Re-framing social movements. Margins, meanings and governance.

This paper addresses issues of the location, form and content of the ‘grass roots’ with reference to global social movement. The paper re-visits frame analytical approaches used in social movement studies and originally derived from Goffman’s work Frame Analysis. Through a consideration of Bateson’s work on framing it is argued that established uses of frame analysis require significant modification in order to address the role of movement cultures in pre-figuring and framing social and political change. In particular the microprocesses transforming individual frame to collective and master frames have been insufficiently explored. It is argued that attention to these micro processes provide both an empirical means of addressing Melucci’s approach to the negotiation and consolidation of collective identity and a theoretical means of engaging with the process of movement capacity building. This process is termed reflexive framing and address key social, cultural and technological transformations accompanying globalisation that have major implications for frame analysis developed within the context of nationally defined political opportunity structures. These points are illustrated by reference to qualitative data from an ESRC funded project on the Prague IMF/WB ‘anti-capitalist’ action in September 2000. The paper concludes by addressing the question of whether such movement capacity is inescapably ‘of the margins’ or can be incorporated within approaches to grass roots governance