``Free spaces'' in collective action

FRANCESCA POLLETTAColumbia University

Good metaphors may be essential to social science. By putting ``thepolysemous properties of language in the foreground,'' they facilitatewhat Richard Harvey Brown calls the ``genre-stretching'' that drivesinnovation.1 The danger of a good metaphor, though, is that claimsmerely implied are subjected neither to theoretical specication norempirical investigation. Evocation substitutes for explanation.This hasbeen the case, I argue, in recent discussions of the role of ``free spaces''in mobilization. Since Sara Evans used the term in her 1979 PersonalPolitics, ``free spaces,'' along with `` protected spaces,'' ``safe spaces,''`` spatial preserves,'' ``havens,'' ``sequestered social sites,'' ``cultural labo-ratories,'' `` spheres of cultural autonomy,'' and `` free social spaces'' ^dierent names for the same thing ^ have appeared regularly in thework of sociologists, political scientists, and historians of collectiveaction.2 For all these writers, free spaces and their analogues refer tosmall-scale settings within a community or movement that are removedfrom the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participatedin, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompaniespolitical mobilization.

The term's appeal is considerable. Not only does it discredit a view ofthe powerless as deludedly acquiescent to their domination, since infree spaces they are able to penetrate and overturn hegemonic beliefs,but it promises to restore culture to structuralist analyses without slip-ping into idealism. Counterhegemonic ideas and identities come neitherfrom outside the system nor from some free-oating oppositional con-sciousness, but from long-standing community institutions. Freespaces seem to provide institutional anchor for the cultural challengethat explodes structural arrangements. Yet the analytic force of theconcept has been blunted by inconsistencies in its denition and usageand by a deeper failure to grasp the more complex dynamics of mobi-

Theory and Society 28: 1^38, 1999. 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

lization. How ubiquitous are free spaces? How necessary are they tomobilization and are they necessary to all movements? What makesthem free? The variety of answers to these questions stems in part fromthe term's conation of several structures that play dierent roles inmobilization. That is, a feminist bookshop created by activists in theAmerican women's liberation movement bore a dierent relation toprotest than did a book circle in Estonia under Soviet rule.3 I suggest,therefore, that we disaggregate structures as well as tasks of mobiliza-tion. The three structures that I identify ^ transmovement, indigenous,and pregurative ^ can be compared along several dimensions. I arguethat the character of the associational ties that compose them, respec-tively, extensive, dense/isolated, and symmetrical, helps to explain theirdierent roles in identifying opportunities, recruiting participants, sup-plying leaders, and crafting compelling action frames.

This reconceptualization still does not answer to a second set of prob-lems, which has to do with a tendency to reduce culture to structure, inspite of the free space concept's promise to integrate the two. This ismost evident in discussions of what I have termed `` indigenous'' struc-tures. Opposition is made dependent on the structural characteristicsof the free space (its density and isolation), and on the structural trans-formations (opportunity or crisis) that turn the challenge nurturedthere into a mobilizing action frame. But that conceptualizationobscures, rst, the cultural dimensions of structural transformationsoutside the free space and, accordingly, insurgents' capacity to inu-ence, indeed create, opportunities; and, second, the cultural specicityof the structures within it. Depending on what meanings are attachedto actual or perceived ties, dense and isolated networks are as likely toimpede protest or limit it to purely local tragets and identities as tofacilitate it. Rather than providing insight into the dynamics by whichsuch constraints are surmounted, free spaces remain a cultural blackbox grafted onto a political opportunity model or a structural break-down one. Conceptualizing structures as cultural reveals resourcesavailable to insurgents and obstacles facing them that have been over-looked in analyses of free spaces.

Drawing on two cases whose status as free spaces has become near-paradigmatic, I demonstrate the yields of such a reconceptualization. Iargue that network intersections are critical to generating mobilizingidentities, not just because weak-tied individuals provide access topreviously unavailable material and informational resources, but be-cause their social distance endows them with the authority to contest

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existing relations of status and deference among the aggrieved popula-tion. Thus, I show how rural black Mississippians' interaction withpeople they saw as representatives of the national civil rights move-ment proved important in countering local black elites' reluctance toengage in militant action. This was true even though the movementactivists to whom they were exposed, namely college-age organizers,provided neither nancial resources, physical protection, nor guaranteesof political success. Similarly, the development of a feminist challengewithin the Southern civil rights movement was made possible byveterans' contact with white newcomers from Northern activist circles,whose social distance not only brought new information and ideas, butenabled them to defy conventions of racial and gender deference. Inboth cases, mapping the structural relations without examining themeanings of those relations is insucient explanation for the timingand form of collective action.

Theoretical convergence on the free space concept

In a much-quoted passage, Sara Evans and Harry Boyte write:

Particular sorts of public places in the community, what we call free spaces,are the environments in which people are able to learn a new self-respect, adeeper and more assertive group identity, public skills, and values of coopera-tion and civic virtue. Put simply, free spaces are settings between private livesand large scale institutions where ordinary citizens can act with dignity,independence and vision.4

For Evans and Boyte and the scholars who have followed them, the freespace concept shows that the oppressed are not without resources tocombat their oppression. In the dense interactive networks of commun-ity-based institutions, people envision alternative futures and plot strat-egies for realizing them. Free spaces supply the activist networks, skills,and solidarity that assist in launching a movement. They also providethe conceptual space in which dominated groups are able to penetratethe prevailing common sense that keeps most people passive in the faceof injustice, and are thus crucial to the very formation of the identitiesand interests that precede mobilization. As Eric Hirsch puts it, `` Havensinsulate the challenging group from the rationalizing ideologies nor-mally disseminated by the society's dominant group.''5 Free spaces haveincluded, by Fantasia and Hirsch's count, block clubs, tenant associa-tions, bars, union halls, student lounges and hangouts, families, women'sconsciousness-raising groups, and lesbian feminist communities.6

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The Southern black church, removed from white control and central tothe life of black communities, gures in most surveys of free spaces.For the emerging civil rights movement it provided meeting places todevelop strategy and commitment, a network of charismatic move-ment leaders, and an idiom that persuasively joined Constitutionalideals with Christian ones.7 The Southern civil rights movement itself,and particularly the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC), in another oft-cited example, gave white women the organizingskills, role models (in eective older women activists), and friendshipconnections that were essential to the emergence of radical feminism.It also gave them the ideological room to begin to question the gapbetween male activists' radically egalitarian ethos and their sexistbehavior. ``Within the broader social space of the movement,'' Evansand Boyte write, ``women found a specically female social space inwhich to discuss their experiences, share insights, and nd groupstrength as they worked in the oce or met on the margins of bigmeetings.''8 Free spaces within movements thus contribute to thespread of identities, frames, and tactics from one movement to another.And as ``abeyance structures''9 and `` halfway houses,''10 they preservemovement networks and traditions during the ``doldrums'' of apparentpolitical consensus. They are `` repositories of cultural materials intowhich succeeding generations of activists can dip to fashion ideologi-cally similar, but chronologically separate, movements,'' as McAdamputs it.11 As `` movement communities,'' free spaces are an enduringoutcome of protest.12

The free space concept has been appealing to scholars of varying theo-retical stripe for its recognition of the usually constraining operation ofcommon sense while refusing the across-the-board mystication ofdominant ideology theses. Counterhegemonic frames come not froma disembodied oppositional consciousness or pipeline to an extra-systemic emancipatory truth, but from long-standing community in-stitutions. Converging with resource mobilization models' attentivenessto the networks and organizations that precede insurgency, the notionof free spaces highlights in addition the specically cultural dimensionsof prior networks.13 It thus seems to provide a much needed concep-tual bridge between structuralist models' focus on institutional sourcesof change and new social movement theorists' interest in challengesto dominant cultural codes. It recognizes the cultural practices ofsubordinate groups (free spaces are often cultural institutions) asproto- or explicitly political. The free space concept undermines anotherwell-worn opposition between tradition and radical change. Free spaces

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are often associated with the most traditional institutions: the churchin Southern black communities;14 the family in Algeria and Kuwait;15

nineteenth-century French peasant communities.16 Although under nor-mal circumstances such institutions are conservative, the rapid socialchange that both threatens their existence and puts ancient ambitionswithin reach may make of them, as Calhoun puts it, ``reactionary radi-cals.''17 Incorporating institutional and ideational dimensions, traditionand change, and community and challenge, the free space concept seemsan ideal conceptual tool for probing the foundations of insurgency.

