Michael Biggs becomes Professor of Sociology

Michael Biggs becomes Professor of Sociology
  

 
The Department's Michael Biggs has been awarded a Full Professorship in Sociology.

His research centres on social movements and political protest. While ranging widely in subject and method, it is animated by two theoretical puzzles.

The first puzzle is the volatility of collective protest: why a mass movement can emerge suddenly, appear powerful, and yet collapse quickly.

The second puzzle is why protesters sometimes inflict costs on themselves. That defies the logic of bargaining, exemplified by strikes and sit-ins, which is to inflict costs on recalcitrant opponents.

Michael has worked on a number of contexts, including waves of protest in the U.S. labour and Civil Rights movements, suicide protest, Hindu-Muslim violence in India, the extreme right in Britain, and the spatial dynamics of political power in Europe.

Currently, he is conducting a survey of 1,600 contributors of Sex Matters, using questions drawn from the British Social Attitudes survey to enable comparison with the overall population. This will provide the first comprehensive portrait of activists in the ‘gender critical’ movement.

Future research will exploit original datasets which Michael has already constructed.

One is a longitudinal survey of American college students from the late 1960s. This dataset required painstaking work to merge multiple waves, identify each college, and link institutional-level data. The survey is unique in capturing detailed information on students’ expectations of protest just before entering college and their actual participation two to three years later.

The first paper from this project examines why protest was most prevalent at elite colleges. Michael's analysis shows that this pattern is largely driven by selection: elite colleges attract students who are already predisposed to protest.

Another dataset links assemblies of the Knights of Labor – the largest organisation in the labour movement in the late 19th century – to microdata from the 1880 Census at the county level. These data will be used to trace the organisational diffusion of the Knights over the 1880s.

Finally, Michael is writing a paper criticising the lack of definition of protest in the literature (the theoretical counterpart to the critique of measurement in ‘Size Matters’). It will use speech act theory and signalling theory to conceptualise protest more rigorously. 

Huge congratulations to Professor Biggs on your well-deserved new title!