Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2020
Publication Title
Contention
Volume
8
Issue
2
Pages
21–52
Publisher Name
Berghahn Books
Abstract
Political opportunity structure (POS) refers to how the larger social context, such as repression, shapes a social movement's chances of success. Most work on POS looks at how movements deal with the political opportunities enabling and/or constraining them. This article looks at how one group of social movement actors operating in a more open POS alters the POS for a different group of actors in a more repressive environment through a chain of indirect leverage—how United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) uses the more open POS on college campuses to create new opportunities for workers in sweatshop factories. USAS exerts direct leverage over college administrators through protests, pushing them to exert leverage over major apparel companies through the licensing agreements schools have with these companies.
Recommended Citation
Williams, Matthew. How College Students Created Opportunities for Sweatshop Workers: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement and an Interactive Approach to Political Opportunity Structure. Contention, 8, 2: 21–52, 2020. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, Sociology: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/cont.2020.080203
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Statement
© Contention, 2020.
Comments
Author Posting © Contention, 2020. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Contention for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Contention, Volume 8, Issue 2, December 2020. https://doi.org/10.3167/cont.2020.080203