MASTER FRAMING AND CROSS-MOVEMENT NETWORKING IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

MASTER FRAMING AND CROSS-MOVEMENT NETWORKING IN CONTEMPORARY

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

William K. Carroll* University of Victoria

R. S . Ratner University of British Columbia

This article maps the network of cross-movement activism in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, and explores the relationship between position in the network and cognitive use of different injustice frames. The study is informed by a neo-Gramscian analysis that views social movements as (potential) agencies of counterhegemony. Viewed as a political project of mobilizing broad, diverse opposition to entrenched economic, political, and cultural power, counterhegemony entails a tendential movement toward comprehensive critiques of domination and toward comprehensive networks of activism. We find that the use of a broadly resonant master frame-the political-economy account of injustice -is associated with the practice of cross-movement activism. Activists whose social movement organization (SMO) memberships put them in touch with activists from other movements tend to frame injustice as materially grounded, structural, and susceptible to transformation through concerted collective action. Moreover, the movements in which political-economy framing especially predominates-labor, peace, feminism. and the urbadantipoverty sector-tend not only to supply most of the cross-movement ties but to be tied to each other as well, suggesting that a political-economy framing of injustice provides a common language in which activists from different movements can communicate and perhaps find common ground.

Recent literature has called attention to the importance of cognitive praxis, framing, and collective identity formation in social movement activism. This interest has expressed itself somewhat differently in the approaches developed by “American” and “European” schools (Klandermans 1986). In American sociology, the interest in framing is in part an elaboration of the resource mobilization paradigm, beginning with William A. Gamson, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina’s (1982) analysis of injustice frames and micromobilization and David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford’s (1986) analysis of frame alignment as a social-psychological aspect of mobilization, and continuing in more recent work on master frames that resonate across movement sectors (Snow and Benford

*Direct all correspondence to William K. Carroll, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada V8W 3P5.

The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 37, Number 4, pages 601-625. Copyright 0 1996 by The Midwest Sociological Society. Ail rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720. ISSN: 0038-0253.

602 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 37/No. 4/1996

1992; Gerhards and Rucht, 1992 Tarrow 1992), on frame disputes within movements (Ben- ford 1993), and on the relation between frames and “identity fields” as ongoing interactional accomplishments that “condition micro and mesomobilization activities” (Hunt, Benford, and Snow 1994, p. 203). In part, however, the recent literature on framing presents a challenge to resource mobilization (RM) theory: by accentuating the cultural and psychological aspect of social movement activity it points to a gap in RM theory, which has tended to employ a rather impoverished, rational-choice theory of subjectivity (Fireman and Gamson 1979; Ferree 1992; Buechler 1993).

In European sociology, a similar interest in framing has emerged, not against the ground of resource mobilization but within the continuing elaboration of new social movement (NSM) theories, whose project has been to situate contemporary movements in the broader context of late (post)modemity. Albert0 Melucci (1989; 1994) is one of the leading proponents of a culturalist approach to NSMs; since the early 1980s, his emphasis on movements as fluid forms of new collective identity that challenge the dominant codes of complex societies has gained influence. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (1991) have also presented a formula- tion that highlights the role of movement intellectuals in articulating new perspectives that are promoted and actualized in the cognitive praxis of movements.

In this research, we build upon a related article (Carroll and Ratner 1996) that explores the phenomenon of collective action frames from a neo-Gramscian perspective. From this stand- point, framing can be seen as the cognitive aspect of counterhegemonic politics. A neo- Grarnscian perspective on counterhegemony proceeds both from a political-economic critique of capitalism and state power and from a cultural analysis of hegemony as a multifaceted ensemble of discourses, identities, and practices that organize consent to existing social and political arrangements (Carroll and Ratner 1994). Clearly, part of the task of social movements-of whatever sort-is to disorganize consent and organize dissent, yet the Gramscian notion of counterhegemony entails more than disruption and dissent. For Antonio Gramsci, counterhegemony meant advancing comprehensive critiques of power and alternative visions of what could be and building the social relations congenial to the realization of those visions. It meant promoting a counterhegemonic project that contrasts dramatically with the status quo, constructing a new “historical bloc” that prefigures a radically different order; waging a “war of position” with institutionalized power, to win new space for alternatives within formal organizations and in the looser networks of civil society (Gramsci 1971; Boggs 1976; Simon 1991; Ratner 1992).

The Gramscian problematic brings a normative dimension to the analysis of collective action: we are interested not only in understanding the practices of contemporary movements but in appraising potentials for current movements to take their politics beyond single issues and local contexts, toward more comprehensive critiques of power and more comprehensive forms of action.’

Framing and networking figure importantly in this regard. The frames that prevail in a given social movement sector may be narrowly defined in ways that attract members from specific constituencies without establishing any resonances across specific issues and movement organizations-as in, say, the “nuclear weapons freeze” frame that predominated among certain SMOs in the American peace movement of the 1980s (Benford 1993). On the other hand, activists in a number of movements may draw upon shared and highly resonant “master frames” (Snow and Benford 1992; Gerhards and Rucht 1992) in their understandings of injustice and in their visions of alternatives. Master frames enable heterogeneous groups to be

Master Framing and Cross-Movement Networking 603

allied in common political struggles and thus lend coherence to the movement politics of an historical conjuncture, or even an era (Tarrow 1992). Similarly, movement networks may be segmented in ways that limit the extent to which activists in one movement cooperate with activists in another. Or networks may involve many intersections of mutual support and cross-membership, fostering an interdependence that can provide a basis for concerted collective action (Diani 1992, pp. 116-22).

In this article, we examine the ways in which network structure bears upon the use of various injustice frames in different movements and in different SMOs within the same movement. Minimally, if networks serve as media for cognitive praxis, we might expect as a working hypothesis to find similar frames in use among those closely tied together in the network. More specifically, we explore whether activists who are relatively central partici- pants ifi a network of cross-movement activism view injustice in terms of a common master frame.

THE STUDY

Our research has been conducted in two phases. In the first phase (and in lieu of any basis for a sampling frame) we identified seven key social movements active in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia: feminism, Aboriginal, gay and lesbian, labor, environmentalist, antipoverty, and peace. On the basis of our studied familiarity with SMOs in this locale, we selected for each movement one or more SMOs that have served as particularly important vehicles for sustained collective action-thirteen SMOs total. For each organization, we first worked up a case history based on oral-history interviews with several longtime activists and an extensive examination of the organization’s archives and documents. Each case history was written with two purposes in mind. We wanted to share our sociological analysis with members of the group, to provide a sympathetic but analytical perspective on their history and current praxis that might be useful to them in their self-construction. We also needed to inform ourselves as to the specific ways in which the group became politically mobilized, the problems they have faced, the successes they have won, and the changing agenda for their politics. All this was necessary in order for us to select appropriate respondents for further in- depth intetviews and to be in a knowledgeable position to conduct those interviews.

