Talking Your Self into It: How and When Accounts Shape Motivation for Action

Introduction

What are people doing when they talk about their motives? In everyday life, the commonsense answer is people are verbally expressing the psychological desires, thoughts, and intentions that move them to pursue particular courses of action. Yet within sociology, a line of influential scholars extending from Mills (1940) in the mid-twentieth century to Vaisey (2009) in the early twenty-first have encouraged sociologists to analyze actors’ motive talk not as data reflecting the underlying subjective states that drive action forward but as socio-rhetorical devices that seek to align actors’ past conduct with the normative or interpretive demands of the present situation (e.g., Goffman 1971; Mills 1940; Scott & Lyman 1968; Vaisey 2009). Many sociologists, in other words, have understood actors’ motive talk not in terms of the inner desires that move them to pursue particular ends but as post hoc accounts oriented toward justifying actions already undertaken.

While affirming several insights within this perspective, in this article, we challenge a priori assumptions about whether motive talk best reflects actors’ justifications or motivations for action, instead illustrating how accounts can migrate from justificatory to motivational status over time. While previous research has noted that actors’ post hoc accounts may be poor reflections of the subjective desires that initiated a course of action in the first instance, we demonstrate that such accounts can nevertheless play pivotal roles in explaining what sustains motivation for that same line of action over time. Combining hermeneutic perspectives on self-identity with pragmatist insights on the temporality of action, we show that accounts can function as hermeneutic hooks that interpretively link actors’ present actions with elements of their more temporally extended self-narratives, conjoining their practices in the here and now with a motivational project of identity exploration and development that extends far beyond the boundaries of the present moment.

We go on to apply this perspective to ethnographic case studies of actors’ involvements in two different careers of social action—religion and mixed martial arts (MMA), respectively—to empirically illustrate both how and when accounts worked to subjectively motivate people to continue pursuing their courses of action, especially in the face of initial feelings of ambivalence, ambiguity, or lack of desire. Through accounts, actions associated with religion and fighting became reinterpreted as significant plot points in actors’ ongoing life stories—namely, their understandings of who they were in the past, are in the present, and might become in the future. In interaction with others in their respective communities, religious and MMA practitioners talked their selves into the action, interpretively linking their religious and fighting practices to a deeply meaningful and motivational identity project.

We begin with a discussion of the sociological trend of analyzing subjects’ motive accounts as indices of the cultural constraints on action within a social situation, a line of thought and analysis that can be traced as far back as Mills (1940) but has also been incorporated into several other contemporary theoretical traditions. While noting the important insights of these perspectives, we also critique some problematic assumptions about the relationship (or lack thereof) between actors’ “external” motive accounts and their “internal” subjective motivations, ones that tend to foreclose alternative—and perhaps ultimately complementary—conceptualizations of the relationship between motive talk and subjective motivation. We go on to develop our conceptualization of how and when accounts come to influence motivation for action, foregrounding dynamics of self-interpretation and temporality overlooked in previous approaches. We then illustrate the explanatory value of this perspective through our ethnographic case studies, showing how—both in the pews and on the mats—accounts worked to motivate actors to continue pursuing their lines of action. We conclude with a discussion of our findings’ broader significance for ongoing conversations regarding the relationships among culture, action, and subjectivity.

Tracing sociological analyses of motive talk: from subjective “springs” to situational “strings”

When I look back, throughout my life, I was always searching for something real, you know, something with a solid foundation, with roots. And then I found [Eastern] Orthodoxy, the original Christian Church, and it was like, “Yeah, this is for me. This is the real deal. This is what I’ve been searching for all along.” (Corey, Eastern Orthodox catechumen)

We are the products of thousands of years of evolution. It took a long time to get bodies that can do this! [laughingly gesturing to the people grappling on the mat beside us, twisting and writhing against each other as they struggle to gain an advantage]. I can’t head back to that chair and desk. It would be insulting to my monkey ancestors. (Mark, ex-accountant, cage fighter)

What motivates people to commit themselves to a new and seemingly strange religious path or to persistently and enthusiastically engage in a violent sport that might get them seriously injured? In our respective fieldwork with Eastern Orthodox Christian converts and mixed martial artists in the contemporary United States, practitioners’ own discussions of these questions converged on a surprisingly similar theme. According to our research subjects, engaging in the action of religion or fighting was primarily motivated by a search for selfhood, a quest to discover who one is, was, and might become. In seeking out their local Orthodox churches and MMA gyms, our participants said they were also seeking out—and discovering—their very selves.

