offices they are difficult to ignore and can meaningfully disrupt the office. Context also constrains the possible targets of protests, "[t]enants experience the leaking ceilings and cold radiators, and they recognize the landlord. They do not recognize the banking, real estate, and construction systems....when the poor rebel they so often rebel against the overseer of the poor, or the slumlord, or the middling merchant, and not against the banks or the governing elites to whom the overseer, the slumlord, and the merchant also defer." The authors argue that "people cannot defy institutions to which they no access, and to which they make no contribution." Cloward and Piven examine the Unemployed Workers' Movement, Industrial Workers' Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Welfare Rights Movement. They find that in each movement, activists and organizers concentrated on building formally structured mass-membership organizations of poor and working-class people, with the hope that these organizations would win concessions from elites that would allow the organizations to grow or at least maintain membership. Attempts to grow these mass-membership opposition groups inevitably lead to conciliation with elites to support such groups and attempts by organizers to rein in the disruptive potential of mass movements. The authors explore the welfare rights movement's fight to increase welfare eligibility. They give Edward Sparer as an example of a welfare rights lawyer working in this area who challenged "[m]an-in-the-house rules, residence laws, employable mother rules, and a host of other statutes, policies, and regulations which kept people off the roles were eventually struck down." Reception In a review for The Nation, Jack Beatty said the book was "bound to have a wide and various influence" and called it "disturbing". While praising the analysis of the industrial workers' movement, Beatty criticized the Piven-Cloward plan for backfiring, noting that in the urban politics of the late 1960s, one "could not talk to a cabdriver or a counterman, a waitress or a barber without hearing a bitter diatribe against the welfare poor". Beatty argued that the backlash to increased use of the welfare system led to working class support for Republican candidates like Richard Nixon. The book also attracted detractors from the right, who accused the authors of "blunt extremism". Influence Poor People's Movements and the associated Cloward-Piven Strategy were criticized following publication and remain a contentious position among activists and organizers. The arguments made in the book have continued to interest scholars,