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Korean immigrants in the USA rely heavily on ethnic resources to start up small businesses. Ethnic resources include business networks and knowledge, start-up capital and access to labour power, which are embedded in networks of family, friends and co-ethnics. This paper shows how Korean dry-cleaners in Southern California used ethnic resources to mobilize in response to an environmental policy initiated by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD). While Korean immigrants used ethnic resources to start up dry-cleaning businesses, they found themselves working with a toxic chemical. In 2002, the AQMD required dry-cleaners in Southern California to convert to costly alternative machines by 2020. Korean dry-cleaners used ethnic-based collective action, particularly the Korean Dry Cleaning Association, as a means of fighting for regulatory concessions. They also used ethnic resources to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers to facilitate the adoption of alternative cleaning machines in compliance with the regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In January/ February 2011, the world watched with admiration the Egyptian revolution that toppled President Housni Mubarak. The demonstration in Midan al- Tahrir ( Liberation Square in central Cairo), which was the nucleus of the revolution, highlighted a largely spontaneous, civil and peaceful political performance. However, this performance was temporary, contradicting subsequent bloody conflicts in post-revolutionary Egypt. This article examines the socio-political origins of the Midan performance. It argues that the demonstrators exercised collective restraint, which was temporary but necessary, in order to topple Mubarak. Building on Norbert Elias' civilising process theory and social movements literature, it is argued that the origins of this performance are found in a collective knowledge of regime strategy and narrative, Egyptian socio-political values and existing repertoires of contention. Drawing on primary sources and semi-structured interviews, the article contends that the demonstrators exercised collective restraint to reframe regime narrative and draw public support for the revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay sketches an array of cultural, political, and bureaucratic mechanisms that mediate the Chinese Communist state's relationship with the major types of social protests, in the process exploring how governance and contention have transformed each other in the past six decades. In particular, it spotlights a noteworthy development in recent years: the increasingly salient market nexus between state and protest. While the regime response of making economic concessions to protesters is hardly unique in the context of China's own past, the transition from top-down mandated concession to pervasive bargaining between the state and protesters is a significant break with past patterns. The negotiability of cash and material rewards insinuates a market logic of governance that is made all the more poignant by the singularly formidable fiscal and infrastructural capacities of the current Chinese regime among its authoritarian counterparts worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]