Practicing Birchism: The Assumption and Limits of Idiocultural Coherence in Framing Theory

Abstract

Social movement theory and research over the past twenty years have utilized the concepts incorporated under the rubric of Framing Theory in order to draw attention to the cultural 'meaning work' within a social movement or social movement organization. Underlying Framing Theory is an assumption of what I term idiocultural coherence -that for a movement organization to be successful, its members must come to agree cognitively with its cultural understandings and identify collectively with it. Drawing on an example of the John Birch Society, a very successful conspiratorial, anti-communist organization, I show how people may join a social movement organization not because they necessarily or fully agree with its collective action frames but because it provides an opportunity to act collectively and publicly perform a collective identity. I argue that a narrow focus on idiocultural processes obfuscates important cultural processes 'outside' of a movement organization that have an impact on how and why people join an organization and maintain membership.Though a number of scholars have questioned Framing Theory's (FT) explanation of how social movement actors make, communicate, and coordinate meaning (e.g. researching the processes whereby social movement actors orient and communicate their understandings of social problems, of culprits, and of solutions have continued relatively unabated in the tradition inspired by Snow and his colleagues' influential article on collective action frames (Snow et al., 1986). In 1986, and drawing on Goffman (1974), FT provided a much needed constructivist grounding to a field that viewed social movement actors as overly rationalistic, and that considered the operations of social movement organizations almost entirely within their organizational fields. FT made room for understanding how cultural meanings affected a variety of social movement processes (especially mobilization) at a time when the role of meaning in social movements was largely disregarded, at least in the leading social movement paradigm.

There Comes a Time: Biography and the Founding of a Movement Organization

“…Welch thus acted much like a moral entrepreneur (Becker 1963) by rearticulating conservative ideas into a more coherent symbolic-moral package. By so doing, Welch was able to unite a disorganized and amorphous conservative movement into a single, national entity (Hart 2008).…”

“…Some may be drawn to participate in a social movement organization, not because it frames issues or social problems in an intriguing way, but because collective action itself is symbolic. Collective action may provide an opportunity to display that one is doing something about a problem, that one is the type of person who acts collectively to solve an issue, and is thus a member of some community that assigns a particular value to collective action (Hart 2008). Others may hope that practicing a culture of collective action itself may lead to new habits and routines that, when performed, will provide ontological security.…”

The impacts of the Turkish government’s conspiratorial framing of the Gezi Park protests

“…Indeed, according to Uscinski and Parent (2014, p. 32), conspiracy theories cite 'as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons, the conspirators, acting in secret for their own benefit against the common good. ' Hart (2008) describes the anti-communist conspiratorial rhetoric of the John Birch society as diagnostic frames.…”

“…Benford & Snow, 2000;Halfmann & Young, 2010;Snow, Tan, & Owens, 2013) has not explored the significance of conspiratorial accounts. Nevertheless, some studies highlight the relevance of conspiracy theories: Hart (2008) suggests that the conspiratorial framework of the John Birch Society was not the most influential factor leading people to join the movement; Leenders (2012) claims that the President Bashar al-Assad's attempt to discredit the protests in Dar'a backfired, as crowds gathered again to protest his conspiracy frame; Chakravarty and Chaudhuri (2012) argue that anti-witch-hunt movements in India used conspiratorial frames about the exploitation of the tribal population, which helped them to forge a common identity.…”

Collective identities and formal ideologies in the Irish grassroots pro-asylum seeker movement

“…This work seeks to begin to rectify that deficiency. Significant attention has already been paid to explicating the differences as well as the relationship between ideology and frames (see Gillan, 2008; Hart, 2008; Oliver and Johnston, 2000; Snow and Byrd, 2007; Westby, 2002), representing something of a renaissance for the concept of ideology in social movement research. Previously, in the existing literature, ideology and framing and especially the idea of master frames have been conflated (Oliver and Johnston, 2000; Snow and Binford, 2000).…”