State-Sponsored Advocacy? The Case of Florida's Students Working Against Tobacco

201 Pages·2015·1.06 MB·English

by  George Wheeler Luke

Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2004
State-Sponsored Advocacy?: The Case
of Florida's Students Working Against
Tobacco
George Wheeler Luke
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

STATE-SPONSORED ADVOCACY? THE CASE OF FLORIDA’S
STUDENTS WORKING AGAINST TOBACCO

By

GEORGE WHEELER LUKE

A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of Sociology
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded:
Summer Semester, 2004
The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of George Wheeler Luke
defended on July 12, 2004.

________________________________
Patricia Yancey Martin
Professor Directing Dissertation

________________________________
Marie Cowart
Outside Committee Member

________________________________
Irene Padavic
Committee Member

________________________________
Jill Quadagno
Committee Member

Approved:

________________________________
Isaac Eberstein, Chair, Department of Sociology

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named
committee members.
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For Emily,
who did more work on this
project than I will ever admit
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Pat Martin, who was not my first choice as mentor during my graduate
education, but was my wisest choice. She has proven to have an unshakable faith in my
ability. I know because I have tried to shake it. As my dissertation advisor she could
boost my ego and knock it flat without drawing a breath, and had a preternatural ability
of knowing when to do which. Had she not used both the carrot and the stick with such
finesse, had she made even the tiniest of miscalculations in her quest to saddle me with a
Ph.D, I would have slipped the noose. I am sure of that and glad of her steady guidance.
Pat also has that rarest skill among Sociologists—of the ability to engage in complex
thinking without sacrificing communicative clarity. In this, and in other aspects, she has
become my role model as well as my advisor.
Thanks to my committee, for verifying and corroborating my matchless ability to
select excellent committee members.
Thank you Tim Buehner, co-worker and collaborator at the University of Miami,
for your Christ-like sufferance, exemplary modeling, and constructive criticism,
including but not limited to collaborating in the gathering of data for this dissertation.
Also, my thanks go to all of my friends and family who did not repeatedly ask me
when I was going to finish. You know who you are.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES............................................................................................................vii
ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................viii
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................1
Research Questions.........................................................................................................3
An Introduction to SWAT..............................................................................................4
Overview of Chapters.....................................................................................................7
CHAPTER 2 THEORIES OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS...................................................9
Social Movements and the State...................................................................................10
The Micro-mobilization Turn in Social Movement Theory.........................................11
Emotions in Social Movements................................................................................13
Framing.....................................................................................................................14
Social Movement Organizations...................................................................................16
Summary and Conclusion.............................................................................................19
CHAPTER 3 THE ANTI-TOBACCO MOVEMENT AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH...21
Movement Framings of Tobacco as a Social Problem.................................................21
19th and early 20th Century Movement Framings.....................................................21
Contemporary Movement Frames:...........................................................................23
Public Health Approaches to Tobacco Control............................................................25
The Rise of State Activism...........................................................................................26
Federal Initiatives......................................................................................................27
State Programs..........................................................................................................30
CHAPTER 4 METHODS.................................................................................................35
Procedures of Data Collection......................................................................................36
Participant Observation.............................................................................................36
Official Documents...................................................................................................37
News Media Sources.................................................................................................38
Focus Groups:...........................................................................................................39
Procedures of Data Analysis.........................................................................................42
Focus Group Comparisons and the Unit of Analysis................................................43
Coding the Focus Group Data...................................................................................44
Analyzing Emotional Content in the Focus Group Data..........................................46
Summary.......................................................................................................................48
CHAPTER 5 A BRIEF HISTORY OF SWAT................................................................49
Successful Anti-tobacco Litigation...............................................................................50
Development of the “Florida Model”...........................................................................52
Regime Change.............................................................................................................57
SWAT Under Waters................................................................................................60
SWAT and Truth...........................................................................................................64
Funding for SWAT Under the Bush Administration....................................................66
Resistance in the SWAT BOD......................................................................................71
Managing the youth..................................................................................................74
SWAT’s Later Agenda: Irrelevant Activism................................................................77
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A Loss of Momentum...............................................................................................78
SWAT on the Sidelines.............................................................................................79
Action Independent of the Statewide Office.................................................................81
Summary and Discussion..............................................................................................82
CHAPTER 6 PARTICIPATION IN SWAT....................................................................83
Who Are the SWAT Youth?.........................................................................................86
The Typical SWAT Team.............................................................................................87
SWAT Activities...........................................................................................................93
The Primacy of the “Health Message”..........................................................................97
Locally Oriented Mobilization....................................................................................102
Constructions of Collective Identity in SWAT...........................................................104
The Identity of the SWAT Leader..........................................................................105
Collective Identity Among the Rank-and-file.........................................................112
Slogans....................................................................................................................117
Empowerment and Youth Power in SWAT................................................................120
Self-Direction..........................................................................................................121
Money.....................................................................................................................123
Knowledge..............................................................................................................125
Sphere of Influence.................................................................................................132
Framing the Tobacco Problem in SWAT...................................................................134
Nature of the Problem.............................................................................................135
Nature of the Solution.............................................................................................137
Motivation...............................................................................................................138
Emotions and Mobilization in SWAT........................................................................139
Summary and Conclusion...........................................................................................145
CHAPTER 7 DISCUSSION...........................................................................................147
Summary of Findings..................................................................................................147
SWAT as a Case of State-Movement Interpenetration...............................................150
Micromobilization in SWAT......................................................................................153
On Empowerment and Power.....................................................................................156
On the Failure to Define SWAT.................................................................................158
Conclusions.................................................................................................................161
APPENDIX A. NEWSPAPER SOURCES....................................................................163
APPENDIX B. PROGRAM DOCUMENTS AND OTHER SOURCES......................172
APPENDIX C. TIMELINE OF FTPP AND SWAT 1990-2003....................................176
APPENDIX D. HUMAN SUBJECTS AND INFORMED CONSENT.........................180
REFERENCES...............................................................................................................183
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH..........................................................................................191