Divergence and ambiguity

Yet what seems like consensus on what the term ``free space'' means,refers to, and illuminates conceals a good deal of divergence.What arefree spaces? Authors variously describe them as subcultures, commun-ities, institutions, organizations, and associations, which are very dier-ent referents. Evans and Boyte represent them as physical spaces; theterm, they say `` suggests strongly an `objective,' physical dimension ^the ways in which places are organized and connected, fragmented,and so forth.''18 However, Scott maintains that linguistic codes that areopaque to those in power are as much a free space as is a physical siteof resistance; Farrell says that the 1950s Beat Movement created `` freespaces in print and performance''; Robnett describes the grassroots,one-on-one recruitment activities that were dominated by women inthe civil rights movement as a ``free space,'' and Gamson calls `` cyber-space'' a ``safe space.''19

Do all oppressed groups have free spaces? Gamson and Scott arguethat only total institutions provide the powerful complete control; allother regimes of power coexist with spaces of relative autonomy. Fan-tasia and Hirsch similarly argue that `` [t]hese `free' social spaces or`havens' have had counterparts wherever dominant and subordinategroups have coexisted.''20 But they go on to suggest that ``the avail-ability and nature of such `free' spaces play a key role in the success of avariety of movement mobilization eorts,''21 this implying that freespaces are not always available. Hirsch reiterates the point: `` Successfulrecruitment to a revolutionary movement is more likely if there aresocial structural-cultural havens available where radical ideas andtactics can be more easily germinated.''22 If not all oppressed groupspossess free spaces, then under what conditions do such sites emerge?What about free spaces make them free, and free of what? There seems

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to be agreement among the authors I've cited that freedom from thesurveillance of authorities is essential.23 The hush arbors of slaves, barsin working-class communities, Kuwaiti mosques under Iraqi occupa-tion: each gave oppressed groups the opportunity to voice their com-plaints and openly discuss alternatives. On the other hand, federalprison served as a launching pad for the radical pacist movement,according to James Tracy. ``In these articial communities, [WW2 con-scientious objectors] feverishly exchanged ideas about reforging paci-sm and experimented with resistance against the microcosm of thestate they had near at hand in their places of internment.''24 Whetherfree spaces are characterized by ideological freedom is also disputed.Evans and Boyte, Gamson, Hirsch, and Fantasia and Hirsch arguethat they are; James Scott claims that subordinates' apparent consentto their domination is everywhere a performance.25 Free spaces oerpeople not the opportunity to penetrate the sources of their subordina-tion, since they are already obvious, but to preserve and build upon acollective record of resistance. But what about groups that are notsubordinate? They launch movements too, for example, for animalrights and environmental protection, but presumably lack a `` hiddentranscript'' of collective resistance. Do they require free spaces?

Small size, intimacy, and the rootedness of free spaces in long-standingcommunities seem to be common themes. Evans and Boyte denethem in part ``by their roots in community, the dense, rich networks ofdaily life.''26 Scott writes: `` Generally speaking, the smaller and moreintimate the group, the safer the possibilities for free expression.''27

And Couto: ``When the conditions of repression are paramount andthe possibility of overt resistance is small, narratives are preserved inthe most private of free spaces, the family. . . .''28 But intimacy is noguarantee of freedom of expression. And as feminist theorists havelong pointed out, the family has been a prime site for the reproductionof patriarchal relations.29 With respect to free spaces' deep communityroots, this doesn't seem to be the case with movement free spaces,which are created de novo as a deliberate strategy for freeing updiscussion. In Hirsch's account of community organizing in East NewYork, the ``havens'' within which an oppositional culture developed ^block clubs ^ were founded by organizers from outside the community.The block clubs were the movement rather than precursors to it.30 TheHighlander Center, federal prisons, and the Christian Faith and LifeCommunity within which New Left ideals were developed have eachbeen labeled free spaces but none can be considered integral to thedaily life of pre-existing communities.31 1960s feminist activist Pam

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Allen is explicit: `` It is when we come into a long term relationship withpeople with whom we don't associate regularly that the old roles weplay can be set aside for a space in which we can develop ourselvesmore fully as whole human beings. . . . Free Space is free because we dorelate apart from our daily lives.''32

Finally, what are the connections between the counterhegemonic chal-lenge that is nurtured in free spaces and full-edged mobilization? ForEvans and Boyte, ``Democratic action depends upon these free spaces,where people experience a schooling in citizenship and learn a visionof the common good in the course of struggling for change.. . . Freespaces are the foundations for such movement countercultures.''33

Fantasia and Hirsch argue, by contrast, that the alternative culturesdeveloped in such sites only become politicized in the context of insur-gency. For Scott, the cultural practices in free spaces are alreadypolitical. However, insurgency is only triggered by a relaxation of sur-veillance. For Whittier, activists turn to cultural work within freespaces when direct engagement with the state is no longer possible.34

Are participants in the free space more likely to perceive politicalopportunities when they open up? Do leaders within the free space,for example, ministers or teachers, the local bartender, or convenersof a consciousness-raising group within a movement, become theleaders of the (new) movement? Do the institutions within whichopposition is nurtured shape the character of insurgency? And do freespaces precede the emergence of all movements? Evans's and Boyte'sclaim that free spaces are necessary to `` democratic action,''35 andFisher's that free spaces are `` seedbeds for democratic insurgency,''36

suggest their limited applicability. But is there any reason why freespaces do not play a role in right-wing movements?

It seems clear that by ``free space'' analysts have something more inmind than a gathering place that is removed from the direct surveil-lance of authorities. It is hard to imagine insurgents not nding aphysical space for communication, whether a shadowy alley, a prisonexercise yard, or the internet. And indeed, in several cases the physicalspace that analysts refer to doesn't seem to amount to much, for exam-ple the `` margins of big meetings'' that Sara Evans identied as a freespace for the development of radical feminism within the New Left, andthe street corner defended against rival gangs that Gamson describesas a safe space.37 Rather it makes sense to see the free space conceptsas an attempt to capture the social structural dimensions of severalcultural dynamics. We know that cultural practices can express, sus-

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tain, and strengthen oppositional identities and solidarities (especiallyat times when repression makes direct claims on the state impossible,but also when institutionalized understandings of politics exclude issuesand identities as personal, private, or otherwise non-political); thatmovements build on prior activist networks, traditions, and know-how; that pre-existing aective bonds supply the selective incentivesto participate rather than free-ride; and that community institutionscan nurture traditions of opposition to dominant ideologies. However,the free space concept simply posits a `` space'' wherein those dynamicsoccur, without specifying how, why, and when certain patterns ofrelations produce full-scale mobilization rather than accommodationor unobtrusive resistance. As a rst cut at these questions, I proposethat we distinguish three types of associative structures that have beencalled free spaces, and specify the ways in which each one is more andless likely to facilitate key tasks of mobilization. Then I suggest whatsuch a typology leaves out.

An alternative: Structures of association and preconditions formobilization

Transmovement, indigenous, and pregurative groups38 all operatewithin or in sympathy with an aggrieved population and all fosteroppositional practices, whether explicitly political or proto-politicallycultural (see Table 1). I focus here on the character of their associa-tional ties, both those linking participants and those linking particularnetworks to others within a `` multiorganizational eld,''39 in account-ing for their dierential capacity to identify opportunities, supplyleaders, recruit participants, craft mobilizing action frames, andfashion new identities, tasks essential to sustained mobilization. Notethat transmovement, indigenous, and pregurative forms of associa-tion by no means exhaust the structures that play a role in mobilization.Most obviously missing are formal movement organizations, alongwith counter-movements, third parties (media and funders), andauthorities. I treat only these three because they have been character-ized as `` free spaces'' but without the dierentiation necessary to iden-tify the specic resources each provides for mobilization eorts. Notealso that my intention is not to privilege the character of social tiesover their substantive content in accounting for their role in mobiliza-tion, that is, to privilege structure over culture. I understand cultureas the symbolic dimension of all structures, institutions, and practices(symbols are signs that have meaning and signicance through their

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interrelations; the pattern of those relations is culture). More on thisfollows below.