What are we to make of such accounts in explaining why people pursue particular lines of action? Several contemporary strands of sociological thought have urged caution in approaching actors’ accounts as offering insight into the subjective intentions that propel action forward. Instead, these traditions have argued actors’ verbal accounts are actually oriented toward—and so a better reflection of—the normative expectations for action existing within the external social milieu. Talk of motives, in other words, does not actually index motivation in the sense of a subjective desire or “drive” that moves action forward but instead points to how people must make sense of and justify actions already undertaken.

An important starting point for this particular perspective on subjects’ motive talk is the now classic paper by C. Wright Mills (1940), “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive.” Mills famously argued against a representational approach to language that would take motive talk as “referring to private states in individuals” (Mills 1940:904). Instead, Mills (1940:904) suggested, one should examine the socially constitutive functions of language: how motive language “coordin[ates] diverse actions” and thus helps consolidate social order. In other words, instead of treating motive talk as accurately reflecting the “subjective ‘springs’ of action” inhering within individuals, they should be conceptualized as social rhetorics people use to interpret, explain, and justify their actions to others. “Motives,” as Mills (1940:905) succinctly put it, “are words . . . they do not denote any elements ‘in’ individuals.” Instead, they function as “accepted justifications for present, future, or past programs or acts” (Mills 1940:907). As such, the researcher should not look to accounts for evidence of the psychological “springs” that propel individuals to action but instead look to accounts of motive as providing the rhetorical “strings” that tie peoples’ actions to the normative expectations of a socially delimited time and place (Mills 1949:910) and/or the “strategies of action” that actors use to make their conduct sensible to others (Mills 1940:907).

Mills’s (1940) original insights about the socially constitutive functions of language and his decoupling of motive talk from subjectivity were eventually developed by later sociological traditions. One well-established line of research originates from the sociology of accounts tradition pioneered by interactionists Scott and Lyman (1968). Within this line of work, researchers examine how actors use the language of motives to account for behavior that is deemed problematic by others. This has proved quite productive, as demonstrated by the numerous empirical studies and attempts at theoretical refinement published since (Blum and McHugh 1971; Blumstein 1974; Hopper 1993; Monaghan 2006; Nichols 1990; Orbuch 1997; Pryor 1996; Scully and Marolla 1984; Stokes and Hewitt 1976). Goffman (1971) also incorporated Scott and Lyman’s perspective into dramaturgical sociology, particularly in the analysis of “remedial interchanges,” namely, how actors use accounts of their motives to reposition the meaning of actions as socially acceptable, protecting themselves against a potentially “spoiled identity.” Like Mills before them, sociologists of accounts do not treat motive talk as reflecting the subjective intentions animating the action but as after-the-fact justifications that actors use to attempt to bridge the gap between untoward actions and situational expectations.

Following Garfinkel (1967), ethnomethodologists have examined the everyday techniques by which actors “observably organize their accounts of action” (Mulkay and Gilbert 1982:182)—in other words, how social actors make their actions intelligible to one another as instances of an ordered reality. Verbally accounting for actions by excusing or “remedying” them and imputing typical motives to oneself and others is one of the primary methods by which social actors constitute their everyday social realities (e.g., Barnes 2000; Schlegoff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Again, the analytic focus shifts away from analyzing actors’ talk for insight into the subjective reasons why an action is undertaken toward analyzing accounts as reflecting how the normative order of a particular social situation is maintained. Like Mills, ethnomethodologists encourage sociologists to understand actors’ accounts of why they did something as radically oriented toward the intersubjective demands for action that exist in the present situation. As Barnes (2000:2) puts it, “for all that it appears to refer to the internal states of individuals, voluntaristic discourse is actually the vehicle of human sociability, through which its users co-ordinate their actions and cognitions.”

The influence of this perspective on actors’ talk is also found within strands of contemporary cultural sociology that focus less attention on culture’s role in determining the ends of human action and more on its role in organizing the means (Frye 2012; Kaufman 2004; Vaisey 2009, 2010), or what Vaisey (2009) has termed cultural sociology’s motivation-justification split. Swidler-inspired repertoire or “toolkit” theories, for example, approach actors’ accounts not as reflections of their subjective desires but as cultural tools through which they develop and organize strategies of action. Swidler (2001) argues in her influential Talk of Love that what Americans in her study verbally expressed about love should not be analyzed as accurate reflections of motivations for why they involve themselves in romantic relationships. Instead, their accounts offer insight into the available cultural repertories through which they can justify, make sense of, and meaningfully act out—or opt out of—their relational commitments. Actors’ accounts of romantic love, Swidler (2001:127–28) argues, “correspond neither to personal experience nor to the observations people make of others they know. . . . Rather the love myth accurately describes the structural constraints of the institution of marriage.” Like the scholars previously described, Swidler analyzes subjects’ motive accounts for why they get or stay married as data on the demands of external, institutional factors, not actors’ internal desires and intentions.

