Walking an Emotional Tightrope: Managing Emotions in a Women's Prison

Until recently, the emotional experiences of women in prison have been overlooked by symbolic interactionists and social scientists. Similarly, research relevant to the sociology of emotions has not been explored in the social context of a correctional institution for women. The purpose of this study is to investigate emotional experiences from the unique perspective of incarcerated women. This research examines how women in prison perceive and manage their emotional lives while confined and asks whether their chosen strategies have an impact on their interactions and thus affect the institutional environment. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with thirty‐five women incarcerated in a correctional institution located in the midwestern United States. Using a semistructured interview schedule, respondents were asked about a range of topics, one of which involved their emotional lives while incarcerated. Findings indicate these women define their emotional experiences as being simultaneously provocative and constrained. Respondents suggest that their emotional resources are individually, contextually, and culturally grounded. They discuss employing various strategies to manage their emotional lives while incarcerated, including diversions, spiritual pursuits, blocking exercises, self‐reflection, and humor. The majority of the techniques employed to control emotions are intrapersonal. Respondents describe personal efforts designed to manage their emotional experiences rather than share their feelings with others.     

Managing the Emotions of Others

Although research has focused on how individuals manage their own emotions, little attention has been paid to how individuals manage the emotions of other people. Here, I describe several techniques of interpersonal emotion-management, drawing from observations of a psychodrama-based encounter group which deliberately manipulated its members' feelings. Analysis reveals a number of strategies (e.g., group enactments, provocations, comforting) which, when used sequentially, produced first emotional loss of control in the individual and then positive emotion. Group solidarity was sometimes affected by these interpersonal emotion-management techniques as well. Some techniques may be similar to those used in military training and cult group recruitment, although further research attention is needed in these arenas. Other settings in which members play upon the emotions of others should be examined to identify other interpersonal techniques and the sequencing of strategies which produce desired individual and group outcomes.     

Partnerships in Transition: Managing Organizational and Collaborative Change

Despite the abundance of literature on collaboration, very little attention is devoted to exploring the how partnerships transition over time. This article reports the findings of a study that examined how a mature partnership adjusted to a new administrative team while moving forward with a strategic plan to advance the partnership's mission. Key informant interviews revealed that when stable leadership is not present during transitional phases, the broker organization's capacity to facilitate the collaborative effort will be limited when priorities shift toward maintaining its organizational capacity for survival instead of the collective goals of the partnership.     

Telling Our Stories: Narrative and Framing in the Movement for Same-Sex Marriage

Although framing and narrative are both well-documented discursive features of social movements, the difference between them is often overstated; where frames are treated as logical, authoritative, and abstract, the usefulness of narratives is frequently documented in relation to pre-mobilization phases of movement development such as identity and community building. Drawing on an analysis of Connecticut's Judiciary Committee hearings on same-sex marriage, I challenge this distinction and elucidate the relationship between storytelling and framing, showing how narrative is used to make packages of frames cohesive and compelling. In demonstrating how proponents of the legislation deployed narratives and frames simultaneously, this research contributes to scholarship on the function and configuration of discursive strategies for social movements.     

Framing Faith: Explaining Cooperation and Conflict in the US Conservative Christian Political Movement

Despite the burgeoning literature on coalition work, very little is known about the cooperative potential within social movements. Drawing on archival, interview, and secondary data, we examine cooperation and conflict in the US conservative Christian political movement from 1970 to 1994. We highlight how framing, political elites and intramovement dynamics within the conservative Christian political movement altered the cooperative potential over time. Specifically, we find that the conservative Christian political movement initially had a strong coordinative potential and even engaged in organization building as a way to formalize cross-denominational cooperation. However, as the evangelical wing of the movement sought to build and consolidate its political power, it began to frame issues in ways that reflected a particularized world view regarding the role of the state in fostering a moral society. Other conservative Christian organizations responded by couching their understanding of political issues in their own faith traditions, creating divisions within the movement and ultimately making cooperation impossible. Conceptually, this research broadens how we think about cooperation and points to the importance of specialization and political elites to cooperation within movements.     

Perception of Emotions in the Hand Movement Quality of Finnish Sign Language

This study investigated whether people can decode emotion (happiness, neutrality, and anger) communicated via hand movements in Finnish sign language when these emotions are expressed in semantically neutral sentences. Twenty volunteer participants without any knowledge of sign language took part in the experiment. The results indicated that the subjects were able to reliably decode anger and neutrality from the quality of hand movements. For happy hand expressions, the responses of happiness and neutrality were confused. Thus, the study showed that emotion-related information can be encoded in the quality of hand movements during signing and that this information can be decoded without previous experience with this particular mode of communication.     

Frame Changes and Social Movement Contraction: U.S. Peace Movement Framing After the Cold War*

This study analyzes framing processes and their relationships with ongoing social movement change. We examine peace frames found among U.S. peace movement organizations (PMOS) in its period of contraction at the end of the Cold War. On the basis of analysis of a unique two-wave survey of US. peace movement organizations in 1988 and 1992, we assess the extent to which organizational framing of the peace problematic changed. We found an overall shift in emphases from more bilateral frames like the nuclear weapons freeze to frames emphasizing multilateralism and global interdependence. PMO frame transformations that took place between 1988 and 1992 represent a trend towards broader, more radical (or structural) and less exclusive peace movement frames. We describe the frame transformations observed here as the emergence of “retention frames.” Retention frames embody several dimensions of movement abeyance structures and serve to sustain organizational continuity across episodes of movement surges and contraction.     