Transmovement structures are the `` halfway houses'' described by AldonMorris, the ``abeyance structures'' by Verta Taylor, the ``movementmidwives'' by Christian Smith, and the ``movement mentors'' by BobEdwards and John McCarthy: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, High-lander Folk School, and Southern Conference Educational Fund forthe civil rights movememt, the National Women's Party for second wavefeminism, and the American Friends Service Committee and Fellowshipof Reconciliation for the 1980s Central American peace movement.40

They are activist networks characterized by the reach of their ties geo-graphically, organizationally, and temporally. That is, activists arelinked across a wide geographic area, have contacts in a variety oforganizations and are often veterans of past movements. At the sametime, they are marginal to mainstream American politics.41 Trans-movement structures can be concentrated in a physical site like theHighlander Folk School, which trained generations of activists in thetechniques of nonviolence and community organizing. Or they mayconsist in a looser cadre of activists, for example, American radicalpacists who operated in a variety of movement organizations in the

Table 1. Associative structures in social movements

Structure Character ofties

Role in mobilization Examples

Trans-movement

Extensiveties

Well-equipped to identifyopportunities. Not well-equipped to supply leadersor mobilizing frames, or torecruit participants

Highlander Folk School,National Women'sParty, radical pacists

Indigenous Dense ties,isolatednetwork

Well-equipped to supplyleaders, local participants,and mobilizing frames; butnot to identify extra-localopportunities or mobilizeextra-local participants

Southern black church,GermanTurner halls,Estonian literary circles,craft guilds

Pregurative Symmetricties

Well-equipped to developnew identities and claims,but unless they begin toprovide non-movementservices are dicult tosustain

`` Women's only'' spaces,new social movement`` autonomous zones,''`` alternative'' services

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New Left, anti-VietnamWar, and civil rights movements.42 Either way,transmovement groups' extensive contacts position them to identifychanges in the structure of political bargaining that indicate the state'slikely vulnerability to movement demands.43 By comparison, locals'distance from national political elites makes it dicult for them toidentify the splits and alliances that signal new prospects for successfulinsurgency.44 Transmovement groups may provide funding for emergingmovements and for activists pursuing militant tactics or a radicalagenda, as well as legal advice and communications contacts.45 Theyoften train movement leaders in strategies and tactics (as radical pacistsGlenn Smiley and Bayard Rustin did in honing Dr. King's knowledgeof Gandhian nonviolent resistance).46 On the other hand, transmove-ment groups are not well-positioned to supply leaders, engage in re-cruitment drives, or develop resonant mobilizing frames. For the U.S.Central American peace movement, the `` stability and bureaucraticformality'' of groups like the American Friends Service Committeeand the National Council of Churches ``seem[ed] to produce a certainsluggishness that inhibit[ed] the kind of high-intensity organizingneeded to mobilize insurgency,'' Christian Smith notes.47 In othercases, the marginal and sometimes prosecuted status of transmove-ment groups has made them of ambiguous benet to leaders seekingto present their movement as `` homegrown'' and deserving of main-stream support. Radical pacists' refusal to bow to movement real-politik made them at times worrisome wild cards for moderate leadersin the civil rights, New Left, and anti-VietnamWar movements.48 Andleaders of the African National Congress in the 1950s sought to disso-ciate themselves publicly from the illegal South African CommunistParty, even as they sought its advice on forming an undergroundorganization.49 Transmovement groups' marginal position has reducedthe pressure to develop ideological visions with broad appeal (indeed,members' collective identity may have been preserved by emphasizingdierences with dominant ideologies50). This may result in a sophisti-cated ideological vision, but one too esoteric or radical for a potentialrecruitment base. Even if not seen as subversive, their very longevitymay make them unappealing to a edgling movement eager to distin-guish itself from an older generation of activists.51

A second structure often dubbed a free space is indigenous to a com-munity and initially is not formally oppositional. Indigenous groupsinclude Southern black churches before the emergence of mass insur-gency, German Turner halls and anti-temperance societies in nineteenth-century Chicago, and Kuwaiti mosques during Iraqi occupation.52

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Discussions of these groups have focused on their political, social, andeconomic isolation from dominant institutions and the density of theirassociational ties. Strongly integrated networks facilitate recruitmenton the basis of pre-existing ties;53 dense horizontal ties and the lack ofties to groups in power facilitate the development of an oppositionalframe. Thus Hirsch writes, `` the lack of positive vertical ties ^ the lackof social interaction with upper status groups ^ makes it more likelythat such groups can be successfully dened as the enemy, which makesit easier to sustain commitment to revolutionary goals and tactics andprevents movement participants from developing undue sympathy forthe opponent.''54 Craig Calhoun argues similarly that `` traditionalcommunities'' have often proved potent revolutionary forces on accountof their distance from outsiders and strongly integrated networks.These provide the communication resources, solidary incentives, andcommonality of interests necessary to develop a radical challenge.Normally conservative, members of traditional communities may mo-bilize when their `` interests,'' that is, their families, friends, customarycrafts, and ways of life, are threatened by rapid social changes or whensuch changes `` put old goals within reach.''55 Their centrality to people'sdaily lives equips indigenous groups to recruit a rst wave of partic-ipants, develop leaders, and formulate mobilizing frames in a familiaridiom. However, as I noted above, they are not well positioned toidentify the extra-local political shifts and potential allies that provideimportant resources for protest. The concentration of ties in indigenousinstitutions may make it dicult to mobilize beyond the bounds of thelocality; hence the importance of formal movement organizations inmass recruitment.56

A third structure often denoted by the term free space is the pregurativegroup created in ongoing movements. These are the ``autonomouszones'' of European new social movements, the ``women's only spaces''of 1970s radical feminism, the `` block clubs'' created by tenant organ-izers to mobilize an urban constituency, the alternative food co-ops,health clinics, credit unions, and schools that ourished in the late1960s and 1970s.57 Explicitly political and oppositional (although theirdenition of `` politics'' may encompass issues usually dismissed ascultural, personal, or private), they are formed in order to pregure thesociety the movement is seeking to build by modeling relationships thatdier from those characterizing mainstream society.58 Often that meansdeveloping relations characterized by symmetry, that is, reciprocity inpower, inuence, and attention.59 I say often, because pregurationmay sometimes mean modeling relationships with the proper degree

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of deference and authority, not equality.60 My association of pregura-tion with symmetric ties simply reects free space analysts' focus onleft-leaning rather than right-leaning movements (more on that be-low).61 Pregurative groups often restrict membership to foster newinterpersonal ties. Thus, by excluding men, women's only spacessought to foreground and strengthen the ties among women that werenot yet salient in their everyday lives.62 Since these structures arecreated in movements that are already underway, they don't play arole in identifying the political opportunities that precedemobilization.However, they help to sustain members' commitment to the cause andmay prove launching pads for `` spin-o'' organizations or movementsbased on new identities and associated claims.63 As a number of authorshave pointed out, pregurative groups are dicult to sustain, not onlybecause the requirements of fully egalitarian decisionmaking are di-cult to square with the demands of quick response to environmentaldemands, but because in societies characterized by taken-for-grantedassumptions about class, race, gender, expertise, and authority, `` socialinequalities can infect deliberations, even in the absence of any formalexclusions'' as Nancy Fraser maintains.64 On the other hand, if theycan provide services (healthcare, food, education) that successfullycompete with mainstream service providers, they may become enduringindigenous institutions and may supply leaders and participants forlater mobilizations.65

Detailing the patterns of relations that make up each of these structuresand that position them in a multiorganizational eld of authorities,opponents, and allies provides clues to their resources and liabilities forprotest. Transmovement groups' generational, organizational, and geo-graphic reach helps to explain both their capacity to nurture edglingorganizations by making available nancial, technical, and legal ad-vice and their weaker capacity for mass recruitment. The density ofrelations in indigenous groups aords incentives to participate even inhigh-risk activism while the concentration of such ties impedes widemobilization. Pregurative groups' insistence on symmetrical ties throwsinto relief the asymmetries of conventional relations and model alter-natives, but also undercuts the groups' prospects for survival. It seemsclear, then, that while physical settings are important to establish orrearm social relationships, it is the relationships themselves ratherthan the physical sites that are important in explaining their role inmobilization.

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But there is more to it than that. Analyzing these structures apart fromthe normative commitments, both explicit and implicit, that animatethem provides inadequate account of their roles in protest. The placeof culture is obvious in the case of pregurative groups, where theinstitutionalization of symmetric relations reects beliefs aboutequality and the proper relationship between means and ends in socialmovements. But explicit normative commitments and taken for grantedcultural understandings are just as important to the other two struc-tures. Not all groups with long-standing and extensive political tiessupport new movements: the National Council of Churches, for exam-ple, only began to assist civil rights and migrant farmworker activistsafter the rise of a modernist ideology of social change activism.66 Noone sees the Boy Scouts as a movement halfway house, although this isa group with extensive ties and, as a social organization, is removedfrom mainstream American political institutions. Likewise, indigenousgroups' capacity to nurture opposition is often a function of institu-tionalized normative principles, which permit religious, familial, andeducational groups some degree of autonomy from state interven-tion.67 And dense ties are as likely to discourage collective action orlimit it to purely local targets as to generate broad insurgency. AsRoger Gould asks, ``What aspect of a dispute over grazing rights witha local landlord would suggest to the peasants of a pastoral village thattheir conict was a single instantiation of a broader struggle between`the peasantry' and `the nobility?' ''68 The existence of an indigenousstructure (a church, a guild, a civic association) is not enough toexplain how threats, antagonisms, or opportunities come to be per-ceived in terms of mobilizing identities and interests.

The problem with discussions of free spaces is not only, then, that theirconation of transmovement, indigenous, and pregurative structureshas obscured the dierent roles that each is likely to play in mobiliza-tion. Despite their claim to integrate culture and structure, discussionsof free spaces have tended to reduce culture to structure. By attributingalternative or oppositional cultural practices simply to the existenceof dense and isolated structural ties, free space arguments miss thepossibility that dense ties may not generate oppositional ideas andidentities, and that weak ties may. By attributing full-edged insur-gency to the political (structural) opportunities that make oppositionalcultures mobilizing, free space arguments miss the possibility thatpeople may use an oppositional culture to create political opportunities.I discuss the latter rst, drawing on some of the most sophisticatedaccounts of free spaces to highlight problems common to many.

