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Peter Ullrich, Reiner Keller

Comparing discourse between cultures

a discursive approach to movement knowledge

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This version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-4956.

Suggested Citation

Ullrich, Peter; Keller, Reiner: Comparing discourse between cultures : a discursive approach to

movement knowledge. - In: Baumgarten, B.; Daphi, P.; Ullrich, P. (eds.): Conceptualizing culture in

social movement research. - Basingstoke [u.a]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. - (Palgrave studies in

European political sociology) - ISBN: 978-1-137-38578-9 (print), 978-1-137-38579-6 (online). - pp.

113–139. - DOI: 10.1057/9781137385796.0012. (Postprint cited, page numbers differ)

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Comparing discourse between cultures. A discursive approach to movement

knowledge

Peter Ullrich & Reiner Keller

Introduction1

A discourse analysis of German left-wing media coverage of the Middle East conflict

brought to light a phenomenon also seen in other political fields, but much stronger in

quantity and quality: Much of the discourse was related to Germany’s National

Socialist past. Vocabulary from that era was used, comparisons drawn. In one

newspaper, Palestinian violence was reported on as the actions “of a mob”, aimed

not at “taking back illegally expropriated soil” but at “exterminating Jewish existence”

(Bartel and Ullrich 2008). Earlier statements by pro-Israeli autonomist activists had

described the Palestinians as the “biggest anti-Semitic collective” and stated that the

“Popular belief in Palestine” is “völkisch” (literally ‘folkish’, extremely nationalistic, an

essential part of German Nazis’ self-description) and aims at a “pure-blood Palestine

free of Jews” (Ullrich 2008). In a similar fashion, the well-known and at times

politically active German poet Günter Grass wrote a poem (“What has to be said”)

about his fears of an Israeli attack on Iran, which in his view may “exterminate the

Iranian people” – an allusion to the Nazi extermination of Jews. Some pro-Palestinian

activists hailed this political statement as an act of bravery. The question arises as to

why, despite having different political aims, politically active Germans – especially

radical activists – debate the Middle East conflict in a discursive framework so

strongly shaped by terms and patterns from the discourse of or about Germany’s

National Socialist past. Or more generally: What shapes the discursive patterns of

these movements?

In this chapter, we intend to propose a research programme for analysing such

phenomena of social movements, with the aim of literally solving the mystery of the

introductory story. By focusing for this purpose on knowledge and its discursive

embeddedness, we thus react to a deficit in line with the general assumptions that

1 We are indebted to the participants of the “Protest | Culture” workshops and Sebastian Scheele for their helpful

comments on earlier versions of the chapter.

underpin this book. This deficit is the predominance of an instrumentalist perspective

or strategic self-restriction in current social movement theory, especially in resource

mobilisation theory, framing and the political opportunity structures approach. Against

the backdrop of these rationalist and instrumentalist restrictions of the potential scope

of movement research, we suggest a different perspective. Instead of analysing

successful and unsuccessful strategic framing efforts, we take on older ideational

approaches (such as Eyerman and Jamison 1991) and shift our attention towards the

conditions of the knowledge and the world-views of social movements (thus towards

inherently cultural phenomena), thereby largely drawing on the sociology of

knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) (Keller 2011). This research approach

combines the questions of the social constructionist sociology of knowledge – How is

the objectivity and facticity of reality established through social processes of

institutionalisation and legitimisation? How does this become the reality of the world

for social actors? What can social actors know? How is knowledge attained,

stabilised, communicated and changed? – with the Foucauldian perspective on

discourse and power-knowledge regimes, providing us with insights into the enabling

and restricting social (discursive) structures of the sayable, thinkable and legitimately

utterable, or: the ideational and institutional context structures of social movement

ideas.

We start with a brief overview of the shortcomings of general and also cultural

analysis in social movement research and propose basic ideas about how to solve

these problems. Secondly, we introduce the sociology of knowledge approach to

discourse (SKAD) and its key heuristic concepts, including discourse, frames,

phenomenon structures and narrative. In the third step, this approach is applied to

social movement and protest research by highlighting the conceptual links to key

concepts of current social movement theory, which are manifold – especially in the

framing approach and the culturalist derivates of the political opportunity structure

approach (frames, cultural resonance, cultural or discursive opportunity structures).

Empirical examples, many of them from Ullrich’s research into historical

reminiscences in German movements, shall illustrate the necessity and fruition of our

perspective. The fourth and last part outlines methodological implications of the

SKAD research programme’s theoretical framework. Most important therein is a non-

deductive, hermeneutic analysis of discourse, which draws on research methods

established in qualitative (interpretative) social research. Through cross-cultural

comparison it reveals the relevant discursive contexts of a specific movement

discourse.

Our aim (for now) is not to present a new cultural theory of social movements but a

theoretical framework for analysing movement specificities across cultures. Such

cultures are considered here as discursive fields – as social arenas where discourses

unfold in a never ending struggle for meaning. Such discursive fields are largely

produced and reproduced by discursive practices and are constituted as internally

connected sets of statements and rules for their production.2

Bringing discourse and culture back to protest research

Our starting point is what Johnston (2009:5) called the “instrumentalist-structuralist

lens” that characterises huge parts of current social movement theory (CSMT3). This

dominant perspective, historically rooted in the North American type of social

movements as well as in the respective current of movement theorising (Eyerman

and Jamison 1991:27), is explicitly or implicitly interested in questions of movement

success (Pettenkofer 2010). While this question is fruitful and absolutely central in

the analysis of actors, who aim to achieve social change (and there is no doubt about

this strategic aspect being a major quality of social movements), it leaves certain

questions unanswered (Teune 2008:541). Among these questions often neglected by

movement researchers in the last three decades under the truism “grievances are

everywhere, movements not” (Japp 1984) were those concerned with the reasons

and causes of mobilisation. Much of the development of social movement theory can

be understood as a pendulum swinging between the poles causes for protest

(grievances, deprivation, modernisation pressure) and conditions of protest success

(resources, political opportunities, successful framing efforts). Yet if we assume that

there is no lack of grievances, and that sometimes there are even (successful or

unsuccessful) protest movements, and if we analyse both aspects, there are still

more issues left unanswered. One would be what concerns people and why things

are perceived as a problem in the first place or not. The other would be how

problems or concerns are interpreted and understood. Why are they constructed,

viewed, interpreted or de-constructed by social movements in a specific way and not

in another? And how do movement activities shape the construction of realities in

2 See e.g. Keller (2009, 2013); Lamont and Thévenot (2000); Eder (2000).

3 We borrow this term from Marion Hamm to gather what we perceive as dominant trends in

social worlds, both in cases of success but also when they seem to fail?

