Template:Did you know nominations/Mayer Zald

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by PumpkinSky talk 02:27, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Mayer Zald

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• ... that Mayer Zald was a notable sociologist of social movements?

• Reviewed: Russell W. Volckmann

Created/expanded by Piotrus (talk). Self nom at 16:57, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

• This is an understated hook. The Zald/Thompson theory of social movement organizations is specific and more interesting. The word "notable" is a peacock word; please find a more substantive adjective. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 23:32, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Can you provide a reference for your claim? The cited source does not support its claim, it merely cites the 1966 work that is supposed to have popularized the term. We need an independent source that would make this claim; citing the original source is not enough. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 23:43, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

    I have to run---family stuff. Here's from the article:

    Zald and Ash (1966). Zald’s article with [[John McCarthy]], “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” published in the ''[[American Journal of Sociology]]'' in May 1977, has been described by [[Jeff Goodwin]] as one of the most influential and frequently cited articles in the field and in the discipline.<ref name=listerv/> His 1966 ''[[Social Forces]]'' article with [[Roberta Ash]] (now Garner), “Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay, and Change,” was one of top 10 most frequently cited articles ever published in ''Social Forces''.<ref name=listerv/>

    Kiefer.Wolfowitz 23:52, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, yes, I know, I wrote it. hence, he is a notable social movement scholar. Neither of the two facts is very DYK-hookable in itself, though. Could use a better adjective, I guess, if you have any ideas. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:48, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Maybe one of Jeffrey Paige, Charles Tilly, Aldon Morris, or Arthur Stinchecombe has made a quotable assessment of Zald? Kiefer.Wolfowitz 11:29, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Maybe - do you have the source? But even so, they are not public names. That's why I don't want to quote Jeff Goodwin; outside the field, he is not famous enough to warrant an interesting DYK. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 16:48, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Here are some sources:

• A Retrospective on the Civil Rights Movement: Political and Intellectual Landmarks, Aldon D. Morris, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 25, (1999), pp. 517-539, https://www.jstor.org/stable/223515
• Tilly and Perrow and McAdam

Kiefer.Wolfowitz 22:35, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

I have added the book reference. The article is non-free, and JSTOR does not have search option, so if there is a good Zald mention in it, please cite it here of add it to the article yourself, I just don't have time to read the entire article to see if there is a mention of him worth citing, particularly as I assume you have done so and could do it yourself with less time than I'd have to dedicate to the task. Based on the book ref, I can propose the following ALT1:

• ALT1: ... that Mayer Zald and John D. McCarthy analyzed social movements with organizational theory and so developed resource-mobilization theory?

--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:34, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

• It's been a week since the above, and the new ALT1 hook hasn't been reviewed. Anyone else want to look this over? BlueMoonset (talk) 03:06, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

  I edited the proposed hook. The article was in good shape a week ago, so per AGF the new hook works. I should double check that the wording of the new hook is supported. (Size increased 11:57, 29 August 2012 (UTC)) Kiefer.Wolfowitz 11:19, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

  I added the following text and documentation, which justifies the hook Alt1: (Kiefer.Wolfowitz 11:45, 29 August 2012 (UTC))

Zald and McCarthy called "attention to the rising trend of professional activism in social movements and [applied] general principles of organizational dynamics to" social movement organizations.

The following has been checked in this review by Maile66

• QPQ done by Piotrus on August 10, 2012
• Article created by by Ryan Lanham on May 8, 2006, and was a 4-sentence article on August 7, 2012 with 476 characters of readable prose
• 5X expansion by Piotrus began on August 8, 2012, with current size of 4,392 characters of readable prose
• NPOV, well written, above-average article for scholarly minded
• Every paragraph sourced
• Alt 1 Hook is interesting, short enough at 136 characters, and sourced at the end of the sentence
• Duplication Detector run, no copyvio found
• Time spent on review approximately one hour

• Good to go - Bio in Sociology field

Maile66 (talk) 11:36, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, you did not check the alt1 hook, because I just added the reference at 13:41, a half hour after I stated an intention to double check the article. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 11:45, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

I certainly did check it. When I did the review, Reference 7 was already there. When I opened Reference 7 and read it, it covers what is in the hook. Maile66 (talk) 12:35, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

The hook contains the key phrase "analyzed ... with organizational theory", which I added. There is no support for that assertion in "Reference 7", regardless of your reading experience. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 12:44, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

• I just reviewed the article, hoping to be a third set of eyes that could resolve the issue, but I fear I have failed. Reference 7 does state that Zald and McCarthy developed resource mobilization theory. The new text that was added to document their application of organizational dynamics to social movements does appear to support the rest of the hook, but it doesn't explicitly indicate that it was this work that led to development of the theory. Rearranging some text sequence could fix that. Also, the new text is a quotation from someone who isn't named; I cannot access the source, so I'm not entirely sure whether Pamela Oliver is the source of the statement. Whoever said those words needs to be named in the text, with some indication of why the person's opinion matters (we wouldn't want people to think that it was sportscaster Pam Oliver). Even better would be to avoid the direct quotation entirely by describing the thought instead of quoting it.