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One: Culture and ``structural'' opportunities

In their discussion of what they call `` havens,'' `` liberated zones,'' `` pre-serves,'' and `` `free' social spaces,'' Fantasia and Hirsch argue thatwhile subordinate groups are able to `` question the rationalizing ideol-ogies of the dominant order, develop alternative meanings, [and] ironout their dierences'' in these settings, it is `` the context of acute socialand political crisis that provides the key fulcrum for the transformationof traditional cultural forms'' into overt opposition.69 And again, ``wewould emphasize that the extent to which culture is transformed incollective action depends not only on the availability of social andspatial `preserves' within which traditional forms may be collectivelyre-negotiated but also, and more importantly, on a level of socialconict that forces participants outside the daily round of everydayactivity.''70 These formulations suggest that free spaces play only aminimal role in igniting insurgency, since culture within the free spaceis, if oppositional, then not mobilizing until the ``crisis'' that reorientsthe meaning of traditional practices.71

Contrary to Fantasia and Hirsch, James Scott sees subordinatedgroups, whether outside sequestered social sites or within them, asunswayed by the ideological blandishments of the powerful. Rejectingeven a thin hegemony argument, which holds that people acquiesce totheir domination because they take it as inevitable (rather than asright), Scott argues that what usually prevents utopian longings andan `` infrapolitics of dissent'' from being translated into overt deanceis simply the likelihood of severe repression. ` A`ny relaxation in sur-veillance and punishment, and foot-dragging threatens to become adeclared strike, folktales of oblique aggression threaten to becomeface-to-face deant contempt, millennial dreams threaten to becomerevolutionary politics.''72 Indeed, ``[a]s soon as the opportunity presentsitself,'' apparent passivity turns to rebellion.73 Powerless people don'trequire free spaces to recognize the injustice of their situation. Whatfree spaces do provide is the opportunity to articulate safely ``the asser-tion, aggression, and hostility that is thwarted by the on-stage powerof the dominant,''74 to plot alternatives, and to test the limits of ocialpower. For Scott, like Fantasia and Hirsch, the hidden transcriptsdeveloped in free spaces do not ignite overt protest. Rather, objectivepolitical opportunities are created remote from the agency of the op-pressed. The oppressed, however, are always alert to potential chinksin the repressive armor of authorities and move quickly to take advant-age of them.

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The problem with these accounts of mobilization is their privileging ofstructural change outside the free space over the cultural framing thattakes place within it. Cultural challenge is eective only when social,political, and economic structures have become unstable, that is, whenrepression has been relaxed,75 when political realignments have cre-ated a ``structural potential'' for mobilization,76 or when a structural`` crisis'' has bankrupted old ideas and made people receptive to newones.77 But these formulations raise thorny questions. Aren't politicaland economic structures themselves shaped by cultural traditions andassumptions? And can't social movements contribute to destabilizingthe institutional logics that inform everyday life? As Gamson andMeyer point out, diering political opportunity structures reect notjust dierent political systems, for example limits on the executivebranch and a system of checks and balances, but also dierent publicconceptions of the proper scope and role of the state.78 `` State policiesare not only technical solutions to material problems of control orresource extraction,'' Friedland and Alford argue in the same vein.`` They are rooted in changing conceptions of what the state is, what itcan and should do.''79 Such conceptions extend to state-makers andmanagers who, like challengers, are suspended in webs of meaning.80

Whether elections ``open'' or `` close'' political opportunities surely hasto do with whether elections have historically been catalysts to collectiveaction and whether there exists an institutional `` collective memory'' ofstate-targeted protest. Something as ostensibly non-cultural as a state'srepressive capacity reects not only numbers of soldiers and guns butthe strength of constitutional provisions for their use and traditions ofmilitary allegiance. In her discussion of protest policing, Donatelladella Porta observes that while the West German police ``views itselfas a part of a normative order that accepts the rule of the law,'' theItalian police `` since the creation of the Italian state had been accus-tomed to seeing itself as the longa manus of the executive power, andthus put preservation of law and order before the control of crime.''These views in turn shaped the opportunities for dierent forms ofprotest.81 Note that some of the above, for example, state ocials'ideological assumptions, may exercise only transient or weak inuenceover a structure of political opportunities; others, for example, statelegitimacy, may have stronger eect, be less malleable, and still others,say, conventions of political commemoration, may be somewhere inbetween.82 Movements themselves can create political opportunitiesby changing widespread beliefs.83 For example, a movement may beresponsible for lowering the level of state repression that is consideredlegitimate and that can therefore be deployed against subsequent in-

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surgencies.84 A culture/structure dichotomy obscures the many instan-ces in which people have seen opportunities where ``objectively'' therewere none.85

Scott seems to be making just this point ^ and retreating from thesharp separation of structure (opportunities) and (mobilizing) culturethat he posits elsewhere ^ when he writes:

An objectivist view would .. . have us assume that the determination of thepower of the dominant is a straightforward matter, rather like reading anaccurate pressure gauge. We have seen, however, that estimating the inten-tions and power of the dominant is a social process of interpretation highlyinfused with desires and fears. How else can we explain the numerous instan-ces in which the smallest shards of evidence ^ a speech, a rumor, a naturalsign, a hint of reform ^ have been taken by slaves, untouchables, serfs, andpeasants as a sign that their emancipation is at hand or that their adversariesare ready to capitulate?86

Scott goes on to pose the ``central issue'' as what Barrington Moorecalls `` the conquest of inevitability.'' `` So long as a structure of domi-nation is viewed as inevitable and irreversible, then all `rational' oppo-sition will take the form of infrapolitics: resistance that avoids anyopen declaration of its intention.''87 But he has already acknowledgedthat unobtrusive resistance has less potential for change than overtdeance (`` No matter how elaborate the hidden transcript may be-come, it always remains a substitute for an act of assertion directly inthe face of power''88). And if what stands in the way of engaging insuch overt politics is a perception of the `` inevitability'' of the existing,then isn't this precisely the `` thin'' theory of hegemony that he earlierdismissed? Despite his claims to the contrary, Scott ends up shiftingbetween the objectivism he derides and a reliance on false conscious-ness to explain people's failure to mobilize.

An alternative, following Sewell, is to conceptualize structures as cul-tural schemas invested with and sustaining resources, in other words,schemas that reect and reproduce unevenly distributed power.89 Thishelps to explain structures' durability and their transformation. It isnot that they bring about their own mutation ^ not that they haveagency ^ but that they are invested with meanings that aord resourcesfor insurgents challenging them. People can ``transpose schemas'' fromone setting to another, can turn the worker solidarity fostered bycapitalist production, for example, into a force for radical action.Sewell's scheme gives people more power to capitalize on minimal

16

opportunities by framing conditions in a way that makes collectiveaction possible or necessary. Unlike free space analyses' tendency todichotomize culture and structure (with culture inside the free spaceand structure outside it), it reveals overlooked resources for mobiliza-tion.

It also reveals, contrarily, overlooked cultural obstacles to protest.Activists' vocabularies of protest are shaped and limited by ostensiblynon-cultural political, economic, and legal structures. For example, tounderstand the currency of an `` individual rights'' frame, as comparedto a `` human rights'' frame or a class-based frame, one would have tounderstand the legal and political traditions, systems, and rules throughwhich those terms have become meaningful. Tarrow notes that ``theFrench labor movement embraced an associational `vocabulary' thatreected the loi le Chapelier, while American movements developed avocabulary of `rights' that reected the importance of the law in Amer-ican institutions and practice.''90 Popular conceptions of ``equality,''`` personhood,'' and ``problem'' are shaped by dominant legal institu-tions.91 Neo-institutionalist theories of organization should alert usto the institutional shaping of movement forms, and indeed, to thehistorical and cultural preeminence of the organization as a means ofprotest.92

To get at these resources and constraints requires that we abandon aset of binary oppositions that have underpinned and undermined recenteorts to integrate culture into accounts of mobilization, including butextending beyond discussions of free spaces. Thus ``cultural,'' `` subjec-tive,'' and `` malleable'' have been opposed to `` structural,'' `` objective,''and `` durable.'' Free space discussions have rendered that set of opposi-tions spatial: culture is restricted to the free space, structure to relationsoutside it.93 As a result, they have underestimated continuities betweenthe two, have ignored the cultural traditions, institutional memories,and political taboos that structure politics and that can be used byinsurgents to strategic eect, and have ignored how cultural under-standings of organization, rationality, legality, and agency constraininsurgents' strategic decisionmaking. In other words, discussions of freespaces have simultaneously underestimated the durability of cultureand the malleability of structure.

