2018 CJS Vol.

Chicago Journal
of Sociology

1
Executive Editor Henry Connolly
Managing Editor Yunhan Wen

Associate Editors Ilgi Cesur Emma Madden

Marissa Combs Allison Yu
Design Editor Eugenia Ko

Faculty Advisor Forrest Stuart

Special Thanks Pat Princell

Cover Images Daniel Chae

The Chicago Journal of Sociology (CJS) publishes excellent undergraduate work in the
social sciences, while giving student editors experience turning coursework into publishable
academic articles. CJS is looking for papers that offer well formulated arguments about
topics of sociological interest. We value clear, straightforward prose, careful citation, and a
wide range of methodological approaches. For more information on submitting your paper,
or on joining our staff, visit sociology.uchicago.edu/cjs or contact cjsuchicago@gmail.com.

Editor’s Note
By way of quick historical overview, the Chicago Journal of Sociology was conceived as
a vehicle to facilitate sharing. The purpose of the journal was to give sociology majors the
chance to share their B.A. theses with each other while they were still a work in progress.
This model provided a forum for constructive criticism and, in the end, celebrated the B.A.
writing process with a physical copy of the participants’ efforts: the journal.

In more recent years, the journal has shifted its focus to acquainting younger sociology
majors with sociology research and the publishing process as a whole. This year’s journal in
particular emphasized a comprehensive review process, which involved reading and debating
the merits of each submitted paper. That being said, the mission of the journal has always
been to publish excellent undergraduate research, and this year’s edition follows suite.

Chen begins this year’s journal by exploring the theme of identity and how family structure
influences the lives of second generation Chinese-American women. Davis explores the
ways in which bicultural Jewish-Catholic families construct a “100% both” identity at an
interfaith Sunday school. Rimlinger surveys Local School Councils in Chicago through the
lens of bureaucratic and democratic organizations to identify distinct categories of Latino/a
parent involvement. Jindal also studies bureaucracy, but with respect to mission driven
organizations, evidenced by the 2016 Hillary for North Carolina campaign. Also on the topic
of politics, Goodfellow applies spatially specific data analysis to correlate income inequality
with tea party activity. We learned a lot reading and reviewing these papers, and hopefully
you do as well!

Sincerely,
Henry Connolly
CJS Executive Editor
© 2018 by the University of Chicago Department of Sociology
Table of Contents

Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American 4

Second Generation
Lily Chen

The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School 25

Will Davis

Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization 66

Bess Goodfellow

Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a 87

Collective Symbol and the Formation of the Democratic
Political Cage
Sonam Jindal

Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement 131

in Education: A Model for Chicago’s Local School Councils
Anna Rimlinger
Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the
Chinese-American Second Generation
Lily Chen
B.A. Sociology and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies

Sociologists of U.S. immigration track second generation quantitative outcomes to

measure incorporation success for different racial and ethnic groups. Immigration
sociologists have examined at length second generation interactions with public
institutions, tracking outcomes such as language acquisition, household income, and
political participation. However, scholars often overlook second generation interactions
in the realm of the ‘private’: Asian Americanists especially have either entirely ignored
issues of family and gender, or have essentialized the immigrant family as a nest of
ethnic culture. In this project, I examine the role of the family as a structural institution
in the lives of second generation Chinese American women. I use the concept of an
aspirational landscape as a guiding principle to understand how gendered interactions
of the everyday delineate the boundaries of possibility for women. In doing this, I
demonstrate how issues of the public are in fact inseparable from those of the private:
second generation outcomes are tightly bound to the familial, the intimate, and the
everyday.

Introduction 2000, 93), and these prostitutes supposedly

The history of Chinese migration
to the United States illustrates the ways
in which racializing processes function
simultaneously with gender concepts to
structure migrant lives. Chinese immigrants
first began arriving in the United States
during the California Gold Rush around
1848. The new immigrants were “heathen,
crafty, and dishonest”, “marginal members
of the human race” compared to the
superior Anglo-Americans (Lee 2003,
25). At the center of this racialization
were concepts of gender and sexuality,
with “Chinese women symboliz[ing] the
most fundamental differences between the
West and the Far East” (Lee 2003, 26).
Between 1860 and 1870, 70 to 85 percent
of the Chinese women who immigrated
to the United States were prostitutes (Hsu
4
represented a “sexualized danger with
the power to subvert both the domestic
ideal and existing relations between white
heterosexual men and women” (Lee 2003,
26). Under these race-gender schemas,
Congress enacted the Page Act of 1875 to
specifically prevent Chinese women from
entering the United States, nearly a decade
earlier than the enactment of the famous
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Through
1943, the Chinese exclusion laws were
significantly stricter for Chinese women
than for Chinese men and became more
and more restrictive for Chinese women
over time (Hsu 2000). When Congress
enacted the National Origins Act in 1924,
the new immigration law explicitly banned
“Chinese women, wives, and prostitutes”
and further guarded against Chinese female
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
immigrants by ensuring that “foreign-born
wives of U.S. citizens were ineligible for
citizenship and could not enter the United
States” (Hsu 2000, 96).
Chinese immigration today still
epitomizes a crucial racial schema of the
States: the dichotomy between black and
brown ‘cultures of poverty’ and Asian
Americans ‘model minority’ status. Chinese
conflation with Asian American model
minority status began in the second-half of
the twentieth century as fear of the ‘yellow
peril’ transformed into a lauding of Japanese
and Chinese Americans as upwardly mobile
and exemplars of “traditional Asian values”
(Wu 2013). Chinese immigrants became
again centered in conversations of Asian
American model minority status with the
publication of Amy Chua’s (2011) Battle
Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which marketed
Chua as a strict, sexy, and successful
Chinese mother of two high-performing
second generation women. Taken up by
scholars, parenting groups, policy makers,
and media outlets alike, the figure of the
Chinese Tiger Mother has dominated
discussions of second generation outcomes,
representing a naturally successful oriental
culture through the Asian female body.
In this study, I examine the structurally-
produced lived experiences of Chinese
American women in order to intervene in
the sphere of the seemingly pure, essential,
cultural space of the family.
Second Generation Incorporation
With a population of over 83 million,
immigrants and their second generation
children represent over 30% of the total
U.S. population (CPS 2016). The second
generation, defined as U.S. born individuals
with at least one immigrant parent, has a
population of over 36 million, making up
over 11% of the total U.S. population. The
vast majority of these migrants and second
generation children are migrants of color
from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, who
began entering the United States in large
groups after the Hart-Cellar Immigration
Act of 1965 overturned the National Origins
Immigration Act of 1924. Sociologists
in this early half of the 20th century
attempted to understand the differences
between white migrant and migrant of
color incorporation outcomes by theorizing
processes of assimilation, popularized by
Chicago School sociologist Milton Gordon
in 1964. Interested in measuring long term
outcomes for migrant families, sociologists
of immigration began tracking second,
third, and subsequent generation outcomes
as a useful way of comparing assimilation
success across different racial and ethnic
groups.
Today, assimilation and segmented
assimilation theories continue to dominate
as the central frameworks under which
immigration sociologists measure and
analyze immigrant incorporation in the
States. According to assimilation theory,
survey data capturing quantitative success
markers of a racial or ethnic group
including educational attainment (Bankston
and Zhou 1998), annual household
income (Ortiz and Telles 2008), rate of
intermarriage (Spickard 1989), language
acquirement (Ortiz and Telles 2008),
political incorporation (Zolberg 2006),
residential integration (Jiménez 2010),
and others can measure how well migrants
are incorporating into the U.S. In the mid-
twentieth century, sociologists theorized
that migrants of color would follow an
incorporation pattern mirroring that of
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
white migrant families in the earlier half
of the century, with assimilation marker
attainment improving over each successive
generation (Gordon 1964). When this failed
to be the case, biological explanations for
this failure arose and eventually fell away to
cultural explanations that masked race and
racism under colorblind ideology (Bonilla-
Silva 2006).
Under colorblind ideology, poverty
cycle concepts, often referred to as ‘culture
of poverty’ cycles, were used to describe the
lack of work ethic and poverty-producing
mechanisms inherent in black and brown
cultures, while ‘model minority’ concepts
was used to describe the quiet, obedient,
and hardworking nature of Asian Americans
(Tuan 1998). In this way, concepts of
culture became a safe way to mask racist
stereotypes while explaining outcome
differences for various racial and ethnic
groups in the U.S. Attempting to understand
instead the structural mechanisms that
produced outcome differences for racial and
ethnic groups in the U.S., sociologists Min
Zhou and Alejandro Portes (1993) theorized
that factors such as racial discrimination,
labor market bifurcation, growing
American inequality, and the growth
of drug use and street gangs structured
migrant of color incorporation through a
framework termed segmented assimilation.
Accordingly, Asian Americans were
shown to have assimilated upwards and
most successfully toward whiteness as an
immigrant group, as quantitative analyses
have shown Asian Americans achieving
higher levels of markers such as education,
intermarriage, socioeconomic status, and
residential integration in comparison to
other immigrant groups (Dhingra and
Rodriguez 2014). However, the framework
6
of segmented assimilation still failed
to account for how second generation
Asian Americans were able to achieve
incorporation markers, especially as
demographers found significant educational
differences between ethnoracial groups
even after controlling for demographic,
socioeconomic, and contextual variables
(Lee and Zhou 2015).
Sociologists have taken up the project
of locating structural explanatory factors
of second generation incorporation by
examining how the second generation
interacts with various public institutions. In
Asian American Achievement Paradox, for
example, Lee and Zhou (2015) explore how
second generation Asian Americans benefit
from ethnic community organization and
host-society reception, arguing that a
combination of “structural, cultural, and
social psychological processes interact
at the global and local levels” to provide
“1.5- and second generation Chinese and
Vietnamese with a ‘toolkit’ of resources
that help them get ahead, despite class
disadvantages” (Lee and Zhou 2015,
5). Gilda Ochoa (2013) takes a different
route, examining how second generation
Asian Americans come in contact with the
institution of the school, arguing that Asian
Americans are ‘academically profiled’ and
granted class-specific resources that allow
Asian American students to get ahead, such
as advanced academic tracks, after-school
programs, and tutoring. Other immigration
sociologists have explored the ways in
which the second generation encounters
public institutions such as welfare agencies,
health care providers, churches, political
institutions, and various labor markets.
Scholars have yet to take into account
how second generation outcomes are
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
shaped by structural formations of gender.
Asian Americanists have especially failed
to critically examine how issues of gender
formation and family relationships shape
second generation outcomes, as Zhou and
Lee point out in their 2015 text. Leisy
Abrego (2014) moves in this new direction
by examining the ways in which gender
shapes and structures family relationships
of Salvadoran transnational families. She
demonstrates, for example, that gender
inequities lock Salvadoran migrant women
into working in the domestic and service-
oriented job sector, which provides less
pay than jobs available to men. At the same
time, gendered constructions of motherhood
place a greater responsibility on mothers
to fulfill parental roles, producing tension
in intergenerational relationships that
demand more from the mothers than is
structurally possible. By bridging the gap
between the sociology of immigration and
the sociology of gender, Abrego is able to
delve much deeper into the lived conditions
of migrant families and bring to light the
gendered sociological structures that shape
migrant outcomes. As a critical structuring
mechanism of second generation outcomes,
gender concepts have been passed over
for far too long by Asian Americanists and
sociologists of immigration.
Feminist Analytics
Immigration scholars have attempted
to study second generation incorporation
outcomes by focusing on institutions of
the public. This focus leads to a lacuna of
sociological knowledge around a key part
of second generation socialization that
takes place in the seemingly neutral sphere
of the private home. Asian Americanists
often pass over examining the institution of
the family, given that scholars in the past
who have centered the family have done
so under racist notions of Asian cultural
superiority, rewriting structurally produced
family dynamics into essentialized cultural
norms (Lee and Zhou 2015). As Lee and
Zhou point out, the stakes of ‘turning
inwards’ are high: studies of migrant and
non-migrant families of color have become
racially coded as notions of cultural
inferiority and superiority throughout the
twentieth and twenty-first century.
Feminist literature, however, has
deeply problematized notions of the neutral
private, critiquing the public private divide
that shields scholars from turning inwards
toward examining messy, unspectacular,
everyday life. Elizabeth Povinelli (2008)
locates structure in the seemingly
unstructured sphere of the private by
reexamining notions of causality and the
temporal that fail to account for the way
in which the unspectacular everyday is
produced. She demonstrates, for example,
that although state violence almost always
takes place not in a singular catastrophic
event, but in “ordinary, chronic, acute, and
cruddy” pain, discourses of illness and
disease are saturated by the logic of the
neoliberal market. The social causes and
social distributions of lethality are in this
way transformed into the responsibility of
the individual or the failures of their culture.
By expanding our notions of causality to
include more expansive temporal modes,
structure becomes illuminated: the state—
not the individual or their failing culture—
becomes the causal mechanism.
Similarly, in this project I delve into the
sphere of the private everyday in order to
draw out the hidden structural mechanisms
within the family form that shape second
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
generation outcomes. I show how notions
of gender difference are mobilized within
the family, demonstrating the ways in
which different experiences of mental,
physical, and emotional regulation across
gendered lines produce different conditions
for second generation men and women to
aspire toward the future. In my analyses,
I use the concept of an aspirational
landscape to better illustrate how gendered
imaginaries of the future can structure the
lived reality of the present. In using this
conceptual model I draw from Carolyn
Kay Steedman’s (1987) “Landscape for a
Good Woman,” in which Steedman writes
of the ways her mothers’ aspirations for
her created a landscape upon which she
understands, shapes, and moves through
her own life. Bridging future imaginaries
with the lived experience of the present, an
aspirational landscape is the desire for the
future through which we experience the
present.
Methods
Feminist literature has demonstrated the
ways in which men are read as ‘unmarked’,
neutral, non-gendered bodies, while only
women are gendered and carry the weight
of its consequences. In this project, I
chose to focus on the experience of second
generation women—interviewing 22
women and 5 men and centering women’s
subjectivities to understand the processes
by which concepts of gender difference
become lived bodily reality. By choosing
to focus on women, I do not wish to argue
that gender issues are women’s issues
only—in fact, using data collected from
male interviewees and interviewees’
accounts of brothers, male cousins, and
other male relatives, I show how women’s
8
gendered experiences are simultaneously
constructed and mutually dependent upon
men’s gendered privileges.
I conducted in-depth, semi-structured
interviews with 27 second generation
Chinese, Taiwanese Americans, Chinese
Canadians, and Taiwanese Canadians in
the Chicago, Detroit, and Washington,
D.C., and San Francisco area over a period
of four months from July 2016 through
October 2016. I obtained interviewees
primarily using snowball sampling after
beginning with a few key informants. When
screening potential interviewees, I required
interviewees to have been raised by at least
one Chinese or Taiwanese first-generation
parent, and interviewees had to have been
raised in the U.S. for the majority of their
childhood years (approximately 10+ years).
I limited interviewee age range to 18 to 25;
this population of transitioning new adults
were well positioned to both accurately
recall and reflect with depth on their
very recent childhood experiences. The
interviews lasted 1.5 hours to 3.5 hours and
usually took place in coffee shops, library
classrooms, study rooms, and interviewees’
apartments, with one interview taking place
over Skype.
I conducted the interviews in three
sections: parent migration history, parent
to parent relationship, and parent to child
relationship. I covered 8-10 questions
with probes, allowing for interviewees to
direct the conversation if some topic or
question became particularly important.
All interviews ended with a four-page
demographic questionnaire covering basic
demographic information for all of the
interviewees’ nuclear family members (ex.
age, occupation, annual income, English
language and Chinese language fluency,
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
year of migration, political affiliation).
I transcribed the interviews and hand-
coded for recurring themes and patterns.
In the analysis, all interviewees’ names
have been anonymized in order to protect
interviewees’ privacy.
Although the interviews were
primarily conducted in the Chicagoland
area, interviewees were raised in a
diverse set of urban, suburban, and rural
settings across the U.S. Interviewees
came from socioeconomic backgrounds
ranging from just above poverty (annual
household income ~30,000) to extremely
wealthy (annual household income over
500,000), with most interviewees coming
from middle-class backgrounds (annual
household income ~90,000). Interviewees
and their nuclear family members had
varying legal statuses in the U.S., ranging
from U.S. citizens, Green Card holders and
permanent residents, temporary Visas, to
undocumented migrants. Most interviewees
were raised by two Chinese parents, with
a few interviewees raised by a single
Chinese mother and one interviewee raised
by a Chinese mother and white father.
Almost all interviews were conducted in
English, although Mandarin phrases were
used throughout, with some interviewees
preferring to conduct major portions of the
interview in Mandarin. In these cases, I
transcribed the Mandarin directly and then
translated during the coding process.
In-depth interviews were essential
for this study. For decades, quantitative
methods have been used to analyze migrant
outcomes, but quantitative data has failed
to tell us why immigrants successfully
or do not successfully incorporate. More
importantly, quantitative data gives us only
a glimpse into the real question we ask when
studying immigration: how do migrants
move through their lives? Qualitative data
collection and analysis is crucial to the
pursuit of understanding immigration and
immigrant lives. By conducting in-depth
interviews with the second generation, I
was able to hear interviewees’ own valuable
interpretations of parenting and the
experiences of being parented. I was able
to listen to interviewees recall events from
childhood and discuss their plans and hopes
for the future. I hope that I was able to give
interviewees the opportunity to be heard.
By nature of the research topic,
interviewees often had to recall intimate
and sometimes extremely painful memories
of family trauma or violence. In cases
where extremely traumatic events were
discussed, I took time to build rapport with
interviewees and allowed interviewees
to get comfortable speaking about
their experiences, which was important
when interviewees cried, broke down,
or felt unable to continue. Throughout
the interview process, I always offered
interviewees the opportunity to take breaks
and was open about my shared experiences
and empathetic feelings. To this end, I am
endlessly grateful to my interviewees, who
were open and welcoming and willing to
share some of the most intimate details of
their lives, sometimes sitting with me for
entire afternoons or days to discuss what
they—and I—feel is a missing story in the
broadening literature of U.S. immigration
studies.
Tracking the Intimate; Thinking in
the Everyday
Gender theory often places at its center
a dynamic relationship between more
‘concrete’ phenomena such as the male and
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
female body and more abstract concepts
such as masculinity and femininity. This
structure will guide my discussion of the
ways in which gender and its concepts shapes
lived experience for women of the second
generation. In my analysis, I begin with a
discussion of the female body and how the
female body is seen, regulated, and often
rejected in the private sphere. I then move
to discuss the more abstract ways in which
parents regulate the women’s sexualities in
the present by calling into being what they
desire for their daughters in the future. I
conclude by thinking through the ways in
which parents negotiate gender difference
between sons and daughters and how these
differences produce aspirational landscapes
through which women must move through
in the everyday. In other words, I show how
the lives of second generation women are
structured through a particular temporal
mode that constantly demands both the
present everyday and imagined future, as
second generation women move through
everyday life as dictated by the needs of
their futures as ideal wives and mothers.
The Female Body
The female body generates intense
effects: in interviews, issues of bodily shame
and disgust were pervasive and appeared
frequently as structuring mechanisms for
relationships between family members. The
women reported being unable to broach
the topic of sex, puberty, or menstruation
with even their closest family members.
This barrier was particularly important in
structuring relationships between women
and their fathers, in many cases producing
drastic changes on the overall family
structure over time. Carol, 21, became
increasingly emotionally distant from her
10
father as she matured out of childhood. The
real turning point occurred at the moment
she began to menstruate. As she describes,
“I was closer to my dad when I was
younger. Like, literally after I got
my period is when my dad and I…
our relationship started to not be as
close. We still spent time together, but
I think he felt uncomfortable talking
about women’s body issues, or that
kind of stuff with me, and then after
that I was always closer to my mom.”
Across all interviews, the women
reported feeling much closer to their
mothers and especially so after early
childhood--after menstruation began,
the women went to their mothers “for
everything: mental, physical, emotional
support,” recalls 20-year-old Emily. Jessica,
22, describes of her parental relationships
after growing up, “My dad and I…I think
a lot of our relationship now is like him
sort of explaining things about why things
are the way they are, and with my mom
it’s very like, we talk about everything,
it’s more of the nitty gritty.” This family
dynamic is summed up succinctly by Ellen,
a 21-year-old Chinese American woman
from Johns Creek, Georgia: “My mother
does everything and knows everything…
there are so many details my mother knows
and he [my father] doesn’t…she’s 98% the
parent.”
Male interviewees and interviewees’
brothers did not experience the emotional
fallout that second generation women
experienced with their fathers. Often,
desiring distance from the female bodies of
their daughters, fathers were very explicit
about preferring their male children as their
female children entered into puberty. As
a gendered dynamic of the family, fathers
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
were also usually the head of household.
As I later show, these affects surrounding
issues of the female body have serious
consequences for the second generation
women’s experiences of child prioritization
and resource distribution, particularly as
notions of the menstruating female body
became tied to gender concepts of female
emotionality and intellectual inferiority.
Interviewee’s parents intensely
regulated the women’s physical occupation
of space every second of every minute of
every day, creating severe demands for
every way the women’s bodies interacted
with the material world. Daughters recalled
being reminded and reprimanded to sit,
stand, and walk gracefully; to speak, laugh,
and yawn without drawing attention; to
wash their hair more, wash their face more,
grow their hair out, shave, wear more
makeup, wear dresses, wear more heels,
wear lighter colors, wear brighter colors,
wear more flowers, and in general, “be
more feminine.” As Vanessa, 22, recalls,
her mother often complained that she
was “not presentable, too loud, not pretty
enough, not good looking…my mom was
always like you should put your hair this
way, you should dress that way, you should
throw these shirts out, you should get your
teeth whitened, you should get your teeth
straightened out.” Jane, 21, recalls of her
constant fights at home, “She [my mother]
wanted me to wear dresses, but I didn’t
like dresses. I just don’t like dresses. She
wanted me to wear bright colors, but I’m
not a bright colored person. And she wants
me to do makeup, but I’m too lazy. And
don’t really want to.”
While the women were guided,
pushed, or forced to present themselves
in particular ways every day, brothers or
male interviewees very rarely received
feedback about the way they dressed, the
way their bodies occupied space, or their
physical weight. Vanessa and her mother
bickered constantly over Vanessa’s physical
presentation, but Vanessa recalls that her
mother “never hampered on [her] brother’s
self presentation.” Cecelia, 21, recalls, “I
remember one time I tried talking to my
parents about why they would always tell
me to ‘be less promiscuous’ and not dress
very revealing and focused on the way
I looked and never brought that up to my
brother, and they just kind of brushed it off.”
Although parents had many ways of
regulating women’s bodies and behavior,
the most pervasive patterns of regulation
always surrounded the women “taking
up too much space.” The women were
reprimanded for taking up space through
their presence, speech, movement, behavior,
attitude, needs, and desires. Parents felt that
the women complained too much, talked
too much, cried too much, just were too
much. Emily, 20, recalls, “My parents have
told me ever since I was young, you’re
selfish, you’re demanding, you’re pushing,
don’t do that.” Jane, 21, tells of her frequent
arguments with her mother:
“We have these arguments about
gender roles. She wants me to be more
feminine, I’m like, I don’t want to be
more feminine, and that’s an ongoing
thing from my childhood. Pretty
much as long as I can remember.
She’s always had opinions on how I
should act as a woman. She’s always
like, be more graceful, less wild. I’ll
say things that are ‘not polite’, things
that I think are funny…she just wants
me to be sweeter and less cynical.”
Parents’ intense regulation of daughters
bodies and gender performance evokes
11
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
a Foucauldian analytics of biopower and
bodily discipline that binds intimately
the more abstract realm of knowledge
and power with the physical body and its
movements. The women were pushed
in every moment of their lives to be
more feminine, to be less present. Every
regulation pushed the women to conform
to rules of heterosexual desirability, making
possible through the present everyday the
aspirational future of ‘wife’. Structured
by parents’ abstract desires for daughters’
futures as desirable partners, the women’s
bodies were intensely and constantly
surveilled and then disciplined into the
type of “docile body”—to borrow from
Foucault—that would perform the desired
functions for the women’s futures (Foucault
1975). For these women, bodily discipline
was not only an avenue of mass regulation;
in their most desirable form, these women
would be only bodies. The women were not
pushed to speak certain things, but instead
to speak less in general. Through everyday
regulation in the present, the women could
call into being their futures as simply
physical bodies capable of attracting a male
mate for reproduction.
Beyond regulating the ways in which
their daughters performed femininity,
parents were also heavily involved in
regulating the amount of space their
daughter’s bodies occupied. Helen, 22, says
of the relationship she has with her father:
“My dad is very controlling, to this day…
he came to visit me, and asked me how
much I weighed, and why I was wearing
the things I was wearing…I think that was
a huge thing when I was younger, like why
do you, what are you wearing, how much
do you weigh…?” Jenny, 22, recalls feeling
frustrated by the issue of body weight when
12
it became a problem for her younger sister:
“I berate her [my mother] for talking about
obesity a lot. It’s so bizarre. She makes
comments about that to my sister a lot,
which makes no sense to me [...] but she’ll
say my sister’s too fat. Before. And in recent
time.” This kind of severe bodily regulation
can have dangerous or life-threatening
consequences for the second generation
women. Catherine, 20, tells of her eating
disorder, developed under constant pressure
to diet from her father:
“I feel like the reason why I developed
this weird eating disorder when I
was growing up is because my dad
would always be like, exercise is so
important, you should be exercising
every day…so there was that pressure
from my dad. And still when I go
home, my dad’s always asking, or
like when I call him, he’s always
asking did I go to the gym today? or
[he’ll say] make sure you to the gym,
or make sure you go for a run!”
Alice, 21, is another interviewee who
developed an eating disorder as a result of
dieting pressure from her grandparents, who
raised her after her father left the family. Her
mother would remind her to “dress cuter,
not be so loud, and don’t be disruptive,”
and her grandparents would comment
incessantly on her eating habits, reminding
Alice that both her and her younger sister’s
‘swimmer bodies’ were overly masculine
and unattractive. For Alice, this pressure
later developed into a severe eating disorder
that pulled Alice out of school for recovery.
These were only some of the cases that
showed the ways in which parents often
chose to prioritize daughters’ physical
presentation over their health, comfort, or
happiness, although this pattern emerged
frequently in the minute but revealing
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
everyday demands of the women’s bodies.
For example, the parents were generally
unconcerned with the women’s Body Mass
Index (BMI), a more telling quantitative
marker body health. Instead, parents were
concerned how and where fat was located
on the body and whether this would affect
the women’s attractiveness to men.
Parents also regulated the women’s
movement through physical space.
Movement was gendered at every scale: in
the day-to-day, daughters were instructed
to walk and run in feminine ways, while
on a larger scale, daughters were restricted
from moving across state and national
borders in concern of women’s safety. Jane,
21, for example, fought intensely with her
parents over their worries over her safety
that restricted her from traveling across
state lines alone. As she recalls, “I wanted
to go to Montana to go to Glacier National
Park, to go on vacation for a week. My
mom did not like that. So at first she was
fighting really hard against that…she thinks
it’s cause I’m a girl, she doesn’t see me as
an adult; I’m a girl in this big dark scary
world.” Vanessa, 22, recalls very similar
interactions with her mother. In one case,
she tells laughing, she snuck out with her
friends to get a tattoo late at night. When
her mother found out, her mother was
horrified: “Not at the tattoo,” Vanessa says,
“but at the fact that I was out past 11PM.”
For as long as she lives, Vanessa recites,
rolling her eyes, Vanessa’s mother will
not allow Vanessa to “drive alone at night,
drive with female friends at night, or drive
with male friends at night.” For Elizabeth,
a 23-year-old Taiwanese-American woman
from Ithaca, New York, Elizabeth’s parents’
strict regulations of her movement shaped
the conditions of her future employment,
a pattern that I later discuss. As Elizabeth
recalls,
“Last summer I was going to do this
internship, either in Hong Kong or
parts of China, to do human rights
things, and I remember they were
really worried about this kind of
thing. Then they were just like flat out
NO, don’t do this, do something else,
and then in the end I compromised
and then did an internship in the
U.S. on Chinese rights. I don’t think
they were worried so much the price
of it as like…safety in their mind
was like, like…having me in a safe
environment was the issue.”
May, 20, pointed out that her parents
were almost never satisfied with her
brother’s pursuit of various internships
throughout his high school and college
career, pushing him to explore further and
accomplish more, while May herself, like
Elizabeth, was often only reminded to do
what was “safe” and “comfortable”. May’s
directives demonstrate the stakes of bodily
regulation as it pertains to possibilities for
the future: parents’ regulations of women’s
bodies not only limits what is possible in
the present every day, as women are asked
to ‘exist less’ and take up less space. These
bodily regulations are the conditions of
possibility through which women will
move through their lives in the future as
well. While the men were free to grow and
move in a diverse array of directions, the
women were expected to be still, silent,
and presentable: future wives, always in the
making.
Sexuality
Perhaps a bridge between the more
concrete physical figure of the woman
and the more abstract realm of movement,
aspiration, and futurity, in this section
13
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
I trace the ways in which women’s
lived experiences were structured by
gendered notions of sexuality. Issues of
sex and sexuality evoked the female body
simultaneously with future imaginaries
of family obligation, wifehood, and
motherhood. In interviews, the women
described innumerous ways in which issues
of sex and sexuality were regulated, even
though explicit discussions of sex rarely
rose to the surface. Interviewees remarked
that fathers were most responsible for
limiting any relationship with sex and
sexuality, while fathers were also the parent
the most willing to give sons total sexual
freedom. No matter which parent involved,
however, the issue of sex often generated
the most serious fights between female
interviewees and their parents. May, 20,
reported having a very strong bond with
both of her parents, rarely fighting when she
was growing up, with one major exception:
at the end of May’s senior year in high
school, a fellow male classmate began to
pursue May, causing May’s parents to fly
into a panic. As she describes, “Honestly the
whole experience was kind of traumatic—
they would literally tell me things like ‘he’s
the devil’, other things like that. I didn’t even
like the boy either, but it was like, why are
you controlling who I can like, who I can
date, who I’m interested in or not interested
in?...That never happened to [my brother].”
Elizabeth, 23, recalls feeling similarly
frustrated after fighting with her parents
over her choice to date in college: “Those
reservations about me dating…they wouldn’t
be the same if I were a boy. All of my Asian
friends that are guys, their parents are super
chill with it. But all my friends that are Asian
girls, their parents are a lot warier. And as for
me, they’ve also been super wary.”
14
Male interviewees also reported
that women were very restricted in their
expressions of sexuality, while they
themselves were given total freedom. John,
22, reflects on his father’s regulation of his
sister’s sexuality:
“There are certain kind of gendered
expectations…he’ll just say casual
offhand comments that are a bit
strange, like when [my sister] was
talking about makeup, he would be
like, girls should be pretty…or he’ll
say like, [my sister] shouldn’t, girls
shouldn’t date until they’re at least in
college, but then he has no problem
with me dating…I don’t know, it’s
weird. He really believes women
should only date at a certain age; he
told my sister you can’t date in high
school.”
Meanwhile Kevin, a 21-year-old
Chinese American man from New Hyde
Park, New York, reflects on the freedom he
was granted to pursue sex as he wanted:
“When I was getting a girlfriend,
my mom talked to my grandfather,
and he was very protective of what I
wanted to do. He told my mom to just
mind her own business and let me do
whatever I wanted, and my mom was
like okay, fine. I think it’s because I
was the first grandson he had, so he
and my grandmother really saw me
as basically a son to them, and they
didn’t want my mom to like, deprive
me of what I think I would require to
be happy.”
Parents were keen on limiting the
women’s relationships with sexuality through
every possible avenue, whether it was the
pursuit of sex with a partner, the exploration
of sexuality through masturbation, or the
development of independent ideas of sex and
sexuality. Elizabeth, 23, reflects on parents’
strict notions of female virginity and purity:
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
“The going assumption has always
been that I would only have sex after
marriage. […] It’s not really religious,
and neither is it about health. They
have a definite sense of what a wife
should bring to a husband, which I
really disagree with [...] I remember
they would say [of a sexuality active
woman]: how is she going to marry
anyone now? Who’s going to want
that? And that was super offensive to
me.”
While masturbation was widely accepted
as necessary and natural for the men,
masturbation was absolutely unacceptable
for any of the second generation women,
generating some of the most intense effects
of disgust and revulsion from parents and
fathers in particular. Emily, 20, describes of
her own encounters with porn as a child:
“When I was young actually my dad
did catch, he had seen in my browsing
history that I had seen porn, and he
would make it a very big moment
of shame for me. He would bring
me to his office and be like, what is
this? Why are you looking at this?
You shouldn’t be looking at this. And
I would feel really bad about it…
there was never any room for me to
respond. I would just run away.”
Expressions of female sexuality were
also controlled through parents’ demands
for ‘appropriate’ clothing, makeup, and
behavior. Parents sought to curb women’s
relationship with sex and sexuality, even
as they were continuously being prepped
as objects of sexual desire. Men were
allowed active positions in the realm of
sex and sexual exploration, while actively
sexual women were seen as contradictory
to the women’s futures as ideal wives
and mothers. Women were expected to be
chaste and virginal in looks, attitude, and
behavior--faithful to a future husband that
was already present in the women’s lived
reality.
Across interviews, both male and
female interviewees reported having
different racialized dating restrictions along
gendered lines. In these cases, parents did
not allow their daughters to date men of
particular racial or ethnic groups depending
on the perception that the men were overly
masculine, dangerous, or patriarchal.
In many cases, fathers held these views
alongside a strong notion of female fragility
and innocence, evoking a paternal protection
of their female children from dangerous,
scary ‘dark’ men. Male interviewees and
interviewees’ brothers were not limited by
the same terms, as parents often figured
they could ‘handle themselves.’ Throughout
the interviews, ‘dangerous men’ included in
various combinations black, brown, Indian,
Korean, Mexican, and Chinese men, with
black men cited most often as symbolizing a
great danger to daughters’ purity, innocence,
and fragility. Catherine, 20, reflects, “My
parents, they always ask me to be safe and
don’t be around black people, don’t be around
Mexican people…they’re more worried
about me because I am a girl. They view
me as more fragile than if I were a boy. So
they’re pretty protective of me…for dating
and stuff, they’re more protective.” Emily,
20, and Julia, 20, are not allowed to date
Korean men, due to a perception of Korean
men’s overly aggressive manners, while
Cindy, 19, and Lucy, 20, are not allowed to
date Indian men for the same reason. While
the racial and ethnic groups fluctuate slightly,
the race-gender schema does not change:
fragile, innocent, virginal daughters need to
be protected from black and brown men, who
are aggressive, dangerous, and hypersexual.
15
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Black feminist theories of
intersectionality provide useful analytics
for understanding this schema. Stemming
from a need to understand both the structures
of privilege and oppression that shaped
the lived experience of women of color,
intersectionality theory argues that regulatory
structures—such as race, gender, immigration
status—are always simultaneously evoked
and must be studied as such in order to
understand how oppressions are actually
lived (Crenshaw 1991). Elizabeth Spelman
(1988) demonstrates, for example, that in
the seemingly separate Aristotelian views
on women and black slaves, gender and race
were instead simultaneously evoked and
mutually reinforcing: gender, for example,
could only be read upon the body after a
race schema had already been established,
since black women were not women, but
slaves, and white women were female-
bodied individuals who were not black. In
the race-gender schema that posits black
men and Asian women at two ends of a
dichotomy, gendered racialization process
read Asian female bodies as fragile, pure,
and in needing of protection in a way that is
not evoked for Asian men or white women.
Similarly, black men are read as dangerous
and hypersexual in a gendered racialization
process that sees blackness and maleness as
mutually enforcing a deviant racialization.
As literature on intersectionality has shown,
race and gender structures are created and
maintained simultaneously, often regulating
most strictly female bodies, bodies of color,
and female bodies of color. For these second
generation Chinese American women,
these race-gender schemas prevented them
from pursuing their romantic interests
freely in a way that was made available to
second generation men. These gendered
16
racialization process also worked to limit
the possibilities for independent travel and
career exploration, as ‘weak and fragile’
daughters were often reminded that they
were incapable of facing the outside world
alone.
Sex and sexuality expectations set
by parents always implicitly demanded
heterosexuality, which became a serious
issue when the women were attracted to,
dating, or committed to other women.
Knowing her parents’ refusal to engage
in any discussion of non-heterosexual
sexualities, Jenny, 22, tells of being unable
to come out to her parents:
“This summer I went to pride
parade…My friend posted a picture
of it on Facebook and tagged me
in it. My dad saw it and sent me a
picture saying, what is this? My mom
actually called me twice that day, and
I just ignored it until 11 and just said I
was sleeping. [...] So I guess for going
to pride parade, they’re not going to
disown me. But if I were to come out
to them, then…I really don’t know
what would happen.”
As I later discuss, Jenny’s parents’
restrictions on her sexuality became the
foundation for Jenny’s career path in finance,
a direction that would lead Jenny toward the
financial independence she desired in order
to freely marry her significant other, at the
same time severing any ties to her parents.
While pressured to limit, hide, or refuse
their sexualities, the women I interviewed
simultaneously reported feeling endlessly
pressured to “marry, settle down, and
have children”: aspiring toward gendered
formations of the future, women’s
interactions with their parents often
revolved almost entirely around the issue of
finding a boyfriend. Helen, 22, reflects,
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
“My dad has expectations…he
thinks college is the place that I
need to be actively working to find
a rich husband. [...] He talks to my
aunt too and my aunt will be like,
you don’t want to be 40 and find
yourself without a rich husband. So
the questions now, when he comes
to visit, he asks about weight and
appearance, but the very first question
he asks me when he comes and he
hasn’t seen me in three months is like,
do you have a boyfriend?”
Cindy, 19, tells a similar story,
sarcastically recalling her parents’ demands
that she marry someone rich from school,
settle down, and have children: “They
bring it up every time I go home. They’re
like, when are you going to bring someone
home? [...] My dad will say things like,
‘What are you going to do if you don’t have
kids? What’s your life going to be like?’”
This sentiment in particular was pervasive
throughout interviews–interviewees
remarked again and again that their parents
would not only push them to date, marry,
and have children, but would remind them
that if they did not date, marry, and have
children, their lives would be meaningless.
For second generation men, parents would
remark that marrying and having children
would bring love and meaning into their
lives, while for second generation women,
parents would remark that marrying and
having children would be the meaning of
their lives. In other words, while men would
benefit from having a family, women, in
their ability to bring a family into the world,
were they themselves the benefit. Parents
were incredibly anxious to create the
conditions for wifehood and motherhood
by limiting the active pursuit of sex while
at the same time pushing for the pursuit of
partnership.
Parents had plenty of advice to give
regarding their daughters’ roles as wives
and mothers in the future. May, 20, laughed
while recalling her mother’s advice, “She
told me when I get a husband, I have to
remember that my husband is always in
charge, or like head of the family, to quote
her.” Catherine, 20, repeats her mother’s
advice: “When you’re a wife, you want to
make sure you cook a good meal for your
husband. [...] It’s definitely pretty gendered.
She’s into teaching me how to cook, there’s
been stuff about how when I have my own
family I need to learn how to take care of
them, cooking and cleaning and stuff.”
Cindy, 19, complains, “My dad will say
things...you’ll have to do the work, you’ll
have to do all the work when you have
kids. And I’ll be like why? Why can’t my
husband do half of it? And he’ll be like haha
you’re funny. That sort of reaction.”
While the women learned to cook and
clean, the men were free to pursue anything
and everything else. John, 22, even recalls
being reprimanded by his mother when he
attempted to learn how to cook because
there was ‘always going to be somebody’ to
do it for him. John was pushed to focus his
energies toward his career, but the women
were often pulled away from thoughts of
their career with reminders “marry, settle
down, and have children” and then “clean,
cook, and defer.” Seeing their daughters
as always-already wives and mothers,
parents were eager to remind daughters of
the right ways to take on their future roles
by regulating their present everyday lives:
daughters were pushed to cook, clean, and
defer to men even as young adults. In these
ways, parents’ gendered aspirations for
the future become bodily lived reality for
second generation women.
17
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Aspirational Limits
Feminist literature has long theorized
the constructed dichotomy that separates the
thinking, rational man from the emotional,
irrational woman (Wollstonecraft 1792,
Friedman 1963). In interviewees’ families,
aspirational landscapes were constructed
on this gendered terrain, often beginning
the moment daughters’ maturing bodies
brought along supposedly ‘uncontrollable’
emotions. As Emily, 20, recalls,
“When I was younger I didn’t see my
mom all that much cause she was so
busy, but we’ve gotten emotionally
closer…my dad, its it’s interesting, I
think I often went to him when I was
younger. Then he started telling me to
not be so sensitive, to toughen up…we
had a more conflicted relationship…
there’s always been kind of a tension
that’s still here today.”
In arguments with her father, Helen, 22,
told of a similar dynamic:
“The way my dad would end
arguments…to this day there’s this
dynamic that exists that is like, a
dismissal of me, not just because
I’m young, you know, someone
who he is ‘above’, but because I’m
a young girl, specifically. If I were
a boy, there would be some level of
mutual acknowledgement, or mutual
respect…when we had disagreements
he would not have dismissed them
with, ‘you’re just being an emotional,
silly little girl.”
Fathers were especially quick to dismiss
the women’s own thoughts and desires,
often refusing to recognize daughters as
fully rational subjects. As discussed, this
relationship between fathers and daughters
generally developed as the women matured
into young adulthood, beginning with
menstruation. In this way, the physical
18
embodiment of gender is intimately related
with more abstract gender concepts and
structures.
Conceiving of women as less
intellectual than men, parents were often
explicit about their belief that women were
not capable of particular career trajectories.
Recalls Jane, 21, of her decision to study
computer science: “My mom, the first
time I think I ever brought up computer
science she was like, that’s a boy’s thing.
It’s hard for women...she just thinks it’s
not for women.” Interviewees and their
parents often became involved in long-
lasting conflicts over questions of women’s
intellectual capabilities. Jenny, 22, bitterly
notes that she no longer picks up the phone
if her mother calls. She recalls, “My mom
has definitely said that men are naturally
smarter and more successful than women.
She says males are better at coding, things
like that. Her reasoning for thinking that
men are better than women is that all the top
executives and chefs and all the top people
in all the different fields are usually men.
And also,” Jenny scoffs, “she references
the Bible passage that says wives should
submit to their husbands.”
Parents often evoked the figure of
the intellectual male as a regulatory
mechanism for the women, even in families
where no male siblings were available for
direct comparison. In some cases, fathers
explicitly stated that they preferred their
sons, preferred raising boys, or would prefer
if their daughter was a male child instead.
Helen, 22, recalls of playing competitive
chess under her father’s guidance when she
was young: “I was one of very few women,
girls who were playing in the national
bubble, and that was always a thing...I
would come home from a tournament, and I
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
wouldn’t do well, and I would lose to some
boy, and he would be like you know, I wish
that boy was my son. [pause] Whenever I
didn’t win first and someone else won, it
was always like oh, well that’s expected.”
Parents prioritized the male child in
more implicit--but meaningful--ways
as well. Male children received more
attention, resources, and were often pushed
to achieve. Female children, on the other
hand, were reminded that their priorities
lay not in their career, but in their futures as
wives and mothers. As Cecelia, 21, notes,
“My parents—it’s mostly my mom—are
a lot more worried about my brother’s
career path than mine. For me, she wants
me to marry…marry someone with either
a similar or higher income than mine. She
doesn’t want for me to have a husband that
relies on me. She doesn’t want me to be the
breadwinner, which is weird.” Cindy, 19,
received similar direction for her future as
a wife:
“My parents would prefer me being
happily married with children and
maybe not as economically wealthy
or successful, than being super
successful but not having the family
or kids. […] I know my mom doesn’t
want me to make more than my
husband. Her main concern is that
you should be able to see each other
as equals, and it’s hard when there’s
financial disparity. She would much
prefer it if the guy made more money.
She feels it’s a good thing for a guy to
have, to bolster himself with.”
While explicitly reminding their
daughters how and what to present to
their husbands, often as early as the age
of five, parents were keen on making sure
their sons were given every opportunity to
flourish. In some cases, parents rationalized
this prioritization of their sons over their
daughters through their knowledge of
the U.S. race-gender schema, claiming
their Chinese sons would face severe
racialized emasculation as they attempted
to incorporate into the United States, while
their daughters would face no such barriers
in the U.S. Ellie, 22, recalls of her family
dynamic,
“My parents are far more involved in
my brother’s life, and that’s something
I’ve felt a bit of resentment over, cause
it’s not like you want your parents to
be control freaks over your life, but
it does feel weird that they treat him
differently in that way. They talk to me
about how it’s way harder for Asian
men to get into college than it is for
Asian women, they mention it a lot.
I don’t know if that’s true…they’re
just like, admissions have an obvious
bias against Asian boys, they’re
very conscious of that stereotype
that Asian boys are ‘effeminate’ or
whatever, and they think it’s not that
bad for Asian women. I have actually
had fights with them where I’m like, I
don’t understand where this is coming
from.”
In fact, many of the interviewees’
parents were well aware of the ways in
which their sons would likely be racialized
as weak, effeminate, and lacking in virility-
-a common experience for Asian men in
the U.S. (Espiritu 1992). Parents attempted
to counter this racialization by pursuing
masculinity, telling second generation men
to “sow their wild oats,” for example, and
by regulating, restricting, and demanding
femininity from second generation women.
Meanwhile, the women’s experiences as
raced, gendered, and sexualized bodies in
the U.S. went almost entirely unnoticed
by the parents. Only Elizabeth, 23,, noted
that her parents had informed her of the
different ways her bodies and behaviors
19
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
would be read in the U.S., warning her
that white men may try to pursue her due
to her racialization as exotic and oriental.
These dynamics reveal much about the
ways in which structural inequities are
reproduced and reified: in this case,
gendered racialization processes that render
Asian American women invisible mask
their experiences of gendered racialization
as well.
Dynamics of male favoritism often
produced feelings of resentment and
frustration through childhood, as Vanessa,
22, reflects:
“[T]he fact of the matter is my mom
always saw my brother as more
valuable. She sees me as more useful,
while my brother is more valuable.
When we were little kids, my mom
just doted on him and showed him
affection, emotional affection in way
that she didn’t show me. My mom,
she instinctively thinks, boys are the
ones you get to keep, the ones you
get to have and hold and girls always
already belong to their husband’s
family. They just keep the whole
operation running. So I just didn’t
get that kind of emotional affection,
emotional attention.”
These kinds of dynamics had direct
consequences for future outcomes. May,
20, describes of her family dynamic, for
example: “In recent years, definitely in the
past two three years, my parents have been
fighting about my brother’s future. They
have a lot more pressure and expectations
for him...I’m the female of the family,
of the siblings, so they have pretty low
expectations. My mom has said multiple
times like, [your brother] can support you
when he gets a job, or you can just works for
whatever [your brother] works for. She’ll
always want me to follow in his footsteps.”
20
For May, the reason for the difference in
treatment is clear--her parents expect that
her brother will need to sustain a family,
while May herself won’t need to at all. “So
in that way,” she says, “I guess I don’t need
as stable of a job, or like, as profitable of
a job.” Given the different futures May’s
parents desire for May and her brother,
May was raised with a different aspirational
landscape, creating the conditions for a
‘self-fulfilling prophecy’: “My mom was
always telling me--even today! She’s
always telling me to just take easy classes,
just take three classes, don’t stress yourself
out. But for [my brother] it’s always like,
be an econ[omics] major, get a job, apply
for internships, do all these things! And in
high school, it was like take all these honors
classes, but then for me it was like oh you
don’t have to take BC Calc, you can take
the lower calculus.”
Sometimes, restricting women’s
aspirational landscapes was this
straightforward: parents just directly asked
their daughters to limit their aspirations
in comparison to their brothers or other
men. For her brother, Annie, 20, noted
that her parents were very strict and held
high expectations: “They’d try to plan
things more out for him, like they made
him practice the viola.” But when it came
to herself, she says, “they didn’t really tell
me to practice. My schedule was a lot more
unstructured...my parents never looked
at my report card...if I were a parent, I’d
want to treat my child the way my parents
treated my brother.” Later, when Annie and
her brother were planning their careers,
Annie’s parents held high expectations for
her brother and pushed him to aim high. For
herself, however, as Annie recalls, Annie’s
parents were pulling her back:
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
“For a while I wanted to do grad
school and do like a PhD or whatever,
and my mom was like no, you can’t do
that, it’s going to take so much time
and you’re going to be thirty before
anything ever happens. And my
dad...my dad’s always talking about
working a job that doesn’t necessarily
make you the most money, just a job
that is repetitive and will make me
happy...not the ‘thinking’ jobs. My
mom’s always like, you might think
and search forever for something,
and you might find it in the end, but
it’s a lot of work, and maybe your
life would be more fulfilling if you
focused on more mundane things, like
your friends and family life, instead
of trying to reach some big goal.”
Perhaps most telling, Annie’s mother
pulls Annie away from a PhD for fear that
‘nothing will happen’ before thirty. What
she refers to is not exactly that ‘nothing’
will happen, but nothing of importance--
namely, marriage, childbirth, childrearing--
will happen before Annie hits thirty. This is
most unacceptable since Annie’s body is on
a time schedule to have and raise children.
Meanwhile, when parenting their male
children, parents reminded their sons
that high career aspirations for men were
essential, since women lacked ability. In
this conversation with Kevin, 21, convinced
that his parents had no gender biases, Kevin
becomes slightly confused when I ask if
his parents would be comfortable with him
staying home to raise his children:
Kevin: “If I were to be a stay-at-home
dad...um, my dad uh, would just
be worried about, our, my family’s
financial stability if my significant
other were to be fired from her job.”
Interviewer: “What if you were the
breadwinner and your significant
other was not working? Would
there be any worries about financial
stability?”
Kevin: “No, they’d be fine with that.”
Interviewer: “There’s not the same
concern of you getting fired?”
Kevin: “Um…[long pause] I think
there is a, I think they have a, they
place less of an emphasis on my
significant other working...but then
again it’s not something that they
expressly told me.”
Parents’ aspirational desires for the
second generation, those that imagined
their female children as future wives,
mothers, and home care-takers, created
an aspirational landscape upon which the
women’s everyday lives were regulated,
surveilled, and controlled. Parents regulated
their daughters’ appearances, movement,
and sexual expression, for example,
with hopes that their daughters would be
able to bring virginity and appropriate
caretaking behaviors to their husbands. In
this way, parents’ aspirational landscapes
structured the conditions of possibility for
the women’s futures, including by shaping
the women’s own aspirational desires.
May, 20, pointed out, for example, that the
lowered expectations that her parents held
for her in comparison to her brother created
a self-fulfilling prophecy, one in which
she fulfilled her parents’ expectations of
lowered female achievement after being
coached to “take it easy” with regards to
her educational attainment. Annie, 22,
decided to drop her pursuit of a PhD and
focus on obtaining a stable, 9-to-5 job that
would be relaxing, fulfilling, and allow her
to prioritize her future family. Elizabeth, 23,
changed the location of her internship on
Chinese human rights from Hong Kong to
the United States, refusing to let her parents
live in fear and worry over her safety. Later,
this decision paved the way for Elizabeth to
21
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
pursue a career in human rights laws of the
United States instead of China.
The Public is Private: Theorizing the
Aspirational Landscape
Aspirational landscapes both limit
and create the conditions of possibility
for women’s outcomes, many of which
are also measured by quantitative markers
of immigrant incorporation, such as
educational attainment and annual income.
However, examining the ways in which
gender concepts structure second generation
aspirations gives us a look at not only if
women were able to achieve markers,
but how they ended up achieving or not
achieving them, and whether or not they
wanted to achieve them in the first place.
Take, for example, the difference between
the two women’s trajectories that I illustrate
below, both which take them toward
paths of upward mobility and successful
achievement of incorporation markers.
Jenny, 22, who described her fear of
coming out to her parents, argued constantly
with parents who were adamantly anti-
gay–so much so, in fact, that Jenny took
a deal with her father that allowed her to
attend a university far away from home but
gave her father absolute authority over her
studies. Traveling across the states to attend
college, Jenny was able for the first time to
explore her sexuality in ways that she had
no access to in the past. When it came time
to choose a career path, Jenny realized that
the only way she would be able to marry
her significant other would be if she was no
longer financially dependent on her parents.
Making this her top priority, Jenny pursued
a career in investment banking–a job that
required every sort of sacrifice, including
Jenny’s personal values–but came away
22
with a big payoff. “All that matters is
financial independence,” Jenny explains.
The importance of Jenny’s financial
independence has increased drastically now.
Two years ago, Jenny’s younger sister came
out to her and felt terrified and paralyzed at
home, begging Jenny to find a way so that
they could detach themselves from their
parents. Jenny’s centering life goal, as she
explains to me, is to make as much money
as possible so that she can support both her
sister and herself, and she is well on her way
to doing so. Jenny now works at a big name
investment bank and takes larger and larger
pay raises each year. Quantitative measures
of second generation incorporation in mind,
Jenny really seems to have ‘made it.’
Helen, 22, pursues a career with similar
objectives in mind, although for entirely
different reasons. Recall that Helen was
raised under strict regulations set by her
father, who checked in on Helen’s weight,
dress, and relationship status every moment
he saw her. In Helen’s family, Helen’s
father became a toxic figure toward her
mother and younger sister, demanding
sex from Helen’s mother and “pink frilly
femininity” from her younger sister. After
blaming his multiple affairs on his wife’s
refusal to ‘put out’, Helen’s father divorced
the family and took the family’s money
along with him–leaving the family stranded
in the U.S., Helen’s mother unable to find a
job. The three women now have a motto, as
Helen repeats: “Always have your own job,
and always have your own bank account.”
Raised by her mother, Helen remembers
trying to do everything as her mother
asked–practicing piano, getting perfect
grades, and achieving in extracurriculars–
knowing that her mother only wished her
a life of financial independence so that she
 Aspirational Landscapes: Gendering the Chinese-American Second Generation
could be free to live her life as she wished.
At the prestigious university Helen now
attends, Helen reflects very seriously on the
‘model minority myth’, remarking that the
story looks different from a different angle.
Literature on migrant incorporation
has explored the ways in which the
second generation interacts with public
institutions, such as the school, church,
and the state. Set in the public sphere, the
stakes of these interactions are made legible
through quantitative data that measures
the achievement of success markers such
as educational attainment and household
income. In this project, I turn ‘inwards’
toward the private and everyday to examine
the ways that second generation women are
socialized in the home, within relationships
of the family. Using gender as an analytic, I
demonstrate that second generation women
are raised under strict bodily, behavioral,
and sexual regulation by their parents,
guided by aspirational landscapes that call
into being a future wife, mother, and family
caretaker. In this way, issues of the ‘private’
become public reality: second generation
migrant outcomes carry intimate ties to
the familial, the intimate, and the home.
By thinking through the everyday, migrant
incorporation outcomes become lived
realities, and the myth of a model minority
is just that – a myth.
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The Construction of Identities in an
Interfaith Sunday School
Will Davis
B.A. Sociology

