Occupational Activism: Activist Careers after the Non-Violent Nashville Civil Rights Movement

• In Event: 437 - Regular Session. Occupational Careers and Identity

Abstract

Social movement studies have focused on social change facilitated through extra-institutional mobilization of symbolic, organizational, and human resources, producing a mobilization-centered conception of social activism. In this paper, we present a fourfold typology of occupational activism, that is, socially transformative individual and collective action that is conducted and realized through an occupational role or occupational community. We induce the typology from the post-mobilization occupational career trajectories of over 60 veterans of the non-violent Nashville civil rights movement of the early 1960s. After the early 1960s, their post-mobilization activism and occupational trajectories intersected with a U.S. economy transitioning from manufacturing to services, occupational race and sex de- and re-segregation, and with the proliferation of interactive service occupations. We typologize occupational activism as multiple modes of dialogical diffusion of a movement praxis and as a biographical consequence of prior social movement activism, shaped and channeled through a dynamic, societal occupational division of labor.

Authors

• Daniel B. Cornfield, Vanderbilt University

• Jonathan Scott Coley, Monmouth College

• Larry W. Isaac, Vanderbilt University

• Dennis C. Dickerson, Vanderbilt University