Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Meanwhile, the authors' antidote to the American sicknessa quest for democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditionshas contributed to a vigorous scholarly and popular debate. Attention has been focused on forms of social organization, be it civil society, democratic communitarianism, or associative democracy, that can humanize the market and the administrative state. In their new Introduction the authors relate the argument of their book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.\

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

■ Abstract Sociologists have turned to collective identity to fill gaps in resource mobilization and political process accounts of the emergence, trajectories, and impacts of social movements. Collective identity has been treated as an alternative to structurally given interests in accounting for the claims on behalf of which people mobilize, an alternative to selective incentives in understanding why people participate, an alternative to instrumental rationality in explaining what tactical choices activists make, and an alternative to institutional reforms in assessing movements’ impacts. Collective identity has been treated both too broadly and too narrowly, sometimes applied to too many dynamics, at other times made into a residual category within structuralist, state-centered, and rationalist accounts.

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Collective identity and social movements

How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as “collective representations”—vocabularies, symbols, or codes—that structure people’s abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of “group style,” showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter collective representations. The result is “culture in interaction,” which complements research in the sociology of emotion, neoinstitutionalism, the reproduction of inequality, and other work, by showing how groups put culture to use in everyday life.

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Culture in Interaction 1

This book challenges the myth that Americans' emphasis on personal fulfilment necessarily weakens commitment to the common good. Drawing on extensive participant-observation with a variety of environmentalist groups, Paul Lichterman argues that individualism sometimes enhances public, political commitment and that a shared respect for individual inspiration enables activists with diverse political backgrounds to work together. This personalised culture of commitment has sustained activists working long-term for social change. The book contrasts 'personalised politics' in mainly white environmental groups with a more traditional, community-centred culture of commitment in an African-American group. The untraditional, personalised politics of many recent social movements invites us to rethink common understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.

The Search for Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Commitment

List of Tables and Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE: In Search of the Social Spiral 7 CHAPTER TWO: Studying the Social Spiral 42 CHAPTER THREE: Networkers and Volunteers Reaching Out 60 CHAPTER FOUR: Crying Out: Social Critics 99 CHAPTER FIVE: Christ-like Care: Social Servants 133 CHAPTER SIX: A Social Spiral Winds Outward: Partners 171 CHAPTER SEVEN: Doing Things with Religion in Local Civic Life 216 CHAPTER EIGHT: Doing Things Together: Lessons from Religious Community Service Groups 247 APPENDIX I: Theory and Evidence in a Study of Religious Community Service Groups 264 APPENDIX II: Studying Customs 274 Notes 281 References 303 Index 325

Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America's Divisions

This paper draws on a participant-observation study of two grass-roots environmental movements to illuminate difficulties in multicultural alliance building between activists. It focuses on different, taken-forgranted cultural patterns in the ways grass-roots movements create group bonds, and it conceptualizes these patterns as different forms of “movement community.” A “personalized” form of movement community in local U.S. Green movement groups contributed to difficulties in multicultural alliance building. These difficulties arose despite the U.S. Greens' explicit multiculturalist ideology and their validation of the “environmental justice” ideology upheld by some activists of color. The paper suggests that U.S. Greens share with other contemporary activists a way of building movement community that places cultural barriers in the path of multicultural alliances. It also suggests that the personalized form of community may be a reasonable, if problematic, response by activists like Greens to difficult cultural predicaments in multicultural alliance building.

Piecing together multicultural community : cultural differences in community building among grass-roots environmentalists

Studies of religion's public roles typically concern the ways in which religious frameworks justify opinions and actions. This article draws from participant-observation research to show how people also use religion to define the boundaries of group identities and relationships. Importantly, people do this in situation-specific ways that we cannot predict from people's religious reasons for public actions. Evidence comes from two religiously-based organizations sponsored by the same local religious coalition, studied during 1998 to 2000 in a midsized U.S. city. One group is an alliance of lay people representing different churches, who organized volunteering and community development projects with a low-income minority neighborhood. The other is an alliance of clergy, representing different churches, that organized public events against racism. In each case, group members used religious terms to argue sharply over civic identity despite sharing the same religious reasons for their goals. Resolving the dis...

Paul Lichterman

Papers

Culture in Interaction 1

The Search for Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Commitment

Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America's Divisions

Piecing together multicultural community : cultural differences in community building among grass-roots environmentalists

Religion and the Construction of Civic Identity