How Collectives Absorb their Members: Toward a Processual Model of Commitment, Attachment, and Embracement

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10

Abstract

In this article, we address two enduring sociological problems: the collapse of structural constraint into subjective motivation and the reduction of social integration to context-based encounters. We do this by formulating a theory of social absorption. Embedded in this theory is a process that accounts for macro-structural forces, meso-level collective arrangements, and micro-situated encounters, without folding any one level into another. In response to sociologists’ tendency to rely heavily upon “commitment” to capture this, we argue that commitment has been asked to do too much work across multiple levels simultaneously. We contend that what appears as commitment in much of the literature conflates three analytically distinct processes: commitment, attachment, and embracement. Our first intervention is to reframe Kanter’s commitment mechanisms as collective action-demands, which we refer to as induction, seduction, and extraction, through which organizations and moral orders structure the conditions of incorporation. We, then, show how attachment captures the process by which actors fuse motivations, loyalties, and identities to collectives. Finally, we draw from Goffman’s term embracement to outline the situational alignment between one’s virtual and actual self in encounters. Taken together, commitment, attachment, and embracement provide the tools necessary to explain how integration is produced across macro, meso, and micro levels through distinct but interacting processes. By unraveling these distinct proccesses, our theory treats cross-level misalignment, such as high commitment and low attachment, as theoretically productive, while providing a framework for linking moral orders, collective arrangements, and situational performances without privileging any one level of explanation.

Authors

• Colter J. Uscola, University of British Columbia

• Kate Feldstein, University of British Columbia

• Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia