Living Worth: Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets

Abstract

in the book. DiMaggio states that he selected ‘‘some of the most salient uprisings of the 2010s as related to the rise of American plutocracy’’ (p. 11). While this works for the Tea Party and the Economic Justice movement, it is less convincing for Black Lives Matter (a movement focused on racism and criminal justice) and the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns (which were presidential campaigns, not social movements). Indeed, the chapter on the presidential campaigns feels particularly out of place. Presidential campaigns are different media and public attention-generating machines than social movements, and so the whole chapter feels even more removed from the rest of the book. This chapter is also the longest, and the section on the Trump campaign is the same length as the BLM chapter. The book also makes no effort to compare the different movements. While there are brief comparisons within campaigns, there is no organized comparison of media coverage, public support, or outcomes between, for example, the Tea Party and the Economic Justice movement. We get glimpses of connections (e.g., Table 4.1 comparing media coverage counts), but not including a chapter that stitches the findings from these chapters together or at least a more fleshed-out conclusion (the book’s conclusion is only five pages) feels like a missed opportunity. Another missed opportunity is DiMaggio’s engagement with theory throughout the book. He begins the book by using citations in mainstream political science journals to point out that social movements are an overlooked aspect of the political process. While this may be true, there is a full literature on social movements, including several journals devoted to the subject, in sociology. The author does nod to some of these theories, briefly summarizing resource mobilization, political opportunity, and disturbance theories in the introduction; but his approach through the rest of the book feels almost atheoretical, acknowledging concepts and theories in passing but never explaining how the movements fit (or fail to fit) their expectations. Political science and social movement studies have a lot to say to one another, and it would have been exciting to see DiMaggio use these cases to integrate concepts and ideas on media coverage of social movements, the relationship between public opinion and movements, the policy impacts of movements, and social movement partyism—by scholars like Edwin Amenta, Jon Agnone, Paul Burstein, and Paul Almeida—into the American politics literature. Even to see him engage with the literature on the Tea Party, early Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump mobilization that already existed at the time of writing would have been insightful for deepening our understanding of these cases and how they connect with a longer history of protest and activism in American society. In summary, DiMaggio’s book provides a good overview of a wide range of social movements over a very short amount of space. The book is a well-written, concise summary of these movements and particularly the media and public responses to them. While it is more focused on a substantive summary of the movements than a theoretical analysis of them, this may be useful for undergraduate and graduate-level instructors or researchers looking for a book that will provide an overview of the past fifteen years of American social movement activity. Considering that this book came out around March of 2020, I imagine that DiMaggio is already hard at work on the next book documenting this next era of collective action.