How Social Movement Coalitions Matter: Lessons from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Recent scholarship has made great strides in investigating the conditions that facilitate the mobilization and maintenance of social movement coalitions, or alliances of social movement organizations that join forces to achieve some common goal. Far less attention has been paid to the effectiveness of these organizational collaborations. This paper begins to address this lacuna in this paper by developing a typology of social movement coalitions based on their inclusivity and coordination capacity, and illustrating some of its distinctions with a case study of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights’ development during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on evidence from four archival collections, I document several changes to the Leadership Conference’s organizational structure and operational procedures that were implemented in 1963 and show how these changes contributed to the achievement of strong civil rights legislation during the mid-1960s.
Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change
Excerpt} For decades, unions around the world, like the teachers' union in Australia, have been struggling. Across advanced English-speaking economies, we have seen the rising power of capital and its increasing influence over government. This has created a hostile environment for unions, characterized by aggressive employers, unfriendly governments, and declining union membership. Unions have been forced to reevaluate their role and objectives. Debates have considered how unions could advance the conditions of their members and whether achieving this goal also requires a more fundamental confrontation with the political and economic logic that underpins this crisis for unions (Hyman 2007). This book is about the promise of successful coalitions. I consider why coalitions have re-surfaced as a strategy and the various ways in which coalitions can successfully achieve social change and rebuild the organizational strength of civil society. To do this, I identify three elements of coalitions using case studies based in Australia, the United States, and Canada. I draw out key principles about how to build strong coalitions and the circumstances under which coalitions succeed. I apply these lessons directly to unions, distinguishing the ways in which coalitions support union revitalization and enable unions to win on issues and build political agendas that they have struggled with on their own. Comments The abstract, table of contents, and first twenty-five pages are published with permission from the Cornell University Press. For ordering information, please visit the Cornell University Press This article is available at DigitalCommons@ILR: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/books/59
Health is a sustainable state

 This commentary by Maurice King questions the viability of current public health strategies. He advocates for an ecological approach that seeks to improve the health of the entire planet. He discusses the concept of the demographic trap. Being demographically trapped refers to a population being stuck in an "unsustainable state with a high birth rate and death rate, with an ever increasing pressure on its resources, and with a rapidly deteriorating environment". King points out that the possible outcomes are limited for a population that becomes trapped. Some of the possible outcomes include dying from starvation and disease; fleeing as ecological refugees; being destroyed by war or genocide; or being supported by food and other resources from elsewhere, first as emergency relief and then perhaps indefinitely. King believes that ecological collapse has already taken place in parts of Ethiopia and the process may have begun on a wider scale elsewhere. According to King, this ecological predicament can be found in both rural and urban areas in the developing world. This article also discusses the problem of high fertility. King believes that the widely held belief that the necessary and sufficient condition for reducing the birth rate is to reduce the child death rate is erroneous. He states that a causal relationship between the 2 rates is untenable, instead, it is more reasonable to say that both rates respond to other common factors. The author suggests that a fall in the birth rate requires the harnessing of social and economic gains to reduce poverty and promote socio-economic development. He also believes that the continued growth in the size of the world's population is due to declining efforts in family planning and declining child mortality not having its alleged effects on fertility. King also brings forth an ethical dilemma. He asks, "are there some programs which, although they are technically feasible, should not be initiated because of there long-term population-increasing consequences?" He suggests that other factors such as ecological deterioration, integrity of the ecosystem, and the welfare of future communities need to be taken into consideration. King presents a new global strategy based on the concept of "sustainability". He says that "sustainability should be the maintenance of the capacity of the ecosystem to support life in quantity and variety". Specifically, he advocates for consumption control in the industrial North with intensive energy conservation and recycling. In the South, he calls for renewed vigor in family planning efforts. Public health measures need to be understood in terms of their demographic and ecological implications. If measures are found to be desustaining, King says that complementary ecologically sustaining measures should be introduced with them. He also believes that desustaining measures, such as oral rehydration, should not be introduced on a public health scale if no adequately sustaining complementary measures are possible. He asserts that desustaining measures, without complementary interventions, can ultimately increase the man-years of human misery.