This paper examines the construction of individual and group identities in a dual-faith
religious community. I draw on ethnographic, interview, and archival data collected
from an interfaith Sunday school wherein intermarried Jewish-Catholic couples come
together to educate their children in both faith traditions. On an individual level, I
find that actors rely on two dominant repertoires of cultural materials to construct
their religious identities, (1) a “100% both” dual identity repertoire, and (2) a choice-
based, self-determination repertoire. These identities find support in the organization’s
cultural production, which de-centralizes doctrinal belief in its definition of religion. I
also find that the organization imbues actors with a morally-charged “political” identity
as “interfaith ambassadors,” in addition to their traditionally religious identities. On
the societal level, I examine how the organization might be fruitfully situated within
discussions of secularization and pluralism. The dynamics revealed in my analyses
point to new possibilities for conceptualizing religious identities and communities and
raise pertinent questions about the integrative and creative potential of the pluralistic
social situation.

Introduction 2016). Similarly, the same report found that

While Jews and Catholics have been
marrying each other for some time, only
a select few of them have reached the all-
too logical conclusion that their offspring,
having two distinct parents, should also
have two distinct religions. Indeed we want
to ask, ‘but what can this even mean? What
would those kids believe? What would they
practice? Is a dual-faith, Jewish-Catholic
religious identity even possible?’
Before tackling such questions directly, it
helps to understand why they are important.
As of 2015, one-in-four currently married
U.S. adults had a spouse of a different
religious affiliation1 (Pew Research Center
one-in-four U.S. millennials claim to have
been raised in religiously mixed families, a
fact which forecasts a continued increase in
the previous measure as millennials marry
each other. With respect to the specific
religious populations mentioned above,
31% of all married Jews are intermarried
with non-Jews, and 39% of these non-Jews
are Catholics (Interfaith Family 2011).
Much of the past work surrounding
these trends—especially amongst scholars
of Judaism—has addressed concerns
about the fate of religious institutions in
the face of “challenges” like intermarriage
(Mayer 1985; Rebhun 2016). Although

1. This includes marriages where one spouse is unaffiliated while the other is affiliated, as well as unions across
Christian denominations.

25
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
such studies have debunked the notion that
churches and temples have grown weaker,
the feeling still pervades amongst religious
leaders that intermarriage is a danger and a
detriment. In the same way, a whole other
set of non-academic literature addresses not
institutional challenges, but the challenges
of the couples themselves. Intermarried
couples often come to internalize the
strife and strain of their religious leaders,
friends, family members, etc. as their
own, sometimes culminating in feelings
of crisis. One need only consider titles like
Mixed Blessings (1987) or If I’m Jewish
and You’re Christian, What are the Kids?
(1993) to guess at the therapeutic nature of
such books for the couples in question.
Speaking broadly, we can trace the
whole phenomenon of intermarriage and its
concomitant difficulties back to processes
of modernization and pluralization, which
allow people belonging to historically
separate social groups (e.g. Judaism and
Catholicism) to interact in the first place.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1995)
summarized the modern situation thus:
Modernity means a quantitative
as well as qualitative increase in
pluralization. The structural causes of
this fact are well known: population
growth and migration and, associated
with this, urbanization; pluralization
in the physical, demographic
sense; the market economy and
industrialization which throw
together people of the most different
kinds and force them to deal with
each other reasonably peacefully;
the rule of law and democracy which
provide institutional guarantees for
this peaceful coexistence.
The following study attempts (a) to
provide an explanation for how it should
be possible for one individual (a child of
26
intermarried parents) to have two faiths, (b)
to explain how such an individual’s identity
is constructed, and (c) to relate the process
of identity construction back to structure
and culture, broadly and locally construed.
I use as my evidence qualitative data
collected at the Chicago Interfaith Family
School, a Sunday school for the children
of intermarried Jewish-Catholic couples
who come together to educate their children
in both faith traditions. The specific case
leads us to the following five theoretical
questions, which will be systematically
answered in this paper:
1. How are religious identities
constructed?
2. How does doctrinal belief relate to
identity?
3. How does a religious education
program influence students’ senses of “who
they really are”?
4. How do internal structure and culture
interact with individual and group identity?
5. How does the structure of pluralistic
society interact with individual and group
identity?
Literature Review
This project sits at the intersection of
three significant bodies of sociological
thought revolving around intermarriage,
identity, and religious community,
respectively. However, limited attention
has been paid to the peculiar subject at
hand, wherein intermarried families have
formed a religious community to explore
the subject of identity.
Intermarriage
Research on American intermarriage
has been concerned with all sides of the
phenomenon, from (1) patterns of incidence
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
and selection to (2) causal factors to (3)
consequences among the families (Barron
1951). With regards to patterns of incidence,
scholars have examined changing trends
such as population percentages as well
as changing characteristics such as
denominational preference. For example,
scholar of American Judaism Uzi Rebhun
has demonstrated that Jewish-Catholic
unions in particular are on the rise in
comparison with Jewish-Protestant pairings,
thanks in part to a change in Catholic stance
on such matters in recent years (Rebhun
1999, 2016).
With regards to causal factors, scholars
have noted variance in intermarriage trends
according to factors such as “age, gender,
region of residence, type of locality, nativity
status, and education” (Rebhun 2016).
Correlations have been found between
premarital levels of religiosity/religious
identification and levels of intermarriage,
suggesting that the less one identifies with
one’s religion, the more likely one will be
to intermarry (Cila and Lalonde 2014; Lidz
1991; Pew Research Center 2016).
Most important to this study is past
work on the consequences of intermarriage,
which also focuses attention on questions
of religiosity and religious identification.
Here, however, the causal arrow changes
direction to imply that intermarriage
results in lower levels of religiosity and
weaker identification with one’s religion
(Kalmijn 1998; Pew Research Center 2016;
Rebhun 1999). Since intermarriage often
affects the entire household, the religious
identifications and religiosities of children
as well as parents are seen to be at stake.
Many studies have attempted to discern
patterns and causes for how and why children
of interfaith unions identify the ways that
they do (Lidz 1991). The child’s identity is
often posed as a problem to be resolved in
one of the following ways: either the family
will (1) choose one parent’s religion over
the other’s, (2) ignore religion altogether
and choose neither, (3) compromise and
adopt something like Universalism, or,
the least common strategy, (4) expose the
children to both religions, perhaps with
the eventual plan to allow them to make
up their own minds (Barron 1951). While
there has been some documentation in the
literature that this last option (“dual faith”)
is accompanied by strong commitment
among those who choose it, scholars
have speculated that raising children in
both religions is uncommon because of
additional strain on the parents. As Bruce
Phillips (2006) put it, “raising a child in two
religions is twice as much work as raising a
child in only one religion.”
Several significant gaps persist in
the intermarriage literature. For one, few
scholars have looked at intermarriage
using in-depth qualitative methods. While
numerous surveys have no doubt been
administered, the lived experiences of
interfaith couples and children has received
little attention outside the work of Egon
Mayer, a celebrated sociologist of American
Judaism who published one of the only
interview-based studies of intermarriage
in 1985 (Love and Tradition: Marriage
Between Jews and Christians). In it, he
presents interview evidence and applies
concepts from the sociology of families
to explain how couples work through
the difficulties of intermarriage (Phillips
2006). He also includes a section on the
commitments of children but slants heavily
toward a focus on the Jewish side of things,
addressing the extent to which the children
27
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
can be said to be Jewish (Mayer 1985).
While I follow in Mayer’s methodological
footsteps, I aim to shed light on a sub-
segment of the intermarried population that
he failed to address but which I believe to
be worthy of our attention, namely those
interfaith families who commit to raising
their children in both traditions.
Theoretical Application and Intervention
In the study that follows, I aim to
contribute to the existing literature on
intermarriage in three ways. First and most
basically, my study adds to the dearth of
qualitative treatments of the subject by
exposing and examining the rich cultural
system of a specific subpopulation of
intermarried families. Second, the case
of the Family School presents itself as an
outlier to many of the trends discovered
in the demographic literature. It stands as
a stark counterexample to the notion that
intermarriage is caused by or causes lower
levels of religiosity, seeing as many Family
School members take their faiths very
seriously and attend church and temple
very regularly. While I do not pretend to
challenge the existence of macro-level
trends that indicate the opposite, I do wish
to challenge the logics that surround them.
Third and most importantly, my study
contests the implicit assumption, present
in all prior work, which takes religious
identity to be a fixed “thing” (factor or
outcome) rather than an ongoing process
of negotiation. In treating religious identity
as a static variable, scholars have wholly
ignored the processes by which it is formed
and maintained via a negotiation of multiple
cultural repertoires and social bases. These
processes are precisely the objects of my
study.
28
Identity
The Poles of Identity
“Identity” is a deceivingly simple term
for a complex range of phenomena. The
question of “who I am” can encompass
“my sense of myself, others’ perceptions of
me, my reactions to others’ perceptions, the
social categories that attach themselves to
me, and [those] to which I attach myself,”
none of which none of which is perfectly
continuous across time and space (Lawler
2014). The concept of identity hinges
on an inherent paradox of sameness and
difference. One the one hand, identities
express sameness: I am the same as myself
from birth to death, and I am the same as
others who share my gender, race, ethnicity,
etc. On the other hand, identities express
difference: I am different from who I was,
and I am unique compared to others. This
fluctuation between poles of sameness/
difference and fixity/fluidity will prove to
be a guiding theme for this study.
Sociologists and social psychologists of
the past century have devoted more energy
to documenting difference than sameness
because, when observed empirically, there
is little about a person that remains the
same and much that varies according to
the environment. The view thus arose of a
fragmented self, which has been famously
conceptualized as a combination of “social
selves” (James 1890) and as an effect
produced by context-specific dramaturgical
presentations (Goffman 1959). According
to such a view, there is no stable core self
which continues across time and space;
instead there are many selves that result
from inhabiting many social roles.
It follows that while one cannot
scientifically observe an unchanging self,
one can still observe people as they talk
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
about their unchanging selves. In this vein,
narrative analysis, memory analysis, and
other approaches have recently been used
to understand the role of biography in self-
construction (Ammerman 2003; Clary-
Lemon 2010; Lawler 2014; Rosenthal
1997). These approaches attempt to
explain not only “what is now making up
one’s identity,” [italics added by me] but
also “how one became what one is,” all
in an attempt to account for the “whole”
individual—history and all—rather than
just the individual as an assemblage of
social roles (Rosenthal 1997). I maintain
that biographical and narrative analyses
can be consonant with the fragmented
conception of self if we recognize that
stories themselves are subject to change
based on the environment where they are
told.
Within sociology, then, one finds
perspectives capable of addressing
identity’s poles of sameness and difference.
We find sameness represented in the
biographical self and difference in the
fragmented self. While I maintain a
methodological agnosticism with regards
to the existence of any stable, core self, I
take seriously the fact that people perceive
themselves to be continuous and relatively
stable. The tensions brought about by
poles of sameness and difference underlie
the formation of each one of the identities
discussed in this paper.
Religious Identity
A religious identity signals membership
in a social category like race or ethnicity. In
addition, being Jewish or being Catholic also
implies membership in a close-knit group
such as a congregation or a church, on top of
adopting the proper social-categorical label.
Such close-knit groups provide the individual
with the necessary symbolic materials for
identity construction and—unlike race or
ethnicity—for the construction of a system
of meaning, moral order, and orientation on a
cosmic scale (Berger 1967; Durkheim 1995
[1912]; Luckmann 1967).
Despite the traditionally close
association between one’s religious
identity and one’s church or temple, recent
scholarship has begun to explore religious
identities which take up other symbolic
content and boundaries as their constitutive
bases. Studies of interfaith activists groups
(Yukich and Braunstein 2014) and Christian
meditators (Mermis-Cava 2009) have
yielded rich new findings about people
constructing “pluralist religious identities”
along lines of tolerance-vs.-intolerance rather
than, say, Lutheran-vs.-Baptist. While we
still want to call such identities “religious,”
they often lose their traditional religious
character when subjected to “aggregative”
or “integrative” strategies that combine or
mix together packages of religious materials
into “something not immediately identifiable
as belonging to any single religious faith”
(Yukich and Braunstein 2014).
The interfaith identities of the actors
I studied at the Family School will
evince a similar disregard for traditional
differentiation along lines of strictly Jewish
or strictly Catholic group membership.
Instead, the Family School engages in a
project of complex cultural innovation and
production that allows for multiple religious
identities to flourish at once.
Identity Salience
Everett Hughes was perhaps one of the
first to articulate the crucial idea that, within
a single person, some roles, statuses, or
29
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
selves could be more important than others.
Hughes termed these “master statuses” that
could “overpower” other status-determining
aspects of self (Hughes 1945). This question
of how disparate identities manifest across
situations and variously affect the self-
concept has been conceptualized by recent
social-psychological scholarship in terms
of identity salience (Callero 1985; Stryker
1968). According to Callero, we might
conceptualize identity salience as a hierarchy,
with those identities most affecting the self-
concept positioned at the top, and those
least, at the bottom (Callero 1985). While
much of this study is devoted to describing
the identities in question, identity salience
enters the picture in order to ground these
descriptions in their respective relevances
for the actors in question.
Theoretical Approach and Intervention:
Identity and Culture
Following Ann Swidler, I understand
culture as “a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories,
rituals, and world-views, which people
may use in varying configurations to solve
different kinds of problems” (Swidler 1986).
Furthermore, following Paul DiMaggio,
I then understand cultural analysis to be
an effective method for probing into how
people solve the problem of their individual
and collective identities (DiMaggio 1997).
Swidler refers to all cultures as “tool
kits” or “repertoire[s] . . . from which actors
select differing pieces for constructing lines
of action” (Swidler 1986). Since identities,
even in their sameness, are always actively
produced and played, we can easily extend
Swidler’s conception to include identity-
construction as a “line of action.” In what
follows, I rely heavily on the term “repertoire”
to refer to a specific assemblage or subset of
30
cultural materials, such as phrases, values,
activities, beliefs, etc., that serve to render
specific identities coherent.
In addition to providing cultural content,
a repertoire delimits, so to speak, the form
of an identity by guiding the process of
boundary-work by which groups distinguish
themselves from other groups. The
importance of symbolic boundary-work in
identity formation has been well-documented
in the cultural sociology of religion (Gurrentz
2014; Lichterman 2008; Mermis-Cava 2009;
Smith 1998). Following the subcultural
identity theory of Christian Smith, which
will be further elaborated below, I take
symbolic boundary-making to be central to
the task of establishing collective as well as
individual religious identities and find that
this task is in fact abetted by the conditions
of pluralistic society.
Religion
The Meso-Level: Moral Community,
Interaction Ritual, and Subcultural Identity
To begin with a foundational sociological
proposition, as articulated neatly by Christian
Smith, “the human drives for meaning and
belonging are satisfied primarily by locating
human selves with social groups that sustain
distinctive, morally orienting collective
identities” (1998). Most famously formulated
by Durkheim (1912), this elementary
principle of the “moral community” has
always taken religion as its example par
excellence. In Durkheim’s words, “a unified
system of beliefs and practices relative to
sacred things, that is to say, things set apart
and forbidden—beliefs and practices which
unite into one single moral community called
a Church, all those who adhere to them”
(1912). The utility of the moral community
concept is well-insulated in the fields of
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School

cultural anthropology and sociology. Yet, terms of boundary-work because it strives

when we introduce our case of the Family to be inclusive of all paths, all the while
School to this lineage of thought, we run maintaining its authenticity as both a Jewish
into a problem: if a moral community entails and a Catholic institution. I claim that
“a unified system of beliefs and practices,” boundary work is still important for group
what happens when a group’s beliefs and identity by demonstrating how boundaries
practices are ostensibly dis-unified or even are drawn not along traditional lines of
contradictory, as would seem to be the case doctrine, belief, or practice, but along lines
in a Jewish-Catholic Sunday school? Is such of acceptance-vs.-non-acceptance.
a group still a moral community? Do the
individuals agree on what is sacred? Do they The Macro-Level: Modernization,
emote around the same symbols? What is Secularization, and Pluralism
going on? Having summarized the classical meso-
To best handle these questions, I look to level treatment of religious communities,
the work of Christian Smith and his extensive we now turn to the macro-level. Two
“subcultural identity theory” for religious questions guide our inquiry: (1) What is
groups (1998). The theory encompasses both the relation of the individual to modern
meso- and macro-level propositions. (The society? (2) What is the fate of religion in
macro-level will be addressed below.) As modern society? Through the late twentieth
for the meso-level, Smith writes, “collective century, the answers to these questions
identities depend heavily for existence on were relatively uniform and clear: the
contrast and negation. Social groups know individual was increasingly alienated from
who they are in large measure by knowing the collective and religion was bound for
who they are not.” According to the theory, obsolescence at the hands of secularism.
the more groups draw and police negative Such seeming pessimism thoroughly
symbolic boundaries via a process called lines the work of both Durkheim and
boundary-work, the more they know who Weber, who pinpointed as culprits such
they are, and, finally, the stronger and more modernizing processes as the division of
satisfying their moral solidarity will be. This labor, the differentiation and rationalization
boundary-work can operate around cultural of institutions, and the development of
materials of all kinds and thus is not limited new technologies (Durkheim 2014 [1893];
to traditional religious symbols or codified Weber 1958 [1905]).
beliefs. In the mid-twentieth century, the
classical logics of alienation2 and
Theoretical Application and Intervention secularization3 were taken up again by
on the Meso-Level Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who
The Family School is an especially foresaw, in the processes of differentiation
tricky (and thus worthy) case to address in and mass communication, the breakdown
2. I take “alienation” here to mean, as mentioned, the individual’s alienation from the collective. Berger deploys
the term alienation quite differently, though, in The Sacred Canopy to signify the alienation of humans from their
awareness of their own world-producing potential and activity.
3. I will, however, follow Berger’s definition of secularization: “the process by which sectors of society and
culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols” (Berger 1967: 107).

