CIAO DATE: 8/99

Working Classification: Identity in Social Movements and Class Formation

John Krinsky

Contentious Politics Series
Spring 1999

Lazarsfeld Center at Columbia University

 

Literature Review: Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Ph.D. in Sociology to Professors Francesca Polletta and Charles Tilly.

Introduction

A broad look at scholarship on both social movements and class formation reveals a clear interest on the part of scholars in the past two decades on the issue of identity. But to say this assumes precisely what is absent from this scholarship, namely, a good working definition of identity. At least four formulations of identity are present in these broad literatures: (1) a we-feeling, (2) a third-party attribution of common interests based on common social-structural location, (3) a claim of common interest based on common experiences, and (4) an argument for a non-instrumentalist rendering of popular protest, which may incorporate elements of any of the first three. It is tempting—and I have tried—to map these meanings onto broad positions within the social and labor movements literatures, and to chart a trajectory from the emotion-laden collective behavior paradigms, through the cold, calculating structuralism of resource mobilization theories (both in social and labor movements), through to the interactionist and linguistic turns represented in the respective literatures by frame analysis, new social movement theory, and concern with the “languages” of class. The problem with this approach is that it is difficult, in a small amount of space, to steer between the Scylla of oversimplification (and straw-man critiques) and the Charybdis of getting so detailed as to lose the core of the argument I want to make.

Instead, I will cut directly to the argument. All of the first three formulations of identity are important to maintain, but they speak to different tasks of analysis, and demand of scholars a critical reflexivity, both towards the categorical divisions upon which we base our analyses, and to our practice of scholarship in light of the movements we study. A rather thorough reformulation of the fourth follows from the careful examination of the first three. Instead of looking at attributes of identity in the literature, I argue that identity talk in the study of social movements raises four related problems:

• Who is claiming identity, to whom, and why?
• What is the relationship between structural equivalence and subjectivity?
• What is the relationship between experience and representation?
• How are identities organized?

Once we can answer, for a given case, these four questions, we can more successfully unpack the “black box” of identities, solidarities, or any other claims to sameness. We will see that feelings, third party attributions, and claims all play their part in each of these questions.

 

Who is Claiming Identity to Whom, How, and Why?

In scholarship on contentious politics, the study of identity claims always involves at least a double operation. First, scholars often position themselves outside the movement they are studying, no matter how great their sympathies may be with it, and identify themselves, through the presentation of their work, as scholars. This is a rather obvious point, but one that has caused much consternation among students of movements (see e.g. Kriesi 1992; Meyer 1999). Scholars who like “their” movement’s goals have tried to overcome the gap between scholarship and movement action (see Touraine 1981; Stoecker 1996). The particular position of the scholar, no matter from which school of social movement studies, is typified by what Bourdieu calls the “privilege of totalization” (1977, p. 106), and the studies must account for themselves first as science, and only second as political intervention. ₁   The stakes in describing the formation of identity are different from the stakes of directly claiming it. Perhaps the greatest exception to this general rule has been among feminist scholars of movements, whose very definition of the field they are studying incorporates the feminist critique of the public-private divide, and hence, allows the study to partake directly in movement claims (see especially Whittier 1995).

The second operation in studying the making of identity claims involves tracing who is making what kinds of claims to whom, how, and why. Three important points come out of recent extensions of Charles Tilly’s metaphor of “contentious repertoires.” ₂   First, sets of contentious interactions, perhaps even more than linguistic claims, can both demonstrate and create “we-feelings” and specific forms of solidarity. Tilly’s examination of the change in the repertoire of contention of British popular protest between 1758 and 1834, shows an increasing direction of protest toward the central state and a tempering of violent protest. Tilly persuasively shows—without having to engage in the phenomenological exercise of trying to find out how the particular actors interpreted their own actions—that an identity of “British citizen” was emerging in the dialogical interactions of that period.

Another important point about repertoires is that they are powerfully constrained in their interactivity. As Tilly’s reformulation of the repertoire concept (1995) makes clear, and as Marc W. Steinberg has indicated (1994, 1995, 1996), claims always involve a dialogue among claimants and their (usually more powerful) state or capitalist adversaries. Steinberg, in particular, highlights the idea that repertoires are hegemonic formations, which, because they are ever shifting, can maintain enough multivalence to allow for opportunities for discursive subversion (for a similar idea with respect to the “framing” literature in social movements, see Noonan 1997 [1995]; J. Gamson 1995). At the same time, oppositional discourse, in order to be effective, must work within the limits set upon it by the broader political idiom. A good deal of literature (see, e.g., Clemens 1996; Tarrow 1994; Meyer and Tarrow 1998) notes that contentious performances, in order to be effective, have to be innovative enough to get noticed, and conventional enough to be intelligible. Negotiating the line between disruption and routinization is one key to effective collective action.

Third, Elisabeth Clemens (1996, 1997) has pointed out that more than “contentious gatherings” and “discourse” can constitute identity claims. ₃   Drawing upon the insistence in the “new institutionalist” literature on organizations (see especially Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Dobbin 1994) that organizational forms are more than instrumental problem-solving solutions, but are themselves powerfully shaped by, and shaping of, cultural practices, Clemens proposes that organizational forms help to draw outlines around how a group identifies itself, and is identified by others. Clemens discusses “organizational repertoires,” and shows how, in the 19th century American labor movement, military and fraternal organizational models of unionism helped to define “workers” as almost exclusively male. ₄

In all of this, people do not claim identity, and do not make other claims on that basis, dispassionately. Yet, it would be a mistake to put “we-feelings” or any other “feelings” at the center of the explanation for why people act together on the basis of claims that they have similar grievances, goals, or ideologies. Rather, those feelings must enter the analysis as something problematic. Emotions, too, are structured in repertoires, with specific venues and combinations of actors making some emotions more or less intelligible. As Colin Barker, drawing on the work of V.N. Voloshinov and Lev Vygotsky, has argued in recent work:

There is, I think, no warrant for treating the emotional aspects of behaviour in isolation. They make no sense apart from other aspects of action, speech, and thought. Rather, the “emotional-volitional tone” or “evaluative accent” of people’s acts and speeches are an essential element of the particular creative sense they make of situations. Emotions do not “hang over the entire event in a numinous manner,” but are always tied to particular moments of action, dialogue, mobilization, are always situational and relational. They define features or aspects interaction as this alters through the narrative (1999, p. 10). ₅  

Indeed, the literature on collective action frames (e.g. Snow and Benford 1988, 1992; Gamson 1988, 1992, 1995), while struggling with the question of the intersection of cognition and strategy, has nevertheless implicitly taken up the challenge set by McAdam’s (1982) concept of “cognitive liberation.” Cognitive liberation entails the status quo becoming recognized as objectively oppressive and affectively anathema. In any case, as Barker and others (see, e.g., Goodwin 1997; Taylor 1995; Jaspers 1997) show, the feelings associated with solidaristic relationships cannot be reduced to individual states of consciousness, but are at once limited and limiting interactions among people and the cues picked up from the settings they create.