In phase two we constructed a purposive sample of activists in each group, using a snowballing method that began with organization leaders and oral-history respondents and that cumulated as we conducted our interviews. To be included, an activist had to have been a resident of Greater Vancouver for at least one year and to show current involvement in the aims and activities of the organization. In addition to these “filters,” we endeavoured in our selection of respondents to balance several substantively important concerns. We chose some higher-echelon leaders and some rank-and-file activists; we ensured that the samples included both longtime activists and activists whose involvement was more recent; we strove to include both women and men. These, then, q e not probability samples; they are purposive cross- sections of key social movement organizations in metropolitan Vancouver.

One strength of this approach to sampling is that it affords detailed comparisons across SMOs, but we were mindful of the need to supplement our 162 informants in the thirteen SMOs with informants from a wider range of organizations. We therefore conducted 50 addi- tional interviews with activists in various groups, including movement sectors not represented by the thirteen groups, such as third-world solidarity, people with disabilities, urban struggles, AIDS activism, and movement-coalition groups that explicitly reach across sectoral bounda-


ries, such as the Action Canada Network(ACN) and Tin Wis Coalition. Our analysis is thus based on 212 in-depth interviews and covers a wide spectrum of progressive movement activism.

Each respondent was interviewed using a schedule comprised mostly of open-ended questions spanning a wide range of issues. Responses to the open-ended questions-the basis for our analysis of master frames-were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim into a qualitative database manager, and coded using the Ethnograph (Seidel, Kjolseth, and Seymour 1988). In this article, we examine the relation between framing and networking, a relation more fruit- fully explored as dialectical and mutually reinforcing rather than one that assumes any one- sided directionality. We begin our empirical presentation by focusing on networking.

CROSS-MOVEMENT NETWORKING

The extensive research in the past two decades on social movement networks has established that networks serve as a crucial means for mobilizing resources through recruitment of activists (e.g.,Gerlach and Hine 1970; Aveni 1978; Klandermans and Oemega 1987; McAdam and Paulsen 1993). More recent work suggests that networks play another role in sustaining activism: they serve as media of cognitive prcwis through which activists in various SMOs come to share both common viewpoints on the nature of their grievances and a sense of collective identity (cf. Friedman and McAdam 1992; McAdam and Rucht 1993; Mueller 1994). This latter dimension of networking concerns us here.

Researchers have identified a variety of ties, ranging from informal friendships to formal relations between SMOs, that might be said to constitute a social movement network. Within a social movement, there are linkages among SMOs, among individual activists, and between SMOs and activists (Diani 1992, p. 107). The same holds for networks that span several movements-the focus of this study. In considering the counterhegemonic possibilities that are opened by networking, our main concern is with activists’ participation in multiple SMOs that form a network of overlapping memberships. Such a network is inherently dualistic in that overlapping memberships simultaneously connect activists and SMOs (cf. Breiger 1974): at the individual level, an activist in one SMO who joins another SMO becomes tied through common membership to activists in the second SMO; at the level of the SMO, the same activist creates a direct tie between the first and second SMO and a potential basis for communication and coordinated action. By analyzing such ties across movements-at both individual and organizational levels-one can gain insight into the nature of cross-movement networking.’

Activists varied greatly as to whether they were currently active in one or multiple SMOs and as to whether they were currently active in one movement or multiple movements. About a quarter (27 percent) was active in only one SMO; at the other extreme, 1 percent partici- pated in eight SMOs (the median activist was active in two SMOs). The sample was fairly evenly split between those active in a single movement and those active in multiple movements. Putting these two distinctions together, we arrived at a three-category typology running from movement “locals” (active in a single SMO) to movement “cosmopolitans” (active in multiple SMOs and multiple movement^).^ When tabulated against the type of movement with which each respondent was primarily involved, this gives us our first fix on the patterning of ties in the network (Table l).4

Clearly, among the activists interviewed for this study, cross-movement networking is a fairly common occurrence (nearly half the sample is cosmopolitan), yet the movements vary


TABLE 1. COSMOPOLITANS AND LOCALS IN NINE SOCIAL- MOVEMENT SECTORS

Locals Intermediate Cosmowlitans

Movement Sector

Labor

Urbadantipoverty

Gayllesbian

Feminism

Environmentalism

Peace

Aboriginal

Coalition

Other I I I I

Column n Total % 26.9 28.3 44.8

Row Total: n %

33 15.6

18 8.5

29 13.7

34 16.0

43 20.3

14 6.6

24 11.3

5 2.4

12 5.7

212 100.0

noticeably in this respect. Few of the labor activists in our sample are locals; many are active in several SMOs within the labor movement, and nearly half are cosmopolitans. Activists around peace issues, poverty and urban issues, and especially coalition activists5 tend over- whelmingly to be cosmopolitans. This last finding is not surprising, nor is the great extent of cross-movement networking among peace and antipoverty activists. In Vancouver, the key SMOs in these sectors-End the Arms Race and End Legislated Poverty, respectively-have both been structured explicitly as coalitions. Their boards are composed of representatives from other SMOs, so that coalitional networking forms part of these groups’ praxis. It is perhaps most interesting to note the two movements in which localism is relatively predominant. Two-fifths of environmentalists and a slightly higher proportion of activists for Aborigi- nal rights are locals. And while about the same proportion of environmentalists are cosmopolitans, very few activists in the Aboriginal movement participate in other movements.

An indicator of cross-movement networking that makes use of more information about the patterning of ties among activists is shown in Figure 1, where the 155 respondents who were active in at least two SMOs are the subjects of an analysis of cross-movement densities.6 These densities indicate the probability of an activist primarily involved in one movement being linked to an activist in another movement through membership in a common SMO. Focusing in this way on the cross-movement network, we find that the preponderance of ties link labor, urbadantipoverty, peace, and coalition activists into a bloc, with coalition activists from the ACN and Tin Wis playing an important integrative role. Feminists are tied to this


bloc by virtue of their participation in SMOs common with labor and peace activists. Gay/ lesbian activists, in turn, are linked primarily to feminists, while environmentalists are linked to both peace activists and coalition activists. Again, the coalition activists appear to play a mediating role, which is unsurprising in that the self-appointed task of these groups is to foster cooperative relations among a range of progressive movements. What is particularly interesting is the complete detachment of Aboriginal rights activists from all other activists: there are no instances in which an Aboriginal rights activist participates in an SMO with an activist in our sample from another movement.

COALITION

ENVIRONMENTAL

PEACE

POVERTYlURBAN

FIGURE 1. DENSITY OF TIES ACROSS MOVEMENT SECTORS

A third representation of the network of cross-movement memberships is provided in Fig- ure 2. These boxplots display each movement’s distribution of ties to respondents in other movements. With the exception of the coalition activists and the partial exception of the labor movement, the distributions are highly skewed. In each movement, most activists are tied by common membership to very few other activists in our sample outside of their own principal movement; most of the cross-movement networking is carried out by a small number of people who appear as statistical outliers in the boxplots. This is especially so for the environmental movement-in which three-quarters of all contacts with activists outside the movement is attributable to just five extreme outliers. Only among coalition activists and in the labor and peace movements is there evidence of widespread participation in the cross-movement net-


work of 155 respondents. Other movements seem split between cross-movement networkers-whose SMO memberships put them into contact with activists from other movements-and the majority of activists whose SMO memberships do not establish such cross- movement ties. This said, the mean differences among movements in degree of cross-movement networking are substantial: 18.2 percent of the variance in the degree of cross-movement ties is accounted for by the movements in which activists are primarily affiliated.’