31
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
of traditional social structure and meaning,
previously embedded in what Berger
called “sacred canopies” (Berger 1967)
and what Luckmann called the “traditional
sacred cosmos” (Luckmann 1967). One
of the mechanisms that was to tear open
the canopy was the weakening of what
Berger calls its “plausibility structure,”
defined as “the social context in which
any cognitive or normative definition of
reality is plausible” (Berger 2014). In the
ideal-typical premodern society, religious
meanings and definitions were reinforced
by nearly all the central institutions and
significant others in one’s life. In contrast,
modern Western society has undermined
the ability of any one social base to
define reality and provide meaning for the
individual, instead segmenting life into
the specialized realms of politics, religion,
health, education, recreation, family,
work, etc. Modern persons are left to flit,
often nervously, between “dehumanized”
institutions whose “instrumental-rational”
logics do not overlap and leave the
individual without any way to tie them
together into a coherent worldview (Berger
and Luckmann 1995). The end result is that
“personal identity becomes, essentially, a
private phenomenon” (Luckmann 1967).
Since these differentiated realms
of life necessitate and provide a
diverse array of thoughts and beliefs,
individuals must confront (or rather, are
confronted by) worldviews that are not
their own. What concerns sociologists,
however, is not just this diversity but
rather pluralism—a situation in which
a diversity of people coexist peacefully.
In Berger’s words, “Pluralism is a social
4. Later in his life, Berger reneged on some of his positions, including his early hard stance on secularization,
and joined “the new paradigm.”
32
situation in which people with different
ethnicities, worldviews, and moralities
live together peacefully and interact with
each other amicably” (2014). In Berger’s
original formulations, he speculated
that the pluralistic situation would lead
to the decline of religiosity and would
undermine religious groups’ ability to
render their particular (or universal) world
plausible (Berger 2014; 1967). Berger saw
modernization as confirming yet again the
prophecy implied by Weber and Durkheim
that the Western world was headed toward a
secular reality devoid of the meaningfulness
and embeddedness humans crave.
Such a bleak picture, for better or
for worse, fell out of fashion amongst
sociologists in the late twentieth century
given copious empirical evidence
demonstrating that religion was, in fact, not
on the decline but rather on the rise (Berger
2014). In 1993, R. Stephen Warner hailed
the arrival of a “new paradigm” in the field
positing a net-neutral or even a net-positive,
growth-based picture of the modern
religious landscape. To paraphrase, ‘maybe
modernity is good for religion after all!’ The
new paradigm has come to include several
instantiations: rational choice theories,
which lean upon the age-old metaphor of the
free market and claim that religious groups
thrive on competition (Iannaccone 1994;
Stark and Finke 2000); subcultural theories
of symbolic group formation (Smith 1998);
and the intermediary institutional theory of
none other than Berger himself (Berger and
Luckmann 1995; Berger 2014).4 All such
theories have come to view the pluralist
situation as a productive force that creates
new possibilities for religious actors to
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
reclaim, reinvigorate, and strengthen their
“traditional ways of life” (Smith 1998).
Having now introduced Christian
Smith tangentially multiple times, it is now
prudent to examine his aforementioned
subcultural identity theory (1998), which
entails an even more radical break with
the secularization thesis. According to
Smith, people are perhaps more drawn to
religion now than in previous eras; and
religion, in turn, is perhaps better equipped
to thrive than was previously thought.
First, pluralistic modernity provides
an abundance of options for religious
commitments, all of which are legitimate
given the modern prioritization of choice
over ascription. Second, Smith argues that
modernity’s crisis of overarching meaning
is actually irrelevant because all people
really need is a single “reference group,”
such as a religious community, to render
their beliefs meaningful. It turns out people
do not need a “sacred canopy”—“sacred
umbrellas” will do. Third, Smith argues
that modernity’s differentiating power
and market-orientation allow for a rich
ecosystem of religious subcultures, which
are made all the stronger by virtue of
having each other against which to define
themselves. Such diversity and strength
would not be possible outside of our
pluralistic situation.
Returning one last time to the work of
Berger and Luckmann, the concept of an
intermediary institution5 refers simply to an
institution which “mediate[s] between the
individual and the patterns of experience
and action established in society.” They
allow the individual to “actively contribute
5. The concept was originally formulated by Durkheim in The Division of Labor in Society. This initial formula-
tion of les corps intermédiaires concerned not so much the individual’s sense of meaning or moral order but rather
her ability to effectively participate in civic and economic life through such groups as labor unions (Greve 2007).
to the production and processing of the
social stock of meaning” (Berger and
Luckmann 1995). While this scheme,
with its emphasis on overarching order,
seems but a sly reincarnation of the bygone
“sacred canopy,” its saving grace lies in
the following corollary: precisely because
modernity has differentiated meaning
systems so heavily that individuals must
choose among them, so modernity has also
differentiated specialized meaning systems
to help people choose among the meaning
systems! These are the intermediary
institutions, manifest in the psychotherapy
clinics, the self-help seminars, and the
local churches and temples of America.
The individual participating in such
institutions as these chooses to participate
and learns how to make her life meaningful
in the face of the confounding disarray of
instrumentally-motivated institutions that
confront her.
Theoretical Application and Intervention
on the Macro-Level
I aim to situate my claims about the
collective identity of the Family School
steadfastly within the “new paradigm,” all
the while retaining insights from the original
work of Berger and Luckmann. Their
original concepts of “plausibility structure,”
the “secularization of consciousness,” and
“the privatization of personal identity” will
prove useful in explaining how the Family
School renders worldviews plausible, as
well as what those worldviews contain and
entail. As for the more creative view of
pluralistic modernity, I draw significantly
from the later work of Berger and Luckmann
33
The Chicago Journal of Sociology

on intermediary institutions and again on the case of religious education, it is best

the work of Christian Smith on subcultural for the whole family to be involved. Thus
identity. I bring these insights to bear on the children’s classes, with the exception
the Family School by suggesting that it of eighth grade, are taught by the parents
coheres and maintains itself by symbolic on a rotating basis. The Family School also
distinction and by offering itself up as a identifies itself as part of a “grassroots social
unique intermediary institution tailored to a movement” (Miller 2014) that comprises
very specific population within the religious similar interfaith programs in New York
landscape. City and Washington DC8, where a similar
pedagogy is practiced.
Background The children’s educational program
The Chicago Interfaith Family School guides students from kindergarten through
(the Family School, for short)6 is best eighth grade. The teachers draw on
introduced simply as “a religious education an extensive curriculum developed by
program that teaches children of Jewish founding member and current eighth grade
and Catholic parents about both faiths” instructor Patty Kovacs. According to the
(Yednak 2008). Currently, the organization Family School’s website, the curriculum
utilizes the facilities of a private Catholic acts “as a toolkit for living fully in an
elementary school located in Chicago’s interfaith family,” and is “designed to foster
West Loop for its classes and events. The a religio-cultural literacy for understanding
Family School was founded by a small, the similarities and differences between
already-existing group of young Jewish- Judaism and Catholic Christianity.” As
Catholic intermarried couples who would Patty told me, she designed the curriculum
meet periodically to discuss common issues to be developmentally appropriate for each
such as disagreements with parents, in- grade level, drawing on her training in
laws, and local clergy or questions about psychology and as a school counselor to
their faiths. As the story goes, the dialogue inform her writing. In the early childhood
group ran strong for about five years7 until years, this translates to learning about the
the member couples began having children, holidays, rituals, and canonical stories
provoking the question, “how do we raise of both traditions. In the later years, the
the kids?” Taking matters into their own lessons gravitate toward the interwoven
hands, the group came together to resolve histories of both traditions as they played
such a question and, in 1993, the Family out from ancient to modern times. By the
School was born. time students reach the eighth grade (the
The Family School derives its name grade level I was able to observe), the focus
from its pedagogy, which holds that, in shifts explicitly to ethics and social justice.
6. The Family School’s name and location have not been anonymized, both at the request of my primary con-
tacts and in order to preserve the meaning and associations that gather around the term “Family.”
7. The dialogue group continued to run strong alongside the Family School until it became inactive in 2013.
8. To be clear, the programs on the east coast, while similar, are not branches of the Family School. They each
have their own names and organizational infrastructures. There is only one Family School. There is, however,
an organization call the Union School, which takes after the Family School’s model to serve Chicago’s suburban
communities.

34
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
The implications of this final turn will be
discussed below; at present it suffices to
say that the Family School seeks to provide
its students with both the granularity of a
faith-based cultural education as well as the
depth of a moral education.
Data and Methods
Methodological Approach and Nature of
the Data
In this paper I draw on ethnographic,
interview, and archival data, collected and
analyzed largely in that order. Since my
research question concerns how identities
are constructed and understood in a specific
space, I chose to use qualitative methods for
the depth and nuance they can provide.
The first step in procuring the
ethnographic and interview data was the
characteristic quest for access. Since I had
no prior affiliation to the Family School, not
to mention that I claim neither the Jewish
nor the Catholic tradition as my own, it
was only by a stroke of luck and a series
of helpful hands that I obtained access to
the site. Through an acquaintance at another
faith-based organization in Chicago, I was
introduced to a former Family School
parent; through her, I was introduced to
David Kovacs, who is a founding member,
one of the eighth grade instructors, and
husband to Patty Kovacs, mentioned above.9
Together, these two graciously became my
primary contacts and informants throughout
the ethnographic process, informing me of
class meeting times and making suggestions
for where to mine for useful data.
Per the Kovacs’ suggestion and once I
obtained parental consent, I began sitting
in on the eighth grade class, which meets
9. The Kovacs requested that I use their real names in this paper. All other names have been anonymized to
protect privacy.
roughly every other week. The ethnographic
portion of my data consists of detailed
field notes from five eighth-grade class
sessions, each lasting around 1.5 hours, one
interfaith service lasting 1 hour, one adult
education dialogue session lasting 1 hour,
and one potluck event which I observed
intermittently for 1 hour, making for a
total of roughly 10.5 hours of participant-
observation over a span of three months.
While my observation keyed in on the
eighth grade class, I was also able to briefly
observe the adults in a dialogue session
and interfaith service I attended. The
Family School community on the whole
currently consists of 80 distinct families
and around 15 distinct couples who do not
yet have children. This translates to 120
active students in grades K-8, 12 of whom,
along with the 3 instructors, make up the
specific ecosystem of the eighth grade class.
Attendance in class by the students was
variable but never dropped below 7 during
my time there. The ecosystem of the eighth
grade class would also periodically change
on days where guest speakers were invited
to come and share, as was the case during
two of the sessions I observed.
The nature of my time in the field
technically falls under the banner of
participant-observation. However, though
I did participate in small talk and assist
with minor tasks before and after class, my
methods were on the whole imbalanced
toward observation. When class was in
session, I sat by myself at a table to the side
of the room with a clear view of what was
happening and only spoke when prompted,
which rarely occurred. Such a set-up turned
out to be ideal because it made for minimal
35
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
obtrusion and simultaneously allowed me
to take extremely detailed jottings on my
laptop in real-time. On the one occasion
where I sat in on the interfaith service
being held in the school’s gymnasium,
my methods slanted back slightly toward
participation given the nature of collective
singing and recitation.
The second portion of my data consists
of semi-structured interviews. In order to
glean as complete a picture of the social
setting as possible, I wanted to hear from at
least one person occupying each of the roles
within the Family School: student, parent/
teacher, organizer, and clergy. Among
students and parents, I solicited volunteers
via an email listhost and in person during
a community-wide potluck after class one
Sunday morning. I limited the student pool
to those in the current eighth grade class and
the parent pool to those with a child either
currently attending the eighth grade or who
had recently graduated. Among the eighth
grade instructors and the current partnering
rabbi, I simply reached out directly to
schedule meeting times. The interviews
ranged from 10 minutes to 2 hours in length
depending on the respondent’s role. The
final dataset consists of interviews with 13
respondents, which made for a culminating
5.5 hours of interview audio.
Interviews were conducted either in
person in the privacy of an empty classroom
at the elementary school or over the phone.
I employed a semi-structured approach,
asking open-ended questions and then
allowing respondents to guide conversation
so long as it was relevant, while also
asking clarification questions on important
points. The interview guides varied slightly
depending on the respondent’s role. In all
cases, the interviews were audio-recorded
36
and transcribed verbatim and in full.
It should here be noted that my biases
and my position as a researcher in the
space may have influenced the nature of the
ethnographic and interview data collected.
While I do not think it possible to access
a person’s unadulterated experience or non-
performative “truth” in any social situation,
I do think it important to delineate a few
exceptional circumstances that may have
interfered with the process of painting
an honest picture. First, many Family
School members are keenly aware of the
sociological interest that an interfaith
organization generates and expressed to
me some suspicions about researchers
misrepresenting interfaith life as confusing
or detrimental to those involved, specifically
the children. It is thus possible that the
actors were inclined to describe the Family
School in an especially positive light so
as to guard against the risk of unfavorable
interpretation on my part. Second, my own
Protestant religious background as well as
my sociological training predisposed me
to carry certain assumptions about religion
(namely, what it is and is not) into what I
observed and heard. While I attempted to
bracket these lenses, I, like any subject,
am not immune to intensely perspectival
seeing and thus imagine that many of my
assumptions and interpretive tendencies
influenced the field notes I took down and
the questions I asked. Third, I made a point to
treat the actors in the space as co-producers
of knowledge with me and to keep them
informed throughout the data collection
process. This attitude on my part as well as
the curiosities of some of the actors resulted
in certain informants becoming surprisingly
interested and invested in the project along
with me, leading them to lend me ideas
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
and reading recommendations along the
way. Multiple times, Patty even offered to
sit down with me over coffee to “develop
a framework.” Such enthusiasm may have
disposed certain actors to generalize about
their experiences more abstractly than
they would have if speaking to someone
occupying a non-academic role.
The third portion of my data is a set of
archival materials produced by the Family
School’s core members and organizers
for use in instructional or promotional
capacities. Paper materials consisted
largely of hand-outs I received while sitting
in on class: one diagram/table constructed
during class, four poems or songs by
external authors which were read during
class, two agglomerations of students’
in-class writings, one interfaith service
program/bulletin, and one year-long class
schedule. The digital materials consisted of
the written content on the Family School’s
website; excerpts from an extensive, 318-
page book of curriculum that doubles as an
introduction to the school’s mission, written
by Patty and David; and a series of ten short
YouTube videos about the Family School or
interfaith life totaling roughly 44 minutes.
The videos were selectively transcribed
based on relevant quotations. I obtained the
class materials and the pdf of the curriculum
book directly from Patty and David either in
class or via email, while the online content
is publicly available.
Analytical Approach
I employed relatively uniform coding
strategies to each of my datasets. Each
process began with open coding for patterns
and concluded with a more pointed reading
of the data for their relation to the original
question. In the ethnographic and interview
datasets, I read through each set of field
notes and each transcript four times: twice
without imposing substantive categories and
twice with certain categories in mind. First,
I would read for notable moments of any
kind; second, to discern recurring patterns;
third, having reflected the recurring patterns
back onto the data, for any loose evidence
that belonged with them; and fourth, for the
original question of religious identity. I then
compiled codes and outlined chronological
structures of the events I witnessed. In
the archival dataset, my methods were
largely identical with regard to the written
materials. The exceptions include the 318-
page book of curriculum and the YouTube
videos. Seeing as the former item consists
mainly of lesson plans for parent-teachers,
I did not deem it relevant to close-read the
whole book. However, nestled before the
grit of the curriculum, the first 79 pages of
the book, which serve as an introduction to
new parents by answering commonly asked
questions, proved valuable and amenable to
the four-step close-reading process. Finally,
the content analysis of the YouTube videos
required an intermediate step between data
and code wherein I would watch them three
times each, paying attention to different
aspects each time. First, I would focus on
the dialogue and selectively transcribe
notable quotations; second, I would mute
the audio and pay attention solely to
images, open coding for types; and third,
I would watch for the narrative structures
of the videos as told, frame by frame, by
the writers and editors. After having taken
down notes on these three aspects of the
videos, I submitted these notes to the
original four-step reading process outlined
above in order to come away with a set of
usable codes.
37
The Chicago Journal of Sociology

My primary codes functioned in two Family School is to examine, largely at

ways. First, I understood them to be elements
that related one “specific event, incident,
or feature . . . to other events, incidents, or
features” via comparison (Emerson, Fretz,
and Shaw 2011). Second, they served
as links between the raw data and what
would become my analytic categories and
themes. After compiling codes from the
three datasets, all the while taking down
in-process memos, I then began a process
of meta-coding, first via “local integration”
(Weiss 1994) of patterns and themes into the
subsections of this report. This was followed
by “inclusive integration” (Weiss 1994)
of patterns and themes into a unified, if
somewhat complicated, narrative revolving
around the analytical axis of “identity.”
Results
The results sections are organized so
as to start at the level of the individual and
move gradually outward to the level of the
classroom, the community, and finally to the
level of Western society. I have organized
my findings under the following five
subheadings: (1) repertoires of religious
identity, (2) the treatment of belief and the
definitions of religion, (3) the construction
of political identity, and (4) group identity
and the Family School as a product of
pluralism.
face-value, how the actors talk about their
identities. In the following section, I use a
cultural lens to analyze speech about identity
processes and find that actors alternate
between two dominant repertoires to
understand their religious identities as shaped
by the Family School, (1) “being both,” and
(2) self-determination.10 The first repertoire
draws on metaphors of familial heritage and
bilingualism. The second repertoire draws
on metaphors of self-discovery, conscious
decision-making, continual questioning,
and fluidity. The repertoires are created
and maintained via ongoing narrative self-
construction and serve to uphold the two
poles of identity, sameness and difference,
within a single self.
Section 1: Repertoires of Religious
Identity
In my eight years of Family School, I
have learned what it means to be two
different religions.
– Regan, Class of 2011
We’re not raising kids up to be Jewish
and Catholic, we’re raising kids up
to know Judaism and Catholicism
and then make their own decision
and chart their own way. And omni-
religion, multi-religion, one religion,
no religion—they’re all valid.
– David, eighth grade instructor

Introduction to Section 1 The “Being Both” Repertoire

The first and most obvious step toward The first repertoire essentially affirms a
understanding identity construction in the dual-faith identity, and is best characterized

10. While the dual-faith and self-determination repertoires were the dominant ones, it should be noted that they
were not the only conceptions I came across. Some metaphors fell out of the purview of these repertoires. For
instance, a few actors alluded to their interfaith identities as a “middle space,” a “third religion,” or as “not really
either.” Yet still the self-determination repertoire and, to a lesser extent the “being both” repertoire, hold the power
of integration and finality, allowing for multiple, scattered, and at times contradictory notions to exist at once,
even within the same person.

38
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School

by the phrase, “being both.”11 While not all
actors used the verb “to be” when describing
themselves, those who did not would say
something along the lines of, “I do both; I
come from both; I am conversant in both.”
This repertoire relates the experience of
being both to that of being bicultural,
relying on the two powerful metaphors of
heritage and bilingualism.
Remembering that the Family School
is specifically designed for families with
one Jewish and one Catholic parent, it is
not surprising that actors, especially the
parents, would tend toward explaining their
thought processes in terms of passing down
two heritages. As one mother told me, “the
concept was that we thought [the kids]
would be both with an emphasis on the
commonality between the two religions and
. . . perhaps a knowledge of what each of us
were brought up as” [italics added].
Another example, which comes from a
promotional video for an upcoming Family
School documentary, does well to convey
the emotional significance of the heritage
metaphor. The video consists of shots of
parents and children sitting together in
pews at Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church
while an old Jewish hymn is played on the
cello. In the middle of the video, the camera
focuses on a young girl looking up lovingly
at her mother, and we hear the overlaid
voice of Rabbi Abigail, the Family School’s
supporting rabbi, chime in:
And for the families raising their kids
with both Judaism and Catholicism
to be able to hear this melody that’s
part of their hearts and souls, to just
interweave these parts of their lives
and these heritages, is such an honor
and so beautiful.
This metaphor hinges on an awareness
of the past and an appreciation for roots that
one might expect in an ethnic identity. For
immigrants, stories of memory, history, and
place play crucial constitutive roles (Clary-
Lemon 2010; Nagel 1994). Memory must
be continually recalled and reimagined
because such populations no longer have
direct access to those histories and places.
Not only that, but the histories are in danger
of being lost or subsumed by the new culture
into which the populations have entered.
One of the functions of the Family School,
then, is to affirm the pasts and histories of
both partners in an interfaith couple, and
thus, both heritages.12
The second metaphor I frequently
came across within the larger “being
both” repertoire analogizes the dual-faith
experience to being bilingual. As the
Kovacs write in the curriculum book, “We
are teaching religio-cultural literacy, the
ability to be conversant in two faiths.” In
learning about the holidays, traditions,
songs, rites, and stories of both Judaism and
Catholicism, students of the Family School
can proudly proclaim to be literate in both:
they can read, they can speak, they can
listen, and they can get by in settings where
either is spoken—in church or in temple.
In a promotional video, an interfaith-
serving rabbi is heard saying, “I’ve known
a lot of kids who grow up in bilingual
households, so I think the same thing is in
play when you’re learning two faiths.” And

11. The phrase entered the Family School’s lexicon through the title of Susan Katz Miller’s book Being Both:
Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family, which has a wealth of insights and data for readers who are
interested in learning more about the nationwide interfaith movement beyond the Family School.
12. This therapeutic function of the Family School is a central subject in Section 4 of the results.

39
The Chicago Journal of Sociology

in a testimonial, a veteran Family School actors, in adopting metaphors that align

mother writes, with what is known about ethnic identities,
have demonstrated sociological intuitions
We groped toward Family School, about the necessary interplay between their
where all was equal, all was fair, and
biographical and fragmented selves.
all was fluent in two mothertongues.
Life was good. L’chaim, [my son]
tells me. In English or in Hebrew, life The Self-Determination Repertoire
was good. In contrast (but not necessarily
in contradiction) to the “being both”
The bilingual metaphor resembles and repertoire, the second repertoire casts
complements the heritage metaphor in being religious identity as, above all else, a
an analog to ethnic or bicultural identities. matter of self-determination. It says, “I am
Just as a first-generation immigrant must what I choose to be; I am unresolved; I am
learn to negotiate life in two languages, so unlabeled.” It surfaced in my data just as
too must an interfaith individual learn to often as the “being both” repertoire. When
negotiate life in two religious languages. deploying this repertoire, actors would
What the bilingual metaphor adds to the use phrases like, “conscious decision,”
heritage metaphor, though, is a sense of “options,” “unresolved questions,” “fluid,”
the present. Interfaith individuals not only or “changing and evolving.” The following
descend from two social worlds: they learn examples are representative of the way
to live in two social worlds, each with actors would speak about choice:
their own languages, norms, and demands
on their subjecthood. The phenomenon of [Our parents] understood the human
right of choice. They wanted us to
alternating between different symbolic tool- explore. To find our own identity.
kits depending on the cultural or linguistic Because a persona taken on by
context has been well-documented in obligation is not a true identity.
-Winston, Class of 2007, from the
literature on bi-ethnic and bi-cultural curriculum book
identities (Chen, Benet-Martinez, and Bond
2008; Phinney 1990; Phinney et al. 2001). Is identity fixed or are we going to
accept that it’s fluid?13
The concept fits rather well when overlaid -Patty Kovacs, eighth grade
onto our case. Interfaith individuals can be instructor
said to alternate between the Jewish and
Catholic tool-kits depending on whether The self-determination repertoire
they find themselves in temple or in church, emphasizes free-thinking, authenticity, and
or, on Mom’s side of the family or Dad’s individual choice. Parents see themselves
side. It would thus seem that Family School as doing something good for their children
13. While Patty’s usage of the term “fluid” might tempt us into applying queer theory to our case by saying
something like, “religious identity is performative,” we ought to resist such a temptation. Performativity in queer
theory posits the constitution of self above all by performing a gender identity, with the emphasis laid on the
interactive and presentational dimensions of the process. In our case, however, interactional and embodied per-
formance matters much less than cognitive choice, meaning identities are fluid only insofar as choices can be
reassessed and changed. While I still characterize religious identity as a doing, the element of presenting as Jewish
or Catholic or fluid is not so important.

40
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School

in providing them with the ability to choose
between, at first, the two religions of their
heritages. Later on, parents told me, they
would also feel okay if their children
expanded their horizons beyond Judaism
and Catholicism—“as long as it was their
choice.” The feeling pervaded (and was
reinforced in class) that only individual
choices endow identities with authenticity
and reality.
The element of choice in constituting
modern religious identity is well-accepted
in the sociological literature (Ammerman
2003; Berger 2014; Luckmann 1967; Smith
1998) and perhaps best addressed in the
early work of Thomas Luckmann (1967).
In The Invisible Religion, he claims that
modernization brought about a massive
shift from a public religiosity to a private
one, from an obligatory sacred cosmos to
a nonobligatory one, and from an ascribed
identity to a chosen one. Luckmann saw
these shifts as symptomatic of “a pervasive
consumer orientation” among moderns that
forces individuals to comparison shop for
commodities and worldviews alike.
If we take Luckmann’s account to
reliably characterize the modern situation14,
then once again, Family School actors
have demonstrated their own sociological
intuitions by taking a social paradox to
its logical conclusion: ‘if we can’t give
them a religious identity, then we’ll give
them a religious identity where they give
themselves a religious identity.’ In positing
a self-determining frame for religious
identity, Family School actors would seem
to have perfectly fit Luckmann’s mold
of the consumer orientation, whereby
autonomous choice acts as the primary
legitimating force.
Comparing and Integrating the Two
Repertoires
The “being both” repertoire hinges on
metaphors of heritage and bilingualism,
while the self-determination repertoire
hinges on metaphors of conscious decision-
making. The former posits two fixed
identities while the latter posits one fluid
one. This seeming contradiction is a point
of sociological confusion and interest.
I propose that we can make sense of
these identities by conceptualizing the
formation of self holistically, in terms of
past, present, and future. The “being both”
repertoire speaks primarily about the past
and its relation to the present; the self-
determination repertoire speaks primarily
about the present and its relation to the
future.
When actors spoke about “being both,”
they did so without hesitation, as if to
express something unchanging. The arising
of religious identity as ancestral fact,
rather than social product, is held up by the
metaphors of heritage and bilingualism.
The heritage metaphor works because one
cannot change one’s ancestry; the bilingual
metaphor works because language is a
tangible, albeit learned, skill that one either
possesses or does not. Having a heritage
and knowing a language are stable things.
While the metaphors are certainly well-
suited to the task of reifying identities as
Jew/Catholics, sociologically speaking it is

14. Luckmann’s point about the privatization of religious faith, made originally in 1967, has since been debated.
Though it was originally part of the secularization thesis, which has been discounted in terms of religious partic-
ipation, I maintain the validity of the privatization argument for individual subjectivities. At some level, modern
individuals must always choose their religion, even if they end up choosing what their parents gave them.

41
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
not only their fit but the process of fitting
that matters. I thus argue that actors’ speech
about their identities is an ongoing process
of reinterpreting and retelling the stories of
their selves, as narrative analysts would put
it (Ammerman 2003; Clary-Lemon 2010;
Lawler 2014; Rosenthal 1997). Thus, on
the one hand, “being both” fragments the
self into a Jewish identity and a Catholic
identity, but, on the other hand, unites the
self as a continuous biography.
The self-determination repertoire, on
the other hand, would seem to lay claim to
a fluid sense of religious identity wherein
actors are ultimately free to choose what
they are. Yet this way of speaking about
identity is especially interesting and
confounding because it makes a meta-claim
about individuals—namely, that they are
fixed in their unfixed-ness. In effect, this is
similar to the sociological view of self as
contingent and continually constructed. Yet
for Family School actors, the production of
self is less a matter of social construction
and more a matter of individual choice,
such that individual choice has the ultimate
authority.
Having said as much, what, then,
becomes of the first identity repertoire?
Could a self-determining subject all of a
sudden choose not to “be both”? What is
the real thing, fixity or fluidity? While such
questions are fascinating, Family School
actors do not answer them because they
do not see them as a problem. For them,
the self is at once fixed and fluid—always
alternating between the poles of sameness
and difference. The two repertoires do not
necessarily contradict but rather reside
on opposing poles of identity within the
overarching (sub)culture of the Family
School, which arms its members with
42
diverse tools for diverse scenarios of
identity expression.
Introduction to Section 2
In the section that follows, I describe
and analyze the Family School’s official
and unofficial approaches to belief and their
consequences for identity construction. I
first describe how the founding rationale
of the Family School takes a hands-off
approach to belief in favor of a “religio-
cultural education.” I then introduce the
idea that this de jure hands-off approach
to belief leads to a de facto situation in
which questions of biblical and theological
interpretation are left open to individual
discretion. Among the discretionary tenets
is the obvious question of Jesus, which
serves as the best example of the successful
de-centralization of belief. I also find that,
when asked about doctrine, actors had a
tendency to emphasize the authenticity of
their paths and identities in the face of more
traditional conceptions that posit stronger
links between belief and identity. Finally,
I delineate the various ways religion is
defined without reference to belief, both
on paper and in live conversation, and how
these create space for the formulation of
various identities.
Section 2: The Treatment of Belief and
The Definitions of Religion
The Official Stance on Belief
As we have seen, Family School actors
have no trouble whatsoever conceptualizing
and expressing their own interfaith
identities. For anyone standing outside this
movement, though, I would imagine that
an important question still lingers: ‘even
if they think of themselves as being both
Jewish and Catholic, aren’t their beliefs
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
contradictory?’
In simplest terms, the answer to the
question of contradictory beliefs is no
answer. The Kovacs made it abundantly
clear to me that they designed the program
according to what I will call a “hands-off”
approach to belief. As they wrote in the
curriculum book,
[We were] sure an interfaith religious
school could never answer the difficult
questions of religious identity. These
are intensely personal issues, and
each family must resolve them on
their own. Thus, we could not teach
belief in Judaism or Catholicism.
Nevertheless, a school that taught
about Judaism and Catholicism —
our practices, stories, heritages and
values — might help children and
their parents to learn about their
religions together. [italics added by
me]
Officially, then, the Family School
holds no stake in specific matters of identity
or belief. Unofficially, though, as we have
seen, the Family School in fact plays a great
part in identity construction by providing
repertoires for self-understanding. As
we will now see, the Family School also
indirectly guides individuals’ beliefs about
the Bible, God, Jesus, the afterlife, etc.—
despite the intention, as stated above, to
allow “each family” to resolve questions of
belief in private.
The curriculum hones in on the granular
details of Jewish and Catholic traditions,
celebrations, stories, and histories, but does
so largely without engaging what is termed
“dogma”—a religion’s “prescribed set of
truths.” Yet, the fact of this neutral stance
on belief should not lead us to conclude
that the Family School is a wholly secular
enterprise. Instead, it belies a greater hope
that the belief-less cultural knowledge base
being built up will eventually grow into
something more/higher. The following
excerpt from my interview with the Kovacs
clarifies the implicit moral vision of an
interfaith education:
In many ways, to say it’s “interfaith”
is an easy buzzword—“faith” is
such a loaded word. But David and I
actually both take faith very seriously.
In many ways, what we’re doing is
much more intercultural. And it’s a
religio-cultural literacy. And through
the religio-cultural literacy, we’ve
been given access through vocabulary
and experiences to probe deeper into
faith. And then it becomes interfaith.
So there’s kind of a hierarchy in my
mind but I haven’t… I haven’t really
taken the time to quantify. But, if you
go beyond the fear and into education
and exposure and participation, I
think [you begin to access] a different
level of transcendence. Interfaith is
all exploration: seeking the divine,
seeking the transcendence.
For Family School members, to say
that the belief systems are contradictory
is to miss the point entirely. Judaism and
Catholicism are conceived not simply as
sets of beliefs or propositions about the
supernatural, as is our colloquial sense of
the word “religion,” but rather as holistic
historical and cultural forces, as ways of
seeing reality, or as ways of orienting moral
action. From one perspective, the tension
created by contradictory beliefs is resolved
by shifting attention away from conflict and
onto the other relevant elements of religious
education, such as moral development.
From another perspective, there exists no
tension to begin with and the Family School
helps families come to this realization. For
our purposes, there is inherent tension in the
belief systems only insofar as it is perceived
and made real by people. To recall the words
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology

of W. I. Thomas, “If men define situations I had mentioned the word “pluralist”
as real, they are real in their consequences.” before the session had started in order to
describe our religious landscape; Aaron
Openness to Biblical and Theological aptly coopted the word to mean the
Interpretation acceptance of multiple interpretive truths.15
In a Western culture beset by the idea This particular class session entailed
that religion is belief (Smith 1998), even a unpacking the concepts of metaphor and
purportedly belief-less religious education myth as ways to access truths which lie at
cannot avoid the question entirely. If the the limits of common language. During this
aim of the Family School is to give families discussion, Patty brought up the work of the
tools for the private cultivation of belief and comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell,
faith, the Kovacs say, such an enterprise saying, “It doesn’t matter if it’s an Indian
cannot help but somehow bound the set of myth; it doesn’t matter if it’s a Sunni myth:
possibilities for belief simply by framing at some point people must go on a journey
lessons a certain way. We then come to in which everything changes.” The lesson
the curious situation in which a de jure was clear yet double-edged: there is no one
hands-off approach to belief becomes a de way to interpret myths and yet, different
facto openness to biblical and theological myths often end up expressing the same
interpretation—the exception being “literal” underlying meaning. One ought therefore
or exclusive interpretations. The position to make one’s own judgments about the
of neutrality or agnosticism thus acquires meaning of Biblical myths.
positive and negative expression in the form Of course, the instruction to interpret
of urging certain conceptions of the Bible Biblical myths on one’s own assumes that
and the divine while discrediting others. the texts in question are myths to begin
with. As Patty told the class, “I hope I’m
not offending anybody but… the Bible is
Openness to Biblical Interpretation
not literal truth. Period.” While the Family
During the first class session I attended,
School strives to be inclusive of as many
Aaron, the young eighth grade writing
interpretations and religious expressions
instructor, had the following to say on the
as possible, there are still some things a
subject of Biblical interpretation:
metaphoric approach cannot abide, namely a
There are many ways to interpret non-metaphoric approach. Such exclusions
the Bible—don’t just take what me as this, which bound the possible ways of
or David or Patty say. If we do that, relating to biblical text, might be thought
we’re no better than the people who about, for the sake of clarity, as belonging
just say the Bible is literal truth… like
Will was saying, what it means to be to a set of “meta-beliefs”—beliefs about
pluralist. how to approach religious doctrine. Though
15. Aaron later told me in an interview that he identifies more as “pluralist” than as “interfaith,” though still
adopts both labels depending on the context—another advanced case of “being both.” In his words, “Interfaith is
more like, ‘there are permeable walls,’ whereas pluralist is like, ‘no walls whatsoever.’” In the same interview, he
succinctly captured the essence of his multi-truth philosophy by saying, “I have a lot of Bibles, ya know? That’s
part of what being pluralist and interfaith means to me . . . I’ll call a novel a bible, but I mean also like a book that
really, really penetrates and touches my soul—I’ll give it that title—and serves as a guide for life.”

