Challenges in organizing social movements: Privilege and resistance in the living wage campaign at Green College

The living wage movement, developing in the 1990's, is new effort for equitable wages, characterized by vast coalition building and novel movement actions. The possibilities and dangers of coalition building and using new tactics for change have been widely studied in social movement literature. This research attempts to examine the challenges, as they are understood by students, in forming a living wage campaign at a college or university. By analyzing interviews with student participants, through the paradigms of ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis, several patterns emerged: the privilege of student-activists and students, as well as the resistance by student activists to privilege. Students called on larger discourses of race, capitalism and social movements to understand their relation to other students, workers, and the administration. Such discourses shaped and limited the activists' talk about the campaign as well as their actions.