More recently, Vaisey (2009) has developed an influential dual-process model of culture in action that attempts to put the question of motivation back at the center of cultural analysis. Vaisey brings together Bourdieu’s notion of habitus with cognitive psychologists’ distinctions between system one and system two cognition (e.g., Evans 2003; Haidt 2001; Kahneman 2011) to argue that motivations operate primarily at the level of deeply ingrained dispositions and automatic cognitive associations existing below the threshold of discourse and reflective consciousness. More specifically, Vaisey argues that subconscious cultural schemas of attraction and repulsion within habitus, or system one cognition, are what motivate people to behave in consistent ways across time and space, whereas consciously articulated motives operating at the level of discursive, or system two, cognition are generally after-the-fact justifications that are only loosely coupled to what subjectively drives actors to do what they do. While critical of theories of action that ignore the question of motivation altogether, Vaisey also treats actors’ own accounts of their motives as post hoc, socially acceptable rationalizations for action.

In sum, over the course of several decades and across multiple theoretical traditions (interactionism, ethnomethodology, dramaturgy, toolkit theory, dual-process theory, etc.), many sociologists have eschewed treating actors’ motives accounts as relevant data on what subjectively motivates action, opting instead for a perspective that analyzes them as rhetorical devices—vocabularies of motive, justifications, excuses, techniques of neutralization, remedial actions, strategies of action, and so on—aimed at aligning actions with the cultural, normative, and/or interactional requirements of the situation.

There are certainly good reasons for being skeptical of accounts as straightforward data on underlying motivations. Sociologists of accounts have rightly pointed out that when actors are asked about motivations influencing why they did something, they may come up with socially acceptable reasons that make sense in the moment of questioning but have little relationship to what actually motivated the action in the first instance, an insight backed by research on the sometimes unstable relationship between observed behavior at one point in time and self-reported attitudes at another (e.g., Beckford 1978; Jerolmack and Khan 2014; Martin 2010, 2011; Vaisey 2009). It is also the case that actors’ accounts are not purely individual but are influenced by the broader scripts and discourses existing within the wider culture. Actors’ behaviors are enabled and constrained by collective understandings of what counts as justifiable action (cf. Boltanski and Thevenot 2006), and talk about motives plays an important role in deciphering, legitimating, and negotiating what counts as such. And as the ethnomethodologists point out, actors’ accounts are not simply a representational medium to communicate internal states but can also be performative—namely, partially constitutive of action and the social contexts in which action occurs. Finally, as Vaisey (2009) notes, peoples’ motivations for acting may operate through habitual dispositions and automatic cognitive associations that are difficult if not impossible for them to consciously recognize and articulate.

Despite our appreciation of these insights, we depart from the aforementioned literature in two significant ways. First, we diverge from strong assumptions that motive accounts only provide sociologists data on the immediate social context and “do not denote any elements ‘in’ individuals” (Mills 1940:905). Or, in the more evocative language of Garfinkel (1963:190), “there is no reason to look under the skull, for nothing of interest is to be found there but brains.” We argue that such strong a priori assumptions lead sociologists to overlook how accounts can also be directed toward aligning actions with internal understandings of the self and how in turn these interpretive hooks can sharpen, redefine, and even construct new motivations over time. In the following, we argue that one does not have to take a strictly representational view of the relationship between motive accounts and motivations (i.e., Do they accurately reflect the previous motivations or not?) but can attend to the ways such accounts reconstitute motivations through ongoing processes of self-interpretation.

Second, even when accounts are inaccurate representations of actors’ initial motivations for embarking on a course of action, our cases show this is not necessarily reason to dismiss their value for explaining motivation in toto. Our research highlights the significance of accounts for sustaining motivation for action over time, particularly over the course of what sociologists have termed social careers or trajectories of becoming—namely, long-term, consistent lines of action in which actors develop a particular identity (e.g., Becker 1953; Becker and Strauss 1956; Benzecry 2009; Goffman 1959; Hughes 1958; Richardson 1978; Tavory 2016). We analyze a process in which initially ambivalent religious and martial arts practitioners would be offered motive accounts that made sense of their experiences by more established members of the sites, ones aimed at persuading them their new actions were very much “for and about them.” Although initially post hoc justifications, over time, these accounts became reworked and internalized by actors as part of their own self-interpretations. In each case, we document how and when accounts subjectively propelled action forward by closely linking actors’ practices to a meaningful and motivational project of self-development and self-discovery.