Even if we acknowledge the complimentarity of emotive and cognitive processes in the creation of identities—now seen as both “we-feelings” and claims to common interests—we still do not have purchase on the question of why claimants pursue at least putatively common goals, and how they induce each other to act. Resource mobilization theory (RMT), rising to the challenge of Olson’s “free rider problem” (1965), sought to explain how “selective incentives” provided by social movement “entrepreneurs” could induce individuals to act together towards a public good (see, e.g. McCarthy and Zald 1977). Friedman and McAdam (1992) have suggested that activist “collective identities”—being in a semi-exclusive group of activists—can be one such selective incentive. But such answers, and related ones, are but one set among many, and like many of the rest, including collective behavior and relative-deprivation explanations (see, e.g. LeBon 1960 [1901]; Adorno, et al. 1950; Hoffer 1951; Smelser 1962; Gurr 1970; Granovetter 1978) beg more questions than they answer, for they ultimately posit individualized psychological mechanisms as answers to matters of clearly intersubjective scope.

Ann Mische and Harrison White (see Mische 1998; Mische and White 1998; White 1992, 1995) have arrived at a neologism-laden, but potentially very helpful way of thinking about what prompts contention. Drawing upon Bakhtinian linguistic theory, Goffmanian interactionism (e.g., 1974) and sociological applications of narrative theory (e.g., Somers 1994, 1995a, 1995b), they begin by breaking down the distinction between social ties and cultural “stories.” Here, sets of stories—temporally located claims—are the specific content of social ties. This duality of structure and culture (see also Breiger 1999; Mohr and Duquenne 1997) means that the active overlapping of associations and sets of stories constitute practical social life. In other words, we are always making claims in “publics” of many sizes, and we learn to switch among these as a matter of course. ₆   If identities are at least in part public claims to similarity or solidarity, they fluctuate as publics fluctuate, and new or renewed identity claims are prompted as the difference among the multiple “worlds” or “network-domains” present in a given public setting is either recognized or suppressed. ₇

 

Structural Equivalence and Subjective Positioning

Identities as Structural Equivalence

In the Mische-White schema, stories—or more generally, modes of communication with shared orientations toward time and space—concatenate into similar sets to define the interlocutors’ social networks. The judgment of “similarity” here is a second-order operation of categorization according to the evaluative schemata that interlocutors bring to a given setting. An “identity” in this case, would be a categorization process—more “identification” than “identity”—based on locally salient structural equivalences. In other words, local claims of identity would be invocations of story-sets that shared similar relations with other story-sets within a social setting, and the suppression of story-sets that did not. ₈

Considering identity as locally-salient structural equivalence brings us back to the first problem we considered, above. Since none of us knows the full extent of the “reach” of our social ties (and they are potentially infinite), we act according to the ones that are most local, most of the time. ₉   Conflicts inevitably arise, but rarely do they arise with such force as to fully reorient identities. Accordingly, in recent work, Charles Tilly (1998b) has suggested that there is a continuum between “disjoined” identities, which appear chiefly in public life, and those identities that are “embedded” in daily routine. ₁₀   Disjoined identities are almost inherently less stable than are embedded ones, and require regular ritual reaffirmation. The problem is that it is not always clear what is “disjoined” and what is “embedded.” Looking only at identities claimed in relation to state actors—that is, identities claimed in the practice of contentious politics, narrowly understood—means that we run the danger of assuming that these identities are “disjoined” and not “embedded.” Yet, as a correction to this problem, the taking of a more “global” view of structural equivalence abstracts from actual settings, and threatens to bring the idea of structural equivalence “back” to the role theory from which it grew (see White, Boorman & Brieger 1976), rather than “forward” to a less objectivist conception of subject-formation through interactive process. The key, I think, is to juggle several settings at once, switching among them depending upon the demands of the study, just as the actors we study, switch among network-domains according to the demands of their work.

Structural Equivalence, Class Identity, and New Social Subjects

Lest I leave the impression that the foregoing discussion is just so much intellectual hand-wringing (which it surely is, too), I should stress that it is precisely over the objectivity of the role-theory interpretation of structural equivalence that many of the debates both surrounding class formation and so-called “new social movements” have taken place over the past several decades. Since E.P. Thompson (1963) challenged structural Marxist orthodoxy, and urged upon social historians a more agent-sensitive, processual, “cultural Marxism,” debates have gone on within the disciplines of labor and social history about the “objective” or “subjective” nature of “class.” These debates have been plainly political, and have been carried out by academics who often consider their work to be “political” in a broad sense. They have turned, primarily, over the question of the continued usefulness of Marxist notions of class to understand collective action among proletarians in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Crudely put, on one side are those whose work has partaken in the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences (see Toews 1987 for an interesting polemical overview of this movement). Following, in part, the (still avowedly Marxist) work of Gareth Stedman-Jones (1982), among others, they emphasize the importance of the language used by protesters to describe themselves, their adversaries, and their actions. In a general sense, this line of research emphasizes the need to listen to what workers say about what they do and to whom they do it (see also Joyce 1994; Rancière 1989), and to understand the sets of relations within which people find themselves as sufficiently complex as to make a language of “class” one among many possible identity claims. In his reevaluation of Chartism—often considered “proof” of a mature English working-class consciousness—Stedman-Jones argues

that the ideology of Chartism cannot be constructed in abstraction from its linguistic form. An analysis of Chartist ideology must start from what Chartists actually said or wrote, the terms in which they addressed each other and their opponents…It is argued that, if the interpretation of the language and politics is freed from a priori social inferences, it then becomes possible to establish a far closer and more precise relationship between ideology and activity than is conveyed in the standard picture of the movement (1983, pp.94-95).

On the other side, were those who made an essentially structuralist defense of the class-concept (which trades precisely upon the more objectivist version of the structural equivalence argument described above). Consider the following polemic launched by Charles Tilly (1981, p.17):

We dare to speak of “class conflict” because so many of the struggles…pitted sets of people who occupied similar positions with respect to the means of production—social classes, that is, or fragments of them—against others who occupied different positions. That usage opens us up to the objection that the people involved did not cast their action in terms of class, were not truly aware of their class interests, or defined their enemies incorrectly. To these hypothetical objections we can only reply that such demanding standards for class conflict nearly banish class conflict from history; however engaging the vision of workers speaking articulately in class terms and acting decisively on the basis of an accurate assessment of their interests and enemies, the event itself has been rare indeed. We settle for a less demanding and wider ranging conception of class conflict. ₁₁

It is not enough to see this as a division between those who concentrated on the “disjoined” identity claims of working-class activists, and those who made identity attributions based upon a wider set of embedded relations. Rather, scholars who picked up on the linguistic turn early, set about to show the myriad relations into which working-class people were inscribed. ₁₂   For example, Patrick Joyce (1994) has suggested that “class” has “fallen” to one category of identity among others. He points not to class as a central feature of the imagination of collective political action of 19th century England, but to a “demotic” or “democratic imaginary.” By this he means that political action in the name of democracy had to first imagine a demos. “These demotic identities, often formed outside and prior to politics, as it were…[were] articulated by formal politics” (1994, p.5). Following the work of Jacques Rancière (1989), and looking at the work of worker-intellectuals, Joyce posits that “the workers’ dream,” or “religion of humanity” that formed the basis of political action,

was far more than the rhetorical expression of some underlying class identity, “bourgeois” or “worker”…Social relations were at once conducted and constituted through it, and one might say that the discursive subject of “humanity,” and talk about this humanity, were perhaps the chief means by which the contemporary social was lived. Its heightened form…enforced all kinds of social closure, unity and difference, of which class, in the sense of “work” and “the worker” was only one variant (Joyce 1994, p. 29).

