The doors that culture opened: Parallels between social movement studies and social psychology

Historical Developments

Culture was not always so obvious or admired as it is today, and generations of scholars blamed it for all sorts of bad impacts on politics. To 19th-century liberals, it was associated with reactionary traditions and communities. For Marxists it contributed to the distortions of ideology as opposed to the supposed truths of science. Because it was a central strand in nationalism and the fascism that emerged out of nationalism, culture was discredited for a generation of political analysts after 1945 (Jasper, 2005). For Neil Smelser (1962), it short-circuited logical thought, leading social movements to scapegoat the wrong targets. In the absence of a robust cultural vocabulary, theorists often turned to psychoanalysis to explain meaning, for instance attributing participation in social movements to efforts to resolve Oedipal complexes (Smelser, 1968).

Grievance theories of the 1950s and 1960s focused their causal attention on psychology, assuming that aggregate individual motivations would lead to collective action in unproblematic fashion. In addition, the psychology itself was insufficiently social or interactive: insufficiently cultural. At most, the psyche and its neuroses arose from children’s interactions with parents, in Freudian traditions, but then lodged there throughout adulthood. What was missing was social psychology: individual pathologies and inner dynamics failed to capture the social (and normal) nature of culture and knowledge (Jasper, 2004).

When the modern study of social movements was born in the late 1960s, it was too structurally oriented to include much culture. For Charles Tilly (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001, p. 57), cultural approaches were a form of phenomenology: untestable, unmeasurable, and unscientific. Or culture consisted of grievances, always there and so of little explanatory interest (Jenkins & Perrow, 1977, p. 251; McCarthy & Zald, 1977, p. 1215). More sympathetic structuralists saw culture as a resource, or as a discursive opportunity (Koopmans & Olzak, 2004), following the structural root metaphors then fashionable but hardly encouraging extensive attention to cultural meanings. In reacting against the psychologism of the grievance generation, the structuralists largely ignored or dismissed the realm of meanings. Because they viewed protestors as narrowly rational, protest motivations were thought to be straightforward and instrumental. When these researchers did eventually include cultural meanings, they preferred public, visible forms such as discourse, frames, and rhetoric over anything that occurred in the minds of individuals (Pinard, 2011).

In France, Alain Touraine (1981) paid more attention to cultural meanings, in part because of his theory of postindustrial or knowledge societies in which the main conflicts are over symbols, knowledge, and other cultural products instead of the material products of the industrial sector. Even though cultural dynamics were often subordinate to Touraine’s theory of history, his empirical investigations uncovered struggles over the meaning of the group, its opponents, and the stakes of each conflict. Packaged in the concept of “new social movements,” especially after 1968, Touraine’s research suggested that many movements aim at cultural change rather than state policy or revolution (even though, critics observed, such cultural movements are not so new; Calhoun, 1993).

In the United States, culture appeared in scholarship on social movements in the guise of frames and framing processes, especially as promulgated by David Snow. Examining a concrete type of interaction, Snow et al. (1986) offered a number of processes by which activists could recruit people in face-to-face settings (frame bridging, amplification, extensions, and transformations). Potential participants come—either quickly or gradually—to see the movement’s issues as impinging on their own basic life concerns. But hundreds of scholars have deployed the concept in a more static fashion, finding frames in the form of bundles of meanings through content analysis instead of watching movement players engage one another (as Benford [1997] complained). Frames either resonate with audiences or they do not, and resonance remains largely unexplained. William Gamson, who had also pioneered the concept of frames, later felt the need to insist that frames are part of action streams, doing little by themselves (Ryan & Gamson, 2006).

In the mid-1990s, many scholars sought to pull together cultural insights into a new vision of social movements. Melucci (1996) placed collective identity at the core of movements. As a social psychologist, Klandermans (1997) paid more attention to motivation and interpersonal dynamics, essentially working parallel to a cultural approach without relying on the term culture. I took a more eclectic approach, drawing insights into cultural processes and products from anyplace I could, and seeing cognition, morality, and emotions as equal parts of culture (Jasper, 1997, 2007). From then on, no scholar of social movements could ignore cultural meanings; even structuralists jumped on the bandwagon (Kurzman, 2004). (As part of the same cultural turn, cultural psychology emerged in roughly the same period [Smith, Fischer, Vignoles, & Bond, 2013].)

A cultural view filled in many existing findings and correlations in social movement studies by specifying the psychological mechanisms at work beneath them. For instance, the constraints of biographical unavailability—a job with regular hours, children to feed—must be interpreted as preventing participation; they do not operate as automatic, generic constraints. Political opportunity structures are more subjective than objective (Goodwin & Jasper, 2004; Kurzman, 1996). Networks are not mechanical circuits but interactive opportunities based on emotional bonds such as trust. State repression is not simply an increase in the costs and risks of protest, but an action that can be evaluated morally, sometimes leading to more mobilization rather than less. Scholars thus began to recognize intention and interpretation beneath the structures, opening the way for dialogue between social movement scholars and social psychologists.

