When do stories change our minds? Narrative persuasion about social problems

Scholars in a number of disciplines have sought to assess the power of reading or viewing a personal story to modify people's beliefs. However, the research, which has been pursued under diverse programs, has produced conflicting findings. We focus on the persuasiveness of personal stories about problems that are structural (rather than individual) and whose solution requires government action. Overall, the research suggests that although personal stories can overcome people's tendency to resist new information, they often do not do so. People's preexisting beliefs, assumptions, and stereotypes affect their willingness to be absorbed by a story, to empathize with the stories' protagonists, and to endorse the message communicated by the story. We argue also for a sociological perspective on narrative persuasion, one which, unlike the mostly experimental research conducted so far, pays attention to the context in which people encounter stories and to the norms shaping people's assessment of a story as credible, relevant, and important.     

Telling the Collective Story? Moroccan-Dutch Young Adults’ Negotiation of a Collective Identity through Storytelling

Researchers taking a social constructionist perspective on identity agree that identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. However, empirical studies in this field are often based on interviewer–interviewee interaction or focus on interactions with members of a socially dominant out-group. How identities are negotiated in interaction with in-group members remains understudied. In this article we use a narrative approach to study identity negotiation among Moroccan-Dutch young adults, who constitute both an ethnic and a religious (Muslim) minority in the Netherlands. Our analysis focuses on the topics that appear in focus group participants’ stories and on participants’ responses to each other’s stories. We find that Moroccan-Dutch young adults collectively narrate their experiences in Dutch society in terms of discrimination and injustice. Firmly grounded in media discourse and popular wisdom, a collective narrative of a disadvantaged minority identity emerges. However, we also find that this identity is not uncontested. We use the concept of second stories to explain how participants negotiate their collective identity by alternating stories in which the collective experience of deprivation is reaffirmed with stories in which challenging or new evaluations of the collective experience are offered. In particular, participants narrate their personal experiences to challenge recurring evaluations of discrimination and injustice. A new collective narrative emerges from this work of joint storytelling.     

Date Rape After the Afterschool Special: Narrative Trends in the Televised Depiction of Social Problems

Social problems scholars have pointed to sensitive depictions of social problems like smoking, rape, and spousal abuse on television as evidence of the success of movements devoted to those causes. Media scholars have countered that the pressure on television producers to hew to formula inevitably leads to stereotypical depictions of social problems. We appraise these two perspectives by way of an analysis of the portrayal of date rape on teen television dramas over the course of 2 decades. We show that, for a period, advocates did secure portrayals of date rape that were in line with a feminist antirape agenda. However, that depiction yielded to one in which date rape figured as a narrative device, used to tell audiences something about the show's characters or their situation, not to tell them something about rape. Developments in teen serials' content and especially their form led eventually to antifeminist portrayals, in which rapes were portrayed as unjust but routine events. Behind these developments, however, were demands on television writers to produce not formula, but novelty. We conclude by theorizing more generally the effects of the demand for novelty on the depiction of social problems on television.     

Is Participation Without Power Good Enough? Introduction to “Democracy Now: Ethnographies of Contemporary Participation”

This introduction to the section Democracy Now: Ethnographies of Contemporary Participation sketches a contemporary enthusiasm for participation that reaches across business, education, popular culture, and politics. The article tries to account for what makes this enthusiasm new and begins to sketch its implications for what people want and expect from their political and economic institutions.     

“Free spaces” in collective action

Theory and Society -     

Snarls,Quacks, and Quarrels: Culture and Structure in Political Process Theory

Political process theories of social movements have relied on a set of oppositions between culture and structure that has limited their capacity to capture the supraindividual, durable, and constraining dimensions of culture. The solution is not to abandon an emphasis on objective political structures in favor of potential insurgents' subjective perceptions of political opportunities, but rather to probe the (objective) resources and constraints generated by the cultural dimensions of political structures. Such a perspective would pay closer attention to the cultural traditions, ideological principles, institutional memories, and political taboos that create and limit political opportunities; and would link the master frames that animate protest to dominant political structures and processes.     

The Moral Obligations of Some Debts

If given the opportunity to reduce your debt, albeit at some financial risk, would you take it? Interviews and observations in two debt settlement firms show that debt settlement clients tend not to calculate financial risks in deciding which debts to try to settle. Rather, they treat their relationship with their creditor as a reciprocal and ongoing one. If the service provided by their creditor was inadequate, clients feel justified in trying to settle their debt. Otherwise, they believe that they must pay back the debt in full. In line with recent work in economic sociology, we show that economic transactors are bound by the moral requirements of the relationship they are in. But debt settlement clients invent those relationships in at least two ways: turning a debt to an impersonal agency into a relationship with a person, and turning a relationship of inequality into one of equality. Clients may preserve some sense of autonomy in a disempowering relationship by conceptualizing their relationship with their creditor as one between equals. But there is a cost: As a result of the relational schemas on which they operate, they often refuse to try to settle debts that might be settled without lasting financial repercussions.     

Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements

Study of stories and storytelling in social movements can contribute to our understanding of recruitment that takes place outside formal movement organizations; social movement organizations' ability to withstand strategic setbacks; and movements' impacts on mainstream politics. This paper draws on several cases to illuminate the yields of such study and to provide alternatives to the overbroad, uncritical, and astructural understandings of narrative evident in some recent writings. It also urges attention to the role of literary devices in sociological analyses of collective action.     

Culture and Its Discontents: Recent Theorizing on the Cultural Dimensions of Protest*

Recent analyses of the cultural dimensions of protest have gone some distance in correcting the structuralist and instrumentalist biases of early resource mobilization and political process models. They remain limited, however, by their retention of dichotomous conceptions of culture and structure in the emergence of protest, of cultural and instrumental orientations in ongoing collective action, and of cultural and political targets of protest. As a result, they have neglected, respectively, continuities between structured inequalities and the movement challenges that are made to them, the cultural shaping of instrumentally rational decisionmaking, and the strategic possibilities that lay in cultural challenge made within the sphere of institutional politics. I draw on recent theorizing in the sociology of culture and on several case studies of collective action in order to highlight these lacunae and to propose analytical alternatives.