ABSTRACT
Rather than treating grievances and political opportunities as objective, given, and exogenous to organized movement groups, cultural analysts of social movements have recently focused on cognitive and linguistic processes by which factors relevant to collective behavior are themselves interpreted collectively. Theoretical and empirical studies within this tradition have investigated an array of issues including cognition, ideology, and identity (e.g., Johnston and Klandermans 1995; Kubal 1998; Polletta 1998; Tarrow 1992; Jasper 1997). Much recent work, including papers by Fine (1995), Billig (1995, 1992, 1991), Johnston (1995, 2002, 2005), MacLean (1998), and Steinberg (1998, 1999, 2000), has begun to focus explicitly on the role of language within social movements and other political processes. Fine, for example, examined narrative framing on the part of VOCAL (“Victims of Child Abuse Laws”), a social movement founded in response to a series of well-publicized cases involving parents wrongly charged with abusing their children (Fine 1995: 138). Steinberg (2000; 1999), in a more elaborate series of studies of the rhetoric of organized cotton spinners and weavers in early nineteenth-century England, has developed a “dialogic” approach to social movement culture inspired by the early twentieth-century literary theorists Bakhtin and Volosinov , and by the writings of a number of “rhetorical” social psychologists, including Billig (1995, 1992, 1991). McLean (1998), taking an alternative theoretical tack, has investigated the political culture of Renaissance Italy through both quantitative and qualitative content analyses of patronage-seeking letters. His results show the discourse evident in the letters to be irreducible to the social positions of the writers. Instead, the writers were found to develop “frames of meaning” by assembling cues available from their cultural backgrounds, in order to build relationships and improve their social standings and careers. As with the work of Fine and Steinberg, McLean treats political culture as an analytically autonomous factor, irreducible to social and political structures, analyzable via content analysis, and having demonstrable sociopolitical consequences.