The Many Carriers of Cultural Meanings

Cultural meanings take many forms. Some (more often the province of psychology) are inside our heads and bodies, in the form of memories, muscular tensions, languages, motivations, and capacities to interpret; others (more often the province of social movement studies) are embodied in the external world of books, speeches, posters, buildings, dancing, and musical recordings. Debates and misunderstandings still occur over how these two are related to each other (Polletta, 2004). Some carriers are metaphorical—frames, narratives, identities—while others are physical, such as paint on a canvas, ink on a page, waves transmitted through the air, or pixels on a screen.

Culture appeared from time to time even in the structural era of social movement studies. “Suddenly imposed grievances” were thought to play a special mobilizing role (Walsh, 1981). “Cognitive liberation” occurred when potential insurgents calculated that they had a chance of success (McAdam, 1982), overcoming the “cognitive encumbrance” that told them they did not (Voss, 1993). Then, as we saw, frames were a major opening to the recognition that cultural understandings can make a difference to outcomes. In these cases, culture was largely restricted to recruitment rather than ongoing processes such as decision-making or outcomes. At the same time, scholars such as Gitlin (1980) demonstrated the influence of the media, not only on how the public responded to movements but also on how the movements understood themselves and on leader dynamics.

In the 1990s, social movement scholars began to favor the concept of collective identity as a way to understand the cultural dimensions of social movements, partly reflecting the growth of gay and lesbian rights movements out of the shambles of the women’s movement (Taylor & Whittier, 1992). Shared structural positions were thought to be necessary although not sufficient for the emergence of collective identities, although we can now see that collective identities can form around tactics, organizations, and other voluntary affiliations too. If collective identities can be politicized, they provide a crucial link between motivations and actions (Klandermans, 2014; Simon & Klandermans, 2001; for a meta-analysis see van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008).

At the end of the 1990s, narrative took off as a means for understanding how meanings and emotions are packaged and transmitted. Although some approaches reflected the influence of French structuralism, showing how structured the narrative codes are, others examined storytelling in social settings in a way that respected their rhetorical impacts on audiences and interactions between storytellers and audiences. Narratives often provide the dynamic thrust of frames through a sense of inevitable or urgent movement toward a better future, and they usually offer a succinct moral lesson (Polletta, 2006).

One central ingredient in narratives revolves around the characters who actually do things; they provide the models for how to act well or poorly, including models for prospective activists. The construction of characters—especially the triad of victim–villain–hero—has recently been analyzed. Specifically, protestors must find victims to arouse sympathy, villains to stimulate outrage, and sometimes heroes (themselves) who can set things right again (Jasper, Young, & Zuern, 2017). We know not only what to think, but especially how to feel, about each character. Even though these traditional characters from epic and myth have disappeared from highbrow fiction, they are alive and well in political rhetoric. We no longer believe in semidivine heroes like Herakles and Achilles, but “everyman” heroes, often groups, still intervene to fix problems. Moreover, there has been a vast expansion of victims in the construction of social problems and in social movements to redress them (Fassin & Rechtman, 2007).

The politics of blame, so crucial for suggesting political solutions to social problems, revolves around victims and villains: without a victim there is no problem; without a villain there is little redress. The negative emotions aroused by villains are a crucial motivation to action, perhaps even stronger than the compassion felt for victims. (The two are correlated: the more innocent and sympathetic the victim, the nastier the villain, and vice versa; Olesen, 2013.)

Collective memory studies followed a parallel trajectory as part of the cultural turn, although often more focused on the kinds of monuments, buildings, and other structures that powerful players construct. But our understanding of the past is embodied in many artifacts and figures, from founding heroes and suffering victims to landscape paintings and visual caricatures, to conversion stories and other textual references, to song lyrics and poems. Carriers of historical meanings are the same as carriers of any cultural meanings, and can be understood with the same tools. Movements try to control broad historical metanarratives, but also their own stories, and especially stories about past conflicts and their outcomes (Doerr, 2014). The concept of “political generations,” marked by the historical events of their youth, continues to inspire research (Corning & Schuman, 2015; Giugni & Grasso, 2016; Pagis, 2014). Of the many arenas in which protestors engage other strategic players, the final one is usually that of writing the history of those struggles (Owens, 2009; Ross, 2002). Collective memory matters as a resource for future politics (Fine, 2001).

Scholars have paid attention to other carriers of meaning as well. Language is an important part of movements (see Droogendyk & Wright, 2017), as of all social life (Tarrow, 2013). Images such as posters, murals, and graffiti are part of protestors’ repertories, although they have not received as much attention as words and texts have (Reed, 2005). Music has been a favorite among cultural scholars, since it is such a central part of many social movements (Rosenthal & Flacks, 2012; Roy, 2010). It carries ideas and ideals in its lyrics, often preserving them for later generations (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998), and it is a means for groups to bond, along with collective locomotion, dancing, and singing (McNeill, 1995). More recently, the emotional impacts of music have surfaced in recruitment; retention; the socialization of new recruits, especially young people; challenges to censorship; the promulgation of moral values; the portrayal of adversaries and authorities (Traïni, 2008).