40 0) e, .- * 6 30 0 e,

> E Q 20 v1 v1

El ,” 10

z 0

0 N = 33 18 29 34 43 14 24 5 12

R’s main movement

FIGURE 2. BOX PLOTS OF N OF CROSS-MOVEMENT TIES FOR NINE MOVEMENT CATEGORIES

Legend For each distribution, the median is shown as a bold line within the box. Fifty percent of cases, representing the interquartile range, have values within the box. Extreme outliers-cases with values more than three box- lengths from the upper or lower edge of the box-are shown as asterisks; other outliers-with values between 1.5 and 3 box-lengths from the edge of the box-are shown as circles. Lines extend from the end of the box to the largest and smallest vahes that are not outliers. For more detail see Norusis (1993, pp. 185-186).

To summarize these rudimentary results, cosmopolitan activists tend to be involved primarily in the labor, peace, and urbadantipoverty movements or to be active primarily in coalition groups spanning several movements. These activists tend to be linked to each other through memberships in common SMOs: they form a labor/peace/antipoverty bloc to which feminists with cross-movement ties are also attached. GayAesbian activists tend to have contact primarily with feminists; and while environmentalists have few ties to labor and antipovertyhrban activists, they do connect with coalition activists. Aboriginal rights activists are rarely involved in SMOs outside their movement and are entirely detached from the network of cross- movement ties. The tendency is for the cross-movement network to be carried by relatively few activists from each participating movement; however, among labor, peace, and especially coalition activists, there is a widespread practice of cross-movement networking.


FRAMING AND NETWORKING ACROSS MOVEMENTS

We turn now to the question of whether the patterning of ties in the cross-movement network may be related to the prevalence of certain collective-action frames-interpretive schemata through which activists make sense of the political realities in which they are enmeshed. Beginning with Gamson and his colleague’s (1982) study, Encounters with Unjust Authority, researchers have recognized that a central element in framing concerns the conception of injustice that serves as a basis for articulating grievances and for envisioning an alternative social order (Donati 1992; Snow and Benford 1992). Gamson (1992, p. 385) has more re- cently distinguished three levels of abstraction implicit in the concept of framing: that of particular events, that of particular issues, and that of Iarger issues that transcend a single issue. While a great deal of empirical work has considered framing at the first two levels (whether within a given SMO or within a given movement) the framing of transcendent issues, by which we mean master framing, remains rather unexplored, although David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford’s (1992) discussion of the extension of the civil rights frame to NSMs in the 1960s and 1970s points in this direction, as does Rhys H. Williams’s (1995) account of how the “public good” is framed by different movements. We are particularly interested here in exploring the use of master injustice frames-general conceptions of injustice, power, and domination-by activists in different movements and with differing involvements in cross- movement activism.

A related article (Carroll and Ratner 1996), whose results were based on the same database as analyzed here, found evidence supporting Barry Adam’s (1993) claim that new social movements have two faces: one based in a particularistic identity politics that constructs a sense of injustice around the claims and experiences of specific groups and another based in the more universalist politics of the socialist left. Differences were also discerned across movements in the extent to which activists made use of these and other master frames in their understandings of injustice and domination. The present analysis draws on that research, in which we used a comparative discourse analysis of interview protocols (Wetherell and Potter 1988) to identify three predominant injustice frames.

Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter’s (1988) method relies upon careful, repeated readings of relevant sections of each interview in a search for regularities that form the basis of “interpretive repertoires,” (i.e., the building blocks speakers use in constructing accounts of phenomena in a given domain). This approach makes no assumptions that respondents are monological or cognitively consistent in framing their accounts; indeed Wetherell and Potter report that although three interpretive repertoires predominated among their respondents, most respondents selectively combined different interpretive repertoires in their discussions of race relations in New Zealand.

Similarly, our search for shared collective action frames involved first a prolonged “soak” in the 212 interview transcripts followed by a tentative process of coding and recoding, through which the frames gradually took shape. We assumed that any respondent could draw upon multiple frames during the course of questioning or even in responding to a given query.

To gain a sense of how activists framed injustice, we asked a series of interview questions on the organization of power in Canada. The probes were designed to be as nondirective as possible; they began with a general question on how the respondent viewed “the nature of power in Canada today,” followed by a question that asked whether and how certain (unspeci- fied) groups are “disempowered: excluded or oppressed or exploited,” and a further question that asked whether the respondent understood power as “structured into an existing system.”


Through repeated readings of these interview sections, we identified three predominant discourses in terms of which respondents framed their understandings of injustice and domination: the political-economy frame, the identity-politics frame, and the liberal frame.

Within the political-economy frame, power is viewed as systemic, institutional, structural, and materially grounded, for instance, in wealth. The various structures of power (e.g., capital, state, the media) are seen as articulated together. Oppression is mainly a matter of mate- rial deprivation, exploitation, alienation, and so on, that may include the domination of nature in the pursuit of profit. In this injustice frame, counterpower involves resistance in the sense of concerted opposition to domination and of attempts to transform the system. As men- tioned, this frame interprets power as a systemic phenomenon, and the system in which power resides is viewed as driven by its own logic andor by the self-interest of those occupying positions of power. Within this universalistic frame, which obviously entails a broadly socialist political sensibility, power is concentrated, not dispersed, and this concentration is itself fundamental to injustice. The critique of systemic power and the transformative thrust of this frame elevate its counterhegemonic prospects.

Within the identity politics frame, power resides in everyday human relations as agency, an attribute of people. Power is often attached to identity markers such as gender and race, as in the often-cited case of white males as the dominant group. It is often associated with practices that are corrupt, discriminatory, and so on, yet there is also the possibility of power shz& as people reject old (e.g. patriarchal) models of human relations. In this frame, counterpower is conceived as empowerment, as sharing power. Oppression is mainly a matter of exclusion, in other words, the oppressed are marginalized, not validated, made Other. Finally, the systemic character of power has to do with cultural processes of subjectification (socialization, pro- gramming, learning heterosexism, etc.) through which it is maintained. This more particularistic frame clearly resonates with many of the sensibilities that are often attributed to new social movements-sensibilities whose counterhegemonic prospects lie in the disruption of dominant discourses and in the emphasis on agency and empowerment for subaltern identity groups.

Within the liberal frame, the state is envisaged as the container of politics and parliaments and governments as powerful agents that adjudicate conflicts among groups in society. On this account, power involves the strategic mobilization of resources such as money, whose distribution is treated as a given rather than as itself constitutive of power. There is a plurality of groups vying for power, each with their own interests and resources. The liberal frame presents a realist view of subjects who act in self-interested ways that reflect human nature. Counterpower is similarly self-interested and can be most effective when exercised through established parliamentary, judicial, or commercial means. In this discourse, injustice per se is grounded in the denial of rights; “disenfranchisement” is often invoked as a metaphor for oppression. The liberal frame calls attention to the alienated nature of governmenta1 power, to its distance from citizens, or to other faults in representative democracy. By the same token, voting is held up as a crucial tool for citizens to exercise power over the state. This rather conventional frame captures much of what passes for political common sense in the capitalist democracies; its prospects as a counterhegemonic master frame are dubious.

