This book explores the internal functioning and exercise of power inside a widely acclaimed transnational social organization: the alternative globalization movement. Drawing on new empirical data and perspectives from the Organizational Theory (OT), it highlights the movements' many unique features that are yet to be fully grasped within theoretical debates: ideological flexibility, emphasis on networking, informal structure and refusal to accept order from political parties. The book asserts that organizational power is a real issue not only within economic enterprises or formal political and labour organizations but also within informal transnational networks and coalition groups seeking to vehicle utopian projects.

During the 1990s, as widespread perception spread of declining state sovereignty, activists and social movement organizations began to form transnational networks and coalitions to pressure both intergovernmental organizations and national governments on a variety of issues. Research has focused on the formation of these transnational networks, campaigns, and coalitions; their objectives, strategies and tactics; and their impact. Yet the issue of how participation in transnational networks influences national level mobilization has been little analyzed. What effects has the experience of social movement organizations at the transnational scale had for the development at the national scale? This volume addresses this significant gap in the literature on transnational collective action by building on approaches that stress the multi-level characteristics of transnational relations. Edited by noted Latin American politics scholar Eduardo Silva, the contributions focus on four distinct themes to which the empirical chapters contribute: Building a Transnational Relations Approach to Multi-Level Interaction; Transnational Relations and Left Governments; North-South and South-South Linkages; and The "Normalization" of Labor. Bridging the Divide will add considerably to empirical knowledge of the ways in which transnational and national factors dynamically interact in Latin America. Additionally, the mid-range theorizing of the empirical chapters, along with the mix of positive and negative cases, raises new hypotheses and questions for further study.

Since the re-democratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational processes, as well as economic changes in Latin America. While there is an abundant literature on particular movements in different countries across the region, there is limited coverage of the approaches, debates, and theoretical understandings of social movement studies applied to Latin America. In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements, Federico M. Rossi presents a survey of the broad range of theoretical perspectives on social movements in Latin America. Bringing together a wide variety of viewpoints, the Handbook includes five sections: theoretical approaches to social movements, as applied to Latin America; processes and dynamics of social movements; major social movements in the region; ideational and strategic dimensions of social movements; and the relationship between political institutions and social movements. Covering key social movements and social dynamics in Latin America from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements is an indispensable reference for any scholar interested in social movements, protest, contentious politics, and Latin American studies.

This book presents an overview of new approaches to the study of social movements emerging out of Latin America, based on original and innovative analyses of the recent changes in collective action across the region. Over the past decade, new repertoires of contention have emerged in parallel to changes in the configuration of actors, in previously established patterns of relationship between social movements and political institutions, and in the shapes of collaborative networks, both domestic and transnational. The authors analyze a broad set of countries and social movements, while focusing on three key theoretical debates: the interactions between routine and contentious politics, the relationship between protest and context, and the organizational configurations of social movements. The research agenda put forward by this book is neither defined nor restricted by geographical boundaries, even though the chapters are based on field research undertaken in Latin America. In doing so, this volume contributes to a still underdeveloped dialogue in theory-building in social movement studies, among scholars from the South and from the North, as well as among scholars specialized in different regions.

In Corruption in Latin America the reader is presented with an alternative starting point for understanding corruption in this key region. The author asserts that corruption is a stable and rational social and organizational mechanism. Seen through this lens, we can begin to understand why it persists, and how to implement strategies to control corruption effectively. Beginning with an in-depth, nuanced examination of the concept of corruption, the author establishes the theoretical basis for viewing corruption as a social construct. An analysis of the experiences of four countries in the region – Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico – provides the reader with concrete data from which they can understand how and why these behaviors are reproduced, validated, and tolerated in everyday settings between governments and citizens, governments and firms, and firms and clients. Once we see corruption as the socially sanctioned norm for getting business done, we can begin to produce and propose effective solutions to reduce corruption in Latin America by designing and implementing instruments that transform this dynamic. This rigorous and original approach will challenge the reader’s assumptions about corruption, and will appeal to students of corporate governance, international business, public management, and business ethics.

This book offers an innovative perspective on the ever-widening gap between the poor and the state in Latin American politics. It presents a comprehensive analysis of the main social movement that mobilized the poor and unemployed people of Argentina to end neoliberalism and to attain incorporation into a more inclusive and equal society. The piquetero (picketer) movement is the largest movement of unemployed people in the world. This movement has transformed Argentine politics to the extent of becoming part of the governing coalition for more than a decade. Rossi argues that the movement has been part of a long-term struggle by the poor for socio-political participation in the polity after having been excluded by authoritarian regimes and neoliberal reforms. He conceptualizes this process as a wave of incorporation, exploring the characteristics of this major redefinition of politics in Latin America.

Democratization is the first textbook to focus on the "global wave of democratization" that has been occurring since around 1970. Bringing together leading authors from diverse international backgrounds, it introduces students to the theoretical and practical dimensions of the subject in an authoritative, accessible, and systematic way. The book takes into account the international factors that affect politics at the level of the nation state, showing students the direction in which the discipline is moving. It is accompanied by an innovative companion website that provides numerous resources for students and instructors. Democratization covers several key themes including: 1. Theories of democratization and their relation to democratic theory; 2. Critical prerequisites and driving social forces of democratic transition; 3. Pivotal actors and institutions involved in democratization; 4. Conditions for democratic survival, the consolidation of newly democratized countries, and the analysis of failed democratization; 5. Demonstrations of how these factors have played a role in the different regions in which the global wave of democratization has transplaced authoritarian and communist systems; 6. Possible futures of democratization worldwide.