In the next section, we develop a theoretical perspective that more fully elaborates on this process, helping us makes sense of our empirical cases as well as the motivational significance of accounts more generally.

From Situational Strings to Hermeneutic Hooks: How and When Accounts Matter for Motivation

In what follows, we draw from hermeneutic theories of self-identity and pragmatist insights on action and experience to provide a conceptual framework for understanding how accounts shape motivation and when in a course of action they are most motivationally significant.

We redirect sociological focus from how motive talk aligns out-of-place actions with the normative demands of the situation to how it attempts to align them with actors’ own interpretations of self. On this point, we draw inspiration from hermeneutic scholars of identity (Giddens 1991; Mead 1934; Ricoeur 1988, 1992; Taylor 1985, 1989), theorists who assert that self-identity is constituted in ongoing acts of self-interpretation. Human beings, as Taylor (1985:45) phrases it, are “self-interpreting animals”—to possess an identity is to have on ongoing, reflexive interpretation of oneself, one that typically takes the form of a narrative. In the face of present action, such theorists argue, a primary way humans make sense of what they are doing is by interpretively placing—or “emplotting”—the action in relation to aspects of their personal pasts, presents, and perceived futures. This transforms the meaning of the action from an isolated event to a causally connected episode within a more temporally extended and personally relevant chain of meaning (Somers 1994; Wagner-Pacifici 2000). At the same time, emplotting new events into one’s autobiography can also alter identity as the integration of new kinds of actions and experiences into one’s story can reshape the meaning and significance of past events as well as future trajectories (Atkins 2010; Ricoeur 1988, (1992; Somers 1994). The content of actors’ self-understandings are thus in part constituted by “the capacity to keep a particular narrative going . . . [to] continually integrate events that occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self” (Giddens 199: 54).

We draw from but also extend this literature by arguing that motive accounts are key mechanisms through which such narrative integration occurs. More specifically, while research on accounts has largely looked at how they function as situational strings, we focus theoretical attention on how accounts may also serve as hermeneutic hooks that propose where a meaningful connection between a course of action and an actor’s life story can be found. Utilized as hooks, motive accounts introduce interpretive linkages between present actions and more temporally extended autobiographies, suggesting to actors that their current practices are in some way central to their ongoing understandings of who they were in the past, are in the present, and might become in the future. As we illustrate in the empirical sections in the following, while these accounts are often initially “cast” by others in interaction, actors may internalize and continue to develop these accounts as key aspects of their self-narratives.

We also follow hermeneutic scholars in their arguments that self-interpretations are deeply intertwined with subjective motivation as the desire for self-understanding can itself be a strong and influential driver of action (Giddens 1991; Ricoeur 1992; Taylor 1989; Trzebinski 1998). This is a claim supported by a robust literature in cognitive and social psychology, where scholars find peoples’ involvements in and commitments to particular courses of action are deeply motivated by their own self-concepts (see Gecas 1986, 1991; Hitlin and Elder 2007; Miles 2014; Miyamoto 1970; Oyserman 2007; Oyserman and Destin 2010; Quinn 1992). A central insight here is that when a line of action is understood as congruent with actors’ senses of self—as for and about them in some meaningful way—they become more invested in, animated by, and committed to it. Accounts, we argue, can be important mechanisms through which such congruence between identities and actions are interactively forged. In articulating a significant connection between actors’ practices and their self-narratives, we illustrate how accounts shaped motivation by suggesting that continuing to engage in the actions constituting religion or MMA was fulfilling or elaborating parts of their life stories in important ways. In other words, accounts motivated actions by imbuing them with “narrative possibilities” (Katz 1988:290), intimating that continuing to engage in the action was a logical, significant, even causally necessary next step or plot point in an actor’s life story (see also Mattingly 1994; Trzebinksi 1998).

