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CHAPTER 1
Collective Identity and Narrative Practice
As the sexual abuse scandal unfolded, the members of St. Erasmus VOTF faced a number of distressing questions and dilemmas. In deciding how to respond to the crisis, long-standing norms of obedience and deference to the Church collided with their outrage, conscience, and sense of injustice. How could they continue to be faithful and critical of the Church hierarchy? How could they chart a change-seeking course and remain committed to the traditions of the Church? In addressing these questions, the members of St. Erasmus VOTF collectively reconstructed themselves and their cause not only in their initial response to the crisis, but in the years since. As change seekers working within an institution — what we have called "challengers within"— they were required to reconcile and refashion their identities as faithful Catholics with their project of challenging and changing the Church. Our analysis follows these unfolding identity processes and is predicated on a shift in some long-standing presuppositions about collective action and collective identity.
According to the dominant model of social movements, the work of challenging groups has an underlying instrumental or strategic logic. This strategic view of social movements shapes how we envision the dynamics of collective challenge. Within this model, groups perceive inequity and injustice, define shared grievances, and adopt an oppositional identity and politics. This politics establishes goals that give purpose and direction to contention, including mobilization, framing, and contentious action itself. In this perspective, groups coalesce around their purposes and end goals at a relatively early stage, and these serve as the basis for the adoption of strategies and tactics during the course of contention. As Amin Ghaziani observes in his critique of this model, strategies "specify the end goals of collective action along with the means for obtaining them" (2008, 18).
Much scholarship on social movement culture and identity politics also relies on some version of this model. Challengers are thought to construct their collective identities to best secure their goals. Movement entrepreneurs strategically engage in culture work such as framing both to recruit others to join the group and to remind and reassure fellow activists to stay on track. The dominant framework, thus, focuses on an underlying and animating purpose for action that signposts the road between a group's self-realization and the realization of their goals.
We offer an alternative perspective in which challengers forge a path to pursue change as much as they follow one. Suspending the assumptions in the dominant model concerning purposes and goals, we examine the emergent nature of collective action and collective actors. We emphasize the reflexivity of activists and how they routinely engage in action and conjure identities as they challenge authority. Groups are self-referential projects, continually reshaping themselves in relation to their prior affiliations, the outcome of previous action, the responses of others, and their prospects for the proximate and distant future. We approach collective challenge as an ongoing adaptive process in which activists map itineraries as they move, and we see our framework as complementary to the dominant model.
Following Kathleen Blee's innovative work, we call this orientation an emergentist perspective, one that is necessarily keyed to micro processes of social action. Blee uses the term emergent to examine "how collective properties of activist groups emerge from and shape individual action, as well as how the actions of individual members sustain or resist this process" (2013, 660). Activism, she writes, is "a process, ever being made" (2012, 4). Our approach similarly focuses on the relational and dynamic nature of social movements.
Instead of focusing on the immanent logic of strategic goals embedded in the dominant model, we conceptualize action in terms of projects. Projects are the broadly imagined transformed futures animated by stories. They differ from goals in that their specifics are emergent in the flow of action. "Ends and means develop conterminously within contexts that are themselves ever changing and thus always subject to reevaluation and reconstruction" (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 966). Activists' aspirations are partly formed in the process of creating paths of redress; as they move along this course their sense of who they are and what they are doing evolves. This does not mean that change groups are rudderless, but that their shared horizons have multiple and varying foci and are regularly reformulated in the flow of their shared histories, experiences of the present, and projections of the future. In other words, while actors do pursue collective goods, such goods can be formulated in situ and are dynamic ways of "being in the world."
The VOTF project can be summed up in their unofficial motto, "Keep the Faith, Change the Church." The specifics of these aspirations, and how to pursue them, emerged in the flow of action over time and took turns that were unimagined when the motto was coined. They materialized as temporally specific goals responsive to changing contexts. For example, as we detail in the analysis below, St. Erasmus VOTFers came to an understanding that fulfilling these aspirations involved a collective and self-transformation not envisioned in the early stages of the group.
Because groups pursue multiple goals in a project, they are coordinating different senses of the past, present, and future within any given situation. Thus, in any particular context, groups find themselves in a web of collectively imagined time spans, and continued action involves successfully negotiating within these various horizons. "Next" is always keyed to evolving temporal orientations. In Mead's terms, "Durations are a continual sliding of presents into each other." Planning action involves simultaneously locating ourselves in the past and future through a construction of the "future perfect tense" of lived experience (1934, 28).
