David A. Snow

Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation

This paper attempts to further theoretical and empirical understanding of adherent and constituent mobilization by proposing and analyzing frame alignment as a conceptual bridge linking social psychological and resource mobilization views on movement participation. Extension of Goffinans (1974) frame analytic perspective provides the conceptualltheoretical framework; field research on two religious movements, the peace movement, and several neighborhood movements provide the primary empirical base. Four frame alignment processes are identified and elaborated: frame bridging, frame amplification, frame extension, and frame transformation. The basic underlying premise is that frame alignment, of one variety or another, is a necessary condition for participation, whatever its nature or intensity, and that it is typically an interactional and ongoing accomplishment. The paper concludes with an elaboration of several sets of theoretical and research implications.

Social Networks and Social Movements: A Microstructural Approach to Differential Recruitment

Past examinations of differential recruitment to and the differential growth of social movements have typically sought explanation at a social psychological/motivational level of analysis. That focus has recently been called into question by scholars concerned with the process through which movement organizations expand their ranks and mobilize support for their causes. Yet, as Useem (1975) and Zald and McCarthy (1979) have noted, there has been little systematic research conducted on the details of the influence process. Drawing on data derived from a synthesis of existing research and two primary sources, this paper attempts to shed greater empirical and theoretical light on the movement recruitment process. The findings indicate that differential recruitment is not merely a function of dispositional susceptibility, but is strongly influenced by structural proximity, availability, and affective interaction with movement members. The findings also indicate that a movement organizations network attributes function as an important determinant of its recruitment strategies and growth.

The Outcomes of Homeless Mobilization: The Influence of Organization, Disruption, Political Mediation, and Framing

This article contributes to a more systematic understanding of movement outcomes by analyzing how organizational, tactical, political, and framing variables interact and combine to account for differences in the outcomes attained by 15 homeless social movement organizations (SMOs) active in eight U.S. cities. Using qualitative comparative analysis to assess ethnographically derived data on the 15 SMOs, the study highlights the importance of organizational viability and the rhetorical quality of diagnostic and prognostic frames for securing outcomes while identifying a contingent relationship between tactics and political environment. The analysis suggests that there are multiple pathways leading to movement outcome attainment, and therefore unidimensional rather than combinatorial and interactive approaches are misguided.

THE MYTH OF PERVASIVE MENTAL ILLNESS AMONG THE HOMELESS

This paper calls into question the double-edged thesis that the majority of the homeless are mentally ill and that the streets of urban America have consequently become the asylums of today. We present data from a triangulated field study of nearly 1,000 unattached homeless adults in Texas that contradict this stereotypic imagery. We also suggest that this root image is due to the medicalization of the problem of homelessness, a misplaced emphasis on the causal role of deinstitutionalization, the heightened visibility of homeless individuals who are mentally ill, and several conceptual and methodological shortcomings of previous attempts to assess the mental status of the homeless. We conclude by arguing that the most common face on the street is not that of the psychiatrically-impaired individual, but of one caught in a cycle of low-paying, dead-end jobs that fail to provide the means to get off and stay off the streets.

Criminality and Homeless Men: An Empirical Assessment

This paper examines the relationship between criminality and homelessness by tracking a random sample of homeless males through the police department records of a large Southwestern city over a 27-month period. When compared with data on criminality in the general population of males within the city over the same period, these data show that while the homeless have a higher overall arrest rate, the majority of offenses for which they are arrested are for public intoxication, followed by theft/shoplifting, violation of city ordinances, and burglary. The findings also suggest that criminality among homeless men varies with time on the streets and contact with the mental health system. Drawing on ethnographic data, these findings are explained in part in terms of criminalization, stigmatization, and adaptation processes. The findings challenge the depiction of homeless men as serious predatory criminals, and suggest a number of theoretical and policy implications.

Space, Politics, and the Survival Strategies of the Homeless:

This article sheds conceptual and empirical light on the ways in which urban physical space and homelessness intersect by considering three focal questions: (a) What are the key spatial concepts necessary for understanding the relationship between urban space and homeless survival strategies and routines, (b) what are the central strategies used within communities to control the homeless spatially or ecologically, and (c) how do the homeless respond to these constraints and impositions? These questions are explored conceptually and empirically with data on spatial contestations drawn from the local newspapers of a southwestern city between 1992 and 1997. The findings illuminate the sociospatial dynamics of homelessness and underscore how a thoroughgoing understanding of the everyday routines and adaptive strategies of the homeless requires consideration of how different types of urban space affect the homeless and of the ways in which the homeless negotiate and respond to the spatial constraints with which they are confronted.

Interviewing by comment: An adjunct to the direct question

Interviewing by direct question has long been the sociologists favored means of collecting data. This article seeks to expand understanding of the research interview by proposingthe comment as a supplementary data gathering technique. Several methodological and theoretical considerations are discussed that indicate the appropriateness of interviewing by comment for the general purpose of discovery and for eliciting information about certain behaviors, events, and relationships. In order to demonstrate concretely the utility of interviewing by comment, eight types of comments that can be employed for a variety of research purposes are presented and illustrated.

Alternative Types of Cross-national Diffusion in the Social Movement Arena

McAdam and Rucht (1993) have recently bemoaned the neglect of diffusion processes in the study of social movements. Clearly there has been work that bears on aspects of diffusion among social movements (Oberschall 1995). But McAdam and Rucht are correct in noting that research and theorization aimed at ferreting out the links among social movements and ‘the dynamics by which they are forged’ (1993: 73) pales in comparison to interest in the emergence of discrete social movements and the factors accounting for constituent participation.

Identifying the Precipitants of Homeless Protest Across 17 U.S. Cities, 1980 to 1990

During the 1980s, homeless people formed social movement organizations and mobilized collective action events in cities across the U.S. From the vantage point of social movement theories and scholarship on homelessness, it is surprising that homeless protest was so prevalent in the 1980s. Yet we find evidence of homeless protest events across no fewer than 50 U.S. cities in the 1980–90 period. Drawing on social movement theories about the precipitants of mobilization, we examine the extent to which city-level contextual factors, and their change over time, affect variation in the frequency of homeless mobilization across 17 of these cities. Our findings reveal that a mix of factors congruent with strain and resource mobilization theories helps to account for variation in the frequency of homeless protest across U.S. cities in the 1980s.

“COOLING OUT” MEN IN SINGLES BARS AND NIGHTCLUBS Observations on the Interpersonal Survival Strategies of Women in Public Places

This article attempts to advance understanding of the interactional survival strategies of women in public places by examining the manner in which they fend off men and parry their advances in singles bars and nightclubs. The strategies employed are conceptualized as variants of the “cooling out” process initially outlined by Goffman (1952). Three sets of strategic practices associated with actual or anticipated cooling-out encounters are identified and elaborated. The data are based on participant observation in nine different nightclubs and drinking establishments, conversational interviews with patrons and employees, and postobservational, semistructured interviews with 33 other individuals. The article concludes with a number of observations regarding both the factors underlying the female-to-male cooling-out process and the relationship between that process, gender role behavior, public order, and the self.