Although some of our respondents offered interpretive accounts of power and injustice that did not fit any of these frames, the three predominant frames account for most of what activists said in response to our queries about injustice and power.’ We analyzed these frames not

61 0 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 37/No. 4/1996

as mutually exclusive alternatives but as interpretive schemata that activists might well combine in their accounts of injustice.

We have previously reported a tendency for the political-economic frame to serve as a resonant master frame, an analytical anchor for many activists in all movements, furnishing an understanding of domination and injustice as structural, materially grounded, systemic, and susceptible to transformation. Indeed, three-quarters of our respondents framed their understanding of injustice at least partly in this way. However, we also noted important differences among movements in the use of injustice frames (Carroll and Ratner 1996). Here, we are interested in examining how cross-movement networking bears upon the prevalence of these frames. If cross-movement ties serve as media for reaching or maintaining consensual viewpoints on injustice spanning sectoral boundaries, we would expect activists with many such ties to rely on a common injustice frame, and because of its great resonance among activists the political-economy frame is the likely candidate? The boxplots in Figures 3, 4, and 5 address this question for each of the three master frames. Across the nine movement sectors, Figure 3 compares the degree of cross-movement ties for respondents who framed injustice in political-economic terms and for respondents who did not invoke that frame; Figure 4 draws similar comparisons with regard to use of the identity-politics frame; Figure 5 considers the liberal frame.

40

v) 2 30 Y

.L C

a, > $ 2o v) v)

0 * 0

e z 10

0 F

T

0

T ~ 3 .

:7 26 10 19 8 26 13 30 3 11 - 7 17

* i !?L 2 10

R s main movement

Political-Economy 0 Frame not invoked

Frame invoked by R

FIGURE 3. BOX PLOTS OF N OF CROSS-MOVEMENT TIES COMPARING ACTIVISTS WHO INVOKED A POLITICAL-ECONOMY INJUSTICE FRAME AND

ACTIVISTS WHO DID NOT

Master Framing and Cross-Movement Networking

40 I CA .2 30

T

0

T

- h N = 2 8 5 126 111811232716122 213 2 3 8 4

61 1

Identity-Politics 0 Frame not invoked

Frame invoked by R

R’s main movement

FIGURE 4. BOXPLOTS OF N OF CROSS-MOVEMENT TIES COMPARING ACTIVISTS WHO INVOKED AN IDENTITY-POLITICS INJUSTICE FRAME AND

ACTIVISTS WHO DID NOT

Overall, activists who invoked the political-economy injustice frame tended to engage in more cross-movement networking than did other activists, suggesting that many cross-movement activists share a structural, political-economic understanding of power and injustice (Figure 3). In the peace, labor and feminist movements, many of the activists who framed injustice in political-economic terms were engaged in cross-movement networking, compared with activists who did not invoke this frame. In the environmental, gayAesbian, poverty/ urban, and “other” movements, where cross-movement networking involved relatively few activists, it was the political-economy framers who had such cosmopolitan ties.

In contrast, respondents who framed injustice in identity-politics terms tended to be less involved in cross-movement ties and more localist in their activism (Figure 4). It was particularly rare for labor, peace, or environmental identity-politics framers to have many cross- movement ties; however, among gay/lesbian activists, use of this injustice frame was not associated with such localism. And among coalition activists-all of whom had many cross- movement ties-the tendency was to frame injustice in terms of both political economy and identity politics. With these exceptions, then, the identity-politics injustice frame tended to inform a localist, single-movement political praxis.

Finally, use of the liberal injustice frame seemed to have little overall bearing on participation in cross-movement activism (Figure 5) , but this was in part because many respondents who made use of this frame (37 of 66) combined it with a political-economic reading of injustice. A majority of the 29 respondents who framed injustice in liberal terms without


I * T

- N=2211 144 16133043013 9 5 1311 5 7 5

Liberal Frame 0 Frame not invoked

Frame invoked by R

R’s main movement

FIGURE 5. BOXPLOTS OF N OF CROSS-MOVEMENT TIES COMPARING ACTIVISTS WHO INVOKED A LIBERAL INJUSTICE FRAME AND ACTIVISTS

WHO DID NOT

drawing on the political-economy frame was active primarily in the gay/lesbian or environmental movements. The eight gayhesbian activists who framed injustice in this way were involved in approximately the same number of cross-movement ties as other gay/lesbian activists (averaging 2.13 and 2.19, respectively), but the eight environmentalists who framed injustice in liberal terms without drawing on a political-economic analysis were much more localist than other environmentalists (averaging just 0.75 ties compared with 2.37 for other environmentalists). Hence, although there was no overarching tendency for the liberal frame to inform a localist networking praxis, within the environmental movement, where exclusive use of the liberal frame had some currency, such a tendency was evident.

These movement-specific patterns are important; indeed, they underline the heterogeneity and context specificity of movement politics. For activists primarily involved in gay/lesbian politics, a liberal framing of injustice may serve well in informing cross-movement praxis- under the universalist rubric of human rights, for instance. But for environmentalists, a liberal injustice frame is more likely to inform state-centered strategies of regulatory reform that neither require nor inspire much in the way of cross-movement activism.

This lesson can be taken a step further if we bear in mind that each movement is itself a diverse political field structured by a plurality of SMOs. Figure 6 maps the relations among the 27 “core” SMOs in the network of overlapping memberships. These SMOs amount to one tenth of the 272 movement organizations to which one or more of our respondents belonged

Master Framing and Cross-Movement Networking 61 3

S I E R R A L D

TRAC

OPRADID

ACN BATTEREDW

BCCAC

BCCPD

B CFE D BCOFR

COOPRADIO

COPE

DERA

EAR ELP GAY LESC

LEGEND Action Canada Network GRNPEACE Battered Women Support LABORLFT Services NAC BC Coalition for Abortion Clinics NDP BC Coalition of People with Disabilities BC Federation of Labour NDPGREEN BC Organization to Fight NDPWOMEN Racism Vancouver Cooperative SIERRALD Radio TINWIS Committee of Progressive TRAC Electors Downtown Eastside TUG Residents’ Association VDLC End the Arms Race

NDPGAYLES

End Legislated Poverty vsw Vancouver Gay and WBE?TERW Lesbian Centre wcwc

Greenpeace Labour-Left Network National Action Committee -- Status of Women New Democratic Party NDP Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Issues Caucus NDP Green Caucus NDP Women’s Rights Committee Sierra Legal Defence Fund Tin-Wis Coalition Tenants’ Rights Action Coalition Trade Union Group Vancouver District Labour Council Vancouver Status of Women Women for Better Wages Western Canada Wilderness Committee