The following example illustrates this. The conflict between Israel and the

Palestinians is generally perceived as an enormous political problem. And all over the

world there are solidarity movements concerned with the issue. Yet, we see that there

are pro-Palestinian activists and pro-Israeli activists. Even in established political

camps like “the left” there are huge differences in how the Middle East conflict is

perceived. While in many countries there is strong, dominant support among

communists for the Palestinian cause, in some, such as Germany, communists are

strongly divided on the question of which side to support. And comparing different

countries, such as Germany and Britain, it can be seen that supporters of the

Palestinians differ considerably in the way they communicate about the problem,

even if they belong to the same international organisation. Regardless of their actual

identification with the Palestinians or Israel, the arguments used stem in part from

and relate to different, in this case mainly national, contexts (Ullrich 2008). Since they

represent what the world is like and what is considered normal, it is above all these

discursive contexts which are the cause for the different “implicit meanings” which

“activists tend to take for granted” (Lichtermann 1998) and which thus heavily shape

social movements and protest.

New Social Movement Theory has partly addressed such ideational questions. It was

interested in the subjects’ concerns, which were analysed in a macro-sociological

framework that considered the impact of post-industrial capitalist society (Brand,

Büsser, and Rucht 1986). But this approach’s scope of attention does not cover all

sorts of movements that seem to react to a complex heterogeneity of problems. And,

as Jasper (2007:69) argued, Tourraine, the most prominent analyst of culture in “New

Social Movements”, sometimes had to force the macro-structural interpretation on

data without convincing his research objects of being understood properly in their

wanting and thinking. The framing approach set off from there, aiming at providing us

with a more detailed idea of the ideational processes in protest activity, and an

analysis of what concerns movements and activists (see for example Snow et al.

1986; Gamson and Modigliani 1989). Yet it stayed well within the narrow

instrumentalist perspective of mainstream US movement research by viewing framing

processes primarily as movement tasks that can be fulfilled more or less successfully

(Snow and Benford 1988; Klandermans 1988; Gerhards 1992). So framing an

theorising movements.

international trade agreement as unjust would be belief amplification, i.e. the attempt

to legitimise one’s own position by appealing to common values. Surprisingly, the

obvious is not done: The injustice frame is not considered as an expression of the

movement’s world view! As scholars of social movements (should) know, much that is

said and done in the everyday existence of movements does not follow any strategic

imperative. Things are sometimes done in a certain way because they have always

been done like that, so we find customs, routines and habits. Some protest is carried

out with no strategic end (at least in this world), such as some self-immolation. There

may be a rationale behind it, but definitely not the one a professional US-American

human rights campaigner may follow when trying to formulate statements that would

most likely appeal to the American public. There are even activists who, in terms of

their own self-perception at least, despise politics and restrict themselves to uttering

negative criticism, considering that they have hardly anybody to appeal to. Other

rather neglected aspects in the analysis of movements are the knowledge stocks and

argumentative claim making resources available to them (like external scientific

expertise or own knowledge production).

Taking the object of social movement studies seriously implies an investigation of

their “ways of worldmaking” (Nelson Goodman), their “vocabularies of motive”

(Charles W. Mills), their world views, beliefs, practices and their communication as an

expression of what they are, and not the subsumption of all ideational aspects under

strategic efforts. Humankind is a narrating species, for which the use of symbolic

systems is elementary. So every time we tell other people about something, we have

to draw upon culturally organised prerequisites: Whether consciously or not, we use

frames, stories, narrative elements of all kinds to make sense of something, to

account for it. Such symbolic expressions of movements are objectified in texts and

images, practices, identities and organisational forms. It is a question of high interest

for the study of society where these ideas come from, what shapes them, enables

them and sets their boundaries. Approaches to that question have often stopped

halfway. There has not been sufficient elaboration on the concepts and research

strategies necessary for analysing where movement knowledge actually comes from.

Johnston (2009:21) for example writes that by “examining the snapshots of texts at

different points in time, the analyst can plumb how the meaning systems of

movement groups evolve”. While this is surely not incorrect, it absolutely leaves open

the question of where the ideas actually come from and how this can be researched.

Scholars of movements can get helpful support in the endeavour to overcome these

theoretical weaknesses from approaches that have not yet had much influence on

current social movement theory, namely the social constructionist sociology of

knowledge (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966) and Foucauldian discourse theory and

analysis. The former offers movement research the following new question: How is

knowledge4 created and sustained, contested and fixed in a movement which in itself

should be considered as a context of interaction, communication and agency? Yet, to

this day this stream of sociology of knowledge has only rarely considered the social

meso- and macro-conditions of knowledge production, circulation and effects. In the

wake of Michel Foucault and others, discourse theory is perfectly qualified to fill this

gap.5 Since his early writings Foucault was concerned with what is considered

“normal” in society and, when developing the discourse approach, with the social

regulation of what can be legitimately stated in a specific (scientific) arena at a certain

point in time.