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Two: Culture and ``structural'' ties

In his review of Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance, CharlesTilly asks an interesting question: Why is there only one hidden tran-script for each subordinated group? Why not as many transcripts assubordinated individuals? Indeed, `` why not ten, twenty, a hundred asmany discourses as subordinates?'' Scott's argument ``requires thateach subordinated population produce a unitary and shared hiddentranscript . . . . Don't subordinates ever resist the hidden transcript?Scott supplies no answers.''94

Actually, Scott does provide an answer, but a misleading one. `` Socialspaces of relative autonomy do not merely provide a neutral mediumwithin which practical and discursive negations may grow. As domainsof power relations in their own right, they serve to discipline as well asto formulate patterns of resistance.''95 And again: ``the hidden transcriptis a social product and hence a result of power relations among subordi-nates.''96 Yet when he describes the process by which a single, coherenttranscript is pieced together from multiple negations, the power relationshe just identied drop out. ``In this hypothetical progression from `raw'anger to what we might call `cooked' indignation, sentiments that areidiosyncratic, unrepresentative, or have only weak resonance withinthe group are likely to be selected against or censored .. . . The essentialpoint is that a resistant subculture or countermores among subordi-nates is necessarily a product of mutuality.''97 In other words, the oppo-sitional frame that is developed within the free space is uninuenced byrelations of power, authority, and deference within the group.

What that misses, of course, are the ways in which densely-structuredrelations within dominated groups foreclose as well as enable certainkinds of challenge depending on the normative content of those ties.By making oppositional identities and meanings a function of theexistence of dense ties within isolated networks, analyses of free spaceshave minimized culture's analytically independent role within freespaces as well as outside them. By contrast, I argue that culture oper-ates in the formal ideologies enacted in the community institutionslabeled free spaces ^ the church, the union, the civic association ^ andin the behavioral expectations associated with, indeed constituting, tiesof kinship, neighborhood, and contract.

To illustrate, I turn to Eric Hirsch's rich account of working-classmobilization in nineteenth-century Chicago.98 Hirsch argues that Ger-

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man workers launched a revolutionary movement while Irish andAnglo-American workers did not in part because Germans possessed`` havens'' or `` free social spaces.'' The ``structural isolation from rulinggroups [of these settings] . . . allowed subordinate groups to developinnovative ideas about the nature of the system, to identify thoseresponsible for the subordinate groups' plight, and to discover whataction was needed to resolve their common problems.''99 But there isno reason that sheer isolation will guarantee the replacement of adominant ideology with an action-mobilizing injustice frame (andphysical proximity, at least, has not prevented people from penetratingthe ideologies propounded by those in power, as Judith Rollins showedin her study of domestic workers100). In fact, Hirsch's historical ac-count reveals that whereas German workers' exposure to anarchist andsocialist ideas in Turner halls, anti-temperance meetings, and anar-chist-sponsored picnics made them receptive to a revolutionary inter-pretation of their exploitation, exploited Irish workers tended to acceptan Anglo-American ideology of individual success and accordingly toreject the idea of working-class mobilization. Irish workers had havenstoo, most importantly the Catholic Church, but the Church's animosityto radical thought, along with Irish nationalist organizations' focus onthe Irish/British conict overseas, led Irish workers to blame theirtroubles on their lack of skills, and to attribute their lack of skills toBritain's underdevelopment of Ireland.101 Hirsch's historical analysis,contrary to his theoretical brief, suggests that the mobilizing power ofhavens lies not just in their structural isolation but in their speciccultural content. Or, better put, that it was the combination of densenetworks and the availability of a radical cultural idiom that wasresponsible for the revolutionary character of German mobilization.

The story that Hirsch tells (as distinct from the way he theorizes it), isnot exceptional. Other accounts have shown how insurgency is shapedby the institutions within which it develops. For example, Doug Rossi-now characterizes as a ``free space'' the Christian Faith and Life Com-munity (CFLC) on the University of Texas campus in the late 1950s, agroup that produced leading activists of the white student left. ``It was a`free space' where, as one student said, he felt the `freedom to talkabout my questions' ^ questions of self, of God and of life . . . . [It]prepared students to take political action in deance of establishedpower.''102 Yet, Rossinow shows that what motivated members to plansit-ins and pickets against segregated facilities was the Christian exis-tentialism they absorbed in the CFLC, and particularly its emphasis onachieving a spiritual `` breakthrough'' via political engagement rather

19

than personal reection.103 It was not just the ``safe haven''104 providedby the CFLC, but the particular cultural frames institutionalized withinit that inspired the students. Similarly, Mary Ann Tetreault shows thatthe mosque played a crucial role in Kuwaiti opposition to Iraqi occu-pation not just because it was one of the few associations that was notrepressed, but because of its long-standing and `` morally unassailable''authority to challenge the state.105 The importance of the culturalframes associated with particular institutions is obscured by a view offree spaces as dened solely by social distance between powerful andpowerless. People's physical or social separation from mainstreaminstitutions doesn't guarantee the emergence of a mobilizing collectiveaction frame.What is crucial is the set of beliefs, values, and symbolsinstitutionalized in a particular setting.

It would be a mistake, however, to see culture only as the ideologiesenacted in community institutions rather than also as the basis for thevery ties that make up the community.106 With respect to free spaceanalysts' claim that dense and isolated networks facilitate protest, it isjust as likely that, depending on the circumstances, such networks mayimpede protest. This is partly because the absence of ties to outsidersmay lead aggrieved people to interpret threats and conicts in purelylocal terms, as Roger Gould points out, rather than in terms of thebroader identities and ideologies that are necessary to mass mobiliza-tion.107 Gould argues that the development of mobilizing identitiesrequires signicant interaction across communities, in other words,that social ties determine the scale as well as content of collectiveidentities. But the same ties may, depending on the circumstances,favor very dierent or contradictory behaviors. Neighborhood ties maypromote competition rather than mutuality.108 Business ties may pro-mote solidarity but also deference. As Allan Silver shows, friendship ineighteenth-century Europe carried dierent behavioral prescriptionsthan it does today.109 The point is that the behaviors expected of andimputed to patterned relations are multiple and variable.110 Thus,strong ties may impede mobilization.111 And weak ties may facilitateit, not only because they provide access to people and resources out-side the community, but because potential insurgents may grant`` known strangers'' the authority to challenge the bonds of authorityand deference within the community that have kept people from overtdeance.

My point, then, is that while it makes sense to pay attention to thestructure of relationships that supply resources for various mobiliza-

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tion tasks, we can strengthen that investigation in several ways: byrecognizing that ties can impede mobilization as well as foster it; byrecognizing a greater range of network dynamics, that is, the role ofweak ties, network holes, conicts, and intersections;112 and by identi-fying the fuller range of behavioral prescriptions associated with par-ticular ties. In the following, I don't attempt the full investigation Ihave in mind, but do review two cases that are frequently cited as freespaces: the black church for the civil rights movement, and the studentwing of the civil rights movement for radical feminism.113 Rather thancharacterizing each one as a space in which the constraints exercisedby structure were somehow suspended, I identify behavioral expect-ations that constrained mobilization by African-Americans in South-ern communities and by feminists within the civil rights movement,and then show how they were overcome. In each case, I nd thatnetwork intersections generated mobilizing identities, but not only be-cause weak ties to other networks (in the rst case the national civilrights movement, in the other Northern left circles) provided materialor informational resources that were previously lacking. Rather, theirsocial distance and social status endowed local members of thosenetworks with the power to challenge the relations of authority anddeference that operated among members of the aggrieved group.

Without detracting from the vitally important role of Southern blackchurches in nurturing and sustaining Southern civil rights protest,evidence suggests that in many Southern communities, particularlyrural ones, black ministers were not the shock troops of the struggle.Field reports by student organizers in the early 1960s make clear thatmany ministers were reluctant converts to the cause.114 Ministers'timidity often stemmed from their nancial dependence on whites:whereas in Southern cities, ministers' livelihoods came entirely fromtheir parishioners, in rural areas most were forced to work part timefor whites and were therefore more vulnerable to economic reprisals.In addition, some church leaders enjoyed positions of brokerage withpowerful whites, and were compensated in some fashion for serving asadvocates of only moderate reform. These stakes were threatened bythe development of new leaders, whether student organizers or blackresidents.

