What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in Social Movement Research

What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in Social Movement Research
Pamela E. Oliver
University of Wisconsin
Oliver@ssc.wisc.edu
Hank Johnston
San Diego State University
Hank.Johnston@sdsu.edu

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What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in Social Movement Research
Abstract
Frame theory is often credited with “bringing ideas back in” to the study of social movements,
but frames are not the only useful ideational concepts. In particular, the older, more politicized
concept of ideology needs to be used in its own right and not recast as a frame. Frame theory is
rooted in linguistic studies of interaction, and points to the way shared assumptions and
meanings shape the interpretation of any particular event. Ideology theory is rooted in politics
and the study of politics, and points to coherent systems of ideas which provide theories of
society coupled with value commitments and normative implications for promoting or resisting
social change. Ideologies can function as frames, but there is more to ideology than framing.
Frame theory offers a relatively shallow conception of the transmission of political ideas as
marketing and resonating, while a recognition of the complexity and depth of ideology points to
the social construction processes of thinking, reasoning, educating, and socializing. Social
movements can only be understood by genuinely linking social psychological and political
sociology concepts and traditions, not by trying to rename one group in the language of the
other.

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What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in Social Movement Research
The study of social movements has always had one foot in social psychology and the other
in political sociology, although at times these two sides have seemed to be at war with each other.
In the 1950s and 1960s, so cial psychology dominated, and social movements were theorized by
collective behavior theorists as long-lasting panics or crowds. In the 1970s, proponents of
resource mobilization criticized collective behavior theory, and stressed the importance of
political and organizational factors. In the 1980s, social psychologists criticized resource
mobilization and political process theories for treating social movements only in organizational
and political terms, and neglecting the problems of social construction. Snow et al.'s (1986)
programmatic article o n "frame alignment processes" was central in the so cial psychological turn,
and is widely credited with "bringing ideas back in."1 Framing theory has provided a way to link
ideas and social construction of ideas with organizational and political process factors. Over a
hundred different kinds of frames linked with specific movements have been identified (Benford
1997).
Not surprisingly, frame theory has itself been criticized. Benford's "insider's critique"
(1997) lists several shortcomings in the way the concept is applied in research studies, and asserts
that the term has become a cliché (p. 415). "Framing" is often inserted uncritically wherever there
is a movement-related idea being defined or debated. It has been pointed out that the concept of
frame does not do just ice to the ideational co mplexity of a social movement (Munson 1999); and
that it tends to reduce the richness of culture to recruitment strategies (Jasper 1997: 76).
Steinberg (1998) criticizes frame t heory as too stat ic and stresses the co ntextual and recursive
qualities of frames.
None of these critiques has ident ified what we consider to be a central problem in frame
theory: its failure to address the relation between frames and the much older, more political
concept of ideology, and the concomitant tendency of many researchers to use "frame"
uncritically as a synonym for ideology. Snow and Benford (1988) are often given credit for
insights which they adopted from the older literature on the functions of and constraints on social
movement ideologies and renamed as framing tasks and constraints o n frames. Their own article
clearly credits this older literature and specifically says that they are drawing on the older
literature to develop insights about framing processes. In this and their own subsequent articles,
they use the terms frame and ideology distinctly and explicitly cite older works. Nevertheless,
they neither pro vide justification for abando ning the term ideology and subst ituting frame in this
context nor explain the relation between frames and ideologies. Subsequent scholars have tended
to cite the Snow and Benford article and its framing language as the original work in the area, and
to use the terms frame and ideology interchangeably. This turn has led t o muddled frame t heory,
diverted attention from a serious examination of ideo logy and the social construct ion o f ideology,
and silenced the question of the relation between frames and ideologies.