This conceptualization of accounts also draws from pragmatist insights on motivation, action, and experience. Pragmatists understand motivation as a relational phenomenon, one arising from the interaction and resonance between (1) aspects of the social situation and (2) the sediments of past, present, and anticipated future experience individuals bring with them into that situation (Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Mead 1934; Norton 2019; Schutz 1967; Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). In important ways, this perspective shares with the aforementioned dual-process model the assumption that what motivates people to do something cannot be solely explained in terms of the present context as actors bring with them a personal history of experience based on previous socialization. However, while dual-process theorists highlight the importance of the automatic cognitive associations and subconscious dispositions—or habitus—actors bring into the social environment, pragmatists also emphasize the significance of actors’ consciously held and discursively articulable self-concepts (Dewey 1922; Gross 2008; Leschziner 2015; Mead 1934). We demonstrate how establishing a motivation-inducing hook between actors’ actions and self-interpretations is an active, collective accomplishment, one in which motive accounts play a pivotal role.

Also drawing from pragmatist insights, we pay close attention to how this self-interpretive process unfolds over time, allowing us to document not only how accounts work to sustain motivation but also pinpointing those instances when they appear to be most causally significant. We argue accounts are most motivationally significant during moments when actors experience ambivalence, ambiguity, and/or trepidation with regard to their present practices—namely, times when actors’ current actions conflict with, disrupt, or otherwise problematize their existing habits and dispositions. Following Bourdieu (1990:62), sociologists have pointed to how such moments of misalignment between existing dispositions and practices are motivationally problematic as they disrupt the “ontological complicity” that holds between habitus and social context—a condition Bourdieu terms hysteresis. Yet for pragmatists, the problematization of habitual action also provides actors with opportunities for reflective thought and the creative (re)construction of meanings, identities, and possibilities for action (Dewey 1922; Joas 1996). We demonstrate accounts can play a crucial role in this process of reinterpreting initially problematic experience, rekindling actors’ motivation by orienting attention away from the frustrations of the present moment and toward the more spatially and temporally expansive self-narrative in which the present action plays a supporting role (cf. Mische 2008). Accounts, to draw from the terminology of Dewey (1922), help construct new “ends-in-view,” encouraging actors to “reread” frustrating, painful, or dull actions in the present as necessary—even vitally important—components of a more meaningful, expansive project of identity development and self-discovery.

Research Settings and Methods

The analysis in this article is based on two separate ethnographic studies—an examination of religious conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity conducted by the first author and an exploration of the allure of training in mixed martial arts conducted by the second author.

Both studies were conducted in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, and the surrounding metropolitan region. The area was particularly suited to a study of religious conversion as it represented a diverse microcosm of Eastern Orthodoxy—and conversions to Orthodoxy—in the United States. At the time of research, the area was home to 16 Orthodox churches representing 8 of the 11 self-governing ethnic jurisdictions in the nation. For the majority of their time in the United States, Eastern Orthodox parishes were ethnically homogeneous enclaves characterized by the ethnonational identifications of Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants (Stokoe and Kishkovsky 1995). Over the past two decades, however, many Eastern Orthodox churches have become home to converts from different religious, spiritual, and even “unchurched” backgrounds.

The bulk of the data presented here comes from three parishes in which the first author conducted intensive fieldwork for 14 months in 2010–2011. The author selected these particular parishes because they were three of the most well known in the local Orthodox community for receiving and socializing converts and because each represented variation with regard to ethnic culture, ratio of converts to cradle Orthodox (those born and raised in the church), geographic location, and size.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is also one of the epicenters of MMA in the United States—more than 20 schools operate within a 45-minute drive of the city center, many with members competing in cage fights. Most are located in suburban strip malls or warehouses on the outer edge of urban sprawl. The rapid rise of such training sites followed the popularization of the full-combat sport first being introduced to the United States in 1993 by the inaugural Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC; Gentry 2002). Following this event, MMA went through accelerated periods of growth, controversy, regulation and rule change, and acceptance—with the UFC recently being sold for $4 billion (Merced 2016).

From 2007 to 2013, the second author trained at gyms ranging from the nationally known, to midsized businesses opened by entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize on the increasing popularity, to local schools opened by traditional martial artists, MMA fans, and rag-tag collectives learning to fight in converted garages and barns. The majority of the analysis in this article is based on immersion within two locations chosen for their contrasting approaches and range of clientele—one more structured and linked with traditional martial arts and the other offering a clearer rejection of traditional approaches and mythologies. In both sites, the vast majority of participants were enthusiastic amateurs, not paid professionals.