44
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
of a high order of abstraction, these meta-
beliefs come to serve as points of symbolic
differentiation for the Family School over
and against other religious groups.
The Treatment of Jesus
The open-ended approach also
extends to the other divine figures found
in Christianity, namely Jesus. Yet, as one
might expect, the character of Jesus presents
a peculiar problem for a group identifying
as both Jewish and Catholic. The Kovacs
informed me that the issue of Jesus—how
to talk about him, how to teach about him,
whether he is the Messiah—surfaced as
a force of “dramatic tension” among the
Family School’s early parents. Patty writes,
“Our fears were tied up in ‘The J-Word’—
Jesus.” While she attributes the gradual
resolution of that tension to patience and
group discussion, the issue remains a hurdle
that all Family School families at some point
face. Interestingly, the curriculum does not
address theological questions about the
person of Jesus until the sixth grade year,
when Patty (who is trained in psychology
as a school counselor) thought the children
would be developmentally ready to reason
through the claims “on their own.” Before
sixth grade, teachers address the issue of
Jesus by emphasizing other elements of his
life or teaching not having to do with his
divine status.
While we cannot take a stance on
any perceived theological tension, my
sociological findings speak to the success
of the Family School’s pedagogical
approach in assuaging any psychological
tension actors may experience by virtue
of belonging to two historically separate
religious groups. A common response to the
issue of Jesus holds that, as one graduate
put it,
In Catholicism, there’s a lot of
teachings of Jesus and a lot of
teachings about Jesus. And in Judaism
you can believe the teachings of Jesus
without necessarily believing all the
teachings about him. [italics added
by me]
This response implies the “being
both” repertoire, since the two faiths are
dealt with in compare-contrast format as
separate systems that one can alternate
between. Yet even the responses I heard
that attempted to integrate Judaism and
Catholicism at the same time, though ripe
with cognitive difficulty, showed few signs
of psychological distress or tension. The
best example comes from an interview
with a current eighth grade student named
Jamie. She was the only student I ever
heard to express cognitive difficulty about
her beliefs—a fact that is itself significant.
While she was speaking to me about the
cognitive barrier of Jesus, though, she was
entirely at ease and expressed a faith that
the difficulty was not a problem:
I know that, like, the one thing that
I definitely believe in is that God .
. . exists and that God is here. And
I know that, like, in Catholicism
people believe that Jesus was the Son
of God and the Jewish side is, like,
still waiting for the Messiah so, like,
I’m still discovering how to combine
those things. I feel like when I get
older I’ll know but right now I’m
still learning—I feel like we’re all
kind of still learning, even maybe my
parents.
Doctrine and Identity
Jamie’s above response serves as
evidence of the Family School’s successful
de-centralization of doctrinal belief. If
doctrinal beliefs were actually the most
45
The Chicago Journal of Sociology

salient factors of religious self-construction,
as we colloquially imagine them to be
in16, we would expect to see many more
responses like Jamie’s as well as much
more psychological distress. Seeing as this
is not the case, we can reasonably conclude
that doctrine matters little for students
when self-categorizing in the “being both”
repertoire as Jews/Catholics. For Jamie
and the other eighth graders I encountered,
things like family heritage, time spent at
church or temple or in Sunday school, time
spent celebrating holidays—the activities
of religious life—were more salient than
the beliefs, at least when defending their
authentic Judaism and Catholicism.
The severing of doctrinal belief
from fixed17 religious identity was most
convincingly articulated to me by Rabbi
Abigail. Whereas most actors conveyed the
unimportance of doctrinal belief to me by
remaining silent about it, Rabbi Abigail did
so by expressly denying its importance for
authentic Jewish identity. When I asked her,
‘how do you see the relationship of doctrine
to identity?’, she responded,
I could say Reform rabbis specifically,
by and large, have many, many
questions about dual-faith families
because they believe you can’t be
dual-faith, that that’s a theologic
impossibility . . . and what I have
found is that dual-faith families, by
and large, umm… are able to pass on
literacy in both faiths and children
are able to learn about two things
simultaneously and they are able to
grapple with things and I think that
they either believe in Jesus in a very
Jewish way, so there are no theologic
issues specifically, or they hold two
truths or two parts of faith within
their same heart, ya know? . . . I think
that these kids are bridge builders
and interfaith ambassadors and they
understand greys and they understand
nuance and they understand that their
Judaism doesn’t have to look like my
Judaism and that it’s complicated and
that their families are complicated
and that’s fine!
We come to see, then, that the stakes here
are not only authentic Jewish and Catholic
identities, but authentic religious lives more
broadly.18 When actors adopt Jewish and
Catholic social-categorical labels, they do so
with the help of the “being both” repertoire
and largely without regard for any supposed
contradictions in doctrinal beliefs. When, at
other times, actors attempt to shed all labels
and conceive of their religious identities
as open-ended and fluid, doctrinal belief
can enter back into the picture as an object
of exploration. In the self-determination
repertoire, both identity and belief are seen
as delightfully unresolved and teeming
with infinite possibilities. Yet whether one
is “both” or “unresolved,” the relation to
doctrinal belief is never one of clinging. The
Family School actor is therefore always able
to say, ‘I don’t have to be bound to doctrine
and dogma to be who I am.’

16. I owe much to Susan Katz Miller, author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family,
for pointing out to me that while it may indeed be common or colloquial to associate belief with religious identity,
it is only so because we live in a culture saturated by Christianity. In her words, “[The concept of belief] makes
the most sense in a Christian or Muslim context, and makes less sense in a Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist context
in which practice is primary.”
17. As opposed to fluid or self-determining identity, which has a different relationship to doctrinal belief, where-
in belief can again become a salient factor—if the actor so chooses. Again, we see the powerful finality of the
self-determination legitimation.
18. The role of clergy in “authenticating” these identities will be further discussed in Section 4 of the results.

46
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
Three Definitions of Religion
The de-centralization of belief is
accompanied and supported by three
working definitions of religion at play in the
setting: (1) as a combination of historical
forces and systems, (2) as a way of seeing
and speaking, and (3) as, above all, action.
Understanding how these three definitions
work in context will help to further
illuminate how it is that the actors are able
to identify the ways that they do.
(1) Religion as a Combination of
Historical Forces and Systems
In the Family School’s curriculum
book, religion is defined as “a combination
of culture, traditions, dogmas, values and
ethics”—all of which are “extrinsic” to
the individual. This combination of forces
and systems is important only insofar as it
is a means to faith and spirituality, which
are “intrinsic” to the individual and express
one’s connection to “transcendence, a
power beyond us.”
(2) Religion as a Way of Seeing and
Speaking
In everyday conversation, Family
School members often express their view of
religion by calling it ‘a lens’ or ‘a language.’
“Interfaith religious education can offer our
children two sets of ‘glasses’ (or bifocals,
if you will),” write the Kovacs. Similarly,
one rabbi was quoted in a promotional
video saying, “Religion is not, ‘this is truth
and your religion is false.’ I would like to
think of it more as language.” As another
affiliated rabbi put it, “Every faith sees a
part of God. So, when different faiths are in
dialogue together, they see a bigger picture
of what God is.”
(3) Religion as Action
The third definition of religion departs
significantly from the first two. Its maxim is
as follows: “religion is not religion until it
becomes action.” This definition abandons
the religion-as-means concept and
essentially poses an ontological ultimatum:
act on your religion, or else it is not real. My
data reveal two meanings to this powerful
and imposing definition, (1) action as the
natural manifestation of love, and (2) action
as political activity in the name of social
justice.
When religion is action and action
is love, we again arrive at a point where
theological and doctrinal concerns dissolve
away. In a powerful moment during my
interview with the Kovacs, Patty and David
captured the essence of this point:
Patty: This model, of what we’re
doing . . . says, we expect that you’re
going to be sitting here face to
face with your disagreements. The
things you don’t know or you don’t
understand or that you’re fearful of
or [that you] disagree with: face to
face. With, with—capital With—the
children that you chose to bring into
this world. What motivated you?
‘Oh, it’s love.’ You fell in love with
each other. Remember, love… is the
creative force for everything in the
universe. Do you bring love into the
world, life into the world? Or are you
gonna get stuck in your head about
theology? And whether or not Jesus
was ‘the Messiah’?
David: Or whether the Jews will
survive if intermarriage takes over.
Patty: No. Are you going to choose to
love? An active verb.
By this conception, religion itself, as loving
action (or active loving) par excellence,
becomes a force that can overcome the
tension of bringing together Catholics and
Jews in intermarriage.
The second meaning of religion-as-
action denotes action which is motivated
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
by a sense of social justice. This meaning
is largely context-specific to the eighth
grade classroom, where most of the
lessons revolved around the meaning of
social justice, past and present. While this
meaning functions in some of the same
ways already outlined—to de-emphasize
belief and to glean religious authenticity
elsewhere—its primary function is quite
different: it undergirds the formation of
what I will call a political identity, rather
than a strictly religious one.
Introduction to Section 3
In the previous two sections, I elaborated
on the basic senses of religious identity
and belief that are active in the space, and
more specifically on how both notions often
operate by framing experience in terms of
self-determination and openness. In the
following section, I suggest that another
dominant sense of self arises in the void
created by a partially open approach to
religious identity and belief. This political
identity is held up by the rhetorical strategies
of the Family School. I first demonstrate
how political identities are more salient for
Family School actors than religious ones.
Next, I introduce the identity repertoire of
the “interfaith ambassador,” who is seen
to be accepting, well-rounded, and peace-
wielding. Then, I discuss the eighth grade
curriculum and the rhetoric surrounding
it as the primary mechanisms by which
political identities become real for the
students. Finally, I speculate that, despite
its political emphasis, we might understand
this process of identity formation in terms
of the enterprise of theodicy, drawing on
Geertz, Berger, and Weber.
48
Section 3: The Construction of Political
Identity
It is one question to ask how religious
identity is constructed; it is another to ask
whether religious identity is what we ought
to be studying in the first place. It came to
my attention in analyzing the data that actors
do not seem to place much stock in their
robust and complex interfaith identities in
the context of their big-picture, multivalent
selves. Complex interfaith identities would
seem to be significant sociologically, but
less so personally. Yet the Family School
is clearly important to its members and
therefore, I thought, must somehow still
influence identity in a significant, more
salient, way. Upon broadening my questions
and reexamining the data, I found what I
was looking for—namely, the lasting and
salient imprint of the collective upon the
individual—in what I will call a “political
identity.” It should be noted that this
denotation is nothing more than an ideal
type, deployed for ease and convenience. It
will eventually become clear that the concept
is inadequate and perhaps even misleading,
seeing as Family School members would
not subscribe to the characterization of a
political identity themselves because, for
them, there exists no divide between religion
and politics.
Identity Saliences
I gathered from many actors that their
religious identities occupy but a small part
of their holistic selves. They do not occupy
master statuses that can “overpower” other
identities (Hughes 1945) and are thus not
salient (Callero 1985; Stryker 1968).
Compared to my other types of data,
interviews were well-suited to uncover
comparative saliences because they allowed
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
me to see into aspects of respondents’
lives outside the Family School walls. For
example, in my interview with current
eighth grader Jamie, I got a glimpse into a
different classroom setting in her Catholic
middle school:
Like my friends . . . whenever we’re
doing something in religion class
about that kind of stuff my friends
will ask me about Judaism—and I
think this is the only time—and, like,
okay I’m not really an expert but . . .
that’s really the only time we really
talk about it.
If we operate on the assumption that
identities of high salience would tend to
“break through” into seemingly irrelevant
settings, the fact that Jamie does not talk
about her religious identity outside the
context of religion class indicates low
salience for her.
Whereas members’ interfaith identities
might not get much airtime outside the
Family School, the political identities that
incubate in the Family School do. These
identities possess a natural capacity to
“break through” into seemingly irrelevant
settings by virtue of their abstractness and
moral relevance. It is hard to be an interfaith
Jew-Christian in the circumstances of
everyday life; is much easier to be a “well-
rounded person” who is “committed to
justice.” As will be shown, the high salience
of political identity derives in part from
the definition of religion as action and the
pedagogy of the eighth grade classroom.
A Political Identity Repertoire: “Interfaith
Ambassadors”
The following quotations were excerpted
from a Family School promotional video
entitled “Learning Two Faiths:”
Affiliated Rabbi 1: I think when
people have been raised with two
faiths they have an openness to the
world.
Older girl 1: It just opens you up to
so many more things. It makes you a
more well-rounded person.
Younger girl 3: We’ve really learned
to accept all religions.
Affiliated Priest 2: This is the way the
world should be.
Affiliated Rabbi 2: If everyone could
be raised being this deeply respectful
and embracing and curious, I think
the world would be a much more
peaceful place.
Affiliated Rabbi 1: Bringing a little
more peace into the world, a little
more joy, a little happiness—that’s
what makes it special.
Such terms as “well-rounded,” “open,”
“embracing and curious,” and “peaceful”
make up the softer side of the political identity
repertoire. Other metaphors more explicitly
draw on political terminology, namely the
regally connoted “interfaith ambassador,”
originally popularized in the community
thanks to Susan Katz Miller’s book Being
Both: Embracing Two Religions in One
Interfaith Family. The term—a favorite in the
Family School—surfaced across the board. I
will thus refer to this set of metaphors as the
“interfaith ambassador” identity repertoire.
The dominating metaphor is simple.
Ambassadors engage in dialogue in order
to keep peace between nations; interfaith
ambassadors do the same between religions.
The metaphor bespeaks an awareness of
historical interreligious conflict and a moral
concern to somehow alleviate such conflict
via practices of everyday diplomacy and
openness to others. This is the stuff of religion-
as-action—the stuff of redeeming a lost world
via political and moral engagement. As one
eighth grader put it,
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
If everyone on earth was half as
tolerant and understanding as any of
the members of Family School, holy
war and genocide would all be things
of the past.
The process of assimilating the interfaith
ambassador repertoire into actors’ sense of
self occurs in great part through the content
and form of the eighth grade year.
The Eighth Grade Year as the Site of
Political Identity Construction
In comparison to years K-7, eighth grade
takes a decided leap out of biblical history
and into “the real world.” Discussions
about current events (occurring in autumn
2016) such as the Standing Rock water
crisis and the election of Donald Trump
were commonplace in class. The framing of
these discussions, though, never lost touch
with the religious mission of the program.
Discussions of social justice were often
referenced back against the histories of
Jewish and Catholic activism. For example,
one class saw the welcoming of a guest
speaker who gave the class an American
history lecture and touched on the social
gospel and the civil rights movement of the
1950s/60s:
Now what I want to remember is the
key role religion has played in all of
these movements. Anybody heard
of the social gospel? The idea that
religion isn’t really religion until it
actually reaches out and helps other
people.
In addition to this historical dimension,
discussions of social justice also referred
back to the main ontological takeaway—not
that students are fundamentally interfaith,
but that they are fundamentally, always
50
and ever, “people of God.” This highly
generalizable and essential phrase served as
a powerful tool for socializing students into
their morally-charged political identities.
The use of religious language in the
construction of civic identity has been
well documented in sociological literature
(Lichterman 2008; Neitz 2004). Such work
focuses on the vocabularies activist or civic
groups use to express motivations or to
conduct boundary-work. Our case serves
as an example of a group doing both at the
same time. Actors’ self-identifications as
Jewish, Catholic, or both in name only serve
as indicators of the deeper sense of being
“People of God.” Again, as articulated in
Section 2, traditional religion and religious
labels are conceived as means to a greater
end.
Identity and Theodicy
In the eighth grade classroom, the
question of “who I am” is presented in the
same breath as questions of social justice.
But why should this be? Why should a
sense of who one is be related to a sense of
justice—or, more specifically, to a coming
to awareness of injustice and suffering?
The Family School curriculum introduces
students to a variety of injustices. In the
words of recent alumna Larissa,
Some topics focused on were women
and children abuse, the Holocaust,
and homelessness. Although we all
know how terrible these things are,
it’s not until we hear someone’s
story who went through it or witness
it happening that we actually say to
ourselves, ‘This is a real problem and
it is affecting people all around us.’
It’s important to emphasize this point,
because if you can’t really connect
with the issue, it most likely will not
make a difference to you. What our
world needs is everyone coming to
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School

terms with our problems, and reach and injustice per se but the response to
[sic] out to help. I felt that our eighth them, thereby still providing orientation
grade year made a deep indent into
that realization. when they are encountered. Family School
members may still not know why the bad
It is said that learning about injustice things exist, but—as People of God—they
and suffering “makes a difference.” My know what to do about them: to reject
fascination concerns why such a difference them by standing up for what is right or by
should play significantly in the coming of lending a hand.20
age event and in the formation of identity. I propose that the whole cycle of
The sociological paradigms that locate theodicy, from the realization of bad things
identity simply as a congruence of social through the realization that one can fix them,
relationships and interactions cannot serves to render the political identity at hand
explain why this association should be all the more potent and salient. By locating
so powerful. And yet, for Family School responses to the bad things in a greater order
actors, it is. of meaning, the theodicy by default also
I assert that a potential answer to locates the identity of a world-fixer/peace-
this question can be mined from old builder in such an order. On top of this, the
understandings of the task of theodicy. “interfaith ambassador” identity is reinforced
The term theodicy, simply put, refers to by framing eighth grade as the time when
religious legitimations of bad things. In students “come into their own” and “when
the Judeo-Christian West, one potential things become real.” In a fascinating paradox
theodicy might say, ‘God allows people to characteristic of religious thought, then, we
get sick in order to test their strength and might say that things become real by virtue
commitment to Him.’ of their participation in something unreal or
According to Berger, old theodicies more-than-real—something transcendent.
would address the bad things by explaining As a sociologist, I cannot comment
them and locating them in a meaningful on whether God makes things valuable
cosmological configuration. This act of or whether things are made real by
location would then make the bad things participating in transcendence—unless
palatable and endurable. There exists, that transcendence is, as Durkheim would
however, a key difference between the say, some version of the collective. What
Family School’s “theodicy” and a traditional I can say, however, is that theodicy makes
one. Theodicies of old19 legitimate suffering a powerful imprint on the identities of our
and injustice; meanwhile, the Family subjects by virtue of its cosmic stakes and
School’s theodicy legitimates not suffering its skillful presentation by the instructors.
19. I say this knowing perfectly well that what I call “old” theodicies still exist and function perfectly well for
many people. This is in line with the widely accepted notion that the secularization thesis was mostly wrong and
that traditional religious forms, along with their concomitant theodicies, are not going away.
20. Such a response comes close to the mold of Weber’s “inner-worldly asceticism,” which “seeks to tame what
is creatural and wicked through work in a worldly ‘vocation’” (Weber 1958 [1920]). In Weber’s writings, the
“vocation” connotes remnants of Puritanism and the idea that one must have a sturdy work ethic to fix the world.
That notion is less present in the case of the Family School, where, as we have seen, the world-fixing impetus is
less about restraint and hard work and more about positive engagement and peace-building.

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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
The Relation of Religion and Politics
Sufficient information has now been
presented that some points of clarification
ought to be made. I have spoken of
religious identities, a political identity,
and of a religious motivation behind a
political identity. These three terms refer
to analytically and conceptually separate
phenomena. What I have called religious
identities bound the self using repertoires
(“being both” and self-determination) that
refer in some way to specific, traditional
religious cultural materials—churches,
temples, beliefs, celebrations, matzah balls,
etc. What I have called political identities,
on the other hand, bound the self using a
repertoire that refers to current events,
world injustices, self-discovery, and one’s
obligation as a “Person of God.” Finally,
what I have called religious motivations
refer to whatever lies beneath such phrases
as “Person of God,” namely, a fundamental
or ontological grounding for action.
While distinguished for the sake of
presenting information, these three are
not wholly separate phenomena. No
cultural repertoire is perfectly bounded
and indeed there is spillover between the
various repertoires I have spoken of. The
more explicit interweaving of the various
identities, though, might be conceptualized
in a sort of depth hierarchy. At the base
(I dare not say “core”), we have the
fundamental ontological assurance that
one is a “Person of God.” Directly atop
this sit the ethical obligations which cohere
into a political identity. Atop this, at a sort
of surface level, we have the particular
instantiation as Jewish-Catholic or self-
determined “People of God.” While these
levels/parts of self are in dialogue with each
other such that no one level creates another,
52
it might be said for rhetorical reasons that
Family School actors are political first
and religious second. This is perhaps the
most significant finding concerning the
formation of individual identity within the
Family School.
Introduction to Section 4
In the following and final section of
the results, I consider the Family School
and its members in light of their relation
to the pluralistic situation. Drawing on the
later writings of Berger and Luckmann,
I first apply the classical concept of an
intermediary institution to our case in order
to conceptualize its therapeutic, crisis-
relieving function for member families.
Through processes of tension resolution,
legitimated in part by clergy from both
faiths, the Family School mediates
between individuals and society to provide
individuals with guidance, orientation,
and a sense of authenticity. Following this
application, I examine the Family School
in light of Smith’s subcultural theory,
which argues for the creative potential
of pluralistic urban environments. In
applying and amending these concepts, I
aim to situate my argument within the “new
paradigm” (Warner 1993) in the sociology
of religion which rejects the classical logic
of disenchantment and replaces it with
a more optimistic portrait of the modern
religious landscape.
Section 4: Group Identity and The
Family School as a Product of Pluralism
Crisis Negotiation and the Family School
as an Intermediary Institution
According to Berger (2014), the
pluralistic situation is one “in which people
with different ethnicities, worldviews, and
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
moralities live together peacefully and
interact with each other amicably.” While
the following argument will ultimately
affirm the positive productive potential of
pluralism, it begins with the real difficulties
the situation can produce in the minds
and social lives of individuals. Pluralism
has allowed individuals from previously
separate and sometimes antagonistic
social groups to fall in love and marry
each other, as in the case of our Jewish-
Catholic couples. However, as a corollary,
the pluralistic situation can also create
strife for individuals like our couples when
their prior social groups pull on them
in conflicting ways. Hence the problem
arises of the disapproving friend, in-law, or
rabbi—a problem which the Family School
sets out to solve.
As one interfaith rabbi fittingly
observed, “Growth comes out of tension.”
For Berger and Luckmann, pluralism’s
tension is a large-scale, anxiety-producing,
existential “crisis of meaning” (Berger and
Luckmann 1995). While I do not doubt the
prevalence of crises of meaning for modern
actors, our data point us elsewhere. The
salient crises experienced by our interfaith
couples, while still resultant from the
pluralist situation, are better categorized
as (1) interpersonal, (2) cognitive, or (3)
authenticity-based rather than (or perhaps
in addition to) simply existential.
(1) Interpersonal crises took the form
of disagreements between couples and
their parents, in-laws, or friends over basic
issues of intermarriage, such as childhood
education. (2) Cognitive crises more often
took the form of disagreements or tensions
between the two partners, or even between
warring conceptions in a single mind. These
crises usually arose out of confusion with
regards to belief. (3) Crises of authenticity
most often took the form of rejection at the
hands of traditional religious authority. The
three types are exemplified in the following
three quotations:
Interpersonal: We were told thirty
years ago—I was told by a friend, a
guy I had worked with in television
for four years, . . . ‘you know what,
I think you should break up with
her.’ And he said that to us when we
were in Cincinnati in her parents’
backyard!
-David, eighth grade instructor
and Jewish spouse
Cognitive/Existential: He was raised
to believe that if you aren’t Catholic
or Christian, you won’t go to heaven.
Where does that leave me? Where
will that leave us at the end?
-Jewish spouse, from the
promotional video “If a Democrat
Can Marry a Republican…”
Authenticity-based: People have
had such pain . . . I have heard over
these years, as we’ve talked to these
couples, so many heartbreaking
stories: ‘I grew up in temple youth
group, I was a teenage this and that
and I thought that I could go to my
rabbi and my rabbi shut me down
and I felt abandoned.’ And that’s
what made us say, ‘we need to be the
safe space where people can bring
this.’ And so many people over the
years have brought these stories
and shared these stories and they’re
heartbreaking, you know? It was like,
no religion should make people feel
that low and that abandoned.
-David, eighth grade instructor
That these crises exist and come to bear
on these couples ought to be clear by now
given what has come before in this study.
Indeed, the Family School was initially
founded as a couples’ support group that
provided a much-needed “safe space” for
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
interfaith couples to discuss their crises.
What now merits attention is the particular
process by which the Family School
attempts to guide families (especially the
parents) through such crises.
Following Berger and Luckmann
(1995), I argue that the Family School
functions as an intermediary institution that
mediates between individuals and society—a
society that is sometimes hostile to the notion
of an interfaith lifestyle. The Family School
accomplishes this by guiding families
through a process of tension resolution and
meaning negotiation.
One of the biggest evidential clues
supporting this therapeutic model lies in the
structure of the Family School’s promotional
and documentary video clips. Put succinctly,
the videos follow a problem-resolution-
moral structure. Consider the following
quotations excerpted from a documentary
video clip entitled, “If a Democrat Can Marry
a Republican…,” which I sorted according
to the above narrative structure21:
(1) Problem: “I was living at home
and when he came to the door my
parents looked at him and said ‘he’s
not Jewish.’ And I said, ‘yes, you’re
right.’”
–Jewish spouse
(2) Contextualization/Resolution:
“But if we keep saying that it’s the
best to marry someone Jewish and
then intermarriage is the second best
option, then we’ll never have an
equal community. We’ll never have
a community that feels open and
accepting and loving and affirming of
an interfaith couple.”
–Family School affiliated rabbi
21. This is not a complete video transcript; however the selections in each section are representative of the types
of things uttered in that section.
22. One could argue that sequence of the appearance of the characters—first couples, then clergy, then back to
couples—is emblematic of the structure as well, although this is less strictly delineated.
54
(3) Moral: “It really is about
loving each other, not only in spite
of our differences but because of our
differences . . . being understanding of
each other and of the world around us
and of people of all different beliefs.”
–young spouse
The order in which the content is
presented is emblematic of the problem-
resolution-moral structure.22 In casting
clergy in roles as attending experts to the
couples’ questions, the makers of the video
attempt a clean, straightforward message to
viewers: the Family School and its clerical
consultants affirm interfaith marriage and
will help guide you through a process of
reconciling your tensions.
My interviews with Rabbi Abigail
confirmed the role of clergy as crisis-
negotiators. Along with the Catholic priests
at the affiliated Old St. Patrick’s Church,
Rabbi Abigail strives to make interfaith
couples feel comfortable and welcomed
where other clergy have done the opposite.
I feel the work I do still puts me on the
far, far, far fringe of my colleagues
and it’s seen as controversial or seen
as hurting the Jewish landscape . . .
So there’s a lot of negativity around
it but . . . I think that if someone has
an opening for Judaism and wants a
rabbi in their lives, then what’s the
way for me to be able to do that?
It’s countercultural at this point for
people to want a rabbi! [laughs] Like,
it boggles my mind that people still
do, especially people who’ve heard
‘no’ so many times, who’ve been told
that they’re wrong over and over.
‘You’re still trying!? Oh my god, like,
wow, great.’
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
The rabbis and priests affiliated
with the Family School resolve crises by
offering counsel and by officiating at life-
cycle occasions. They counsel couples who
are facing tension with in-laws and they
attend discussion groups where couples
grapple with doctrinal issues. They officiate
at baptisms, baby-namings, circumcisions
(bris), first communions, bar and bat
mitzvahs, and weddings. These ceremonies
often take on an interfaith character, with
both Catholic and Jewish symbols at play,
so as to validate and acknowledge both
heritages as relevant and authentic.
I propose that the clerical services
function as the primary mechanism within
the Family School that mediates between
the families and society. By providing
institutional affirmation, the clergy
legitimate actors’ identities as authentic
Jews and Catholics; through legitimation,
the clergy help resolve crises and relate
actors back to society “at large”—a
pluralistic society made up of friends, in-
laws, the Catholic church, and the various
branches of Judaism. The Family School
provides individuals with belonging in a
unique subculture while also tying them
to traditional, historical faith traditions. As
such, it constitutes a unique adaptation to
the pluralist situation in facing both forward
and backward, and, once again, preserving
both sameness and difference.
Creative Pluralism and the Family School
as an Urban Subculture
The Family School offers what few
other religious institutions can in the way
of supporting intermarried families. Its
highly specific orientation as a therapeutic
institution and reference group for Jewish-
Catholic couples endows it with a uniqueness
well-suited to thrive as a subculture. Having
seen this, we would do well to imagine the
Family School metaphorically as a unique
“good” on the religious marketplace, or
as a unique species in a “large coral reef
ecosystem, teeming with an abundance
of complex and varied life forms” (Smith
1998).
To briefly lean on the market metaphor,
the Family School advertises itself as
catering to the demands of a certain sub-
section of religious consumers, categorized
as follows: They are, first and foremost,
intermarried Jews and Catholics in the
Chicagoland area. They seek to resolve any
crises they may face, to find like-minded
families and affirmation, and to understand
their situation and themselves. They are—
or are taught to be—theologically liberal
and tolerant of all religious paths. Most
of them do not seek an intense religious
commitment, but rather a safe space for
them and their children to explore difficult
questions and feelings. Though I did not
explicitly ask, all seemed to be heterosexual
and almost all of them, white.
While families need not be alike in all the
above ways, it is not by simple coincidence
that such a specific group has come together.
Rather, we can make sense of the Family
School as occupying one niche in an urban
ecosystem of religious niches. According to
subcultural theory, cities produce deviant
subcultures by “providing ‘critical mass’
and ‘institutional completeness’” (Smith
1998). In other words, the sheer size of a
city like Chicago (pop. 9.4 million metro
area (Eltagouri 2016)) allows miniscule
sub-sections of the population to come
together into sustainable groups that might
not otherwise draw enough individuals to
survive. Seeing as Chicagoland was 34%
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Catholic and 3% Jewish in 2014 (Pew
Research Center 2014), we need not strain
to imagine how a community of around
100 intermarried couples was able to come
together (400 over the school’s 24 years).
Additionally, the diversity of a city like
Chicago, with its majority-minority status
and infamous ethnic enclaves, endows
groups with a plethora of potential out-
groups against which to define themselves.
Having found each other, Family
School members, like any other subcultural
group, engage in the creation of symbolic
distinctions through what has been called
boundary-work (Gurrentz 2014). Cultural
theories of group identity formation have
regarded boundary-work as an inseparable
part of the cohering process and as implicit
in the project of cultural production
(Smith 1998). Many strategies of negative
distinction found actors constructing
hypothetical naysayers against which
they could affirm their identities. One of
the Family School’s promotional videos
yields a straightforward example of such a
dialogue:
Affiliated Rabbi: How do you answer
somebody who says, ‘You can’t be
both’?
Middle-school girl: Well I say, ‘yeah
I can.’
Other instances of negation entailed the
construction of more specific Others such
as biblical literalists, traditional clergy, and
even sociologists—who were imagined as
having statistically informed biases against
successful interfaith marriages. These
Others share one important commonality,
namely their intolerance. Since the Family
School takes up acceptance as a virtue
and defining characteristic, intolerance
56
(non-acceptance) then becomes just
about the only thing that is excluded/
abjected from group identity. The Family
School’s boundary-work would then seem
to be a contradiction: a commitment to
inclusivity seems to require excluding the
non-inclusive. The contradiction begins to
dissolve, however, when we distinguish
acceptance and doctrinal inclusivity from
group-inclusivity. Family School members
do not see themselves as unaccepting
or non-inclusive of biblical literalists or
single-faith individuals, they simply see
themselves as different and thus partially
define their group with respect to this
difference.
To support the process of boundary-
work, Smith’s subcultural identity theory
outlines “reference groups,” which might
be thought of as miniature plausibility
structures (1998). Reference groups “serve
for people as sources of norms, values,
and standards of judgment, functioning as
informal authorities in the process of self-
evaluation.” Individuals falling outside
one’s reference group have significantly
less sway in determining one’s self-
evaluation than those inside. I thus propose
that actors are able to express their identities
so confidently in the face of doubters by
virtue of the Family School’s status as a
reference group. When a Family School
member confronts someone in society at
large who denies the plausibility of a dual-
faith identity, she can easily brush off such
comments given the security of the reference
group. The fact that the Family School
devotes itself to teaching people how to talk
about their identities and negotiate crises,
and even advertises itself as a safe space,
only further cements its status as a reference
group par excellence.
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
Few religious groups—not even the
Universalists—can offer what the Family
School offers. Even amongst interfaith
groups, the Family School distinguishes
itself as a unique specimen. Most often,
when one hears of an interfaith group,
one thinks of the many existent efforts
to bring together various single-faith
individuals for dialogue. A number of
prominent organizations of this type, such
as the Interfaith Youth Core, are present in
Chicago. The Family School distinguishes
itself even from these by offering something
much more specific and complex. That said,
a small number of dual-faith organizations
very similar to the Family School do exist
in places like New York City, Philadelphia,
and Washington D.C., having cropped up
independently around the same time (Miller
2014). These organizations still differ,
though, in catering to the slightly wider
umbrella of Jewish-Christian families and
in the varying levels of support they receive
from local churches and temples (Miller
2014).
We thus come to the conclusion that
the relative success of the Family School
makes sense given the pluralistic, urban
conditions under which it arose and in
which it currently thrives.
Summary, Discussion, and
Conclusion
Summary
I have attempted to give an account of
how individual and group identities interact
with culture and structure in the peculiar
setting of a dual-faith Sunday school.
Section 1 saw the description and
elaboration of religious self-understandings,
as articulated in the two identity repertoires,
(1) “being both” and (2) self-determination.
I have argued that the “being both”
repertoire allows for the coexistence of
Jewish and Catholic identities within a
single individual and serves to connect
one’s past with one’s present. Meanwhile,
the self-determination repertoire allows the
individual to negotiate between identities
and serves to connect one’s present with
one’s future. The two identity repertoires
coexist and come to provide the individual
with a sense of self that alternates between
the poles of sameness/difference and fixity/
fluidity.
In Section 2, I described how the
Family School treats “traditional” religious
concepts like belief and doctrine. While the
Family School, in theory, takes an agnostic
stance on doctrinal belief, I have argued that,
in practice, the organization encourages a
liberal and metaphorical interpretation of
scripture and doctrine. I have argued that
this approach is part of an overall effort to
de-centralize doctrinal belief as important
to identity construction, compared with
other constitutive factors such as cultural
participation and moral sentiment.
In Section 3, I examined the cultural
system and identities that emerge in the
wake of de-centralizing doctrinal belief. I
have argued that it is not religious identities
that matter most to Family School actors,
but political ones. I have shown how the
Family School’s cultural production and
classroom-level rhetorical strategies serve to
instill students with identities as “interfaith
ambassadors,” and how these identities are
actualized through moral action and the
project of theodicy. I have also implied that
Family School actors understand politics
and religion to be thoroughly connected,
which helps explain why political identities
should emerge in a religious context.
57
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Finally, in Section 4, I examined
individual and group identities as they
relate to the structure of pluralistic society.
I have argued that the Family School
functions as a therapeutic institution which
mediates between the individual and
society by offering support, guidance, and
clerical legitimation of actors’ identities. I
have also shown how the hyper-pluralistic
conditions of an urban environment serve to
reinforce a unique subcultural identity for
the individuals and the group.
Discussion
Individual identities do not come into
being in isolation: they are always products
of social structure and culture. In this
paper, I began analysis at the level of the
individual and gradually zoomed out to the
classroom, community, and societal levels
in order to paint a picture of how the various
tiers interact. For the sake of clarity, I now
present that picture in reverse order.
Pluralistic social structure enables the
peaceful coexistence of multiple religions,
ethnicities, races, genders, sexualities,
nationalities, etc. in one place—in this
case, the United States. In cities, pluralistic
social structure manifests in dense and
diverse populations, which allow for
deviant or unique subcultures to emerge.
Such subcultures thrive on the abundance
of potential members, symbols, and out-
groups available to them for shaping
group boundaries and identities. When
the subcultural group is a Jewish-Catholic
Sunday school, internal cultural production
can take on a rich and complex character,
thanks in part to the wealth of symbols
imbedded in each of the historical faith
traditions. Given some baseline level of
individual identification with the group, the
group’s cultural production comes back to
58
shape individual actors’ senses of self (e.g.
via classroom pedagogy). To complete the
circle, these individuals are always present
at each of the preceding levels and never
cease to act back upon them in ways that
affirm their statuses as social realities
(Berger and Luckmann 1966).
This relational schema of self, culture,
and society does not, in itself, pose anything
new or innovative to the discipline of
sociology. Its elaboration in the case of the
Family School, however, points us to new
theoretical understandings for sociological
literatures on intermarriage, identity, and
religion.
In the case of intermarriage, the
findings of this study have the potential
to reform literature in three ways. First,
the very existence of an institution like
the Family School challenges the notion
that intermarriage and religious strength
are negatively related, for here we find a
religious institution committed solely to
intermarried couples. Instead of weakening
their respective religiosities, most of our
couples would say that their intermarriages
have brought them closer to their faiths.
Such an insight obviously does not overturn
any macro-level trends indicating the
opposite (Cila and Lalonde 2014; Kalmijn
1998; Lidz 1991; Pew Research Center
2016; Rebhun 1999, 2016), but it does
invite a deeper look into the phenomena
than previously ventured, perhaps now
with an eye to other variables. Second, my
study challenges the notion that raising a
child dual-faith (as opposed to single-faith,
neither, or Universalist) is too idealistic or
confusing to work (Barron 1951; Phillips
2006). While the option may still be
uncommon in intermarried households, the
creation of more intermediary institutions
like the Family School could precipitate
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
a change in this trend. Third, my findings
detailing actors’ comfortable mastery of
multiple identity repertoires challenge the
notion of religious identity as a fixed thing
(factor or outcome) and replace it with
a view to an ongoing process of cultural
negotiation. Future scholarship would do
well to incorporate this view into things like
survey design, so as to glean more accurate
representations of identities outside their
social-categorical labels.
Literature on identity, religious and
otherwise, also begs to be rethought in
light of this study. First, the case of the
Family School points to new possibilities
for conceptualizing dual-faith or otherwise
complex religious identities. Just as
bicultural individuals describe themselves
as participating in two different cultures
and histories at once (Nagel 1994; Phinney
et al. 2001), so do our dual-faith actors learn
to view their two religions as “heritages”
from which they descend and in which
they actively take part. Second, our dual-
faith actors appear somewhat like classical
religious actors by participating in a moral
collectivity (Berger 1967; Durkheim 1995
[1912]); yet they also share commonalities
with more recent religious actors who
aggregate or integrate cultural packages
into “pluralist religious identities” (Mermis-
Cava 2009). Our dual-faith actors have
various cultural materials and expressions
available to them, see themselves as
participating in two distinct traditions at
once, yet still rely on the religious collective
(here, an intermediary institution) in
rendering themselves coherent. Future
research would do well to further examine
dual-faith individuals through cultural
analysis, as I have done, but also through
social-behavioral analysis, as I was unable
to fully do. The field could benefit from
an in-depth and perhaps longitudinal look
at the institutional behaviors of dual-faith
individuals to discern how their various
identity repertoires relate to things like
attendance or civic participation.
Lastly with regards to the identity
literature, our case presents us with a
special opportunity to grapple with the
concept of identity more broadly, through
the poles of sameness/difference (Lawler
2014) and fixity/fluidity. Family School
actors are same with Jews, Catholics, and
other interfaith Jew-Catholics. Yet they are
also different from any of these categorical
groups by virtue of the self-determination
repertoire, which enshrines the choosing
subject as unique and ultimately able to
decide with whom she is same. Such is the
case with much identity construction in the
modern world: individual choice is seen
as bearing the final authority (Luckmann
1967), with structure and culture coming
into play only insofar as they delimit and
shape the choices. The Family School, then,
provides us a portrait of the modern self
as coming to terms with its fluidity in the
social sphere (‘I can choose to go to temple
or church’), all the while holding onto its
fixity as a choosing and biographically-
constituted subject (‘I was raised with the
choices of Judaism and Catholicism’).
Finally, this study constitutes an
addition to sociological literature on
religion by describing a new, innovative
religious institution that has arisen in part
thanks to pluralistic conditions. On the
surface, this study affirms the view of
creative pluralism and rejects old logics of
secularization. However, on a deeper level,
the Family School continues to stir tensions
by virtue of its strange combination of
59
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
secular and sacred discourses. The new
theories of creative pluralism reject the
secularization thesis, citing as evidence
the sacred discourses and fervors of groups
like evangelicals (Smith 1998). The Family
School, however, is a far cry from an
evangelical church: it teaches culture rather
than belief, it meets but twice a month, and
its members, while perhaps just as fervent
about their Catholicism or their Judaism
in private, do not express much interfaith
ecstasy when they come together. On the
one hand, we have no choice but to describe
our belief-less Sunday school as secular,
given that it relegates matters of belief to
the private realm and spends equal energy
cultivating political identities as it does
religious ones. On the other hand, one could
read the melding of religion and politics as a
re-animation rather than a secularization—
an extension of the sacred into the secular
rather than the other way around. Given
that frequent references to traditional sacred
things are still made in the Family School,
albeit in abstract terms like “People of
God,” “the holy,” or “the transcendence,”
we cannot characterize it as a wholly
secular enterprise. My findings support
the notion, then, that a “secularization of
consciousness” (Berger 1967) has occurred,
but that even such consciousnesses can still
come together in search of the sacred. The
old lines have been blurred: the sacred
discourses (Judaism, Catholicism) are
discussed in a secular context and the
secular discourses (politics, activism) are
discussed with sacred terms. Once again,
then, the Family School makes a name for
itself by “being both.”
To clarify, there are a number of things
I am not saying. With regards to my initial
question of identity construction, I have
60
not claimed to uncover “where identity
comes from.” Nor have I made an empirical
argument about “how the kids turn out,” for
my data were not numerically representative
of the Family School as a whole—not to
mention that such a phrasing tragically
oversimplifies the question. Rather, I have
made claims about how the particular
identities in question are conceptualized
and shaped by structure and culture in the
particular setting at hand. My findings,
while indicative of further empirical and
theoretical innovation, are not generalizable
beyond the Family School walls.
Conclusion
Looking ahead, the pluralistic social
situation seems poised to endure in
the United States. Non-Christian and
unaffiliated populations are on the rise
(Pew Research Center 2015) and Christian
populations are on the wane. More broadly,
the country is on pace to cross over to a
majority-minority racial population by
2044 (United States Census Bureau 2014).
Even so, group tensions fester and erupt
with regularity, threatening the “peaceful”
component of pluralism’s definition (Berger
2014). While the construction of symbolic
boundaries aids and abets the formation
of identities, it is also a process prone
to reifying and amplifying difference in
poisonous ways. It may even be that the very
process of Othering is but a way for subjects
to cast out the nastier bits of themselves and
deposit them safely away in people and
things who appear to be different (Kristeva
1982). While such a process may keep the
peace via a sort of embittered stalemate, it
also, if true, bodes ill for the prospect of an
open-minded and accepting sort of peace.
The fact the Family School too draws
 The Construction of Identities in an Interfaith Sunday School
symbolic boundaries between itself and
other groups would then seem to implicate
it partially in some disastrous cycle of
Othering. However, here I must interpolate
an important caveat: for Family School
actors, the twin acts of participating in
dialogue and sharing in the search for
holiness are seen to somehow break down
the very symbolic boundaries they seem
to erect. In dialogue or in the presence of
the holy, social-categorical labels and even
socially and culturally informed identities
fall away, leaving only the raw selves and
their encounters with each other and with
“the transcendent.” As a sociologist, I
cannot comment on what occurs in such
interactions once deprived of their social
content, but must instead cede to the
mystics, theologians, and Sunday school
teachers of the world for possible insights.
I thus leave the proverbial last word to my
first point of contact, David, who put things
this way:
Like I said before, in an incredibly
polarized society where people form
opinions about the Other and the
other groups that they don’t think are
like them, I think we’re creating a
little bit of space to say, ‘that’s not the
way to look at life.’
Acknowledgements
I extend my abundant thanks to all who
supported me intellectually, logistically,
emotionally, and nutritionally throughout
the completion of this project. Specific
thanks go to my advisor, Omar McRoberts,
who inspired my thinking in many ways,
and my preceptor, Austin Kozlowski,
who pushed me and encouraged me at
critical moments. General thanks go to my
gracious friends and family for believing in
me, listening to my ideas, and helping me
through my struggles. Additional thanks
go to David Dault, Susan Katz Miller, and
Barbara Mahany for intellectual inspiration
and for pointing me towards the Family
School to begin with. Most of all, I thank
David and Patty Kovacs, Adam Gottlieb, and
all the Family School members I met along
the way for making me feel so welcome,
teaching me many valuable lessons, and for
being much-needed exemplars of love and
acceptance.
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65
Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party
Mobilization
Bess Goodfellow
B.A. Sociology

