Bridging People and Protest: Social Relays of Protest Groups against Low-Flying Military Jets in West Germany

Ohlemacher, Thomas

doi:10.1525/sp.1996.43.2.03x0205w

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…These other ties include kinship and friendship, attendance at the same school, membership in the same recreational club or religious congregation, employment at the same workplace, or membership in some secondary association that has no direct relation to the movement. In many cases, these "other" ties become the basis for recruitment into a movement organization or its actions, as well as for increased support for the movement's opinions (Ohlemacher 1996). Movements whose members have social connections to the larger society through many different social ties are likely to be better able to mobilize support than those which lack such ties.…”

Section: Specifying Network Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of particular concern is whether a group is relatively inbred, with ties only to itself or to other movement groups, or whether it has ties out into the general population of people who are not already mobilized. For example, Ohlemacher (1996) develops the concept of the social relay to distinguish the networks in two communities, one in which the protesters were relatively isolated, and the other in which protesters had substantial ties to nonprotest organizations in the community: the relatively isolated protesters were viewed as more radical and failed to generate a broad mobilization, while the protesters with substantial nonprotest ties built a broader, less marginalized, mobilization.…”

Section: Influencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Networks, Diffusion, and Cycles of Collective Action

Oliver¹,

Myers²

2003

Social Movements and Networks

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This paper shows how different "network" arguments about how protest spreads imply quite different underlying mechanisms that in turn produce different diffusion processes. There is considerable ambiguity about the relationships among networks, diffusion, and action cycles and the way these can be identified in empirical data. We thus both seek to unpack the "network" concept into different kinds of processes, and then show how these different network processes affect the diffusion processes we are studying. We sketch out some formal models to capture some of these distinctions. This paper extends recent work (Oliver and Myers forthcoming) that develops diffusion models of protest cycles, and focuses on discussing link between network concepts and diffusion concepts in understanding protest cycles. We conceive of social movements as diffuse action fields in which actions affect other actions and the action repertoires of the different actors coevolve through time and through interaction with each other. Movement activists and regimes engage in strategic interactions, each responding to the actions of the other. Different organizations within a movement respond to the actions of others, as successful tactical innovations and movement frames diffuse to new organizations. News media cover or fail to cover particular protests, and thus encourage or discourage future protests. Each of these processes effects the others, in a complex, multi-faceted set of interactions. Over time, the action set of each actor evolves in response to the actions of the others and, thus, the whole field is one large co-evolving environment in which the characteristics and actions of any actor is constrained and influenced by the characteristics and actions of all other actors in the environment.One central concern about understanding diffusion and networks in protest waves is that we do not actually have straightforward data about the underlying social networks or mobilization processes. Protest event data usually just contain records of the timing and location of events along with some (often incomplete) information about the participants in the event, their forms of action, their stated claims or other rhetoric (Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, and Giugni 1995;McAdam 1982;Olzak 1992;Tilly 1995). Rarely, if ever, will the data contain information on the social relationships or communication processes that were involved in organizing and mobilizing that event. Lacking this kind of data, we want to know whether different patterns of social organization will give rise to different patterns in protest event data, and how what we already about how protests get organized might influence our analysis of protest event data.After a brief review of the interplay between diffusion concepts and network effects, we develop some important distinctions among different processes often lumped together as

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Section: Specifying Network Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Influencementioning

confidence: 99%

Networks, Diffusion, and Cycles of Collective Action

Oliver¹,

Myers²

2003

Social Movements and Networks

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“…Community organizations play a vital role in addressing community needs and wants. Connections between organizations can have important consequences, both for the organizations and for civil society in general (Baldassarri and Diani, 2007; Cornwell and Harrison, 2004; Ohlemacher, 1996). Interorganizational connectedness engenders the capacity for community associations to access the various benefits of social capital, leading to better coordination of organizational agendas and actions in the pursuit of goals serving collective interests.…”

Section: Theoretical Discussion and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gathering places serve the two primary functions of “social relays,” which are organizational and institutional spaces that provide the context of informal social networks (Ohlemacher 1996): (1) they provide a meeting ground where connections are possible and (2) they are open to everyone so that they can bridge individuals and groups who may otherwise not be in contact. This may especially be the case in small towns, where there are usually few options of any particular type of gathering place—there may only be one grocery store or just a few restaurants, reducing the potential for class or taste segregation that gathering places in larger or even mid‐size cities may experience.…”

Section: Gathering Place Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community Connections: Social Capital and Community Success¹

Whitham¹

2012

Sociological Forum

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This article examines the impact of two types of community social capital-ties between civic organizations formed through shared members and ties between residents formed through socializing in local gathering places-on residents' subjective appraisals of community success. Community social capital studies tend to focus on the first of these types of ties, networks of civic engagement, while the second, gathering place networks, has received relatively little scholarly attention. Studying both allows me to assess the formal and informal arenas of community sociability, providing a more thorough understanding of social capital and community life. I assess the effects of community-level social capital networks on the individual-level experience of residing in the community using survey data on 9,962 residents from 99 small towns in Iowa. This rich data set allows me to avoid two shortcomings common in social capital research: I construct genuine network measures of social capital (rather than infer network structure from community attributes) and conduct multi-level analyses (rather than rely on disaggregation). My findings indicate both types of social capital are positively and significantly associated with resident ratings of community success, suggesting community networks-in both the formal and informal sectors-have important consequences for small towns and their residents.

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“…Building on the work of scholars such as Fox (2004), Katsiaficas (2010), McAdam (1995), Meyer and Whittier (1994), Bandy and Smith (2004), and Tarrow (2011), who have investigated collaborations and connections, the following begins to develop the concept of the movement-building relay to gain analytic purchase on the workings and dynamics of linkages and cooperation of groups and activists. Starting from Ohlemacher's (1996) conception of a relay as "protest-proliferating contexts of networks [which] in the process of protest mobilization act as the fertile ground where seeds of protest can germinate and then [function] as a catalyst for mobilization efforts to flourish beyond the networks" (p. 201), the article introduces four ideal-typical conceptions of movement-building relays: clustering relay, networking relay, coalitioning relay, and organizing relay. Heuristically, each ideal-type captures different points on a continuum of increasing movement building and thus describes higher stages of commonalities, shared understandings and identities, mobilizations and strategies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%