Law and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasilegal, and/or extralegal processes. Based on a national random survey of teachers and administrators, and in-depth interviews with educators in California, New York, and North Carolina, we find an integral relationship between gender inequality and experiencing rights violations, choices about rights mobilization, and obstacles to formal mobilization. Compared to complainants, those accused of rights violations – especially male administrators – are more likely to use quasilegal and legal mobilization to defend themselves or to engage in anticipatory mobilization. Actors in less powerful status positions (teachers) most often pursue extralegal mobilization to complain about rights violations during which they engage in rights muting as a means of self-protection; when in more powerful status positions, actors use rights muting as a means of self-protection and to suppress the rights claims of others. This paper concludes with implications for future research on rights mobilization in school workplaces amidst changing political and demographic conditions.

Many academic authors, policy makers, NGOs, and corporations have focused on top-down human rights global norm-making, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). What is often missing are contextual and substantive analyses that interrogate rights mobilization and linkages between voluntary transnational rules and domestic governance. Deploying a socio-legal approach and using a combination of longitudinal field and archival data, this article investigates how a local, indigenous community in Northern Chile mobilized their rights over a period of almost two decades. We found that rights mobilization was largely shaped by tensions between the different logics of legality and the business organization. In our case, the UNGP implementation process has been ineffective in giving rightsholders access to genuine remedy. On the contrary, it has led to weakened rights mobilization, dividing the local community. We conclude that greater attention to rights mobilization and domestic governance dynamics should be given in the business and human rights debate.

This paper analyzes how activists used a parliamentary petition to overcome legal and political barriers and mobilize openly for gay rights for the first time in Singapore. Unlike societies where rights mobilization has political legitimacy, exercising and claiming rights in the de facto one-party state are non-conformist behaviours and face greater limitations. Gay rights activists in Singapore not only struggle with the state and their opponents over the right to equality; compared to their counterparts in liberal democracies, they also have to overcome stronger restrictions on political access and civil-political liberties that enable or protect rights mobilization. This paper therefore describes and analyzes a politics of rights under authoritarian conditions and the complicated consequences of legal resistance and rights mobilization. Although the petition campaign transformed collective grievances, expanded activists’ support base, and opened up new tactical possibilities, it also provoked intense, third-party opposition and foreclosed other avenues of mobilization.