Abstract
Study of stories and storytelling in social movements can contribute to our understanding of recruitment that takes place outside formal movement organizations; social movement organizations' ability to withstand strategic setbacks; and movements' impacts on mainstream politics. This paper draws on several cases to illuminate the yields of such study and to provide alternatives to the overbroad, uncritical, and astructural understandings of narrative evident in some recent writings. It also urges attention to the role of literary devices in sociological analyses of collective action.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Alinsky, S. (1971). Rules for radicals. New York: Random House.
Apter, D.E. (1985). The new mytho/logics and the specter of superfluous man. Social research, 52(2), 269-307.
Ashe, M. (1989). Zig-Zag stitching and the seamless web: Thoughts on reproduction and the law. Nova Law Review 13, 355-383.
Babb, S. (1996). 'A true American system of finance': Frame resonance in the U.S. labor movement, 1866–1886. American Sociological Review, 61, 1033-1052.
Bacon, D.C., Davidson, R. H., and Keller, M. (1995). Encyclopedia of the United States Congress. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Benford, R. (1993a). 'You could be the hundredth monkey': Collective action frames and vocabularies of motive within the nuclear disarmament movement. Sociological Quarterly, 34(2), 195-216.
Benford, R. (1993b). Frame disputes within the nuclear disarmament movement. Social Forces, 71(3), 677-701.
Benford, R. and Hunt, S. (1992). Dramaturgy and social movements: The social construction and communication of power. Sociological Inquiry, 62, 36-55.
Bessette, J. M. (1994). The mild voice of reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bodnar, J. (1992). Remaking America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Carr, D. (1997). Narrative and the real world: An argument for continuity. In L.P. Hinchman and S.K. Hinchman (Eds.), Memory, identity, community: The idea of narrative in the human sciences (pp. 7-25). Albany: State University of New York.
Carson, C. (1981). In Struggle: SNCC and the Black awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Carson, C. (Ed.) 1990. The Student Voice. Westport: Meckler.
Chafe, W. H. (1980). Civilities and civil rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black struggle for freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clay, W. L. (1992). Just permanent interests: Black Americans in Congress, 1870–1991. New York: Amistad.
Delgado, R. (1989). Storytelling for oppositionists and others: A plea for narrative. Michigan Law Review, 87, 2411-2441.
Denzin, N. (1987). The alcoholic self. Philadelphia: Temple.
Evans, J. (1997). Multi-organizational fields and social movement organization frame content: The religious pro-choice movement. Sociological Inquiry, 67(4), 451-470.
Evans, S., and H. Boyte, 1986. Free spaces: The sources of democratic change in America. New York: Harper and Row.
Ewick, P., and S. Silbey (1995). Subversive stories and hegemonic tales: Toward a sociology of narrative. Law and Society Review, 29(2), 197-226.
Fine, G.A. (1995). Public narration and group culture: Discerning discourse in social movements. In H. Johnston and B. Klandermans (Eds.), Social movements and culture (pp. 127-143). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Franzosi, R. (1997). Mobilization and counter-mobilization processes: From the “red years” (1919–1920) to the ‘black years” (1921–1922) in Italy. Theory and Society, 26, 275-304.
Gamson, W. A. (1988). Political discourse and collective action. International Social Movement Research, 1, 219-244.
Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gergen, K. J., and M. M. Gergen (1997). Narratives of the self. In L. P. Hinchman and S. K. Hinchman (Eds.), Memory, identity, community: The idea of narrative in the human sciences (pp. 161-184). Albany: State University of New York.
Gerhards, J., and D. Rucht (1992). Mesomobilization: Organizing and framing in two protest campaigns in West Germany. American Journal of Sociology, 98, 555-595.
Ginsburg, F. D. (1989). Contested lives: The abortion debate in an American community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Greenblatt, S. (1983). Murdering peasants: Status, genre, and the representation of rebellion. Representations, 1, 1-29.
Hart, J. (1992). Cracking the code: Narrative and political mobilization in the Greek resistance. Social Science History, 16(4), 630-668.