Both researchers began their respective projects independently but with a similar interest in why people were involved in and how they became socialized into these new practices and communities. Both also employed a form of “observant participation” (Wacquant 2011)—immersing themselves in their sites and participating in the practices of the field to analyze the processes and attendant experiences by which people became Orthodox Christians and MMA fighters. For example, the first author engaged in rituals such as liturgies, prayers, and lengthy periods of fasting, and the second author exchanged punches, kicks, and chokes with other members of the gym. While neither fully became members of the sites—the first author did not convert, and the second author continued to have research as a motivation for his time spent on the mats—both were able to draw on their participation to gain access to conversations and experiential aspects of these activities that would have otherwise been impossible to appreciate.

During the process of immersion, both authors became independently interested in the question of what motivated people in their sites to commit to these at once voluntary but also physically and psychologically demanding lines of action, crossing the threshold from curious newcomer to devoted enthusiast. The authors found little in these actors’ backgrounds or networks alone that consistently explained what motivated them to keep coming back to the action, week after (often grueling) week. For example, while those interested in Eastern Orthodoxy were mainly (though not exclusively) people with prior religious backgrounds, there were also substantial differences in belief, ritual, and experience between Eastern Orthodoxy and their former religious identifications, and potential converts did not share the salient ethnic backgrounds of the cradle members of their new religious communities. Similarly, while some of those who engaged in MMA had previous experience with organized athletics, the majority were of the highly educated, upper-middle, professional, and creative class—a set of class dispositions that generally discourages participation in violent combat sports (e.g., Bourdieu 1978). In addition, most people in these individuals’ existing social networks did not share an enthusiasm for these practices. Subjects talked about how engaging in Eastern Orthodox and MMA careers made them appear “strange,” “weird,” or “crazy” to significant others, including spouses, parents, coworkers, and friends. In short, there appeared just as many background factors discouraging continued participation in these communities as encouraging it.

In continuing to investigate this question in their fieldwork, both authors became aware of a process in which those who stuck with the practice would be regularly “talked into” the action. In both sites, actors would be offered various accounts that made sense of why they were involved in these new, seemingly strange practices and experiences, motive talk aimed at persuading them that these actions were very much for and about them. After discussing these similarities, the authors decided to combine these observations in an effort to investigate and theorize the processes by which accounts appeared to sustain motivation for action across such seemingly disparate cases.

Findings and Analysis

In the following sections, we utilize data from our respective field sites to demonstrate how and when accounts subjectively motivated actors to engage in Orthodox Christianity and mixed martial arts. While the content of these accounts differs in several respects, the processes by which talk about action at one point in space and time served to motivate action at another are strikingly similar. In the first section, we analyze accounts that connected present actions with events and identities from our subjects’ pasts, leading them to reinterpret engaging in religious and fighting actions as shedding new light on things both present and lacking in their previous lives. In the second, we look at accounts that connected present religious and fighting experiences with other actions in the present, leading our subjects to view their new pursuits as providing insight far beyond the pews or the mats. Finally, we document accounts that interpretively linked actors’ present religious and fighting actions to potential future states of being, suggesting to our subjects that continuation in the practice would lead to a more physically, morally, and/or spiritually advanced self. In each case, we demonstrate how and when accounts worked to hook actors’ experiences with religion and fighting to elements of their biographies, helping to subjectively propel action forward by indexing their practices to a motivational project of self-understanding and identity (re)construction. For reasons of analytic depth as well as constrained space, we focus the bulk of our analysis on representative cases from each site.

Discussion and Conclusion

Taking inspiration from hermeneutic perspectives on self-identity as well as pragmatist conceptualizations of the temporality of action and experience, we have argued accounts significantly influence motivation when they interpretively connect or hook actors’ present actions with aspects of their self-narratives—namely, their past, present, and/or future self-understandings. Drawing on ethnographic case studies of actors’ involvements in Eastern Orthodoxy and mixed martial arts, we demonstrated common processes by which accounts helped integrate actors’ fighting and religious actions into highly motivational projects of self-development and self-discovery. While decades of previous sociological scholarship on motive talk has placed analytic focus on how actors’ accounts index the normative constraints of social contexts as opposed to subjective motivations, our perspective has aimed to highlight how this is a false dichotomy. Accounts can be invaluable for explaining what sustains motivation for a course of action, particularly in the face of feelings of ambivalence, doubt, or routinization.

