Francesca Polletta | University of California, Irvine (original) (raw)
Papers by Francesca Polletta
Activists, like prophets, politicians, and advertising executives, have long recognized the power... more Activists, like prophets, politicians, and advertising executives, have long recognized the power of a good story to move people to action. But what is it about stories that render them more politically effective than other discursive forms? Just as important, are there political risks to telling stories-especially for groups challenging the status quo? Drawing on cases ranging from nineteenth century abolitionism to twentieth century movements around AIDS, abortion, child molestation, desegregation, and domestic abuse, I make two non-intuitive arguments. One is that stories' power comes not from the clarity of their moral message but from their allusiveness, indeed, their ambiguity. The other is that activists' ability to tell effective stories is shaped as much by the norms of stories' evaluation as by the norms of their content. In this sense, culture may curb challenge less through the canonical limits on what kinds of stories can be imagined than through the soci...
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The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy
As deliberative democratic theory has moved from a macro theory of democratic legitimacy to presc... more As deliberative democratic theory has moved from a macro theory of democratic legitimacy to prescriptions for institutional design, questions about what constitutes deliberative communication have taken on increasing practical importance. At the same time, empirical data has accumulated to answer those questions. We review findings on the kinds of talk that produce either mutually-agreed upon decisions or better understanding of the issues at stake, equality among speakers, and impacts on policies or participants after the forum is over. Deliberative talk in facilitated settings today does not resemble the abstract, dispassionate reason-giving imagined by many theorists of deliberation. However, precisely for that reason, deliberative talk today is producing some of the benefits claimed for it.
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Memory Studies
The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.... more The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. We focus on a key moment in that process, when Republicans in the early 1980s battled other Republicans to establish King’s birthday as a federal holiday and thereby distinguish a conservative position on racial inequality from that associated with southern opposition to civil rights. The victory was consequential, aiding the New Right’s efforts to roll back gains on affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. We use the case to explore the conditions in which political actors are able to lay claim to venerated historical figures who actually had very different beliefs and commitments. The prior popularization of the figure makes it politically advantageous to identify with his or her legacy but also makes it possible to do so credibly. As they are popularized, the figure’s beliefs are made general, abstract, and often vague in a way that lends them to appropriation by those o...
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Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitme... more Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitment, lobbying, management, and public messaging. We argue that the risks that accompany that development have less to do with experts’ mixed loyalties to the movement than with the tendency of expert discourse to remake political problems into technical ones, thereby obscuring the dilemmatic choices movement groups must make. We focus on expert discourse around personal storytelling, a strategy that has become popular for raising funds, advocating for policy, and building public support. Our interviews with activists and consultants and content analysis of stories they rated as successful point to an expert discourse that emphatically rejects “victim” storytelling. Instead, activists are instructed to tell stories of hope and resilience, avoid referring to the graphic details of abuse, and only hint at their emotional pain. Experts justify these strategies as the best way to avoid exploit...
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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2018
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Players and Arenas
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Journal of Deliberative Democracy
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Mobilization: An International Quarterly
Why do activists choose the organizational forms they do? Social movement scholars have tended to... more Why do activists choose the organizational forms they do? Social movement scholars have tended to focus on activists' instrumental assessments of organizational forms' costs and benefits or on activists' efforts to balance instrumental calculations with a commitment to ideological consistency. Neither explanation is adequate. Organizational forms, like strategies, tactics, and targets, are often appealing for their symbolic associations, and especially, their association with particular social groups. The article fleshes out this dynamic through a case study of the rise and fall of participatory democracy in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Contrary to standard explanations for SNCC activists' repudiation of consensus-based and nonhierarchical decision making in the mid-1960s, I show that participatory democracy was abandoned when it came to be seen as ideological, oriented to personal self-transformation, and—no coincidence—as white. That was no...