In short, this is an argument to consider the full range of relations into which people enter, rather than privilege the relations at the “point of production.” ₁₃   Roger Gould’s work on popular uprisings in Paris (1991, 1993, 1995), similarly suggest that different identities—different social ties—may be activated in different situations. Where Gould differs from Joyce and others is in Gould’s firm stance against the subjectivism implied by the language of the “linguistic turn,” and in favor of the objectivity of social ties.

The challenge to the primacy of “class” and the assumption of “class interests” formed the initial backbone of the “new social movements” challenge both to class-based politics and to RMT interpretations of social movements that failed to question how people acquire the interests on behalf of which they act. In its early formulations, new social movement theory (NSM) suggested three major things. First, NSM theorists claimed that the new movements—for example, the women’s movement, the student movement, the environmental movement—opened up new social spaces and challenged the class-party dominated European political sphere, and in the US as well (Mouffe 1988; Turner 1994, Johnston et al. 1994, Flacks 1994). Second, they claimed that within the new movements, the Olsonian calculus was suspended, and that actions were judged solely according to “whether they produce solidarity or not” (Pizzorno 1978, p.293; see also Pizzorno 1986; Mayer 1994; Mayer and Roth 1995). Third, they claimed that the proliferation of new collective identities and solidarities superseded the non-processual, interest-based class politics in importance (Cohen 1985; Offe 1985).

I only note here that NSM theory drew a good deal of criticism, especially in the US. It generated both enthusiasm and concerns among left-wing academics who welcomed both NSM’s concern with cultural processes that created “collective identities” and its challenge to the already well-known rigidities of Olsonian RMT theory, but were wary of NSM’s apparent refocusing of radical politics (within and outside of academia) from concerns of redistribution to ones of “recognition,” and its apparent lack of historical sensitivity (see, e.g., Fraser 1997; Kauffman 1991; Plotke 1991; Echols 1989; Calhoun 1995).

Considering Class

While some of the intensity of the original debates about languages of class and NSMs have subsided, the main problem to which they point is one that informs both the various iterations of “repertoire” studies, and the Mische-White approach discussed above. In spite of the many caveats and complications in its formulation, it still appears that to speak of class conflict in the Marxist sense used by Tilly in 1981 makes for at least potentially good sociology. The trick is to move away from the crude metaphor of “base” and “superstructure” that has plagued Marxist cultural theory in some form for the last 150 years (see e.g., Marx & Engels, 1970 [1846], p.57). ₁₄   There can be little doubt that capitalist relations of production exert a powerful influence on the possibilities, forms, and content of collective protest. Even beyond the issue of the general structural equivalence among workers vis-à-vis capitalists, the profit-oriented media and laws protecting the pursuit of profit and regulating labor structure a wide variety of social settings by entering in them as powerful story-sets with extensive “reach” from one “network-domain” to another. So even where the relations of production (at some often admittedly elusive “point of production”) are distant, the relations therein may well enter into the considerations of actions, organizational forms, and languages of protest. ₁₅

 

Experience, Categories, and Representation

A problem arises in discussions of class, notwithstanding the importance of signaling the broad influence of capitalist relations of production on identity claims and feelings. The problem is that even if we speak of class as aggregates of those individuals sharing structurally equivalent positions in relations of capitalist production, we often end up assuming that occupation of structurally equivalent positions implies common experiences, and orientations to them. This is not actually too big a problem if you concentrate upon a very small set of individuals’ relations; workers doing the same job on an assembly line are likely to experience assembly-line work in similar ways, all other things being equal. It becomes a much larger problem when a broader range of relations are examined—that is, when all other things are not equal—and still larger when relations are considered to be made effective (and affective) in the semiotic dimension of action.

The first set of problems has been rather thoroughly addressed in feminist labor historians’ challenges to standard accounts of class formation. Much of the debate around “comparable worth” in the 1970s and 1980s (see, e.g., Kessler-Harris 1986, Milkman 1986, McCann 1993) was about the gender-typing of jobs. It is clear from this debate that relations that lie far beyond those of immediate salience to the employment relationship structure this relationship in a number of ways. Accordingly, class becomes inflected by many other structuring categories of identity, none of which has exclusive hold upon the person so identified (see also Cobble 1991). This hold is not exclusive because each categorical boundary is made up of stories or pieces of stories that are proper to—or at least more central to—other categories and their boundaries. We can only talk about the “gendered” nature of “class,” or the “racialization” of “gender” and “class” because the boundaries are both mutually reinforcing and nonexclusive. ₁₆

I have quoted Patrick Joyce, above, as noting the important contribution of feminist labor historians and the work of poststructuralist philosophers to labor history. The fundamental challenge posed by early feminist labor history to the “new labor history” was that of asking whose experiences were being counted in the formation of classes, and where the locus of class formation was. Even in Richard Biernacki’s (1997) complex and subtle account of differences in the development of class claims in Britain and Germany, the keys to class formation are located firmly on the shop floor (see also Burawoy 1979; for a critique, see Clawson and Fantasia 1982). In contrast, Rose (1997) has indicated that “the study of working class formation [that centers] on artisanal and skilled workers engaging in organized political protest…has been subjected to critique by feminist scholars for more that twenty years” (p.135). The thrust of this critique has been to problematize the white, skilled worker as the epitome of the working class, as the “quintessential worker.”

Among the first and most prominent contributions to this line of work was that of Louise Tilly and Joan Wallach Scott. Their landmark Women, Work and Family (1987 [1978]), in focusing on different relations of different women to different kinds of work, provides a rich analysis of the dangers of considering any of the three categories that make up the title of their book, invariate quantities. They disaggregate the categories of women, wages, and families, and show how different situations of women (single, married, in the paid workforce or not), determinants of wages, and structures of families (though this is least theorized) conjoin and disjoin in various ways so as to make the “freedom” of wage labor for women a more problematic concept than it was imagined to be in some feminist circles in the early 1970s.

Particularly strongly in evidence in Scott’s work (1988, 1993), but also in a series of labor studies (e.g. Milkman 1987; Baron 1991; Rose 1992; Kessler-Harris 1990), is an increasing awareness of the integral importance of women’s experiences in any account of labor history and class formation, and not just in “women’s” history. This was not simply because women constituted one half of the working class, or that even women confined to the home, or isolated from the cash economy (which was actually rarely the case, at least for the whole adult life of a woman) contributed her labor-power to the capitalist through her role in reproducing the male (and child) labor. Rather, feminist scholarship, often, but not always armed with post-structuralist theory, argued that the very constitution of class in Marxist and Marxist-influenced scholarship on class formation, as well as in the politics of class as articulated by workers in the 19th and 20th centuries, was made up of a series of inclusions and exclusions that typically reproduced notions of men’s and women’s work, and the public and private “spheres” (Rose 1997; see also Somers 1994).

