This paper, based on in-depth interviews with thirty-three individuals involved in the burgeoning Menstrual Activism movement, explores why the identity ‘activist’ is resisted among some social movement actors. Drawing on a ‘perfect standard’ of politics and activism grounded in the core values of rigor and humility, an activist must ‘live the issue’, demonstrate relentless dedication, and cont...

*The paper has benefited from comments obtained at presentations of an earlier version at the Technical University, Dresden and Jadavpur University, Calcutta. We would like to sincerely thank Jean-Pierre Ponssard for his useful remarks. The first author acknowledges support from FMSH, Paris. The second author acknowledges support from the program " Chair for Sustainable Finance and Responsible ...

Screen and song celebrate social justice movements that protested in the streets when they were convinced that existing institutions and their normal procedures only reinforced the status quo. Many rights have been won in democratic societies by means of courageous activism — the eight hour day, votes for women, the right to sit at any lunch counter. Yet contemporary democratic theory rarely re...

Consumption of green products is growing rapidly in the United States. We assessed the extent to which this consumption is motivated by a desire to promote societal-level change in corporate practices that affect the climate, and posit a social–cognitive model in which people’s global warming beliefs and consumer activism beliefs predict their green purchasing goals, behavior, and opinion leade...

The focus of this paper is that actual political systems do not appear to satisfy the property of convergence to an electoral center that is often predicted by formal vote models. The key theoretical idea is that the convergence result need not hold if there is an asymmetry in the electoral perception of the “quality” of party leaders (Stokes 1992). The average weight given to the perceived qua...

Network societies are characterized by social media, media that are supposed to level out power hierarchies, making political participation more inclusive and equal. By developing a typology for studying networking power within activist demands in network societies, such technooptimistic/deterministic assumptions are questioned. This typology is based on Bourdieu’s conceptual framework of socia...

The Internet and World Wide Web are emerging as important public relations tools for both profit and non-profit organizations. Little evidence exists, however, about the extent to which new technologies help organizations build relationships with publics. This article examines the relationship between Web site design and organizational responsiveness to stakeholder information needs. Two organi...