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Social movements are conventionally understood as a means by which groups seek to resolve collective grievances outside of the regular political process. With this in mind, I explore the important role of ''institutional activists'' -insiders with access to resources and power -who proactively take up causes that overlap with those of grassroots challengers. This article focuses on the history of, and recent developments in, the study of institutional activism, situating the concept within existing social movement theory and providing examples of the varying roles of institutional activists in mobilization.

Most research on efficacy and participation in collective action has focused on single country samples with little attention paid to the relationship between efficacy and country-level structural factors. Drawing on value expectancy theory, we theorize a link between macro-level political institutions and micro-level efficacy. To address the previous limitations in the efficacy and collective action literature, we use multi-level, cross-national data, and present results from a series of hierarchical models testing whether efficacy increases collective action cross-nationally, whether political institutions affect efficacy, and whether the effect of efficacy on collective action is conditional on political institutions. We find that efficacy increases collective action, that certain political institutions increase efficacy, and that the effect of efficacy on collective action is partly conditional on the inclusiveness of a country's political institutions. These findings suggest the insufficiency of purely structural as well as social psychological explanations of collective action.

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<p>Americans with disabilities represent a significant proportion of the population. Despite their numbers and the economic hardships they face, disability is often excluded from general sociological studies of stratification and inequality. To address some of these omissions, this paper focuses on employment and earnings inequality by disability status in the United States since the enactment of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a policy that affects many Americans. After using Current Population Survey data from 1988-2014 to describe these continuing disparities, we review research that incorporates multiple theories to explain continuing gaps in employment and earnings by disability status. In addition to theories pointing to the so-called failures of the ADA, explanations also include general criticisms of the capitalist system and economic downturns, dependence on social welfare and disability benefits, the nature of work, and employer attitudes. We conclude with a call for additional research on disability and discrimination that helps to better situate disability within the American stratification system.</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

Prior studies on perceptions of structural disadvantage and injustice, efficacy, and collective action have suffered from two major limitations: (1) they have used singlecountry samples, usually of economically advanced countries, and (2) generally theorized and investigated perceptions of structural injustice and efficacy separately. Drawing on value-expectancy theory, we provide an integrated theory to predict direct and conditional effects of efficacy and perceptions of structural disadvantage and injustice on collective action within countries. To address the limitations of previous research, we use cross-national data of 29 countries, including economically advanced and less advanced nations, to test how well these hypotheses explain within-country variation in collective action. We find that internal efficacy is significantly and positively associated with lowand moderate-cost collective action, whereas organizational embeddedness, a proxy for political efficacy, is significantly and positively associated with low-, moderate-, and high-cost collective action. Perceptions of legitimate and unjust structural disadvantage are also positively associated with all types of collective action. Importantly, the positive effects of both types of efficacy on high-cost collective action are conditional on perceptions of structural injustice. That is, participation in high-cost collective action is more likely for those who are both efficacious and perceive structural disadvantage as unjust.

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This article examines whether shared religious beliefs and religious social relationships (Durkheim) and belief in a personal, moral God (Stark) negatively affect attitudes toward the acceptability of white-collar crime. In addition, using a large cross-national sample and estimating multilevel models, we test whether effects are conditional on modernization and religious contexts characterized by belief in an impersonal or amoral God. Shared religious beliefs and the importance of God in one's life are negatively related to the acceptability of white-collar crime. These effects, however, weaken in religious contexts characterized by belief in an impersonal or amoral God as do the effects of religious social relationships and belonging to a religious organization; modernization, on the other hand, does not have a moderating effect. In short, religious belief is associated with lower acceptance of white-collar crime and certain types of religious contexts condition this relationship.