmovement political orientations and even moretoward political process and political opportu-nity than many studies of social movements.

These by-product explanations of politicalorientation are already familiar, although theyhave received much less explicit and systematicattention than the process of mobilization. Itremains to be seen whether they will be intel-lectually satisfying except in the context of ques-tions about the strategic choices of movementsthat are a given starting point in an analysis.Not all social circumstances, and not all mobi-lized groups, have an equal capacity to generateany given political orientation. The limits of by-product explanations will become evident onlywhen laid against alternatives that investigatethe social structural sources of movements—and vice versa.

MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS

Social movement organizations are a familiarsubject in the political process perspective be-cause they are the key actor in mobilization pro-cesses. They vary in ways that contribute to orimpede a movement’s success, as past research

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has emphasized. They also embody and enforcepolitical orientations, and they differ in waysthat affect their ability to alter and shape the po-litical beliefs of their adherents. Some are easyto join, and others make it very difficult. Someare easy to leave, and others make it very diffi-cult. Some movement organizations are able tocommand only a portion of a member’s timeand effort; others are able to command verylarge portions. Some are geographically or so-cially isolated and provide for most of theirmembers’ needs (guerilla bands, undergroundrevolutionary organizations, sect-like groups);others are little more than clubs in an open andliberal environment. It follows that the poten-tial impact of social movement organizationsand their leaders on the views and level of com-mitment of their members varies considerably.The more effective the mechanisms that en-force group solidarity, the greater will be thegroup’s impact on its members (Hechter 1987).

The evolution of the political orientationof social movements and their impact on theirmembers was once a major preoccupation ofpolitical sociology. The famous early examplewas Michels’s (1915) analysis of how the growthand success of radical labor parties turned theminto oligarchies that adopted more moderateand reformist political aims. Lipset et al. (1956)showed how the generation of what would laterbe called social capital in the organization ofthe typesetting trade created a strong social ba-sis for union democracy rather than oligarchy.Others examined the powerful pull that smallsect-like ideological groups have on the mental-ities and discipline of their members (Nahirny1962, Schurmann 1966, Selznick 1960), ideasthat strongly paralleled processes in religioussects (Lofland 1966). This older interest hasbeen revived in recent studies of new reli-gious movements and sect-like socialist parties(Lalich 2004).

It has been widely noted in recent publica-tions that participation in a social movementhas a powerful effect on an individual’s subse-quent life course (McAdam 1989, Yang 2000).This implies that one should look more closelyat the point at which these changes take place,

during the movement itself. What actual im-pact do social movement organizations have onthe political orientations of members, how isthis impact achieved, and through what mech-anisms? The more fundamental question thisapproach raises is to what extent social move-ment organizations collect like-minded individ-uals, mobilizing them for objectives that theyall understand and about which they all essen-tially agree beforehand. Alternatively, to whatextent do they attract individuals with vague andunformed ideas and commitments and shapeand transform their political outlooks and intosomething very different from where they be-gan? These questions may revive interest inone of the most important and enduring ques-tions in political sociology: why organizationsdesigned to liberate populations from oppres-sion sometimes create new and more intensiveforms of oppression.

TURNING ANSWERSINTO QUESTIONS

We have seen that one can address ques-tions about political orientation with familiarconcepts from mobilization studies—politicalopportunity structure and social movement or-ganizations. Other familiar ideas (in particu-lar, the interpretive framing of movement ap-peals, the formation of collective identities, andthe emotional dimensions of participation andcommitment) cannot be adapted in quite thesame way. This is because each of these conceptscan be viewed as part of what defines a move-ment’s political orientation—how it framesappeals to potential followers, the identities itmobilizes, and the kinds of emotions that sus-tain it. These notions might help explain mo-bilization, but to employ them to explain polit-ical orientation leads readily into tautologicalarguments.

If we explore these notions to explain move-ment political orientations, these answers turninto questions. What social circumstances de-termine the resonance of an interpretive frameor the subjective salience of one collective iden-tity over another? What social circumstances

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make one collective identity more salient thanan alternative? What social circumstances in-cite or amplify what kinds of politically relevantemotions, and how are they sustained? A furtherinteresting implication of pursuing these sub-jective dimensions of mobilization is that theyinevitably lead us back to the question of thesocial structural circumstances that make cer-tain interpretive frames, collective identities, oremotions salient to potential participants in amovement. In a somewhat paradoxical fashion,interest in the subjective dimensions of polit-ical mobilization leads one inexorably back tothe relationship between social structure andpolitics.

