Framing cooperative development: The bridging role of cultural and symbolic value between human and material resources

ABSTRACT

The Community Capitals Framework has been used by scholars and practitioners to both evaluate community projects and help leverage community resources. However, less work has examined the role of symbolic values in these processes. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this research examines the relationship between value and identity frames and resource access in three food and agriculture cooperatives that aim for community improvement. We find that as cultural and symbolic power become concentrated, diverse cultural values, and the potential resources they represent, can become more difficult to enact. While sustained dialog during a frame process can help bridge diverse resources, additional resources are often needed to support such activities. Our work suggests that frames are related to resource access, that they can be in tension with each other, do not always reflect practice, and may help reorganize capitals access.

KEYWORDS:

• Community capitals
• cooperatives
• cultural capital
• frames
• symbolic value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We draw on the sociological and social movement theory lineage of “frames” although we do recognize that other disciplines use the term (e.g. communication studies).

2. By “capitalized,” we mean the outcome of a contested process of reworking values so that additional capitals become recognized, sought after, and accessed.

3. Relational theorizing emphasizes the importance of relations rather than substances in patterning social life (Emirbayer, 1997). Put another way, relational theorizing focuses on how connections constitute objects, rather than the other way around. For instance, as this research examines, resource access might be less explained by individual or cooperative characteristics (substances) and more by the values and identity frames performed by cooperative participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture [grant number NIFA-COL00725] and Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [grant number NRF-2016A3A2924243].