FIGURE 6. NETWORK OF CORE SOCIAL MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS


(i.e., a small but central part of the entire network). Each of these core SMOs had at least ten common-membership ties to other SMOs; together, they comprise a densely connected component at the heart of the SMO network in Greater Vancouver.” Several observations are worth making:

Entirely absent from the core network are the SMOs of the Aboriginal movement. Three urban-oriented Aboriginal groups formed a separate component with many overlapping memberships, but there were no membership ties linking Aboriginal to nowAboriginal groups. Among the movements represented in this core network, there is a discernible clustering of SMOs according to movement sector. Because the points have been assigned to this space on the basis of a nonmetric multidimensional scaling of ties between SMOs, these spatial clusters are interpretable: the closer the points are in the diagram the closer they are in the network. We can see definite regions where environmental, feminist, and povertyhrban groups cluster, indicating that ties within movements are more extensive than ties across movements. At the center of this core network is a complex composed of two key labor centrals (the BC Federation of Labour [BCFED] and the Vancouver and District Labour Council [VDLC]), the Action Canada Network (ACN), and the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) which (although not an SMO) figures prominently in movement politics through its activist caucuses.*’ These four central organizations are tied to each other and to SMOs in a variety of movement sectors. The strength of ties varies greatly in the network (the thickness of a line in the diagram is proportionate to the number of shared members). Overall, 34 percent of all pairs of SMOs share at least one member, and 6 percent share more than one member, constituting a “strong tie.” For instance, the NDP has very strong ties to the BCFED and to the Gay/ LesbiarVBisexual Caucus, and strong ties to its own Women’s Rights Committee and to the Vancouver Gay and Lesbian Centre (GAYLESC), indicating that respondents active in these groups were also active NDP members. Yet the NDPs ties to the VDLC, the ACN, and even to its own Green Caucus are weaker, and each of its ties to ten other SMOs, including the ACN, involves only one shared member. For its part, the ACN, the major coalition organization in the network, has its strongest ties to the VDLC, to the main antipoverty group End Legislated Poverty (ELP), to the NDP Greens, and to the BC Coalition for Abortion Clinics (BCCAC). The differing positions of the two labor centrals vis-A-vis the NDP and ACN illustrate the heterogeneity that prevails within a given movement. As discussed elsewhere (Carroll and Ratner 1995), the ACN in British Columbia was initially organized with strong input from the VDLC, which over the years has consistently pursued a strategy of grassroots, extra- parliamentary coalition formation. The current BCFED leadership, on the other hand, has eschewed close ties to the ACN, preferring instead to cultivate its alliance with the gov- erning NDP. Embedded in the network is a history of two quite different strategies for forming a “grand coalition”: one focused on an electorally oriented party and the other focused on a grassroots coalitional SMO. Through this and other examples, the network of SMOs points to the mundane but impor-

tant fact that each movement is heterogeneous, less a unified political community than a “multiorganizational field” (Curtis and Zurcher 1973; Klandermans 1992). Ultimately, an analysis of movements, networking, and framing must be sensitive to this diversity, to the specificity


of SMOs as potential carriers of distinct movement factions that may engage each other in frame disputes and/or competition for resources (Benford 1993; Hathaway and Meyer 1994). As a telling illustration, consider the three environmental SMOs we have studied in depth. Each participates in the core network of Figure 6, but they differ considerably in centrality. The NDP Green Caucus is one of the most central groups in the network its mean distance from other points is 1.81-somewhat higher than that of the NDP (the most central point at 1.38) and ACN (1.58) but exactly equal to the average distance for other relatively central points such as the BCFED and VDLC. In contrast, the Western Canada Wilderness Commit- tee (WCWC) is located on the periphery of the core network; its average distance from other points is 2.50, a value exceeded only by three other groups, and it has only one weak cross- movement tie to the Vancouver Battered Women’s Support Services (BATTEREDW), also a peripheral SMO in this network. Slightly more central is Greenpeace (GRNPEACE), with an average distance of 2.23 and two weak cross-movement ties, one to the major peace movement group, End the A r m s Race (EAR).

Most of the environmentalists we interviewed for this study were active primarily in one or another of these three groups: the results reported earlier thus derive from an amalgamation of data gleaned from several environmental SMOs. Yet from our case studies we know that these SMOs differ in the strategies they have pursued and in the ways they have framed environmental issues (cf. Adkin 1992). WCWC has emphasized the middle-class project of wilderness preservation: its literature stresses the need to protect old-growth forests and resonates with a deep-ecological concern for biodiversity as an end in itself. Greenpeace has fashioned a collective-action frame that avoids any programmatic commitments but embraces an opportunistic politics of direct action. The cross-movement linkage of ecology and peace-inscribed in Greenpeace’s name-has however signaled a continuing tendency to transcend localist forms of environmentalism. The NDP Green Caucus was formed in 1989 explicitly as a progressive voice challenging the Fordist commitments of the BCFED with a social-ecological critique of capitalist industrialism. From its inception the caucus was comprised not of single-minded ecologists but of ecologically minded socialists and left social democrats.

It is not surprising, then, that fully 75 percent of the Green Caucus members we interviewed were cosmopolitans in the sense of belonging to multiple SMOs that spanned two or more movements while 42 percent of Greenpeace respondents and only 25 percent of WCWC respondents were cosmopolitans (Table 1). Nor is it surprising that four of the five environmentalists who were outliers in Figure 2, each with ten or more cross-movement membership contacts, were Green Caucus members, with the fifth being a Greenpeace campaigner. In- deed, to characterize environmentalists as uniformly detached from cross-movement memberships would be to ignore the fact that Green Caucus members had a mean degree of cross- movement contacts (5.00) twelve times the mean for WCWC respondents (0.417) and sub- stantially higher than the mean for our entire sample (3.06)’’

It is also understandable, in view of our working hypothesis and earlier results, that the three environmental SMOs differ in the use of injustice frames. Activists in the Green Cau- cus, steeped in cross-movement contacts and committed to a project of greening social democracy, framed injustice predominantly as a matter of political economy. A number of activists in the other two groups also invoked the political-economy frame but were likely to combine it with an identity-politics interpretation or to make exclusive use of the liberal frame, especially the WCWC respondents.l3


The small ns of our subsamples at the level of specific SMOs and the cross-sectional nature of our study render these findings no more than suggestive, but the intimation is that the relation between master framing and cross-movement networking is mediated by the SMO in which an individual’s activism is focused. We shall revisit this issue in our conclusion.

The collective profile presented by the 26 cosmopolitan net worker^'^ in our sample provides another look at the network and returns us to the individual level. As a group, these 26 activists carried 55.7 percent of all the cross-movement ties that linked 155 of our respondents into a network (ie., their SMO memberships account for a great deal of the cross-movement networking in our entire sample). To a large extent, the network structure emanates from the agency of these relatively few activists, who may be thought of as organic intellectuals- coordinators and organizers-of the progressive movement sector. Almost to a person, the 26 shared a political-economic understanding of injustice. l5 All were NDP supporters, 12 being currently active members. Most had had experience in the labor movement: 14 were union members and another 6 had previously belonged. The major coalitional SMO figured prominently in this group; in fact, all 14 of the currently active ACN members we interviewed were among the 26 cosmopolitan networkers. Six of the 26 were primarily labor activists; 5 (as discussed above) were primarily (social) ecologists, 4 were primarily coalition activists (see n. 3), 4 were primarily peace activists, 2 were mainly affiliated with the antipoverty movement (through ELP), and 2 were primarily feminists.

