Benford (1997), “An Insider’s Critique of the Social Movement Framing Perspective.”
Benford, Robert D. (1997) ‘An Insider’s Critique of the Social Movement Framing Perspective,’ Sociological Inquiry, 67:4, pp. 409-430.
Abstract: “In the last decade the framing perspective has gained increasing popularity among social movement researchers and theorists. Surprisingly, there has been no critical assessment of this growing body of literature. Though the perspective has made significant contributions to the movements literature, it suffers from several shortcomings. These include neglect of systematic empirical studies, descriptive bias, static tendencies, reification, reductionism, elite bias, and monolithic tendencies. In addition to a critique of extant movement framing literature, I offer several remedies and illustrate them with recent work. The articles by Francesca Polletta, John H. Evans, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, and Ira Silver in this special section address several of the concerns raised in this critique and, in so doing, contribute to the integration of structural and cultural approaches to social movements.” p409
Benford (1997:410): “Whatever else social movement actors do, they seek to affect interpretations of reality among various audiences. They engage in this framing work because they assume, rightly or wrongly, that meaning is prefatory to action.”
Benford (1997:410): “meaning is problematic; it does not spring from the object of attention into the actor’s head, because objects have no intrinsic meaning. Rather meaning is negotiated, contested, modified, articulated, and rearticulated. In short, meaning is socially constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.”
Benford (1997:415): Criticises a “tendency to focus on frames as “things” rather than on the dynamic processes associated with their social construction, negotiation, contestation, and transformation. Movement scholars have been more inclined to attend to frames rather than to framing”