Some social movement scholars have acknowledged the centrality of morality to culture (Jasper, 1997), but few have explored it in depth. Part of the reason, in my view, is that morality operates less as a set of explicit principles and more as a bundle of intuitions and emotions that drive our actions (e.g., Haidt, 2007; van Zomeren, 2013). The sociology of culture suffers from a kind of idealism: if culture matters, it is because it is formulated in publicly stated principles and ideologies that guide action. I see culture (and morality) as more implicit and emotional: we feel our way through the world. How we do this is a question that social psychologists might well answer, especially by sorting out preexisting moral intuitions, perceptions of unfairness, and collective identities (van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2012). Social movement scholars are better at describing when stories are told and when music is played than at understanding the impacts they have on how humans think and feel.

Collective Identities

Because they are so central to group processes, collective identities are worth a more detailed look. The interplay between class and national identities formed the heart of political conflict in the industrial world of the 19th and 20th centuries. Melucci (1996) saw collective identities as an ongoing project for all social movements, and often the main purpose of the movement, but they have also been used to account for ethnic conflict (Coleman & Lowe, 2007), labor market strategies (Wimmer, 2013), and electoral arenas (Beltrán, 2010). Sherif and colleagues’ (Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961) classic Robbers Cave experiments demonstrated just how easy it is to arouse group identities (see also Tajfel, 1970; Tajfel & Turner, 1979).

Group members share emotions about the external world (shared emotions, I call them, when they tend to define the group, such as compassion for animals or hatred of nuclear power) and also emotions about each other (reciprocal emotions; Jasper, 1998). Both can reinforce collective identities: whether we express shared outrage at opponents, or our fondness for our comrades. (Those positive feelings can come to rest on a single comrade or on a small group, constricting our loyalties to the bigger group; Goodwin, 1997. I call this the band of brothers dilemma that organizers face; Jasper, 2004.)

Shared and reciprocal emotions interact with each other, in part because the former tend to be shorter run than the latter. Reciprocal emotions are normally background emotions to the shared emotions, as when we trust the opinions and interpretations of leaders about new events. Even negative shared emotions can increase positive feelings for fellow group members, as when they share an unpleasant experience such as intimidation, arrest, or jail time. Positive feelings toward one’s group and negative feelings toward opponents and targets would seem to be a powerful “moral battery” (Jasper, 2011). But negative feeling-thinking processes may focus attention better than positive ones (Jasper, 1997, p. 362). Indeed, Becker, Tausch, and Wagner (2011) found that negative emotions toward outgroups were more powerful predictors of willingness to participate in collective action than positive emotions toward the ingroup.

When a group develops strategies that are admired, members tend to feel a stronger bond with the group. Bongiomo, McGarty, Kurz, Haslam, and Sibley (2016) found this, defining good strategies as those that are expected to be efficacious and which are worthy of public expression—presumably tapping pride in the group’s moral position. Collective identities help us distinguish different moral motivations: we feel morally proud of acting as a “‘good’ group member based on internalization of group goals and standards,” but we also feel morally proud of following our individual consciences (Alberici & Milesi, 2016, p. 45).

A related stream of sociological thought, centered today around the work of Michèle Lamont, has focused on the symbolic and social boundaries that help define these identities (Lamont, 1992, 2000; Pachuki, Pendergrass, & Lamont, 2007). How do scientists distinguish themselves from quacks? How do members of the working class see themselves as different from the rich? How are femininity and masculinity constructed, and how do individuals sort themselves into such categories? Wimmer (2013) shows the strategic considerations that lead ethnic minorities either to assimilate as individuals or instead to play up their collective identities in pursuit of political and economic benefits. Although boundary research tends to favor cognitive over emotional processes, it has traced a number of the boundary-construction mechanisms that social movements pursue (Lamont et al., 2016).

We still do not know enough about the interactive psychological mechanisms that nourish collective identities. Durkheim, followed by Collins (2001, 2004), points to the excited mood of crowds that share a focus of attention and intent, which give them a sense of something bigger than they are as individuals (see also Neville & Reicher, 2011). Organizers use the tools of collective effervescence that Durkheim described—dancing, chanting, shared focus of attention—in order to reinforce group identities of all sorts (Páez, Rimé, Basabe, Wlodarczyk, & Zumeta, 2015). Emotions are central: love of one’s fellow members, hatred for its enemies, joy in mass gatherings, trust, respect, and of course pride.

In contrast to the individualism of rational-choice theory, collective identities shape individuals’ goals, what they consider advantages and disadvantages. They may care more about injustices to their groups than to themselves as individuals. A growing body of research has found that group-based anger encourages mobilization, in the form of an appraisal that a group disadvantage is unjust: moral emotions interact with affective loyalties (van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, & Leach, 2004).

