Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements

3. Controlling Narratives and Narratives as Control within Social Movements

THREE Controlling Narratives and Narratives as Control within Social Movements ROBERT D. BENFORD As the essays in this volume demonstrate, narrations constitute a pervasive and influential form of activity for collective actors across a wide array of social movements—be they concerned with politics, religion, or lifestyle. My interest in this chapter is not with the form or content of such stories; nor am I concerned with how collective action narratives are constructed and disseminated. Rather, I focus on the recursive relationship between narratives and social control within social movements. Once a set of movement narratives has been constructed, social movement actors seek to sustain them. That is, they actively, often strategically , collude to uphold various aspects of the movement’s narratives, in part by preventing alternative or competing narratives from being constructed and disseminated. While most movement adherents routinely engage in various activities directed toward controlling the story that is told about the movement, the narratives themselves function as internal social control mechanisms, channeling and constraining individual as well as collective sentiments, emotions, and action. In this chapter, I offer a preliminary conceptual elaboration and analysis of the relationship between narratives and social control within social movements. This framework is grounded in research of and experiences in various social movements.1 I begin by distinguishing between two generic types of collective action stories—participant narratives and movement narratives. Next, I discuss the concept of social control before turning to a theoretical discussion of the concept’s utility in understanding 53 social movement dynamics. Then, after delineating several peace movement narratives, I identify and illustrate individual and collective processes that are constrained by movement narratives and which in turn serve to reproduce movement stories. I conclude by suggesting some additional theoretical considerations, including various contexts that are likely to affect the relationship between narratives and social control within social movements. GENERIC TYPES OF COLLECTIVE ACTION NARRATIVES There are two generic types of narratives discernable within social movements : participant narratives and movement narratives. Participant narratives refer to the stories that individual participants tell about their (and sometimes others’) movement-related experiences. Movement actors and their opponents fashion and tell stories: stories about encounters with unjust authorities (Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina 1982; McAdam 1988), stories expressing moral outrage in response to suddenly imposed threats to their welfare or way of life (Ĉapek 1993; Jasper 1997; Walsh 1981), stories recounting how and why they became involved in the movement (Hunt and Benford 1994; Polletta, chapter 2), stories of empowerment in the course of participating in movement activities, and stories highlighting who they are and who they are not (Hunt and Benford 1994; Rice, chapter 4; Taylor and Whittier 1992). These various participant narratives or “bundle of stories” contribute to the construction of a group’s “idioculture ” and are among the interpretive materials from which movement narratives are fashioned (Fine, chapter 10). Movement narratives, by way of comparison, refer to the various myths, legends, and folk tales, collectively constructed by participants about the movement and the domains of the world the movement seeks to change. Participant and movement narratives are closely linked in much the same fashion that individual interpretive frames and collective action frames are aligned (Snow et al. 1986) and personal and collective identities overlap or fuse (Hunt and Benford 1994). Movement narratives are distinctive from most other narratives in a fundamental way. Whereas the temporal structure of most narratives includes a singular beginning, middle, and end, movement narratives suggest alternative middles and endings.2 Typically, at least two middles and two endings are portrayed in movement narratives. One middle and one 54 BENFORD ending are offered as the logical flow of events that will unfold if no collective ameliorative action is undertaken. This status quo story is then contrasted to an alternative approach for dealing with what movement actors see as the problematic set of conditions, an alternative middle that they posit (or at least hope) will lead to a different, more desirable, ending.3 Thus, movement actors seek to insert themselves, individually and collectively, into an extant narrative (the status quo story) to bring about change, to create a new narrative.4 For present purposes, what is most relevant regarding this feature of movement narratives is that it tends to amplify social control issues. As Maines (1993: 21) notes, “Narratives and narrative occasions are always potential sites of conflict and competition as well as cooperation and consensus...