The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) has been developed

since the late 1990s by Keller (2001) to combine the analytical focus of sociology of

knowledge on actors, interaction, everyday negotiation and socialisation with the

Foucauldian discourse perspective, which stands in a Durkheimian tradition,

focussing on emergent social facts as a reality of their own. It should be noted at this

point that SKAD resulted from empirical research performed by Keller during the

1990s, which originally started with comparative framing studies on ecological

communication of waste issues and policies in the German and French mass media

and political spheres (Keller [1998] 2009). This research was, in the beginning, close

to social movement theory and studies carried out by Snow, Benford, Gamson,

Gerhards and others. It used mass media texts as well as documents from political

actors and interviews. But the restricted vocabulary as well as the strategic,

cognitivist and instrumentalist orientation of frame research quickly proved too limited

for addressing analytical questions of broader cultural, institutional and discursive

contexts. Like other social scientists – especially Maarten Hajer (1995) – Keller

4 The term knowledge, according to this sociological tradition, refers not only to factual assets

of history, mathematics, hard sciences and so on, but to all kinds of competences for interpretation

and action. Indeed it even considers religion, ideologies and institutions as knowledge. Every society

or culture establishes its own realities, its stocks of knowledge. The given reality is a socio-historical a

priori, mediated by such stocks of knowledge.

5 Interestingly, a search in relevant journals and handbooks revealed that Foucauldian thinking

has had almost no impact on current social movement theory, even in works dealing with discourse.

For some of the exceptions see Baumgarten (2010); Baumgarten and Ullrich (2012); Death (2010);

decided that a more Foucauldian notion of discourse and a closer look at social

constructionism would be helpful to elaborate a more comprehensive approach to

what he called later on in more general terms the social politics of knowledge (in

Foucauldian terms: power-knowledge regimes).

The approach addresses five central points of concern: First, it takes seriously the

notion of discourse, which was of course used in the social movement research

tradition but in a rather narrow sense; second, it looks for discursive battles, conflicts

and contexts, and not for isolated movement actors and strategies; third, it accounts

for the practices and materialities of discourse or statement production, including the

usage and production of knowledge of all kind; fourth, it considers “problematizations”

(Foucault 1984) as social actors’ attempts to establish a particular “definition of the

situation” (Thomas and Thomas 1928), which means to fix the reality of the world in a

particular way; and fifth, it makes use, for purposes of concrete research, of the rich

traditions of qualitative research in sociology. The application of this approach to

social movement research (see also Ullrich 2012), which we are proposing in the

following, will not account for all of the theoretical and methodological implications,

but it does highlight certain aspects of SKAD:

First, it is a cultural approach in the sense that it brings to the fore the importance

(not exclusiveness!) of symbolic processes for the development and existence of

social movements. Where “social” usually refers to a collective set of human actors,

actions, constellations and (certain kinds of) structures, acknowledging “culture”

accentuates the role of meaning and symbolic systems. The production of symbols

and interaction in a symbolic form (thus referring to and relying on supra-individual

cultural patterns and rules) is not seen as a mere layer of social reality next to

structures. It does not support the idea of society vs. culture, but sees culture as a

necessary perspective for looking at society, because everything that is social is also

cultural (and vice versa). This means, to put it literally, not a disregard for factors

such as hunger, social inequality or structural unemployment as reasons for protest,

but instead the insistence that even hunger and poverty first need to be interpreted

within the realm of the respective societies’ horizons of meaning; only then can

protest become a possible reaction. Additionally, this approach has been

supplemented by additional insights from a variety of other cultural approaches, such

as political culture and framing theory. The main focus of research is movements’

Heßdörfer, Pabst, and Ullrich (2010); Sandberg (2006); Ullrich (2008, 2010, 2012).

involvement and embeddedness in discursive structurings, contexts and practices. If

we consider movements as being embedded in social relationships of knowledge and

as actors in social politics of knowledge, then we can address these discursive

struggles in order to analyse what kind of knowledge movements and their members

produce, express or (pre-)suppose in their practical engagements and in all kinds of

documents. Thus their symbolic expression and interaction are primarily analysed

based on their textual, but also oral or visual practices.

Second, the conditions of this knowledge are primarily located in a discursive context,

which is a reality sui generis, a pre-existent condition from the actors’ point of view.

This also implies the negation of the cognitively or emotionally straitened concepts of

culture (where culture has the tendency to be viewed basically as a sharing of

cognitions and/or emotions6) and rather strengthening a perspective on cultural

“structurations” (Anthony Giddens), which are objectified in artefacts, ways of saying,

writing and doing, that is in (discursive) rules for their enactment in the concrete

production of statements.

Third, this goes along with stressing the important influences on movements of

discursive contexts, which can be manifold (such as issue fields, arenas, ideological

currents/movement sectors, or local/regional/border crossing cultures). In particular

we argue that besides the growing relevance of transnationalisation, national

contexts still matter immensely in the formation of movements and movement

knowledge (Buechler 2000:88 ff.), which underlines SKAD’s affinity with comparative

research designs. So, though being careful not to fall into the trap of “the

reproduction of holistic nationalist clichés” (Koopmans and Statham 2000:31), we

disagree with Jasper (2007:61), who sees cultural approaches as basically micro-

oriented in contrast to the big metaphors like “states, structures, networks, even

movements”. On the contrary, the contribution of SKAD to movement research lies in

the specification of relevant discursive contexts of movement knowledge with

considerable formative power.

Yet, fourth, movements themselves are also of importance as a discursive context,

although this will not be elaborated thoroughly here. Movements represent a life

world, too, an everyday communicative and interactive practice, with sedimented

6 This seems to be connected with a strong influence of psychology and social cognition

(Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Eyerman and Jamison 1991; Jasper 2007 and his contribution in this

volume), which gives the concept of culture a cognitive (and hence individualistic) bias (Goldberg

norms, roles and practices, whose meanings cannot be reduced to their strategic

relation to society. Without this level – the agency of actors and the complexity of the

interactional contexts/situations – no change in the general discourse could be

imaginable.

Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse: Foundations and key

concepts7

As Stuart Hall and his Birmingham Cultural Studies colleagues argued, we are living

in “circuits of culture”, indicating that meaning-making activities and social

construction of realities have become effects of organised production, representation,

marketing, regulation and adaption (Hall 1997). This was a concern of interpretative

sociology from the outset: Max Weber’s work on “The Protestant Ethic” (Weber 2002

[1904/1905]) is nothing less and nothing more than a discourse study avant la lettre

of a social movements religious discourse and its power effects in capitalist societies.