Frames and framing processes are powerful concepts. Frame theory’s emphasis on the
intentional ways in which movement activists seek to construct their self-presentations so as to
draw support from others points to critical processes in social movements. There is no question
that this line of theorizing has been extraordinarily productive of new research and new
understandings of social movements. In seeking to back up and revisit a part icular turn in framing
theory, we should no t be understood as trying to discount t he value and impo rtance of a whole
line of work. Nevertheless, the power of frame theory is lost if “frame” is made to do the work of
other concepts. Ideology is of central importance in understanding social movements and other
political formations, and it is trivialized when it is seen only as a frame. We need both concepts,
and we need to understand the relation between t hem.
The importance of distinguishing these concepts may be seen most starkly in the
movements for and against legal abortion. As Kristen Luker argues, these movements are rooted
in deeply-held ideologies and understandings of the meaning and purpose of a woman’s life, as
well as in the professional ideologies of physicians. Strong anti-abortion beliefs were in the 1960s
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rooted in Catholic doctrine which links sexuality to procreation, condemns artificial birt h control,
and condemns killing a fetus even to save the life of the mother (two deaths are morally superior
to one murder); people who live according to these doctrines build lives in which pregnancies can
be accommodated. As the abortion struggles evolved, conservative Protestants also adopted anti-
abortion ideologies which do not necessarily contain all the elements of t he co herent Catholic
world-view, but strong anti-abo rtion sentiment remains deeply rooted in religious traditions and
religious world-views. Those with strong ant i-abortion ideo logies reject abo rtion even for the
“strict constructionist” reason of saving the mother from the immediate risk of death, although
laws permitting such abortions do not outrage their moral sense. The initial impetus for abortion
reform was rooted in physicians’ desire to clarify the “broad constructionist” views of the medical
necessity for abortion which would include severe deformity of the fet us, and threats t o the
mother’s life and well-being that might include physical strains of excessive pregnancies or
illnesses, psychological distress, and financial hardship. For physicians, the issue was the right to
practice medicine in good conscience, unconstrained by others’ religiously-motivated intrusions.
Physicians were not supporting “abo rtion on demand,” but the ideo logy of themselves as the
proper arbiters o f medical necessity. As the women’s movement energized and joined the
abortion debate, feminists developed an ideology stressing women’s autonomy and need to
control their own bodies. As Luker argues, women who were in the labor force saw pregnancy as
capable of disrupting and destroying a perso n’s entire life, valorized sex for enjoyment and
intimacy, and believed that women should choose to have children when they could devote proper
attention and energy to them.
Simply renaming these three ideological strands as frames (e.g. religious, medical
necessity, women’s need) would add nothing to the analysis and would, in fact, risk obscuring the
depth and complexity of the belief systems underlying these views. But this does not mean that
frames are unimportant o r irrelevant in these debates. Rather, the frame concepts are most
powerful precisely if they are sharply distinguished from ideology. The ways in which actors have
self-consciously posit ioned the issue over time is very different from what one would think from a
simple extrapolation of the underlying ideologies. Several examples illustrate this. First, Luker
argues that the 1972 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision essentially framed abortion as a
church-state issue: those who filed friend o f the court briefs against abortion reform were all
religious organizations, while those who filed briefs for abortion reform represented a broad
spectrum of professional and secular organizations. The decision was constructed in the context
of a recent prior decision which had overturned laws against the sale of contraceptives as
representing an unwarranted intrusion of the state and particular religious beliefs into the personal
lives of people. Beliefs abo ut abo rtion were seen (framed) as religious beliefs. Secondly, the
self-naming of each movement in the politics of the 1970s is a framing turn. From anti-abortion
and pro-abortion, the sides proactively renamed themselves as pro-life and pro-choice as the pro-
life movement sought to position itself in a secular space to reach out to people who did not
necessarily share their religious understandings of the issue, and the pro-choice movement
defensively repositioned itself to emphasize its defense of contraception and personal
responsibility, with abortion as a necessary backup to failed contraception. Thirdly, and most
tellingly, both sides have adopted the civil rights master frame. The pro-life movement stresses
the right of the fetus to life, while the pro-choice movement stresses the right of the woman to
control a fundamental aspect of her life. If we think of frames as synonymous with ideologies, we
will lack the analytic tools, even the very language, for talking about this fascinating instance of
the same frame being tied to diametrically opposed ideologies. If we keep the concepts clearly
differentiated, we have so me vocabulary and tools for talking about ho w people present t heir
issues in a public space, and we avoid the danger of simply extrapolat ing ideologies from their
public presentations.