As scholars such as Campbell (1996), Vaisey (2009, 2010), and Smith (2015) have noted, longstanding sociological debates about the relationship between accounts and motivation are also deeply embedded within and reflective of different theoretical assumptions about how culture in general works to shape human subjectivity and action. With this in mind, we suggest how our findings speak to—and may ultimately help bridge—two interrelated theoretical divides in cultural sociology: (1) the role of automatic versus discursive cognition in the culture-action relationship and (2) the means/ends or justification/motivation split in contemporary cultural sociology.

This research provides an important corrective and complement to sociological theories of action that have emphasized automatic cognitive associations and nondiscursive dispositions when it comes to explaining what subjectively organizes and motivates action (e.g., Bourdieu 1990; Martin 2010, 2011; Vaisey 2008, 2009; Vaisey and Lizardo 2010). Like us, dual-process theorists have been critical of sociological approaches that abandon the question of motivation altogether. However, they tend to share the assumption that actors’ motive accounts are post hoc rationalizations for action that are only loosely coupled—if at all—to the underlying desires and intentions that propel action forward.

While we agree with these theorists that action is often strongly motivated by subconscious habits and cognitive schemas resistant to discursive articulation, the one-to-one association of culture’s motivational role with habitus/automatic cognition ultimately hinders investigation into how discursive consciousness and accounts also play important (and ultimately complementary) motivational roles. Our findings suggest accounts are most significant for influencing motivation at precisely those times when significant aspects of actors’ habitual dispositions/automatic cognitive processes become problematized. Our research also suggests such moments of problematization are relatively common, occurring at several stages within the social career. Upon moments of entry into a new field of practice, for example, many people may initially approach the action with feelings of ambivalence and trepidation, a mixture of both curiosity/attraction and wariness/repulsion. After initial entry and involvement, actors encounter plenty of moments of discomfort and displacement as old habits and cognitive associations are reconstructed in line with the demands of the new practice, whether that reconstructive process involves prolonged periods of fasting, fisticuffs, or something else entirely. These moments are usually what initiate the development of accounts and the concomitant process of identity exploration and reconstruction. The excitement generated by this self-interpretive process may be strong enough to motivate actors to sustain lines of action even in the face of dispositional ambivalence. Indeed, such accounts and the anticipation of future moments of self-discovery may carry an actor through periods of dispositional misalignment until they develop and solidify the elements of their habitus that are out of place.

However, our research also highlights there are instances where even developing the requisite habitus may not always in and of itself be enough to sustain motivation. Previous research has shown prolonged habituation into a new set of activities may actually lead to periods of decreased motivation as actors burn out and lose the desire that led them to engage in the action (see Tavory and Winchester 2012). Indeed, we found instances where seasoned and well-habituated members had to be talked into the action—namely, provided with accounts for why they should desire to practice the same prayer rule or training routine they had been doing for months or even years on end. New accounts added new layers of meaning to the “same old” action, encouraging even old-timers that there was still something in it for (and about) them. In sum, our research suggests accounts become invaluable for sociological explanations of motivation at precisely those moments in time when it is phenomenologically weak, unclear, and ambiguous—namely, when actors are trying to understand and work through their own muddied and muddled desires for sustaining a course of action.

Conversely, while dispositional theories of action can be criticized for not taking the narrative dimension of subjectivity into full account, hermeneutic theorists of the self can in turn be critiqued for assuming actors’ self-interpretations matter for what they do but not being sufficiently concerned with how and when. This research also extends hermeneutic perspectives on subjectivity by highlighting the intricate sequencing of narrative selves and social actions, drawing attention to when narrative self-understandings matter for sustaining a course of action and how these understandings are solicited and even in part transformed through motive accounts.

This article also speaks to what various scholars have highlighted as a means/ends or justification/motivation split within parts of contemporary cultural sociology (Friedland and Mohr 2004; Frye 2012; Kaufman 2004; Vaisey 2009, 2010). While earlier, Parsonian theories conceptualized culture as shaping action by instilling deeply internalized values that motivate actors to pursue particular ends, theories following the more contemporary “cultural turn” in American sociology have largely replaced this view with one that sees culture as providing the publicly available, symbolic means through which actors make sense of and justify their actions (most notably in Swidler-inspired repertoire or toolkit approaches). This turn toward “culture as means” offers an important criticism of models that view culture strictly in terms of internalized values and motivations. However, simply reversing the dualism evacuates questions of subjectivity from cultural analysis and leaves the question of what motivates people to pursue, commit to, and stick with lines of action vague and underdetermined (Kaufman 2004; Vaisey 2008).