The tea party has been a prominent but under-theorized social movement with mean-
ingful effects on US politics throughout the last decade. Existing literature provides a
strong explanation of why individuals are driven to participate in the tea party (Skocpol
and Williamson 2012, Williamson et al 2011), but significant gaps remain when exam-
ining the effect of systemic factors on the tea party. Scholars have advanced competing
systemic explanations of the tea party’s success, including economic grievances and
the role of educational segregation in promoting traditional conservative narratives
(Cho et al 2012, McVeigh et al 2014). However, significant gaps remain, including
further assessing how and why economic grievances play a role in structuring the tea
party movement, and the application of spatially-specific techniques presents a unique
opportunity to close some of the gaps. I apply these techniques on an existing dataset
that I augment with data from the American Community Survey. I find that the tea party
is more active in areas where middle class interests, measured by income inequality,
are more salient.

Introduction within the US, political movements within

In 2008-2013, the tea party movement
was a prominent and deeply conservative
force in American politics. They held
frequent rallies and meetings, donated
extensively to far right political candidates,
and helped elect extremely conservative
representatives and senators. Although
tea party-related groups were present
throughout the US, levels of tea party
engagement were not evenly distributed
throughout the US at the local level (see map
in Figure 1). This variation in engagement
presents an opportunity to examine the
structures and causes of the movement
quantitatively across the entire US.
Insight from this study may give us clues
to understanding not only the origins of the
tea party, but also conservative movements
66
democracies more broadly, and the social
bases of democratization processes. In
addition to its role in US politics at the time
it was founded, the tea party represents an
initial swell of conservative populism in the
US before its reemergence in 2016 during
the campaign and election of Donald Trump.
Although the two phenomena are different,
the origins of the tea party may give us
clues if not answers to what factors were
important in later conservative swells –
which in 2016, due to the transient nature of
the campaign, exhibited activity that became
less formalized through organizations and
documented meetings (and is thus harder
to study in detail). Further, although it is
just one movement, the tea party provides
a case study that may open questions for
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization

Figure 1: Octile map of counties with different levels of tea party activity. Octiles were determined
using counts of tea party events occurring in each county.

future investigation on social movements Literature Review

and swings in political preferences within
democracies, as the tea party was an
organizational actor within the process of
democratization – specifically, they often
sought to exclude groups or individuals
they perceived as other from receiving
benefits from social programs and, in some
cases, even from voting by advocating more
restrictive voter ID laws or voting processes.
To answer these questions, my study
seeks to examine two potential causes of
tea party engagement through the use of
quantitative spatial methods. I first will build
a theoretical framework that explains why
tea party engagement would be higher or
lower in certain types of areas. I will then
test these theories using spatial regression
models on data collected on 3143 counties
throughout the US (out of 3144 total US
counties). These tests will help account for
the spatial variation present in patterns of
tea party engagement throughout the US and
in examining the validity of my theoretical
frameworks.
Although much is known about the tea
party, the existing explanations of its roots
provide a foundation for new hypotheses.
Building from existing theories, I argue that
explanations for the tea party must involve
rigorously theorizing its social bases and
contextualizing the movement within
democracy as a sociopolitical system.
Existing explanations can be grouped into
three categories, a complex post-Obama
ultraconservative movement, educational
segregation, and economic grievance, each
of which I discuss below.
Education segregation is one hypothesis
that explains the tea party’s rise to power.
The main proponent of this theory is Rory
McVeigh (McVeigh et al 2014). McVeigh
argues that educational segregation within
local areas in the US “shapes perceptions
of economic inequality” (McVeigh et
al 2014:635) and in doing so promotes
traditional conservative narratives
explaining social and economic inequality
as natural products of heterogeneous
67
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
abilities at birth, making individuals in
educationally segregated areas more likely
to participate in the tea party. McVeigh
measures educational segregation by
looking at counts of individuals with college
level education or above within census
tracts. This measure is flawed: McVeigh
doesn’t account for spatial or social
patterns in the distribution of individual’s
education levels above or below the
arbitrary census tract level in determining
educational segregation. Such patterns
may be important in describing the level
of segregation presented to individuals in
terms of how often their network overlaps
with other individuals with lower levels of
education. McVeigh’s dependent variable,
the number of tea party organizations
in a county, is also problematic in that
it measures only baseline levels of tea
party field complexity not actual activity
or engagement with the tea party. More
problematic in McVeigh’s analysis are
the regressions he uses. McVeigh does
not account for spatial autocorrelation
between counties (or census tracts) in his
analysis. Spatial autocorrelation, the idea
that there is a spatial structure to the values
McVeigh observes, is extremely important
to consider in his regression, as spatial
structures create an environment in which
one observation can influence – and is
then influenced by – each of its neighbors.
This problem is especially salient in the
context of a grassroots political movement,
where political preferences and activist
networks may spread spatially from one
county to another. In fact, examination of
McVeigh’s data suggests positive spatial
autocorrelation at p ≤ 0.01. This phenomenon
of autocorrelation between observations
creates a situation in McVeigh’s regressions
68
where there is structure in his error term,
and the key assumption that the regression’s
variables are uncorrelated with the error
term does not hold. McVeigh’s regression
estimates therefore may be biased and, more
problematically, may not be consistent.
Future research that appropriately reflects
the structure of the study’s data is needed to
assess the true social bases of the tea party.
Another paradigm within tea party
literature suggests that the tea party is a
movement that combines grassroots activism
with elite support in an ultraconservative
reaction to Obama’s election, drawing
from traditional conservative thought in
an age where most conservations could
not identify with American leadership.
Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
are leading authors within this body of tea
party literature. Through close analysis and
thick description of the tea party, Skocpol
and Williamson describe in detail the
composition and history of the tea party
and its most typical members (Williamson
et al 2011, Skocpol and Williamson 2012).
They describe a movement that is at once
grassroots and top down – a movement
that experiences support from Republican
elites as well as less politically involved
Republicans that may have felt alienated
from politics or their party in the years
leading up to the movement. Skocpol and
Williamson further shed light on who the
typical tea party member is and what they
believe the tea party stands for, noting that
tea party members are demographically
older, middle class, and white. Some are
evangelicals, while others are libertarian and
less tied to religion. They tend to espouse
a narrative promoting exclusion based on
race and class, based on generalized views
of immigrants and other marginalized social
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
groups, and they advocate for government
to conform to this narrative by limiting
government aid to groups or people that
tea party members do not empathize with,
but promoting government programs that
help tea partiers. Skocpol and Williamson
further note that tea partiers hold a “deep
suspicion” (Williamson et al. 2012:633)
for liberals and traditional institutions,
believing that one must work hard to
develop firsthand knowledge of texts like
the constitution or other laws that take on
an almost religious aura for tea partiers.
Skocpol and Williamson elaborate on
the history of tea party formation as well.
Often, tea party groups came together
spontaneously after the 2008 election, and
most of the people Skocpol and Williamson
interviewed describe the aftermath of the
election as a moment of deep shock and
alienation from traditional institutions.
Other tea party groups did form out of
existing social networks, but often these are
networks that weren’t explicitly political.
Finally, national tea party organizations
emerged under the guidance of traditional
Republican elites, such as FreedomWorks
and the Tea Party Patriots. Ultimately,
Skocpol and Williamson advance a
fascinating and nuanced view of the tea
party as a movement that reinterpreted
traditional conservative and sometimes
ultraconservative frameworks in an era of
conservative alienation from mainstream
political leadership. However, they stop
short of examining why some but not
all conservatives felt so alienated from
politics or investigating the role played by
local environments in structuring tea party
activity. Were conservatives in all locations
equally likely to be drawn into the tea party
movement and to participate actively in that
movement? Examining these secondary
factors can help build a more nuanced
view of how and why the tea party gained
momentum at an aggregate rather than
individual level – answering the question
not of who is in the tea party, but where and
why the tea party movement gains traction.
A second, more contentious, paradigm
has emerged suggesting economic grievance
as a primary determinant of the tea party.
Past literature on conservative movements
suggests that economic grievance is a factor
in conservative mobilization, because of
the threats indicated by these grievances
on the interests of conservative constituents
(Almedia 2003, Tilly 1978) or because
of declining economic power (McVeigh
2009). Wendy Cho and her cowriters
suggest that this factor matters for the tea
party as well (Cho et al. 2012). Cho et al
build a dataset measuring the number of tea
party-related meetings occurring in counties
across the US. They conduct a spatial
analysis using appropriate methodology
and find that one of their economic
indicators, foreclosure rates, is positively
associated with tea party activity at a
highly significant level. However, her two
other economic indicators, median income
and unemployment, have no significant
relationship with tea party engagement
levels. Although Cho et al find compelling
support for ecosystem-level economic
grievance as a factor in structuring outcomes
of tea party activity, Cho et al offer little
explanation or framework for why some
economic indicators generate economic
grievances, while others do not, or for
why foreclosure rates as a specific form of
economic grievance translate into tea party
mobilization. Skocpol and Williamson
suggest that it is the socioeconomic middle
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class that organizes as the tea party, creating
ambiguities on whether or not it is tea party
participants precisely who are affected by
the tea party (Williamson et al 2011), and
Cho et al provide little theory to support
a mechanism explaining the relationship
between foreclosures specifically and tea
party activity. Further investigation is needed
to unravel the relationship between various
economic indicators, economic grievance,
and the tea party. Additionally, the role of
economic grievance overall is ambiguous.
Other writers find that economic hardship
is not a motivator of tea party activity at the
individual level, but draw little conclusions
on the role of economic hardship in the
ecosystem on structuring tea party success
(Fetner and King 2011). As a result, future
study must still resolve what role theories of
mobilizing based on economic factors play
in the tea party and similar movements, and
if so, how they do this and what types of
economic grievance or distress matter.
Existing literature on the tea party
therefore leaves much to study, particularly
in uncovering, describing, and explaining
the role of economic grievance. Past
theorists have proposed several mechanisms
for tea party mobilization, including
economic grievance and educational
segregation, but their research leaves much
to further assess and calls for the use of
more rigorous methodology appropriate to
the data. Analysis at the local ecosystem
level is particularly lacking due to the
difficulties of using spatial data. This paper
aims to fill those gaps by building theories
explaining the relationship between certain
types of economic grievance and tea party
mobilization and subsequently testing those
theories rigorously using spatial data.
70
Socioeconomic Class and The Tea
Party
In this paper, I evaluate the relationship
between structural inequality at a local
level and the tea party. I use literature to
create a mechanism by which inequality
and movement success are related, paying
careful attention to the nuances involved
in how different types of inequality across
different classes should affect movement
outcomes. I then explicitly relate my
literature to the tea party.
A long literature on social movements
and democratization suggests that tea
party presence will be highly correlated
with salient class divides. In order to fully
understand the role of class within the tea
party, it is useful to draw both from social
movement literature and democratization
literature, since the tea party is not only
a social movement, but also a movement
advocating the interests of certain
individuals and groups within a democratic
context. I therefore draw heavily from
democratic literature that explains how
individuals and groups gain access to
sufficient power to mobilize, find affinities
for certain types of issues, and ultimately
participate in the democratic process.
Additionally, substantial sociological
literature exists concerning class as well as
the connections between class and social
movements and class and democratization.
Taken together, these literatures are
incredibly important in theorizing the
causes of the tea party, as the tea party is a
social movement within a democracy with
predominant participation from a specific
class (Skocpol and Williamson, 2012).
Sociological thinkers demonstrate that
class and economic resources play a crucial
but twofold role in structuring opportunities
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
for social movements. On the one hand,
Marx suggests that class divisions create an
impetus for revolution and the conditions
of the lower class drive the creation of
social movements. In his formulation,
Marx emphasized the role of production
as the predominant and teleological force
or determinant of history (Marx 1978).
Marxian theory suggests that conflict
between economic classes should produce
political movements and revolutions.
Later thinkers like John Gaventa add
nuance to Marx’s claims, demonstrating
that, while class interests are important,
the lack of economic power can actually
create monumental obstacles to social
movement formation. In his book Power
and Powerlessness, Gaventa posits first that
power can not only force an individual to do
an action, but also structure that individual’s
ability to even conceive of their desired
action (Gaventa 1980). Gaventa then
analyzes the case of lower class coal miners
to suggest that power can be integrally
related to class. The coal miners did not
have the economic resources necessary
to conceive of rebelling against their coal
company employers, as doing so could
mean losing their job, as well as their home
and ability to purchase needed goods like
food. Taken together, Marx and Gaventa’s
theories suggest that class interest is crucial
to the development of social movements –
but that organizing classes must have access
to power, through their economic resources
or otherwise. Later theorists pick up this
theme up again, suggesting that social
movements within democracies specifically
are fundamentally shaped by class power
and class struggles.
Theories of democracy are crucial
in examining how exactly class interests
translate into political interests and agendas
within a democracy. In his analysis of
democracy, Dahl theorizes that, due to the
existence of slack, citizens with access to
fragmented, unequal resources, have the
ability to organize to influence specific issue
areas in which politicians make decisions,
creating a situation of fragmented inequality,
in which all citizens have some power to
affect change, if some more than others.
More specifically, a political system often
contains unused resources, which define a
gap between citizens’ potential to influence
a decision and their actual influence on
a decision. Furthermore, influence is not
absolute: individuals can exert pressure
on specific issue areas through the use of
their resources, or the exercise of power.
Citizens have heterogeneous resources,
ranging from wealth to social status to
votes, which may be more or less powerful
depending on the type and amount of
resource (Dahl 1963). Terry Clark expands
Dahl’s list of resources, further including
resources such as control over jobs, mass
media, knowledge, subsystem solidarity,
etc. (Clark 1968). Finally, although citizens
have access to unequal resources, each has
some potential to influence specific issue
areas (Dahl 1963). Dahl’s work, augmented
by Clark, suggests that class interest
play a role in how individuals or groups
may coalesce into a social movement,
mobilizing certain resources to affect key
issue areas. However, Dahl has little to say
on how individuals or groups choose key
issue areas of interest on which to exercise
influence.
Rueschemeyer et al pick up this theme in
detail, suggesting that capitalism and class
interests are fundamental in structuring
the political interests of an individual or
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group in a landscape where inclusiveness in
political decision making (i.e., the level of
democracy) is malleable. Upper classes seek
greater political control, acting to exclude or
diminish the role played by lower classes in
key decisions. Similarly, lower classes seek
to augment or expand their political power,
mobilizing to expand voting rights, equalize
the amount of influence gained through
donations to political parties, or advance
a welfare state (Rueschemeyer et al 1992).
However, Gaventa suggests that lower class
individuals may not be able to collectively
define their interests, and when they do, are
less able to mobilize resources to achieve
them. While other identities like gender,
race, and religion, play a role in defining
the issues individuals and groups mobilize
towards, Rueschemeyer et al contend
that class is by far the most important.
Ultimately, Rueschemeyer et al suggest that
political interests, and the issues around
which citizens choose to mobilize in Dahl’s
theory, is itself structured by class.
Taken in sum, literature on class and
social movements suggests that class
identity, while a strong basis for movement
mobilization, is especially important when
obstacles, like lack of resources, are not
present for the group in question. Further,
such class-based movements have distinct
agendas in the context of democracy, as
lower class-derived groups seek to gain
inclusion and more privileged classes
work to exclude others. In the context of
democracy, groups promote these agendas
by mobilizing resources to influence
specific political decisions.
Applied to the tea party, the literature
suggests that tea party activity will be more
pronounced in more unequal localities. I
start by suggesting that class boundaries
72
and identities are most salient in localities
with higher economic inequality across
the distribution of wealth or income.
Past ethnographies suggest that tea party
participants tend to be middle class in
terms of socioeconomic class (Williamson
et al 2011). Following Marx and Gaventa,
I expect that in places with higher middle
class consciousness and identity, this
identity will provide a strong basis for tea
party mobilization. Further, in a democracy,
a movement based on strong middle class
identity will more easily coordinate an
agenda, choosing specific issue areas to
promote. In the case of the tea party, a
movement with participation from relatively
higher classes, the agenda is primarily
exclusionary. Key issue areas might
include taxation, welfare, and immigration,
although as Skocpol and Williamson note,
the tea party espouses a broad platform
(Skocpol and Williamson 2012). They tend
to promote lower taxes and an end to welfare
benefits, in addition to the deportation of
immigrants. Following Dahl, the tea party
will mobilize their resources to affect these
issue areas, including through meeting
and organizing events. Ultimately, high
inequality will produce more salient and
defined class identities, including middle
class identities, which will in turn spark
greater tea party activity and organizing.
I propose two tests for this. First, I
expect that tea party will have high activity
in areas with higher measures of income
inequality. I discuss my measure below
but chose it to reflect inequality throughout
but especially around the middle of
the distribution so that it more closely
corresponds with class boundedness around
the middle class. Second, to provide support
for my contention that it is specifically
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
inequality rather than economic distress
more generally, I expect that measures
of inequality that focus exclusively on
the lower end of the income or wealth
distribution will not have a positive
significant relationship with tea party
activity. I look at poverty and unemployment
to assess this relationship. I do not expect to
see a strong positive relationship between
poverty or unemployment and tea party
activity, because I do not expect raw levels
of poverty and unemployment to track
with class identity and consciousness,
particularly middle class consciousness.
Class boundaries and identities should be
more salient in places where there is a large
spread in the income or wealth of residents,
rather than a high concentration of lower
class residents.
Subject and Variables
In order to test the above hypothesis, I
will draw upon data on tea party meetings,
class divides and inequality, political
preference, and race at the county level
for 3143 counties across the US (out of
3144 total counties). My unit of analysis
is therefore the county and the overlapping
local networks of civil society that the
county contains. I use my data to discover
why some counties are more likely to
experience higher levels of tea party
engagement than others – not why an
individual would engage with the tea party.
My dependent variable is tea party
engagement, which I will operationalize
as the number of tea party events in a
county. This variable was collected during
2010 only, which previous studies suggest
was the height of tea party activity due
to the midterm elections. (Skocpol and
Williamson 2012) The number of tea party
events is a good indicator for the level of tea
party activity and involvement. Although it
excludes information such as the number
of participants at each event, it is a more
precise indicator of activity than simply
number of organizations. My indicator
ignores some of the more nuanced facets
of involvement in the tea party movement
in favor of focusing on active and frequent
participation in real events – it doesn’t look
at the number of people in a county who
may approve of the tea party, vote along tea
party lines, or give money to the tea party,
all of which are factors that would indicate
affinity but not direct involvement in the
movement (Diani 2015).
My explanatory variable is income
inequality. Specifically, I will use the mean-
median ratio for income. The mean-median
ratio is not a perfect measure of inequality,
but trends with more traditional measures
like the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of
variation, and the variance of logs, as well
as measures of percentile ratios. To give
a greater sense of how the mean-median
ratio reflects various distributions, I have
included two figures. The first is the density
function of a normal distribution. With its
mean and median both equal to 0.5, it has
a mean-median ratio of 1. However, the
second graph, Figure 3, shows a skewed
distribution that is similar to, if less skewed
than, the 2013 US income distribution
indicated by the Survey of Consumer
Finances (Kuhn and Rios-Rull 2016: 10).
With mean 0.99 and median 0.51, it has
a mean-median ratio of 1.94. Similarly,
the skewed graph would score higher on
traditional measures of inequality, from
the Gini coefficient to the variance of
logarithms and the coefficient of variation.
While the mean-median ratio does not
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Figure 2: Normal distribution (top), with mean-median ratio 1,
and skewed distribution (bottom), with mean-median ratio 1.94
perfectly measure the nuances of inequality
in a distribution, it is by far the most
convenient, as more precise information
about income distributions at the county
level was not available.
I also include two measures of
economic distress and lower class presence
that do not directly measure inequality as
controls to ensure that it is not merely these
factors that lead to higher tea party support.
Specifically, I draw from the American
Community Survey to assess the percentage
of residents of a county living in poverty
and the percentage unemployed. These two
metrics correspond to the percentage of the
county living at the bottom of the income
distribution. As explained above, they are
74
a weak measure of inequality, especially in
assessing the inequality experienced by the
middle class, since they look only at how
many people live below a certain income
level, rather than at how the incomes of
residents in a certain area are dispersed
relative to one another. As a result, poverty
and unemployment will not lead to more
salient middle class identities, and I expect
that poverty and unemployment will not
have a significant positive relationship with
tea party activity.
I am also including several extraneous
variables in my study as controls. These
variables comprise key information about
characteristics of each county that might
intuitively or theoretically affect the level of
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
Figure 3: Log of Population
tea party activity. First, I controlled for the
level of population. As population increases,
one might expect a greater number of tea
party events to occur as a result – there are
more people both to plan and to participate
in events. I choose the natural logarithm of
population as my control by convention and
in order to prioritize differences in the scale
of cities, rather than the exact population
value. A county of 1000 people might
intuitively be expected to see a level of
meetings more similar to a county of 1500
than to a county of 500, all else being equal.
In other words, as population increases, the
marginal effect a single individual might be
expected to have on the level of meetings
or movement activity should decrease
rather than scale linearly. Ultimately, using
a log scale allows me to model the effects
a population increase might intuitively
have – i.e., a difference effect at different
base population levels. I am including a
histogram of log of population values for
my sample to show that the distribution
is relatively even and that, after taking
logarithms, there are few extreme values. I
further verified that my results were robust
to using log or total population. I chose to
use log of population as a control rather than
constructing a rate of tea party meetings
per population in order to avoid issues
of heteroskedacity as the variance of my
dependent variable shifted across counties.
I also control for population density.
Counties with greater population density
might be expected to have a greater number
of tea party events – a city may have more
events than a suburb or a rural area due to
tighter social network structures and shorter
transportation times to meetings, lowering
the barrier for meeting participation.
Although intuition suggests that population
density may have some impact on tea party
activity, there is little theoretical support
for population density being a factor in
social movement formation and activity.
However, I included it in addition to the
log of population in order to ensure that
no outside factors affected the number of
meetings held by the tea party, as I use this
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to measure the level of tea party activity.
I further control for spatial patterns
affecting the data. Once a social movement
occurs, participants mobilize through pre-
existing social networks (Diani 2015,
Goodwin and Skocpol 1989, Mann 1986),
and these networks are often located in
space (Tita 2012, Knoke 1990, Yinger
1960). Mann characterizes these networks
as overlapping, suggesting that individuals
remain connected – if increasingly socially
distant – to those in overlapping but distinct
networks (Mann 1986). This principle,
applied to spatially located networks,
strongly echoes Tobler’s law of distance
decay (Anselin and Rey 2014) within the
context of the county. Counties closer to
one another in space contain individuals
that are socially closer as well, and these
counties may have similar levels of social
movement activity as a result of the role
social networks play in the spread of
social movements. Tests for this type of
spatial interdependence indicated that it
was present in my data (see discussion of
these tests in the next section). Controlling
for these patterns of spatial influence is
key in isolating the county-level factors
that affected tea party activity. I control
for spatial effects using both spatial error
models and spatial lag models, but I
verified that my results were consistent
across using spatial error models only or
spatial lag models only. I choose to use both
spatial lag and spatial error models as these
models maximized the R-squared of my
regressions, thus providing the best fit to
the data. These three methods are the most
common ways to control for spatial effects
in regression analysis (Anselin and Rey
2012). I discuss the methodology behind
these in greater detail below.
76
I further follow Cho et al to include a
measure of election competitiveness in
the county’s congressional district, as my
data was collected during 2010, a midterm
year in which citizens elected senators and
congressional representatives. Although
I found little direct theoretical support
for higher levels of events occurring in
more competitive areas, a theoretical and
intuitive argument could be made that
competitiveness matters. My measure of tea
party activity, tea party events, requires an
allocation of resources, time and money, by
local or national participants. The national
tea party movement, as an office-seeking
organization, may make resource allocation
decisions to maximize the number of seats
they could win, allocating more resources
and throwing more events in counties
with more competitive congressional
districts. Similarly, local participants may
be more willing to allocate personal time
and resources to events that have a greater
probability of making a difference. Thus,
I included competitiveness as a control
to account for this intuitive argument that
competitiveness could affect the level of tea
party activity.
I included an additional economic
variable as a control, foreclosure rates.
Cho et al found that foreclosure rates were
positively related with tea party activity at
a level that was highly significant. In order
to demonstrate first that my decomposition
of economic distress factors was significant
beyond any correlation with foreclosure
rates and second that my model was
correctly specified (i.e., no variables were
correlated with the error term), I included
foreclosure rates explicitly as a control in
my regression model. More theoretically,
foreclosure rates could represent many
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
different types of economic distress, from
an increasing level of wealth inequality as
individuals lose houses, their main source of
wealth, to a visual signal of economic decay
to outrage of individuals at their loss of a
home. Regardless, it is clear that omitting
foreclosure rates creates ambiguities in both
my argument and my model specification.
Finally, I included several demographic
variables as controls. First, I included a
variable measuring Republican affinity
within a county, operationalized by looking
at past voting patterns. Since tea partiers
tend to have conservative affinities, this
variable allows us to include some baseline
of how many individuals in a given area may
have the conservative affinities prerequisite
to tea party support. It may also create
strong clues as to how taboo or stigmatized
conservative viewpoints are. Since such
stigmatization may lead to more tightknit
and bounded conservative networks, due
to conservative individuals developing
a double identity with both negative
and positive components in response to
alienation from their peers (perhaps even
despite the lack of a visual stigma or
construction of a ghetto – although without
these factors the effect would undoubtedly
be less pronounced) (Wacquant 2011).
Such communities may be able to more
easily compel mobilization of individual
participants, as intense boundary work at a
field level allows such networks to develop
into social movements in the presence of
strong resource exchanges (Polanyi 1944,
Diani 2015) and as other conditions like the
election of Obama create the preconditions
for active mobilization (Staggenborg and
Lecomte 2009). Thus, higher levels of
Republican affinity could counterintuitively
produce lower levels of tea party activity,
an effect that should be controlled for in my
regression model.
Finally, I control for the percentage of
white residents. Similarly to the mechanism
explained above for the variable Republican
affinity, I suggest that race – specifically
whiteness – may create a visual but not
stigmatized mechanism that has the potential
to draw white potential tea party participants
into tighter networks as they fail to identity
with the increasingly diverse and foreign-
born community around them. Though this
mechanism, white tea partiers interact more
frequently with one another where there are
fewer white people by percent, which is
consistent with the existence of segregated
communities in the US today. This repeated
and frequent interaction would give rise to
more dense identity-based communities.
Those communities may then organize more
actively compared to communities that are
less white by percent. However, as with
the Republican affinity variable, percent
white may also structure a baseline for the
potential level of tea party participants.
Despite the contradictions involved in how
the variable structures tea party activity, it is
important to include as a control.
By including these extraneous variables
explicitly in my models, each variable
should be orthogonal to the error term. As
a result, my model coefficients should be
specified consistently and without bias.
Data and Methodology
In this paper, I use data collected by Cho
et al from Meetup.com, a website that lets
groups organize public meetings, and the
event schedule for the Tea Party Patriots,
the largest tea party organization, to
calculate the number of tea party meetings
that occurred in different counties in the US
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Figure 4: Connectivity plot with k = 4 nearest neighborest
in 2010, including Alaska and Hawaii (Cho
et al. 2012). The meetings vary widely,
from smaller meetings in which participants
discuss Tea Party ideas or plan movement
actions to larger protests. In total, Cho et
al identify 5990 meetings. Tea party events
are reported across the country (3143 out
of 3144 counties are present in Cho et
al’s dataset), so although this data may be
biased downwards, it should otherwise be
consistent.
I supplemented Cho et al’s data with
data from the American Community
Survey (ACS) for population, income
indicators for inequality, unemployment,
poverty, and race. I used five year estimates
collected in 2010 for all my data points.
Population measures the total population of
the county. My income inequality measure
was constructed by dividing the mean
income given by the ACS to the median
income of a county given by the ACS. My
unemployment metric gives the percentage
of the population who is actively looking
for but cannot find work. My poverty metric
gives the percentage of residents living in
poverty, families making below a certain
78
amount dependent on family size. Poverty
should therefore be relatively insensitive
to changes in welfare schemes across
locations. My measure of the percent of
white residents using the ACS’s measure
of the percentage of residents identifying
as Caucasian. Please refer to the ACS for
additional methodological details.
I used Cho et al.’s estimate of
foreclosure rates, population densities,
competitiveness of the 2010 midterm
election, and Republican voting patterns
as controls (Cho et al 2012). Please refer to
Cho et al’s paper for details of how these
variables were constructed.
I tested the spatial autocorrelation in
my data using two different tests: Moran’s I
and Geary’s C. Both measure global spatial
autocorrelation, basically assessing whether
or not counties across the US tended to
exhibit levels of tea party activity similar
or dissimilar to that of their neighbors’.
I computed both using analytical and
permutation-based methods. For all four
measures, I found statistics that indicated
positive spatial autocorrelation with p ≤
0.01. This confirms that counties in the
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
US tend to experience tea party activity at
levels similar to their neighbors, suggesting
that each county influences the tea party
levels of its neighbor – and so implicitly,
since counties are often their neighbors’
neighbor, each county influences its own
level of activity.
These results require that spatial
regressions be used to control for the spatial
autocorrelation in the data. I implemented
several regressions with spatial error and
spatial lag components to control for the
positive spatial autocorrelation. I verified
that the results were robust to using both
spatial lag models and spatial error models
individually, but I chose to use a regression
model that incorporated both, as it tended
to have a slightly higher R-squared,
indicating that it was more accurate to the
data. I used k-nearest neighbor weights
with k = 4 to build this regression in order
to achieve an exactly even distribution of
neighbors for each county across the entire
United States. Under this weights scheme,
each county was a neighbor to the four
nearest counties (distance was measured
from the mean center of each county). See
the connectivity plot in Figure 4, which
traces the relationships between different
counties. Since I used a spatial process
model for my regression, using weights
that produced an even number of neighbors
for each observation was important to
avoid heteroskedacity, even though my
weights were unfortunately not symmetric
(ie, not all counties were their neighbors’
neighbor).
I choose to use a simultaneous spatial
autoregressive process model rather
than a conditional spatial process. The
simultaneous autoregressive spatial
process model uses exogenous factors to
control for the random errors of a given
variable (in this case, tea party activity)
in an observation’s neighbor, while the
conditional spatial process uses Bayesian
statistics to endogenously define the spatial
error or lag of an observation relative to the
values of its neighbors. The simultaneous
spatial process model I used is best used
with Gaussian distributions; however, my
data, which features an extensive (count)
measurement as my dependent variable,
follows a Poisson distribution (see Figure
5 for a histogram of tea party events).
There are few ways to incorporate the
Poisson distribution structure of my data
into a spatial model. One conditional
spatial process model allows for a Poisson
distribution, but it takes into account
only negative spatial autocorrelation,
the presence of a checkerboard type
pattern, where neighboring counties have
dissimilar values for tea party activities.
However, Moran’s I and Geary’s C test
indicates positive spatial autocorrelation
in my data, so it is extremely important
to use a model that assesses positive as
well as negative spatial autocorrelation.
Additionally, the mechanics of the
conditional spatial process model are
best used for prediction compared to
explanation. I prioritized incorporating
positive spatial autocorrelation rather than
best treating the Gaussian distribution of
my dependent variable.
As a result, I chose to use the
simultaneous spatial process model rather
than the conditional spatial process. Please
note the potential for misspecification as
a result of the misaligned distributions
throughout my analysis of my data. I further
address these issues in my discussion.
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Figure 5: Histogram of tea party event counts across counties
Results
My data strongly supports my
hypothesis, which suggests that areas of
greater inequality, especially inequality
salient to the middle class, also see greater tea
party activity. Meanwhile, weak measures
of inequality not salient to the middle
were not positively related to tea party
activity. This model supports my theoretical
framework above, suggesting that it is the
salience and boundaries around the middle
class identity, rather than economic distress
more generally, that forms a social basis for
tea party mobilization.
I want to first give some brief descriptive
statistics to contextualize the model. Tea
party event counts ranged from 0 to 173,
with the vast majority of counties (2673 out
of 3143) experiencing 0 tea party events.
See the histogram in Figure 5 for more
details about the distribution. My measure
of inequality, the independent variable
80
in my study, followed a more Gaussian
distribution, and ranged from 0, comprising
3 counties in Alaska with insufficient data
that I removed from my regression, to 2.5,
with most counties containing ratios close to
1. See the histogram in Figure 6 for details.
Distributions of poverty and unemployment
across counties skewed towards 0 and
did not follow a normal distribution. See
histograms in Figures 7 and 8. Due to space,
I will not produce histograms for the other
variables, but will give brief descriptions.
Foreclosure rates range from 0 to 147.5,
with significant concentration around 0.
Competiveness ranged from 0 to 100,
with most counties having observations
lying above 50. Population density ranged
from 0 to 70,401, with the vast majority of
observations falling between 0 and 10,000.
The percent of white residents ranged from
0 to 99.2, with over 80% of observations
lying about 60. Republican affinity
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization

