Moral Authenticity and Collective Identity in Broad-Based Collective Action

• In Event: 3451 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Biography, Identity, and Social Bonds

Abstract

A growing literature at the intersection of social movements, organizations, and cultural sociology argues that cultural practices—ritualized interactions through which participants identify, elaborate, and potentially internalize shared understandings of who they are, what they want to do together, and why—are central to collective strategic action, especially in diverse settings. But the precise sociological mechanisms through which cultural practices become effective for social movement organizations are not well understood. What specific features of cultural practices determine their utility for producing compelling narratives, identities, boundaries, and styles that can support sustained action within a given organizational context? The present study begins to answer this question by examining cultural practices in ELIJAH, a racially, religiously, and socioeconomically diverse coalition of approximately 100 churches that works for social transformation across a wide range of issues, from payday lending reform to voting rights. I find that ELIJAH’s cultural practices are effective to the degree that they 1) affirm the importance of individual participants’ longstanding, community-embedded identities and interests, 2) discursively reconstruct these identities and interests relative to larger narratives of politics and social life, and 3) synthesize participants’ personal goals and preferences within a shared understanding of moral selfhood that can only be realized through collective strategic action. Bringing recent literature on ritual practice and collective identity to bear on the question of how social movements produce cultural strategically, this study suggests that the affirmation of personal moral authenticity selfhood is a key feature of the cultural practices that make diverse social movements effective.

Author

• Jack Delehanty, Clark University