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Patterns of engagement: identities and social movement organizations in Finland and Malawi

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Abstract

Based on interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this article reconsiders the ways in which the coordination of identity projects and action is approached in social movement scholarship. Rather than beginning with personal and collective identities, we take our cue from recent work by Laurent Thévenot and trace actors’ forms of engagement—the various ways actors produce commonality. As we show, doing so in vastly different social contexts allows us to see permutations in such forms afforded by participation in a transnational social movement and to identify patterns of collective action that we would otherwise be apt to miss. Finnish activists narrated their activities by way of engaging in the forms of the common good driving the climate movement, but coordinated various situations also through engagement in familiarity, comfort, and ease. Malawian activists and NGO employees also spoke of the common good the movements worked to achieve, but principally created common ground by engaging in shared individual choices and projects, which were jointly consecrated by fellow NGO participants. Ultimately, we argue that tracing forms of engagement enables more in-depth understanding of what is at stake when people act together in social movement organizations: moving away from collective and personal identity to patterns of engagement allows a vantage point into the processes through which commonality is created and generates new hypotheses regarding the coordination of action in social movement organizations.

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Notes

  1. The study is part of a larger comparative effort, Climate Change and Civil Society (CLIC), in which the civil society’s participation in the politics of climate change is analyzed and compared from the perspectives of media debate, (transnational) NGO networks, and local civil society groups in Finland, France, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Russia, and the US (Alapuro 2010; Ylä-Anttila and Kukkonen 2017).

  2. The authors want to thank Anna Kukkonen, Tomi Lehtimäki, Elina Mikola, and Veera Nurmenniemi for their help with the Finnish interviews.

  3. The authors want to thank Hastings Honde and James Mkandawire for interviewing and analytic insights in the Malawian context.

  4. This results in, for example, the particular system of financing of civic associations and NGOs, based largely on various forms of government funding, including the profits of the state-owned gambling monopoly, Finland’s Slot Machine Association.

  5. Activists’ ages varied from their early twenties to late forties, thus the length of prior experience in social movement organizations also varied significantly. However, only one interviewee had less than two years of campaign experience at the time of the interview.

  6. The acronym stands for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.” This issue was first placed on the agenda of the 2005 international climate-change negotiations and has since become both influential and the source of controversy in a global movement (IIED 2018).

  7. The authors thank Tom Hannan for this observation.

  8. There were two types of negative cases in the thirty-five interviews where narratives were strikingly different. The first was a narrative-cluster of a few interviewees who were above fifty years old and thus not part of the same generation; the second, the only interviewee who did not have a high school certificate. Although these cases are important, we do not analyze them here for reasons of space.

  9. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) have suggested that the order of the project is a novel form of justification, in which the common good is adaptability, flexibility, and continuous re-connecting, and the logic of belonging and ordering depends on temporal assemblages of peoples and things. In our analysis, the world of projects does not, however, emerge in this fashion. The shared goals of the Malawian activists did not portray the project itself as a purpose or an evaluated good, but instead the advancing of the plural individual plans and forging the common in the form of shared goals (see Eranti 2016).

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Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank the reviewers of Theory and Society for insightful comments that pushed our thinking further. We are grateful for comments and discussions on different versions of the text to Rogers Brubaker, Nina Eliasoph, Veikko Eranti, Robert Jansen, Paul Lichterman, Laurent Thévenot, the participants of the HEPO Seminar, the participants at the IASR/Tampere lectures, and the participants of the comparative historical workshop at UCLA.

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  1. Faculty of Social Sciences/Sociology, University of Tampere, 33014, Tampere, Finland

    Eeva Luhtakallio

  2. Department of Sociology, New York University, 295 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY, 10012-9605, USA

    Iddo Tavory

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Correspondence to Eeva Luhtakallio.

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Luhtakallio, E., Tavory, I. Patterns of engagement: identities and social movement organizations in Finland and Malawi. Theor Soc 47, 151–174 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9314-x

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