Master Framing and Cross-Movement Networking in Contemporary Social Movements

Abstract

This article maps the network of cross-movement activism in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, and explores the relationship between position in the network and cognitive use of different injustice frames. The study is informed by a neo-Gramscian analysis that views social movements as (potential) agencies of counterhegemony. Viewed as a political project of mobilizing broad, diverse opposition to entrenched economic, political, and cultural power, counterhegemony entails a tendential movement toward comprehensive critiques of domination and toward comprehensive networks of activism. We find that the use of a broadly resonant master frame—the political-economy account of injustice —is associated with the practice of cross-movement activism. Activists whose social movement organization (SMO) memberships put them in touch with activists from other movements tend to frame injustice as materially grounded, structural, and susceptible to transformation through concerted collective action. Moreover, the movements in which political-economy framing especially predominates—labor, peace, feminism, and the urban/antipoverty sector—tend not only to supply most of the cross-movement ties but to be tied to each other as well, suggesting that a political-economy framing of injustice provides a common language in which activists from different movements can communicate and perhaps find common ground.