A growing literature examines the dynamics of social movement contention within and across "social fields." While fields tend toward stability, events and processes elsewhere in a broader system of fields can provide opportunities for movement mobilization. Most accounts see these cross-field dynamics as exogenous events, granting movements little control over when and how these opportunities might emerge. In contrast, this article argues that activists can and do purposely create cross-field effects. Examining changes in contentious practice in the American labor movement-which in recent decades, has reoriented contention over workplace issues away from workplaces themselves, and toward political arenas more traditionally dominated by community concerns-this article advances the concept of cross-field manipulation, purposive strategic action that accounts for the positioning of actors across social fields, triggering events in one field so as to reorder the dynamics of another. Using a historical study of evolving organizing practices in a Southern California hotel workers' union, including interviews and archival sources, the paper identifies three mechanisms-power analysis, alliance building, and actor-triggered crises-whereby labor activists purposely generate cross-field effects. Through repeated interactions with employers and polities, activists learned a unique campaign model that politicized workplace conflict in communities and markets, generating opportunities for workplace gains.
The Essential WorkerEven as they devastate lives, crises can create opportunities-not certainties, but possibilities-for usually powerless people to exercise historical agency. The empowerment of working people relative to employers, in particular, can create durable changes in broader patterns of social inequality. The Great Depression and the end of World War II unleashed massive strike waves that undermined longstanding inequalities in American life. Pathogens, too, have the potential to help dismantle the durable norms and institutions that can seem impervious to social intervention. With aspects of our social order crumbling under the burden of COVID-19, the question becomes: what will people do? Will workers take the opportunity to change the balance of power? A labor history of healthcare provides some possible answers.Take our last great pandemic: the human immunodeficiency virus. HIV moves slower than SARS-CoV-2, and its relatively low transmissibility and long incubation period make its infections socially clustered. In its early years, the pandemic devastated stigmatized subpopulations-gay men, intravenous drug users, Haitian-Americans-while mostly sparing others. Yet when the virus arrived on hospital wards in the 1980s, it dramatically destabilized work. Although we now know that it carried a comparatively low probability of infection for frontline care workers, a needlestick injury that led to infection meant certain death early on. The combination of perceived risk and patient stigma created a distinct dilemma for workers and patient advocates: those pursuing greater workplace precautions were sometimes at odds with advocates
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