One important series of inclusion and exclusion concerned categories of skill. Criticism of the “natural” distinction between skilled work and unskilled work has reached beyond feminist scholarship into institutional accounts as well. Recent feminist and institutionalist scholarship has indicated the ways in which the claim to being a “skilled worker” has always been as much a story about specific types of ties to craft organizations, as it has been a categorical property of the worker’s work or of the worker him- or herself (see, e.g. Baron 1989, Rose 1997, Stark 1980, Haydu 1988). These ties to craft organizations entailed entitlements to a location along the axes of time discipline and short-term monetization that was clearly favorable to the worker with such ties, relative to those without them. Accordingly, processes of “opportunity hoarding” (Tilly 1998a), and the activation of job recruitment and chain migration along neighboring lines of identity construction—whether by neighborhood, country-of-origin, race, and gender—were effectuated, increasing the propensity for the excluded parties to be exploited at work (see also Asher and Stephenson 1990). Hence, as Rose writes:

While scholars may have been aware that skilled workers built their political organizations by excluding unskilled laborers, recent scholarship has emphasized that skill itself was constructed by workers through exclusive apprenticeships…[and] historically as a masculine attribute…Crucially, then, race and gender were not incidental to the construction of skill, or to the processes by which skilled workers built their organizations, made political alliances, and developed bonds of solidarity (1997, p.147).

Moreover, as Stark (1980) and Haydu (1988) show in different types of analyses, the process of “identifying” skill was further caught up in the broader social processes as well: craft unionism was threatened in the US, for example, by the First World War, and compromises to ensure the ability of craft unions to survive—even as war labor policies heavily favored employers—were bought at the price of unions’ promise to control labor strife. ₁₇

In spite of all this, we should not be too quick to think of skilled, artisanal organization as reactionary, and only concerned with preserving artisanal privileges in the labor process. Rather, in a series of studies conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s (e.g. Hanagan 1980, Hanagan &Tilly 1988, Voss, 1993) a different picture emerges, one in which the lines around skill and craft were not so much blurred by artisans or unskilled workers, nor even always eliminated due to changes in the labor process, so much as they were bridged in efforts to combat capitalists’ encroachment on labor process and wages.
And yet a charting of inclusions and exclusions in the formation of identity—something like the “indexical” process of “framing,” (see Benford 1997) though without the suggestions of calculated intention—runs the risk of merely substituting women’s experiences, or the experiences of any other excluded category of people, for that of the “dominant” white, male worker, as the “true” or authentic experience. This raises a paired methodological and theoretical question. We still do not seem to have cracked the nut of phenomenology and distanced ourselves from an inviolable kernel of “experience.” How can this be done?

Before addressing this, it is probably a good question to ask why we might want to do this. The object here is neither a descent into an ultimately solipsistic relativism, nor an aestheticization of politics, nor still a desire to “kill off” the subject just as subjectivity is being claimed by a host of excluded groups. Nor, moreover, is it an attempt to say that “bodies” don’t matter, and that somehow the death, maiming, disease, injury, and anguish caused in industrial work, slavery, housework, are not “real” and did not form at least one basis for the making of collective claims. But just as phenomenological schools of thought in social movement theory felt a need to move beyond “interests” as pre-constituted and given, so we must move beyond “experience” as “the ontological foundation of working-class identity, politics, and history” (Scott 1993, p. 30). This is not just to be philosophically self-consistent with a position that uses one experience to destabilize the authority of other, exclusionary ones, but rather, to be able to show the ways in which many relations come to shape those “things” that are being related along one line of analysis, and to show this in such a way that indicates how boundaries are formed between public and private, male and female, skilled and unskilled labor, black and white, the unemployed, and the poor, employees and workfare workers, etc. ₁₈

The importance of this is underscored by the ongoing concern among writers on contemporary labor movements—as opposed to labor historians—on cross-national labor organizing, and on the international division of labor (see, e.g., Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1982, Moody 1996). While most, if not all, of these studies take “experience” to be the irreducible and authentic basis for rights claims, they also present a challenge to our imagination of what the working class is and how it is constituted in so-called “core” countries. As Gayatri Spivak (1988) indicates, pious deference to the practicalities of the “workers’ struggle” in contemporary Western (really Northern) scholarship helps to consolidate “The West” as the subject of history even as it consigns workers in the West to embodying a double reduction to interest and desire. We clearly need a way for critical analysis to avoid both reproducing dominant discourses of inequality and parroting the populist essentialism of insurgent identities, which, often as not, merely builds on dominant discursive foundations in the first place.

In the context of addressing the methodological question to which I alluded above, I will close the consideration of the relation of experience and representation “at work” by noting an irony: Don Kalb’s (1997) work on class formation in the Netherlands, Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands 1850-1950, begins with a virulent attack on post-structuralism, but is actually a terrific example of its possibilities. Following “relational marxists,” (1997, pp. 4-5) Kalb claims for Marx a “cultural” relevance that mirrors the sort of “material” relevance that Scott (1988) claims for language (see also Sewell 1993). ₁₉   Kalb draws on Marx’s contention that a mode of production was a “definite mode of life” in order to emphasize that Marx’s “consistent use of the distinction between the social and the material was not meant to indicate observably distinct and separate spheres, or things, or phenomena, but only to analytically distinguish between different functions of one and the same phenomenon” (Kalb 1997, p. 5). This, it seems to me, is the sine qua non of any materialist conception of history, and why materialism that is economically reductionist is no materialism at all, and a profound misreading of Marx.

Kalb tells a story of the growing and shifting solidarities among shoemakers and electronics workers in the Netherlands, in which class formation—in the sense imagined by the challengers of class analysis (e.g., Reddy, Joyce, and Rancière)—never happened. While I have no space to rehearse his whole argument here, what is significant is that he is able to draw together changes in global patterns of trade, the effects of interstate conflicts, industrial policy, with shifting modes of accumulation by Dutch industrialists, internal immigration, urban development, strategies of combining male and female labor to maximize profit, and the role of church authorities in both congealing and deflecting efforts to build solidarity among the workers through successive periods of unrest.

Just as Margaret Somers understands identities as narratives and sets of narratives people use to account for their positions in “relational settings” (Somers and Gibson 1994, p. 70, Somers 1997), rather than as “categories” that people adopt in “society,” Kalb puts such a perspective into practice (without either of them acknowledging the other’s work). Moreover, his careful argument, which “historicizes and spatializes class analysis” (1998: 279), is consistent in many respects for Sonya Rose’s call for treating class as a Sartrean “series,” (see also Connell 1983, Young 1994, and Fantasia 1988). Here, “seriality is a structure ‘arising from people’s historically congealed institutionalized actions and expectations that position and limit individuals in determinate ways that they must deal with” (Young 1994, quoted in Rose 1997, p. 150). ₂₀   Kalb’s work shows just how this process of localized congealing worked, and the dilemmas for counter-hegemonic resistance it provided.