If we back up to the turn toward framing theory and away from ideology among social
movement scholars, we will need to revisit why the turn was made. We believe that this was
largely due t o the legacy of pejorative theories of ideo logy which still laced the social movement
writings about ideology in the early 1970s. For this reason, a second agenda of this paper is to
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revisit this pejorative legacy and call for a rehabilitated non-pejorative understanding of ideology
in the study of social movement s. There is, in fact , a huge literature on ideology to which this
paper cannot do just ice. Our agenda here is simply to revisit the debates that were abandoned by
movement scholars in the 1970s, and point to the directions in which we think a rehabilitated
theory of movement ideology should move.
The plan of this paper is as follows. First we summarize the history of the frame concept
and its roots in linguistics and cognitive psychology; then we review the history of the ideology
concept and its roots in the study of politics. We then discuss the advantages of keeping these
concepts separate and explore the important issues that are highlighted by considering the
relations between frames and ideologies. We suggest t hat frame alignment t heory correctly
captures some of the impo rtant particulars of United St ates political culture in the 1990s, but is
misleading for other problems, especially for movements in other times and other places.
A Frame is a Frame is a Frame
The frame concept is rooted in the study of communicative interaction. Gregory Bateson
introduced the notion of a frame as a metacommunicative device that set parameters for "what is
going on" ([1954] 1972). He showed that interaction always involves interpretative frameworks
by which participants define how others' actions and words should be understood. Twenty years
later, frame analysis was introduced t o sociological research by Erving Go ffman. In Frame
Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981) Goffman explored types and levels of framing
activities. In Forms of Talk, Goffman discussed t he several layers of framing in interaction, and
shifted his focus to linguistic analysis of co nversat ional conventions t hat mark the application and
changes in interpretative frames. Researchers building on Goffman's work have developed an
extensive body of empirical knowledge abo ut how speech o ccurs, how cultural knowledge is
used, and how these interplay with interactional intentions and constraints; but this body of
knowledge has not been utilized by social movement approaches to framing.
Within the linguistic tradition, there is divergence between those who treat a frame (or its
synonyms, script and schema) as a relatively fixed t emplate, and those who treat it as malleable
and emergent. Work in ant hropological linguistics views frames as fully formed co gnitive
structures that constitute part of the cultural tool kit of everyday life. Frames are an aspect of
cultural knowledge, st ored in memory, that permit social actors to move in and out of different
experiences as if they were not completely new. Frames are used to explain speech acts, rituals,
and commonly occurring behaviors in other cultures (Hymes 1982, 1974; and Frake 1964). The
assumption is that the element s of frames can be elicited through ethnographic interview and
reconstituted into a wo rking schema or algo rithm. This appro ach has also been adopted by
researchers in artificial intelligence to explain speech behavior in everyday situations such joking,
gossiping, doing business, lecturing, shooting the bull, etc. (Schank and Ableson 1997; Minsky
1974, cited in Tannen 1993).