While Vaisey’s (2009) previously mentioned dual-process model attempts to bridge this division by grounding culture’s motivational and justificatory roles within two different cognitive systems, our research suggests—in line with pragmatist insights (Dewey 1922; Frye 2012; Whitford 2002)—rejecting a stark dichotomy between justifications/means versus motivation/ends is a more tenable way forward. Dewey (1922) claimed there was no strong division between ends and means and that the two were in fact reciprocally related. Within a particular course of action, what was initially a means for action at time one can quickly become an end of one’s action at time two, which then can act as a means for further action at time three, and so on. Post hoc justifications for an action undertaken at one point in time, in other words, can transform into sincere motivations for undertaking that same action at another. In our cases, after-the-fact accounts of why actors were engaging in the action began as justifications that were likely only loosely coupled with what was initially motivating the action, as traditional theorists of accounts would predict. But these initial ex post facto justifications were just the start of a more temporally extended interpretive process of linking the new actions and experiences with existing self-understandings. As actors began to identify new religious or martial arts practices as part of a larger narrative of self-discovery and self-improvement, what were once “disconnected” justifications or accounts became constitutive of motivations for further action.

A final general point here is while action and commentary on action may appear disjointed if we only attend to a very short sequence of (inter)action, if we take a longer view, we may find action and accounts can become tightly woven together into temporally extended social career trajectories. Our research found it was precisely the work of accounting for the practices comprising Eastern Orthodoxy and MMA training that made them about more than prayers and fasts or roundkicks and kneebars. While such embodied actions and experiences were central to each social career, these aspects alone did not constitute the entirety of their cultural form or meaning. Motive accounts extended and expanded the meaning of a rumbling stomach or a bruised rib into new cultural terrain—namely, it’s not only about fasts or fists; it’s also about your life and who you are. While sociologists have sometimes been dismissive of reflexive self-concepts and self-narratives as so many “biographical illusions” (Bourdieu 2000), we argue attending to how actors interpret their actions as implicated in their own self-narratives and life “projects” (Mische 2009; Schutz 1967) is vitally important for explaining what sustains motivation within particular career trajectories.

This study also opens avenues for further research. While we have analyzed cases of religious and sporting careers specifically here, we hope our more general claims about how and when accounts influence motivation will be usefully applied to (and evaluated against) empirical research on other social careers, for example, marriage, parenthood, professions and occupations, criminality, schooling, military service, physical and/or psychological rehabilitation, and so on. While habituated dispositions, routines, and normative expectations certainly propel action forward in many moments within such careers, there are also likely important instances where habits and expectations become problematized and where people reflect on and question their own motivations for continuing on (with that same relationship, that half-finished book manuscript, that next month of therapy sessions, etc.). The temporal patterning of these moments, the role accounts may play in motivating actors to move beyond them, and the kinds of self-narratives that emerge from these interactions are fruitful areas for future comparative inquiry.

Additionally, while we have focused on processes by which accounts successfully motivated actors to continue with their practices, future scholarship is needed on the converse question—when do accounts fail to do this work? This research suggests two important factors likely to contribute to such failure: (1) the contents of the motive accounts developed within a given community do not resonate with elements of an actor’s self-narrative and/or (2) the otherwise resonant accounts are not deployed at the right moments within the actor’s career trajectory (particularly during those times when actors face ambivalence, discomfort, frustration, or some other problematization of their current course of conduct). Future sociologists could develop more carefully controlled comparative studies of stayers and leavers within a given social career, more rigorously testing how, when, and to what extent these (and other) factors influence the likelihood accounts will or will not sustain a course of action.

Future research could also explore whether some accounts contribute to motivation for exiting a particular career trajectory. While our case studies attend to the motivational significance of accounts for sustaining a line of action, it stands to reason that accounts may also play an important role in persuading actors to opt out and/or choose alternative careers. Once embedded within a particular social career and community, do actors hear competing accounts—perhaps from family members, friends, or peers outside of the community of practice—which suggest that perhaps another career would in reality be more fulfilling, more in line with who they were, are, and wish to become? Is the current commitment cast as “just a phase” or perhaps a stepping-stone to a different social career path? And how and when might such competing accounts motivate actors to leave one line of action and embark on another? Answers to such questions would stand to make significant contributions not only to understanding motive talk but also role exit (e.g., Ebaugh 1988).

Ultimately, we hope this research serves as encouragement for sociologists to reconsider the motivational significance of accounts, particularly as they pertain to how we understand what moves social actors to keep coming back to the action.