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Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, Democrats’ handwringing centered first on the ... more After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, Democrats’ handwringing centered first on the woes of the white working class. Displaced from jobs that had offered decent pay and a modicum of self-respect and unheard by mainstream politicians, the argument ran, working-class voters turned to Trump in the vain hope that he would restore their economic fortunes. The diagnosis was compelling, but it soon ran aground on new analyses of Trump’s electoral base. The people who voted for Trump were white, yes, but many were middle-class. What they had lost, in this alternative diagnosis, was not their economic security but their unquestioned racial supremacy. That Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep compare the rise of Trump to that of the Ku Klux Klan might lead one to think that they side with the second view. But in fact, their argument is closer to the first. The point of comparing Trump’s supporters to those who joined the KKK is not to liken them to white-hooded racial terrorists. Rather it is to show how susceptible to nativist appeals are white Americans who have been whipsawed by political and economic change. The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment is a fascinating read, combining deep knowledge of the history of the Klan with a careful postmortem of primary votes for Trump. Its analysis is evenhanded and sophisticated. I will take issue with the authors’ conclusion about what animated Trump voters, but more important, I want to push further down a path the authors themselves take, asking about the ways in which Americans’ selfinterest is shaped by the communities in which they live. However, I want to press for a more expansive understanding of communities’ influence than the authors allow. The white nationalism we see today is nothing new, McVeigh and Estep make clear. In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had between two and five million dues-paying members: one in every 23 Americans. In the county surrounding the Lynds’ Middletown—Muncie, Indiana—fully a quarter of the adult population were members of the Klan. There were chapters in every state, with especially strong representation in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. This was not your Reconstruction-era Klan. When Methodist preacher William Simmons set out to revive the organization in 1915, he was largely unsuccessful until he paid recruiters 4ofevery4 of every 4ofevery10 membership fee they collected and sent them around the country to identify the resentments of white Protestant Americans. Those resentments, it became clear, had everything to do with the emerging industrial economy and the flood of unskilled laborers—women, African Americans who had left the South, and immigrants—who were filling jobs in new factories at the same time as they were gaining new access to politics. Those left behind were small producers and skilled laborers. It was easy for the new Klan to pin these Americans’ woes on immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and union organizers, and Klan organizers did just that. The strategy worked, and membership soared. Local Klans marched and rallied, hosted concerts and baseball games, boycotted immigrant The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment, by Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 310 pp. $32.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780231190060.
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Sociology Compass
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Annual Review of Sociology
The most important impacts of social movements are often cultural, but the sheer variety of poten... more The most important impacts of social movements are often cultural, but the sheer variety of potential cultural impacts—from shifts in public opinion to new portrayals of a group on television to the metrics guiding funding in a federal agency—presents unique challenges to scholars. Rather than treating culture as a social sphere separate from politics and economics, we conceptualize it as the ideas, values, and assumptions underpinning policies and practices in all spheres. We review recent research on movements’ impacts on public opinion and everyday behavior; the media and popular culture; nonpolitical institutions such as science, medicine, and education; and politics. We focus on cultural impacts that have mattered for movements’ constituencies and address why movements have had those impacts. We conclude with an agenda for future research, seeking greater connection between the literatures on movements and the literatures on the institutions that matter to movements. Expected f...
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Disability & Society
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Law & Social Inquiry
The notion that families should care for their own seems straightforward in its meaning. I sugges... more The notion that families should care for their own seems straightforward in its meaning. I suggest that it may not be. Building on the argument advanced in Sandra Levitsky's Caring for Our Own, and especially its focus on the discursive shaping of rights consciousness, I draw attention to three discourses that may be responsible for how the caregivers quoted in the book understand family responsibility. One is an American discourse about the limits of government; one is a therapeutic discourse that is enacted in the support groups from which the book's respondents mainly come; and one is a nativist discourse that pits the American-born against newcomers. I argue that these discourses inflect the meaning of family responsibility in distinctive ways.
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Storytelling, Self, Society
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Mobilization: An International Quarterly
How have social movements fared in an era marked by new enthusiasm for citizen participation? I i... more How have social movements fared in an era marked by new enthusiasm for citizen participation? I identify several features of today's participatory landscape that make it different from earlier ones, including its scale and scope, its reliance on the Internet, and its relation to state power that is dispersed among multiple actors. Then I trace the mixed consequences of these features for social movement groups.