This is clear if we consider the potential con-tributions of the framing literature. This ap-proach, rooted in the symbolic interactionismof Goffmann (1974), was originally proposed tofill subjective gaps in political process accountsof mobilization. Individuals must interpret theworld around them, and social movement or-ganizations offer interpretive frames that con-nect with the self-conceptions, values, or moraland cultural sensibilities of potential adherents.The idea was designed primarily to account forprocesses of recruitment to movement organi-zations or episodes of collective action (Benford& Snow 2000, Snow et al. 1986). It was later ex-panded into the idea of a master frame that pre-sented the movement to a broader public andconditioned the response of other groups, alter-ing the political opportunity structure (Snow &Benford 1992, Tarrow 1992).

The core idea is frame resonance—the cred-ibility and salience of the rhetorical or cognitiveframe, based on the observation or experienceof those who are exposed to it. Movement orga-nizers have to frame their appeals to emphasizeideas or themes that resonate with individuals’observations and experiences. If they fail to doso, individuals fail to respond, recruitment fails,and commitment declines. One very importantimplication of this idea is that the resonanceof a frame depends on social experiences. Thissuggests that a core task of the framing per-spective should be to explore how variation in

individuals’ social circumstances or experiencesaffects their responses to differently framed po-litical appeals.

It is remarkable how rarely this importantimplication has been pursued in the large liter-ature generated by this perspective. The fram-ing literature has been criticized, sometimesby its originators, for simply describing andclassifying rhetorical themes articulated bymovement organizations, classifying them bydifferent types, and asserting their subjectiveimpact (Benford 1997). It has also been criti-cized for offering a more narrow and depoliti-cized version of the long familiar concept ofideology (Oliver & Johnson 2000). In response,proponents of frame analysis have argued thatthe older notion of ideology is broader andmore rigid than the notion of frame (Snow2004).

The essential core of the classic concept ofideology, however, is that it serves as a maskfor other kinds of interests, in particular, ma-terial or economic interests. The old Marxistidea that all political, moral, and religious con-ceptions are essentially representations of thematerial interests of social classes no longerhas much appeal. However, the idea that in-dividuals’ social experience (including but byno means limited to economic interests) affectstheir receptivity to different ideas, or frames,through which they understand their world isinherent in the very idea of framing. This is thecore question that ideas about framing raise inpursuing the question of a movement’s politicalorientation: What social circumstances deter-mine the receptivity to one frame over another?What kinds of people respond to what kinds ofinterpretative representations? Do beliefs serveinterests either consciously or unconsciously?Do people have incentives to adopt one or an-other interpretive frame, and if so, what arethey? Do they freely choose, or do they con-form to social pressures?

It is odd that research about framing in socialmovements has shown so little curiosity aboutthe people who are the targets of frames, inparticular, their social structural circumstances,

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which according to the core tenets of the ideashape resonance. In this sense the notion offraming offers many unexploited opportunities,and it immediately suggests research designsthat compare individuals in different groups orsocial settings in their receptivity to specificframes. What social circumstances make whatframes more or less appealing? What is the re-lationship between the specific appeals framedby social movements and the broader ideolo-gies that define the orientations and aims ofmovements? Can a frame of resentment againstwealthy plutocrats successfully recruit workersinto socialist movements or anti-Semitic fascistmovements equally well, or is the oft-noted shiftof working-class allegiance from left-wing par-ties to fascism in interwar Europe, as Brustein(1988, 1991, 1996) argues, due to the incorpo-ration of appeals to working-class economic in-terests in fascist party platforms?

The same kinds of questions are raised byarguments about emotions and social move-ments. This represents a circling back to ideasabout the emotional roots of social movementparticipation that were largely rejected duringthe original shift toward mobilization studies(Aminzade & McAdam 2001; Goodwin &Jasper 2006; Goodwin et al. 2000, 2001). It maybe undeniably true that there are emotional di-mensions to recruitment and commitment, andthat emotional responses are important mecha-nisms in explaining political mobilization. Thisthen raises the older question: Under what so-cial structural circumstances, and what socialsituations, are the relevant emotions stimulatedand sustained? What are the relationships be-tween these emotional states and the politi-cal orientations of individuals and the move-ments they join? Far more so than proponentsof the cognitive framing perspective, students ofemotions in social movements have recognized

the social structural sources of these subjectiveprocesses and have already begun to investi-gate the subject (Kemper 2001, Lalich 2004,Nepstad & Smith 2001).

