Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation

Abstract

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

Veganism as a Cultural Movement: A Relational Approach

“…Many scholars have studied ties between prospective participants in social movements (Tilly, 1978;Snow et al, 1980) as well as social movements as networks themselves (Gerlach & Hine, 1970;Curtis & Zurcher, 1973), but current research has grown in both volume and topic. More recent network analyses of social movements link embeddedness in social networks to identity construction (Somers, 1992;Passy, 2003), identity salience (McAdam & Paulsen, 1993;Melucci, 1996;Passy, 2003), and higher intensity and commitment in participation (Passy, 2001(Passy, , 2003.…”

Social Networks Matter. But How?

“…The social networks in which actors interact convey meanings (e.g. symbols, rituals, narratives) that build and solidify identities and shape the actors' cognitive frames, thereby enabling them to interpret social reality and to define a set of actions that involve them in this perceived reality (Somers 1992). Once individuals have been integrated into formal or informal networks, they find themselves in an interactive structure that enables them to define and redefine their interpretive frames, facilitates the process of identity-building and identity-strengthening, and creates or solidifies political consciousness towards a given protest issue.…”

Reversals of fortune: path dependency, problem solving, and temporal cases

“…Arranging past events into singular paths with a clear direction, however, is the work of ordinary people as well as "detached" observers. As some of those observers have noted, their own historical narratives have a similar character to the stories social actors tell to make sense of social change or to construct identities (Somers 1992;Carr 1997;Polletta 2006). But historical reversals highlight a further point that is more subversive for models of path dependency: when social actors change their interests, identities, or goals, they may rearrange past events, constructing new paths from the past towards the future.…”

“…Champions of path dependency, then, endorsed the move to replace independent and dependent variables with narratives in which sequences of events lead to specific historical outcomes. In principle, that move to narrative explanation has much to recommend it (Abbott 1992;Somers 1992;Griffin 1993;Gotham and Staples 1996). And in practice, path-dependent accounts have been valuable for explaining differences between cases, such as contrasting patterns of state formation (Ertman 1997;Mahoney 2001), working class politics (Voss 1993), and welfare policy (Pierson 1994;Orloff 1993).…”