 

Organizing Identity

One of the great benefits of the resource mobilization program in the study of popular contention is that it drew our attention to organizations. While the tangible benefit of organization is still debated, ₂₁   and while there is a considerably broader range in the types of social movement organization than suggested by early RM work (see, e.g., Lichterman 1994; Bordt 1997; Whittier 1995), RM reminds us in a way that neither collective behavior or NSM theory does, how important organization is to social movements. As I have suggested above, there need be no contradiction between a focus on identity and a focus on organization. Rather, even beyond the ways in which organizational forms help to shape and index identity, we might think about the ways in which identities—feelings, claims, stories, structural equivalences—are organized.

On one hand, most social movement organizations, whatever their formal structure, have professional or volunteer organizers. Where this is not the case, as in formally “structureless” organizations, there are still likely to be informal leaders, whose voices powerfully shape the internal and external proceedings of the group (Freeman 1973). Organizers are something like the “social movement entrepreneurs” depicted by early RM theory. But there is a necessary caveat. To wit, if we are tempted to see organizers as social movement entrepreneurs, we should be open to the ways in which the study of entrepreneurship and the firm has changed in the past two decades. While here is not the place to review this literature, it is important to indicate that, at least in some parts of this literature, emphasis is put on the ability of entrepreneurs to broker ties across a network, to be central actors in a network, to attract interorganizational endorsements, and to read others’ strategic moves before making one’s own (see, e.g., Padgett and Ansell 1993; Burt 1992; Lane and Maxwell 1996). Similarly, the study of organizing in social movements should no longer be limited to the intentional actions of builders of clearly-bounded, formal organizations.

A further distinction, of course, between social movement organizers and entrepreneurs is that the former are not directed towards financial profit. For movement organizers, the payoff is often measured in changed policies or laws, numbers of mobilized people, publicity of “the message” through media coverage, the founding of formal organizations, “raised consciousness” on the part of participants, and the ability to demonstrate what Tilly (1997) has called “WUNC,” or worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. The variety of organizers’ metrics for “success” indicates the variety of relations that they must track. The importance of any one, or combination of metrics depends in some large measure on their respective salience to the effective network-domains being brought together in the course of contention. ₂₂

In this reading, organizers, both formal and informal, attempt to do what all agents do in their social settings all the time. They try to “translate” the world, in the sense suggested by Bruno Latour (1988) and other proponents of what John Law calls a “relational materialism.” As Law writes:

[Translation] is the process in which putative agents attempt to characterize and pattern the networks of the social: the process in which they attempt to constitute themselves as agents. Thus an agent is a spokesperson, a figurehead, or a more or less opaque “black box” which stands for, conceals, defines, holds in place, mobilizes and draws on, a set of juxtaposed bits and pieces (Law 1994, p. 101).

These “juxtaposed bits and pieces” can be, as I have suggested, a wide range of things or acts with apparently different ontological status, as “material” and “ideal.” But the strength of the “translational” approach to what organizing is, lies in that it suggests a radical return to a dialectical materialism that denies the absolute distinction between the two. ₂₃   Moreover, this approach suggests what social movements scholars have recently been beginning to identify: namely, mechanisms for organizing identities and solidarity. ₂₄

Mische’s work (1998; Mische and Pattison 1999) on the Brazilian youth movement’s role in the impeachment of President Collor in 1992 indicates two mechanisms, “interanimation” and “suppression” as somewhat anonymously occurring over the course of the protest cycle. Interanimation occurs when various groups, with various projects, increasingly become present at the same events. Some organizations take on projects originally esponsed by other organizations, or make alliances with groups with overlapping but non-coterminous sets of projects. Organizational co-presence at events both “make” the events, and turn them into a context for the renegotiation of organizational and projective boundaries, the renegotiation of claims, and “multivalent” action that “plays” differently to different audiences around a given actor. ₂₅  
Suppression, according to Mische, marks a different phase in the protest cycle. Suppression is the sine qua non of coalition building, but can likely only take place after a process of interanimation. Here, organizations’ project become submerged or latent in events that attract many different groups. This is not simply a process of a variety of actors’ collectively finding a “lowest common denominator.” Rather, the suppression of specific projects, mainly through groups’ own self-policing judgments about what will and what will not “play” to a diverse audience, helps to promote common projects, even if these were at the center of no group’s original set of projects, and even if they end up being championed by groups which might have opposed the projects in question at the beginning of the protest cycle. Thus, Mische shows how the demand for Collor’s removal began in left-wing parties as an adjunct to more radical claims for revolution, and “migrated” to being a coalitional language for an entire movement, where the more particularistic claims of both right- and left-wing actors were ultimately suppressed.
Francesca Polletta’s work (1998a) on attributions of spontaneity in and to the Southern sit-in movement is similar in some respects to Mische’s (and pre-dates it), pointing to the critical importance of silences to mark what are, in some broad sense, identity claims. Why, Polletta asks, do participants “remember” the sit-in movement as “spontaneous,” and as spreading “like a fever,” when it was, in fact, very carefully planned and coordinated among Black college students and their mentors in local NAACP chapters? Part of the explanation may lie, she suggests, in specific ways that “spontaneity” is used, inflecting it with different-than-usual meanings. But such new inflections mark, in some senses, a continuance of the action, even long after the fact: key silences, what Polletta (1998a, p.154) calls a “critical discursive ellipsis,” may be as important to processes of identity formation, by concealing movement origins. Similarly, as Polletta (1998b) suggests with respect to the way SNCC organizers were silent about their particular movement connections when they were associated by those whom they were organizing with Dr. King and the Freedom Riders, these critical discursive ellipses may open up room for potential allies or opponents to project their narrativized hopes and fears onto an actor or set of actors, and thus help to constitute them.
In social and labor movements, judgements of worthiness, based on claims of authentic and authenticating experience, often create the “critical discursive ellipsis” that establishes the substance of the subject. ₂₆   This, of course, creates problems for researchers, at least insofar as the addition of a “scientific” identity that presumes or performs the objectivity of its practice, comes into conflict with the accounts of the actors under study. Academics and movement activists both jealously guard their silences. Solidarity may be about letting others guard their silences as much as it is about letting others speak.

And yet, such a position raises a difficult issue for critically engaged practice, whether academic or in a movement. In labor politics in the United States, guarded silences have characterized unions that are anti-democratic, corrupt, and often linked with organized crime. Yet, at the same time, as recent work on international labor organizing amid global trade liberalization has shown, Northern advocacy organizations that work workers’ organizations in the developing world’s “free trade” and “export processing” zones take “representative” workers from these areas on tour throughout the US in order to dramatize labor abuses by multinational concerns. Eliding the distinction between pictorial and political senses of “representation” entails the silencing of questions about how “representative” of working conditions the representative worker’s experience is, and about whom she, or the advocates “represent” (see Brooks 1998; Spivak 1988).

