Doctoral Dissertation Research: How World Conferences Matter: Transnational Influences and Organizational Change in Two National Women's Movements

本研究旨在了解跨国政治影响国家社会运动组织的机制。社会科学家越来越一致地认为，跨国因素在国内政治中发挥着越来越重要的作用，但对于它们的重要性和重要性存在争议。这项研究通过具体说明联合国主办的第四次世界妇女大会如何影响中国、印度和其他亚洲国家的妇女运动组织，帮助阐明了这些问题。这一研究项目的重点是为理解跨国影响在国家背景和组织实践中的作用奠定基础。现有的研究在考虑组织变革时着眼于国内因素。那些关注跨国因素的人几乎只关注对国家行动和政策的影响。因此，该研究通过将跨国影响整合到组织变革理论中，填补了现有文献中的理论空白。研究设计要求对中国和印度的案例进行深入比较，以产生关于跨国影响如何发挥作用的初步假设。然后，将采用与更广泛的国别案例进行比较的方法来评估和完善假设。该项目采用了深度访谈、文献研究和有限的参与者观察。世界妇女大会只是由国际组织主办的众多会议之一，这些会议旨在解决环境、儿童权利、人权、社会发展和种族歧视等广泛的社会问题。项目成果将有助于社会科学家、政策制定者和妇女权利组织，阐明使世界会议与不同社会中的妇女和其他边缘化群体更相关的因素，提供有关各种国家方案在日益相互关联的跨国、全球组织和法律环境中实施时的有效性的信息。

This study seeks to understand the mechanisms by which transnational politics influence national social movement organizations. There is growing consensus among social scientists that transnational factors play an increasingly important role in domestic politics, but there is dispute over how they matter and how much they matter. This study helps illuminate the questions by specifying how the United Nations sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women affected women's movement organizations in China, India, and other Asian countries. The emphasis of this research project is to ground the understanding of transnational influences in national contexts and organizational practices. Existing studies look to domestic factors when accounting for organizational change. Those that look at transnational factors focus almost exclusively on the effect on state action and policy. The study thus fills the theoretical gap in existing literature by integrating transnational influences into theories of organizational change. The research design calls for in-depth comparison of the Chinese and the Indian case in order to generate initial hypotheses about how transnational influences work. Comparison with a broader set of country cases will then be employed to evaluate and refine the hypotheses. The project utilizes in-depth interviews, document research, and limited participant observation. The world conference on women is only one among many conferences sponsored by international organizations to tackle a wide range of social problems such as the environment, children's rights, human rights, social development, and racial discrimination. Project results will contribute to social scientists, policymakers, and women's rights groups by illuminating the factors that make the world conferences more relevant to women and other marginalized groups in different societies by providing information about the effectiveness of various national programs as they are implemented in an increasingly interconnected transnational, global organizational and legal environment.