While the contentious politics (CP) model has come to dominate the field of social movements, scholars note the paradigm's shortcomings, especially its narrow focus on movement organizations, public protest, and political action. The conceptual wall between lifestyles and social movements has created a theoretical blind spot at the intersection of private action and movement participation, personal and social change, and personal and collective identity. We suggest that lifestyle movements (LMs) consciously and actively promote a lifestyle, or way of life, as a primary means to foster social change. Drawing upon our observations of a variety of LMs, we discuss three defining aspects of LMs: lifestyle choices as tactics of social change, the central role of personal identity work, and the diffuse structure of LMs. We also explore the links between LMs and social movements, CP, and conventional politics. Finally, we demonstrate that LM, as a new conceptual category, is applicable across a range of movement activities.

Utilizing data drawn from online and print advertisements, this research compares the green advertising techniques of companies with well-documented strong and weak social and environmental track records. Notwithstanding more subtle, divergent narratives suggesting that more responsible companies direct the consumer gaze toward more political and systemic issues while their counterparts tend to emphasize relatively low-cost, scientific, and philanthropic efforts, the main findings indicate that all companies employ a very similar grand narrative focused on consumer empowerment regardless of their actual ethical track record. This suggests that most attempts, by consumers and scholars alike, to determine anything meaningful about actual corporate practices via an analysis of environmental advertising, may be largely futile. A dramaturgical framework is employed to argue that the findings are most suitably explained by reframing green advertising as a form of impression management for an audience of ethical consumers. Thus, greenwashing emerges only when such performances are contradicted by a company’s actual environmental track record. The author proposes a more relational definition of greenwashing to reorient the analytical focus on the processes behind, and connections between, the product, the company, and the industry, including their broader cultural context.

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This article considers the labor market consequences of attending a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). With 2015 U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard Data, we use a matching estimator to identify and estimate the treatment effect of HBCU attendance on median earnings, earnings relative to a high school graduate, and income relative to that of the household at the time of initial enrollment, 6 and 10 years after attendance. Our treatment effect parameter estimates suggest that once we account for the differential return to college majors, the urban wage premium, and the proportionality/dependence of the labor market return of Black student college attendees on the share of a college/university’s student population that is Black, there is a long-run earnings premium associated with HBCU attendance. In addition, for HBCUs in general, we find that there is a population of students who would realize a positive labor market premium—as high as approximately 42%—and earn more than a high school graduate if they were to attend an HBCU. With respect to intergenerational income mobility, we find that HBCU attendance enables their actual and potential attendees to move to a higher quantile of income relative to their households in the long run.

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