To make his claim about the connection between “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit

of Capitalism”, Weber analysed several kinds of texts: religious prayers, advisory

books, sermons. It was from such textual data that he developed his ideas on

“innerworldly ascetics” and deeply structured ways of shaping everyday life, home

and work. The “Protestant Ethic” delivered a deeply social vocabulary of motives, an

institutionally preconfigured “definition of the situation” (William I. Thomas and

Dorothy Thomas). Weber never used the term discourse, but the Chicago

pragmatists did. They argued that social groups produce and live in ”universes of

discourse”, systems or horizons of meaning and processes of establishing and

transforming such systems (Mead 1963:89 f.). Without being exhaustive, one could

mention Joseph Gusfield’s (1981) study on the “Culture of Public Problems”, Anselm

Strauss’s attention to ongoing negotiated orderings in social worlds/arenas (Strauss

1979, 1991, 1993) or the broad work on social construction and careers of social

problems as exemplars of such a perspective. Social movement research in the

symbolic-interactionist and resource mobilisation traditions was interested in public

discourses, but it did not elaborate a more comprehensive theory and methodology of

discourse research. Neither did studies which used the term “discursive opportunity

2001:190 f.).

7 For a condensed presentation of SKAD see Keller (2011); theoretical foundations and the

whole case for SKAD are elaborated in Keller ([2005] 2010) and will be available in English soon

(Keller forthcoming). The methodological toolbox of SKAD is elaborated in Keller (2013). Keller and

Truschkat (2012) present a whole range of SKAD studies.

structure” (see next section). In recent political science, Vivien Schmidt (2010)

elaborated “discursive institutionalism” in order to give a richer account of the role of

discourse in political actions and decisions. But she reduced discourse to the

rhetorical power of individual actors, in trying to draw a line between constellations

when discourse matters and others when discourse does not matter – that is

between a situation where an argument or a speech makes a difference, and others,

where bargaining and established structures of interest and power determine the

outcomes. Seen through a Foucauldian lens, this is a rather narrow vision of

discourse – for discourses matter in both cases, as structured and structuring

practices of the discursive construction of reality.

As a philosopher turning to empirical and historical studies, Foucault developed his

approach to discourse and the complexities of power/knowledge quite apart from

sociological positions. Nevertheless he invented his own historical sociology of

knowledge and problematisations (Manning 1982:65,76). Foucault's fundamental

achievement was first to look at discourses as socio-historically situated practices

manifest as textual data and not as the development of ideas or lines of

argumentation, and second to liberate discourse analysis from linguistic issues. In

doing so, he laid important foundations for a sociological analysis of discourses.

When he argued that his main concern was the analysis of “problematizations”

(Foucault 1984), that is, the appearance of central “critical events” in the history of

social constitutions of subjectivities or particular orders of practice, he came quite

close to the interests of the symbolic interactionists or social movement research.

According to Foucault, discourses are situated social practices, not representing

external objects but constituting them. This implies a research focus on concrete data

– oral and written texts, articles, books, discussions, institutions, disciplines – in order

to analyse bottom up how discourses are structured and how they structure

knowledge domains and claims. Foucault speaks of “discursive formations” (Foucault

2010 [1969]:34-78), for example the “formation of concepts” (what concepts are used

and how they relate to each other) or the “formation of enunciative modalities” (as the

places for speakers and the established criteria – e.g. academic careers and titles –

to access them, see Baumgarten and Ullrich 2012). In the “Rivière case” Foucault

(1982) addresses discourses as battlefields, as power struggles over the legitimate

definition of phenomena.

Despite its enormous achievements in setting up a discourse research agenda, there

were some remaining deficits in the Foucauldian toolbox which led to the elaboration

of SKAD. First, Foucault’s theory of discourse as established in the “Archaeology of

Knowledge” largely neglected the agency of social actors making discursive

statements. Second, he was not interested in a theory of human consciousness and

sign/symbol usage, which has to be assumed in order to allow discourses to exist

and to exert power effects on people. And third, he did not put much effort into

research methods.

SKAD’s concepts

Social relationships of knowledge are complex socio-historical constellations of the

production, stabilisation, structuration and transformation of knowledge within a

variety of social arenas. Following Foucault, SKAD identifies discourses as regulated,

structured practices of sign usage in social arenas which constitute smaller or larger

realities, symbolic universes. Discourses are at once both an expression and a

constitutional prerequisite of the (modern) social; they become real through the

actions of social actors, supply specific knowledge claims, and contribute to the

liquefaction and dissolution of the institutionalised interpretations and apparent

realities that are taken for granted. Discourses crystallise and constitute themes in a

particular form as social interpretation and action issues. Discursive formations are

assemblies of statements which follow the same formation rules. For example, a

scientific discourse is manifest in texts, conferences, papers, talks, associations and

so on, all of which can be studied as data. It emerged historically out of actions and

interactions that were committed in order to tell the empirical truth about phenomena

in the world. In discourses, the use of language or symbols by social actors

constitutes the sociocultural facticity of physical and social realities. The meaning of

signs, symbols, images, gestures, actions or things is more or less fixed in socially,

spatially, and temporally or historically situated (and therefore transformable) orders

of signs. It is affirmed, conserved or changed through the concrete usage of the

signs. Discourses can be understood as attempts to freeze meanings or, more

generally speaking, to freeze more or less broad symbolic orders, that is, fix them in

time and by doing so institutionalise a binding context of meaning, values and

actions/agency within social collectives. SKAD is concerned with this correlation

between sign usage as a social practice and the (re)-production/transformation of

social orders of knowledge.

SKAD examines discourses as performative statement practices and symbolic

orderings which constitute reality orders and also produce power effects in a conflict-

ridden network of social actors, institutional dispositifs, and knowledge stocks. It is

emphasised that discourse is concrete and material, it is not an abstract idea or free-

floating line of arguments. There are people on the streets, gestures of resistance,

papers are written, speeches held: The German anti-waste movement during the

early nineties occupied territories, published books, organised knowledge on the risks

and hazardous effects of waste etc. This means that discourse appears as speech,

text, discussion, images, use of symbols, which have to be performed by actors

following discursive instructions, and discourses are, therefore, a real social practice

in which agency and symbolic orders are bound together. SKAD research is

concerned with reconstructing the processes which occur in social construction,

communication, and the legitimisation of meaning structures in institutional spheres

and (public) issue arenas. Several heuristic concepts from the sociology of

knowledge tradition are useful for analysing the discursive construction of reality:

interpretative schemes, classifications, phenomenal structures

(Phänomenstrukturen), and narrative structures. Together, these elements create the

interpretative repertoire (cf. Potter and Wetherell 1998) of a discourse. We shall now

consider these concepts more closely.

