CULTURE IN AND OUTSIDE INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

Even as theorists of social movements have paid increasing attention to culture in mobilization processes, they have conceptualized its role in curiously circumscribed fashion. Culture is often treated as a residual category; that is, invoked to explain what structure does not explain in accounting for movements’ emergence, what instrumental rationality does not explain in accounting for movement groups’ choice of strategies and tactics, and what policy change does not encompass in accounting for movements’ impacts. As a result, culture’s role in creating structural opportunities, in defining what counts as instrumentally rational, and in determining movement impacts within the policy arena as well as outside it has gone largely untheorized. An alternative view of culture focuses on the schemas that guide, and are reproduced in, institutions. Such a perspective makes it possible to identify the conditions in which culture has independent force in shaping identities, interests, and opportunities, and to grasp culture’s simultaneously enabling and constraining dimensions. Drawing on recent empirical studies, I show how this perspective can illuminate neglected dynamics of movement emergence, tactical choice, and movement impacts.

Citation

Polletta, F. (2004), "CULTURE IN AND OUTSIDE INSTITUTIONS", Myers, D.J. and Cress, D.M. (Ed.) Authority in Contention (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 25), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 161-183. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-786X(04)25007-8