The Moral Economy of Activism : Sustaining Participation Through Emotional Debt

• In Event: Politics, Social Movements, and Emotions

Abstract

Traditional explanations for sustained participation in social movements and activism heavily relied on positive affective ties, such as a sense of belonging, friendship, joy, and trust. But what about negative emotions? Research in social psychological and organizational studies tells us that negative emotions, especially guilt, are powerful motivators for action; in fact, organizations may deliberately elicit guilt to shape members’ actions in their interest. The puzzle then becomes not just how members persist, but how organizations are harvesting guilt to extract labor from it. Accordingly, I ask: (1) How does organizational structure systematically create emotional debt? (2) Once emotional debt is established, how does guilt sustain commitment? (3) At what point does the emotional debt cease to be effective and lead to organizational bankruptcy? Anchoring on interdisciplinary insights as well as Hochschild’s notion of mental-emotional ledger, I propose a new concept of emotional debt that captures the mechanism of sustained commitment through organizational leveraging of guilt. Drawing on 28 months of ethnographic observation at CALPIRG, a Californian statewide grassroots organization, along with 48 interviews with its members, I argue that social change organizations operating under a lack of resources sustain participation by systematically generating guilt and asking people to compensate for it through additional labor. Specifically, I show that (1) guilt is a powerful motivator of both proactive and reactive commitment; (2) organizations instigate guilt by being “greedy” and creating an irreconcilable gap between expectations and the actual capacity of labor; and (3) emotional debt ceases to be effective as the debt-serving labor crowds out affective ties and leads to exits. This study has implications for understanding retention and institutionalization of emotions, and contributes to the literature on social movement, political participation, emotional labor, and control.
Keywords: Guilt, Sustained Participation, Social Ties, Non-profit organization, Greedy Institutions

Author

• Yeryeng Choi, University of California-Irvine