The term interpretative scheme or frame (Deutungsmuster) covers meaning and

action-generating schemes, which are combined in and circulated through

discourses. Interpretative schemes are structuring patterns of societies’ stocks of

knowledge. They are used to assemble signs and symbols and to create definitions

of the situation (which happens all the time, not only in strategic action). Discourses

differ in the way they combine such frames in specific interpretative frameworks. If

complex technology is considered risky, nature seen as the endangered mother

earth, and society as the supreme instance of politics, then waste appears as a quite

different problem than in other possible or established combinations of interpretative

schemes. Discourses are able to generate new interpretative schemes and ways of

positioning them within the social agenda – which is exactly what characterises them.

Differing from social movement framing research, SKAD argues that such framings

are of interest far beyond the singular question of their strategic use, because they –

whether intentionally or not – always configure reality.

Classifications are a more or less elaborate, formalised, and institutionally fixed social

typification or categorisation process. Classifications have specific impacts for action.

As an example, consider affirmative action or similar politics which draws on

classifications of populations. Movements often classify opponents and their own we

as well as those whose interests that we is (striving to be) working for.

Alongside interpretative schemes and classifications, the concept of phenomenal

structure offers a complementary third form of access to the levels of content-related

structuring of discourse. Constructing an issue as a problem on the public agenda for

instance requires that the protagonists deal with the issue in several dimensions, and

refer to argumentative, dramatising, and evaluative statements; it requires the

determination of the kind of problem or theme of a statement unit, the definition of

characteristics, causal relations (cause-effect), and their link to responsibilities, actors

and identities involved, and others. Social actors are not pre-given or pre-fixed

entities with clear interests, strategies and resources. SKAD research is very much

about the discursive processes in which actors emerge, engage themselves or are

engaged by others, claim or perform reciprocal positionings, and are involved in

multiple ways in discursive structurations. The comparative study on waste politics in

Germany and France (Keller 2009) showed that the critique of established waste

treatment and waste production existed in Germany well before the anti-waste

movement came into being. One could even regard it even as a precondition of the

movement’s existence.

A final element that is part of the content-related shaping of discourses should be

discussed here. The structuring moments of statements and discourses, through

which various interpretation schemes, classifications, and dimensions of the

phenomenal structure (for example, actors, problem definitions) are placed in relation

to one another in a specific way, are narrative structures. Establishing narrative

structures is not simply a use of techniques to combine linguistic elements, but a

configurative act which links disparate signs and statements to tell a story. Narrative

structures link the various elements of a discourse to render them in a coherent,

portrayable, and communicable form. They provide the acting scheme for the

narration with which the discourse can address an audience in the first place and with

which it can construct its own coherence over the course of time.

But SKAD is not only interested in the symbolic ordering of reality. It is also

concerned with the analysis of the material world and its effects. This includes

various dimensions of reconstruction: sense making as well as subject formation,

ways of acting, institutional/structural contexts, and social as well as material

consequences (e.g. installed infrastructure designed to solve a problem, such as

laws, staff, computers).

SKAD further describes discursive fields as social arenas, constituting themselves

around contested issues, controversies, problematisations, and truth claims in which

discourses compete with each other. In the processing of discourses, specific

discourse coalitions and statement bearers can win out over others, by a wide range

of means. Concrete families are performances of doing family. Discursive orders,

accordingly, are the results of a continuous communicative production within

individual language and action events which are, however, not understood as

spontaneous or chaotic, but rather as interwoven, structured practices which refer

back to one another. A pamphlet or a speech within the context of a demonstration,

for instance, actualises an environmental policy discourse in differing concrete forms.

The materiality of discourses (as discursive or non-discursive practices, real

speakers, texts, speeches, discussions, things) simply means: the way discourses

exist in societies.

Social actors are related to discourse in two ways: on the one hand, as the holders of

the speaker position, or statement producers, who speak within a discourse; and on

the other, as addressees of the statement practice. But actors generally appear on

the discursive level too: Subject positions/Identity offerings depict positioning

processes and patterns of subjectification which are generated in discourses and

which refer to (fields of) addressees.

The term practice(s) covers very generally conventionalised action patterns which are

made available in collective stocks of knowledge as a repertoire for action, that is, in

other words, a more or less explicitly known, often incorporated recipe or knowledge

script about the proper way of acting. This knowledge can originate, establish, and

develop itself (further) in fields of social practice through experimenting and testing

actions in relation to specific issues. SKAD considers several forms of practice:

Discursive practices are communication patterns which are bound to a discourse

context. Discursive practices are observable and describable, typical ways of acting

out statement production whose implementation requires interpretative competence

and active shaping by social actors. SKAD differentiates between the latter and

model practices generated in discourses, that is, exemplary patterns (or templates)

for action which are constituted in discourses, fixed to subject positions and

addressed to the discourse’s public or to some opposite counter-discourse. To

continue with the above-mentioned example of environmental discourse, this

includes recommendations for eco-friendly behaviour (such as for example: turning

the shower off while you shampoo your hair, using your bike, preparing Slow Food).

SKAD and social movement research

Essentially, it should not be too controversial an approach to apply SKAD to social

movement research. It is quite compatible with current social movement theory as it

does not in the first place aim at explaining the latter’s claims better, but at asking

new questions and bringing into focus new research interests. Yet, SKAD in social

movement research is linked to previous efforts in the field, albeit – to quote Marx –

by standing them from their head onto their feet.