The other way to view a frame is to see it as an inherently malleable and emergent mental
construct, in Bartlett's terms an "active developing structure" (1932), shaped in action and
especially face-t o-face interaction as additional elements are added and linked to existing
structures based on new inco ming data. In this sense, frames are the basic to ols by which
"we live by inference," to invoke Goffman's famous dictum. Frames are the instruments by which
we infer "what is going on" with the caveat that they are under constant revision based on new
occurrences and unexpected actions by others. Many ethnographic linguists stress the malleability
of frames by asserting that the proper unit of analysis is an interactional event or activity. Frake,
for example, points out that people are "doing something all the time," and that these activities,
not "mental structures," are the proper units of analysis. Gumperz (1982) adds that this is true
when we speak, people do things with their words within culturally typical situations of speech
and interaction. Frake offers a poignant metaphor for the fluid and interactive view of frames:
Rather than providing a few fixed cognitive maps to be unrolled and referenced to make sense of
situat ions, culture gives people "a set of principles for mapmaking and navigation, resulting in a
whole chart case of rough, improvised, continually revised sketch maps (1977: 6-7, quoted in
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Tannen 1993). Given the tentative nature of these maps, better t o see how they are applied in
actual behavior than to spend too much time plotting their structure.
As imported into the study of social movements, frames have been treated as both fixed
and emergent. Early insights into framing focused almost wholly on the interactive level of
analysis. In Encounters with Unjust Authority, Gamson, Fireman and Rytina (1982) created
artificial focus groups of strangers who gradually were made aware t hat they were being
manipulated into giving false statements on camera t hat co uld be used deceitfully in a
civil lawsuit. Gamson and his colleagues focused on the interactive emergence of a frame, of a
shared understanding of "what 's go ing on" that they labeled an injustice frame, and t he way in
which a public announcement o f this frame was essential for rebellion against authority. In their
programmatic statement of frame theory a few years later, Snow, Rochford, Worden and Benford
(1986) discussed the improvised and pro cessual quality of sketch-map frames by developing the
concept of frame alignment processes.
Subsequent elaborations of the framing perspective moved to a more fixed conception of
collective action frames, even tho ugh the most influential scholars of framing have consistently
stressed emergent and processual aspects of framing tasks. This paradoxical effect has occurred
for two reasons. First, Snow et al.'s early discussion of frame resonance (1986) gave individual
cognitive schemata an organizational dimension level by making their generation a strategic task
of the SMO, namely to link the movement's frame to existing belief systems and cultural values.
By "strategically framing" movement po sitions in accord with dominant cultural values and the
stock of folk ideas and beliefs, the SMO elicits greater participation. While strategic framing is a
process, the emphasis is on the content. When a collective action frame is recast as somet hing
that leaders must articulate so that it better "markets the movement," the interactive negotiat ion of
"what's going on here" takes back seat to a one-way, top-down process. The sketch maps are
already drawn up, and remain only to be passed on to the grassroots. Simultaneously, the cultural
beliefs of the targets of t hese efforts are also viewed as relatively fixed, wit h framers merely
putting the right "spin" on their issue to tap into these fixed preconceptions. It would be foolish
to deny the importance of these processes in the United States in the 1990s, but few scholars with
a sense of history would want to say that this is all there is to idea-making in social movements.
The second source of fixity in framing theory is the growing use of the concept of a master
frame (Sno w and Benford 1992). Master frames are linked to cycles of protest, and work at t he
most general level of analysis, functioning to "turn the heads" of movement participants and
(especially) movement entrepreneurs to see issues a certain way. Movement participants draw
upon master frames to portray their perceived injustice in ways that fit the t enor o f the times and
thus parallels other movements. Snow and Benford cite as one example the psychosalvational
master frame which TM, est, Scientology, Silva Mind Cont rol, and other groups drew upon in the
1970s. Another example is "rights frame" which was defined by the southern civil rights
movement, picked up by other racial/ethnic movements and the women's movement, and diffused
to gay rights, animal rights, abortion rights, fetal rights, and student rights. Master frames are
conceptualized as general assemblages of concepts that are often new and ascendent, but
relatively unelaborated compared to established ideologies. Typically articulated by early-riser
movements, they are idea structures upon which late-comer movements can draw (Swart 1995;
Carroll and Ratner 1996; also see Williams 1995, for "rhetorical models" which are utilized rather
than master frames).