Hinchman, L. P., and S. K. Hinchman (1997). Memory, identity, community: The idea of narrative in the human sciences. Albany: State University of New York.
Hirsch, E. L. (1990a). Sacrifice for the cause: Group processes, recruitment, and commitment in a student social movement. American Sociological Review, 55, 243-255.
Hirsch, E. L. (1990b). Urban revolt: Ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Horowitz, D. (1996). Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor union radicalism and feminism in Cold War America. American Quarterly, 48(1), 1-42.
Hunt, S. A. and R. D. Benford (1994). Identity talk in the peace and justice movements. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22(4), 488-517.
Iser, W. (1972). The reading process: A phenomenological approach. New Literary History, 3(2), 279-299.
Jenkins, J. C., and Perrow, C. (1977). Insurgency of the powerless: Farm worker movements (1946–1972). American Sociological Review, 42, 249-268.
Johnston, H. (1991). Tales of nationalism: Catalonia, 1939–1979. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Johnston, H. (1996). Mobilization and structure of opposition in repressive states. Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings.
Kammen, M. (1991). Mystic chords of memory: The transformation of tradition in American culture. New York: Knopf.
Killian, L. M. (1984). Organization, rationality and spontaneity in the civil rights movement. American Sociological Review, 49, 770-783.
King, K. (1986). The situation of lesbianism as feminism's magic sign: Contests for meaning and the U.S. women's movement, 1968–1972. Communication, 9, 65-91.
Klandermans, B. (1988). The formation and mobilization of consensus. International Social Movement Research, 1, 173-197.
Klandermans, B. (1992). The social construction of protest and multiorganizational fields. In A. D. Morris and C. M. Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (pp. 77-103). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Klandermans, B. (1997). The social psychology of protest. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kohl, H. (1995). Should we burn Babar? Essays on children's literature and the power of stories. New York: New Press
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Mandler, J. (1984). Stories, scripts, and scenes: Aspects of a schema theory. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Marable, M. (1995). Beyond Black and White: Transforming African American politics. London: Verso.
McAdam, D. (1982). Political process and the development of black insurgency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McAdam, D. (1996). Conceptual origins, current problems, future directions. In D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald, Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures and cultural framings (pp. 23-40). New York: Cambridge University Press.
McAdam, D., McCarthy, J. D., and Zald, M. N. (1996). Introduction: Opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framing processes—toward a synthetic, comparative perspective on social movements. In D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures and cultural framings (pp. 1-20). New York: Cambridge University Press.
McDew, C. (1967). Spiritual and moral aspects of the student nonviolent struggle in the South. In M. Cohen and D. Hale (Eds.), The new student left (pp. 51-57). Boston: Beacon.
Mendel-Reyes, M. (1995). Reclaiming democracy: The Sixties in politics and memory. New York: Routledge.
Merelman, R. M. (1992). Challenge and resistance: Two cases of cultural conflict in the United States, in Merelman (Ed.), Language, symbolism, and politics. Boulder: Westview.
Merelman, R. M. (1995). Representing Black culture. New York: Routledge.
Michotte, A. E. (1963). The perception of causality (trans. T. R. R. Miles). London: Methuen.
Miller, J. H. (1990). Narrative. In F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin (Eds.), Critical terms for literary study (pp. 66-79) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review, 5, 904-913.
Mink, L. (1974). History and fiction as modes of comprehension. In R. Cohen (Ed.), New directions in literary history (pp. 107-124). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Morris, A. (1984). The origins of the civil rights movement: Black communities organizing for change. New York: Free Press.
Oberschall, A. (1989). The 1960 sit-ins: Protest diffusion and movement take-off. Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, 11, 31-53.
Olick, J., and J. Robbins (1998). Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105-140.
Orbuch, T. L. (1997). People's accounts count: The sociology of accounts. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 455-478.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany: State University of New York.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1991). Narrative and self-concept. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1(2&3), 135-153.
Polletta, F. (1998a). “It was like a fever...”: Narrative and identity in social protest. Social Problems, 45(2), 137-159.
