This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement’s past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement’s mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015. This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 (...) shaped the strategizing process. While those who experienced Copenhagen as a success preferred strategic continuity, those who experienced defeat developed a “Copenhagen narrative” to advance strategic adaptation by projecting previously experienced threats and opportunities onto the Paris campaign. Yet by relying on a retrospective narrative, movement actors tended to overlook emerging political opportunities. We demonstrate that narrative analysis is a useful tool for understanding the link between structure and agency in social movements and other actors affected by (political) opportunity structures. (shrink)

Originally created by the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, the concept of “food sovereignty” is being used with increasing frequency by agrifood activists and others in the Global North. Using the analytical lens of framing, I explore the effects of this diffusion on the transformative potential of food sovereignty. US agrifood initiatives have recently been the subject of criticism for their lack of transformative potential, whether because they offer market-based solutions rather than demanding political ones or because they fail (...) to adequately address existing social injustice. In this paper, I consider how food sovereignty measures up to this critique both as it was originally framed by Vía Campesina and as it is being reframed for the US context. First I briefly compare food sovereignty to community food security (CFS), which was developed more explicitly for the North American context and has been criticized for its lack of transformative potential. I then explore how the potential of food sovereignty has been affected as it is reframed to resonate with US audiences through an examination of its use on the web sites of US-based organizations. I find that, while some reframing of the concept to highlight consumer choice does seem to be occurring, it remains a primarily political concept. It may not, however, be fulfilling its potential for addressing social injustice in the US agrifood system because it tends to be used either in reference to international issues or, when applied to the US context, treated as a rough synonym for local control. I conclude that, if advocates can successfully guide the reframing process, food sovereignty could serve as a valuable counter-hegemonic vision to complement the more pragmatic and locally-grounded work of CFS advocates. (shrink)

This article argues that the Bakhtin Circle presents a more realistic theory of concrete dialogue than the theory of discourse elaborated by Habermas. The Bakhtin Circle places speech within the “concrete whole utterance” and by this phrase they mean that the study of everyday language should be analyzed through the mediations of historical social systems such as capitalism. These mediations are also characterized by a determinate set of contradictions—the capital-labor contradiction in capitalism, for example—that are reproduced in unique ways in (...) more concrete forms of life (the state, education, religion, culture, and so on). Utterances always dialectically refract these processes and as such are internal concrete moments, or concrete social forms, of them. Moreover, new and unrepeatable dialogic events arise in these concrete social forms in order to overcome and understand the constant dialectical flux of social life. But this theory of dialogue is different from that expounded by Habermas, who tends to explore speech acts by reproducing a dualism between repeatable and universal “abstract” discursive processes (commonly known as the ideal speech situation) and empirical uses of discourse. These critical points against Habermas are developed by focusing on six main areas: sentences and utterances; the lifeworld and background language; active versus passive understandings of language; validity claims; obligation and relevance in language; and dialectical universalism. (shrink)

This article shows how the ethical framing of the contemporary issue of modern slavery has evolved in UK construction, a sector in which there is a high risk of labor exploitation. It also examines how these framing dynamics have inhibited the emergence of a common framework of action to deal with the issue. We draw on both framing theory and the literature on the discursive construction of moral legitimacy. Our longitudinal analysis reveals that actors seeking to shape the debate bring (...) their own moral schemes to justify and construct the legitimacy of their frames. Actors cluster their views around five evolving frames: human rights issue (later shifting to hidden crime), moral issue, management issue (later shifting to human moral obligation), social justice issue, and decent work issue—which promote particular normative evaluations of what the issue is, who is responsible, and recommendations for action. Our study contributes to a dynamic and political understanding of the meaning making of modern slavery. We identify the antecedents and conditions that have forestalled the emergence of new patterns of action to tackle modern slavery in the UK construction sector thereby evidencing the effects of the interplay of morally competing frames on field-level change. (shrink)

In this article the authors1 approach material and symbolic violence through transdisciplinary readings of theoretical debates, fiction and empirical narratives. They make use of the concept of turning points which disrupt dichotomous and static categorizations of victim and survivor, and their association with passivity and agency respectively. In situations of violence, turning points represent temporality instead of timelessness, dialogism instead of monologism, multilayering rather than any fixed identity. The authors draw on the theorists Bakhtin and Certeau, whose work highlights the (...) significance of meaning-making between self and other. They analyse empirical and fictional narratives to understand the creation of dialogic spaces, a space that both subordinates and subverts. Pointing to the procedural nature of turning points within the everyday, the authors argue that women, despite the pain and trauma, are neither just a victim nor just a survivor in a violent relationship. (shrink)

Pragmatic sociology is often read as a reaction to and an alternative to Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. This article, in contrast, offers an assessment of pragmatic sociology in terms of its contribution to the theory of culture in general and its affinities with repertoire theory in particular. Whereas the tendency has been to conceive of repertoires as largely unstructured entities, pragmatic sociology has demonstrated a systematic interest in their internal contents and structure, which it has even expanded through its more recent (...) turn to historical and macro comparative analysis. In the process, however, pragmatic sociology has also been leaning towards a form of cultural sociology that actually challenges some major aspects of repertoire theory–thus also bringing into relief the dilemmas facing any attempt at further elaboration of what is now a growing strand of cultural theory. (shrink)