"The Church, OccupyLSX and the City: Interactional Framing in Social Movements"

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate the value of an “interactional framing” perspective to study social movement dynamics. While the notion of framing has been used to study how social movement activists strategically use frames to achieve a specific purpose, much less attention has been paid to how frames emerge from interactions. Drawing on a qualitative study of Occupy London Stock Exchange (LSX) and its chance encounter with St Paul’s Cathedral, Church of England, the article shows how parties interactively co-construct issues, frames and relationships. Initially targeting the Stock Exchange, OccupyLSX shifted from a radical protest frame under the banner of “Capitalism is Crisis” to a more morally benign religious frame asking “What would Jesus do?” while St Paul’s was challenged on its moral foundations to review its role as a values-based institution in the City of London. Three mechanisms, interaction zones, identity battles and interaction memory, are found to shape interactions as parties negotiated the meaning of their relationship as either antagonists or collaborators in the cause for social justice. Privileging attention to local, unplanned interactions over deliberate, and goal directed meta-discourses contributes to understanding how and why targets and frames of social movements may evolve and shift radically over time.