Capable Leaders

Capable leaders
Smart, honest, committed leaders are invaluable to a social movement. The
literature on activism emphasizes the importance of leaders in generating a
movement, and the importance of creating new leaders to keep it rolling.
Particularly important is the articulate and charismatic leader who can
elegantly articulate everyone’s concerns, and inspire an emotional response.
A Mobilizing frame
Corporations and elites, aided by corporate media, preserve the status quo by
linking problems to individual shortcomings. They blame the victim,
promoting the demobilizing view that lung cancer results from consumer
choice, unemployment from laziness, and family breakup from selfishness. A
movement can build quickly inside a homogenous, highly interactive group
when people question the blame-the-victim frame, and begin to see a
problem deriving from not from flawed individuals, but from flawed public
policy.
Erving Goffman originated the term “frame” to refer to an interpretive
scheme that people use to simplify and make sense of some aspect of the
world. When a mobilizing frame becomes widely shared, the chances of
collective action increase markedly.
Frame alignment
Frame alignment describes what happens in small informal groups that
promote social change. Movement supporters attempt to recruit bystanders
by providing examples and rationales that support a mobilizing frame and
legitimize the movement. If the examples and rationale are convincing,
bystanders will adjust their view of issues and events to fit the new
mobilizing frame.
Most frame alignment comes from social movement organizations as
they try to bring in new people and fend off counter-movement attacks.
Frame alignment comes in varieties sociologists have named frame bridging,
frame amplification, frame extension and frame transformation. According
to David Snow and others, frame extension occurs when a social movement
organization extends “the boundaries of its primary framework so as to
encompass interests or points of view that are incidental to its primary
objectives but of considerable salience to potential adherents. In effect, the
movement is attempting to enlarge its adherent pool by portraying its
objectives or activities as attending to and being congruent with the values
and interests of potential adherents.”
Optimistic expectations
Any given individual is more likely to participate in a project if he or she:
Expects a large number of people to participate
Expects his/her participation will contribute to success
Expects success if many people participate.