The persistence of St. Erasmus VOTF is due, in part, to its capacity to move within this web of activities using multiple conceptions of the flow of time. At first, the revelations of the scandal and cover-up produce a crisis of meaning in the present. The experience of crisis alters our sense of time passing. In the midst of such a crisis, time seizes up, encapsulating us in what can feel like an unbearable present fraught with ambiguity. Crisis thus disables our ability to project, to plan, to imagine a future. Paradoxically, while a crisis impedes our ability to plan, it also intensifies our motivation to act. The members of St. Erasmus VOTF, despite their reluctance to get involved or challenge the Church, felt compelled to do something.
This long process of discovering their "own possibilities of being" was present from the beginning — even while they were supporting priests, assisting survivors, and trying to reform Church structures. It was there in the early "listening sessions," where many heard for the first time the distressing and painful stories of other Catholics whom they had silently kneeled next to in Mass for years. It was there as they boarded the bus that would take them to the national VOTF convention at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston only months after the scandal broke. It was there as they congregated in front of churches and cathedrals bearing signs with the childhood pictures of victims. It was present every Monday night in the basement of St. Erasmus as they sang "Amazing Grace," listened to invited speakers, and shared brownies and punch. Although "becoming" was not their only project, it is what we call a "constitutive" project. As they acquired a sense of their own spiritual and social identity, they acted differently. "Becoming" entailed reclaiming their past and reimaging their future. Indeed, as they raised money to assist survivors, organized picnics and panels to support priests, and worked to change the governance structure of parishes and dioceses, they were constituting themselves as simultaneously faithful Catholics and challengers within.
As we have observed, early group decisions have a formative and enduring influence on the makeup, sense of purpose, and dynamics of a challenging group. However, even though a group proceeds along an increasingly familiar path, critical conjunctures — unanticipated events, collective reflections, and altering group dynamics — can disturb the group's sense of purpose and identity and produce unexpected changes in the direction that groups travel. In a signal illustration, Blee examines how a local animal rights group radically changed its course of action. The Animal Liberation League had envisioned themselves as a local group of activists who brought attention to the rights of animals through an eclectic mix of nonconfrontational public actions. However, a campaign to stop the serving of foie gras at area restaurants drastically transformed their sense of purpose within a national animal rights movement. Their orientation shifted from the present to a more distant future where animal abuse would be eliminated. Most significantly, they began imagining themselves as rights warriors, confronting restaurateurs in order to eradicate commercial animal farming. Their increasingly antagonistic actions were invested with emotion and passion. The Animal Liberation League "recomposed itself" based on "a complex mixture of changing realities, its unfolding interpretations of its context, its theories of political action, and its sense of collective competence and efficacy" (2012, 50).
Like Blee, we also theorize challenging groups as experiencing traction and resistance as they encounter the unfolding of historical, situational, and relational realities. Our aim is to explore how a challenging group regularly revisits and imagines its shared understandings of identity and purpose, and at specific junctures significantly reimagines them. As groups confront power and constraint, as well as reflexively narrate their activities, they not only look at the past, but also envision alternative futures projecting "themselves into their own possibilities of being" (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 986). Such projections of the possible significantly involve the dynamics of collective identity.
Rethinking Collective Identity
There is a crucial link between agency and identity, between what a group believes itself to be and what it does. Holland et al. observe that "Identities are a key means through which people care about and care for what is going on around them. They are important bases from which people create new activities, new worlds, and new ways of being" (1998, 4). For this reason, collective identity is implicated in virtually every aspect of activism. By developing an identity, challengers share a perception of "we-ness"; establish a sense of boundedness; achieve cognitive, moral, and affective solidarity; and recognize common fate, cause, and agency. Collective identity is also context-dependent, keyed to audience, organizational fields, and the larger external environment.
Identity politics involves claiming authorship over, setting boundaries for, and valorizing collective identity. There is an emphasis in the literature on how challengers strategically deploy collective identity to pursue power and resources (Bernstein 2005, 48). Identity can be deployed for critique, confronting "the values, categories, and practices of the dominant culture," or for education, challenging "the dominant culture's perception of the minority or ... used strategically to gain legitimacy by playing on uncontroversial themes" (Bernstein 2008, 281). Thus, activists can either foreground sameness or difference — engaging in celebration or suppression of collective identities — depending on the situational logic of the political engagement.