Figure 6: Histogram of the mean to median ration, my measure of inequality

Figure 7: Histogram of poverty levels

Figure 8: Histogram of unemployment levels

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ranged from 0 to 92. It followed a normal
distribution with a mean of 58.
I then created several models (Table
1), starting with only inequality and log of
population as variables on the right-hand
side of my regression and slowly adding in
controls. My initial model indicating that
inequality was positively related to tea party
activity, but not at a significant level. Log
of population had a directionally similar but
more significant effect. The R-squared of
the regression is 0.13, indicating that some
of the variation in tea party activity can be
explained by the model.
I then performed additional regressions
by adding in more controls in order to
further examine the relationship between
inequality and the tea party. First, I accounted
for spatial effects. While the spatial
effects themselves were not especially
significant, their inclusion demonstrated
that inequality is actually more significant
and more strongly positive than the initial
regression revealed. When I account for
the spatial relationships seen in the data,
inequality emerges as significant at the p
≤ 0.01 level. The coefficient of inequality
in this model is positive even when taking
the standard deviation into account. The
spatial relationships, and other controls,
had obscured the effect inequality had on
tea party activity, since without examining
these factors, the tea party appeared to
have relatively high activity in places
that were nearby one another but didn’t
have uniformly high levels of inequality
and bounded middle class identities. The
pseudo-R-squared value of the regression
increases substantially with the inclusion
of spatial variables, suggesting that spatial
information is important in capturing
variation in tea party activity.
82
Adding in controls related to population
density and election competitiveness, the
relationship between inequality and the
tea party holds, remaining positive and
significant at the p ≤ 0.01 level. However,
the coefficient decreases slightly compared
to my second model. Interestingly,
population density has an effect that appears
to be significantly 0. Pseudo-R-squared
decreases compared to model 2, but the
spatial pseudo-R-squared (not reported in
the table) increased slightly.
I continued by adding in controls
relating to economic distress: foreclosure,
unemployment, and poverty. The mean
to median ratio maintained its strong and
significant relationship with the tea party,
actually increasing in significance from
the p ≤ 0.01 level to the p ≤ 0.001 level.
The coefficient for inequality in my model
additionally increased in magnitude.  
Unemployment was negatively related
to tea party activity at a significance level
of p ≤ 0.001. In locations with higher
unemployment rates and where more
people have difficulty finding jobs, the tea
party is less active. Poverty similarly had
a negative but not significant coefficient.
Foreclosure rate had a positive coefficient
and was significantly related to tea party
activity at the p ≤ 0.001 level, suggesting
that as foreclosure rates rise, the tea party
becomes more activity. However, while the
coefficient is positive, it is much lower than
the mean to median ratio. Additionally, the
mean to median ratio experiences only small
magnitudes of variation, ranging from 0 to
2.5, while the scale of the foreclosure rate
ranges from 0 to 147.5. The difference in
coefficient suggests that, while foreclosure
rates are important, they play less of a role
in structuring tea party activity than does
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
Table 1: Regression results: inequality and the tea party
pure income inequality. A marginal increase
of 1 in the foreclosure rate will have a much
smaller effect on tea party activity than a
marginal increase in the mean to median
ratio. By including variables meant to
measure economic grievances, the pseudo-
R-squared increased to 0.20, suggesting
that these economic factors matter to some
extent in explaining tea party activity.
Finally, I added all my controls in the
regression, including Republican affinity
and the percentage of white residents.
Republican affinity was negatively related
to tea party activity at a significance level
of p ≤ 0.05. However, this significance was
not robust to small changes in the included
variables, including removing poverty
and unemployment from the regression.
Percent of white residents had a negative
but insignificant coefficient. The economic
relationships continued to hold. Inequality
had a strong, positive, and highly significant
effect on tea party activity. Foreclosure
rate had a weaker but positive and highly
significant effect on tea party activity.
Unemployment had a negative relationship
with tea party activity, and was significant
only at the p ≤ 0.05 level. Poverty had
a negative but insignificant coefficient.
Competitiveness and population density
held their same relationships with tea party
activity.
In sum, my regression models suggest
that inequality is strongly tied to tea party
activity, especially compared to other types
of economic grievance. This result supports
the mechanism I identify in my theoretical
framework. Inequality salient to those in
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 The Chicago Journal of Sociology
the middle class reinforces middle class
boundaries and identities, forming a strong
social basis for tea party mobilization.
However, weaker indicators of inequality
like poverty and unemployment that look
only at the bottom end of the income
distribution do not positively affect tea
party mobilization outcomes. Similarly,
measures of economic grievance were
positive and significant but directionally
weaker compared to measures of inequality.
This finding further supports that specific
types of economic distress – inequality
and defined class identities – form a strong
basis for the mobilization of the tea party,
a middle class movement, than do other
types of economic distress such as an
increase in impoverished residents, the
inability of residents to find employment,
or the loss of property by residents. Rather
than any specific economic grievance, it is
the salience of class interests and identity
that form the social networks and identities
needed to mobilize. like tea party activity or inequality were
Discussion
In this paper, I investigated the
sources of uneven distribution in tea party
involvement. I hypothesize that the tea
party will see greater mobilization in areas
where class divisions are salient to the
middle class, as such places encourage
a class basis for the mobilization of
the tea party, which catered to middle
class interests. My findings support this
hypothesis, demonstrating that certain types
of economic issues – specifically inequality
throughout the income distribution – matter
in different ways than others, pushing
tea party activity in different directions
and affecting it at different magnitudes.
Economic grievances and distress at the
84
bottom of the income distribution has a
negative effect on tea party activity in the
case of unemployment, an uncertain effect
in the case of poverty, and a small but
positive effect in the case of foreclosures.
Overall, this paper fills theoretical gaps
within the tea party literature and creates
a theoretical framework that may be
applied to other ultraconservative or
fringe mobilizations within democracies.
Understanding the origins of the tea party
further advances our knowledge both of
right-wing movements within the US and
of extremist or anti-democratic social
movements within democratic settings
more generally – knowledge that may be
beneficial not just on a theoretical level,
but on a practical level as well, since such
groups tend to persecute and disenfranchise
others (Rueschemeyer et al 1992).
This paper has several limitations.
First, measurement is a key source of error
here. The indicators I used for phenomena
selected on the basis of convenience (ie,
they were collectable measures) even if the
ideal measurements were much more subtle
– for example, detailed information on the
number of individuals mobilized and more
accurate frequency of tea party meetings, or
information on wealth rather than income
inequality at a local level (since the two
measures look very different - people with
high or low wealth are not the same people
with high or low income) (Kuhn and Rios-
Rull 2016). Other variables suffer from
similar issues. A second source of error is
methodological. Although I control for basic
differences between counties, the steps I take
may not be enough, since counties have an
incredible level of variation and as a result
are extremely difficult to compare. The
 Theorizing Disparities in Tea Party Mobilization
choice to modify population by log rather
than taking raw population additionally may
more heavily weight more populous counties
(which in the data tend to have more diversity
and higher inequality). Similarly, my choice
of a simultaneous spatial autoregressive
process may run into issues with the Poisson
distribution of my dependent variable,
casting some additional uncertainty of the
significance of the regression model. On
a more theoretical level, my hypothesis
explains only some of the variation in tea
party activity, given the R-squared in my
regressions of between 0.15 and 0.20.
Other factors, including individual factors
undoubtedly provide a strong basis for tea
party mobilization in addition to the factors
I propose. Further, my results speak only
to the tea party – although my theoretical
frameworks may be extended to other
anti-democratic or extremist movements
within democratic contexts. Significant
future research is needed, including most
importantly the comparison of the tea party to
other ultraconservative or otherwise extreme
movements across countries or times.
In sum, by looking at the case of
the tea party, I find that class interests, a
product of capitalism, may play a strong
role in mobilizing the middle class against
extending certain aspects of democracy
to the lower class. This relationship holds
even when controlling for other forms of
economic distress that may coexist with
income inequality, including poverty,
unemployment, and foreclosure rates. My
work adds greater nuance to past tea party
literature suggesting a relationship between
the tea party and economic distress, and
it raises questions for the future study of
social movements, especially those in
democracies.
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Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to
Become a Collective Symbol and the Formation
of the Democratic Political Cage
Sonam Jindal
B.A. Sociology

Organizations become increasingly bureaucratic within various fields and industries.

The literature on organizational practices is rich, particularly within the realm of
profit-maximizing organizations with a clear bottom line. However, bureaucratic
homogenization is not limited to capitalistic firms with profit-maximizing bottom
lines and can expand even to organizations thought to be uniquely organized around
a distinctive mission. The way in which an organization relates to its mission through
its day to day operations defines the very fabric of the organization. This paper lies at
the intersection of research on organizational practices in mission driven organizations
and on the importance of political figures as symbolic representations of the collective.
Through an in-depth ethnographic account of the 2016 ground game in North Carolina,
this research shows the consequences of a candidate that fails to transform into a clear
symbol for her followers on the practices of the candidate’s ground game. Namely,
this research suggests that a lack of clear vision and mission may lead an organization
to rely more heavily on previously established and proven bureaucratic practices due
to a lack of its own guiding force on which to base its organization practices. On a
broader level, these findings have implications for mission-driven organizations and
organizations hoping to effectively mobilize civil society around specific causes.

