ABSTRACT
Many social movements seek to enact in their own operation the society they hope to bring into being. Their members may make decisions by consensus and rotate leadership. They may trade conventional gender roles, swap sexual partners, sign over their paychecks to the group, or refuse to eat animal products. Sometimes, movement groups succeed in creating enduring communities that are nonviolent, egalitarian, self-sustaining, and/or sexually liberated. Often, they collapse, imploding amidst mutual recriminations and charges of bad faith. And occasionally, whether or not they endure, they pioneer organizational forms, interactional styles, and cultural objects that make their way into the mainstream. Food co-ops, blue jeans as a young person’s fashion statement, Ms. magazine, participatory democratic decision-making, organic food, folk music, and alternative media all began in movements, but each one outlasted the movement and era in which it was born. It is tempting to see movement cultures as idealistic and expressive, as experiments in
alternative living that offer activists a respite from, or alternative to, the more instrumental tasks of engaging opponents, mobilizing support, and negotiating with allies. In recent years, however, scholars have drawn attention instead to the political and instrumental dimensions of movement cultures. Holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” can serve practical functions. At the same time, while not downplaying the experimental character of how movements operate internally, scholars have recognized that movement cultures are rarely created de novo. They have therefore probed the institutional sources of activists’ ideas about how to operate in a feminist or democratic or traditional way. This research, in turn, has shed light on a practical difficulty activists have faced in enacting their countercultural ideals-namely, the limited repertoire of behavioral models that activists have had to draw upon in practicing those ideals. Along with these two themes, I draw attention to a third that has emerged in recent
scholarship. Rejecting the instrumental/expressive duality from the opposite direction, scholars have shown, not only that what often passes as expressive action has instrumental benefits, but that what counts as instrumental action has expressive benefits. In an important sense, instrumental rationality is performed. This observation has implications for our understanding of cultural processes outside movements as well as within them.
Movement groups have a stake in subscribing to mainstream ideas where it serves them and refusing them where it does not. The fact that groups sometimes define what is strategic in ways that actually undercut their own aims can help us to understand how mainstream constructions of the rational operate more generally to rule out alternatives. Not only expressive, experimental but not created out of whole cloth, and not so
easily defined in opposition to an instrumental orientation-movement cultures are also less ephemeral than we tend to think of them. They have impact beyond the movements in which they are forged. Surprisingly, there has been little scholarship on this fourth theme. I raise it nevertheless because, like the other three themes, it has implications for cultural processes outside movements as well as within them. In short, studying the conditions in which elements of movement cultures diffuse can shed light on dynamics of cultural change more broadly. Before I go any further, let me define a few terms. I define a movement as an
organized effort to produce institutional or cultural change through the use of noninstitutionalized means. Movements are often composed of organizations (such as NOW, the National Organization for Women, and NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, for the American women’s movement) but they are also composed of more informal networks and transient groupings. I define culture as shared beliefs, values, ideas, and practices. I emphasize practices, since when we talk about movement cultures colloquially, we are usually referring to styles of action and, especially, interaction that distinguish participation in the movement from participation in institutions outside it. If you go to a meeting of anarchist anti-corporate-globalization activists, you learn rather quickly-or should learn quickly-that wearing a suit or flashing your copy of Robert’s Rules of Order will elicit suspicion. To be sure, particular movement organizations have norms that are more or less extensive and more or less exigent. Compare, for example, the culture of NOW with that of some radical feminist groups that required their members to live together, renounce intimate relationships with men, and follow strict procedures for ensuring equality. I will argue later that scholars have erred in studying the latter kinds of movement cultures at the expense of the former. For now, though, I simply want to note that when I refer to cultural practices I do not imply that those practices are equally constraining. At times in the following, I will treat as cultural certain practices that many scholars
treat as non-cultural, for example tactics like sit-ins and organizational forms such as bureaucracy. I do so because I want to show that ostensibly brass-tacks, hardnosed, non-ideological practices, just as much as ideologically laden ones, are also cultural insofar as they are animated by shared beliefs (see Hart 2001 for a similar point).
