Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Methods and Data

My analysis draws on two major sources of data. The first is thirty in-depth interviews with activists in the US anti-sweatshop movement, conducted between June and October 2007. Because the people I wished io speak with were scattered across the US, I conducted the majority of interviews by phone, though I was able to do some face- to-face; I noticed no difference in the quality of the interviews--i.e., the interviewees’ willingness to speak freely, etc.--whether they were by phone or in person. My selection of interviewees was guided by the need to create what Robert Weiss (1994) calls a panel of knowledgeable informants--people who have participated in the events I am interested in and have otherwise difficult to obtain knowledge. The intent was also ethnographic, since I wanted to understand not only what happened, but how the interviewees understood the social forces they were up against and the strategic reasons for their actions. I interviewed people from a broad range of organizations, though the focus was on current and former members/ staff of United Students Against Sweatshops and the Worker Rights Consortium. My second major source of data was historical research

using newspaper articles, various groups’ reports and websites, and other such material to help me reconstruct some events in detail.
For practical reasons of time, finances and linguistic ability, 1 confined this study to US-based organizations, not attempting to study the entire global network of the anti- sweatshop movement. As should be clear from my analysis though, most of the activists I spoke with had spent a considerably amount of time abroad working with allies in the Global South and many of the actions of the US anti-sweatshop movement were

influenced by feedback from these allies. The activists 1 spoke with all gave me permission to quote them using their real names; given the small size of the anti- sweatshop movement, trying to protect people’s confidentiality through pseudonyms probably would have been fruitless in any case. In a few cases, however, 1 have used pseudonyms for particular quotes or citations of interviews because the interviewees are currently in positions where it would be problematic for them to be publicly associated with certain positions they took in their interviews. I have marked such pseudonyms with an asterisk (•) the first time they appear in each chapter.

In doing the interviews, analyzing them afterward and writing this dissertation, 1 have treated my interviewees as experts on the topic of anti-sweatshop activism. While as a trained sociologist, I bring a particular sort of expertise to these questions my interviewees don’t have, as experienced activists who have often thought a good deal about the causes of sweatshops and the strategy of their movement, they have a practical expertise I lack. In analyzing how the anti-sweatshop movement has strategized and particularly what makes for successful strategy in the social contexts in which they work, I have found their insights invaluable. The theory of social movement strategy and political opportunity 1 develop here is my own, but it builds upon the practical insights my interviewees shared with me.

The Current State of Social Movement Theory

Part of the reason that scholars of social movements in sociology and political

science have not closely analyzed strategy until recently is that the field itself is relatively

young, only really taking shape in the 1970s, whereas many other central topics in the social sciences took shape as subfields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is not to say that scholars did not study social movements before the 70s, but, at least in the US, they did so through the lens of collective behavior theory, a perspective that current scholars (despite the disagreements among themselves that we will look at below) have largely rejected. Although there were a number of important variations of the theory, collective behavior theorists generally look a dim view of social movements, seeing them as irrational, their participants as emotionally disturbed and socially isolated, and movements themselves as a threat to democracy. US scholars developed this perspective largely in response to movements they disliked and which
were actually anti-democratic—fascism and Marxist-Leninism. This model did not fit well with the movements that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, however, which clearly played a role in deepening democracy in the United States. A new generation of scholars who were either participants in these movements or broadly sympathetic to them arose and began developing new theories (Buechler 2000).
Since this time, two distinct camps of thought have developed among US scholars of social movements--political process theory and cultural constructionism. Political process theorists have largely emphasized structural and organizational factors in understanding the dynamics of social movements, while cultural constructionists emphasize, as one might guess from their name, cultural factors. Despite some broad areas of agreement between the two camps, there are also many points of difference, leading to some at times highly contentious debates (e.g., Goodwin and Jasper 2004b). I

will briefly review the main claims of the two schools, before turning to look in depth ai those areas of both theories most relevant for understanding social movement strategy.