Collective identities impose a number of tradeoffs and dilemmas on potential groups, especially the Janus dilemma between internal and external efficacy: the stronger the group identity, the less a group may care about external gains compared to internal solidarity (Blackwood & Louis, 2011). The identity dilemma suggests that no collective identity is going to fit all potential members equally well and will fit some poorly enough to exclude them (McGarry & Jasper, 2015). “The necessary fiction of a cohesive identity,” observe Evans and Gamman (1995, p. 38), “must be spoken in order for political communities to maintain any sort of presence. But there are obviously problems with the articulation of any sort of fixed identity.” Collective identities are a form of representation, with a range of benefits, costs, and risks. Scholars often deconstruct the same identities that activists are trying to deploy politically, as happened with feminism (Nicholson, 1990). Cultural meanings are tools with both advantages and disadvantages.

Social movement scholars have paid little attention to certain collective identities, such as national, ethnic-racial, and religious ones, partly because these have their own lively subfields in sociology and partly because they do not fit the broadly progressive image of history that has traditionally underpinned the social movement studies paradigm. When they are incorporated, they are often treated as strategic programs for power and inclusion (Wimmer, 2013), an accurate enough portrayal but one that ignores what it feels like to have one of these traditional identities. Religious faith in particular remains a mystery to most scholars in social movement studies.

Psychology of course has its own rich tradition of research into social identity. Henri Tajfel (1981) was explicit about the fusion of cognitive, moral, and emotional elements in an individual’s identification with a group (although I follow him in defining collective identity as an individual’s identification with a group, most social movement scholars do not [Polletta & Jasper, 2001]). Psychological research on stereotypes, prejudice, outsiders, group conflict, and attitudes to authority is well developed but not fully incorporated into social movement studies (cf. Gamson, Fireman, & Rytina, 1982). It is clear that stronger collective identities are correlated with greater political participation (van Zomeren et al., 2008), but the mechanisms are still being sorted out (van Zomeren, 2015). And it is up to social movement scholars to trace these mechanisms in concrete organizational settings.

Gender Roles

The wave of scholarship on gender that flourished in the 1970s contributed enormously to our understandings of culture, not just in social movement studies but across most disciplines. It is a good example of how cultural research opened new doors. First feminists and then LGBTQ scholars detailed the ways that we construct personal and collective identities, the ways in which we use binary oppositions to devalue one component of each pair, the ways in which we actively but unconsciously construct something as apparently personal as sexual desire. Because gender operates differently from class, and because men and women are not usually distinct communities, the mechanisms reproducing gender oppression were more easily seen as cultural and psychological, and only partly based on inequality of resources. The personal is indeed political.

The women’s movement generated cultural insights even through its internal conflicts. In the US, women of color were quick to criticize the false universalism of leading feminists, for whom “women’s issues” looked suspiciously like the issues of middle-class White women. Liberal feminists such as Betty Friedan actively discouraged “the lavender menace” from playing a prominent role in the women’s movement, and lesbians returned the favor by forming their own movement. Debates over sexuality, especially pornography, further unsettled the cultural construction of “women.”

LGBTQ movements offered a veritable laboratory for understanding collective identity during the 1990s. ACT UP was the center of an exciting movement around AIDS activism that inspired a number of young scholars (and activists who would later become scholars) around the globe. It was now gay activists’ turn to struggle over presenting the “right” faces to the public (Bernstein, 1997; Gamson, 1997). Queer labels challenged the collective identities that gays and lesbians had crafted for themselves, while queer theory deconstructed any and all identities as fictional, or worse, as oppressive subject positions.

In the last decade or so, transgender and transsexual movements have taken their turn at the cutting edge of thinking about culture, identity, and protest. Although always available as an example of gender constructionism (Garfinkel, 1967, Chapter 5), they are now active movements promoting positive images of their members—although the case of former Olympic star Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner reminds us that the media have their own fascinations that may or may not fit the interests of the movements (Schilt, 2011; Valentine, 2007).

In all these cases, emotions and the construction of bodies have been central issues. Feminists had to break gendered norms of emotional display to show their anger and outrage over their oppression (Hercus, 1999), to destigmatize their postpartum depression (Taylor, 1996), or to reposition themselves as survivors rather than simply as victims of sexual abuse (Whittier, 2009). Gays and lesbians had to set aside some of their yearnings for respectability to make room for aggressive tactics over AIDS research and treatment; Gould (2009) traces the emotional trajectory of ACT UP from its exciting rise to its depressing disintegration a few years later. Gender of all types is performed through our bodies, just as we express pride in our identities through our bodies—as the case of pride parades illustrates so dramatically (Bruce, 2016). Performance has become a popular lens for seeing the rich embodiments of cultural meanings and their power to persuade others (Alexander, 2010; Juris, 2014; Lamb-Books, 2016).

