The Center for the Study of Law and Society 

is pleased to announce a special event with

LAURA NELSON

Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University

Speaking on her research

“The Meaning of Action: Linking Goals, Tactics,
and Strategies in the Environmental Movement”

Collective behavior is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a social movement. To be classified as a social movement, collective action must be linked to other actions and symbols that, taken together, work toward a coherent movement strategy. Linking action to meaning is an important topic in social movements research, but systematically analyzing these links has been both theoretically and methodologically limited. Using the U.S. environmental movement as a case study, and employing a data-driven and inductive strategy combining both computational and qualitative methods, we find the underlying principle linking actions to meaning within this movement is what level of society the organization views as the locus of change—their goal orientation. Movement strategy, which we define as the linking of a particular organizational goal orientation to a set of actions, we find can be measured through movement discourse, illuminating the meaning-making functions of social movements.

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Please join us on Friday, February 28 from 12:45-2:00p in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room, 2240 Piedmont Ave. 

Coffee and water are provided. We invite you to bring your own “bag lunch.”

We are looking forward to seeing you soon!

Catherine Albiston, Faculty Director

Pamela Erickson, Executive Director