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The SAGE Handbook of Resistance
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The SAGE Handbook of Resistance

Edited by:


December 2016 | 530 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Chosen by Library Journal as one of the best reference texts of 2016. 

Occupy. Indignados. The Tea Party. The Arab Spring. Anonymous. These and other terms have become part of an emerging lexicon in recent years, signalling an important development that has gripped many parts of the world: millions of people are increasingly involved, whether directly or indirectly, in movements of resistance and protestation.

However, resistance and its conceptual "companions”, protest, contestation, opposition, disobedience and mobilization, all seem to be still mostly seen in public and private discourses as illegitimate and problematic forms of action. The time is, therefore, ripe to delve into the concerns, themes and legitimacy.

The SAGE Handbook of Resistance offers theoretical essays enabling readers to forge their own perspectives of what “is” resistance and emphasizes the empirical and experiential dimension of resistance - making strong choices in terms of how contemporary topics related to resistance help to rethink our societies as “protest societies”. The coverage is divided into six key sub-sections:  
  • Foundations
  • Sites of Resistance
  • Technologies of Resistance
  • Languages of Resistance
  • Geographies of Resistance
  • Consequences of Resistance

David Courpasson and Steven Vallas
Resistance Studies: A Critical Introduction
 
PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS
Jeffrey Juris and Marina Sitrin
Chapter 1: Globalization, Resistance, and Social Transformation
Bob Kurik
Chapter 2: Emerging Subjectivity in Protest
Valentine M. Moghadam
Chapter 3: Islam: Fundamentalism and Insurgency in the Arab Spring
David Knights
Chapter 4: The Grand Refusal?: Struggling with Alternative Foucauldian-Inspired Approaches to Resistance at Work
André Spicer and Peter Fleming
Chapter 5: Resisting the 24/7 Work Ethic – Shifting Modes of Regulation and Refusal in Organized Employment
 
PART TWO: SITES OF RESISTANCE
Erynn Masai de Casanova & Afshan Jafar
Chapter 6: The Body as a Site of Resistance
Amanda M. Gengler
Chapter 7: The Complexities and Contradictions of Resistance: An Intersectional Perspective
Jillian Crocker
Chapter 8: Individual Constraint and Group Solidarity: Marginalized Mothers and the Paradox of Family Responsibility
Linda Blum & Shelley Kimelberg
Chapter 9: Protecting Our Children: Paradoxes of Resistance in an Era of Neoliberal Education
Anniina Rantakari and Eero Vaara
Chapter 10: Resistance in Organizational Strategy-Making
Tammi Arford
Chapter 11: Prisons as Sites of Power and Resistance
 
PART THREE: TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER AND RESISTANCE
Felipe G. Massa
Chapter 12: Recasting Community for Online Resisting Work
Edward T. Walker
Chapter 13: Between Grassroots and ‘Astroturf’: Understanding Mobilization from the Top-down
Marianne Maeckelbergh
Chapter 14: From Digital Tools to Political Infrastructure
Daniel Hjorth
Chapter 15: Resisting the New: On Cooptation and the Organisational Conditions for Entrepreneurship
 
PART FOUR: LANGUAGES OF RESISTANCE
Ryan Moore
Chapter 16: Musical Style, Youth Subcultures, and Cultural Resistance
Guillaume Marche
Chapter 17: Graffitti as Infrapolitics: A Study of Visual Interventions of Resistance in San Francisco
Gay Seidman
Chapter 18: Naming, Shaming, Changing the World
Adam Reich
Chapter 19: Contesting Authority in a Moralized Market: The Case of a Catholic Hospital Unionization Campaign
Sierk Ybema, Robyn Thomas & Cynthia Hardy
Chapter 20: Organizational Change and Resistance: An Identity Perspective
 
PART FIVE: GEOGRAPHIES OF RESISTANCE
Giuseppe Caruso
Chapter 21: The World Social Forum and Global Resistance: The Trajectory of an Activist Open Space
Pablo Fernandez
Chapter 22: Back to Work: Resisting Clientelism in a Poor Neighborhood of Buenos Aires
Xueguang Zhou & Yun Ai
Chapter 23: Bases of Governance and Forms of Resistance: The Case of Rural China
Lamia Karim
Chapter 24: Resistance and its Pitfalls: Analyzing NGO and Civil Society Politics in Bangladesh
Sandrine Baudry & Emeline Eudes
Chapter 25: Urban Gardening: Between Green Resistance and Ideological Instrument

Resistance takes many forms, and is aimed in many directions. The editors have given us a powerful new language for grasping this diversity by cleverly dividing the handbook into foundations, sites, technologies, languages, and geographies of resistance. This book should attract wide attention and will reverberate across many disciplines.

James M. Jasper
Graduate Center of the City University of New York

The Editors have assembled a collection of expert articles traversing sources in time and space on what it is to ‘resist’. These argue that resistance studies is an interdisciplinary area looking, in part, at ‘the art of the weak’, ‘the weapons of the weak’, ‘style warfare’, ‘the great refusal’, ‘inaction’, and ‘rebellion’. On (or perhaps in) the other hand, there is a consideration of ‘co-optation’, ‘accommodation’ and ‘commodification’ as all equally associated with resistance. The articles move through different depths of visibility e.g. resistance is ‘underground’, ‘rhizomatic’, ‘grass roots’, ‘astroturf’ or as fully ‘out in the open’. But all are aware of the context-specific nature of resistance in a major text that will illuminate many contemporary features of a world in which power differentials appear to be increasing and where the 1% may yet come to fear a call from a resistant mob armed with pitchforks.

Gibson Burrell
Professor of Organisation Theory, Universities of Leicester and Manchester

Resistance is the new normal. Anti-elite resistance in politics, both nationally as in Brexit and organisationally, in the role of Trump and Corbyn in their respective parties as well as in social movements globally and in the interstices of organisations that seem increasingly out of kilter with the spirit of the times  is a major contemporary phenomenon. While no relations of power are ever alike that are resisted and no resistance follows universal scripts – both power and resistance are highly contextual – the Handbook of Resistance offers an invaluable resource understanding the dialectical relations of power and resistance theoretically and through many insightful empirical analyses. I recommend it as essential reading for the social sciences.

Stewart Clegg
Professor of Management and Research Director of the Centre for Organization and Management Studies, University of Technology, Sydney Business School

In conceiving and making available this rich interdisciplinary and globally-oriented handbook, Courpasson and Vallas are doing a great service to social scientists committed to social change. This book is an important resource that should become widely used and widely referenced.

Michele Lamont
Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Key features
  • offers a global, diverse and cross-disciplinary (organization studies, sociology and anthropology of work, cultural studies, global affairs, and even social theory) look at resistance
  • the handbook moves from the foundations, through the current status to look at future directions
  • includes topical coverage of modern movements including Occupy and Wiki-Leaks

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ISBN: 9781473959163

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