Abstract
Social movements refer to groupings of people who share common goals regarding social issues. Within sociology, they have been studied primarily by focusing on questions of ideologies, networks, tactics, and resources. The dominant tradition in this approach has been “frame analysis,” which, following Goffman and Snow, refers to cognitions about how issues should be perceived, interpreted, and considered, and about how people can be mobilized. In this book, Hank Johnston and the authors he has assembled argue for a broader consideration of how social movements should be studied, including bringing in other disciplinary perspectives.
In an introduction and ten chapters, the authors discuss ideas from anthropology, developmental psychology, social psychology, grammar analysis, and drama. At the theoretical level, John Krinsky and Colin Barker’s application of Cultural-Historical Activity theory (which is based on Leontiev’s notions that individual actions may sometimes be understood only by knowing group goals) is especially intriguing.
As might be expected, the authors do not refer to “culture” in exactly the same way. In his introduction, Johnston suggests that culture consists of ideations, artifacts, and performances. Although he concludes that performances (encounters between social actors) are the most fundamental for understanding culture, ideations (norms, values, beliefs, traditions) are obviously also vital. In part, the relative importance may depend on whether one considers narratives as performances or ideations. Regardless, Johnston and most of the authors argue that people make sense of the world by telling stories that have characters and actions that convey understanding about both self-identity and group identity.
There are three chapters in the book that are particularly good (Gary Alan Fine, Gabriel Ignatow, and Darcy Leach and Sebastian Haunss), because they have cohesive literature reviews and an excellent application of theoretical ideas to specific case studies. Fine uses a case-study examination of the America First Committee (AFC), the leading organizational advocate of isolationism during the years 1940–41, in order to understand how movements deal with the problem of members whose reputations tarnish that of the overall movement, resulting in attacks on the moral stature of members which often substitute for attacks on policy. In the case of the AFC, members, the most famous of whom was Charles Lindbergh, were accused of having Nazi sympathies. Fine suggests that such attacks are useful because uncovering some disreputables means that there are probably others like them in the organization, that their beliefs reflect the true goals of the organization, and that, through guilt by association, the organization actually has the same goals as the disreputable organization.
Using cognitive linguistics, Ignatow analyzes detailed transcripts of union meetings and several press conferences in connection with an attempt in 1971 by the British government to close shipyards in Scotland. Ignatow argues that an analysis of the figurative language of social movements can be used to understand whether the culture of a social movement is bounded or fragmented and whether movement participants accept or question interpretive frames.
Leach and Haunss use the idea of “scenes,” both figuratively as places where frames and oppositional frames are fought over in the construction of collective identities and literally as physical spaces where members congregate, in their analysis of the contemporary German Autonomous Movement in Berlin and Hamburg. Whereas the radical leftists in Berlin make themselves known by posters and graffiti, by movement newspapers, by a Web site, and by a visible area generally concentrated in four districts, the radical leftists in Hamburg are fewer in number and are active almost exclusively in the neighborhoods where they live. In a nicely written discussion of these two scenes, the authors present ten hypotheses about how scenes mobilize, develop, and sustain social movements.
The word “culture” in the title of the book is a little misleading, as it implies that broad cross-national questions are likely to be addressed. In fact, almost all of the chapters describe studies of social movements in the United States or Western Europe, and even the exceptions, Sveta Klimova’s study of protest discourse by three Russian movements and Johnston’s study of the grammar of Chechen nationalists, are broadly within the Western cultural tradition. A similar book using comparable interdisciplinary techniques to look at social movements in other parts of the world ought to be on someone’s agenda.
As with many edited books, the collection is somewhat uneven and a little disjointed. The book could have been more unified if there had been a better introduction, more connections between chapters (in the entire volume I found only one reference to another chapter in the book), and a better index. In particular, an author index would permit easier comparisons across chapters, particularly in terms of how the various authors used work by Goffman, Snow, and Levi-Strauss. A few of the chapters are updates or summaries of prior published work, raising questions about the need to purchase the book.
Finally, I include a note to the publisher, and perhaps the authors, about proofreading. Across the book, there are numerous typos, grammatical errors, and a persistent omission of needed words. However, because there are some chapters that have no errors, I suspect that authors were responsible for the final proofreading. The worst offender is Johnston, whose two chapters contain more than three dozen errors.