Most research on role transitions, following a tradition pioneered by van Gennep, regards these major turning points in the life course primarily as times when people move between different sets of social networks. While these studies acknowledge that rites of passage occur within particular physical spaces in which material objects are present, the importance of such objects has received little attention. I explore one particular role transition—moving away to college—and illustrate that objects play a central role in how students construct their identities. Students at “Midwestern” University make strategic choices about which objects to leave at home as anchors of prior identities and which ones to bring to school as markers of new identities. Moreover, I suggest that the meanings of these two categories of objects differ by gender. I argue that this case opens up the possibility that objects play a much more central part in role transitions than social scientists have acknowledged. This study also challenges existing assumptions about different processes of identity formation. Therefore, it engenders the need for additional research about how people reinterpret objects during role transitions, and about the different meanings that objects may have for the constructions of masculinity and femininity.
During the 1990s, universities and foundations separately entered into community partnerships with the intent of revitalizing poor urban neighborhoods. We describe the historical context that preceded their involvement in these partnerships, outline the evolution in ideas about "community empowerment" integral to such partnerships, and explain the partnership model's attractiveness. We then analyze how and why these partnerships embraced the rhetoric of community empowerment and discuss the paradox of elites attempting to empower poor people. Our analysis suggests that these partnerships allowed for the appearance of an inclusive solution to community problems, while maintaining the legitimacy and privilege of their elite sponsors.Since the 1960s "community empowerment" has been an enduring refrain in the rhetoric surrounding U.S. anti-poverty initiatives. Policymakers have often pursued this goal without explicitly defining what it means, which has enabled them to occupy the moral high ground ("we support empowering the poor and revitalizing communities") while being ambiguous about the feasibility of their actually producing meaningful changes. During the war on poverty, community empowerment, also referred to as community action, entailed offering opportunities for poor residents to exercise their own political voice in defining the array of reforms-job creation, housing, education, and the like-aimed at improving their neighborhoods. Due to the specific manner in which the war on poverty was carried out, these community action programs gradually came under attack. During the ensuing decades, this attack became part of a broader neoconservative assault on the welfare state, culminating in a series of sweeping changes during the 1980s that shifted responsibility for social policy from the federal government to private and local organizations. Since then, anti-poverty work has for the most part been privatized (Lenkowsky, 1999;Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). The idea of community empowerment has persevered, however, with new institutional sponsors and renewed hopes for social change.We examine two types of institutions that stepped into the social policy vacuum left by the federal government: universities and foundations. We focus on their partnerships with
I embrace Mills's (1940) conception of motives to offer new insight into an old question: why do people join social movements? I draw upon ethnographic research at the Crossroads Fund, a “social change” foundation, to illustrate that actors simultaneously articulate two vocabularies of motives for movement participation: an instrumental vocabulary about dire, yet solvable, problems and an expressive vocabulary about collective identity. This interpretive work is done during boundary framing, which refers to efforts by movements to create in‐group/out‐group distinctions. I argue that the goal‐directed actions movements take to advance social change are shaped by participants' identity claims. Moreover, it is significant that Crossroads constructs its actions and identity as social movement activism, rather than philanthropy. This definitional work suggests that analyzing the category social movements is problematic unless researchers study how activists attempt to situate themselves within this category. Hence, methodologically attending to organizations' constructions of movement status can theoretically inform research which essentially takes social movements as a given, in exploring their structural components.
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