Framing Free Trade Agreements: The Politics of Nationalism in the Anti-Neoliberal Globalization Movement in South Korea

This paper offers a critical analysis of the current political trajectory of the anti-neoliberal globalization movement (ANGM) in South Korea. Drawing on framing theory, it analyzes the ways in which the Korean ANGM interpreted a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States. This article postulates that national sovereignty was the master frame of the Korean ANGM and that the movement has projected the nation-state as the ethical guardian of ‘national interests’ without specifying an alternative trading or economic model that can better serve the interests of the people. Thus, through pointing out the shortcomings of a nationalist framing that ignores the class relations and conflicting interests that ultimately shape the contents of any trade or economic development model, this article seeks to bring attention to the limitations of the ANGM as well as the need to develop alternatives to the existing global trading system.

Este artículo ofrece una visión crítica de la trayectoria política del movimiento de globalización antineoliberal (ANGM, por sus siglas en inglés) en Corea del Sur. Extrayendo de una teoría enmarcada, el artículo analiza las maneras como el movimiento de globalización antineoliberal enmarcó un tratado de libre comercio (FTA, por sus siglas en inglés) con los Estados Unidos y luego discute las limitaciones y las deficiencias de la enmarcación del movimiento del tratado de libre comercio. Sostiene que la soberanía nacional fue la enmarcación principal del movimiento coreano y que la enmarcación nacionalista del tratado de libre comercio, no era fundamentalmente diferente del discurso hegemónico de la elite coreana, sobre el tratado de libre comercio. También asume que dado que los principales prognósticos de los marcos del movimiento se enfocaron al proteccionismo selectivo y capitalismo de bienestar, tendieron a limitar el rango de alternativas a la globalización neoliberal.

     

INSTITUTIONALIZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: The Dual Strategy of the Korean Women's Movement

Since the 1990s, scholars have paid attention to the role of social movements traversing the official terrain of politics by blending a “contention” strategy with an “engagement” strategy. The literature often highlights the contribution of institutionalized social movements to policymaking and sociopolitical change, but rarely addresses why and how specific social movement organizations gain routine access to formal politics. Using the Korean women's movement as a case study, I analyze the conditions for movement institutionalization. As I perceive it as the consequence both of social movements' decision to participate in government and of the state's desire to integrate such movements into its decision‐making process, movement institutionalization appears when the three factors are combined: (1) pressure from international organizations, (2) democratizing political structures, and (3) cognitive shifts by movement activists toward the role of the state.     

Managing Organizational Paradoxes in Social Enterprises: Case Studies from the MENA Region

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This study aims to examine the question around how small- and medium-scale hybrid social enterprises within the context of...     

Motherhood and the Construction of Feminist Identities: Variations in a Women's Movement Organization

This paper examines the relationship between feminism and motherhood as it plays out in the construction of feminist identities. Through a qualitative analysis of two grassroots chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW), I examine how members'understandings and experiences with motherhood and their community context and organizational environment shape the construction of shared feminist identities. Central to this study is the conception of motherhood as a historically constructed ideology that provides a gendered model of behavior for women. In the organizations studied, I find that motherhood is interpreted two ways: as a social status with political ramifications and as the act of caring and taking responsibility for relationships. These interpretations are incorporated into frames extended to potential recruits and shape the group's actions. As a result these two ideologically similar liberal feminist organizations construct distinct feminist identities.     

The Flayed and Exquisite Self of Travelers: Managing Face and Emotions in Strange Places

Travelers who cross cultural and linguistic borders encounter recurrent failures of social competence. People routinely violate the linguistic and nonlinguistic normative order, and have few means at their disposal for repair work. These episodes lead to the experience of a flayed self: a temporary, painful identity born of one's inability to display competence, combined with heightened, exquisite self‐consciousness. Using interactionist scaffolding and travelers' accounts, I examine this self, its commitments, and resources. I examine four techniques used to avoid flayed and exquisite selfhood: denying negative experience, externalizing the causes of that experience, engaging in the mind cure, and doing time work.     

Attack of the Butterfly Spirits: The Impact of Movement Framing by Community Garden Preservation Activists

This study of the community garden preservation movement on the Lower East Side of New York examines the role of movement framing by activists in their struggle to save hundreds of gardens from destruction. In repeated confrontations with the Giuliani administration, gardeners successfully de-routinized the process of urban redevelopment by portraying the loss of a garden as an unimaginable violation against themselves, and the city. This process of re-framing urban development helped activists to compensate for their disempowered political status, and was instrumental in forcing the Giuliani administration to negotiate to save the gardens. Focusing on framing by movement activists demonstrates the purposive and strategic character of neighborhood identity. Emphasizing the strategy of neighborhood identities is a useful corrective to the many studies of community movements that emphasize their emergence from a relational, presumably non-strategic, local reality.     

Support Among Women for the Issues of the Women's Movement*

Using both data from a national and community sample, this paper explores support among women for issues relevant to the women's rights movement, and the extent to which the issues of the movement are perceived as a coherent whole by women. Five distinct issue dimensions emerged. Support for or agreement with each of the issue areas was only slightly correlated with support for the others. Thus some types of women are supportive of the variety of issues and in agreement with the basic assumptions of the movement while others are more selective in their support. In general, support for any particular issue area is greater than support for women's liberation, yet even those opposing women's liberation agree with the position of the women's movementon on a majority of issues examined.