A prominent role for connecting SKAD and CSMT has to be reserved for the framing

concept, as it has been outlined for social movement research and distinguished from

ideology e.g. by Oliver and Johnston (2000:39) and Ferree et al. (2002). The latter

consider frames as a concept covering two structuring aspects of signification, which

are related to the meaning of the term frame. First, a frame (like a picture frame) sets

boundaries, explaining what is being thematised and what is not (~ thematic

relevance). Secondly, they pick up on the meaning structure, which leads our

attention to the inner structure of the phenomenon, to how something is thematised.

This conceptualisation has some advantages over other ideational concepts like

ideology. One aspect is this concept’s economic connotation or the implicit

connection of the superstructure phenomenon of ideology with its objective basis in

social relations of production (which is the power and a restriction of this concept)

(Oliver and Johnston 2000). The frame concept is – if not conceived of only as a

“shallow conception of the transmission of political ideas as marketing” (Oliver and

Johnston 2000:37) – simply more open to cultural complexities and ties in with basic

insights of research into political culture. Karl Rohe (1990:335) once wrote that

political cultures (and political cultures are among the central contextual discursive

conditions of movement discourse) do not differ so much in their problem solutions,

but in what would become a problem for them at all and how (for Foucault:

problematisations). If we lay aside the classical view of movements as actors who are

opposed to society (or power or actors/institutions in it) and perceive them more as a

part and expression of society,8 we can grasp the embeddedness of movement

ideas. In the social repertoire of movement action the use of frames is not chosen for

exclusively strategic reasons, since they belong to the basic ideational prerequisites

which shape given movements in culturally specific ways. As already mentioned,

much of this is due to national discursive contexts.

The most striking example of this is the influence of historical memory and dealing

with the national past in German movements, including in political fields that are

thematically not necessarily connected to the past. Ferree et al. (2002) showed that

in debates between the women’s movement and the so-called “pro-life” camp, anti-

abortion positions differed between Germany and the US. The moral anti-abortion

positions in Germany are, the authors argue, grounded in the experiences of Nazi

euthanasia. This eminent politico-cultural issue for Germany gives the abortion

debate a layer of meaning that is unique for the respective discursive context

(besides other meanings with contexts greater than the German nation state). It is

thus an illuminating example of how a discursive context shapes modes of sense-

making by offering specific frames and not others. Other research has shown these

kinds of reminiscences in the visual production of German protest movements

against surveillance (Ullrich and Lê 2011; Daphi, Lê, and Ullrich 2013). The most

commonplace depictions of surveillance worked with allusions to Germany’s past.

Very prominent in the images was the Nazi regime, with many statements implicitly or

ironically equating today’s surveillance with that in Nazi Germany or alluding to the

latter as the ultimate threat if today’s development of the surveillance state is not

stopped or reversed. The most common symbols of the protests worked with

allusions to the GDR (which in the decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain replaced

the Nazi period as the ultimate other of German national narratives, cf. Zuckermann

1999:8). Probably the most widely circulated picture showed the then German

minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, who was responsible for many post-9/11

security laws, with the slogan “Stasi 2.0” (“Stasi” being the colloquial abbreviation for

8 This view is also fundamentally supported by Foucault-inspired governmentality approaches

to social movements (see contributions in Heßdörfer et al. 2010; Death 2010; Baumgarten and Ullrich

2012).

the political secret police of the GDR). While the anti-surveillance movement is a

wide coalition with a fundamentally liberal orientation, Della Porta (1999:76-78)

showed similar historical references to the Nazi regime for left-libertarian (or

“autonomist”) movements in Germany (as well as in Italy, with references to its fascist

experiences) in the 1960s to 1980s.

These examples also clearly illustrate how useful the concept of frame resonance

(Gamson and Modigliani 1989) is, and how strategic and expressive aspects of

movement discourse go hand in hand. Frame resonance refers to the public’s high or

low response to a framing strategy. While the historical allusion may be grounded in

strategic thinking, considering the Stasi link funny (and thus creating sympathy) and

considering the Nazi allusion provocative and threatening (thus creating a sense of

the necessity to mobilise), they also inform the scholar of the frames that were at

hand or seemed plausible to the movements’ imagineers – and which were not. This

is the concept of frame resonance turned upside down: It is not only the movements’

frames that gain resonance (more or less successfully) among bystanders, potential

adherents or the public – it is also the available frames of a discursive context that

influence the movements’ possibilities to grasp things. Foucault’s influence guides us

in the attitude not to consider movements as basically free actors who deliberately

choose their frames, because he encourages us towards the position that what can

legitimately be stated, or what makes sense, is structured by discourse. Whether the

framing choice is more strategic or more expressive, the pool from which to choose is

regulated and restricted. Still, discourses of movements remain battlegrounds, too.

While the German discursive context fosters the use of the historical allusions

described above, there are some actors who criticise these. A current has developed

within the German left that centres on criticising nationalism, the principle of

nationality and especially the unique character of German nationalism and anti-

Semitism. They see the Nazi allusions as a relativisation of German guilt. The

mainstream and critics do not agree, yet in different ways relate to the same

discursive context. We see here that discourse does not determine positions, but by

offering classifications and interpretative frames it defines what makes sense at all.

National Socialism and its consequences are the prime example of this in Germany.

Highly illustrative is the analysis of left-wing discourse on the conflict between Israel

and the Palestinians (Ullrich 2008). As far as the discursive field ‘Jews/anti-

Semitism/the Holocaust etc.’ is concerned (which evokes a substantial connection), it

is not surprising that in the German variant of this discourse German history is

omnipresent. Interestingly, the Nazi allusion in this discourse has become a one-size-

fits-all allegation, with similarities being drawn between Israel and the Nazis as well

as between the Palestinians and the Nazis. A discourse analysis of movement media

(Bartel and Ullrich 2008) revealed that parts of the discourse indiscriminately transfer

frames and terminology from the Nazi era and the politics of remembering that era

into the Middle Eastern context. Many position papers, programmatic statements or

parliamentary motions about the conflict start with ritually acknowledging “German

responsibility” (Ullrich 2011). The interesting effect of the discursive formation is that

even people who adhere to the same political ideology and fight for the same ends

can differ considerably in their framing of the conflict when from different countries.

