Reframing the Community: How and Why Member Participation Shifts in the Face of Change

Goffman (like Schutz [1962] and Berger and Luckmann [1966]), was primarily interested in the organization of everyday experiences, what he calls “strips of action.”

A simple illustration helps make this point. The role of the curtain in a play, and the backstage-frontstage distinction more broadly, is to bracket the beginning or the end of an act, so that audience members and actors alike have clarity on whether actors are playing their characters or being themselves. Lee (2009) offers a more recent analysis of keying in the context of rap battles, revealing how embodied and emotional cues sustain the shared presumption that “this is play.”

For example, an instance of adultery can break a person’s frame for their marriage, or leader turnover can break members’ frames for a communal organization or movement.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959) argues that dramaturgical stages provide specific frames or “definitions of the situation.” When the conditions of the stage change, previous frames may no longer resonate or work in the same way. That said, some may attempt to sustain previous frames in new scenes and stages, while others may reframe not only the present stage, but past scenes as well. Examining why people adopt these different modes of framing is the central goal of my empirical analysis.

Of course, a global pandemic is a rare event that affects multiple aspects of members’ lives. In the discussion, I address the scope conditions, limitations, and potential insights this case offers for considering other collective changes that may be experienced by other kinds of communal organizations.

Swidler (1986) develops two models of cultural influence for settled and unsettled cultural periods, arguing that culture influences action in settled periods by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action, while in unsettled periods, explicit ideologies govern action. She later expands on this distinction, arguing that individual lives vary in terms of whether they are “examined or unexamined” (Swidler 2001, Chap. 3). As discussed in the theoretical framework, unsettling circumstances often require examining one’s assumptions and frames of a situation and developing more robust accounts for action that previously could be taken for granted (Scott and Lyman 1968). I use the terms “settled” and “unsettled” times as a shorthand to describe group life prior to the onset of the pandemic and after.

Because CF is an open, voluntary organization that does not have a competitive recruitment and selection process (as sororities and fraternities do), CF has both core and peripheral members. The latter includes people trying out CF but unsure of whether they will commit, people who are involved with CF but prioritize other commitments, and people whose spiritual beliefs or behaviors do not align easily with CF, leading them to be wary of deep involvement. CF is like other sites of voluntary commitment on campuses and in society (intramural sports, political groups, hobby-based groups, etc.) but distinct from groups with competitive entrance processes and mandatory involvement. While these groups may have greater uniformity in member involvement, there often still exists a distinction between the “core” and the “periphery” of any group. Effler (2010), for example, describes a similar dynamic of core and peripheral members in the two social movement organizations she studied.

These trends raise the question of what typical participation in organizations during college is. While this question has not received systematic evaluation, existing research on other college student groups (and my own observations) suggest a general trend from wide-ranging participation early in college that narrows to a smaller set of commitments as students identify their primary community and extra-curricular commitments. Thus, major changes in organizational commitments become less common as students’ progress through college. (For additional research, see Chambliss and Takacs 2014; Binder and Wood 2014, and Magolda and Ebben Gross 2020.)

Due to my ethnographic approach, the primary outcome of interest, shifts in participation patterns, are based on observations rather than self-reports which is helpful for linking what members said with what they did (Jerolmack and Khan 2014).

Past frames and imagined futures are both more stable than present circumstances, where unexpected changes can occur. Past frames and imagined futures also tend to be linked. If one’s past frame for a group is that it is a beautiful community, their future anticipation is likely that it will continue to be such indefinitely. When people experience changes or unexpected circumstances arise, past frames and future anticipations are often destabilized. Taken-for-granted schemas suddenly stop working. This process triggers reconsideration, which can lead to reframing or frame maintenance.

Goffman (1974:202) defines disattending as “the withdrawal of all attention and awareness” but disattending need not be so absolute.

Autumn received an email because she was on CF’s listserv, even though she had never been to a CF event.

For example, these findings may be relevant for social movement groups that are embedded within firms (Soule 2012), hospitals (Kellogg 2009), or universities (Soule 1997; Zhao 1998).