We draw four conclusions regarding frame analysis as it is currently practiced by social
movements scholars. First, frames are individual cognitive structures, located "within the black
box of mental life" that orient and guide interpretation of individual experience. Frames "enable
individuals to locate, perceive, ident ify and label occurrences" (Snow et al. 1986: 464); and
"selectively punctuate and encode objects, situations, events, experiences and sequences of
actions within one's present and past environment" (Snow and Benford 1992: 137). They are
complex interpretative schemata—not just isolated ideas—which are relevant at different levels of
experience. Second, frames become important in analyzing collective action insofar as they are
shared by enough individuals to channel individual behaviors into patterned social ones. This
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presumes an ideal-typical formulation of a frame that rises above both idiosyncratic differences
between part icipants and the contention, negot iation, and emergence that characterizes discursive
behavior about the frames. This aggregated notion freezes the buzzing and swirling confusion of
individual cognitive processing at a point in time, enabling comparisons at other points of time.
Third, this snapshot of a frame is a methodological artifice that, in the best of worlds, enables an
invent ory of what cognitive orientations are shared by individual part icipants. Ideally, there would
be some representat ions of the concepts and their interrelations to show how thinking within the
frame occurs, but with very few exceptions (Gerhards and Rucht 1992; Johnston 1995) this kind
of plotting is not found in the social movement literature.
Fourth, it is important to distinguish between these "snapshots," which represent the
structure of cognitive frames, and framing processes which capture the emergent, contested, and
socially constructed quality of cognitive frames as they are molded in interaction. Frames are
mental structures or schemata. Framing is a behavior by which people make sense of bo th daily
life and the grievances that co nfront them. Frame theo ry, therefore, embraces bot h cognitive
structures whose cont ents can be elicited, inferred, and plotted in a rough approximation of the
algorithms by which people come t o decisions about how to act and what t o say; and the
interactive pro cesses o f talk, persuasion, arguing, contestation, int erpersonal influence, subt le
rhetorical posturing, outright marketing that modify—indeed, continually modify—the contents of
interpretat ive frames. Applied to social movement studies, we can see instances o f framing at the
SMO level and, if we looked closely, we would see them in interaction at the membership level.
An Ideology is a System of Ideas
Ideology arose in a revolutionary era from politics and the study of politics. From the beginning,
it carried evaluative and politicized connotations. The word ideology was co ined in 1796 by the
French writer A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy for his own "science of ideas" (influenced by John Locke)
which emphasized human senses for verification of knowledge and supported his program to
create a democratic, rat ional, and scientific society (Cranston 1994, Rudé 1980). The word first
took on a pejorative connotation seven years later, in 1803, when the "ideologues" were
suppressed by Napoleon Bonaparte. Marx and Engels adopted the pejorative meaning when they
called ideology the class-mot ivated deceptions of the bourgeoisie, which they contrasted with the
correct scientific understandings of the conscious working class. Of course, oppo nents of Marxist
movements soon countered by labeling Marxism itself as a distorting ideology, which they
contrasted with o bjective scient ific theories of liberal democracy and the market. This cont inuing
use of the term "ideology" as a pejorative label for the ideas of political opponents leads most
people to be uncomfortable using the term for ideas t hey agree with.
By the twent ieth century, t he term "ideology" and its battling political meanings was well
established in the lexicon of politics and social science. Despite the long tradition of pejorative
usage, there is also a strong tradition, especially in political science, of using the t erm non-
pejoratively or even positively. As Gerring (1997) documents in his extensive and detailed
review, ideology has taken on an incredible diversity of specific meanings which are often directly
opposed to each other. Among those using the non-pejorative meaning, some political scientists
use the term to distinguish people with coherent and well-structured rational belief systems from
those with inconsistent or illogical belief systems (Converse 1964), while others use it to refer to
any belief system, regardless of its internal consistency (see Nelson 1977 for a discussion of these
issues). Additionally, political scientist s and many sociolo gists use the term ideology specifically
to refer to the belief system of any social movement. Among tho se who use the pejorative
meaning of ideology, there is a split between those who associate ideology with the defense of
privilege versus those who associate ideology with challenges to the system (Weberman 1997).