Social psychology should be well positioned to elaborate on these gender dynamics at the level of individuals and small groups. Despite rich traditions on gender (such as the gender dynamics of small groups; Ridgeway, 2011), to my knowledge this work has not been integrated with social-psychological research on collective action (cf. Becker & Wright, 2011; Ellemers & Barreto, 2009).

Feeling-Thinking Processes

Cultural analysis in social-movement studies has frequently suffered from a kind of idealism, as if well-formulated ideas are promulgated and suddenly inspire people to action, perhaps aided by networks and media infrastructure. Much of our thinking is more intuitive, and a great deal of it occurs through our emotions (Barrett & Salovey, 2002). We sense attractions, repulsions, excitement in ourselves and others; understand information differently if we are in good moods or bad (Schwarz & Clore, 2003); and have a sense of what is right and wrong before we can articulate a principle to guide us (Haidt, 2007). Far from an opposition, emotion and cognition have an enormous overlap in how they operate. I prefer the term feeling-thinking processes to label the raw materials that go into both of them, as a way to stress the similarities rather than the differences (Jasper, 2014).

Emotions are part of culture, shaped by our biographies and expectations, interactions and experiences with others, every bit as much as cognition is so shaped. In both cases, we have biological capacities—brain circuitry, hormones, nerve endings, and so on—but culture shapes what triggers an emotion (or an ideal or idea), how we express it to others, how we label and understand it.

Some components of emotions feel automatic: once anger is triggered, we have facial expressions, increased heart rates, a surge of adrenalin, and so on (in other words a predictable package or program; Ekman, 2003). But emotions like anger do not suddenly erupt from inside us. They are part of how we engage our environment; and they inform us about how things are going for us in that environment. As a result, normally functioning adults know how to create emotions, and we know what the socially appropriate emotions are. We place ourselves in settings in order to arouse expected emotions: we hope to feel outrage over a government policy if we go to a rally; we hope to feel solidarity with our group after a meeting (although we may feel the opposite, as some meetings disappoint our expectations).

The structuralist tradition ignored emotions for much the same reason it ignored the rest of culture: they threatened to make protestors seem less than fully rational (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001; van Zomeren et al., 2012). Except the charge seemed even more devastating in the case of emotions, as it had been the anger and fears of crowds that had damned them in the eyes of scholars. Crowd theorists had pointed to these dramatic emotions in order to condemn crowds and the movements that deployed them (Le Bon, 1895/1960); the structuralists hid emotions in order to dispute the earlier charges of irrationality. Both generations believed that only anomic, disturbed individuals have emotions, whereas normal people simply pursue their objective interests.

Emotions are neither all helpful nor all disruptive. They are a part of all social life and social meanings. They are no more likely to lead us to make mistakes than bad information or poor calculations are. Actions may lead to later regret (especially when we favor short-run goals over long-run goals), and they may disrupt collective projects (our individual goals never coincide completely with the goals that group leaders have for us). A variety of feeling-thinking processes go into any stream of action—including intrinsically interactive processes such as contagion and a desire to please others.

Feeling-thinking processes help us see the idealism inherent in much cultural research and theory, which out of methodological convenience focuses on products rather than the processes of cultural work (just as scholars came to focus on static frames instead of interactive framing processes). But the inclusion of emotions in models of protest promises a broad rethinking of action, of motivation, of the complexity of political engagement altogether. Feeling-thinking processes come in devilishly complex combinations and sequences, but we are developing vocabularies for sorting them out, at least theoretically.

For example, feeling-thinking processes are helping us reconsider crowd dynamics. The structuralist generation downplayed crowds, reflecting an even older association (in crowd theory) between mobs and irrationality; when they did attend to crowds it was in a behaviorist fashion as bodies assembling, gesticulating, marching, and so on with no attention to what they are thinking or feeling (McPhail, 1991). But crowds help shape the emotions that participants feel through contagion as well as by suggesting ways of thinking and behaving. Counter to older expectations of crowd anomie, van Zomeren and Spears (2011) found that crowd experiences reinforce group identity, especially for those who have little of it, increasing their expectations of support and thus their interest in collective action (also Neville & Reicher, 2011).

A word of caution. Although I have just done it, there are risks to treating emotions (or feeling-thinking processes) as if they were a single natural type. I have found it useful, as a starting point (Jasper, 2011), to distinguish bodily urges such as hunger or fatigue: reflex emotions such as joy, surprise, and fear (Ekman’s packages); moods that increase or decrease our energy for action; affective commitments to groups, places, and ideas, such as trust, love, hate, comfort, and respect; and moral emotions such as pride, shame, compassion, or a feel for justice. I list these from more short-term to more long-term feelings. They operate in different ways, and they interact with each other. It helps little at this point to make general statements about emotions, as if they were all the same type.

