Dana L. Cloud - Böcker

In this extraordinary tale of union democracy, Dana L. Cloud engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and corporate management. Taking readers into the central dilemma of having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it as a bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union offers a sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly relevant case study.  Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud renders a multi-layered account of the battles between company and the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness and the entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union leaders.We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs.  Drawing from communication studies, labor history, and oral history and including a chapter co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas, We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.

A New Rhetoric of Social Movements explains the rhetoric—visual, aural, verbal, and technological—of social change actors from a theoretical perspective that emphasizes the interrelationship of agitation and control and the spectrum of movement activities from the reformist to the revolutionary. Readers learn not only how to describe social movements, but also how to explain them: why they succeed and by what means, why they fail and in what contexts and conditions, and in whose interests they operate. There is extensive consideration of how media, including social media, serve as affordances of social movement actors and organizations. Each chapter provides multiple current examples and features an extended case study for continuity and clarity.Chapters lay out a new theoretical framework for studying social movements: the Hegemony-Formation-Pressure model. In the context of counterhegemonic struggle, this model puts the moments of formation (identity- and consciousness-forming rhetorics) in a dialectical cycle with the tactics of pressure (instrumental action demanding institutional change). The idea of a circuit of formation and pressure captures the totality of movements and their complexity. Filling a gap in the literature, A New Rhetoric of Social Movements is an invaluable textbook for upper-division and graduate courses in communication studies, rhetoric, social movements, and U.S. history.