Similarly, in the community organizing movement inspired by Saul Alinsky (1946, 1972) and by the National Welfare Rights Organization (Piven and Cloward 1979, Delgado 1986), the populist practice of putting forward “grassroots” leaders as the spokespeople for the organization and as the facilitators of meetings often obscures the work of organizers whose job it is to “prep” the leaders so that there are no surprises during demonstrations or meetings, and that the organization’s agenda—often determined, either loosely or strongly, by staff—is adhered to. But the matter of the “critical ellipsis” in organizing oppositional movement organizations and the representations of their identities is only partly covered by the distinction between cadre and mass. A central insight of the framing perspective (outlined above) is precisely that “frames” are asserted boundaries around the indexical possibilities of a significant action. Identity claims are stabilized through silence or through active reproduction of these boundaries in a variety of contexts.

Other mechanisms for consolidating identities play upon the emotional resonances of actions (see Barker 1999; Taylor 1995). Still others involve “temporal matching” of distinct narratives. Kimeldorf’s description (1988) of the “strategic pivot” of West Coast Communist organizers away from “dual unionism” and away from the teleological Party line of revolutionary politics in their propaganda efforts among longshoremen, shows how the suppression of one temporal dimension (the teleological) in the Communists’ narrative, enabled them to make their “here-and-now” radicalism much more salient to the longshoremen’s concerns. These organizers defied Party directives, and organized within moderate AF of L union structures. They soon took over the AF of L unions, and within a very brief time, were able to organize one of the broadest, most radical strikes of the century.

Another mechanism for consolidating identity claims is what we might call “narrative inversion,” in which elements of stories are recontextualized, and the subjects of the narratives “reclaimed.” Much of the work in “Queer Theory” involves such attempts to re-narrate stories of stigmatization (see Gamson 1995, Bernstein 1996; Catalano 1997), though these remain controversial. The same dynamic may be seen in movements of the disabled (see e.g., Anspach 1979). Noonan (1997 [1995]) indicates that Chilean women seeking to protest the regime’s abuses in the 1970s located themselves within “traditional” narratives of motherhood in order to press their quite radical claims for political recognition. Finally, in earlier, unpublished work on the homeless movement (1997), I have shown how the recasting of “the homeless” into a narrative of purity and redemption reinforced the “otherness” of the homeless, and the inversion remained incomplete.
Such a view of mechanisms of identity formation implies strategic action. Yet, the question of what a strategy is gets raised, lest our picture of social movement actors and organizers become too Machiavellian. Certainly, attempts to “characterize and pattern the networks of the social” can be informed by Realpolitik. But we have already said that the measures of success can be quite different among different actors. Moreover, we can see, in Padgett and Ansell’s (1993) account of the rise of the ‘Medici, that strategy may entail less manipulation than it does letting others do the manipulating, in effect, until they have to start suppressing their own projects. This suggests that even if we conceive of strategic action as intentional action, we must still recognize that such is the complexity of the “networks of the social” that sometimes you don’t intend what you intend. ₂₇

The making of identity claims, therefore, may take us back to a curiously reformulated “resource mobilization” theory, one in which the ground has shifted considerably. In contrast to the RM of the 1970s, the model for a new theory must abjure the tendency to divide strategy from meaning, culture from structure, and organization from language or texts. Rather, we have to understand how actors, formed in overlapping networks of affiliations based on sets of stories, form themselves (ourselves) into subjects in determinate and determining settings. Building formal organizations, attracting money and other material resources, and gaining allies and third-party (elite or otherwise) endorsements can only be part of the story. Behind this lies the more important questions of how organizational forms are chosen, what counts as a resource, when and why, and how solidary alliances are held together through collective action on shared programs, and through collective silences on some matters of subject-creation. Theories of social movement spontaneity—however much they may themselves be solidaristic interventions with one or another movement—tend to obscure the complex dynamics of identity formation. Surely movement actors organize, but the pieces that must be put or fall into place in order to stabilize a claim are such that they cannot be organized by a single entrepreneur or a set of them. Rather, all movement actors organize each other and create settings for new combinations of rhetorics, organizations, and venues to arise in which new identity claims may be made, and old ones reformulated or sustained.

 

Conclusion

In this review of the literature on identity in social and labor movements, I have gone from identifying four positions on what identities entail (we-feelings, third-party attributions common interests, claims of common interests based on common experiences, and an argument for non-instrumentalist renderings of popular protest), to a set of questions about identity formation processes.

Tracing my argument backwards, I make the following claims. Identities have a strong organizational component. They are attempts to create sociocultural structure out of locally available narratives, organizational forms, venues, and interpersonal connections. Holding these elements together often entails obscuring the work that goes into holding them together, and making the “experiences” that inform them seem natural. ₂₈   There are several ways of going about this that are identified in the literature, including processes of interanimation, suppression, temporal matching, and narrative inversion, though others doubtless are common.

The organizational component of identities sheds light on the ways in which “experience” must be created in, through, and for identity claims, that is, claims to sameness or similarity based upon common experience or common relations to a specific order (e.g., the “means of production”). The politics of identity, especially as they have concerned class and class-formation, have thrown the representation-experience divide—both in methodology and in the substance of the claims—into bold relief. Post-structuralist and feminist scholarship, in particular, have sought to open up the “black box” of class claims—both those of workers themselves and of academics—to ask how class-based identity claims work to exclude other identity claims and experiences beyond the “point of production,” and to indicate the range of socio-semiotic relations that structure “experience” at the “point of production” as well. I have argued, however, that the opening of the black box of class should reposition class claims but not lead to their abandonment. The recognition of class consciousness as what Spivak (1987, p. 205) has called an “a strategic and artificial rallying awareness, which on the transformative level seeks to destroy the mechanics which come to construct the outlines of the very class of which a collective consciousness has been situationally developed” captures the simultaneous artificiality and reality of class, and its continuing importance.
I have also indicated that the organizational aspect of identity—the drawing together of disparate, but often structured “bits and pieces” of social relations and interactions—demands that we suspend, at least for purposes of analysis, the ontological asymmetry between material and ideal. Rather, we should consider elements of social relations as co-constitutive, and be concerned with their concatenations at different scales and in different temporal sequences. If this is the case, we should also not treat the “we-feelings” of identity as irreducible and fundamentally “experiential.”
Finally, the position I seek to stake out on contentious political identities demands something of a deconstruction of our own identities as “academics.” Taking the challenge of a “reflexive sociology” seriously, I invite inquiry into how and why we position ourselves in relation to the fields of contention we study, and how the study of contentious politics can be at once inside and outside of these fields. In so doing, I hope to indicate how, though identities—whether conceived as “feelings” or “claims”—are strategic, they are rarely fully intended, and still more rarely controllable. Moreover, since identities can be accounted for by a host of different measures and stories, and, as local consolidations or “blocs” may themselves become measures within other accounts, saying that they are “strategic” does not efface the feelings of solidarity they create.

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: See Calhoun (1996) for a rather tendentious critique in this vein of the “domestication” of social history. Back.