CONCLUSIONS

We have indeed found a tendency for the use of a broadly resonant master frame-the political-economy account of injustice-to be associated with the practice of cross-movement activism. Activists whose SMO memberships put them in touch with activists from other movements (and especially the cosmopolitan networkers) tend to view power and domination as materially grounded, structural, and susceptible to transformation through concerted collective action. Moreover, the movements in which the political-economy frame especially predominates (labor, peace, feminism, and the urbadantipoverty sector) tend not only to supply most of the cross-movement ties but to be tied to each other. This suggests that a political- economy injustice frame provides a common language in which activists from different movements can communicate and perhaps find common ground. That all the coalition activists we interviewed framed injustice in political-economic terms underlines this point, for their explicit political project is one of moving beyond the fragments of single-issue activism. In this sense, we might say that a political-economy injustice frame is elemental to counterhegemonic politics: activism that pushes beyond conventional movement boundaries requires a common language and an analytical perspective that emphasizes the systemic and interconnected character of the various injustices and problems of late modernity. Viewed as a political project of mobilizing broad, diverse opposition to entrenched economic, political, and cultural power, counterhegemony entails a tendential movement toward both comprehensive critiques of domination and comprehensive networks of activism. Cross-movement networking and the framing of injustice in political-economic terms are means by which activists elevate their politics beyond single issues and local contexts.

We would suggest further that the practices of master framing and cross-movement networking probably condition each other. On the one hand, cross-movement networking fur- nishes an experiential basis for a more comprehensive critique of injustice; and the political- economy frame is favored for that task, compared to other more particularistic or conventional


frames. On the other hand, it is probably activists with a political-economic critique who are drawn to cross-movement networking in the first place.

Finally, the comparisons we drew among three environmental SMOs suggest that the relation between framing and cross-movement networking is not merely a matter of individual action but is mediated by the SMO in which an individual’s activism is focused. Specific SMOs provide the context within which the practices of networking and framing occur. Thus, activists with a broad political-economic understanding of power and injustice will likely gravitate to SMOs that frame injustice in such resonant terms (as part of the process of frame alignment), and the praxis predominant in such SMOs will afford opportunities for cross- movement contacts while serving to validate consensually the master frame. Concomitantly, activists with cosmopolitan political interests will tend to join or remain in SMOs that are alert to the interdependence of progressive causes, and in such SMOs it is likely that a broadly resonant political-economic frame will predominate over narrower frames based in liberalism or identity politics.

Beyond advancing these inferences, which are consistent with our cross-sectional data but not logically entailed by them, it is worthwhile to consider some of the substantive implica- tions of our findings. First, it is striking that much of what has been dismissed as politically pass6 by new social movement theorists and postmodernists alike seems central to the activist network we have studied. This includes not only the labor movement and social-democratic party but also the cognitive practice of framing injustice in structural terms, which especially predominates among the 26 cosmopolitan networkers who carry most of the cross-movement ties. That three-quarters of our respondents understood injustice in political-economic terms while nearly half of them were “cosmopolitan” in their pattern of activism calls into question claims that social criticism has “split into myriad local critical analyses mirroring the social fragmentation of the left” (Seidman 1992, p. 51).

In some measure, labor’s centrality may be a site-specific implication of the long history of social activism among trade unionists in British Columbia and particularly of the VDLC’s commitment to sponsoring and supporting SMOs such as End the Arms Race, End Legislated Poverty, the Action Canada Network (BC), the Labor Left, and the Committee of Progressive Electors. Yet even where the labor movement has had a less social-activist past and now has a less vibrant presence (e.g., the United States) there is evidence that the mmours of its death as a transformative force are exaggerated. In their longitudinal study of protests in Washington, D.C., Peter S . Bearman and Kevin D. Everett (1993) report that although new social movement groups have gained structural centrality since the early 1960s, by the 1980s the labor movement occupied a more central position in the structure of protest than either mainstream or new social movements. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello (1990) and their contributing authors point to myriad contemporary instances of labor-community coalitions at the grassroots level in many American cities.

It is partly out of necessity that the Canadian labor movement, challenged by the eclipse of class compromise and the globalization of capital, has turned however tentatively to a social- unionist strategy of coalition-formation with other progressive movements. But labor’s continued prominence in the field of movement activism has also been fueled by the infusion into its ranks of public servants and women, many of whom form the constituency of new social movements (Warskett 1992; Carroll and Ratner 1995).

Finally, it is worthwhile to comment on the role of identity politics in counterhegemonic activism. We have found that in most movements, respondents who frame injustice in iden-


tity-politics terms were less cosmopolitan than those whose understanding of injustice was informed by a sense of political economy. From a Gramscian perspective, a major problem with identity politics is its obvious tendency to fragment oppositional politics along the lines of reified identities (Gitlin 1993). Barbara Epstein (1991, p. 25) suggests that “a politics that is organized around defending identities . . . forces people’s experiences into categories that are too narrow and also makes it difficult for us to speak to one another across the boundaries of these identities-let alone create the coalitions needed to build a movement for progressive change.” On the other hand, the forging of “identities” is clearly requisite to coalition formation since coalitions have value only to the extent that they promise solutions to the problems facing the groups that compose them. Presumably, no group could achieve such a recognition unless it had first established a firm identity, only afterward coming to grips with the limitations inherent in its “identity-politics’’ frame. This suggests a more complex learning process than that implicit in the binary notion of restricted versus elaborated collective action frames (Snow and Benford 1992), in which restricted framing within a movement might be seen to hinder permanently cross-movement networking.

In any case, our findings provide evidence that the tendency for identity politics to be associated with insular, localistic activism is conrexr dependent. Thus, for instance, three of the five coalition activists we interviewed (as a group the most cosmopolitan) drew upon the identity-politics frame, but they did so in combination with political-economic analyses. Sim- ilarly, although in other movements the identity-politics frame was associated with localism, among gay/lesbian activists cross-movement activism was associated with the combined use of political-economy and identity-politics frames. l6

The counterhegemonic resonance of an identity-politics injustice frame thus seems to de- pend upon the context in which it is invoked. Among our coalition activists, the construal of injustice as a matter of identity was combined with political economy and invoked explicitly in the context of a commitment to reaching across identity boundaries. Among gayllesbian activists, the identity-politics frame was employed in the context of a political praxis that challenges the essentialized identities of heteronormativity. In combination with a political- economic understanding of injustice, such a framing may inform a cosmopolitan kind of gay/ lesbian activism.