Despite these evaluative and political debates, there is a common thread o f shared meaning in the
non-pejorative senses of ideology which is captured by no other term. Gerring (1997) concludes,
"Ideology, at the very least, refers to a set of idea-elements that are bound together, that belong to
one another in a non-random fashion."
Scholars of social movements writing in the old collective behavior tradition drew o n these
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meanings when they wrot e about ideology, and their works suffered from failing to sort out the
pejorative and non-pejorative usages in their discussions. Nevertheless, the core of their work
provides a solid basis for investigating ideology in its non-pejorative sense as the system of
meaning undergirding a social movement. Heberle, in his 1951 text Social Movements: An
Introduction to Political Sociology, defines the ideology of a movement in "a broad, nontechnical
sense" as "the entire complex of ideas, theories, doctrines, values and strategic and tactical
principles that is characteristic of the movement." (: 23-24) The second edition of Ralph Turner
and Lewis Killian's Collective Behavior has a very similar conception, saying "Ideologies are
prescriptions or maps that tell the individual how to look at events and people, and they provide a
simplifying perspective through which the observer can make sense o f otherwise overwhelmingly
complex phenomena and find definiteness in otherwise vague and uncertain impressions.
Ideologies tell the observer how to distinguish figure fro m ground." (1972: 270) John Wilson's
Introduction to Social Movements (1973) defines ideology as " a set of beliefs about the social
world and how it operates, containing statements about the rightness of certain social
arrangements and what action would be undertaken in the light of those statements." He goes on
to say, "An ideology is both a cognitive map of sets of expectations and a scale of values in which
standards and imperatives are proclaimed. Ideology thus serves both as a clue to understanding
and as a guide to action, developing in the mind of its adherents an image of the process by which
desired changes can best be achieved." (Wilson 1973: 91-2)
Both Wilson and Turner and Killian take a functionalist appro ach to ideology, stressing
what it does for a so cial movement in terms of providing an account of reality and justifying and
motivating action. Wilson develops the very useful trichotomy of the structural elements of
ideology which Snow and Benford adopted: diagnosis (how things got to be how they are),
pro gnosis (which should be done and what the co nsequences will be), and rationale (who should
do it and why). Turner and Killian emphasize ideology as a product of active social construction
processes by which people understand their circumstances and their possible courses of action.
Much of both discussions emphasizes the continuity between movement ideologies and other
forms of meaning-making, and each has passages which suggest that movements' opponents may
be no more logical and just as ideological as the movements themselves. Turner and Killian, for
example, stress that movement and anti-movement ideologies develop in dialectic with each other,
arguing that the ideo logy of racism developed in response to challenges to racial stratification and
the ideology of divine right of kings developed in response to challenges to monarchy.
At the same time, the legacy of pejorative connotations makes its way into all these
presentations. Heberle approvingly cites Mannheim's "technical" definition o f ideology as the
inconsistent and illogical distortions of the ruling class, as cont rasted with t he challenger's
rational, coherent Utopia (1951: 28) Turner and Killian say ideologies "provide a simplifying
perspective" and Wilson says "Ideologies create highly simplified images of social process." (p.
99). In cont ext, it is possible these statements are meant t o refer to the co gnitive process in any
abstract t hinking in which attention is directed to some elements at t he expense of others, and
both authors recognize that some ideologies, particularly radical ones, are often highly elaborated
and complex systems of beliefs. However, these same contexts have other cues suggesting that
this simplification is inappropriate or irrational, especially their citations to Smelser. Smelser
(1962) did not use the term ideology, but made simplification and illogic central to the belief
systems of movement participants with his notion of a generalized belief as a "short-circuit" which
leaves out the complex and multi-determinant steps between general principle and specific change.