`` Outsiders'' proved important in overcoming those barriers to radicalaction. The resources possessed by student organizers who moved intorural areas in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the early 1960s arenot readily apparent.With neither federal backing nor the capacity to

21

furnish physical or nancial protection, organizers could oer resi-dents little in the way of material incentive to participate. Their arrivalwas often met with stepped-up white violence against black residents.Yet, organizers were seen as representatives of a national movementand were often called ``freedom riders'' long after the freedom rideshad ended. Perhaps some residents believed that the organizers' pres-ence signaled the government's willingness to intervene, but my reviewof eld reports, testimony at mass meetings, and interviews with for-mer organizers suggests that other rationales were operating. Theyoung organizers were putting their lives on the line, were willing todie for black Mississippians' freedom, locals often reminded each other.How could they not participate? The rationale was one of obligationmore than opportunity, and it was the organizers' outsider status, thedistance they came, that authorized their calls to participate.115

Georg Simmel described the `` stranger'' as combining `` distance andnearness, indierence and involvement.'' Strangers `` are not really con-ceived as individuals,'' but this does not mean that they are marginal orpowerless. To the contrary, Simmel observed, the stranger often enjoysa position of inuence by virtue of his `` free[dom] from entanglement''in existing interests and cleavages.116 This seems to have been the casewith Southern student organizers. Their intimate involvement in thelife of Mississippi black communities made them trustworthy, whiletheir outsider status enabled them to challenge the relations of defer-ence that impeded militant collective action. Former SNCC activistHollisWatkins remembers that several organizers had begun seminarytraining and others, likeWatkins himself, were well-versed in scriptureand skilled orators. Some ministers may have come around to support-ing the movement, Watkins suspects, because they believed that theSNCC organizers were ministers, whose popularity with the localpeople made them a threat to their jobs. This is an example of how thevery weakness of informational ties facilitated mobilization.117 Aview offree spaces as untrammeled by relations of power and authority missesin this case both the constraints on mobilization and the dynamics bywhich they were overcome. Categorical classication of actors asblack, white, or middle class would miss the networks crosscuttingthose categories, which proved more salient to people's decision toparticipate, or to oppose participation, than categorical ``interests.''

Southern ministers who were initially wary often did come around tosupporting and, indeed, leading the struggle. It seems that the mostsuccessful organizers managed to persuade, cajole, or help residents to

22

push traditional leaders into an active role rather than circumventingthem altogether.118 Thus a Holly Springs organizer reported happily in1963, `` The image of students knocking on doors, the fact of theirspeaking at churches on Sundays, and the threat of demonstrationhave served to build respect for them and has challenged the localministers no end. They see this and are beginning to work to try tobuild their images and redeem themselves.''119 Outsiders didn't em-power a powerless group, or enlighten the falsely conscious, but theydid undermine the structured relations within the group that channeledresistance in a conservative direction.120

Contrary to historical accounts ^ Sara Evans's (1979) seminal piece andthe host that have followed her121 ^ it seems that outsiders, or weak-tied individuals, were also crucial in the emergence of a feminist chal-lenge within SNCC. In November 1964, a position paper on sexism inthe movement was oated anonymously at a SNCC sta retreat. Evansattributed the paper to two white SNCC veterans: Casey Hayden, whohad been involved with SNCC since its founding in 1960, and MaryKing, who joined in 1962. On Evans's account, Hayden and King'sconversations with other women about their second-class status in themovement and discussions of the writings of de Beauvoir, Lessing, andFriedan culminated in their decision to bring up the issue with theSNCC sta. The paper they wrote documented a range of sexist prac-tices ^ women relegated to minute-taking duties, rarely given projectsto direct, never made SNCC spokespeople ^ and called on the group toextend its egalitarian commitment to women. For Evans and subse-quent chroniclers, the fact that the memo was written by longtimeSNCCers suggested that in spite of their circumscribed role as women,Hayden and King had the freedom to explore this `` new'' source ofoppression, to toy with unconventional ideas and experiment withnew roles. It suggested that SNCC was indeed a kind of culturallaboratory for radical ideas, a `` free space.''A year after the rst memowas met with the laughter and derision they had anticipated, Evansgoes on, King and Hayden collaborated on a second memo, directed toblack and white women active in the civil rights and New Left move-ments. Its eect, by all accounts, was galvanizing, and spurred womento build the networks and consciousness-raising groups that wouldeventually explode into radical feminism.

In fact, new testimony suggests that a larger group, including severalNorthern white women who had only recently joined SNCC, wrote therst anonymous memo in November 1964.122 These women occupied a

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curious position: they became part of SNCC's inner circle almost upontheir arrival in Mississippi because SNCC was so shorthanded on theeve of the massive summer project it was planning, but they lacked thebonds of long friendship that united veteran members of the group.Active in other movements here and abroad, they brought a `` Northern''aggressiveness that enabled them to defy not only the group loyalty thatmade criticism dicult, but also the norms of deference that struc-tured white women's relations to the mainly black men who headedSNCC. Taking meeting minutes, not seeking the higher status job ofeld organizer, not competing for the public limelight; white womenveterans understood these as choices, made because they were unwill-ing to endanger black residents by serving as eld organizers, but alsobecause they saw the movement as properly led by black men. It waseasier for women who were longtime members of the group to see anauxiliary role as consonant with the group's radically egalitarian ethos.And it was easier for women whose ties to the close-knit SNCC cadrewere weaker to name that role as inequality. Again, network overlapsnot only provided access to new sources of information and newprocedural norms, but gave license to contest long-standing bonds offriendship and shared political commitment.

Views of indigenous structures as providing only resources for mobi-lization and not constraints preclude analysis of how mobilizing iden-tities and interests are shaped by the culture-structures within whichgrievances are framed, and by the networks that provide and limitaccess to power, information, and authority. Rather than seeing asingle subordinate group or community, with a single set of interests,free space, and ``hidden transcript,''123 we should examine the multiplenetworks, some extending beyond the bounds of the locality, whichgenerate distinct, often conicting, interests and identities. Thus, inthe case of Southern civil rights organizing, we see how the connec-tions of some black ministers to white elites discouraged their adoptinga militant stance, this in spite of their prior commitment to reform.

A second important line of inquiry would explore the eects of dier-ent kinds and strengths of social relations.124 Rather than assumingthat protest requires dense ties, we should investigate where and whendense ties constrain action and `` weak'' ones facilitate it. The latterpoint is reected in the role of `` outsiders'' in both cases of mobiliza-tion that I described. Mississippi civil rights workers' combination ofintimacy and distance gave them the capacity to defy structured rela-tions within black communities, this in spite of their lack of access to

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material or political institutional resources. Similarly, the white womenwho were fairly new to SNCC when they catalyzed a feminist challengewere in overlapping networks: a Southern black movement and aNorthern white one. Their marginal position in the former, with accessto the inner core of decisionmakers but without close bonds to them,made it easier, and more acceptable, for them to refuse the more defer-ential role played by white women veterans. These examples also showthe intersection of the cultural and structural dimensions of networks.Outsiders' scope of action had to do not with the actual resources theybrought to bear, but with those imputed to them, and with culturalunderstandings of intimacy and remoteness, of the boundaries of thegroup, and of the range of the sayable.

Conclusion

One of the chief analytic payos of the free space concept was to havebeen its capacity to integrate culture into structuralist models of collec-tive action. I argue that, so far, such analyses have not taken adequatemeasure of the multiple and contrary dimensions of the culture/struc-ture relationship. Fuller specication of that relationship alerts us bothto the greater capacities of cultural challenge to destabilize institutionalarrangements and, at the same time, to the obstacles that stand betweencultural challenge and full-edged mobilization.

Rather than continue to rely on the ambiguous `` free spaces'' concept, Ihave argued that we should explore how the form and substance ofassociational ties in dierent contexts shape the emergence of mobi-lizing identities. Physical gathering places may build on those ties bydemonstrating the co-presence of others, thus showing people thatissues they thought taboo can be discussed, and strengthening collec-tive identity by providing tangible evidence of the existence of a group.However, it is the character of the ties that are established or reinforcedin those settings, rather than the physical space itself, that the freespace concept has sometimes successfully captured. Networks predat-ing movements, as resource mobilization theorists have long noted, arecritical in supplying the personnel, resources, and tactical expertisenecessary to mobilization.125 They are also important in fostering andimpeding the very identities and interests on the basis of which mobi-lization is mounted.

25

To begin to illuminate those dynamics, I have disaggregated the struc-tures that are more and less equipped to identify opportunities, recruitparticipants, develop leaders, generate collective action frames, andfashion new identities. The typology of transmovement, indigenous,and pregurative structures that I have introduced is preliminary but itshould alert us to the dierent kinds of resources and constraints leviedby dierent kinds of ties, respectively, extensive, dense, and symmet-rical. In analyzing indigenous networks' role in developing mobilizingidentities, where the need for something like the free space concept ismost apparent, I have argued for attention to the ways in which pre-existing network ties militate against the formation of mobilizing iden-tities, and the dynamics by which such constraints are surmounted.One such dynamic is the network intersections that provide an ag-grieved population new access not only to physical, nancial, andcommunicative resources, but also to people whose only weak ties andconsequent social distance and status enable them to challenge existingrelations of deference. There are other such dynamics. Specifying themenables us to understand the conditions in which cultural challengeexplodes structured relations, without reducing those conditions tostructural voids.

