de la Garza Toledo 2005

Introduction, 9-17 in


de la Garza Toledo, Enrique. 2005. Sindicatos Y Nuevos Movimientos Sociales En América Latina. 1. ed. Buenos Aires, Argentina: CLACSO.

• the strict definition is that conditions, experience, and demands  of work are the things that create "work subjects", ie a work identity for a worker (15)
• but what we actually need is a broader conception of the creation of identities at work, including workers who work in noncapitalist enterprises, and times spent NOT at a workplace
• for example, the idea of desocupados is both a work subject, but one disconnected from work itself...demands aren't made against a boss, but against a society with a deep divide between winners and losers
• we can't just look at one world, e.g. the work world, to understand teh genesis of collective action, have to see the multiple influences and demands that build inside and out of work (16)
• 
  

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001

McAdam, D., Tarrow, S. G, & Tilly, C. 2001. Dynamics of contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.


Chapter 1:

• contentious politics: episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, and object of claims, or a party to the claims, and (b) the claims would, if resolved, affect the interests of as least one of the claimants  (5)
• episodic is key to this being contentious politics, and not just "normal" politics
• this definition is broad to combat the fact that the study of institutional/non-institutional politics has gotten too narrow, and often politics (contentious or otherwise) can go in and out of institutional realm (6)
• contained versus transgressive contention: (govt is involved in both in some way)
• contained contention
• cases of contention in which all parties are previously established actors employing established means of claim making (7)
• transgressive contention:
• at least some of the actors involved are newly self-identified political actors AND/OR at least some parties employ innovative collective action (7-8)
• "many instances of transgressive contention grow out of episodes of contained contention" (8)
• "substantial short-term political and social change more often emerges from transgressive contention than from contained contention", contained contention often just reifies existing regimes (8)
• "insted of seeking to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for mobilization, action, or certain trajectories, we search out recurrent causal mechanisms and regularities in their concatenation (13)
• seem to be looking for similarities across different cases
• pursuing "partial parallels" (13-14)
• four overlapping and competing lines fof explanation of contention (20)
• (21) structural analysis -- interests + capacities = action or not
• rationalist analysis -- individuals are rational and decide
• phenomenological analysis -- plumbing states of awareness for explanations of involvement in contentious politics
• cultural approaches -- norms, beliefs, and symbols that affect/create contention
• mechanism: a delimited class of events that alter relations among specifified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations (24)
• types:
• environmental mechanisms (25): extnerally generated changes to social conditions, ie resource depletion
• cognitive mechanisms (26): alterations of individual and collective perceptions
•  relational mechanisms (26): alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks
• processes: regular sequences of mechanisms that produce similar transformations (24)
• families of processes:
• mobilizations
• political identity formation
• the family of repression, diffusion, and radicalization (28)
• episodes: continuous streams of contention including collective claims-making (24)
• combine all these things above
•