The Cultural Contexts of Collective Action: Constraints, Opportunities, and the Symbolic Life of Social Movements

Abstract

That the study of social movements and collective action in the US took a ‘‘cultural turn’’ beginning in the 1980s is not news. One can chart culture’s popularity in the recent scholarly literature (e.g., Larana et al. 1994; Darnovsky et al. 1995; Johnston and Klandermans 1995), but in 2003 development is approaching two decades old. Even as the ‘‘resource mobilization’’ approach was establishing itself as the dominant theoretical lens for studying socialmovements (e.g., Jenkins1983;Zald andMcCarthy 1987), and ‘‘political process’’ models were amending the conception of ‘‘structure’’ in movements (e.g.,McAdam1982;Morris 1984), scholarsweredevelopingand refining approaches to understanding culture and social movements. Several chapters in this volume report on the fruits of this engagement – or perhaps ‘‘re-engagement’’ – with culture and collective action. The topics covered include such concepts as ‘‘framing,’’ and ‘‘collective identity,’’ or the study of the roles of emotions inmovement actions and the resulting cultural consequences from activism. This chapter contributes to the consideration of culture by making an argument for increased attention to the ‘‘cultural environment’’ in which movements occur and how that environment shapes collective action. This involves a de-centering of the individual social movement as the level of analysis, and increased attention to how the availability of legitimated cultural resources channels and often constrains movement activity. I begin with a review of the general cultural turn in the study of social movements.