What remains unexplained is why the use of the identity-politics frame by feminists (whether alone or in combination with the political-economy frame) was associated with a relative lack of cross-movement activism. We speculate that in the context of contemporary feminism, identity politics often has a more essentialistic and reified meaning than it does in the context of gay/lesbian politics where it is characteristically used to put into question the fixed identities of heterosexism-most strikingly in the developing field of queer theory (Hen- nessy, 1995). Among feminist activists, the radical-feminist valorization of women’s experiences and critique of male dominance, which posits biologically based, unitary identities, remains a political current of some influence. Within the broader discursive field of feminist identity politics, the most influential alternative to radical-feminist essentialism has been a proliferation of identity subgroups within what Linda Briskin calls a competitive “hierarchy of oppression.” In Briskin’s view (1990, p. 103), this pluralization of identity politics does not rectify its problems; rather, “the identification of certain oppressions as more salient than others promotes bonding on the basis of shared victimization, and exclusion organized around guilt”-both of which undermine the possibilities of broader political alliances (cf. Kauffman 1990; Phillipson 1994).


It is socialist feminism that has continued to present an alternative to the radical-feminist and post-radical feminist versions of identity politics (Adamson, Briskin, and McPhail 1988), and it is striking that among our feminist respondents those who framed injustice in political- economic terms tended to have the greatest number of cross-movement contacts, a finding consistent with Epstein’s (1991) and Briskin’s (1990) related concerns about the insular impli- cations of essentialistic identity politics. While the conclusions drawn from these instances in feminist politics are admittedly tentative, they point to the need for a more extensive inquiry into the distinctive discourses of identity politics that inform activism in different movements. An identity politics founded on an essentialistic claim would seem to problernatize cross- movement praxis; yet an identity politics of the sort advocated by Iris Marion Young (1990)-emphasizing reflexive awareness of identity as a construction, the valorization of difference, and the recognition of structural bases of oppression-might facilitate such praxis (cf. Fraser 1995).

A final case to consider is that of the Aboriginal movement, which was founded upon a strong identity claim and whose activists did not participate in the network of cross-movement contacts. Concerned primarily with “the continued assertion of difference” (Kulchyski 1995, p. 61) and with “land” questions, and running on limited political resources, few Aboriginals engage with other social movements, especially given their antiassimilationist agenda and profound distrust of “outsiders” (in which other social movement activists are no exception). As Rennie Warburton (1995, p. 10) points out, with specific regard to class politics:

Although engaged in struggles for control of the means of production, aboriginal peoples are not class conscious. . . . They associate what they call “left-wing ideologies” with industrial workers and intellectuals in centres of power that have been used to oppress indigenous peoples and fear that proposed alliances with those groups could be used to further oppress them. At worst, they see such alliances as a potential threat and at best irrelevant to their situation.

The looming dilemma for Aboriginal peoples in Canada is that the isolation afforded by re- strictive networking may block the growth of a broader visionary politics needed to bring about fundamental social change. Reverse blockades on native lands by environmentally conscious whites, government-created parklands on native territorial claims, and market-driven logging of Aboriginal woods are but a few examples of the consequences that befall natives for shunning cross-movement activism. Clearly a priority task for native activism in coming years is that of becoming more “cosmopolitan” with respect to political affiliations, though maintaining momentum on the singular question of land claims and native solidarity.

In sum, we have undertaken to explore the relation between framing and networking in social movement organizations because, among other effects, we recognize that this relation has an important bearing on the potentialities of a counterhegemonic politics. Minimally, our findings confirm that networks do serve as media of cognitive praxis in the sense that networking across movements tends to be informed by a shared framing of injustice. Cross- movement activists are more inclined to adopt a political-economy frame, suggesting that wider participation fosters more holistic political views; identity politics are associated with a “localist” political praxis that tends to inhibit recognition of commonalities among activists across different movements. However, as noted previously, we do not wish to convey the impression that the political-economy frame is always preferable to other master frames, nor


do we wish to imply that cosmopolitan activism is always preferable to localism. In a given conjuncture there may be compelling strategic reasons for a movement to adopt a single-issue focus, just as an SMO may reap important benefits from a division of labor between a great many pragmatic locals and a relative few visionary cosmopolitans. Moreover, in bolstering a group’s collective identity, localist single-issue activism may form a necessary starting point for many movements.

Yet ultimately, counterhegemonic politics requires that activism go beyond the horizons of individual social movements in order to grasp the interconnectedness of resistance struggles. The localism implicit in identity politics, while conducive to the pragmatic pursuit of immedi- ate objectives in some contexts, can obscure this realization by fixating on narrow agendas and can truncate the transformative framing processes that nurture counterhegemony. Our findings also reveal that the differences in cosmopolitan and local networking patterns and the corresponding deployment of frames are, to a considerable degree, context specijc, so the political strategies of movement activists are subject to contingencies that defy simple dichot- omizations and entail more nuanced and culturally specific positional strategies than conceived even by Gramsci.

Of course, it would be immodest to describe this line of analysis as anything but suggestive at this point in our investigations. Longitudinal and more precise data collection could examine such issues as:

the directionaiity of relationships between movement frames and networks, and whether certain kinds of frames should be promoted at critical stages in the development of social movements and movement coalitions; the evolution of cross-movement ties over time, including the interactive effects of networking patterns and the priorization of frames, as well as their relative permanence or tran- sience; and the concordance between aggregate profiles of individual activists and actual organizational strategies, taking into account the influences of leadership, constituent support, and ex- ternal factors such as media impact, regulatory state practices, and the effects of countermovements. While we cannot yet fully clarify the reciprocal relation of discourses (frames) and struc-

tures (networks), we have been able to show that certain kinds of networking patterns and master frames are associated with certain kinds of movements. Movements preoccupied with “identity” concerns are less inclined to tap into the more inclusive or universalistic modes of interpretation that facilitate cross-movement networking; movements propelled less by identity quests and more by goals of structural transformation (as in the end of militarism or poverty) are more likely to articulate their political projects in ways that enjoin coalition formation. In view of the continuing appeal of identity politics (Gitlin 1993), the strategic challenge for counterhegemonic politics is to “reframe” identity politics in less defensive and essentialistic terms, enabling movements and activists operating under that discursive logic to adopt more “cosmopolitan” outlooks and practices without renouncing specific identity claims. As Nancy Fraser (1995, p. 69) has aptly noted:

Instead of simply endorsing or rejecting all of identity politics simpliciter, we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a criri- cul theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be combined with the social politics of equality.


From a research perspective, the analytical challenge is to look within the general perime- ters of framing and networking mapped here. More detailed ethnographic work could, for instance, explore the possibility that the discursive formations we have treated as master frames contain distinct genres-perhaps specific to certain movements-with differing potentialities to shape collective action (as suggested above in the discussion of identity politics in the contexts of feminism and gayAesbian liberation). An ethnographic approach is also well suited to examining the submerged networks, quite distinct from the cross-movement memberships we have analyzed here, that sustain activist subcultures in the realm of the everyday. In short, the need is to consider the intricacies of framing and networking more closely: to unpack these concepts in ways that address both the pragmatics of organization central to resource mobilization theory and the hermeneutics of cultural politics central to new social movement theory. All this may be said to constitute the task of tracing more clearly the sociological contours of movement activism, of which two indisputably important elements are networks and frames.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We appreciate the research assistance of Jordie Allen-Newman, George Pavlich, and Donna Vogel.

