ABSTRACT The work of Antonio Gramsci points the way to the analysis of political conjunctures in ways that are complementary to, but go beyond, those of historical institutionalists. With a focus on the layering of longer‐ and shorter‐term movement and policy dynamics, as well as on the fundamental contradictions that fuel social struggles, the approach is applied here to an analysis of recent housing struggles in New York City. Tracing the historical and organizational roots of contemporary fights over social housing, rent regulation, and evictions, the article argues that broader political backlash has hampered the movement, while the institutional innovations of the movement—and over 80 years of policy—remain resources for a broader and more radical future.

Abstract From the practice of movements against oppressive conditions, a critical sociology can emerge constituted by the following elements: Ideological demystification identifies the ways those in power mask their positions from criticism. Reabstraction redefines objects to understand their relation to larger wholes; it helps us to think beyond what is directly in front of us. Studying contradictions means identifying the ways social processes pull apart, to understand why problems appear as they do. Embedding inquiry in movements—which bring together people with multiple perspectives and different experiences in relation to movements’ objects and goals—allows it to be both rooted and networked in a way that enhances its ability to leverage the other three elements effectively. Such a critical sociological inquiry is illustrated through a study of work around a community land trust coalition in New York, cofounded by homeless activists, and in which the authors are active.

Marxism is an important mode of thinking about social movements. It developed within social movements and provides resources to think about a wide range of questions that we might encounter in movements. This chapter discusses five of these resources: the ability to grasp reality at multiple levels of abstraction; understand the contradictory nature of social relations; trace the historical development of social relations and the movements that challenge them; understand the centrality of class in social conflict without reducing its actual complexity; and see the ways in which consciousness - what and how we think about ourselves in the world, and how we learn - and practice can be coherent and why they sometimes are not. Marxism is a creative and flexible orientation to the problems of oppression that drive us to protest in the first place, and can help make our challenges more durable.

offers several exciting new avenues for future research. McNally argues future research should consider the relationship between legislative reputations and members’ legislative effectiveness, campaign promises, and progressive ambition. Additionally, I think future research could consider whether McNally’s conceptualization of legislative reputations can be expanded to consider the representation of other groups and whether there are factors other than the advocacy window that cause members to work toward specific reputations. McNally only considers actions taken by members once elected to office in constructing their legislative reputation scores, but future research could consider how members’ experiences prior to being elected influence the reputations they pursue. Overall, I believe Representing the Disadvantaged should be of interest to scholars of American politics broadly and will likely become required readings for classes on Congress and representation.

In spite of the dialogue with and use of dialectics in Bourdieu's foundational work on fields, recent work in social movements that employ fields and kindred concepts have generally abjured dialectics and, especially, Marxism. A renewed dialogue with Marxism is important to overcome some of the key limits of these meso-level analytic concepts. Several areas of extension are discussed, including the process of abstraction; the centrality of contradiction in driving change; the question of real potentials for change; and the problem of cohesion, including of consciousness. It is argued that Marxism pushes a sociology of movement fields back toward reflexivity, and from there to critical questions of intellectual practice.

Chapter 2 takes a close-to-the ground look at the different kinds of workers who clean parks. It analyzes the shifts in the organization of work and categorization of workers with reference to two main processes: broadbanding and segmentation. Broadbanding refers to the consolidation of many categories of work into fewer. Segmentation refers to the expansion of the number of categories of workers and especially to the creation of distinction among them in terms of pay, workplace rights, and supervisory discretion, and the erection of barriers mobility among them. The chapter shows that these apparently contradictory dynamics actually work together in creating a segmented and "fissured" workplace in which systems of contracting and restructuring enable the degradation of previously decent jobs into more insecure and contingent ones not only outside the public sector--as with the emergence of the conservancies' non-union workforces--but also outside of formal labor markets with the growing use of volunteers, workfare beneficiaries and community sentencees since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

Chapter 6 discusses how the partnership organizations and their governance arrangements blur the boundaries between public and private, and how the changes operated in the governance of public parks can be understand in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the “integral state.” In the integral state, political and civil society are mutually constituted and mutually reinforcing. This chapter considers the developing governance repertoire discussed in the previous chapter as a whole, and asks how the state integrates the corporate, civic, and philanthropic repertoires and their actors into the larger complex of parks maintenance. It further asks how it does so in the face of considerable and growing criticism about elite control and public accountability.

Chapter 5 moves "up" a level of abstraction from the previous ones and examines the organizational arrangements that shape how the worksites operate. We introduce the new webs of organizations involved in parks maintenance and governance, and present the varied types of groups—public, nonprofit, and partnerships—that now maintain parks. Focusing on the three main conservancies that were created after New York City's fiscal crisis, Central Park Conservancy, Bryant Park Corporation and Prospect Park Alliance, the chapter describes the growth of three distinct repertoires of blending the public and private in the operation of parks: a philanthropic, a corporate and a civic one. In describing these repertoires, the chapter traces the formation and operation of these conservancies, their performances of organizational leadership, labor relations and legitimacy, and their unequal influence on the more recent generation of conservancies and Friends-of groups from the 1990s until today.