Ullrich (2008:281 ff.) compared – among others – Trotskyists of the same

international tendency in Great Britain and Germany and found immense differences

in their frames of the conflict, though not in their policy positions or intended

solutions. Anti-Semitism, Jewish/Israeli interests and the ethic imperatives of

Germany’s National Socialist past occupy a considerable proportion of German

discourse compared to Britain, where the frames “anti-Semitism” and “historical

responsibility” are virtually absent in movement discourse. The reason, of course, is

the very relevance of the respective sensitivities in the two national discursive

contexts. All other heuristic concepts of SKAD can be applied to that discourse, too.

One can identify certain – conflicting – narratives of the conflict. There are fixed

subject positions, e.g. the “Israel-sympathetic lefty” or the “critic of Israel”. The

German metadiscourse binarily classifies camps (pro-Israeli “Antideutsche” vs. pro-

Palestinian Anti-Zionists/Anti-imperialists – a common classification scheme that

ignores intermediary positions). Such sub-discourses also construct different

phenomenal structures: One discourse sees the issue primarily as a problem of anti-

Semitism in the Muslim populations and their left-wing supporters, which evokes the

need for reconnaissance and awareness measures. Others construct it as a problem

of imperialism, which in turn evokes the need for international solidarity campaigns

or, for example, boycotts against Israeli goods. Model practices and blueprints for

acting subjects are set up too, for instance when appropriate or politically correct

behaviour is proclaimed. And this all is done through a whole set of discursive

practices, including the writing of pamphlets, books, the organisation of discourses

and discussions, or the invitation of ‘real’ testimonies.

It should be noted that new interpretative schemes may always emerge if social

action encounters problems – this indeed is an old pragmatist argument. SKAD

considers such constellations as events. Catastrophic events like the Fukushima

disaster (catastrophic for the environment) or wars in the Middle East (considered

catastrophic for the Palestinians), may evolve as generators of evidence for new

interpretative schemata. Discourses are therefore also open to new frames, which

can eventually become established as factual.

It is not new to social movement research to consider cultural or discursive contexts’

relevance for movements. Eyerman and Jamison’s “cognitive approach” was an early

variant of this, considering itself a sociology of knowledge approach, taking “long

term traditions in political culture” (Eyerman and Jamison 1991:36) into consideration

to analyse social movements. One of the striking examples they give is Britain, where

“the conflict between capital and labour has continued to define the political culture,

and thus the way social movements are conceived” (Eyerman and Jamison 1991:37).

This impression is still vivid for researchers with a knowledge of the British movement

landscape.

There have been a number of attempts to widen the scope of the political opportunity

structures approach by introducing cultural factors, and several of these point in this

direction. The terms cultural/discursive context or cultural/discursive opportunity

structures (COS/DOS) overlap heavily and comprise a lot of different aspects and

lookouts. Like the framing approach, most of them were not intended to complete the

cultural turn, because they often restrict themselves to analysing the influence of

cultural or discursive structures on mobilising success and policy outcomes (McAdam

1994; Koopmans and Kriesi 1997; Koopmans and Statham 2000). The term

‘opportunity’ implies this strategic bias; this is why we prefer the more open concept

discursive context, which is in fact the discourse of the wider society in which the

movement is embedded. Others have used the terms rather en passant without

further theoretical elaboration (for instance Winkler 2001; Benthin 2004; Laubenthal

2006; Linards 2009). Yet there have also been theoretical advances – whether in the

strategic corset or not. Goldberg (2001), for example, subscribing to the Durkheimian

tradition of culture-as-structure as opposed to the cognitive concept of culture,

explains the perceived legitimacy to protest through deeply-rooted cultural systems,

like basic binary codes. Ferree et al. (2002), in their seminal study on discourses

about abortion, and Ullrich (2008) in his book on left-wing discourses on

Israel/Palestine (both comparative research designs) have not defined general layers

or dimensions of the DOS (see Baumgarten and Ullrich 2012:4 ff. instead), but make

their interpretations plausible by referring to several specific cultural schemes, which

they grasp from historical analyses as well as from different types of political culture

approaches. The possibility of leaving behind the strategic corset is quite obvious

when movement framing efforts are seen as a key to the culture of a country in the

study on abortion (Gerhards and Rucht 2000:181). Completing this cultural turn

means considering discursive contexts as relevant for the formation of world views

and positions of engagements well before strategic action starts. Discursive contexts

in this sense are the structures that enable and restrict the circuits of culture, of

meaning making and social action. Research carried out by Hajer (1995), Keller

(2009), Lamont and Thévenot (2000), Ferree et al. (2002), Ullrich (2008) and many

others accounts for the continuing relevance of national contexts – seen, at least in

certain regards, as cultural spheres with discursive fields of their own – distinguished

by collective memory, language, historical traditions etc. (see for example

Baumgarten, this volume).

Using SKAD in movement research: Methodological implications and

challenges

The concepts introduced and the perspective taken do not make a research project.

To carve out the relevant discursive contexts for a given movement or thematic

discourse, one must start with the discursive material. While other approaches

remain quite silent on the criteria for the selection of influential macro-phenomena

(Pettenkofer 2010:71–74), we suggest looking for it in the data. Especially helpful for

this is comparative analysis.

The approach, as we suggest it, has a very strong affinity with qualitative

methodology, in general, and with certain aspects of Grounded Theory in particular.

One of the main tasks for the researcher is to identify which relevant discursive

contexts the analysed movement knowledge relates to. This is hermeneutic and

theoretical work in a circular process. Depending on the issues concerned, there will

be knowledge more or less readily available from existing research. This knowledge

is a source of hypotheses or questions put to the data that influence analysis by

offering foci of awareness. On the other hand, the in-depth analysis of the data will

reveal different content and thus other relevant discursive contexts. However, pure

data means little to us. First, all data needs questions – and the same text may give

different answers to different questions. Second, every interpretation and analysis of

data is influenced by pre-existing knowledge of the person doing the interpreting.

This means that any aspects that are unknown to the researcher may stay hidden,

and pieces of meaning that do not resonate with the researcher may get lost despite

thorough hermeneutic work. This is where comparison comes into play. The constant

comparison of cases – similar ones and highly different ones – allows us to see the

invisible, since its nonexistence is visible in the contrasting case.