CONCLUSION

As they became increasingly preoccupied withthe process of mobilization, students of socialmovements strayed far from their intellectualroots in the sociological tradition. The chal-lenge for those seeking to revive interest in thepolitical orientation of movements is not to re-vive theories prominent in the 1950s, but toconstruct alternatives that look afresh at ques-tions that have been neglected for decades. Itis possible to fashion certain kinds of explana-tions from now familiar ideas about opportunitystructures and the interactions between insur-gents and authorities, but it is hard to believethese will be intellectually satisfying as long asthe field continues to display its characteristiclack of curiosity about the social structural rootsof protest.

The number of alternative sociological ex-planations for group mobilization has prolifer-ated almost beyond description. This review hassuggested that the range of answers to questionsabout mobilization is not the problem; the ques-tion itself is too narrow. How and why a move-ment is able to mobilize is important, but it isnot the only important question. In many casesthe question of what kind of movement is mobi-lized is far more urgent. For too long, studentsof social movements have neglected this classicquestion of political sociology. The field needsnew questions more urgently than it needs newanswers, and the first of these questions is themost fundamental: What is the relationship be-tween social structure, however conceived, andthe political orientations of social movements?

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The author is not aware of any biases that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of thisreview.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is grateful to Samuel Cohn, Jeffrey Goodwin, Michael Hechter, Doug McAdam, PaoloParigi, and Susan Olzak for comments on an earlier draft, and Brian Cook for research assistance.

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Annual Reviewof Sociology

Volume 35, 2009Contents

FrontispieceHerbert J. Gans � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � xiv

Prefatory Chapters

Working in Six Research Areas: A Multi-Field Sociological CareerHerbert J. Gans � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Theory and Methods

Ethnicity, Race, and NationalismRogers Brubaker � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �21

Interdisciplinarity: A Critical AssessmentJerry A. Jacobs and Scott Frickel � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �43

Nonparametric Methods for Modeling Nonlinearityin Regression AnalysisRobert Andersen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �67

Gender Ideology: Components, Predictors, and ConsequencesShannon N. Davis and Theodore N. Greenstein � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �87

Genetics and Social InquiryJeremy Freese and Sara Shostak � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 107

Social Processes

Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative PerspectiveEdward E. Telles and Christina A. Sue � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 129

The Sociology of Emotional LaborAmy S. Wharton � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 147

Societal Responses toTerrorist AttacksSeymour Spilerman and Guy Stecklov � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 167

Intergenerational Family Relations in Adulthood: Patterns, Variations,and Implications in the Contemporary United StatesTeresa Toguchi Swartz � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 191

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Institutions and Culture

Sociology of Sex WorkRonald Weitzer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 213

The Sociology of War and the MilitaryMeyer Kestnbaum � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 235

Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian AmericansArthur Sakamoto, Kimberly A. Goyette, and ChangHwan Kim � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 255

Men, Masculinity, and Manhood ActsDouglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 277

Formal Organizations

American Trade Unions and Data Limitations: A New Agendafor Labor StudiesCaleb Southworth and Judith Stepan-Norris � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 297

Outsourcing and the Changing Nature of WorkAlison Davis-Blake and Joseph P. Broschak � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 321

Taming Prometheus: Talk About Safety and CultureSusan S. Silbey � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 341

Political and Economic Sociology

Paradoxes of China’s Economic BoomMartin King Whyte � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 371

Political Sociology and Social MovementsAndrew G. Walder � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 393

Differentiation and Stratification

New Directions in Life Course ResearchKarl Ulrich Mayer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 413

Is America Fragmenting?Claude S. Fischer and Greggor Mattson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 435

Switching Social Contexts: The Effects of Housing Mobility andSchool Choice Programs on Youth OutcomesStefanie DeLuca and Elizabeth Dayton � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 457

Income Inequality and Social DysfunctionRichard G. Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 493

Educational Assortative Marriage in Comparative PerspectiveHans-Peter Blossfeld � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 513

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Individual and Society

Nonhumans in Social InteractionKaren A. Cerulo � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 531

Demography

Social Class Differentials in Health and Mortality: Patterns andExplanations in Comparative PerspectiveIrma T. Elo � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 553

Policy

The Impacts of Wal-Mart: The Rise and Consequences of the World’sDominant RetailerGary Gereffi and Michelle Christian � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 573

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 26–35 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 593

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 26–35 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 597

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Sociology articles may be found athttp://soc.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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