Psychology has devoted decades to specifying and measuring precise emotions and types of emotions, down to the level of brain scans and neurotransmitters. Unfortunately, this may be where the methodological gap between psychology and social movement studies is greatest, or at least the gap between laboratory experiments and ethnographic participation: experiments cannot replicate the full conditions of the field, while field research cannot hold many variables constant much less attach players to wires and scanners. For now, mutual awareness may at least prevent social movement scholars from making serious mistakes in their descriptions of emotions.

Strategy

Strategic action has a purpose that plays out in interaction between players. It differs from communicative action aimed at mutual understanding, and from instrumental action directed at inanimate objects (Jasper, 2006). Since the 1920s, game theory has almost monopolized social science research on strategy and decision-making, but cultural approaches have recently added new insights that challenge traditional game theory.

Tactics are not simply neutral actions taken to attain desired goals. They themselves have moral and emotional value; players all have culturally shaped “tastes in tactics” that guide their choices (Jasper, 1997). There are distinct families of strategies and tactics, or ways of getting what we want: we can pay someone, persuade someone, coerce someone physically, or hold a position in an organization that allows us to do one of the other three. These tactics feel very different to those carrying them out—and to those being thus engaged.

Attention to the feeling-thinking processes behind strategy helps us see the many tradeoffs and dilemmas that players face, beyond the simple ones that game theory has identified (which often have to do with individual vs. collective payoffs). Some have to do with clashes between morality and practicality, such as the dirty hands dilemma (there are some goals that are attained more easily with unethical tactics). Others arise from the fact that strategies have many different outcomes: the naughty-or-nice dilemma suggests that coercive or aggressive tactics (unpopular with bystanders) can give a player some gains (usually short-term) along with some losses (usually long-term). All these dilemmas are culturally defined. (Jasper [2006] describes dozens of strategic dilemmas.)

Scholars have not paid much attention to how groups of activists make decisions. The literature has been dominated by normative discussions, especially of democratic procedures such as consensus (Maeckelbergh, 2009). Blee (2012) has shown how groups establish decision-making habits in their early months. We know from small-group research (e.g., Ridgeway, 2011) that individuals carry traits that allow them more or less authority in the groups, but these insights have rarely been applied to protest groups. Kleinman (1996) found that men and women were treated differently in an alternative health organization, with the men especially rewarded for displaying traditionally feminine emotions.

Betsy Leondar-Wright (2014), a lifelong activist, has applied a cultural (Bourdieusian) perspective on social class to decision-making in social movement groups. She examines those who have remained in the working class or the upper middle class, as well as those who have risen from one into the other and—perhaps most interestingly—those who have voluntarily given up many class advantages for the sake of their (often anarchist) politics. In the United States activists talk easily about race and gender, but not about class, even though their class origins influence their styles and tastes: how they curse, express emotions, joke and tease each other; how long they talk, the racial terms they use, and how concrete or abstract their language is.

The concern with formal democratic procedures that seems ubiquitous in most left-leaning groups today comes from the upper middle class, where “speech is a central work activity” (Leondar-Wright, 2014, p. 150). Working class participants, Leondar-Wright finds, often value actions over words, and close personal bonds of trust over ideological correctness. Formal queues for speaking in meetings (“stacks,” in Occupy’s lingo) disrupt the natural rhythms of interaction, where each speaker responds to the prior speaker. Elaborate hand signals can frustrate and alienate the uninitiated. Rotating who facilitates meetings can be a disaster, especially in the eyes of those who care more about external efficacy than internal solidarity. I am oversimplifying Leondar-Wright’s nuanced analyses, but attention to tastes in tactics and to subtle emotional displays can help us understand a number of group outcomes, including their failure.

Collective identities demonstrate the close connection between culture and strategy, partly because they are consciously created, criticized, and transformed. Even though proponents present them as primordial and essential, they are forever contested, changing, and fraught with tradeoffs (McGarry & Jasper, 2015). Van Stekelenburg (2014) finds that radicalization occurs through interactions with opponents, but only as mediated through collective identities that encourage radicalism. For the most part, however, I believe that psychologists have devoted less research to decision-making processes in social movements than to decisions in other settings or to other dimensions of protest, such as motivations. This is clearly an exciting direction for future research.

Leaders and Other Individuals in Networks

Leaders are out of fashion these days, both in movements themselves and among those who study them. Part of the distaste arises from the cult of “leadership” fostered by military and business theorists, who wish to maximize the discretion we grant those at the top based on some mysterious powers they supposedly have (Khurana, 2002). The blame fixed on demagogues in older theories of crowds or mass society—they were the true villains, while their followers were merely misguided minions—did not help leaders’ reputations.

Charisma, Max Weber’s contribution to understanding how leaders function, retains some utility, but the structural paradigm tended to locate it in the settings where it was needed rather than in the traits of the charismatic leader (Morris, 1984). If we instead view charisma as resulting from interactions, we can give equal weight to personalities, settings, and expectations; we can be honest about the benefits and risks of various organizational structures. Cultural theorist Alberto Melucci (1996) also understood leadership as exchanges between leaders and followers, but he thought what was being exchanged was a more limited set of costs and benefits (Ahlquist & Levi, 2013). Leaders are the core of two dilemmas that all organizations face: the pyramid dilemma, over how steep a hierarchy to construct, and the organization dilemma, over how rigidly to follow formal rules instead of being flexible. (The two interact in various ways: formal rules can either prevent or encourage steep organizational pyramids.)