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Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
gap in sociological research: the lack of attention to class discrimination. Too often the class ... more gap in sociological research: the lack of attention to class discrimination. Too often the class literature describes ‘‘barriers,’’ ‘‘resources,’’ ‘‘access,’’ ‘‘opportunities,’’ and ‘‘mismatches’’ without also suggesting that discrimination occurs. Even Rivera, who expertly shows how systematically employers favor the class-privileged over the underprivileged, does not use the word ‘‘discrimination’’ to describe what she sees. But Pedigree uncovers elements of several types of discrimination: taste-based, statistical, and the perpetuation of inequality that occurs through classism without classists. She also highlights that even though we live in a time when social closure is particularly stark when considering individuals’ class position as adults, discrimination is also leveled against individuals with low class origins. This is a powerful statement, given that the working-class-origin students who are considered by EPS firms have the ultimate badge of achievement—a degree from an elite university. Others should build on Rivera’s work, not only by creating carefully crafted, well-written, deeply important ethnographies, but also in uncovering the ways that class discrimination occurs. In doing so, we can better understand how class reproduction and mobility occur in an era when class animosity, segregation, and inequality are particularly entrenched.
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Work and Occupations, 2016
Research on emotional labor has shown that workers who are required to feign emotions are more li... more Research on emotional labor has shown that workers who are required to feign emotions are more likely to suffer ill effects than those who are able to deep act their emotions. The authors argue that what may stand between surface and deep acting is workers’ ability to claim the kind of socially valued role that makes their enactment of emotional display rules seem consistent with that role. The authors draw on observations and interviews with workers in the debt settlement industry to show that men who were agents were able to claim that they were educating clients rather than selling to them. This made it possible for them to avoid feeling that they were taking advantage of customers who might have been better off without the service they sold them. Men were able to help clients in a way that did not conflict with their role as salespeople. Women agents, by contrast, were not able to style themselves educators. Instead, clients and employers expected them to adopt a therapeutic rol...
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Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2016
Activists have long justified their egalitarian organizational forms in prefigurative terms. Maki... more Activists have long justified their egalitarian organizational forms in prefigurative terms. Making decisions by consensus, decentralizing organization, and rotating leadership serves to model the radically democratic society that activists hope to bring into being. Our comparison of consensus-based decision-making in three historical periods, however, shows that activists have understood the purposes of prefiguration in very different ways. Whereas radical pacifists in the 1940s saw their cooperative organizations as sustaining movement stalwarts in a period of political repression, new left activists in the 1960s imagined that their radically democratic practices would be adopted by ever-widening circles. Along with the political conditions in which they have operated, activists’ distinctive understandings of equality have also shaped the way they have made decisions. Our interviews with 30 leftist activists today reveal a view of decision-making as a place to work through inequal...
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Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug 12, 2005
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Activists, like prophets, politicians, and advertising executives, have long recognized the power... more Activists, like prophets, politicians, and advertising executives, have long recognized the power of a good story to move people to action. But what is it about stories that render them more politically effective than other discursive forms? Just as important, are there political risks to telling stories-especially for groups challenging the status quo? Drawing on cases ranging from nineteenth century abolitionism to twentieth century movements around AIDS, abortion, child molestation, desegregation, and domestic abuse, I make two non-intuitive arguments. One is that stories' power comes not from the clarity of their moral message but from their allusiveness, indeed, their ambiguity. The other is that activists' ability to tell effective stories is shaped as much by the norms of stories' evaluation as by the norms of their content. In this sense, culture may curb challenge less through the canonical limits on what kinds of stories can be imagined than through the soci...
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The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy
As deliberative democratic theory has moved from a macro theory of democratic legitimacy to presc... more As deliberative democratic theory has moved from a macro theory of democratic legitimacy to prescriptions for institutional design, questions about what constitutes deliberative communication have taken on increasing practical importance. At the same time, empirical data has accumulated to answer those questions. We review findings on the kinds of talk that produce either mutually-agreed upon decisions or better understanding of the issues at stake, equality among speakers, and impacts on policies or participants after the forum is over. Deliberative talk in facilitated settings today does not resemble the abstract, dispassionate reason-giving imagined by many theorists of deliberation. However, precisely for that reason, deliberative talk today is producing some of the benefits claimed for it.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Memory Studies
The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.... more The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. We focus on a key moment in that process, when Republicans in the early 1980s battled other Republicans to establish King’s birthday as a federal holiday and thereby distinguish a conservative position on racial inequality from that associated with southern opposition to civil rights. The victory was consequential, aiding the New Right’s efforts to roll back gains on affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. We use the case to explore the conditions in which political actors are able to lay claim to venerated historical figures who actually had very different beliefs and commitments. The prior popularization of the figure makes it politically advantageous to identify with his or her legacy but also makes it possible to do so credibly. As they are popularized, the figure’s beliefs are made general, abstract, and often vague in a way that lends them to appropriation by those o...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitme... more Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitment, lobbying, management, and public messaging. We argue that the risks that accompany that development have less to do with experts’ mixed loyalties to the movement than with the tendency of expert discourse to remake political problems into technical ones, thereby obscuring the dilemmatic choices movement groups must make. We focus on expert discourse around personal storytelling, a strategy that has become popular for raising funds, advocating for policy, and building public support. Our interviews with activists and consultants and content analysis of stories they rated as successful point to an expert discourse that emphatically rejects “victim” storytelling. Instead, activists are instructed to tell stories of hope and resilience, avoid referring to the graphic details of abuse, and only hint at their emotional pain. Experts justify these strategies as the best way to avoid exploit...