Note 2: For the development of this concept, see e.g., Tilly (1992, 1995). Back.

Note 3: I should note here that my use of “discourse” here follows the convention of reducing the term to “language.” I note this reduction—perhaps most conventional within sociological engagements with poststructuralism—to that in Foucault’s work, and that influenced by it, the term often takes on a broader meaning, referring to a great range of practices, and not just to linguistic ones. Back.

Note 4: This adoption of new institutionalism accords with Tilly’s (1998a) conception of the “mechanisms” of “categorical inequality.” Here, we see that unions “emulated” and “adapted” existing chunks of social structure to their organizational problems (the need for secrecy, discipline, etc.) and reproduced the gender divisions extant in the institutions from which these “chunks” were taken. Back.

Note 5: Melucci, too, insists on the connection between cognition and emotion, claiming that “[p]assions and feelings, love and hate, faith and fear are all part of a body acting collectively, particularly in those areas of social life that are less institutionalized, such as the social movements. To understand this part of collective action as ‘irrational,’ as opposed to the parts that are ‘rational’ (a euphemism for the ‘good’), is simply nonsensical. There is no cognition without feeling and no meaning without emotion” (1996, p.71). Back.

Note 6: “Publics” in this sense are areas that facilitate “switching” between network-domains. They do not carry the same meaning, as “public” as used in “public sphere.” Rather, “publics” in the Mische-White definition are shared space-times in which the multiple temporalities that characterize different network-domains are suspended, and subject to observation by third parties. Back.

Note 7: A generally unrecognized link exists between this and certain strands of feminist theory, particularly that informed by poststructuralism. The challenge to the strict separation between “public” and “private,” especially as it pertains to claiming rights and identity, meets there, too, with a challenge to the fixity of the category of “woman,” treating it instead as a “fluctuating identity.” See Whittier (1995); Taylor and Whittier (1992); Taylor (1989) for a challenge to the prevailing definition of public claims-making in their discussions of “social movement abeyance structures” and of “cultural feminism”; a forceful poststructuralist statement of feminist criticism of the category of “woman” may be found in Riley (1988). Back.

Note 8: A temporal element to this categorization process, and of narrative processes of social action in general is pointed out in Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische’s work on agency (1998). They propose that agency has three moments, regarding past, present, and future action-orientations, respectively, and that that each is present in every action, but that they differ in degree of emphasis and in arrangement. Similarly, claims to identity have different moments, arranged and emphasized differently as contexts for these claims change. Kimeldorf (1988) picks up the importance of matching temporal orientations in the invocation of story-sets and ties in organizing. I expand on this below. Back.

Note 9: The concept of “reach” among network domains almost inevitably involves some discussion of network “centrality” (see Rosenthal, et al. 1985; see also Fernandez and McAdam 1988).  Back.

Note 10: I should note that Tilly’s definition of “public” is here more standard and state-centered —and thus, historical—than is the broad and more abstract one suggested by Mische and White and the feminists cited above. His definition of “public” might accord better with Mische’s notion of a “civic arena” (1997). Back.

Note 11: I am indebted to Rick Fantasia (1988) for drawing my attention to this passage. Back.

Note 12: It is important to note here that in spite of the emphasis that Thompson put on “culture,” he did not at all subscribe to the “linguistic turn.” Rather, Thompson argued that class formation had to be seen as a process in which workers—increasingly similarly situated with respect to the means of production—came to share lifeways, practices, and languages, and came to base a common political orientation upon these. Thompson stressed the process of workers’ creatively “making” class, rather than their being either forced, or “called” into class-being.  Back.

Note 13: Even here, it should be noted, William Reddy goes further, writing against the “liberal illusion” that the “cash nexus” reduced everything—including workers—to fully exchangeable abstract quantities: “The concepts of class and class interest are in crisis for two reasons: (1) because individuals’ roles in production and exchange are seldom simple, so that their class identity is a difficult matter, and (2) because human motivation and perception are, in any case, too complex to ensure that class identity will offer any key to political behavior” (1987, p.60).  Back.

Note 14: The “base” and “superstructure” metaphor is one among several offered by Marx and Engels in the German Ideology. This early statement of historical materialism contains, in fact, far more subtle discussions of the relationship between “culture” and “material relations” than the common metaphor suggests. Back.

Note 15: The challenge for analysis here becomes at least partly methodological. How do we understand the “reach” of capitalist relations of production? Can we measure it? The concept of a “network-domain,” or multiple network-domains at different scales tempts me to want to conflate the idea of “historical blocs” from Gramsci (1988, pp.193-4) and the idea of “blocks” from White (see White, Boorman and Breiger 1976). From Gramsci, we can take the idea that “base” and “superstructure” are inextricably bound up with each other (as they are in the Mische-White schema), and the idea that popular struggles are shaped by the particular clusters formed by social relations and their constituent political representations. From White, we can get some greater methodological clarity on how each element within a particular field relates to other elements and how these relations create clusters. The problem is that blocks (for blockmodels) are built upon mathematical procedures whose criteria for partitioning (e.g., in blockmodel partitions’ always yielding an even number of blocks) are exogenous to the logic of a particular field. Nevertheless, the use of structural equivalence along a number of relations to tease out “blocs” in a field might prove to be analytically useful. Back.

Note 16: Herein lies a point of convergence between work in Critical Race Theory (e.g., Crenshaw 1988) and the work of Simmel (1955) and other sociologists influenced by network theorizing drawn from Simmel’s work. We can see, for example, that Abbott’s (1995) call for us to consider “things of boundaries” rather than the “boundaries of things” resonates quite well with Crenshaw’s call for us to be able to consider more than one category of inequality at a time in our judgments of oppressive relations. Back.

Note 17: Haydu’s account carries an interesting point about the “language of class” as well: while “wartime sacrifices seemed to fall disproportionately on the working class,” the war provided a language of enmity and difference for workers as well. Said one labor leader: “While our members and the wage-earners in general are sacrificing their lives on the battlefields of Europe, we who comprise Uncle Sam’s industrial army can not stand idly by and see the ‘Kaisers’ of American industry continue their un-American practices in the workshop…We want to be able to show our brother members when they…again pick up their tools to reenter the shop…that they now can enjoy the freedom and democracy they were fighting for” (quoted in Haydu 1988, p.141). That this statement formulates a wealth of rhetorical equivalences to tell a particular, counter-hegemonic story about social ties goes without saying. Back.

Note 18: See Stark (1980), Haydu (1988), and Rancière (1989) on the construction of “skill,” and Rose (1993), and Baron (1991) on the mutual determinations of skill and “women’s work”. On the common determinations of race and class identities, see, e.g. Roediger (1991); see Katznelson (1981), and Asher and Stephenson (1990) on the shaping of class claims in the relational contexts of urban change and ethnicity. On historical treatments of unemployment and its relation to the problem of the “poor,” see Kumar (1988); Weir (1992); Keyssar (1986); Skocpol (1992), Abramowitz (1988), Mink (1998), Dietrich, et al. (1998) for gender-inflected analyses). For more contemporary accounts, see Ness (1998). For new distinctions along these lines concerning workfare workers and “regular” employees, see Krinsky (1998) and Diller (1998). Back.