Introduction their campaign designs according to these

Though electoral campaigns are
transient organizations disbanded
shortly following election day, they
can be highly complex with dozens
of different departments. The field of
political campaigns has experienced
increased formalization due in large part
to campaigns becoming more data driven
which is correlated with technological
advances making it easier to communicate
with a targeted set of people. These
changes have undoubtedly proliferated
the view that winning campaigns is a
science and influenced operatives to tailor
‘proven’, ‘scientific’ strategies.
That being said, the fundamental
goal behind each political campaign is
to appeal to humans and get them to vote
for the candidate. As prolonged efforts to
achieve this ultimate goal, campaigns and
in particular field departments of campaigns
are advanced mobilization organizations
that represent a microcosm of democracy.
This makes studying the ground game and
organizing practices meant to mobilize
citizens particularly interesting. In a time
characterized by political polarization,
gaining a better understanding of political
87
The Chicago Journal of Sociology
movements and organizers leading those
movements is important. Those on the
ground, as the most direct conveyors of
a movement’s message and meaning,
encapsulate the spirit of a movement and
more fundamentally, of civil society.
The Obama campaign was revered for
both for its innovative data analytics as well
as revolutionary field (organizing) practices
on the ground. Many journalists have noted
that the Clinton campaign adopted this
data driven approach and micro-targeting
but fell short in presenting a cohesive
story, arguing that Democrats learned the
wrong lessons from the Obama campaign’s
successes (Gold). The focus of this paper
is to gain a better understanding of the
characteristics that determine the success
of a ground game in its core objectives of
energizing, mobilizing, and organizing civil
society behind a particular cause. While
there may be standardized objectives that a
field program must attempt to achieve, the
extent to which it is successful in activating
and mobilizing people is a function of how
the stories and mission shape the quality of
those core tasks to energize people.
In an effort to understand the
mechanisms that characterize the ground
game, this paper presents an ethnographic
account of the Clinton campaign’s field
department in North Carolina during
the 2016 campaign cycle. Through this
in-depth case study, I find that a lack of
cohesive vision and the inability of Clinton
to become a collective symbol substantively
influenced the field program’s practices in
creating a greater reliance on established
rules and bureaucratic structures, thus
forming an iron cage which obstructed the
campaigns ability to adapt to its unique
circumstances.
88
I begin this paper with a literature
review, followed by a methods section. The
results are then divided into three sections.
Part I sets the stage by introducing the
importance of organizing and providing
an overview of the organizing experience
on the Clinton campaign. This section
paints a picture of the role that organizers
play, their position in civil society during
grassroots campaigns, and a brief preview
of how this experience differed on the
Clinton campaign. The focus of Part I is
on providing background and context for
which to understand the next two sections.
Part II demonstrates how the campaign
failed to become a collective representation
of a clear vision and mission. This part
is divided into three sections: The Lack
of Cohesive Vision, Incorporation of the
Personal Story, and Campaign Culture.
On a high level, Part II describes the way
in which Clinton’s 2016 ground game was
not guided by charismatic authority which
in turn influenced the practical operations
of the campaign. Namely, the lack of
charismatic authority limited the campaigns
ability to internally motivate its followers
from ‘within’ which led to a shift away
from practices tied to charismatic authority
and led to a greater reliance on traditionally
bureaucratic mechanisms. This went as
far as building a culture centered around
bureaucratic measures of success and
sought to further function as a regulatory
mechanism on its members as opposed
to being centered around a clear vision or
mission. To some extent, Part II explains the
observations detailed in Part III based on
the theoretical framework. In particular, the
lack of a cohesive vision explains that the
resulting organization would not be guided
by a charismatic authority and would rely
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
more heavily on mimicking pre-established
practices within the field of campaigns. This
would and did create a greater incorporation
of bureaucratic practices to take the place
of guiding the organization through
charismatic authority. The lack of cohesive
vision guiding a mobilization organization
also partially explains why it may have
been difficult to incorporate personal stories
into the campaigns repertoire.
Part III describes the resulting iron
cage that was created through over-
bureaucratization and rationalization due to
the lack of a cohesive mission. This section
is divided into the following sections:
Measuring and Monitoring: Numbers,
Metrics and Goals, Standardization:
The Lack of Community Catering and
Organizing, and No Room for Continued
Rationalization: Disempowered
Organizers. Part III builds on Part II by
detailing the ways in which Clinton’s
ground game consequently became overly
bureaucratic. Specifically, this manifested
through an overreliance on measuring and
monitoring the performance of organizers
to the point that numerical goals became
the mission, standardization and one size
fits all approach to community organizing,
and disempowered organizers who did not
have the opportunity to employ their own
rationalization and innovation in their work
in the pursuit of a greater mission.
Literature Review
Though there is a significant body
of work on organizational practices,
only a small portion has focused on
mission-driven organizations and even
less on the inner working of grassroots
political campaigns. That being said,
the ingenuity of the Obama Campaign
attracted a lot of attention from journalists
and academics alike. Barack Obama has
been characterized by sociologists as a
charismatic leader and performer, which
created unprecedented levels of excitement
around a political candidacy and inspired
innovate breakthroughs within the field of
electioneering. However, most scholarly
work on political candidates has been
directed towards analyzing characteristics
and perception of the candidate as opposed
to the organizational features of their
resulting campaign operations.
Jeffery Alexander applied performance
theory to analyze the ‘Obama effect’ in his
book, The Performance of Politics. He argues
that the most successful candidates, and
Obama in particular, have been successful
by becoming symbolic representations for
specific ideas through their performances.
The focus of his analysis is on the broader
symbolic power of political figures. Though
he includes a short ethnographic account of
a field training from the Obama campaign
during the 2008 cycle, this chapter provides
a limited snapshot of the ground game over
the course of a training meant to onboard
new members. In contrast, my research
focuses on the programmatic practices
and organizational structure of a field
department over the course of four months
leading up to the general election which
allows for a deeper analysis of the day-to-
day execution of a field program and the
organizing experience.
Karin Knorr Cetina explains the nature
of Obama’s appeal and command using
Weber’s definition of ‘charismatic authority’
in her paper, What is a Pipe? Obama and
the Sociological Imagination. Weber’s
analysis establishes the type of authority a
leader has as being most clearly identifiable
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
in the nature of the followers and the social
group that forms around the leader. Often
times, this has been researched based on
the appeal that a political candidate has
to voters. However, Weber’s typology
offers a rich opportunity to analyze the
campaign structure and particularly the
field program itself. By evaluating the
experience of organizers, the followers
who are responsible for mobilizing civil
society to ultimately elect the candidate,
we can postulate a more comprehensive
theory about how the relationship between
followers and a leader impacts the structure
of the organization which brings them
together.
Central to Weber’s concern with class
and power, was his fascination with the
characteristics of modern organizations
subject to a capitalistic world order. He
framed bureaucratic organizations as a
distinctly modern phenomenon that existed
both in the context of the state and private
economy. In outlining the features of a
bureaucracy, he highlights the prioritization
of efficiency and productivity through strict
and centrally regulated operations. One of
the central problems of bureaucracies in this
rigid focus on efficiency is the inflexibility
in handling individual cases. Because
bureaucracies function based on stable
and generalized rules, they are meant to
diminish the need for ambiguous judgement
by different members of the organization
and adhere to pre-established criteria and
documents. Theoretically, such a structure
would limit the influence of any sort of
charismatic authority through a heightened
state of discipline and rationalization.
According to Weber, individual
members of an overly bureaucratic
organization would be stifled and
90
transformed into cogs of a machine, where
their primary function is performing
pre-established and specialized tasks in
the name of the bureaucracy’s functions
(Essays 228). In its efforts to strive for
efficiency and follow a pre-established
plan and rationale, bureaucracy creates
depersonalized organizations incapable
of incorporating individual agency. The
scripts, frameworks, and outlines which
guide members of a bureaucratically
run organization allow them to achieve
goals without necessarily having an
understanding of the overall work being
done. This occurs through decentralized
specialization of particular tasks. While the
bureaucratic organization creates efficiency,
it also removes unique human judgement
from its direct functions and “threatens
to dehumanize its creators” (Coser 232).
The over-rationalized and bureaucratic
organization can be characterized
as imprisoning men in a stahlhartes
Gehäuse or iron cage (Coser 233). The
end result is an organization stripped of
its humanistic characteristics, namely the
ability to rationalize, incorporate individual
judgment into work, and communicate with
people on a personal level. While arguably
conducive to reaching the bottom line in a
profit maximizing organization, this would
be problematic in the context of a campaign
field program which is meant to mobilize
and appeal to people around a common
mission that is greater than or distinct from
the ‘bottom-line’.
Weber had a more romanticized vision
of charismatic authority. He treats charisma
as sacred and charismatic leaders as prophet
like characters with seemingly magical
powers to influence an organization by
creating motivation around the functions of
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
the organization from within, “The bearer
of charisma enjoys loyalty and authority by
virtue of a mission believed to be embodied
in him; this mission has not necessarily and
not always been revolutionary, but in its
most charismatic forms it has inverted all
value hierarchies and overthrown custom,
law and tradition” (Economy and Society
1117). At its core, charismatic authority
owes its ability to mobilize people to being
centered around a particular mission. It
allows for clear identification of a cause
which consequently provides the motivation
for action and mobilization. Weber suggests
here that charismatic authority reduces the
need and power of customs and bureaucratic
methods because the organization can
instead rely on a mission to guide actions.
One way to distinguish between
charismatic and bureaucratic authority
is based on whether members of the
organization are compelled to act based
on internal or external forces. Bureaucratic
organizations create structure through
technical means in order to create strict,
external guides for its members’ actions.
On the other hand, organizations guided
by charismatic authority ‘revolutionize
men’ from within (Economy and Society
1116). This distinction between within and
without is key in understanding both the
motivation driving members of a given
organization and consequently the nature
of their actions. If members are being
acted upon through bureaucratic authority,
their individual actions will be the result
of pre-rationalized scripts handed down
to them by the organization. In contrast,
charismatic authority motivates its
members from within and compels them to
exercise their own rationale in pursuit of a
higher goal.
Rationalization and bureaucratization
act as external forces which cause
individuals to adapt and conform to these
pressures. On the other hand, charismatic
authority causes people to change through
intrinsic motivation and alignment with the
mission and purpose of the organization.
Whereas charismatic authority powered
through intrinsic motivation is able to
inspire action around a well-defined
mission, bureaucratic organizations must
construct layers of rationale and design the
organization carefully to achieve its core
function because it lacks the ability to create
internal motivation amongst its members.
In her research on the challenges
of sustaining member commitment to
perform the formal tasks of an organization
without losing excitement amongst the
members, Chen 2012 finds that that over
rationalization and bureaucratization
can strip the “members’ experiences of
magic and meaning, thereby introducing
disenchantment” resulting in the alienation
of the members (Chen 312). Chen shows how
storytelling can be used as a tool to reverse
the alienating and disenchanting effects of
rationality and inject organizations with
charisma. Historically, storytelling has been
incorporated into grassroots campaigns as
well. Within the realm of campaigns, the
extent to which storytelling is incorporated
into the campaign is also a function of the
candidate’s symbolic power and ability
to represent a cohesive story and greater
mission. While charismatic and bureaucratic
authority may not be completely mutually
exclusive, Chen’s research suggests that
over-bureaucratization can actively reverse
the positive influence that charismatic
authority can have on the members of an
organization.
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
While bureaucratic structures have a
foundation in traditional profit-maximizing
organizations, these practices have spread
to other industries and fields. Within the
‘field’ of grassroots campaigns, there’s
a high emphasis placed on sharing best
practices and incorporating strategies used
by other campaigns. As new strides in
campaign organizing strategies are made,
those innovations are then communicated
through the campaign network, in large part
through political consulting firms which
are generally started by former political
operatives who made the initial innovations
and are capitalizing on their successes. This
falls in line with DiMaggio and Powell’s
(1983) analysis on how organizations
within a particular field homogenize over
time. Industries formalize a theory of
institutional isomorphism to help explain
the process by which organizations in
a particular industry begin to fall into a
particular mold. Though organizational
decisions are made through rationalization,
this rationale becomes institutionalized over
time in a particular field and takes the form
of an ‘iron cage’ which limits future rational
reason and makes it more difficult over
time to innovate. The original ‘rationale’
embedded in an organization takes on the
role of the ultimate authority. According to
DiMaggio and Powell, this process of rigid
bureaucratization of an organization comes
from “processes that make organizations
more similar without necessarily making
them more efficient. Bureaucratization and
other forms of homogenization emerge…
out of saturation of organizational fields”
(147). Not only do individual organizations
become internally inflexible, but the field
which the organization is a part of grows
increasingly rigid.
92
Campaigns and ‘Organizing
Departments’ in particular have certainly
followed this winnowing, to use Rothman’s
term, into predictable and general structures.
All campaigns seek to do the same thing
and generally conduct the same activities
that have gained a reputation within the
‘field’ for being effective. The field around
campaigns today is composed of a rigorous
and scientific approach, with a foundation
in past studies, experiments, and past
campaigns. In the Clinton field program,
these studies of particular campaign
practices were referred to religiously as a
rationalization and justification for each
decision that was made. Contextualizing
this within DiMaggio and Powell’s work,
the over-reliance on frameworks and on
what has been done in the past has led to
a narrowing within the field of campaign
practices.
While the creation of an organization
is based on rational principles, this can
create an environment that makes future
employment of reason nearly impossible.
This is partly due to the way in which
practices get embedded in bureaucracies
and the creation of an environment which
makes adherence to the traditional, founding
principles of the organization inviolable
standards. The role of the members of the
organization is then diminished to following
the outline which is set and institutionalized
to the extent that individuals who are a
part of the organization no longer have the
ability to use their own rational power to
influence the organizational structure once
it has been set.
Furthermore, the problem with this
homogenization of strategies is that
their adoption is often irrational. Within
increasingly isomorphic fields, strategies
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
are adopted in large part to gain legitimacy
within the field that the organization is
operating within, “Strategies that are
rational for individual organizations may
not be rational if adopted by large numbers.
Yet the very fact that they are normatively
sanctioned increases the likelihood of their
adoption” (DiMaggio and Powell, 148).
This blind use of previously rationalized
strategies leads to a disregard for the
particular context and unique circumstances
for which the rationalization and construction
of those practices was designed. However,
the success of an organization that reacts
to unique circumstances and constructs
appropriate practices in response is often
taken as a signal by other organizations
within the same field to model their own
operations on the same principles. This is
not likely to result in the same outcomes
as the original organization. Within a
particular field, creating standard operating
procedures can be seen as an efficient way to
replicate organizations without having to go
through the entire process of rationalizing
an appropriate structure and reinventing the
wheel.
March and Olsen say that this
mimicking is more likely to happen when
an organization itself has ambiguous or
uncertain goals causing it to revert to
familiar and ‘proven’ models. I would
extend this to argue that a lack of clear vision
and mission leads to over rationalization,
bureaucratization, and imitating. The
converse would suggest that vision and
mission may lead to innovations and a more
directed approach to forming an organization
that is not as dependent on standards
established within a particular field. For
organizations like campaigns which are tied
to a mission, the mission and vision serve as
a guidepost and inspire rational deliberation
of unique circumstances, how best to adapt
to a particular context, and whether the
previous practices can be applied or further
innovation is required.
This vision and mission are indicative
of the presence of a charismatic authority
whether that is in the form of a leader or not.
That being said, the charismatic authority’s
distinctive features cannot be replicated
outside of a particular context. The extent
to which an organization is guided by
charismatic authority influences its other
practices and the quality of those practices.
This theory is distinct from theories that
argue that organizations can have blended
practices (Chen 2012 and Bordt 1997) in
that I’m drawing the link between vision and
mission on organizational practices within
mobilization efforts. Alexander’s work
demonstrates how Obama was successful in
becoming a political symbol which allowed
him to appeal to different kinds of followers
including voters, volunteers, campaign staff,
donors, and more. I build on this by showing
how a campaign’s practices, in particular
on the ground, are also shaped by the
extent to which the candidate can become a
collective symbol for something and garner
charismatic authority amongst its followers.
In particular, my ethnographic account of
the Clinton campaign’s ground game in
North Carolina shows the consequences
on an organization’s practices when the
candidate does not become a clear symbol
of a specific mission or vision. My research
is uniquely positioned because of its focus
on the field organizers as the ‘followers’ of
interest. Studying the grassroots operation
of a political campaign is particularly fitting
because it represents the organization’s
mobilization team whose theoretical
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function is to get voters and volunteers to
‘follow’ a candidate. Their effectiveness in
being able to do so and the organization that
forms for that purpose is a reflection of the
candidate’s symbolic strength.
Methodology
I worked for approximately four months
as the Western Regional Youth Vote Director
in North Carolina, which meant I operated
as a Regional Organizing Director for
college campuses in the western half of the
state. I managed a team of organizers and
reported directly to the Youth Vote Director
for the state. My general responsibilities
included working with various universities
and youth organizations in the western half
of the state, and guiding organizers to build
multiple volunteer organizations aimed
at mobilizing young voters around the
election and ultimately turning supporters
out to vote. Over the course of this time, I
took daily field notes on events of the day
and my observations on what was going on.
Additionally, after the election, I conducted
21 interviews all of which were at least
an hour long – mostly with organizers
and volunteers on the campaign. Two
were students who in some way had been
exposed to the campaign.
There are a few of limitations of my
study. Most of the official interviews were
conducted after the election because it was
difficult to find time before the election in
the busy schedules of campaign staff. This
may have biased some of the interview
responses as they were reflecting on
their experiences after the election result.
That being said, relevant anecdotes and
conversations from the campaign have also
been incorporated. Additionally, prior to
working on this campaign, I had worked as
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an organizer for Barack Obama’s campaign
and Ro Khanna’s congressional campaign –
both of which may have potentially biased
my observations. It is important to note
that the focus of my research was on the
field department in part because it is the
department I had most exposure to and due
to the field program of a campaign having
the closest tied to voters and the supporters
of a campaign.
As the direct intermediaries between
volunteers and the campaigns, studying the
organizing department provides the ideal
vantage point from which to understand
what sentiments, messaging, and vision
are being deliberately transferred to civil
society during the time period where people
are most active participants in democracy.
Moreover, studying organizers provides
insight into how and to what extent civil
society is being activated to be participants
of democracy.
The names, genders, and personal
details of interviewees have been changed
in this paper to protect their identities.
Part 1: Organizing Overview
The Importance of Organizing
Over the course of the campaign
and interviews, a somewhat contentious
distinction formed between what field
organizers do on most campaigns versus
what they did on this particular campaign.
However, a general understanding of the
critical role played by organizers became
clear from conversations with staffers in
various departments and through constant
communication from the campaign.
Campaign staffers and those familiar with the
campaign world consider organizing to be a
very unique and challenging job, requiring
what many in the campaign world referred
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
to as a ‘certain type of person’. Organizers
come from a variety of backgrounds
ranging from college students taking time
off of school to experienced lawyers and
academics to sales representatives and
more. This diverse group of people get
involved for a variety of reasons which will
be detailed in Part II. That being said, there
are a number of characteristics and qualities
that organizers deemed to be important for
their jobs – namely having a high tolerance
for uncertainty, having a willingness to
work long hours and seven days a week
with little pay, being organized with tasks
and time, being able to communicate
well with people, having the ability to
be outgoing, maintaining a high level of
energy, responding well to constantly being
pushed beyond their limits, and being
flexible based on changing demands and
resources.
That being said, it was made clear
that there was a belief that organizing
though challenging work was inordinately
critical within the context of the broader
campaign’s efforts. One lawyer, Tam,
described his motivation for seeking out
the opportunity to be an organizer as a
need to be doing what he conceived as the
‘real work’ of a campaign, “Yeah, I wanted
to really get dirty, I wanted to have direct
voter contact…where it could make a
difference on the ground, very much.” Tam
had held a variety of positions on different
campaigns but his professional career no
longer revolved around campaigns. He was
in the unique position of transitioning to a
new job and wanted to take time off in the
middle to specifically work as an organizer
in the 2016 campaign. This sense of
organizing being direct, real, and hard work
is well-established by those familiar with
campaigns. Organizers are on the ground,
interacting with everyday citizens within a
particular geographic area every single day
leading up to the election. This positions
them as being the most direct contact most
citizens will have with the candidate, giving
them an important role both in context of
the campaign and within democracy itself.
They serve as the face of the candidate
in their respective turfs. As an organizer
on the Obama campaign, I became easily
identifiable and was often referred to as
the ‘Obama girl’ within the communities I
was responsible for. Organizers are at the
center of civic engagement and take on the
responsibility of activating civil society to
participate in democracy. As such, getting
an understanding of the conditions under
which this role can be maximized reveals
the mechanisms through which mobilization
efforts and democratic participation are
made most effective.
In the pre-Obama campaign era, field
staff were generally tasked with volunteer
management and voter contact –making
phone calls and knocking on doors. With
the innovations of the Obama campaign,
the philosophy around organizing shifted
to treating field staff as true community
organizers responsible for building local
teams of volunteers who would then
organize their own neighborhood teams
to do voter contact within their individual
neighborhoods. This was based on the belief
that they could scale the field program and
increase the volume of work being done
by creating dedicated and self-sufficient
volunteers. Turning these volunteers into
intrinsically motivated agents focused
on a clearly defined mission was central
to making this possible. They did this
by turning field staff into community
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organizers who would recruit, train, and
manage teams of volunteers within the
various neighborhoods who would then
go on to train other community members
and so on to be active for the election
process. The magic of the Obama campaign
lay in reconciling the tension between
‘empowering local communities’ and
‘scaling’ within a large ‘top-down campaign’
(McKenna and Han 11). They were able to
make community organizing and the idea
of catering to individual communities a
systemic bedrock of the campaign across
fifty states. This sort of standardization
comes through the chain of command and
establishment of a strong sense of culture.
The Clinton campaign certainly adopted
the structure of enforcement which ensured
consistency across the organization.
However, it differed in the cultural
elements and community focus which had
allowed the Obama campaign to create an
extensive network of community leaders
who could be trusted to deal with their
unique communities. Organizing looked
quite different on the Clinton campaign
in comparison to the description of the
Obama campaign both in Groundbreakers
and the experience of interviewees who had
worked on other campaigns. The primary
difference, which will be detailed later,
was the way in which these campaigns
interacted with the communities they
were working with and the quality of their
relationships with community members.
While it would be reasonable to expect a
campaign modeling best practices to build
an organizing department in a similar way
as the Obama campaign, it is important
to understand that the underlying reasons
for the Obama campaign’s approach was
due to their connection to a central vision
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that could serve as the basis for their
philosophy and consequently, this method
for activating communities. Without a
cohesive vision or mission, followers may
not have been necessarily relied upon to
be intrinsically motivated and empowered.
Given the central role that organizers play
as intermediaries between regular citizens
and their prospective representatives, the
central area of interest becomes determining
the conditions which makes the relationship
between organizers and community
members most effective. Understanding
this consequently reveals what makes
mobilization efforts most successful.
The Organizing Experience on the
Ground in North Carolina
Organizers worked seven days a week
with their days often starting at 9 AM and
not ending until anywhere from 10 PM to
the early hours of the morning. Though a
temporary job, it was all consuming in
every sense of the term. Mornings began
with conferences calls with their direct
supervisors and, on occasion, calls with
the rest of the state or national campaign
staff. At the beginning of the day, each
organizer would get an email from their
direct supervisor. The content in these
emails would be discussed on the first,
most basic level of the calls –between the
regional organizing director (ROD) and the
organizers that the ROD was supervising.
These calls were specific to the work that
the organizers needed to do and would
cover any relevant updates. As calls moved
up in level – from a regional level to state
to national, they became more and more
general. While the purpose of regional
level calls was to discuss micro-level
information regarding priorities for the day
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
or week (if it was the beginning of the work
week), the information on calls became
more abstract as it moved up in scale. The
topics of discussion on these state and
national level calls were often centered
around highlighting the key metrics being
hit by the campaign. These calls would
in a sense try to position the scope of the
individual organizers work within the
context of the wider work being done by
the overall campaign. They contextualized
the daily and weekly accomplishments
of the organizers in terms of the overall
campaigns’ accomplishment. Each day
would end with a with a nightly, statewide
call that brought the entire state’s organizing
department together. Though organizers
reacted to these differently, the calls seemed
to be trying to generate excitement around
the short-term milestones being reached
each day.
Some, like Brent, saw it as a motivator
because of the macro level re-framing of
their individual work in terms of the overall
campaign,
Those nightly calls became huge,
because you could see on a macro
level what we were achieving rather
than ‘man I only got 7 forms today,
I feel terrible’ but when your 7 forms
go into the statewide pool and we got
thousands of forms, like that feels
so much better…it ended up being a
huge motivator and a huge pick me
up every day.
On the other hand, others thought that
these calls lacked substance and felt unreal.
One organizer recounted how his team
called this the ‘woo call’ because it was
a call led by people who were constantly
yelling and screaming about the state’s
performance during the day. The intention
was very much to create excitement
around the work of the organizers. Another
organizer, Lena, remarked,
They didn’t seem real to me – like it
was a lot of people cheering and being
happy which I know was on purpose
and maybe some people react well to
that, but for me it was the end of a
long day, the last thing I wanted to do
is hear people being really cheerful
and yelling, especially when I have
no emotional investment in it because
I don’t know any of them.
Part of the purpose of the state and
national calls was to create hype and
recognize organizers. Organizers who
stood out were given shout-outs for their
hard work out in the field and cumulative
numbers would be announced at the end
of the call. In essence, the calls reinforced
the importance of the work that organizers
were doing by recognizing their work in
‘public’. As one of the regular rituals of the
campaign and the only one in which each
member of the campaign was collectively
participating in on a daily basis, the call
became a central moment in the daily
schedule which brought together each staff
member on the campaign and summarized
the achievements of the campaign for the
day. Furthermore, the content of these
calls served as a microcosm of what was
important to the overall campaign as it
was the one time each day where the entire
organizing staff would be tuned in. The
focus on these calls ended up stressing the
importance of hitting established metrics
and the role these metrics played in the
overall numeric milestones of the field
program. In addition to starring in the nightly
call, the emphasis on metrics and goals was
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constantly repeated through emails, regular
conversations between each staff member
and their direct supervisor multiple times
a day. This focus on metrics, enforced
through the ritual of campaign calls,
highlighted the organizations’ priorities on
numbers and measurable bureaucratic tools.
Other communication practices on the
campaign also highlighted the campaigns’
bureaucratic tendencies. There was a strict
communication protocol referred to as ‘the
chain of command’ or simply ‘the chain’.
While there isn’t an inherent problem with
having a chain of command in itself or even
a hierarchical structure, it is a matter of how
the structure of the organization impacts
the various levels of a hierarchy or chain
of command. There was a duality to this
that was expressed by numerous people
who worked on the campaign. The chain of
command was seen as an efficient way to
streamline communication. But in this case,
it was more than a simple communication
protocol – it added an extra layer of rigidity,
inflexibility, and bureaucratic structure to
the overall campaign. When I asked Linda
to describe the structure of the organization,
the first thing she mentioned was the chain
of command.
The first thing is the chain of
command…I must have heard that
every single day I was there. ‘Like, oh
no, we can’t do that because it needs
to be brought up through the chain
of command’ and you would have to
wait until every single person would
approve whatever you wanted to do –
which is such nonsense because every
single person, the higher you go up,
has more responsibilities – they don’t
have time to approve of every little
thing you wanted to do. But I guess
the structure meant that they wanted
us to do the same thing.
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In a similar vein, Tara characterized
it as a controlling mechanism. Though
perhaps necessary for the purpose of
streamlining communication in such a
massive organization, the use of the chain of
command systematically made it difficult to
be innovative or suggest changes because of
the layers of hierarchy that such suggestions
would have to go through in order to get a
response. Consequently, it was a structure
that enforced regularity and consistency
and dis-incentivized unique approaches.
In instances where people did bring forth
suggestions, the direct managers acted as
additional buffers to turn ideas down and
reiterate the ‘program’ parameters which
had been pre-established and were not
subject to change. This created a lot of
frustration amongst organizers who argued
that the program they were told to follow did
not reflect the knowledge they had acquired
by being on the ground and observing the
conditions in the unique communities they
were working in.
Individual days and weeks were
regulated through a strict system of goals.
Goals were revealed at the beginning
of the week and tracked through google
spreadsheets throughout the week. Each
Regional Organizing Director managed a
group of organizers and was responsible
for checking in regularly over the course
of the week (and often times multiple times
a day) to ensure that organizers were on
track to meet their goals. Similarly, each
Deputy Organizing Director managed a
group of Regional Organizing Directors
to do the same and so on. For the field
program, these goals were the bottom line
of the entire operation. The relationship
organizers had with these goals indicates
not only the centrality of these goals
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
within the organization, but the struggles
organizers faced due to the strict pressure
to adhere to these goals. One organizer,
Martha remarked,
There was a balancing act of taking
in the goals and directives, sometimes
from [my ROD] but usually from
above [my ROD] and creating,
creating a plan to execute those in the
best way possible for our individual
[regions]… Its really hard to maintain
focus and stamina in such a mission
driven project if you aren’t actually
on board with the mission.
An explanation of the goals was usually
not given to the organizers. This lack of
providing a rationale for the specific actions
organizers needed to perform parallels how
individuals within a Weberian bureaucracy
are reduced to their specific function. There
was a general understanding of who created
them and with what in mind, but a thorough
explanation of how these week-to-week
goals changed was not always clear. But
the problem identified here is the challenge
of needing to perform tasks without
understanding why and how it contributes
to the end mission. The rationale was so
deeply embedded in the structure of the
organization that it demanded compliance
without challenge. The goals guided the
basic functions and tasks which were to be
performed by individual members of the
campaign. But as Martha points out, the
tension in pursuing these sorts of directives
within the context of an organization that has
a greater mission or purpose. While she was
certainly on board with the overall mission of
the campaign – to get Hillary Clinton elected
– the dissonance arose from balancing
these specific directives with that broader
goal on a daily basis. Within the context of
organizing, the overall goal is clear. That
being said, there was something about the
way in which the organization was guiding
the daily functions of a campaign that did not
seem to link directly to the overall mission.
There was a sense that these directives were
coming from an authoritative body that did
not necessarily provide a plan for ‘individual
regions’, but demanded meeting generalized
goals that were decided by a central
authority and could not be questioned. These
individual goals became the direct focus of
the campaign, in place of the overarching
mission – to elect the candidate they were
working for. Tam reflected,
….it’s really hard to see the big
picture and we used to talk a lot about
what was the win for the day and
you look at small gains. You look at
success within your very small circle
of influence, so to speak. And you do
the best you can in your turf because
you can’t effect change everywhere
and it’s hard to see what was working,
what was not working outside of that
small circle.
This adopted mindset that Tam describes
reflects the position organizers were placed
in. Without having a view of the big picture,
organizers were distanced from the big
picture mission that could have served as
their guiding force. Organizers were very
much insulated in their individual goals
on a daily basis and disconnected from the
broader mission of the organization as is
characteristic of bureaucratic organizations
which create hyper-specialized functions
for individual members in the name of
driving maximum efficiency. The problem
arises when this occurs in the context of an
organization which is meant to be guided by
a mission.
Even in the nightly calls, what was
discussed were these short-term numeric
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measures of success in terms of broader
numeric measures of success, not the wider
mission of the campaign. In that respect,
the organizers worked with blinders on,
told to trust that hitting the numeric goals
they were assigned each week was key to
winning. A few even remarked that this
was one of the most extended periods of
time where they did not follow the news as
intently as they used to and had little idea
of what was happening on the campaign
trail because their days were so packed
and focused on their individual goals and
milestones. The scope of their work was
narrowed to the individual goals that they
were given. While this may be an ‘efficient’
way to break down the overall tasks of a
campaign, this limitation of individuals
parallels the restraint on individuals in a
bureaucracy that Weber discusses. What’s
more is that through the campaign’s sole
focus on meeting these goals, the individual
organizers’ work in their regions also
became limited to extrapolating numeric
metrics, thus reducing the scope of their
own rationalization in their daily work. The
enforcement of these goals was more or less
set in stone and could not be altered through
additional rationalization because they had
already been rationalized and embedded
into the system of the campaign. This will
be discussed in further detail in Part III.
To that extent, organizing on this
campaign led organizers to feel less
connected to a centralized mission. Multiple
organizers reflected that they understood the
importance of the job that they were doing,
but could not imagine doing this again.
Some expressed their desire to pursue future
roles similar to the ones they maintained on
the campaign, but made the distinction of
particularly not being willing to work for
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an organization like the one they had just
worked on. Dana, someone who had been a
successful organizer on a campaign before
this, explained
I see the importance of organizing
and because I see it holds such great
value, to me it’s something I would
do again, but it would have to be for
an organization that I knew could run
smoothly – I’m not a fan – I wouldn’t
do it for any old democratic party that
isn’t up to par with – like how I know
it can run.
Lena, who had worked in the organizing
department of another campaign before
recalled that leaving the previous campaign
(which had also resulted in a loss) had left
her feeling like she would still want to do
it again for the experience and chance to
make an impact. However, in discussing her
experience on this campaign, she brought
up a conversation she had with a coworker
who had characterized working on this
campaign to be similar to getting out of an
abusive relationship,
She described it as an abusive
relationship – you know we worked
so hard and we were so happy while
we were doing it but it was also so
stressful, you never knew what was
coming next and there was always
somebody there to yell at you to do
better and like you thought you were
doing better and all that type of stuff
which I know is a certain element
on a campaign but I feel like on a
presidential it’s on steroids.
One staffer who had worked in the state
during 2012 Obama campaign observed the
difference between these two experiences,
“This year, definitely the connection, the
connection that we had in ’12 was not
what it was this year. I think it was really
like a family in ’12 and this year it was
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
just really not the same.” The reasons for
these observed differences between the
experience of organizing on this campaign
compared to others reveals the elements
of organizing, outside of core tasks and
duties, that can fundamentally change the
experience of organizing. What seemed
to account for this difference was a higher
degree of bureaucratic authority and a lack
of charismatic authority that provided an
inherent motivation for members of the
organization (organizers) and a sense
of collective mission. This may seem
characteristic of an organization run
through bureaucratic authority, however
it seems to be at odds with the implicit
nature of a campaign which is tied to a
very specific mission and whose success
relies on mobilizing the masses.
Part 2: Symbolic Power and its
Promotion
The Lack of Cohesive Vision
Working on a campaign in any
capacity, but especially as an organizer
who is on the ground seven days a week
and upwards of twelve hours a day, means
putting life on hold for the campaign with
certain unemployment after the election.
It is a fair question to ask why someone
would ever join a campaign. McKenna and
Han astutely identify the central challenge
that campaigns and movements have faced
for years – that of sustaining motivation.
While descriptions of the campaign’s
organizational structure and culture paint
a picture of the experience the organizers
had, delving into the motivations for the
organizers working on the campaign
and what they believed their candidate
represented presents an opportunity to
develop a theory of how the collective
representation of a candidate influences
the organization built to promote that
cause.
Reasons for joining the campaign
varied, but the most common response
was that the stakes were getting high
with Donald Trump’s nomination and
his consistently increasing momentum.
Some cited their interest in politics and
progressive causes, a will to get more
experience, and a belief that a national
campaign was the best place to get
experience and a sense of what it means
to work on a high-stakes campaign. Of
note, proactive support of Hillary Clinton
was not a primary motivation for any
of the interviewees, except one. Nearly
everyone mentioned a certain restlessness
to get involved due to the threat of Donald
Trump becoming president.
It should strike the reader as surprising
how little Hillary Clinton was mentioned
in these discussions surrounding
motivation for joining the campaign.
Tara’s story for joining the campaign
represents a particularly striking instance
of the extent to which electing Hillary
Clinton was a peripheral thought. She
recounted how she was applying to a
multitude of jobs in a variety of fields and
a friend recommended getting involved
with campaigns due to opportune timing.
Her first instinct was to look for a job on
Jane Blane’s campaign because her mother
strongly supported Blane, she had met her,
and had consequently established a strong
reverence for her as a person.
I met her in person – so she was
very real to me – I met…so I got to
hear her as a real person and she’s
honestly the first politician that
I’ve seen like a real person. To me,
politicians…the idea that she was a
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politician and she was talking to me
and maybe I can make a difference on
the frontlines appealed to me.
This establishment of a connection and
seeing Jane Blane as a real person was a
strong motivator for her wanting to initially
join the campaign. However, because that
campaign was not hiring, she turned to other
campaigns to drop her resume. In fact, those
native to North Carolina mentioned their
belief that statewide candidates such as Roy
Cooper and Deborah Ross had progressive
visions they were excited about far more
often than citing Clinton when discussing
motivation for being involved in politics
and this election cycle. Some explicitly
mentioned their hesitation in joining the
campaign because they had difficulty
reconciling their feelings towards Hillary,
This 2016 campaign, I was really
hesitant at first because I was not
necessarily a fan of Hillary Clinton
but seeing everything that was taking
place with what was being said and
the rhetoric that Donald Trump was
spewing – as a minority here in
America, I just felt I can’t sit on my
butt and not participate – regardless
of how I feel about her personally, at
the end of the day this is about policy
and one person definitely has better
policy and more experience to enact
those policies than the other and I
can’t just sit back and not aid her in
achieving that.
The fact that a desire to get Hillary
Clinton elected was not a proactive
motivation amongst so many organizers for
joining this campaign and that some even
had hesitation to support Clinton at all is
indicative of a far greater problem. The
workers on the campaign were misaligned
with the fundamental mission of the
campaign. Far from being guided by a
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proactive charismatic authority and clear
mission, they were disconnected from the
ultimate mission and leader of the very
mission driven organization they were a
part of. Working on the campaign may have
helped them achieve their peripheral goals
of working against the election of Donald
Trump, working to help other democratic
candidates, or gaining political experience.
However, these peripheral goals aren’t
as strong as a unifying charismatic force
which can cohesively bound individuals
together towards a single, collective vision.
This relationship that organizers had with
the organization and more importantly with
the campaign likely impacted not only their
buy-in with the organization they were
a part of, but also the way they delivered
and represented the campaign’s message to
others on the ground.
Organizers and volunteers function
as the most direct contact most citizens
will have with the candidate on a national
campaign. They are the people on the ground
having face to face conversations with
voters during the months leading up to the
election. However, the campaign message
was not clear to even the organizers who
were responsible for communicating that
message on the ground. While the campaign
was of the opinion that persuasion efforts
conducted by field programs have had a
statistically insignificant impact on the
outcome of the election and the candidate
through the communications department
has a more sizable impact, the message and
vision of a candidate is central to all aspects
of organizing. The vision and mission is
central to how organizers maintain their
own motivation, how they bring people
into the organization, retain volunteers, and
ultimately turn precincts out to vote.
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
When asked, organizers working on the
Clinton campaign could clearly articulate
what Obama had symbolized and what
his vision was during his campaign. These
Clinton campaigners could even clearly
articulate Trump’s message and what he
symbolized. However, these Clinton staffers
had trouble articulating what Clinton
symbolized or was trying to convey. When
asked what Obama was a symbol for, nearly
every organizer immediately responded
with ‘Hope and Change’. When asked the
same question about Trump – organizers
responded ‘taking America back’ and ‘Make
America Great Again’ with some adding
in ‘bigotry’ and ‘hatred’. But when asked
the same question about Clinton, there was
a much greater variance in the answers. In
describing Clinton, people referenced her
intelligence, experience, qualifications,
inaccessibility, attempts to bring people
together, perseverance over her long career,
and more. But the discussions around Clinton
always included more pauses and hesitation,
with many organizers acknowledging that it
wasn’t quite clear. As Tara put it,
It’s not as clear. That’s really
interesting that it’s not as clear – I
didn’t realize that until I just said
it…that she was a fighter and she
wasn’t going to give up…which is
interesting because my interpretation
of what Obama represented is about
America and my interpretation of
what Hillary represented is more
about like women’s rights and her as
a person.
The problem with this lack of
clarity regarding Clinton’s message and
representation in terms of organizing is that
this confusion and lack of understanding
was present not only amongst everyday
citizens, but amongst staff members who
had put their lives on hold to advocate
for her election to the highest office.
This fundamental inability of organizers,
Clinton’s most direct followers, to
articulate her message reflects the lack of
charismatic authority that was guiding them
in their work, resulting in an organization
fundamentally void of a defining character
that bound everyone together in the name
of a singular vision or mission. Within
the context of a large-scaled mobilization
effort, the organizers, as agents of a
grassroots mobilization program, had
difficulty identifying and agreeing on what
they were mobilizing for. When I talked to
Dillon about this, she solemnly explained,
…that’s the thing that never came
together. And I couldn’t say it and I
was an employee. I know the tagline
was ‘Stronger Together’ but we never
had it together. And I don’t feel like
we were ever strong. I believe she
tried but I just felt that she just never
brought it together – she never had a
strong message to make us believe
that our country would be stronger
together because it just wasn’t - it just
never happened.
Evident in Dillon’s statement is the
belief that Clinton was unsuccessful in
providing that cohesive message that could
incite and engender both staff and the public
with a cohesive vision for the country. Many
echoed this belief that Clinton’s message
was either unclear or had gotten lost.
Lena for example felt like the campaign
emphasized getting behind Clinton as a
person who was qualified and experienced
as opposed to getting behind any message
or vision for the country. Similarly, Martha
reflected,
I think a major failing of the campaign
was that they weren’t really able to
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turn her into a symbol for anything. I
certainly joined the campaign as more
of an anti-Trump measure than a pro-
Hillary measure. I felt very neutral
about her.
Interestingly, many organizers drew the
comparison between Obama and Trump
as both being able to mobilize and inspire
people in similar manners. In describing
Trump, Linda acknowledged,
He was like Obama for the right
wing – not the entire right wing, but
the people who felt like they were
not being represented at all and felt
like they had been forgotten…Obama
and Trump were most similar to each
other because both of them were able
to get people excited and get people
involved and people were talking
about them.
Many of staff members over the
course of talking about Trump came to be
surprised by this similarity. For instance,
in discussing Trump, Jamie reflected,
“Oh God, Hope – funny – the word hope
comes up again, but it’s hope for a different
set of people, it’s hope for white dudes
so that their white supremacy will not be
as threatened as perhaps it would have
been.” Both Obama and Trump were able
to inspire people around a focused message
and clear cause through their charismatic
qualities. This charisma and energy were
missing from the Clinton campaign which
consequently made it difficult for organizers
to articulate what Clinton symbolized or
even represented. As the primary conveyers
of a campaign’s message to people on the
ground, this represents a fundamental
misalignment between the role organizers
typically take on during campaigns and the
role they were positioned to play on this
campaign in which they could not articulate
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the greater mission they were working
towards. In Tom’s words,
I think there should have been a
greater sense of kind of commitment,
like you’re committed to this thing.
People were committed, but – how
am I trying to say this – mission,
that’s the word I’m looking for. There
should have been a greater sense of
mission, we’re all in this together,
we’re doing this great thing, and
we’re going to elect this president
and the country is going to be on
much better footing, the state is going
to be on much better footing. Instead
it felt like there was a workman like
quality to the campaign. You know,
we’re going to grind it out and elect
a president. It needed to be a little
bit higher energy I guess. And not
in terms of anybody wasn’t working
hard enough, but in terms of the
excitement level wasn’t necessarily
there. It sounds superficial, but I
don’t really mean it to be superficial.
We kind of needed a little bit of a jolt
of something other than the fact that
‘oh my god, Donald Trump might be
president’.
The distinction Tom draws between
‘mission’ and the workman ‘grind’ maps
well onto the Weberian distinction between
charismatic and bureaucratic authority,
respectively. Of note, Tom seems to be
suggesting that the workman like quality of
the campaign existed in lieu of a mission
or as a result of there not being a greater
sense of mission. Had there been a mission,
the bureaucratic characteristics of the
ground game and ‘the grind’ of working
on a campaign may not have stood out as
much. In a sense, it is this lack of mission
which shaped the stronger pervasiveness of
the bureaucratic grind. The lack of a uniting
vision and mission on the Clinton campaign
was a pervasive sentiment expressed by
staff. While this seemed to have been true
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
of her public image, it is more problematic
that it existed within her campaign
organization and more specifically for her
organizers, the most direct representatives
of her message on the ground to prospective
volunteers and voters. This is key to
understanding why the organizations ended
up relying more heavily on bureaucratic
practices and why practices typically
associated with campaigns and mission
driven organizations, like storytelling, were
less assessable to Clinton’s organizing
department.
Incorporation of the Personal Story
One organizer, Leonard, shared how
he came to realize overtime how impactful
his personal story could be. He told the
story of bonding with a volunteer who had
experiences with cancer and the Affordable
Care Act. After having a conversation
about why they were there and sharing
their personal stories, Leonard reflected
that they became closer and that volunteer
came in more often. That being said, he
pointed out that this was not something that
the campaign had trained or guided him to
do as an organizer. During his onboarding,
there hadn’t been much training on personal
stories – but rather it was mentioned as
important and those who had been on the
campaign longer or had previous campaign
experience had briefly shared their personal
stories. In comparison, talking to staffers
from previous, recent Presidential and
Congressional campaigns, it became
apparent, that this approach to incorporating