One of the few books on leader dynamics in social movement studies is scathing about their role. In a comparison of the suicidal Heaven’s Gate cult and a tiny Marxist-Leninist sect, Janja Lalich (2004) examines “true believers” in “charismatic cults” whose leaders proved destructive for their followers. But her catalogue of what leaders do for (and to) members applies to healthier groups as well; she notes both positive and negative sides. To take just a few examples, the security of having a strong leader at the same time reduces challenges to that leader; an awareness of community makes it harder to be critical of that community; a sense of belonging can undermine personal confidence and individuality; an increased feeling of responsibility can lead to anxiety about making mistakes.

The interactions between leaders and others (“followers” is misleading, implying too much passivity) contain a number of emotional dynamics. Leaders thrill us because they embody our moral aspirations, express our own affective loyalties, display our reflex emotions such as anger or pride: they are our ideal selves. They are useful symbols of our ideologies, and hence they are good to think with. They are useful to outside audiences as well, representing a movement and what it stands for. Leaders make good symbols, but they are also influential as decision-makers. A strategic perspective encourages us to be clear about how decisions are made, including the role of various individuals in the process. These two roles for leaders can diverge: a leader remains a symbol even after her death, when she is no longer making decisions; a leader can be crucial to decision-making without being well known to the rank-and-file or to outsiders.

I prefer to talk about symbolic and decisive individuals rather than leaders, since many individuals have only local resonance or influence. They are central to a small network rather than the formal leaders of organizations. This avoids the pointless question of who is a real leader and who is not, as well as the mystique of leadership. We should be able to ask all sorts of questions about what gives an individual decision-making or symbolic influence, including the impact of formal positions, recognition by various audiences (including the media), and skills in different strategic arenas. None of this has been adequately researched, although Hogg (2001) suggests that an individual’s symbolic power—namely her ability to personify a social identity—gains her decision-making authority as well (see also Turner, 2005).

Many groups are held together by personal loyalty to the leader, usually the founder. This love, trust, and respect can be a powerful glue, keeping groups together for decades, even during hard times (Taylor, 1989). But it tends to keep groups small and homogeneous. And if the leader dies, defects, or is discredited, the group disappears (Leondar-Wright, 2014, p. 68). And as Lalich demonstrates, leaders can take advantage of such intense loyalties. These emotional dynamics have both benefits and risks, and we need more comparative research to tease them out.

Many of these interactions are assumed in social movement research, but some could be tested with experimental research. The challenge is to create a dynamic of loyalty in a short amount of time, but we know that people already tend to attribute leadership qualities to strangers on the basis of ascribed traits or perceived performance on small tests. Subjects can be encouraged to reinforce this loyalty or admiration for leaders. Some of the more destructive dynamics would be difficult to recreate, however, especially given oversight by institutional review boards.

Recognizing Constraints: Players and Arenas

If we pay attention only to meanings (see Gergen, 1973), we can end up doing humanistic cultural studies, which tends to interpret the world as texts outside of their social context. As social scientists, we need to retain a grasp on the organizational infrastructure through which meanings and feelings are created and promulgated. We can push to understand creativity and agency, but this requires that we understand the constraints on cultural-strategic players. Scholars have used several concepts to get at the constraining effects of political structures, such as institutions, political opportunity structures, and fields. In my opinion, these all overemphasize the structures and leave too little theoretical space for strategic agency or cultural subjectivity.

My own preference is to use the common-sense term arenas, within which players pursue their goals in interaction with other players (Duyvendak & Jasper, 2015; Jasper & Duyvendak, 2015). Arenas are physical places that contain objects such as oil paintings and wise quotes, areas to sit or stand, amplification and lighting, recording devices, and more. People in those places arrive at decisions (or block them) in which something is at stake, following formal rules and informal traditions. (Places always have meanings imposed on them, of course; Daphi, 2014). Players are individuals or groups who share goals and some sense of identity, and who coordinate their actions in arenas. By distinguishing players and arenas (often conflated in more structural theories), we can better see how they interact.

Both players and arenas must be understood through cultural lenses. As humans, players are shaped by meanings and act through them. But arenas too are governed by formal rules and informal expectations that must continually be interpreted. Meanings are built into the chambers, the furnishings, and the decorations, all of which guide the action and the understanding of the action that occurs in arenas. Most arenas contain small or medium-sized groups, and are subject to the many dynamics of face-to-face groups.