In concentrating on the cognitive and instrumental dimensions of identity work, the identity politics literature runs the risk of reifying identity and neglecting its processual, dilemmic, and dialogic dimensions. As Alberto Melucci, among others, has noted, collective identity "must be conceived as a process because it is constructed and negotiated through repeated activation of the relationships that link individuals (or groups)" (1995, 44). In their critique of the collective identity literature, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper agree, arguing that even while the analytic category of collective identity is defined as a contingent process, entailments of essentialism are secreted into the concept. Scholars tend to lapse into what Brubaker and Cooper call the "category of practice," or folk category of collective identity, as an abiding thing. "Even in its constructivist guise," they write, "the language of 'identity' disposes us to think in terms of bounded groupness. ... Identity is already 'there,' as something that individuals and groups 'have.' ... Even constructivist language tends therefore to objectify 'identity,' to treat it as a 'thing,' albeit a malleable one, that people 'have,' 'forge,' and construct" (2000, 27).
Their assumption is that as an analytic concept identity cannot be both essential and emergent, abiding and contingent, an entity and a process. For this reason, Brubaker and Cooper recommend abandoning the concept altogether. By contrast, we argue that the concept of collective identity is not vexed by these contradictions between sameness and difference, or fluidity and permanence, as much as it encompasses them. In their effort to avoid reproducing the "folk category"— and its reifying essentialist tendencies — Brubaker and Cooper dismiss it as "wrong." But what if the folk category (the sense of collective identity as abiding and core) is what the analytic category (identity as process and emergent) needs to explain? In other words, if we take seriously the phenomenological experience of identity as more or less stable and essential, rather than simply dismiss it, we must consider how that experience emerges and is sustained. Furthermore, we must consider why it is significant, particularly for collective action.
We suggest that both dimensions can be involved, that people move through social lives with deep investments in collective identities but that these are the contingent outcomes of ongoing action. In this sense the debate as to whether identity is a product or a process is misconceived (Flesher Fominaya 2010a, 2010b; Snow 2001). Identity is an emergent process that must also have an epiphenomenal stability to it, an imagined and acted-upon concreteness in the moment as actors negotiate its dilemmas. As Giddens (1984) suggests, identity is the process of keeping a story of self going. Such activity, he argues, provides us with an essential ontological security necessary to navigate the provisional nature of ongoing action. Of course, claiming that identity is a process obliges us to consider what mechanisms animate the process. By what logic does it unfold? And, just as important, if identity is not stable and "already there in some form," how does it come to appear, or even feel, to be so? How, in other words, does a process that is constantly unfolding appear more or less unchangeable and even essential?
In the chapters that follow, we trace the ways in which individual and group identities of St. Erasmus VOTF changed, and what events and processes accounted for the nature and direction of these changes. At the heart of the process, we argue, is the internally contradictory nature of identity itself. Rather than a singular, stable, and holistic essence, identity is work. It is work because it is often in trouble.
Identity Trouble
"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
The process of creating, experiencing, and sustaining collective identity (what we call identity work for short) involves three analytically distinct dimensions: the temporal, the external relational, and the internal relational. Each of these falls along an axis that marks sameness or difference. The temporal dimension represents a group's meaningful construction of their situation across time. With regard to the temporal dimension, groups generally strive to achieve a sense of continuity with the past and the future. Of course, continuity does not mean constancy: people and groups change. But in the face of such change, actors must reasonably account for the transformation. Continuity is thus constructed reflexively by the actors through the selective retrieval of memories and the reinterpretation of events such that what has been experienced as chaotic and disruptive seems to unfold in a meaningful way. Because events and experiences are always in flux, identity work necessarily entails an ongoing reconstruction of continuity. But the reflexive interpretation of our past (and future) becomes particularly problematic when emergent events challenge the typical schema for interpretation, thus disrupting the identification of oneself in the flow of time. In the case of groups, a problematic moment appears at that point at which there is no past, at the moment of the group's conception, so to speak. Challengers then find themselves at a point along this temporal axis away from continuity toward discontinuity, jeopardizing ontological security and undermining the grounds for agentic action. In the face of such challenges, continuity must be actively reconfigured in order to repair or, in the case of newly formed groups, to establish identity anew.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Beyond Betrayal"
by .
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