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Counterframes and Allegories of Evil

Characterizations of Labor by Gilded Age Elites

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Social movement scholars have increasingly focused on the importance of the cultural-symbolic dimensions of collective contention. Conceptual and empirical studies of mobilization (and countermobilization) employing a framing perspective have become a growth industry. In this article, the author expands our purview of the symbolic-representational repertoire employed in collective contention and conceptually distinguishes between counterframing, counternarrating, and counterimagining as strategic forms of symbolic characterization employed by oppositions against social movements. The author illustrates these ideas by focusing on the countercontention against labor during the Gilded Age. All three symbolic countering strategies—framing, narrating, and imaging— were employed by business and cultural elites against labor as it was becoming a national-level movement during the last several decades of the 19th century. However, extended narratives (e.g., novels and partisan quasi-histories) and pictorial art produced an intelligibility distinct from, if not unrelated to, frames because they have the capacity to feature (a) movement or active presentation over time; (b) detailed characterization of actors; and (c) collective representation in allegorical-political terms that specified the evils of important emergent categories, like the transformation of "the good worker" into "the bad worker." The author concludes that students of the labor movement (and social movements more generally) would benefit by augmenting analyses of frames to include allegorical-political uses of narrative and pictorial art forms as well.

Key Words: symbolic opposition to labor • counterframing • counternarrating • counterimaging • Gilded Age

Work and Occupations, Vol. 35, No. 4, 388-421 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0730888408325307


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