Acknowledgments

Research was supported by a Columbia University Social SciencesFaculty Grant. I presented a version of this article at the AmericanSociological Association Meeting in Toronto in August 1997. For val-uable comments on previous drafts, my thanks to William Gamson,Todd Gitlin, Stephen Hart, James Jasper, Paul Lichterman, DavidMeyer, Kelly Moore, John Skrentny, Marc Steinberg, Charles Tilly,and the Editors of Theory and Society. Thanks also to Linda Catalanofor research assistance.

Notes

1. Richard Harvey Brown, `` Social science and the poetics of public truth,'' SociologicalForum 5 (1990), 57^58.

2. Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Harry C. Boyteused the term in his 1972 article, `` The textile industry: Keel of southern industrial-ization,'' Radical America (March-April), and it is central in Evans and Boyte'sFree Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York: Harperand Row, 1986). Others who have used the term ``free spaces'' include Robert

26

Couto, `` Narrative, free space, and political leadership in social movements,'' TheJournal of Politics 55 (1993): 57^79; Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neigh-borhood Organizing in America, Updated Edition (New York: Twayne, 1994);William A. Gamson, ``Commitment and agency in social movements,'' SociologicalForum 6/1 (1991): 27^50; Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action inthe Information Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Aldon Morris,The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing forChange (New York: Free Press, 1984); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York and Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1997); Doug Rossinow, `` `The break-through to newlife': Christianity and the emergence of the new left in Austin, Texas, 1956^1964,''American Quarterly 46/3 (1994): 309^340; Randy Stoecker, Defending Community(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement:Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, second edition (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nancy Whittier, Feminist Generations: ThePersistence of the Radical Women's Movement (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress, 1995). On `` havens,'' see Eric Hirsch, `` Protest movements and urban theory,''Research in Urban Sociology 3 (1993): 159^180; on `` spatial preserves,'' see RickFantasia and Eric L. Hirsch, ``Culture in rebellion: The appropriation and trans-formation of the veil in the Algerian revolution,'' in Hank Johnston and BertKlandermans, editors, Social Movements and Culture (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1995), 144^162; on `` free social spaces,'' see Robert Fisher andJoseph Kling, ``Leading the people: Two approaches to the role of ideology incommunity organizing'' in Joseph Kling and Prudence S. Posner, editors,Dilemmasof Activism: Class, Community, and the Politics of Local Mobilization (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1990), 71^90; on ``safe spaces,'' seeWilliam Gamson, ``Safespaces and social movements,'' Perspectives on Social Problems 8 (1996): 27^38; on`` cultural laboratories,'' see Carol McClurg Mueller, ``Conict networks and theorigins of women's liberation,'' in Enrique Laraa, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R.Guseld, editors, New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1994), 234^263; on ``spheres of cultural autonomy,'' seeVerta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, ``Analytical approaches to social movement cul-ture: The culture of the women's movement,'' in Hank Johnston and Bert Klander-mans, editors, Social Movements and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press, 1995), 163^187; on ``sequestered social sites,'' see James Scott, Domina-tion and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); on `` socialspaces,'' see Craig Calhoun, `` The radicalism of tradition: Community strength orvenerable disguise and borrowed language?'' American Journal of Sociology 88(1983): 886^914; on ``protected spaces,'' see Mary Ann Tetreault, `` Civil society inKuwait: Protected spaces and women's rights,'' Middle East Journal 47/2 (1993):275^291. Since almost every one of these authors cites Evans and Boyte's book, andnone distinguishes explicitly between `` free spaces'' and the term they prefer, I suspectthat the rationale for the use of dierent terms is simply to inect the concept witha particular emphasis, for example, the safety of such spaces, or the predominatelycultural activities that are pursued here.

3. On feminist counter-institutions, see Whittier, Feminist Generations. On Estonianresistance, see Hank Johnston, `` Mobilization and structure of opposition in repres-sive states,'' paper presented at the American Sociological Association AnnualMeetings (1996).

4. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 17. The passage is quoted in Couto, `` Narative,'' 59;

27

Aldon Morris, `` Centuries of black protest: Its signicance for America and theworld,'' in Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, editors, Race in America (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 27; Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 214; Gamson,`` Safe spaces,'' 29; Tarrow, Power in Movement, 147; and Stoecker, DefendingCommunity, 57.

5. Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 206; see also Mueller, `` Conict networks''; Verta Taylor,`` Social movement continuity: The women's movement in abeyance,'' AmericanSociological Review 54 (1989): 761^775; Gamson, `` Commitment and agency'';Debra Friedman and Doug McAdam, ``Collective identity and activism: Networks,choices and the life of a social movement,'' 156^173, in Aldon D. Morris and CarolMcClurg Mueller, editors, Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven:YaleUniverssity Press, 1992).

6. Fantasia and Hirsch, ``Culture in rebellion.''7. Morris,The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces.8. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 102; see also Evans, Personal Politics; Alice Echols,

Daring to Be Bad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); DougMcAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930^1970(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties:Yearsof Hope, Days of Rage (NewYork: Bantam, 1987).

9. Taylor, `` Social Movement Continuity.''10. Morris,The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement.11. McAdam, ``Culture and Social Movements,'' 43.12. Steven M. Buechler,Women's Movements in the United States (New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 1990); Taylor and Whittier, ` A`nalytical approaches.'' Seealso Couto, `` Narrative''; Stoecker, Defending Community; and James J. Farrell,The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism (NewYork: Routledge, 1997).

13. McAdam, ``Culture and Social Movements.''14. Morris,The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; McAdam, Political Process and

the Development of Black Insurgency; Evans, Personal Politics; Evans and Boyte,Free Spaces.

15. Fantasia and Hirsch, `` Culture in rebellion''; and Tetreault, `` Civil society in Kuwait.''16. Calhoun, `` The radicalism of tradition.''17. Ibid.18. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 18. See also Stoecker, Defending Community;

Fantasia and Hirsch, ``Culture in rebellion''; and Tetreault, ``Civil society.''19. Scott, Domination; Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, 54; Robnett, How Long?;

Gamson, `` Safe spaces.''20. Fantasia and Hirsch, ``Culture in Rebellion,'' 157.21. Ibid., 159; my emphasis.22. Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 216; my emphasis.23. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces; Fantasia and Hirsch, `` Culture in rebellion'';

Hirsch, Urban Revolt; Scott, Domination; Eric Hirsch, `` Protest movements andurban theory,'' Research in Urban Sociology 3 (1993); 159^180; Farrell, The Spiritof the Sixties; Tetreault, ``Civil society in Kuwait.''

24. James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Pacism from the Union Eight to the ChicagoSeven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13.

25. See also Couto, `` Narrative''; and Morris, `` Centuries of black protest.'' Gamsonpoints out, however, that it is the rare movement organization that permits com-plete freedom of dissent: `` Social movement organizations will often considercaucuses a direct threat to the unity that challengers need to succeed against a

28

formidable antagonist. This often extends beyond formal caucuses to include anyattempted meeting by a restricted subset of participants.'' ``Safe spaces and socialmovements,'' 30. More on this below.

26. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 20; see also Fisher, Let the People Decide.27. Scott, Domination, 223.28. Couto, `` Narrative,'' 77.29. See also Gamson, `` Safe spaces.''30. Hirsch, `` Protest movements.'' See also the discussion of `` freedom schools'' as free

spaces in Farrell,The Spirit of the Sixties.31. Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Tracy, Direct Action; Rossinow,

`` `The breakthrough to new life.' ''32. Pamela Allen, Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group inWomen's Liberation

(NewYork: Times Change Press, 1970).33. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 18^20. The foregoing passage in fact seems to

suggest both that free spaces precede social movements and that they are createdby social movements, a dual role reected in other statements in the book butnever theorized explicitly. If free spaces are sometimes created by social move-ments, does that mean that they are not necessary to movements' formation?

34. Whittier, Feminist Generations.35. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 18; my emphasis.36. Fisher, Let the People Decide, 221; my emphasis.37. Evans, Personal Politics; Gamson, `` Safe spaces.''38. I use the term `` group'' occasionally to describe these structures, but in its minimal

sense as `` a number of individuals assembled together or having some unifyingrelationship,'' Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springeld, Mass.: G. & C.Merriam, 1977). As ChuckTilly points out to me, the term risks conveying a senseof solidarity, connectedness, and common culture that I want to make problem-atic.

39. Bert Klandermans, The Social Psychology of Protest (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997),chapter 6.

40. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Taylor, ``Social movementcontinuity''; Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America PeaceMovement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Bob Edwards and JohnD. McCarthy, `` Social Movement Schools,'' Sociological Forum 7 (1992): 541^550.