All in all, I'd find this more interesting if the article and hook told me something about the substance of Zald's ideas, rather than only naming the noun clusters used to describe them. In a snippet view of reference 6, I find an indication that Zald and McCarthy had a "sweeping assumption of motivation" for individuals' participation in social movements and that they viewed movement participation as the result of a "rational calculus in which costs of participation are weighed against the rewards". The first page of this article (not cited in the Wikipedia article) says that McCarthy and Zald characterized social protest of the 1960s and 1970s as having resulted from the rise of the "professional social movement organization," with full-time paid staff, paper-only memberships, etc. I'm curious to know more about these ideas, but the term "resource mobilization theory" leaves me totally uninterested. --Orlady (talk) 15:13, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

I share your concerns, but Piotrus and I have limited time. The quotes you gave are extremely misleading: "characterize" is utterly wrong. Zald discussed e.g. PIRGs (as examples of professionalization) and e.g. The March of Dimes choosing new causes after the elimination of polio. Before Zald, a lot sociology modeled social movements using diffusion models similar to those for spreading rumors or disease. (Charles Tilly has a useful essay, "useless Durkheim", that is one-sided fun.) Kiefer.Wolfowitz 15:57, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, here is where we stand with the three hooks that have been proposed:

• Original hook: never approved (... that Mayer Zald was a notable sociologist of social movements?)
• Original ALT1 by Piotrus: based on timing, seems to have been approved by Maile66, "resource mobilization theory" later deemed totally uninteresting by Orlady, and hook demoted to for that reason among others.

• ALT1: ... that Mayer Zald and John D. McCarthy developed one of the main theories for explaining the social movements, the resource mobilization theory?

• Revised ALT1 (I'll call it ALT1K to differentiate the two) by Kiefer: unclear whether it was reviewed or properly approved by Maile66, presumably also covered by Orlady's since it uses the same phrase.

• ALT1K: ... that Mayer Zald and John D. McCarthy analyzed social movements with organizational theory and so developed resource-mobilization theory?

Orlady also requested that the person being quoted be named in the text. At this point, someone needs to make the next move, since I imagine we all want to get this approved, and it currently is not. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:47, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

I (re)wrote Alt1 because of competence in organizational theory and extensive knowledge of Zald's contributions, noting that I had not checked the article lately. Then I found a source for the hook's claim. Before I added the appropriate reference for the hook (but after I said that I should check to make sure that it is properly sourced), the hook was approved---no harm, no foul, because I had added a source a few minutes later.

I don't paraphrase an author to avoid quotation. Orlady is welcome to improve the article.

I struck the definite article "the" from Alt1, which also seems fine: However, I remember Zald and Thompson more for their SMO theory. The resource-mobilization slant seems to have been pushed by Aldon Morris: Was Gamson at Stoney Brook?Kiefer.Wolfowitz 21:58, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

The original hook appears to be true, but it is not explicitly stated and sourced in the article. I can't find sourced support in the article for the full content of ALT1. The article states that Zald and McCarthy called "attention to the rising trend of professional activism in social movements and [applied] general principles of organizational dynamics to" social movement organizations, but there is no indication in the text of who is speaking in that quotation; opinions should be attributed, whether or not they are inside quotation marks. I don't give an [expletive deleted] about this, so I'm not interested in Kiefer's suggestion that I can improve the article. (Where's Piotrus, who created it and nominated it?) --Orlady (talk) 22:13, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

This hook would be acceptable (it's in the article and it's sourced):

ALT2 ... that Mayer Zald and John D. McCarthy developed the resource mobilization theory, which became one of the major theories on social movements? --Orlady (talk) 22:18, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

• Hmm... It seems that my ALT2 hook is very similar to the ALT1 hook that Piotrus proposed earlier and that was reviewed favorably by Maile66, but got altered by Kiefer. The original ALT1 was:

• urALT1 ... that Mayer Zald and John D. McCarthy developed one of the main theories for explaining the social movements, the resource mobilization theory? --Orlady (talk) 02:11, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

• I think it's a good hook. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:08, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

• ALT2 hook is the only one approved: it is sourced and is backed up in the source, interesting, neutral, and at 140 characters is well within the length requirement. All other hooks have been struck to avoid confusion. The rest of the article requirements approved per Maile66's excellent review. Thanks to everyone for their patience. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:57, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

References