“Communities Change When Individuals Change”: The sustainability of system-challenging collective action
Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
People who challenge the status quo through collective action face tremendous obstacles—not just practically, but in their ways of thinking, existing, and relating to others. This article addresses how collective actors sustain their engagement in the face of such high costs. System-challenging collective actors must reimagine and enact new, non-normative ways of thinking, existing, and relating that transform the status quo. This article explores the social psychological processes underlying sustained system-challenging collective action through activists’ narratives of politicization, experiences of identity change, and reimagination of social structures. We draw on contributions from social psychological theories of system justification and social identity to examine how system-challenging collective action is motivated and sustained. Through interviews with Chicago-based activists and organizers engaged in system-challenging collective action, we implement a qualitative thematic analysis to propose that sustainability arises from three integrated factors: shared identity, system-challenging ideology, and intentional community.
Originalsprog | Engelsk |
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Tidsskrift | European Journal of Social Psychology |
Vol/bind | 51 |
Udgave nummer | 3 |
Sider (fra-til) | 525-537 |
Antal sider | 13 |
ISSN | 0046-2772 |
DOI | |
Status | Udgivet - apr. 2021 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Denise Huang, Samhitha Krishnan, Thomas Morton, Dasom Nah, Lydia Nichols-Russell, Shantá Robinson, Yzza Sedrati, and Martha van Haitsma for considerable support and guidance on earlier versions of this article. We would also like to thank a non-anonymous review by Winnifred Louis, constructive comments from the managing editor, John Dixon, and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive suggestions. We also extend a special thanks to each interview participant for their generous engagement with the research topics.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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