Douglas McAdam

About

Douglas McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and an Emeritus Faculty member. He has served as the former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research focuses on political sociology, with a special emphasis on race in the U.S., American politics, and the study of social movements and contentious politics. He is the author or co-author of 18 books and approximately 85 other publications in these areas. Among his most well-known works are 'Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970,' which was published in a new edition in 1999, 'Freedom Summer' (1988), which received the 1990 C. Wright Mills Award and was a finalist for the American Sociological Association’s best book prize in 1991, and 'Dynamics of Contention' (2001), co-authored with Sid Tarrow and Charles Tilly. He also authored 'A Theory of Fields' (2012) with Neil Fligstein, and a forthcoming book titled 'The Origins of Our Fractured Society: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America' with Karina Kloos. McAdam was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Economic growth
• Political economy
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Social Movement Theory and the Prospects for Climate Change Activism in the United States

  Annual Review of Political Science · 2017-05-11 · 247 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The issue of climate change poses something of a puzzle. For all the attention accorded the issue, climate change/global warming has spawned surprisingly little grassroots activism in the contemporary United States. Drawing on social movement theory, the author seeks to explain this puzzle. The prevailing consensus among movement scholars is that the prospect for movement emergence is facilitated by the confluence of three factors: the expansion of political opportunities, the availability of mo…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Political Context of Social Movements

  2018-10-05 · 96 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• States, social movements and markets†

  Socio-Economic Review · 2019-01-01 · 40 citations

  articleSenior author

  The field of socio-economics has been dominated by two perspectives: political economy and economic sociology. Political economy has generally stressed how the political and economic institutions of capitalism interact to produce unique and dynamic national capitalisms. That perspective emphasizes the way in which the relative strength of workers, capitalists and the state in capitalist systems determines the institutional conditions that operate to structure the dynamics of societies. Economic…

  PublisherDOI

• Strands of Classical Theory in the Study of Social Movements

  Handbooks of sociology and social research · 2021 · 17 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
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• Be Careful What You Wish For: The Ironic Connection Between the Civil Rights Struggle and Today's Divided America

  Sociological Forum · 2015-02-25 · 15 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The deep political and economic divisions that characterize the contemporary United States have been the subject of much discussion and analysis. However, most of the accounts of these divisions have tended to emphasize relatively recent events or trends, such as the Tea Party movement or the extreme partisanship that has marked the last three presidential administrations (e.g., Obama, George Bush Jr., Clinton). The origins of today's divisions, however, have much older roots. They date to the h…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: REU: Community Reactions to Extreme Weather Events

  NSF · $65k · 2014–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Sidney Tarrow

  Cornell University

  47 shared

• Charles Tilly

  New School

  33 shared

• John D. McCarthy

  Swansea University

  25 shared

• Mayer N. Zald

  24 shared

• Neil Fligstein

  University of California, Berkeley

  17 shared

• W. Richard Scott

  14 shared

• Hilary Boudet

  11 shared

• Jack Α. Goldstone

  George Mason University

  10 shared

Awards & honors

• 1990 C. Wright Mills Award for Freedom Summer

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Ann Hsingh-117
• Jon A. Krosnickh-95
• Robert Weisbergh-77