Political consciousness 7
of one's time. Private life has its own legitimate demands, and caring for
a sick child or an aging parent may take precedence over demonstrating
for a cause in which one fully believes.
Finally, there is the matter of opportunity. Changes in the broader political
structure and climate may open or close the chance for collective
action to have an impact. External events and crises, broad shifts in public
sentiment, and electoral changes and rhythms all have a heavy influence
on whether political consciousness ever gets translated into action. In sum,
the absence of a political consciousness that supports collective action can,
at best, explain only one part of people's quiescence.
Lest we be too impressed by the inactivity of most people, the history
of social movements is a reminder of those occasions when people do
become mobilized and engage in various forms of collective action. In spite
of all the obstacles, it occurs regularly and frequently surprises observers
who were overly impressed by an earlier quiescence. These movements
always offer one or more collective action frames. These frames, to quote
Snow and Benford (1992), are "action oriented sets of beliefs and meanings
that inspire and legitimate social movement activities and campaigns."
1
They offer ways of understanding that imply the need for and desirability
of some form of action. Movements may have internal battles over which
particular frame will prevail or may offer several frames for different constituencies,
but they all have in common the implication that those who
share the frame can and should take action.
This book looks carefully at three components of these collective action
frames: (1) injustice, (2) agency, and (3) identity. The injustice component
refers to the moral indignation expressed in this form of political consciousness.
This is not merely a cognitive or intellectual judgment about
what is equitable but also what cognitive psychologists call a hot cognition
- one that is laden with emotion (sec Zajonc, 1980). An injustice frame
requires a consciousness of motivated human actors who carry some of the
onus for bringing about harm and suffering.
The agency component refers to the consciousness that it is possible to
alter conditions or policies through collective action. Collective action
frames imply some sense of collective efficacy and deny the immutability
of some undesirable situation. They empower people by defining them as
potential agents of their own history. They suggest not merely that something
can be done but that "we" can do something.
The identity component refers to the process of defining this "we," typically
in opposition to some "they" who have different interests or values.
Without an adversarial component, the potential target of collective action
is likely to remain an abstraction - hunger, disease, poverty, or war, for
8 Political consciousness
example. Collective action requires a consciousness of human agents whose
policies or practices must be changed and a "we" who will help to bring
the change about.
It is easy to find evidence of all of these components when one looks at
the pamphlets and speeches of movement activists. This book asks about
their broader cultural presence in understanding public affairs. Looking
closely at four quite different issues, it asks about the presence of these
collective action components in both mass media commentary and the
conversations of working people about them. To what extent do the dominant
media frames emphasize injustice, for example? To what extent do
the frames constructed in conversations emphasize this component? The
answers to these questions tell us both about the mobilization pote ntial in
popular understanding of these issues and about the contribution of media
discourse in nurturing or stifling it.
The four issues
Each of the four issues is the subject of a long and continuing public
discourse: affirmative action, nuclear power, troubled industry, and A rabIsraeli
conflict. Each is enormously complex in its own way and quite
different from the others. Arab- Israeli conflict is relatively remote from
the everyday experience of most people compared to affirmative action.
Troubled industry and affirmative action have a high potential for tapping
class and e thnic identifications, but nuclear power docs not appear to
engage any major social cleavage in American society. Nuclear power,
more than the other issues, includes claims of privileged knowledge by
technical experts.
In the course of the research, I learned what I should have known from
the outset: These apparent characteristics of issues that my colleagues and
I used in selecting them were our own social constructions and not an
intrinsic property of the issues. Whether an issue touches people's daily
lives, for example, depends on the meaning it has for the m. One person's
proximate issue is remote for the next person; with a vivid imagination or
a convincing analysis of structural effects, an issue that might initially
appear remote can be brought home to one's daily life. Similar observations
can be made about the other dimensions as well. Whether an issue is
technical or not is a matter of how it is framed, not an intrinsic characteristic;
the relevance of social cleavages is a matte r of interpre tation .
This complicates the analysis hut, in general, the issues did provide
substantial variety. Our a priori construction of meaning on these issues
was close to the mark for most people, in spite of a few surprises. The