Note 19: Cf. Roger V. Gould’s argument in Insurgent Identities. Here Gould takes issue with Joan Scott’s emphasis that “discourse” is more than speech and text…but “whole ways of thinking, of understanding how the world operates and what one’s place is in it. And not only ways of thinking, but ways of organizing lives, institutions, societies, ways of implementing and justifying inequalities, but also of refusing them” (Scott 1987, quoted in Gould 1995:26). Gould’s complaint is that such an inclusive concept renders the statement that “language is social practice” “banal.” While Gould may be correct on a purely conceptual level, Scott’s conception actually points to a difficult and sophisticated set of analytic and empirical problems. Specifically, she begs the question of how identities are constructed with a variety of materials, none of which can be considered “purely” ideational or material, but must be considered in relation with each other in order for them to make even local sense. The act of construction, therefore, requires a complex interplay of attributions, feelings, organizations, material objects helping to configure space, and other people and their concomitant actions. See also Tilly (1998b). Back.

Note 20: Fantasia (1988: 278) cites Fredric Jameson’s (1979) definition of Sartre’s concept of “seriality” as “the reified atomization…of capitalist social life.” A series is the temporary, but nevertheless solid result of boundary-drawing processes. Rose suggests that class is formed as series come together and disjoin, and create new series. As such, she considers class to be a conjunctural effect of struggle, “formed discursively by cultural or symbolic processes that define a common project and create for the participants the sense of having a group identity. Political identities are formed from a series, in other words, as a consequence of political mobilization that involves discourses. These discourses always entail processes of inclusion and exclusion and inevitably are boundary-making endeavors” (Rose 1997: 151). Here, Rose invokes Gamson, Snow and Benford, and Tarrow and the concept of collective action frames as evidence that “the idea that political mobilization depends on discourse has become central to sociologists of social movements.” The problem here is that Rose does not run sufficiently with the idea of seriality, retreating into the idealism of phenomenology and effecting a possible metalepsis (due to the lack of dialecticism in her formulation) whereby collective action depends on discourse, but not so equally in reverse. Back.

Note 21: The classic anti-organizational piece is still Piven and Cloward’s Poor People’s Movements. Citing Robert Michels and Rosa Luxemburg, they warn against the dangers of bureaucratization and praise spontaneity. The debate is more or less clearly set up between Piven and Cloward and Alinsky (1946, 1972), who claims that strong organizations are the key to radical reformism. Both claim pride of place for their position’s prediction of the ability of poor and disenfranchised people to disrupt. It has become clear, however, that Piven and Cloward’s animus toward formal organizations has something of a dated ring to it: much of the work on SMOs, especially since the late 1980s, has focused on non-bureaucratic organizations, and often on non-mass organizations as well. A recent exchange between scholars in this latter vein and Piven and Cloward at an American Sociological Association mini-conference exposed the extent to which Piven and Cloward’s arguments are talking past the concerns of contemporary scholars, even while holding valuable observations.  Back.

Note 22: Entrepreneurs may be oriented to more than financial profit as well, depending upon the setting. Though clearly, financial profit is ultimately the “bottom line” for business organizations, alternative accounts and justifications for action, and stories about profit potential, may operate forcefully as well. See, e.g., Stark’s account (1996) of efforts of Hungarian firms to attract capital with a variety of narrative strategies, and note the vast growth of Amazon.com, billed as the most successful company that has never made a dime. Back.

Note 23: Latour’s call for a “symmetrical anthropology” (e.g. 1993, p. 105) is a move toward the simultaneous overcoming and preservation—implied in the term Aufhebung —of the opposition between “nature” and “society.” The call to look at “translation,” rather than “consititution” (see, e.g., p. 126), reminds of Marx’s observation in Grundrisse that “[I]deas which have first to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable, offer a somewhat better analogy” to the relation between money and commodities than does the analogy of language itself. This is because language “does not transform ideas, so that the peculiarity of ideas is dissolved and their social character runs alongside them as a separate entity, like prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from language” (Marx 1973, pp. 162-3). In other words, ideas do not belong to a separate realm from the interactive social relations in which they are formed. In contrast, money—the all-purpose metric for accounts—takes on the appearance of a separate entity. Moreover, money’s apparent objectivity makes of value a “social hieroglyphic” which must be translated if it is not to dominate producers (see, Capital I, pp. 166-7). Back.

Note 24: In my use of the term “mechanism” I do so only partly in the spirit suggested recently by Hedström and Swedberg (1998, ch. 1); it should be clear by now that I reject their call for even a “weak” version of methodological individualism as the baseline for any theory of social mechanisms. It is precisely this reduction that voids much that is of interest in the most radical implications of White’s work, and in the insistence in network theory on socio-cultural and socio-individual dualities. Back.

Note 25: Contexts of interanimation are not unlike what Stark has termed “recombinant” property (1996), in his work on Eastern European transitions. Stark describes “recombinant property” in East European capitalist expansion, as new property forms that “blur 1) the boundaries of public and private, 2) the organizational boundaries of enterprises, and 3) the boundedness of justificatory principles.” He goes on: “Recombinant property is a form of organizational hedging, or portfolio management, in which actors respond to uncertainty in the organizational environment by diversifying their assets, redefining and recombining resources. It is an attempt to hold resources that can be justified or assessed by more than one standard of evaluation”(1996a:7). In the context of contemporary mobilizations against workfare, I have used this idea to speak of “recombinant repertoires” in situations of marked uncertainty in the development of contentious claims (1998). Back.

Note 26: Latour’s claim (1988, pp. 158-9) that “what resists trials is real” is instructive on this point. The ability to withstand “deconstruction” lends, at least in a given moment, an object “reality” and is precisely why we often observe the phenomenon of the “rebellion of research objects” (See Kriesi 1992). The conflation of “worthiness” and “authenticity” so commonly made is not, in fact, limited to the “worthiness” side of WUNC. In fact, authenticity claims are larded through WUNC, so much so, that we could add it to the formula, creating “WUNCA,” or better, “WUNCA-WUNCA” so as to invoke B-Movie visions of primordial reality. Back.

Note 27: I am indebted to Colin Barker for this idea; in a personal communication, Barker described Bakhtin’s theory as indicating that “the problem with language is that you don’t know whose mouth it’s been in.” This reaches beyond a theory of unintended consequences because both “intention” and the actor doing the “intending” are problematized. Back.

Note 28: It could be that the process of obscuring origins is precisely what marks “identity” as such a quintessentially modern concern. Identities, accordingly, so often appear as “natural” or “given” within an atemporal social “structure” that they take on the status of a commodity. That people are constrained by identities—that more stabilized identities can bound political possibility—even shows something of the estrangement that we might think of as marking commodity production. In this way, we might ask whether Reddy’s dismissal of the “liberal myth” is premature. Moreover, we might ask whether the very proliferation of identities—and the suppressions that they entail—is precisely what marks the postmodern challenge to, as Jameson (1990) has put it, “think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically.”  Back.