Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups
by Erika Summers Effler
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Cloth: 978-0-226-18865-2 | Paper: 978-0-226-18866-9 | Electronic: 978-0-226-18867-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188676.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Why do people keep fighting for social causes in the face of consistent failure? Why do they risk their physical, emotional, and financial safety on behalf of strangers? How do these groups survive high turnover and emotional burnout?

To explore these questions, Erika Summers Effler undertook three years of ethnographic fieldwork with two groups: anti–death penalty activists STOP and the Catholic Workers, who strive to alleviate poverty. In both communities, members must contend with problems that range from the broad to the intimately personal. Adverse political conditions, internal conflict, and fluctuations in financial resources create a backdrop of daily frustration—but watching an addict relapse or an inmate’s execution are much more devastating setbacks. Summers Effler finds that overcoming these obstacles, recovering from failure, and maintaining the integrity of the group require a constant process of emotional fine-tuning, and she demonstrates how activists do this through thoughtful analysis and a lucid rendering of their deeply affecting stories.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Erika Summers Effler is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

REVIEWS

Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes may well be the best-written book of serious social science you are ever likely to read. Erika Summers Effler puts you in the midst of the drama and humanity of people struggling for near-impossible ideals, simultaneously facing cold organizational realities and ironies and buffeted by the whirlwind of time. Alongside her moving account of two organizations with vastly different emotional styles, she condenses a theory into memorable aphorisms. Summers Effler comes closer than anyone yet to conquering a theory of time. Her book should delight and inform readers all the way from undergraduate students to sophisticated theorists to leaders of all kinds of organizations seeking a guide for riding the organizational storm.”

— Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

“By alternating charming stories with hard-hitting theory, Summers Effler unravels the emotional intricacies of the Janus dilemma: saints turn inward to inspire transcendent joy and protect the purity of the group, while heroes storm out to vanquish foes and threats. Best of all are her accounts of her own reactions to the characters she encounters in the two groups she compares, a Catholic Worker community and an organization opposed to the death penalty. Both groups face unimaginable challenges as they struggle to survive.”

— James M. Jasper, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

- Erika Summers Effler
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188676.003.0001
[social movements, emotional dynamics, sociology, local environment, groups]
This chapter investigates altruistic social movement groups and the day-to-day interactions in two altruistic social movement organizations in order to understand how such groups maintain intensity of involvement. It focuses on the process of maintaining the energy required to carry out good work; to maintain a sense of responsibility for others, commitment to the work, and cooperation among group members; and the ability to deal with failure. The purpose of this study is to understand the emotional dynamics of such groups, and how group dynamics either motivate the production of collective goods or drain participants of their feelings of efficacy and enthusiasm. The findings from this research are also relevant to the recent and increasing focus on the role of emotions in social life within the field of sociology. Furthermore, this text illustrates how these groups survived unfavorable political conditions, internal conflict, and fluctuations in their resources, through a combination of adjusting to their local environment and working on their local environment so that it adjusted to them. (pages 1 - 22)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Erika Summers Effler
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188676.003.0002
[emotional techniques, Catholic Work, risks, involvement, STOP]
This chapter identifies the emotional techniques the two groups, the Catholic Worker community and STOP, used to attract member involvement in high-risk actions and to manage the members' subsequent positive and negative emotional reactions. Both groups attracted involvement by creating opportunities for high-risk action. The story about the Catholic Workers illustrates how they continually exposed themselves to the contingencies of poverty when they placed themselves “in God's hands.” Sometimes they were able to feed a hungry neighbor, but just as often they did not have the resources to grant such requests. Other times they engaged in potentially dangerous interactions in under-policed areas. The Catholic Workers' uncertain circumstances created intense interactions, exhilarating emotion, a sense of purpose, and, in the most powerful cases, mystical experiences. A comparison of dynamics that attract involvement in these groups suggests how risk followed by success generates feelings of thrilling expansion. (pages 23 - 68)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Erika Summers Effler
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188676.003.0003
[Catholic Worker, STOP, negative experiences, involvement, emotions, politics]
This chapter explains how both groups in this study survived collapse by reestablishing involvement or attracting new involvement. Their negative experiences served as emotional warning signals, so evolving strategies became ancestors of earlier struggles and failures. When the groups failed, they experienced the opposite of the emotional dynamics associated with success: contraction and low levels of enthusiasm. In response to failure, the groups developed emotional techniques for recovering and avoiding future draining interactions. The story about the Catholic Worker community illustrates how after each struggle that ended in failure, the Workers redefined what it meant to live up to the Catholic Worker ideal of taking personal responsibility for the poorest of the poor. Despite their continually changing expectations, the community survived as a center of action with a coherent history by courting grief as an indirect route to laughter and mystical awe. Both laughter and mystical awe provided release from routine conflict and frustration over their sense of inefficacy. The story about STOP describes how internal conflict followed closely on the heels of STOP's early popularity, eventually contributing to the breakdown of the group. STOP's director renewed involvement by attracting new participants and shifting the group's focus to expanding its networks and influencing electoral politics. Thus their strategies lagged behind their unfolding contexts. The comparison of the two groups suggests how such groups can harness the intensity of threatening emotions, like grief and horror, to stabilize themselves. (pages 69 - 127)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Erika Summers Effler
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188676.003.0004
[STOP, Catholic Workers, emotional workers, positive emotions, failure]
This chapter describes how both STOP and the Workers attempted to avoid threats so that they could create stability out of uncertain conditions. Although both groups narrowed their focus and emotional expectations to protect against the drain of future failure, their techniques changed at a slower rate than their contexts, and as a result drawing on these strategies eventually undermined the groups' future stability. The story about the Catholic Workers shows how they developed aversions to planning and righteous anger in response to numerous failed projects. The story about STOP describes how the group's leaders rejected efforts to establish an internal focus in response to their history of internal conflicts. They maintained their enthusiasm with horror stories about injustices and political corruption, which engendered feelings of righteous anger. The leaders' emotional techniques failed to draw in the lower-level members who were responsible for managing STOP's mundane internal tasks. As a result, lower-level group members frequently left the group after comparatively short periods of involvement. The stories in illustrate how the groups' evolving patterns of action generated rhythmic cycles of negative and positive emotions over time. (pages 128 - 182)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Erika Summers Effler
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188676.003.0005
[social patterns, emotions, comparative method, abstract theory, literary styles]
This chapter shows how stable social patterns can be seen as evolving cycles of emergence, stability, collapse, and reemergence that move at varying speeds and rhythms. It argues that such patterns emerge when anticipation shunts action into increasingly well-worn paths, and that these patterns collapse when increasingly rigid organization limits access to necessary resources. From a distance, these groups seem solid and stable; up close, they seem fluid and disordered. It assumes a mid-range position, which smoothes processes but does not solidify them into static or discrete entities and discusses how social scientists can gain analytic leverage by repeatedly shifting focus. This process is illustrated by moving closer to convey gritty physical emotional dynamics in a literary style and by moving farther out to develop smooth abstract theory with the comparative method. (pages 183 - 202)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Methods Appendix

References

Index