NOTES 1. Current space limitations do not allow an extensive discussion of Gramscian perspectives on con-

temporary social movements. See, however, Epstein (1990), Carroll and Ratner (1994). and Steinmetz (1994). Though dated somewhat by subsequent developments, Boggs’s (1986) comparative study of social movements in Europe and the United States remains an instructive neo-Gramscian treatment of social movements and counterhegemony.

2. Cross-membership provides a fairly strong criterion for a social tie: it involves a more regularized relation than, say, mere communication between an activist and an SMO or an activist’s sociometric nomination of an SMO as worthy of political support.

3. Although we will show that “cosmopolitans” are more likely to adopt a discursive logic that impels them toward counterhegemonic action, our typology is not intended to disparage the single-issue activism of “locals.” The particularistic identity-politics frame that often guides the action of locals is also related to the formation of counterhegemony in complex ways, as we discuss below.

4. The cross-tabulation in Table 1 is significantly distinguishable from independence according to the Chi-square test at the .01 level; the contingency coefficent equals 0.385. Here and elsewhere in this article, our use of inferential statistics is heuristic, in view of the purposive nature of our sample.

5. By coalition activists we mean respondents whose main SMO membership was with a group explicitly dedicated to building cross-movement coalitions. The two main SMOs of this kind in our sample are the Action Canada Network (ACN), a coalition of groups opposing the neoconservative (or ‘corpo- rate’) agenda (Bleyer 1992) and the Tin Wis Coalition, an organization of labor, Aboriginal, and environmental activists whose project has been to build a progressive consensus around shared concerns about forestry and land use in British Columbia. Coalition activists are considered to be distinct from activists whose main involvement is with a group within a specific movement, even if that group is organization- ally structured as a coalition and even if the activist has a secondary membership in, say, the ACN.

6. The figure refers to relations among 155 activists, each of whom indicated active membership in at least two SMOs. Two activists are taken to be directly linked if they are both active in a common SMO. Note further that: (1) the cross-movement density equals the actual incidence of ties as a proportion of the theoretically possible maximum incidence, (2) the diagram is based on a multidimensional scaling of

6 2 2 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 37/No. 4/1996

cross-movement densities: the proximity of points (“movements”) to each other indicates the relative density of ties between them, and (3) the thickness of lines indicates the density of cross-movement ties. Densities of less than .01 are excluded from the diagram.

7. A one-way ANOVA yields an F ratio of 5.629 (df 8,203). significant beyond the .0001 level. Post hoc least significant difference tests (pc.05) show that for activists in the Aboriginal, environmental, gay/ lesbian, povertyiurban, and other movements, the degree of cross-movement networking is not statistically distinguishable from zero. At the other end of the spectrum, coalition activists exhibit a mean degree of cross-movement networking that is significantly higher than all other groups. We are aware that the skew and between-groups variability of variance tries the robustness of the ANOVA model.

8. In all, 75 percent of respondents invoked the political-economy frame, 38 percent invoked the identity-politics frame, and 31 percent invoked the liberal frame. Two other frames not considered here were invoked by twelve and 6 percent of the respondents. See Carroll and Ratner (1996) for full details. The distillations of each frame given above are in a sense ideal types constructed on the basis of the entire series of interviews. To be coded under a given frame, not all of the aspects had to be present in a given passage, but the overall sense of the passage would place it in the frame. Our comparative discourse analysis is a kind of latent content analysis that is particularly sensitized to the “meaning clusters” that constitute injustice frames.

9. Considering as factors (1) the nine movement sectors and (2) the distinction between those making use of a given frame and those not, a two-way analysis of variance yields statistically significant differences associated with the use of political-economic and identity-political frames but not with the use of the liberal injustice frame, Both the nine-category movement-sector variable and the dichotomous distinction between political-economy framers and other respondents were found to have significant main effects on the degree of cross-movement ties at the .05 level, with no significant interactions. Together, these factors explained 20.1 percent of the variance in degree of cross-movement ties. For the identity- politics frame, an analogous two-way ANOVA showed a highly significant main effect for movement sector and a barely significant main effect for the distinction between identity-politics framers and other respondents (p = .05), with no significant interaction effect, explaining 19.7 percent of the variance in degree of cross-movement ties. The analogous ANOVA for the liberal injustice frame did not approach statistical significance. On average, activists who frame injustice in political-economic terms had 3.60 cross-movement contacts; activists who frame injustice in identity-politics terms had 2.36 contacts; and all activists in our sample had 3.06 cross-movement contacts.

10. The 27 SMOs were selected as follows. From the entire network of 272 SMOs, we selected those with at least ten ties to other SMOs, yielding a set of 30. We then examined the pattern of ties among these SMOs and selected the 27 SMOs that made up the largest connected component, in other words, that were all mutually reachable, either directly or through other members of the component. See Bor- gatti, Everett, and Freeman (1992), Krackhardt, Lundberg, and O’Rourke (1993), and Sprenger and Stokman (1989) for documentation of the network-analytic routines used in this analysis.

11. Namely, the Women’s Rights Committee (NDPWOMEN), the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Issues Caucus (NDPGAYLES), and the Green Caucus (NDPGREEN)-the last of which is no longer active.

12. A one-way ANOVA comparing our 12 Caucus, 12 Greenpeace, and 12 WCWC respondents on their degree of cross-movement contacts is significant at the .05 level. The mean for Greenpeace activists is 1.583.

13. In the Green Caucus ten of twelve respondents invoked the political-economy frame, one made exclusive use of the identity-politics frame, and another made exclusive use of the liberal frame. Eight of twelve Greenpeace activists framed injustice in terms of political economy, but four of these combined their political-economic framing with an identity-politics account of injustice, and another two used an exclusively liberal frame. Seven of twelve WCWC respondents used a political-economic injustice frame, and as with Greenpeace the tendency was to combine political-economic and identity-politics frames (three respondents) or to make exclusive use of the liberal injustice frame (another three respondents).


14. By cosmopolitan networkers, we mean respondents who were active in multiple SMOs spanning two or more movements (Table 1) and who each had cross-movement membership ties to ten or more other activists in our sample. In many instances, cosmopolitan networkers are the outliers in Figures 2-5.

15. All but one of them framed injustice in political-economic terns; seven of them also invoked identity-politics frames, six also invoked a liberal frame, and one framed injustice in singularly identity- politics terms.

16. Closer inspection of the data shows that the fifteen gayflesbian activists who combined identity- politics and political-economy frames were actually the most cosmopolitan members of this movement (with a mean of 2.80 cross-movement contacts), while the three gayflesbian activists who relied exclusively on the identity-politics frame were the most local (with a mean of 0.33 cross-movement contacts).

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MASTER FRAMING AND CROSS-MOVEMENT NETWORKING IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

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