41. Smith, in Resisting Reagan, objects to Morris's characterization of halfway housesas socially isolated and lacking a mass base; in the case of the Central Americapeace movement, `` the groups that assisted the formation of key movement-carrierorganizations were as important as they were precisely because they were bothsocially integrated and possessed mass constituencies'' (ibid., 403, n. 9). Smithdistinguishes movement midwives from formal movement organizations rather bytheir `` trans-movement identities and the specialized role they played in facilitatingthe formation of new movement-carrier organizations without becoming protestorganizations themselves'' (ibid.). I characterize religious groups as politicallymarginal not because they are socially isolated, or politically radical but because,as religious groups, they are not routinely involved in mainstream politics. TheNational Women's Party that Verta Taylor characterizes as an abeyance structurehad ties to earlier forms of protest (and later ones) rather than extensive geo-graphic ties. Taylor also notes the exclusiveness and highly centralized structure ofthe group. These features do seem to characterize other dissident groups. Forexample, Tracy, in Direct Action, notes the charismatic leadership and power of

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A. J. Muste in radical pacist circles, and Myles Horton was almost single-hand-edly responsible for the survival of the Highlander Folk School. On the latter, seeFrank Adams, Unearthing the Seed of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Charlotte,North Carolina: John F. Blair, 1975).

42. On the Highlander Folk School, see Morris,The Origins of the Civil Rights Move-ment, and Adams, Unearthing the Seed of Fire. On American radical pacists, seeTracy, Direct Action.

43. These are components of what Sidney Tarrow, in Power in Movement, identies asthe political opportunity structure. See also Doug McAdam, ``Conceptual origins,current problems, future directions'' in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, andMayer N. Zald, editors, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23^40.

44. Moreover, they may have had experience with federal directives ignored by localpolitical elites. For residents of the deep South, for example, the federal govern-ment had long been an ineectual actor. Most of the Supreme Court decisions andexecutive orders favorable to black claimants in the 1940s and 1950s that DougMcAdam sees as evidence of the government's amenability to black demands hadlittle chance of being enforced in Mississippi. FBI agents, even when they appearedat victims' behest, did little but take notes, and White Citizens Councils were ableto get black leaders audited by the IRS after 1955. The message was not obviouslyone of federal support for racial equality. Mississippi's long political isolation meantthat a central challenge for activists was to convince residents that political oppor-tunities on the national scene had meaning for the state's black Mississippians. AsCharles Payne shows, networks of black activists and allies extending outside thestate were able to communicate to local residents the existence of new prospects.See Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom:The OrganizingTradition and theMississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

45. See Smith, Resisting Reagan; Edwards and McCarthy, `` Social movement schools'';C. Craig Jenkins, `` Radical transformation of organizational goals,''AdministrativeScience Quarterly 22 (1977): 568^586, on the National Council of Churches'support for civil rights and farm workers' movements.

46. Tracy, Direct Action, 94.47. Smith, Resisting Reagan, 111.48. Tracy, Direct Action.49. See James DeFronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements, second edition

(Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), chapter 8. Thanks to a Theory and Society re-viewer for directing my attention to this case.

50. See Taylor, ``Social Movement Continuity''; Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier,`` Collective identity in social movement communities: Lesbian feminist mobiliza-tion,'' in Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, editors, Frontiers in SocialMovement Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 104^129.

51. Taylor shows that members of the National Women's Party did go on to becomeleaders in the liberal branch of the women's movement, with four of the ten signersof NOW's founding statement of purpose members of the NWP. However, shequotes NWP leader Alice Paul's complaint that NOW members acted `` as ifthey've discovered the whole idea.'' ``Social movement continuity,'' 771. Elsewhere,I discuss 1960 student sit-inners' emphasis on the spontaneity of their protest as away to signal their break with an earlier generation of activists. Francesca Polletta,`` `It was like a fever . . . ': Narrative and identity in social protest,'' Social Problems45/2 (1998): 137^159.

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52. On black Southern churches see Morris,The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement;McAdam, Political Process; Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces. On ethnic organizationsin nineteenth-century Chicago, see Hirsch, Urban Revolt. On Kuwaiti mosques,see Tetreault, `` Civil society.''

53. See Anthony Oberschall, Social Conict and Social Movements (Englewood Clis:Prentice-Hall, 1973); Tarrow, Power in Movement; and David A. Snow, LouisZurcher Jr., and Sheldon Ekland-Olson, `` Social networks and social movements:A microstructural approach to dierential recruitment,'' American SociologicalReview 45 (1980): 787^801.

54. Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 203; see also Johnston, `` Mobilization and structure.''55. Calhoun, `` The radicalism of tradition,'' 898.56. See Roger Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris

from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); DavidKnoke, Political Networks: The Structural Perspective (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990).

57. On `` autonomous zones'' in a European new social movement, see FrancescaPolletta, `` Politicizing childhood: The 1980 Zurich Burns movement,'' Social Text33 (Winter 1993): 82^101. On radical feminism, see Echols, Daring to be Bad. Ontenant organizing, see Hirsch, `` Protest movements''; on alternative service organ-izations, see Stoecker, Defending Community.

58. See Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs inContemporary Society (London: Radius, 1989) and Challenging Codes, andWini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962^1968:The GreatRefusal (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989).

59. On symmetry in relations, see Barry Wellman, ``Structural analysis: From methodand metaphor to theory and substance,'' in Barry Wellman and S.D. Berkowitz,editors, Social Structures: A Network Approach (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1997), 19^61.

60. These may or may not be explicitly right-wing groups. Ethnic nationalist groupsmay form alternative political, economic, and educational institutions that preg-ure an ethnically `` pure'' society. See, for example, the recent shadow state andschools formed by Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Fabian Schmidt, `` KosovoLiberation Army Launches New Oensive,'' Open Media Research Institute Ana-lytical Brief, 16 January 1997 (www.omri.cz/Publications/AB).

61. Precisely one of the weaknesses of recent discussions of pregurative politics hasbeen an unwillingness to see its value for right-wing groups as well as left-wingones. See Allen Hunter, ``Pregurative politics,'' for a good critique.

62. See Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumans-burg, NewYork, 1983); Allen, Free Spaces; and Echols, Daring to Be Bad.

63. David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, `` Social movement spillover,'' Social Problems41/2 (1994): 277^298; and Doug McAdam, `` `Initiator' and `spin-o' movements:Diusion processes in cycles of protest,'' in Mark Traugott, editor, Repertoires andCycles of Collective Action (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1995), 217^239.

64. Nancy Fraser, `` Rethinking the public sphere,'' in Craig Calhoun, editor, Haber-mas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 119. See also Tarrow,Power in Movement; and Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (NewYork: Basic Books, 1980). Again, note in the foregoing discussion the assumptionthat pregurative groups strive for equality in relationship. At least one structuredubbed a free space doesn't t into my typology: the Latin American Christianbase communities described in Gamson, `` Commitment and agency'' and `` Safe

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spaces and social movements,'' were established by a non-oppositional but extra-local network (the Catholic Church), but became central to the communities inwhich they were established.

65. Stoecker recounts how the cafe, food coop, and health services established by civilrights and antiwar activists in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolisevolved into community institutions and then formed a recruitment base for sub-sequent neighborhood mobilization. Stoecker, Defending Community.

66. By the early 1960s, the National Council of Churches `` was no longer to dispensetraditional `Christian services' to individuals but rather to serve as the generalinterest advocate and protector of the various deprived groups that had formerlybeen objects of missionary concern.'' Jenkins, `` Radical transformation of organ-izational goals,'' 573. Jenkins shows that NCC sta was able to act on thatcommitment even in the face of lay opposition to support for radical movementson account of the growth of indirect and nondenominational sources of income,which insulated sta from members' concerns.

67. See Tetreault, ``Civil society.''68. Gould, Insurgent Identities, 20^21.69. Fantasia and Hirsch, ``Culture in rebellion,'' 146; my emphasis.70. Ibid., 158.71. Fantasia and Hirsch's account suggests in dierent places that the oppositional

culture developed in havens only becomes mobilizing in the context of structuralcrisis, and that the culture enacted in havens only becomes oppositional in thecontext of already-launched insurgency. The latter formulation implies that havensplay no role in the development of insurgency.

72. Scott, Domination, 201.73. Ibid., 213.74. Ibid., 114.75. Ibid. See also Couto, `` Narrative.''76. McAdam, `` Culture and social movements''; Johnston, `` Mobilization and struc-

ture.'' McAdam argues that ``long-standing activist subcultures'' (45) provide thetools to interpret ``objective'' structural opportunities in mobilizing ways. He isclear in distinguishing between `` accounting for the structural factors that haveobjectively strengthened the challenger's hand,'' and ``analyzing the processes bywhich the meaning and attributed signicance of shifting political conditions areassessed'' (39). Culture, on McAdam's view, thus mediates between objectivestructural opportunities and objective mobilization; it does not create those op-portunities. McAdam also delineates a category of `` cultural opportunities,'' forexample, the sudden disasters, like Three Mile Island, that spur public oppositionto a broader condition, or the events, like the Brown v. Board d