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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2018
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Players and Arenas
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Journal of Deliberative Democracy
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Mobilization: An International Quarterly
Why do activists choose the organizational forms they do? Social movement scholars have tended to... more Why do activists choose the organizational forms they do? Social movement scholars have tended to focus on activists' instrumental assessments of organizational forms' costs and benefits or on activists' efforts to balance instrumental calculations with a commitment to ideological consistency. Neither explanation is adequate. Organizational forms, like strategies, tactics, and targets, are often appealing for their symbolic associations, and especially, their association with particular social groups. The article fleshes out this dynamic through a case study of the rise and fall of participatory democracy in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Contrary to standard explanations for SNCC activists' repudiation of consensus-based and nonhierarchical decision making in the mid-1960s, I show that participatory democracy was abandoned when it came to be seen as ideological, oriented to personal self-transformation, and—no coincidence—as white. That was no...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, Democrats’ handwringing centered first on the ... more After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, Democrats’ handwringing centered first on the woes of the white working class. Displaced from jobs that had offered decent pay and a modicum of self-respect and unheard by mainstream politicians, the argument ran, working-class voters turned to Trump in the vain hope that he would restore their economic fortunes. The diagnosis was compelling, but it soon ran aground on new analyses of Trump’s electoral base. The people who voted for Trump were white, yes, but many were middle-class. What they had lost, in this alternative diagnosis, was not their economic security but their unquestioned racial supremacy. That Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep compare the rise of Trump to that of the Ku Klux Klan might lead one to think that they side with the second view. But in fact, their argument is closer to the first. The point of comparing Trump’s supporters to those who joined the KKK is not to liken them to white-hooded racial terrorists. Rather it is to show how susceptible to nativist appeals are white Americans who have been whipsawed by political and economic change. The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment is a fascinating read, combining deep knowledge of the history of the Klan with a careful postmortem of primary votes for Trump. Its analysis is evenhanded and sophisticated. I will take issue with the authors’ conclusion about what animated Trump voters, but more important, I want to push further down a path the authors themselves take, asking about the ways in which Americans’ selfinterest is shaped by the communities in which they live. However, I want to press for a more expansive understanding of communities’ influence than the authors allow. The white nationalism we see today is nothing new, McVeigh and Estep make clear. In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had between two and five million dues-paying members: one in every 23 Americans. In the county surrounding the Lynds’ Middletown—Muncie, Indiana—fully a quarter of the adult population were members of the Klan. There were chapters in every state, with especially strong representation in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. This was not your Reconstruction-era Klan. When Methodist preacher William Simmons set out to revive the organization in 1915, he was largely unsuccessful until he paid recruiters 4ofevery4 of every 4ofevery10 membership fee they collected and sent them around the country to identify the resentments of white Protestant Americans. Those resentments, it became clear, had everything to do with the emerging industrial economy and the flood of unskilled laborers—women, African Americans who had left the South, and immigrants—who were filling jobs in new factories at the same time as they were gaining new access to politics. Those left behind were small producers and skilled laborers. It was easy for the new Klan to pin these Americans’ woes on immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and union organizers, and Klan organizers did just that. The strategy worked, and membership soared. Local Klans marched and rallied, hosted concerts and baseball games, boycotted immigrant The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment, by Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 310 pp. $32.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780231190060.