Turner and Killian cite Smelser and explicitly endorse his claim that movement ideologies
inevitably include hostile elements, arguing that " villain and conspiracy themes are universal. . ."
and that "The visible effects of their [villains'] evil intent are supplemented by imaginary activities.
. ." (272) They do, however, suggest that this mode of reasoning parallels that of the social
control agents. Wilson also summarizes Smelser, but his text neither clearly endorses nor clearly
critiques Smelser's arguments.
Despite their failure to overcome pejorative connotations, the works of Wilson and Turner
and Killian point to a social constructionist view o f ideology that has been missing from recent
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scholarship. Despite its history of contradictory meanings, the concept of ideology focuses on
ideas, on their systematic relations to each other, and on their implications for social and political
action for change based on value commitments. A tentative definition (based heavily on Wilson's)
would capture this core meaning: a system of meaning that couples assertions and theories about
the nature of social life with values and norms relevant to promoting or resisting social change.
The “values” element refers to moral, ethical, or solidaristic commitments to some groups or
conditions of society as right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral, important or
unimportant. The “norms” element refers to standards for behavior, especially behaviors which
are relevant to pro moting or resisting social change. The reference to “assertions and theories
about the nature of so cial life” is meant to encompass both relatively simply descriptive claims
(e.g. men have more power than women) and elaborate theories (including social science theories
as well as religious or po litical belief systems) about ho w society works, and everything in
between.
To study ideology, then, is to focus on systems of ideas which couple understandings of
how the world works with ethical, moral, and normative principles that guide personal and
collective action. We can ask how these ideas came to be, what the internal structure of the idea
system is, whether the ideo logy accounts adequately for t he phenomena it purports to explain,
how the ideologies are distributed across populations, and what the variations are among
proponents of a common ideology (see Gerring 1997 and Nelson 1977 for further elaboration of
these points and others). Significantly, we suggest that an ideology links a theory about society
with a cluster of values about what is right and wrong as well as norms about what to do. We use
the term "theory" in a broad sense to refer to systems or sets of beliefs that explain how social
arrangements came to be and how they might be changed or strengthened. These theories are
linked to core values and norms in an ideological system. Value co mponent s animate the theory,
and go a long way to translate individual grievances int o collective ones. If gro ups have the same
values but different social theories, we would tend to t hink of them as different branches of the
same social movement, such as the religious and secular branches of the Civil Rights movement.
The socialist movement always contained groups advancing diverse and competing social theories
which were nevertheless unified by their positive valuation of the lower strata of society and
oppositio n to capitalism. By the same token, gro ups with similar social theories may be in
opposed movements. For example, there are both pro- and anti-capitalist ideologues who share
the same general assumption of rational individualism and the same theory of how a capitalist
market economy works, but disagree about whether to support or oppose capitalism, and disagree
about whether they attach greater value to the entrepreneur or the worker. Similarly, groups may
have similar norms for action (e.g. an ethic of self-sacrifice, advocacy of disruptive protest, or
legislative lobbying) around widely different or even opposite values.
It is often argued that movement activists seem to be resistant to evidence or arguments
that challenge their beliefs (Turner and Killian 1972: 249; Wilson 1973: 108-124), and these
arguments are part of the pejorative legacy in the study of ideology. But distinguishing the value
commitments of an ideology from its theory may clarify some of these processes. Because an
ideology links theory, norms, and values in one interconnected system, what may seem to
outsiders as an unreasonable at tachment to a particular belief or norm can frequent ly be
understood as a defense of core values by defending the whole belief system in which they are
embedded. Conversely, what may seem to outsiders to be vacillation in belief or abandonment of
prio r beliefs may be seen by activists as a realistic reappraisal of their theory of so ciety or their
strategies as they seek better ways to pursue their core values. Distinguishing core values of an
ideology from its norms and theory, and tracing the interrelations among them, may be helpful
strategies for understanding how people construct and reconstruct their ideologies.