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LIST OF TABLES
Table 4.1. SWAT Member Characteristics by Interview................................................40
Table 4.2. Study sites.......................................................................................................41
Table 4.3. SWAT focus group interview questions.........................................................42
Table 4.4 Initial analytic codes.........................................................................................45
Table 5.1 Highlights of focus group sites.........................................................................89
Table 6.2: Types of SWAT activities...............................................................................94
Table 6.3: SWAT activities mentioned by type and site.................................................96
Table 6.4 Dominant Emotions Found at Each Study Site..............................................142
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the relationship between the state and a social
movement organization thus raising questions about relations between the two.
Specifically, are state sponsored anti-tobacco youth organizations viable social movement
organizations? How do they contribute to the anti-tobacco social movement in terms of
the mobilization of individuals for social action on tobacco issues? The author applies
theories of micromobilization, originally developed to understand how social movement
organizations work, to assess the ways one state-run youth group, Florida’s Student’s
Working Against Tobacco (SWAT), mobilized youth and also determine what they were
mobilized to do. Political opportunity theory is used to frame the analysis and interpret
the results, in line with Burawoy’s extended case method. Data for the project, covering
events prior to SWAT’s launch in March 1998 through its effective end in June 2003,
include newspaper articles, official documents and reports, participant observation by the
author, and transcripts from group interviews with 86 youth aged 12 to 18 about their
experiences in SWAT. Inductive analysis, using the qualitative program ATLAS/ti, was
done to identify key themes in the youth interviews, including issues related to
mobilization, collective identity, emotions, and framing.
The findings are as follows. (1) The SWAT program proved to be dependent on
the state leadership, especially the governor, having been founded under one governor
who lent his name and time to the fight against big tobacco and undermined (as in de-
funded) by the succeeding governor. State officials used a variety of tactics to suppress,
redirect, and manage youth after regime change occurred. (2) Youth comments in the
group interviews (conducted two years following regime change) revealed an
organization substantially re-purposed away from social action on tobacco and partly
reoriented away from tobacco issues altogether. While the ‘Board of Director’ groups,
comprised of youth from around the state who played a leadership role, maintained
rhetoric of social action consistent with the organization’s original construction, the
practice of social action was limited. It was found in only one of the eight sites included
in the study, and accounted for there by locally driven issues. (3) Analysis of structural
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relations in SWAT, presented in terms of the youth’s state of empowerment within the
organization, generally contradicted SWAT’s official claims to be “youth run” and
further problematize the notion of a viable state-supported movement organization.
The conclusions return to the questions posed at the start of the project and review
how the findings can be used to improve social movements theories, particularly theories
of political opportunity and micro-mobilization but also the role of emotions in social
movement mobilization. Most importantly, they show the dilemmas, indeed major
hurdles, that a state-sponsored movement organization faces including its vulnerability to
changes in formal/administrative state support. Policy implications are addressed that
identify the kinds of conditions that would be necessary for a state-sponsored social
movement organization to succeed. Lastly, the impact of SWAT involvement on the
lives of its youth participants is addressed. While most were likely minimally affected, at
least some of the students came to understand the goals and tactics of a social movement
and developed and maintained an emotional and intellectual commitment to the fight
against big tobacco. While the Florida experiment arguably failed in the aggregate, this
conclusion does not hold for at least some individuals. A call for further research is
issued, including theorization of the dynamics of state-movement relationships, the
defining elements of social movement organizations, and the dynamics and emotions of
mobilization, with a special plea to focus on the evolving interface between public health
policy and the anti-tobacco movement agenda.
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