Polletta, F. (1998b). Legacies and liabilities of an insurgent past: Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. on the House and Senate floors. Social Science History, 22(4).
Powledge, F. (1991). Free at last? The civil rights movement and the people who made it. New York: Harper Collins.
Reed, A. (1986). The Jesse Jackson phenomenon. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Richardson, L. (1990). Narrative and sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19, 115-125.
Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Rogers, K. L. (1993). Righteous lives: Narratives of the New Orleans civil rights movement. New York: New York University Press.
Sarbin, T. (Ed.). (1986). Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct. New York: Praeger.
Scholes, R., and R. Kellogg (1966). The nature of narrative. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, S. (1996). Dead work: The construction and reconstruction of the Harlan Miners Memorial. Qualitative Sociology, 19(3), 365-393.
Sewell, W., Jr. (1992). Introduction: narratives and social identities. Social Science History, 16(3), 479-488.
Shapiro, M. (1985–6). Metaphor in the philosophy of the social sciences. Cultural Critique, Winter, 191-214.
Smith, R. C. (1996). We have no leaders. Albany: State University of New York.
Snow, D. A., and R. D. Benford (1988). Ideology, frame resonance and participant mobilization. International Social Movement Research, 1, 197-217.
Snow, D. A., and R. D. Benford (1992). Master frames and cycles of protest. In A.D. Morris and C.M. Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (pp. 133-155). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Somers, M. (1992). Narrativity, narrative identity, and social action: Rethinking English working-class formation. Social Science History, 16(4), 591-629.
Somers, M. (1994). The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach. Theory and Society, 23, 605-649.
Steinberg, M. (1996). 'The labour of the country is the wealth of the country': Class identity, consciousness, and the role of discourse in the making of the English working class. International Labor and Working-Class History, 49, 1-25.
Steinberg, M. (Forthcoming). Tilting the frame: Considerations on collective action framing from the discursive turn. Theory and Society.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers Microfilm, 1959–1972 (1982). Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corporation of America.
Swain, C. M. (1993). Black faces, Black interests. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Tarrow, S. (1994). Power in movement: Social movements, collective action and politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, V. (1989). Social movement continuity: The women's movement in abeyance. American Sociological Review, 54(5), 761-775.
Taylor, V., and Whittier, N. E. (1992). Collective identity in social movement communities: Lesbian feminist mobilization. In A. D. Morris and C. M. Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 104-129). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Tetreault, M. (1993). Civil society in Kuwait: Protected spaces and women's rights. Middle East Journal, 47(2), 275-291.
Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Tilly, C. (1998). The trouble with stories. In R. Aminzade and B. Pescosolido (Eds.), Teaching for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Pine Forge Press.
Voss, K. (1996a). The collapse of a social movement: The interplay of mobilizing structures, framing, and political opportunities in the Knights of Labor. In D. McAdam, J.D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements (pp. 227-258). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Voss, K. (1996b). Defeat ‘frames’ and solidarity: Researching the impact of social movement culture. Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting.
Walzer, M. (1960). A cup of coffee and a seat. Dissent, 7, 111-120.
Weschler, L. (1982). The passion of Poland: From Solidarity through the state of war. New York: Pantheon Books.
White, H. (1980). The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry, 7(1), 5-27.
White, J. B. (1984). When words lose their meaning: Constitutions and reconstitutions of language, character, and community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Williams, G. (1997). The genesis of chronic illness: Narrative reconstruction. In L. P. Hinchman and S. K. Hinchman (Eds.), Memory, identity, community (pp. 185-212). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Williams, G. I., and Williams, R. H. (1995). “All we want is equality”: Rhetorical framing in the fathers' rights movement. In J. Best (Ed.), Images of Issues: Typifying contemporary social problems, 2nd edition (pp. 191-212). New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Zerubavel, E. (1996). Social memories. Qualitative Sociology, 19, 283-300.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Polletta, F. Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements. Qualitative Sociology 21, 419–446 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023332410633
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023332410633