Let us explain this using the example of left-wing Middle East discourse in Germany

and Britain. It was surely not surprising that Germany’s past was the number one

reference point (Hafez 2002:162 ff.), and thus the politics of remembrance the prime

discursive context, for German perceptions of the Middle East. This insight could be

taken with some elaborations on aspects, dimensions, positions and causes from

existing literature, but manifested itself richly in the textual production of the

movements and their members, yet in a specific way (that had similarities with and

differences from the general German discourse). So the theoretically already

available knowledge offered hypotheses that were confirmed by the data. Analysis of

the data revealed a particularity of the left-wing variant of this discourse in that people

relate not only to the Middle East conflict itself and Germany’s past, but also to

historical struggles and debates involving left-wing political and workers’ movements,

or specific left-wing ideological schemata of interpretation and many other factors.

The interplay of these contexts was at the centre of the interpretative work. It was

somewhat more surprising to discover that the historical British involvement in the

conflict (e.g. as the colonial power holding the League of Nations mandate for

Palestine before the foundation of Israel) and other explicit historical references do

not play an important role in the British left-wing discourse on the conflict. Another

aspect the comparison revealed is that in the British interviews (the study was based

on interviews) Israel appears only as the oppressing nation, a military player and

regional power. In the case of Germany, on the other hand, even those who were

very critical of or even hostile towards Israeli policy, spent more time and elaboration

on other aspects of Israel (for example, they contemplated the rights and fears of the

Israeli population) and stressed the important role of anti-Semitism in the conflict or in

Germany, which is a relevant frame only in the German context. The incompatibility of

certain frames in the German discourse (the anti-Semitism frame and the occupation

frame sometimes suggest different identifications from a left-wing point of view) and

their constant clashes, eventually also lead to the start of learning processes towards

more complex positions than 100% identification with one of the conflict parties and

thus also to new narratives with changed phenomenal structures, e.g. to

combinations of the Palestinian and the Zionist master narratives.

The basic research design was the comparison of two sets of discursive contexts –

the movement-specific or political camp context and the national context. The former

was kept constant (both cases are left wingers), while the latter was modified through

cross-national case selection and comparison. This allowed for a deep insight into

the respective national characteristics of discourse on Israel, Palestine, (Anti-

)Zionism and anti-Semitism. Philo-Semitic and militant pro-Israeli positions that

constrain themselves to the politics of memory frames (historic responsibility and

anti-Semitism), are virtually non-existent in Britain (neither the discursive context “the

left” nor the national discursive context pointed in that direction), while they are

prominent in Germany. The discursive context “the left” and the national discursive

context in Germany were partly contradictory, which led to the arguments, extremely

antagonistic positions and much metatalk. But left-wing and pro-Israeli positions

could only be established there. In the British left-wing discourse they would not

make any sense.

Although we consider the national context as relevant for many issues, there is no

rule for this. The symbolic production of movements has to be analysed in a

comparative perspective. Depending on the interest of research and the actual

character of the movements analysed, the dimensions of comparison can be

different. It seems especially fruitful to compare diachronically9 or across movement

sectors. There is no general rule governing which discursive context is relevant, but

one may speculate about hierarchies. General political contexts (like nations) will be

important for more issues, especially those that are articulated and debated

nationwide. In many countries with national media, for a national public this is of the

highest importance. Other issues may relate more to transnational or local publics.

Yet they, too, will be structured historically, or based on place and time.

9 Jasper (1997:152 ff., 322 f.) gives us a striking temporal example. He argues that it was

unimaginable to campaign for animal rights as long as animals were ubiquitous as working livestock.

Animal rights campaigns reflect a situation in which we usually only ever come into contact with

animals as pets.

Conclusion

The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) offers social movement

and protest research a powerful tool for the analysis of movement knowledge.

Movement knowledge is analysed in its concrete socio-historical circumstances,

which we construe as the discursive context. SKAD offers a conceptual framework

for combining the interactional processes of re-iterating and shaping knowledge on

the micro level with the level of emergent social structures of knowledge. In this

article we concentrated our efforts on highlighting the significance of the latter for

giving movements time-spatial specificity.

So, what is the benefit of using the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse in

comparative social movement research? First, considering movement activities as

part of discursive struggles in social arenas leads us to the discursive structuration of

such processes. This means that there are established (and changing) ways of

saying and interacting, role positions and resources for speakers, taboos, stocks of

knowledge, symbols, values, norms at hand (or not), accepted expertise, scientific

and other knowledge production – all of this enters into the movements’ discursive

accounts of how the world really is, and how it should be. To approach movements

via discourse means to analyse them as being embedded in whole discursive fields,

where their action resonates with that of other collective actors and vice versa – we

can account for what they do and say only if we try to get the whole picture. Second,

it allows for comparative studies of movements simply because the toolbox of

discourse research is able to account for the different discursive contexts which

shape movement activities and are shaped by them in an empirically sound way.

There is no need to refer to mysterious national mentalities or cultural preferences as

ideational forces. As Keller shows in his comparative research, a discourse-

orientated perspective can clarify how such cultural differences are to be understood

as permanent and performative productions, processed in and through discourses as

well as through the instutionalisations which already exist, and how they are

transformed or brought into being by discursive engagements of social actors. The

interplay of the relevant discursive contexts (e.g. the national and the issue-specific

ones, see Daphi et al. 2013) are decisive for giving movements their shape.

Is it necessary to say that this is all about power/knowledge? Discursive structuration

is both: enabling and limiting discursive activities. The power to speak and make

discursive statements as well as the power to find resonance, to create, stabilise,

transform or to abandon all kinds of worldly effects – this all is not just the result of

some determining force (like well-established and known capitalist or class

interests)10 which could be identified by theorisation ad hoc, but which has to be

analysed in its empirical appearance – it might differ rather widely according to the

issues and time periods considered. As for other social sciences research, SKAD’s

approach to social movements has to reflect on and account for its objects’

boundaries for the relevant elements, dimensions, discursive fields and data to be

included. This is a question of convincing arguments as well as of manpower, time

and financial resources.

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