Civic Renewal And Inequality

Abstract

ions do not point to an external target whose actions or policies must be changed. If pollution is the problem and are all polluters, then are the target of the action. are the in such frames and neither agent nor target is a col Individualizing Citizenship. Encouraging citizen participation as individuals is much less threatening to the beneficiaries of existing power inequalities than is encouraging groups of citizens to attempt to articulate and develop a sense of themselves as a community capable of engaging in col lective action. The latter increases the possibility of collective action while the former does not. And collective action Absent an injustice component, it is difficult to see how the civic renewal master frame promotes such a sense. If there is no designated as the target or the they is an abstraction such as the decline of Community/1 then the we tends to become a pool of individual citizens rather than a potential collective actor lective actor. Cold anger directed toward abstractions is difficult if not impossible to sustain. Dropping or over looking the more threatening concep tion of the citizenry as potential collective actors seems a natural out come in the civic renewal master frame. One can see this tendency operating in the various civic or public journal ism projects that the authors describe. There is certainly a collective compo nent in those experiments when citizens by groups of relatively powerless citizens can easily take a dis ruptive form in which the relatively powerful become the tar gets. Students of social movements use the concept of a collective action frame, i.e., emergent, action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate social movement activities and campaigns.4 Ryan and Gamson have emphasized the close relationship between an injustice component and the collective agency component of such frames.5 An injustice frame consid ers collective injuries, not individual ones. What one has suf fered individually is shared by some implied we. If an unfair situation is regarded as immutable, it is not likely to lead to moral indignation; an injustice frame implies the pos sibility of change. Otherwise, says life is fair. The injus tice component combines emotion and cognition?it is what psychologists call a cognition. Indignation exerts a push toward action and predisposes a sympathetic response toward those who attempt it. At one point, Sirianni and Friedland suggest that rather than hot cognitions, what need is anger. But this is mere wordplay, since cold anger is a hot cognition, and the argument being made by those who emphasize an injustice frame is that it channels emotion into an effective strategy. It allows the fire to burn in a controlled fashion where it can continue to fuel and convene in discussion groups to talk about the issues that concern them. They learn something about what others are thinking but there is no effort or encouragement to constitute themselves as a community of action. The boldness of the muckrakers of a hundred years ago in speaking truth to power seems to contrast with the meekness of most civic jour nalism efforts. The idea of these citizens becoming advocacy groups with journalists becoming mouthpieces for their causes is what crit ics of the civic journalism movement fear. Its advocates disown such a model. They are helping citizens to articulate their shared concerns so that journalists can push politicians and public offi cials to address them. Being a medium is not being an advocate. The danger of treating the citizenry as merely an aggregate of individuals rather than as potential collective actors is that it turns them into clients to be served. This clientalization of the citizenry tends to subvert the stated desire of the civic renewal movement to empower them. The abandoned social justice frame contains the antidote to this tendency. Narrowing the Scope of Conflict. The Media Research and Action Project (MRAP), which I co direct with Charlotte Ryan, fits comfortably into Sirianni and Friedland's description of the civic renewal movement. We work