Emphasizing the theory component in ideology points to an element of ideation often
neglected in the study of social movements: thinking. People think a lot in social movements,
along with the related activities of reasoning, judging arguments, evaluat ing evidence, test ing
predict ions, recognizing connections, and developing new knowledge. There is a continuity in the
theorizing of ideo logues and the theorizing of those who study ideologues. Heberle argues "The
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ideologies of social movements stand to each ot her in a twofold relationship: first, as the
integrating creeds and immaterial weapons of social groups in conflict with one another. . . . But
there is a second kind of relationship between ideo logies; t hat is the relationship between ideas in
the realm of intellectual endeavor" (1951, 29-30). It is essential to appreciate the intellectual
aspects of ideology (what Heberle calls the debate of ideas over t he centuries) as well as their
function in motivating action. The theories in ideologies can be understood as part of intellectual
history and subjected to the same standards of logic and evidence as any other theories (Nelson
1977). Social relations and networks among people, usually small groups of intellectuals, are
central in creating new theories and new ideologies. Rochon (1998: 22-25) calls these networks
critical communities, loci of ideological production. He distinguishes this ideological production
from movement activities, part icularly framing, which pro mote the ideas to a wider public. In this
view, framing does not create ideological change, but can be a way of recruiting people into a
context within which ideology can change.
There is a long history in the study of ideology of raising questions of the origin of ideas
and their fit with "reality" or "material interests." Snow and Benford (1988) point to these issues
when they say frames need "experiential commensurability," but their awkward neologism elides
the complexities of this issue. Materialism and the constraints on beliefs were treated with much
more subtlety and greater constructionist insight in Turner and Killian, Wilson, and others upon
whom they drew. Scholars in the Marxian tradition, such as Rudé (1980), have also developed
social constructionist theories of ideology which link material constraints to social processes.
Frame and Ideology Are Not Synonyms
Frames and ideologies are related concepts, of course, and overlap somewhat in their empirical
referents, but each points to different dimensions of social construction. Very roughly, framing
points to process, while ideology points to content.
The concept of frame points to the cognitive process wherein people bring to bear
background knowledge to interpret an event or circumstance and to locate it in a larger system of
meaning. Framing processes are the ways actors invoke one frame or set of meanings rather than
another when t hey communicate a message, thereby indicating how the message is to be
understoo d. In everyday interaction, framing is often done tacitly by subtle linguistic and
extralinguistic cues. Applied to social movement studies, framing processes mostly refer to the
intentional activity of movement entrepreneurs at the organizational level (see Tarrow 1998: 108-
112). The frame concept calls attention to the ways in which movement propaganda reflects both
the frames of t he writers and their perceptions of the frames of t heir targets. The malleable
concept ion of a frame calls at tention to the interactional processes that occur at every level of a
movement, both within a movement organization and between the movement and outsiders. The
fixed conception of a frame has its greatest power when one frame is contrasted with another,
when the question is how and why a person invokes one frame rather than another in a particular
context. Clearly the concepts of frames and framing processes point to matters that the older
ideology concept dealt with only obliquely, and for this reason they are important contributions to
the understanding of social movements.
But t here are other ideat ional processes which are obscured when authors try to make t he
concept of frame do the work of the concept of ideology. The concept of ideology focuses
attention on the content of whole systems of beliefs, on the multiple dimensions of these belief
systems, and on the ways the ideas are related to each other. Ideologies as sets of ideas can be
abstracted from the thought processes of any particular individual. They can be elicited through
interviews with movement participants, or written in books, articles, and pamphlets by movement
intellectuals, or declaimed from platforms by leaders. The concept of ideology leads to questions
about the origins of those ideas, their interrelations and consistency or inconsistency with each
other and with other systems of ideas in the larger society, and to the processes whereby people
construct and reconstruct those ideas as they encounter other ideas and accumulate experiences.
It leads to questio ns about the relation between t he elaborate syst ems constructed by intellectuals
and the folk ideologies of ordinary people (see Rudé 1980 on derived ideologies) and to questions
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