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Sociology Compass
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Annual Review of Sociology
The most important impacts of social movements are often cultural, but the sheer variety of poten... more The most important impacts of social movements are often cultural, but the sheer variety of potential cultural impacts—from shifts in public opinion to new portrayals of a group on television to the metrics guiding funding in a federal agency—presents unique challenges to scholars. Rather than treating culture as a social sphere separate from politics and economics, we conceptualize it as the ideas, values, and assumptions underpinning policies and practices in all spheres. We review recent research on movements’ impacts on public opinion and everyday behavior; the media and popular culture; nonpolitical institutions such as science, medicine, and education; and politics. We focus on cultural impacts that have mattered for movements’ constituencies and address why movements have had those impacts. We conclude with an agenda for future research, seeking greater connection between the literatures on movements and the literatures on the institutions that matter to movements. Expected f...
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Disability & Society
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Law & Social Inquiry
The notion that families should care for their own seems straightforward in its meaning. I sugges... more The notion that families should care for their own seems straightforward in its meaning. I suggest that it may not be. Building on the argument advanced in Sandra Levitsky's Caring for Our Own, and especially its focus on the discursive shaping of rights consciousness, I draw attention to three discourses that may be responsible for how the caregivers quoted in the book understand family responsibility. One is an American discourse about the limits of government; one is a therapeutic discourse that is enacted in the support groups from which the book's respondents mainly come; and one is a nativist discourse that pits the American-born against newcomers. I argue that these discourses inflect the meaning of family responsibility in distinctive ways.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Storytelling, Self, Society
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Mobilization: An International Quarterly
How have social movements fared in an era marked by new enthusiasm for citizen participation? I i... more How have social movements fared in an era marked by new enthusiasm for citizen participation? I identify several features of today's participatory landscape that make it different from earlier ones, including its scale and scope, its reliance on the Internet, and its relation to state power that is dispersed among multiple actors. Then I trace the mixed consequences of these features for social movement groups.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
gap in sociological research: the lack of attention to class discrimination. Too often the class ... more gap in sociological research: the lack of attention to class discrimination. Too often the class literature describes ‘‘barriers,’’ ‘‘resources,’’ ‘‘access,’’ ‘‘opportunities,’’ and ‘‘mismatches’’ without also suggesting that discrimination occurs. Even Rivera, who expertly shows how systematically employers favor the class-privileged over the underprivileged, does not use the word ‘‘discrimination’’ to describe what she sees. But Pedigree uncovers elements of several types of discrimination: taste-based, statistical, and the perpetuation of inequality that occurs through classism without classists. She also highlights that even though we live in a time when social closure is particularly stark when considering individuals’ class position as adults, discrimination is also leveled against individuals with low class origins. This is a powerful statement, given that the working-class-origin students who are considered by EPS firms have the ultimate badge of achievement—a degree from an elite university. Others should build on Rivera’s work, not only by creating carefully crafted, well-written, deeply important ethnographies, but also in uncovering the ways that class discrimination occurs. In doing so, we can better understand how class reproduction and mobility occur in an era when class animosity, segregation, and inequality are particularly entrenched.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Work and Occupations, 2016
Research on emotional labor has shown that workers who are required to feign emotions are more li... more Research on emotional labor has shown that workers who are required to feign emotions are more likely to suffer ill effects than those who are able to deep act their emotions. The authors argue that what may stand between surface and deep acting is workers’ ability to claim the kind of socially valued role that makes their enactment of emotional display rules seem consistent with that role. The authors draw on observations and interviews with workers in the debt settlement industry to show that men who were agents were able to claim that they were educating clients rather than selling to them. This made it possible for them to avoid feeling that they were taking advantage of customers who might have been better off without the service they sold them. Men were able to help clients in a way that did not conflict with their role as salespeople. Women agents, by contrast, were not able to style themselves educators. Instead, clients and employers expected them to adopt a therapeutic rol...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2016
Activists have long justified their egalitarian organizational forms in prefigurative terms. Maki... more Activists have long justified their egalitarian organizational forms in prefigurative terms. Making decisions by consensus, decentralizing organization, and rotating leadership serves to model the radically democratic society that activists hope to bring into being. Our comparison of consensus-based decision-making in three historical periods, however, shows that activists have understood the purposes of prefiguration in very different ways. Whereas radical pacifists in the 1940s saw their cooperative organizations as sustaining movement stalwarts in a period of political repression, new left activists in the 1960s imagined that their radically democratic practices would be adopted by ever-widening circles. Along with the political conditions in which they have operated, activists’ distinctive understandings of equality have also shaped the way they have made decisions. Our interviews with 30 leftist activists today reveal a view of decision-making as a place to work through inequal...
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Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug 12, 2005
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