Decisions are important, we saw, including decisions about whether and when to switch arenas. The players–arenas framework highlights the players who make decisions, and carry them out in arenas or in backstage settings (where players prepare for arenas but in which no decisions are made: pep rallies, marches, and other gatherings for the purpose of energizing or persuading one’s own group members or others). It forces us to ask just how decisions are made, by what individuals or small groups, via what processes.

Players, when we look inside them to see how they make decisions, are also arenas: there are disagreements, procedures for resolving them, and eventual outcomes (including nondecisions or vetoes). What looks like a unified player from the outside—the state, a bureaucracy, a protest group—turns out to be filled with factions and individuals who struggle to impose their visions and goals on the compound player.

Arenas impose structural constraints on players, but often what looks like a structural constraint is actually being imposed by other players, operating in those arenas. They use the rules and resources of arenas to get their way. There are also cultural constraints imposed by our own and other players’ understandings. Some actions are just not thinkable, others are (Polletta, 2004). Attention to culture helps us understand players’ agency, but it also helps us understand arenas, other players, and the constraints they together impose.

In some ways the pendulum has swung back again in the past decade, toward economic structures and away from cultural meanings, due to movements like global justice and Occupy. Even authors who helped describe emotions are bemoaning the disappearance of structural concepts such as capitalism from recent research (Hetland & Goodwin, 2013). But this is a false dichotomy: structures are cultural creations; economic inequality matters in part for the humiliation and other emotions it imposes. To understand capitalism we must still understand cultural processes. To understand structural constraints we must grasp the players on both sides of them. There is a rich psychology to every arena.

Conclusion: Getting the Psychology Right

An article-length review of cultural research in social movement studies must be concise to the point of being cryptic at times. I hope I have at least suggested some theoretical opportunities for cross-disciplinary dialogue that culture has created. A cultural view of social life, along with interpretive methods of research, allow us to reenvision all dimensions of politics, even some of the most structured and rigid ones, that social psychologists have been studying all along.

The problem with the theories of crowds and collective behavior, which dominated social movement studies until the 1970s, is not that they were psychological—although most were—but that they got the psychology wrong. Participants are not pathologically expressing narcissistic personalities or attempting to resolve Oedipal complexes; they are not social isolates pathetically seeking connections or identities. The older theories began with the assumption of inadequacies inside the individual in order to explain elaborate coordinated action and organization. A vigorous social psychology could have saved us from many pejorative misconceptions.

Culture has helped show us that protestors engage with the world, beginning with how they understand and feel about it. They define themselves by identifying with others, via cognitive and affective attachments to group labels and identities. They work out—sometimes intuitively and on occasion explicitly—moral commitments that can in turn trigger anger and outrage. They interact with others to reinforce these commitments and to generate emotional energy to encourage further action. They tell and listen to stories that define what is important in their lives. Culture connects us to the world, including shaping our psychology.

The intellectual pendulum has swung from grievances and psychology in the 1950s to economic and political structures by the 1970s, and back to softer factors since the 1990s. But thanks to the earth’s deeper rotations, a pendulum does not return to exactly the same place with each swing. The language we use to describe feeling and thinking today is more elaborate, and I hope more sophisticated, than what was available a generation ago. A smart scholar like Neil Smelser (1962, 1968) had to turn to psychoanalysis to do the subtle work that would later be done by cognition and emotion (Jasper, 2004). It’s no wonder that the structuralists dismissed such models altogether, accepting their poor psychology at face value (Pinard, 2011). And yet a number of concepts, especially relative deprivation, survived in new cultural forms (Walker & Smith, 2002).

On the one hand, culture includes a number of objects that can be measured and analyzed as specimens: frames, identities, narratives, images, and sounds. On the other, it offers an approach to understanding humans and what they do, an insistence on the interpretation of the meanings that people hold, recount, denounce, hide from themselves, and are guided by. We have not yet learned all that we can about cultural products, but I suspect we know even less about the second category. The ripple effects of the cultural turn are still forcing social movement studies to apply cultural lenses to states and economic structures, to costs and benefits and risks, to the decisions that groups and individuals make, to strategic plans and engagements. This includes rethinking older notions like crowds (Drury & Reicher, 1999; Reicher, 2001; Stott & Reicher, 2011).

All these cultural processes and products occur through groups, whether we see them as players or as interacting in arenas (or both). Small groups are precisely the kind of interactive context that creates understandings, in which decisions are made and actions initiated, where emotions are generated and displayed, with impacts on others (Fine, 2012). They are the kind of local setting where politics unfolds (Goldfarb, 2006). The cultural study of social movements and the social psychology of small groups have typically followed parallel paths in recent years. The time has come for them to converge more completely, and culture is a promising lens to guide them. Social psychologists’ wealth of results from experiments and surveys needs to be taken up by social movement scholars, with their methods of intensive fieldwork, participation, and depth interviews. At the same time, social psychologists interested in collective action may want to look beyond psychological predictors of such action and appreciate the importance of the complex cultural contexts of social movements. Dialogue, debate, and synthesis seem the most promising way forward for both traditions.