Culture in Mind

Chapter 7 wraps up the book’s main findings and highlights our main theoretical conclusion: The interplay between the mind and social interactions helps explain the process behind sustained commitment. But what does our conclusion imply for the study of social movements and activism more generally? We begin by emphasizing the necessity to bring the mind back in all its complexity. Second, we argue for the need to take into account considerations regarding the interpretative dimensions of social networks. Third, we advocate a better integration of culture in the study of social movements, as this places an emphasis on the role of culture in shaping a person’s mind, and ultimately provides for finer theories of mobilization. Finally, as with any research, this study faces limits; we expose these in this final chapter, providing us with the opportunity to suggest avenues for further research.

Contentious Minds in Action

Do activists rely on synchronized minds to perform joint action? What notions of democratic cultures do they hold? And what role does the mind play in participation and the sustainment of commitment? Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the central argument of the book, namely, that the mind matters to the performance of joint action, and explains why it is crucial that we dedicate more attention to this topic. The chapter further sketches the main theoretical proposal and presents the three central cognitive dimensions: activists’ relation to common good, politics, and political citizenship. The chapter’s second half explicates the comparative research design which relates the moral voicing to the Christian aid and the radical workers’ rights community. Finally, we combine survey and interview data with an innovative mixed-methods design to study the minds of activists and answer the central research questions.

Synchronized Minds

The first of the book’s four empirical chapters use the survey data to examine three issues empirically: first, we show that activists rely on a specific understanding of common good and politics that departs from that held by the general population. Second, we consider how their inclusion in a specific commitment community provides them with a particular understanding of common good and politics. Activists of a specific commitment community hence see both common good and politics through particular cognitive lenses. Third, we show that activists who evolve in the same commitment site but are members of different organizations, as well as active and passive members involved in the same organization, rely on similar views about common good and politics. From these primary analyses, we demonstrate that activists rely on socially shared meanings that are distinct from one commitment community to another. Their minds are synchronized with that of their peers and enable them to perform and sustain joint action.

Networks as “Islands of Meanings”

Why do activists’ minds differ from one commitment site to another? And why are people’s minds synchronized when they are engaged in the same commitment community? Chapter 6 proposes an explanation of the findings advanced in the previous chapters by adding a relational layer to the cognitive mechanisms. We show how conversational interactions shape the meanings about common good and politics that activists construct. The chapter also shows that not every interaction shapes the activist’s mind but that specific relational mechanisms are at work behind the synchronization of understandings. First, we demonstrate that face-to-face interactions are the key to the construction of socially shared meanings. By contrast, mediated interactions (through discursive outcomes of the organization like newspapers or newsletters) are insufficient to shape an activist’s mind. Second, we highlight how face-to-face interactions in interpersonal networks allow passive members to construct socially shared meanings with fellow activists. Third, we show that the redundancy and abundance of interactions are not essential to the nourishment of the activist’s cognitive map. Finally, we claim that the density of interactions is a crucial relational mechanism for cross-committed activists. This chapter ultimately shows the importance of conversational interactions to the synchronization of the activist’s mind.

Politics and Intentionality

Whereas Chapter 4 focused on understandings of common good, Chapter 5 concentrates on activists’ understandings of politics. Based on activists’ narratives, we offer a thorough analysis of how activists apprehend state and civil society actors that goes beyond the general sketch provided by survey data in Chapter 3. We then proceed to assess how activists’ views on politics allow the construction of cognitive components that set their intentionality and orient them toward particular forms of action. Finally, the in-depth analysis of activists’ understanding of common good and politics in both chapters enables us to grasp the types of political citizenship activists adhere to. We thereby show that notions of democratic cultures vary across commitment communities.

Common Good and Intentionality

Chapter 4 develops the topic of mind synchronization further and delves into understandings of common good. Based on activists’ narratives, we first scrutinize their understandings of common good by offering a fined-grained analysis of the way they conceptualize this pillar of activism. The statistics of Chapter 3 provide a representative picture of the activist’s mind but one that is rather cursory as they reflect raw measurements. In this chapter, we investigate the intricate ways in which common good is understood inductively. In a second step, we examine how activists’ broad understanding of common good enables them to develop mental constructs that orient their action specifically. We highlight the cognitive paths that set activists’ intentionality and orient their action on a number of aspects: toward certain groups of people, on particular social problems, and within a specific field of action.

A Cognitive-Relational Process

Chapter 2 is effectively the book’s theoretical heart. Building on existing literature, it deploys the theoretical toolkit with the purpose of explaining why the mind and conversations enter into play in the sustainment of activism. We begin by clarifying why the mind is central to our study and for human life in general, before highlighting our contribution to the literature on social movements, which is twofold: we broaden the set of meanings that serve to explain commitment and sustaining participation, and we specify the cognitive paths that link broad understandings to action. The chapter continues by describing the relational mechanisms that shape the activist’s mind and expands on the reasons these cognitive and relational mechanisms both enable action and help sustain it. Chapter 2 hence sets out to detail the nexus between an activist’s mind and the conversational interactions which maintain action, thereby resulting in the thesis that a cognitive-relational process is at play in the sustainment of commitment.