the art of telling personal stories differed
from their prior experiences. Personal
stories and relationship building were
described by those with previous organizing
experience as the pulse of a grassroots,
ground campaign in large part because
the purpose of a grassroots campaign is
to engage people within communities
and pull people into a movement. Stories
are a critical part of how people share
their own relationship to the campaign to
invoke empathy, bring what’s happening
in the wider political arena a personalized
framework with which to evaluate
policy matters, and ultimately convince
prospective volunteers or voters that the
cause they are working for deserves their
attention and involvement. The purpose of
widespread sharing of individual personal
stories is to make what’s happening on a
national scale feel more local and to foster
personal relationships within a community.
It is meant to make national messaging and
strategy seem more local.
For this campaign, two things became
evident from organizer interviews.
Organizers both recognized the power
that personal stories had in achieving the
objectives prescribed to their roles but
personal stories were not made a central
part of the campaign. Linda, who had
organized before for a campaign that was
led by former Obama staffers and was an
organizer for this campaign, shared her
surprise by the lack of emphasis placed on
personal stories,
I didn’t even use my personal story
once, like my volunteers didn’t even
know what that meant unless they had
volunteered for the Obama campaign,
like I didn’t even know the personal
stories of most of my coworkers. Like
I asked about it for the first week, I
was like ‘Oh what’s your personal
story’ and people [People working for
the campaign] would look at me like,
‘What, what are you asking’” I was
never asked to have a personal story
on this campaign.
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She continued on to reflect that none
of her co-workers on her team had used
their personal stories while working on
the campaign. She speculated that this
was in part because the campaign had not
proactively built it into their program.
Personal stories tend to be used during
persuasion and team building. It is
somewhat less surprising as this campaign
did not have a persuasion program and did
little to build self-sufficient neighborhood
teams. In addition to a lack of a persuasion
program, personal stories were not built
into the scripts that were used for phone
banking or canvassing and there were not
any one-on-one goals.
This lack of stress placed on personal
stories in places where personal stories
would traditionally be elevated diminished
their overall role in the campaign and
also contributed to the overall absence
of a cohesive message for the campaign.
Linda observed that this impacted her own
relationship with the campaign, “That’s a
big reason I felt a disconnect in myself to
my candidate too.” The personal story also
unites those involved with the campaign
around a shared sense of purpose. Though
this may seem like an unessential add on,
connections between staff and the cause or
the candidate they are working for in such a
mission driven organization influences the
level of commitment to the cause and shapes
the fabric of the campaign. Stories function
as calls to action, mobilization tools, and the
narrative surrounding charismatic authority
which binds individuals to their leader. The
lack of storytelling on this campaign coupled
with the inability to determine what Clinton
represented directly debilitated organizers’
ability to spread excitement about the
campaign and mobilize communities
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towards a specific cause, changing the
nature of the organization.
Despite believing that personal stories
were central to the practice of organizing,
Jamie admitted that this was not actively
incorporated into their work. Jamie reflected
that the personal story had been used to a
greater extent in previous campaigns and
wished that it had been incorporated more
intentionally over the course of working on
the Clinton campaign. However personal
stories are not likely to become a prevailing
part of the campaign if it is not encouraged
on a systemic level. Through conversations
with numerous staff members and nearly all
interactions I had, it became apparent that a
lack of emphasis on stories was institutional.
In particular, Jamie mentioned,
No, was it a part of the big training?
It didn’t stand out to me if it was.
Uhm, and it’s not something that
Janet[Jamie’s supervisor] necessarily
focused on. Like we were focused on
metrics, numbers, like less focused
perhaps on stories in a way that I
feel like I’m a little…The Obama
campaign was all about training of
stories and training trainers and a
more distributed model than perhaps
what we did. Like we were super
structured and our volunteer teams
were super structured but they
weren’t necessarily training people
who would then go out and train other
teams themselves. Like it sort of was,
it sort of wasn’t – I think we could
have done that a lot better.
This emphasis on hitting key metrics
and numbers was emphasized more than
stories. Though never explicitly stated by
the campaign that hitting numbers was
more important than building personal
relationships, the lack of emphasis on
sharing personal stories seemed to be unique
based on the experiences of the organizers
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
interviewed, my own experiences, and what
is known about campaigns. This is evident
from Jamie’s explicit reference to the Obama
campaign’s operation as someone who did
not work for the Obama campaign. Jamie
also referenced his previous experience
on a different campaign, reflecting that it
had required more use of personal stories.
He also alluded to the connection between
personal stories and a ripple effect through
which those stories become the basis for
growing the organization and a network
of followers begin to pull more and more
people into the organization. The contrast
between the use of personal stories on
various campaigns became strikingly
clear from Gloria’s account of a previous
campaign she worked on,
...we were required to, every time we
met with our bosses – we met with
our RODs every Monday…and we
were with her all day and gave her
our personal story at least two times
– yeah it got annoying (jokingly) and
then we had training…everybody in
the room had to stand up and give
their personal story.
Sharing personal stories in North
Carolina was not stressed by the organizing
department and consequently had a less
significant role in the work of organizers
on this campaign than those on campaigns
that proactively stressed personal stories.
In an organization where the staff is
constantly pressed for time and in a high
stakes environment, what is constantly
repeated is most likely to get actualized
by those working on the campaign. While
the concept of the personal story was
introduced at trainings to each organizer
and occasionally used internally, it was not
something that was consistently reinforced.
To this point, Lena shared her struggle with
incorporating the personal story into her
work in the midst of balancing all of her
various responsibilities,
No I don’t think so, I think it was
mentioned like obviously at the
training where we did the personal
story but then it was never explained
when and how you use your personal
story in context of I need to make 150
calls tonight, how do I make a 150
calls and also get my personal story
in those calls. So it was told that it
was important so you were always
felt like you were lacking – I didn’t
talk to anyone, I didn’t have any real
interactions with many people today
and I know I’m supposed to but I just
didn’t have time so it was like a ‘I’ll
try that tomorrow’ or like the next
training, we’d bring it up again and
it was like ‘yeah, I should try that,
that sounds great’ then you get back
to your office and it was kind of like
I don’t have time for that…I feel like
laying down that expectation early on
would have helped.
The expectation of using the personal
story was not clearly articulated for
organizers. Lena’s account is also
particularly interesting in that it was
recognized as something that she wanted
to incorporate into her work and felt like
she was supposed to. However, because
it was never emphasized as critical to her
work, it was something that was placed in
the periphery for her as she focused on the
more immediate goals and expectations that
were enforced on a consistent basis, day
to day. What seemed to be lacking was a
clear explanation of how the personal story
was meant to be incorporated into the work
they were doing each day – something that
seemed to have been given critical attention
in other campaigns that were mentioned by
those who had other campaign experience
to reference. For organizers who had not
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been on other campaigns, it was not clear
the extent to which the personal story could
be used to support their work. Rather,
organizers with no previous experience
recounted that they were encouraged to
follow the script rather than engage with
their personal story.
Martha recounts how the personal
story had been left until the end of her
training but ended up not being fully
covered because they ran out of time. The
placement of the personal story, despite a
verbal acknowledgement of its importance,
within the broader training demonstrates
the extent to which the leaders of the
organization were stressing its use.
Recognition that this was powerful did not
come from an organizational standpoint.
As someone who was trained by Obama’s
campaign, I remember meeting my new
organizers at a statewide training and
pulling my entire team aside at lunch to
share personal stories. I began by sharing
my personal story, something I had learned
to craft four years earlier but had gone
through some changes since the first time
I told it. Two colleagues who were not on
my team noticed my group and came to
sit down near us and seemed surprised by
what we were doing. They joined in – and
I told them what we were doing. One of
them shared their resume and involvement
with various campaigns while the other
recounted his family’s involvement with
various progressive causes. That was the
first time I realized that the personal story
was not something that could be taken for
granted as the cornerstone of all campaigns
and mission driven organizations. The other
features of a field program which form its
outline – knocking doors, making phone
calls, registering votes, hosting events –
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seemed like core components that more or
less remain constant. However, personal
stories which shape and transform this
outline into a full and unique body of a
campaign by shaping the motivation and
drive of staff and volunteers were left out.
Personal stories are how individuals
uniquely connect to the shared vision
and mission on the campaign. In order
for a campaign to enable people to use
personal stories, it must first have a clearly
articulated mission and vision which
allows people to connect to it. One possible
reason why personal stories appeared to be
missing from this campaign could be due
to an unclear or undefined mission. While
the Clinton campaign mimicked the Obama
campaign’s practices in many ways and
often cited research to justify its practices,
it did not (at least in practice) mimic the
Obama campaign’s use of personal stories.
Practically speaking, the Clinton campaign
replicated the quantifiable practices which
had proven successful for other campaigns,
but fell short in understanding why those
practices had been successful in their given
contexts. Personal stories enabled the Obama
campaign to pull both staff and volunteers
in based on their unique relationship to the
campaigns greater purpose. Understanding
how personal stories were incorporated into
every day work for community organizers
and therefore characterized the quality of
their actions helped energize the campaign.
In contrast, Tom, an organizer on the
Clinton campaign, noted that he was able to
schedule hundreds of shifts from someone
who only came in twice. While Tom was
still given credit for scheduling those
shifts and meeting his numeric goals, this
didn’t help the campaigns end goal and he
himself noted that had he built a stronger
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
relationship with the volunteer through a
personal story, the volunteer would have
been more engaged. However, that is not
what was incentivized by the campaign. One
issue is that the impact of personal stories on
the bottom line is more difficult to measure,
study, document and therefore more
difficult to replicate. While it is relatively
easy to mimic successful ‘actions’, it is
significantly more challenging to execute
those actions in a way that was unique to
a charismatically guided organization.
While the Clinton campaign objectively
performed some of the same activities as the
campaigns they mimicked, they fell short in
executing those actions in the same way.
As noted earlier, having a greater vision
or mission is the basis of forming a deeper
connection between followers and the
leader/organization. The absence of such a
vision may have made the incorporation of
personal stories less accessible.
Personal stories on the ground serve as a
microcosm of the campaign’s overall story
and narrative that is being communicated
to the American people. The ground game
acts as an extension of the candidate in
making the story of the broader campaign
assessable on the local, micro level. The
inability to guide organizers to effectively
use their personal story parallels the
inability of the overall campaign to craft a
broader story. It also represents the inability
to connect individual members of the
campaign to the candidate. This is therefore
consistent with how most organizers had
trouble pinpointing their own candidate’s
message and almost always cited reasons
other than a belief that Clinton needed to
be the next President of the United States
as their motivation to join the campaign in
the first place.
Culture of the Campaign
In 2008 and 2012, the Obama campaign’s
internal motto was ‘Respect, Empower,
Include’. In 2016, the Clinton campaign’s
motto was ‘Honest, Hungry, Humble.’
During both campaigns, these words were
pasted around respective campaign offices
everywhere and repeated throughout the
duration of the campaigns. Both were
deliberate attempts to shape the culture of
the respective campaigns. It may be a simple
coincidence that both mottos consisted
of three distinct words, but the similarity
seems to end there. The two mottos are
distinct and reflective of the overall culture
of the campaigns. ‘Respect, Empower,
Include’ focused exclusively on external
relationships and the treatment of people
that campaign staff would be interacting
with on a regular basis. On the other hand,
‘Honest, Hungry, Humble’ were objectively
positive, yet inherently individualistic and
introspective characteristics. Both phrases
were composed of characteristics that the
campaign wanted to embody and have
its entire staff embody during its daily
operations. However, the individualistic
nature of ‘Honest, Hungry, Humble’ seemed
to be designed to regulate the type of work
ethic that the campaign wanted to instill in its
workers, as opposed to how representatives
of the campaign ought to interact with other
members of the campaign and volunteers.
In contrast, ‘Respect, Empower, Include’
were all words that touched on traditional
elements of community organizing, with a
focus on empowering organizers and local
neighborhoods to take ownership of the
way the campaign operated in their unique
and individualistic communities. This was
consistently emphasized as a cornerstone
of the campaign. This focus on traditional
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organizing and community empowerment
was noticeably absent from the Clinton
campaign. The Clinton campaign certainly
modeled itself off of the Obama campaign
in terms of the specific tasks it set out to
execute. But those tasks and strategies
served a simple outline. The bodies of these
campaigns were in large part determined
by the culture, mission, and values. This
consequently shaped both the experience of
the organizers and the quality of the work
they ended up doing.
When asked about culture, there were
an array of responses which is evidence in
itself that the culture was not unified. That
being said, there were a few things that
stuck out in conversation about culture.
One that was particularly interesting led
into a much longer conversation about
the overall structure of the organizing
department. Hal started off by saying that
he didn’t quite know what the culture
was intended to be, but that the campaign
had not been able to fully execute the
neighborhood team model that was
established by the Obama campaign.
On the Obama campaign, the purpose
of the neighborhood team model was to
decentralize the tasks of the campaign by
empowering local communities to organize
their own neighborhoods. This led to a very
decentralized and community oriented
model for the field program. Hal explained
that neither he nor anyone in his county
got to that point of local communities
effectively taking over the operations
in their individual neighborhoods. He
referenced how in many ways, the
structure was meant to model the Obama
campaign, but to be different and ‘unique’.
The phrase ‘like the Obama campaign but
different’ was something that came up
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repeatedly both in interviews and during
the campaign at trainings or explanations
of certain strategies.
The campaign in many ways was meant
to represent a continuation of the Obama
campaign both in terms of messaging
and symbolic power, but also in terms of
practical operations. During trainings when
explaining the programmatic details of the
campaign, the presenters would often make
comparisons to the Obama campaign but
with slight differences. One example was
how the neighborhood team model under
the Obama campaign had being altered to
diverge from a snow-flake model to a more
basic model. The most striking difference
however was a culture focused on making
the campaign personal. The outline of the
Obama campaign was there and there was
always a verbal acknowledgment of making
the campaign personal, but organizers
believed this didn’t actually happen. There
was a marked lack of personalization in the
proceedings of the campaign. Jane said,
Thomas would always say, let’s make
it personal, let’s make it personal.
But I don’t think that’s what actually
happened. It hmm…it’s hard to
explain what it actually turned out to
be…but it wasn’t what was supposed
to happen…I just think it was really
impersonal for a lot of people – for
some volunteers. Even in our office,
I know some volunteers were not that
happy and did not want to come back.
I don’t think it was made personal the
way it was emphasized to be.
This was not an isolated account.
Numerous organizers shared stories of
volunteers being frustrated in this way and
I myself encountered numerous volunteers,
many of which had been neighborhood
team leaders during the previous Obama
campaigns, who expressed their frustrations
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
in being kept in the dark about the operations
in their own neighborhoods and not being
given the opportunity to be involved to the
same extent as they had been with previous
campaigns. The lack of emphasis placed
on empowering local communities and
catering to neighborhoods directly impacted
the types of interactions that the campaign
had with members of the community.
Rather than focusing on empowering
local communities, the culture was centered
around winning. The confidence that the
campaign would be successful and win
was palpable. While discussing a delay in
shipping of an online clothing store, a senior
staff member once jokingly remarked, “I
probably won’t get it until the re-election
campaign.” These notes of certainty were
engrained in every level of the campaign
and in every day conversations. It can’t
be seen as unexpected that a campaign
would constantly repeat that they were
going to win – but this went much deeper
than holding an optimistic and confident
outlook. In making decisions about certain
goals and campaign strategies, there was
a level of confidence that no matter what
happened, the outcome of the election would
inevitably swing in Clinton’s favor. Even
on election night, after losing a few states
that had previously been expected to vote
for Clinton – one of Clinton’s fundraisers
reassured the room that he had just talked to
folks at the Brooklyn headquarters who said
they were still expecting wins in Wisconsin
and Michigan. This attitude of impending
success defined the culture. In discussing
culture with Linda, she reflected,
I feel like there was no culture coming
down. It was just kind of like “Let’s
go win” Yeah that was it. Actually I
have a t-shirt that on the back of it, it
says hashtag, the acronym for let’s go
win this fucking thing. But it wasn’t
like ‘Let’s go do this together’ or like
‘Let’s make sure that everyone has
fun doing it’ it was ‘Let’s go win’ and
that was it. It was never more than
‘Let’s get this woman into office’ It
should have been more about ‘let’s
make sure everyone who’s involved
feels like they’re empowered. Let’s
make sure that everyone who’s
involved feels appreciated and knows
why this is important.’
Organizers remarked on the impersonal
nature of the campaign in part because
the clear and overwhelming objective
of winning took front and center, with
limited recognition of why winning was
important or what winning would mean.
Consequently, the campaign’s culture
became focused on meeting measures of
success that would indicate winning, or
carrying out the very objective, bare bones
function of the campaign – getting Hillary
Clinton elected through pre-established
numeric milestones. The culture of the
campaign was centered around hitting
metrics and carefully calculated definitions
of numerical success. As one organizer,
Jenn put it, “…on a work-product level,
there was very much the sense that we were
going to meet metrics and it was just about
the metrics.” The organizing department
focused on encouraging organizers to limit
their concerns to only the goals they had
been assigned. Many remarked that they
had little idea about what was happening
on the broader scale of the campaign
because of the immense amount of focus
and time that was required of them to meet
their individual goals. This is perhaps an
unsurprising aspect of a high intensity work
environment, but certainly a reflection
of the immense amount of attention that
was placed on the short term milestones.
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Additionally, this attention and focus meant
that what was bureaucratically established
as a priority for the campaign became the
sole focus, with limited flexibility to go
beyond directly hitting the numbers. The
trouble here is that the culture was directed
by this data-driven, metrics focused
approach rather than an ambient mission
or vision. While being metrics driven is
not necessarily problematic on its own,
its centrality in shaping an organizations
culture to the extent that it stands out as
the defining culture can be problematic for
a campaign aimed at mobilizing people
around a mission or vision greater than
themselves or any one person.
Within North Carolina, the phrase ‘Burn
the ships’ was invoked repeatedly and many
organizers I talked to mentioned the use of
this phrase in discussions around culture.
The phrase was a reference to Hernan
Cortes’s courageous words to his troops
upon reaching the New World so that his men
would have no recourse but to be successful
on land because they wouldn’t have the
security of their ships to return to. This story,
with the names of the generals and Cortes
replaced with senior leadership in the North
Carolina campaign, was told to each member
onboarding the campaign. ‘Burn the ships’
came to be a well-known phrase amongst the
campaign because it was cited regularly in
daily conversations or over twitter in order
to remind everyone that they needed to get
over any hurdle that would hold them back.
This phrase embodied a similar sentiment as
‘Honest, Hungry, Humble’, in helping direct
and regulate members of the campaign in
how they should approach their work each
day. Jamie explained how ‘burning the ships’
played into helping guide their organizers on
a daily basis,
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Burning ships is really helpful in
terms of not taking excuses for an
answer. Like everything in organizing
was like, no, no, you can definitely
make 200 calls a night, like you can
do that, like I know that is something
you can do – like burn that ship, like
I don’t care what excuse you’re going
to give me, you can do that, we’re
going to do that, and that’s how we’re
going to win. And that’s how we made
so many, so many, so many calls, that
was like very clearly communicated
from above, that expectation was
clearly communicated and then like
the everything we did was under the
guise of this, this, this and this and
all of these little pieces – like trust
me, but also I’ll try to sketch it out
– these things add up to us winning.
And then that didn’t happen to so
it’s like fuck. It became a phrase that
you probably couldn’t go a single
day without hearing. I found myself
saying it to my organizers because it
was something that everyone on staff
knew the meaning of and could be
easily said in cases where there was
a desire to encourage someone to just
work hard and not let any hesitations
hold them back. That being said, I
found myself feeling annoyed when
I heard someone tell me ‘that sounds
like a ship you need to burn’ when
sharing with them a challenge I was
facing or seeking advice.
The phrase played the role of a
managing tool, brought out to remind
employees that they should always be
pushing themselves further and not
let themselves get caught up with any
excuses. It also re-emphasized the strict
focus on winning above all else as opposed
to establishing a more meaningful purpose
centered around a shared vision that
would create internal motivation for the
staff. The two culture inducing mottos of
the campaign, ‘Honest, Hungry, Humble’
and ‘Burn The Ships’, were both aimed at
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
regulating employee behavior as opposed
to invoking a sense of purpose about a
unified vision. These cultural elements
highlighted the bureaucratic tendencies
of the campaign which emphasized the
need for individual members to perform
their functions at all costs. This is in direct
contrast to being guided by charismatic
authority in the pursuit of a greater vision
or mission.
Almost every organizer remarked on
the importance of North Carolina in the
overall election results. This was something
that was not only expressed by political
pundits around the country, but repeated
by the campaign almost every single day
either through the daily calls, emails or
social media. The importance of the work
that organizers were doing in the state was
hammered in – which in part contributed to
the pressure. Organizers talked a lot about
the stressful environment and the constant
pressure to meet goals because of the high
stakes of the election and the importance of
North Carolina.
While there tended to be elements
of a general statewide culture that some
organizers pointed out as discussed earlier,
others thought that there wasn’t a cohesive
or defining culture beyond the local teams.
Martha recalled that much of the culture that
stood out to her was focused on regional
teams,
…we should have all been able to say
I know what it means to be in North
Carolina, I know what it means to be
HFA and I don’t think that was sort
of front and center but on a baseline
I think it’s important to know what it
means to be on your own team and to
feel committed to teams and goals of
that team and I think that was sort of
very dependent on the regional in a
given region.
To Martha, there lacked a single
charismatic emblem that united the
campaign, which ties into the lack of message
of the entire campaign discussed earlier.
A lack of cohesive message is indicative
of an absence of overall charismatic
authority that would unite members around
a specific mission, which allowed for local
and regional cultures to take a stronger
hold. Some also remarked that there were
different levels of commitments within the
teams which created a divide, making it
more difficult to see the campaign as one
cohesive unit. Others reflected that it was
due to the different levels of hierarchy –
organizers, RODs, DOD’s, and so on. Lena,
who had been on the campaign longer
than most, astutely observed that united
cultures formed across various levels of the
hierarchy,
We felt the organizers were a unit and
the ROD’s themselves were a unit,
and then the DOD’s were a unit, but
together those three levels were not
a unit. And it was obviously because
everyone had their own meetings
and different levels like obviously
things can’t be communicated all the
way down the chain of command,
but there was obviously a lot of ‘do
not break the chain, don’t even look
at the other ROD or DOD’. We had
like Slacks[an online forum], we had
a group text, and then we had google
chat and then we had slack and you
were also supposed to be talking on
twitter and we had a Facebook group.
So it was like how are we going to be a
cohesive unit – if we don’t even have
a cohesive manner of communication
there’s like 6 different ways you can
communicate – so it was kind of
like we’re really trying for this, but
couldn’t ever figure out.
The overall feeling was that there was
not enough cohesion within the campaign
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that allowed organizers to understand and
keep the overall campaign mission and
objectives in the forefront. The formation of
identity forming across one’s role and place
within an organization is characteristic of
a bureaucratic structure. This may be true
of other campaigns as well, but the degree
to which group formations occur based on
role and one’s place in the overall structure
of the campaign is a function of the degree
to which the campaign is (or in this case,
is not) centered around a specific mission.
This may be characteristic of any extremely
structured organization, but the extent to
which the hierarchy becomes a defining
part of the culture is symptomatic of an
overly bureaucratic organization.
Part 3: The Iron Cage
Measuring and Monitoring: Numbers,
Metrics, and Goals
Obama for America (OFA) was widely
revered as a new-age campaign in large
part due to the advances they pioneered in
data analytics and metrics driven strategies.
McKenna and Han identify the importance
of this ‘centrality of metrics’ as one of key
characteristics that distinguished the Obama
Campaign’s ground game. Decisions made
to direct actions on the ground were backed
by advanced data analytics. The goals given
to each field organizer were treated with
the utmost importance in the context of
the overall organization and structure. The
standard within the ‘field’ of campaigns
became targeting, specifying, and giving
every member of the organizing department
a specific goal each week. That being said,
Alexander demonstrates that the Obama
campaign also was deeply grounded in a
cohesive vision and Obama as a candidate
became a clear symbol of ‘Hope’ and
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‘Change’ which became the prevailing
feature of his candidacy and colored each
strategic decision made by the campaign. It
was perhaps his being a symbol that set the
stage for inspired and internally motivated
staff to innovate in the name of a greater
purpose or mission.
In itself, the specificity of goals is a
strategic decision meant to measure and
track an organizing department’s work and
provide guidelines for the output it needs
to reach. However, the way in which this is
stressed within the organization differs based
on its position relative to other priorities of
the campaign and how these goals relate to
the broader campaign. Viewing these goals
as a means to a greater mission is different
from treating those numeric goals as the
ultimate end. If, for the sake of argument, we
take the ‘tasks’ of campaign as given (there
will always be certain tasks that need to be
performed) and these tasks are grounded in
the name of a particular vision, the vision
will define the organization. On the other
hand, without a vision, the organization that
must still perform certain tasks may not be
able to ground the execution of those tasks
in any greater meaning and the performance
of those tasks becomes the end in itself. An
organization lacking this sort of grounding
vision is not internally guided to construct
strategies that align with and serve that
particular vision and context. Consequently,
it may rely more heavily on proven
strategies pioneered by previous successful
organization within the same field. Moreover,
the campaign would be characterized solely
based on those ‘tasks’ as opposed to the
reason why those tasks are being performed
in the first place. The previous sections of
this paper establish the lack of a cohesive
vision guiding the Clinton ground game in
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
North Carolina. The rest of this paper will
demonstrate the consequences of this on
the way in which campaign practices were
approached. More specifically, the lack of
vision on the North Carolina campaign led
to the centrality of and emphasis on the
bureaucratic functions of the campaign as
ends in themselves, which consequently
constructed an over-rationalized iron cage
on the ground games’ core functions.
Every single interviewee brought up the
way in which numbers were stressed to the
point where they took on an importance far
greater than connecting with communities
around a mission. North Carolina serves
as an example of a campaign in which the
context around metrics and the purpose
of hitting certain metrics were given a
far diminished role in comparison to
the metrics themselves. One Regional
Organizing Director describes their account
of campaign culture as being deeply
characterized, guided, and overwhelmed by
numbers:
Numbers, numbers, numbers. I would
say numbers dominated the culture
of our team in a way that I thought
was really smart, really clean, really
focused. I mean I would wake up, pull
my numbers, update my spreadsheets.
I would get on the morning call and
report my numbers. I would then get
on the call with my team and check in
with them about goals, PTG, etc. etc.
and then we’d go through the day and
then calls, calls, calls. And then I’d
check how many calls everyone made
and sometimes I’d so some weird stuff
with conditional formatting about
how many calls everyone made, that
was fun, that was fun and then we
had the nightly check out call…Yeah
numbers, metrics, goals.
The common thread that united each
member of the organizing department was
a deep relationship to numbers. Organizers
would be given their goals for the week on
Mondays. Each morning email from their
RODs would include an update on their
progress to the weekly goal. The RODs
were responsible for constantly keeping
up to date with the numbers for each of
their organizers, tracking what numbers
were being logged into VAN, knowing if
there were discrepancies between soft and
hard numbers, and knowing at all times
why certain numbers were low or high.
The DODs would similarly maintain an
understanding of the numbers being reached
by each region and so on. The relationships
and communication between various levels
of the campaign hierarchy were regulated
by numbers and goals. Everything was
about these numbers. This is not to say that
a focus on numbers ought not be seen as
critical to the ground game of a campaign.
However, the way in which these staff
members related to their numbers relative
to ‘people’ became was problematic in
terms of what was prioritized. Jane makes
the distinction clear:
The last campaign I worked on was a
lot more fun because it seemed more
about the people whereas this one
was more so about the numbers. So
that was the big difference for me. It
was just numbers for me. In 2012, of
course it was still numbers, but it was
about people more so than it was this
year.
The reason she gives to explain why
this may have been the case was that
stories, connections, people seemed to fall
short in achieving the objectives of the
campaign, which led to a greater need to
direct attention on hitting numbers. Jane’s
analysis provides an interesting hypothesis
about the relationship between stories and
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numbers. Both are critical to a ground game,
but what seems to have gotten prioritized
was what was assessable – perhaps there
was an acceptance that relying on stories
in this particular circumstance would not
yield the desired results. It is possible
that the Obama campaign was able to
be powered by both stories and metrics
because a cohesive story around a candidate
who was a symbol of ‘Hope’ was easily
assessable. But the rationale here is also
revealing of a fundamental discordance
present in a strategy which over-prioritizes
technicalities and reaching numbers
above all else within a mission driven
organization. A clear rationale for why
this campaign’s relationships to numeric
definitions of success and communities was
the way it was, was not clearly articulated.
Consequently, the story that organizers
ended up telling was that the candidate
didn’t have a compelling story that could
provide that intrinsic drive. As Jane put it,
We had a lot of work to do just because
our candidate wasn’t as likeable as the
2012 candidate. We really didn’t run
on policy in ’12…it was much more
about getting people excited about
the future and it was just amazing
speeches that got people pumped up
because our candidate was likeable.
But this time our candidate was not
likeable and she had a lot of things
working against her so we just had to
play a numbers game instead.
Jane’s characterization may be a result
of the campaign being overly bureaucratic
and not invoking that sense of internal
motivation that comes from a charismatic
authority. Multiple organizers believed that
this focus and prioritization on the metrics
was placed above community organizing.
When I asked Tom how this campaign was
116
different from the ones he had previously
worked on, he replied, “It was more
antiseptic than other campaigns I’ve worked
in. There was a heavy emphasis on metrics
and meeting metrics as opposed to meeting
voters.” The analogous problem he identified
with this focus was an unwillingness to
account for differences amongst various
communities that organizers were working
in. Though the metrics that organizers
were to meet varied based on the type of
geographic areas they were in, the way in
which these metrics needed to be met and
which metrics needed to be met were very
much set in stone, rationalized by a higher
authority and dictated to organizers. These
numbers and metrics provided the strict
structure under which organizers carried
out all other tasks. This apotheosizing of
these pre-rationalized metrics impacted
the approach taken towards community
organizing and created the inflexibility in
taking different approaches to different
communities. Tom explained his frustration
with this positioning of metrics,
…it was the idea that you had to
meet this metric even if the calls
were – even if a 140 of your calls
were going to answering machine.
You had to meet the metric even if it
would be better to go to a community
meeting and have people see you
and then they get comfortable with
you and they decide to volunteer in
the campaign.…The campaign held
us to metrics on the number of calls
we made and the number of shifts
we scheduled, but these shifts didn’t
have to be completed. They properly
didn’t hold us accountable for people
not showing up to the shifts – but that
was what was most important – that
people show up for the shifts. Like I
had a guy who said 5 weeks out that
he was going to be there 3 days a
week from then until the election with
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
his son for 3 hours. So that counted
for 180 shifts that I scheduled in that
one call, but I think he made two of
them. So you know, the thing is – the
important thing would have been to
build a relationship with him and to
get him to come to more of the – than
the two he made. That’s the important
– the important metric is really that
people show up. And of course the
only important metric is the number
of people that vote. So I didn’t feel
like the phone calling strategy was
getting us there.
The goals took on the role of the
bureaucratic authority which shaped the
behavior of the people who made up that
organization. The prioritization of these
metrics by the organizing department
constrained and limited the individual
judgement and rationalization of the
organizers within their own communities.
Mechanisms for organizers to help improve
the overall structure of the campaign or ask
the organization to allow for adjustments to
be made for unique cases were not built into
the organization. Tom shared his experience
of questioning the campaign’s rigid
framework and asking for flexibility. At the
end of the day, Tom felt that he did not have
the autonomy to do whatever he wanted
because he did not have the freedom to
employ his own rationale. Though he had an
idea of how he would handle his turf based
on his own observations and rationale, the
hierarchical structure prevented these sorts
of adjustments from being made on the
ground. He said any conversation to voice
such concerns was certainly heard, but it
was obvious that nothing would come of it,
I had a feeling that my ROD
understood but that her hands were
tied – that she was being held to make
sure that we met our metrics. And it
wasn’t her call. She understood what
I was getting at but she wasn’t free to
tell us ‘okay go out there and go make
yourself known and bring people in
that way.’
This struggle came from the extreme
rigidity of the organization in terms
of numbers and the way they were
emphasized, leaving individual members
in the organization feeling like they had no
choice but to accept the conditions of the
work they were doing as set in stone. This
inability to adapt to the needs identified
by the organizers was characteristic of
the bureaucratically structured organizing
department.
The problem was not due to the
importance placed on metrics, but the
extent to which they was given importance
and the relationship organizers formed with
those metrics. The nature of this focus was
recognized even by the one person who
did not find issue with the way that it was
emphasized. Jamie remarked,
It was more focused, more clean,
more data driven than I could have
expected. I knew it was going to be
all of those things, but then it was
all of those things, in my mind, and
this is a bit romanticized, it was all
of those things near perfectly that
like every moment of every day was
just so focused on doing nothing but
things that helped win us the election.
Like I don’t think we could have done
that any better. I don’t think we could
have managed to do that any better.
Within an organization, it is perceivable
that a logic that has been previously
rationalized ought to be adhered to in the
name of consistency. At the time, heralding
that this was a ‘metrics driven campaign’
theoretically made sense because advances
in data analytics and previous success stories
based off similar data analysis gave the
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perception and created layers of confidence
that this was the key to winning. This
was the established framework, the North
Carolina team executed the plan according
to this framework, and the framework
could not be questioned. The various levels
of hierarchy repeated the messages, ‘This
is how we win’ or ‘Studies have shown
that this is how we win’. The fabric of the
campaign was determined by the confidence
with which this was believed by those who
designed the campaign strategy and focused
on spreading this throughout the rest of the
organization. As Jamie put it, “…if you did
this or hit this number, or scheduled this
number of shifts, you were successful and
that would be celebrated and like that was
great.” However, this framework could
not be questioned under any circumstance.
The focus directed through this framework
regulated the work of each member of the
campaign and shifted the focus away from
the ultimate goal and redirected it to short-
term measures of success. Success was
defined and guided by these artificially
constructed structures as opposed to being
organized around the long-term picture or
a charismatic authority. This came forward
also in a phrase from state leadership used
constantly and stated as one of the main
guiding principles for the last leg of the
campaign – ‘focus on what you can control’.
What could be controlled was defined by the
directives coming down through hierarchy.
Putting aside a discussion of whether
those directives were right or wrong, the
emphasis here was on reducing the scope
of what organizers were doing only to
what the campaign defined as ‘success’ and
removing any need for them to bring in
individual judgement into their work as to
that definition of success. At its cores, this
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organization was bureaucratically guided
and constantly reinforced that organizers
needed to solely focus on hitting their
numerical goals that they had specifically
been assigned and not worry about anything
else. This could have played a role in further
distancing organizers from the larger goal
and prevented them from feeling connected
to the bigger mission.
Moreover, this resulted in a lot of
frustrations from the organizers – not all
of which got voiced during the campaign
itself. This frustration seemed to stem from
a lack of a well-constructed story around
how goals were structured in relation to
their roles on the campaign. And in many
ways the focus as defined by the campaign
seemed to contradict the implicit goal of the
campaign. Martha explained,
…like I can definitely see how people
could be like the goals are the goals,
somebody who does numbers and
knew that these are the goals we need
to hit – that’s fine, but I think that
when people know the underpinnings
of what they’re doing, they can be
perhaps more motivated so it’s not
necessarily that I think that something
was lost by that focus on figures, but
I think that there was a rigidity in
the focus on figures that without the
undercutting’s of here’s the story of
why we’re doing these things and
what we’re building towards, might
have hurt us.
Again what is stressed here is the
way in which numbers were stressed in
relation to an overall mission and how
that in itself could not compel organizers
to be completely bought in. Working
on a campaign is challenging in almost
any election for a variety of reasons.
Highlighting the goals and numbers in a
way that they are given more importance
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
than some greater good underlines the ‘hard
work’ aspect as opposed to the cause being
worked on.
Organizers also recounted how these
metrics were given a greater focus than
the communities they were supposedly
organizing. This focus turned the field
department, which was responsible for
working directly with communities, into
something that did not recognize the
importance of those very communities. One
organizer, Tim, remarked, “A lot of the things
I saw with this campaign was sometimes
they saw the individual as a number and not
as a person.” As a consequence, the focus
on metrics altered the interactions that
organizers had with community members.
This expectation was set by the leadership
of the organizing department and enforced
through the chain of command. Through
continual repetition of the priorities of the
campaign, the importance of hitting the
assigned metrics was constantly reinforced.
Had relationships and stories been enforced
in a similar manner, that too would have
transcended throughout the organizing
department. Lena describes what actually
ended up being emphasized,
You were constantly told, you need
this many forms, you need this many
forms. You need to stay out and can’t
come back in until you have this many
forms. And any conversation I had
after getting that type of text message
is not going to be pleasant or any
conversation I have with a volunteer
– like ‘hey thank you for coming, get
the hell out so I can get my forms’
so it was that type of conversation-
obviously I didn’t say that but very
much like we need to turn this
around, I don’t care why you’re here
or who you are, but you need to bring
me back forms…So I do see that
there was definitely too much focus
on numbers and not enough focus
on the person that you’re interacting
with or the issue that you want to
talk about or anything like that and
even like – and it really hit me in the
events too because surrogate events
are obviously supposed to be good to
try to get shifts and you were banking
on the fact that the field pitch and
the surrogate that they saw was good
enough to sell them and so you were
like ‘Hey want to sign up for a shift?
Great – here!’ and then ‘Cool see you
then!’ and that’s your conversation.
There was like no human element to
that whatsoever. And then even on the
phone calls because you had to make
you know however – there was like
1900 calls a week at a certain point
and it was like ‘I don’t have time to
talk to you. Like if you’re not going
to sign up for a shift, you need to get
off the phone. And even if you are
going to sign up for a shift, tell me
when and where and k, great, we’ll
see you then.’
Lena’s descriptions reflect how the
pressures placed on her shaped the way she
interacted with people. Namely, pressures
to meet metrics and the extent to which
reaching these goals was stressed altered
her relationships with people. Lena said
she felt that she didn’t have the chance
to develop personal relationships with
volunteers because of the intense focus on
hitting numbers, saying, “…towards the
end it was like ‘we just need you to get in
here, I don’t care why’ in reference to her
attitude towards volunteers. This attitude
was established and reinforced constantly
by the campaign. There was a sense,
however, that relationships and metrics did
not have to be at odds. Being a data driven
campaign did not need to come at the
expense of organizing. Indeed, being a data
driven campaign is not the problem, but the
way in which data and numeric measures
of success are positioned in relation to the
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rest of the campaign. Rather than being one
part of the field program, they became the
defining characteristic at the expense of
personal relations. As Martha put it,
But I do think a differently run
campaign might have been attuned
to that from the top down. And had
it been, [my ROD] would have been
comfortable when I came to [my
ROD] then saying like ‘yes, trust
your gut and we’ll make up those
numbers in future weeks because
you are three weeks behind and
[inaudible] need to build your team’
but because the culture was numbers,
numbers, numbers [laughter], [my
ROD]…couldn’t give the go ahead to
me, so I couldn’t give it to myself and
I think that in the long run, that did
set us back.
Individual judgements could not be
made because this adherence to what
was outlined by the campaign served as
the law of the organization that could not
be broken. This rigidity, to be expected
from a bureaucratically run organization,
created a less efficient system in dealing
with individual cases. The problem was
not that there was a focus on hitting
numbers and metrics, but that this became
the ultimate end as opposed to a means
to achieve a greater vision. This proved
problematic in situations where adjusting
to unique circumstances was required,
namely because deviating from the short
term numbers would constitute deviating
from the stand-in ultimate goal of the
organization. The focus on metrics was
so overpowering that it also overpowered
other elements of the campaign and took
the place of an organizational mission.
Rather than being internally motivated by
a cohesive charismatic authority, organizers
were solely guided by the core tasks and
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bureaucratic incentives that characterized
the overall organization. This emphasis on
numbers took the form of the iron cage
which constrained all other aspects of the
campaign.
Standardization: The Lack of Community
Catering and Organizing
The approach to community organizing
on this campaign serves as another clear
illustration of how the organization
developed into an overly bureaucratic
structure. Discussions of community
organizing, even during training, did not
emphasize the need to cater work on a
campaign to the individual community.
As Tom put it, “It was just a one size fits
all approach to organizing and that was
troublesome, shall we say”. A one size
fits all approach though a cornerstone of
bureaucratic organizations, is inherently
incompatible with community organizing
which requires an organization to connect
with individual and unique communities
with distinct concerns. Linda explained,
It’s a different constituency that
we were responding to – but that
was never in consideration with the
structure of the campaign. So they
wouldn’t make changes based on
who we were talking to. I definitely
think that the structure theoretically
should work, but it really is only as
strong as the leadership and they can
see that – ‘oh, this county, we need to
work on it differently than the way we
work on this county’ then it works,
but it doesn’t work if it’s all uniform
organization. Because at the end of
the day, we are talking to people, it’s
interactions with people that we are
having.
Here, Linda is touching upon the
intrinsic discord in not catering to individual
communities in the context of a community-
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
focused operation. In compromising quality
and catered interactions with people, the
effectiveness of the organization to connect
with and mobilize members of diverse
communities was limited. As Tam noted,
this de-emphasis on connecting with people
and communities was distinct from other
campaign field programs,
I was a little surprised that there
was virtually no emphasis placed
on developing relationships with
community organizations for example
or building in more time to cultivate
relationships with the church groups
and some of the other community
groups that in previous campaigns
had been a much bigger element of
the campaign strategy.
This came from someone who had
worked on multiple other campaigns in
different capacities and was working on this
campaign in particular because he had the
flexibility and wanted to get his hands dirty
on the ground. He expands on this and says
that relationships were treated like zero sum
games. He tells the story of raising a point
about a certain practice that he thought
would not go over well,
… and the response, although not
verbatim was ‘okay, you may annoy
one person, but if you get to two, then
that’s a sum game and we don’t care
about that one person.’ And that was
a little surprising. I guess the upshot
of this is there was at least from my
perspective, a little bit more focus
on numeric metrics than on you
know the, interpersonal or people
engagement.
This attitude which values people in
a very utilitarian way demonstrates the
lack of focus on communities and people.
Another organizer, Bill, expressed his
frustrations over the rigidity involved in
sticking to script and the same pattern
regardless of the unique concerns of the
community he was working in. He worked
in a region where the demographics were
quite different from the average that the
campaign seemed to be designed for. In
his region, people worked multiple jobs
and had a different level of ability to get
involved in the campaign. However, he was
asked to stick to the ‘script’ and likened the
structure to the campaign to ‘big brother’,
making sure that that the structure set out
was always being followed. What was lost
on this campaign, according to almost each
organizer I talked to, was the attention to the
individual communities they were working
in. This seemed to be systemic based on the
structure of the North Carolina operation.
According to Tam, the approach taken by
the campaign made sense on a broad level,
but fell short in other aspects,
…you know from a global perspective
or from a 30,000 foot looking down on
the campaign across the country, the
methodology worked, the program
worked, the methods of volunteer
recruitment – the idea of building
your volunteer base and all of that
works from a really big picture view.
But I don’t think it took into account
the specific differences in community
culture, in economic – in the ability
for those communities or areas that
were in the lower economic strata to
play into that model. So in that sense,
I do think it was systemic.
This low prioritization of catering to
individual communities is characteristic of
Weberian bureaucracies that are incapable
of dealing with diverse cases, as is the
lack of concern for personal relationships
between organizers and communities.
One other thing that demonstrated a
lack of attention to community organizing,
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
building relationships, and catering to a
specific turf was the amount of times turf
was redrawn. Organizers expressed the
difficulty in building and maintaining
volunteer relationships as a result of turf
changing and seeing some volunteers
decreasing their level of involvement after
being moved from one organizer to the other.
The fact that turf was moved or redrawn
sent a message that the neighborhoods
were not of the highest priority – that those
relationships between an organizer and the
community were not critical. Beyond that,
some organizers did not actually know what
their turf was. Tom expressed,
One of things they did soon after I
got there was divide up turf, so we
each had a region, we each had a turf
within the region and the map was
really poorly done to the point where
the turf where I was- first of all it was
moved, and second of all, when it
was moved, it wasn’t clear what the
distinction was between me and two
other organizers. So what they were
saying was – eh your turf doesn’t
really matter, just make your phone
calls.
Hal recounts how his region was redrawn
three different times and the impact that had
on relationships with volunteers, a central
component of community organizing,
Redrawing the maps 3 different times
affected the existing relationships
that we as organizers had already
developed with volunteers. 3 months
in, I found out that some of my best
volunteers were now working with
another organizer and I saw a couple
of volunteers leave because they
didn’t like that …redrawing the maps
messed with the relationships between
organizers and volunteers and just
made our jobs that much harder to
recruit the number of volunteers that
we needed.
122
Hal’s frustration stemmed from the
impact this had on his ability to dedicate
his time to developing larger, self-sufficient
teams of volunteers. Rather than investing
his entire time getting to know a specific
community, building relationships with
them, and building teams that could execute
a proper field program – he had to adjust
to entirely different turfs three times.
Organizers were seen as interchangeable
cogs with little consideration of how personal
relationships may have factored into their
work. This campaign design is indicative
of the way in which personal relationships
were not factored into decisions made
on the campaign. Decisions were rather
made based on a bureaucratic framework
which did not incorporate consideration for
relationships with individuals.
Additionally, organizers themselves
were removed from their turf during GOTV.
Not only did this create a lot of frustration
amongst organizers, but the rationale
behind this was never fully explained to
them. When I asked the decision-makers
regarding the rationale behind this, I was
told that it was because organizers would
theoretically be the best door knockers
and help raise the overall number of doors
that would be knocked. Traditionally, the
role of solely knocking on doors is given
to ‘paid canvassers’. However, in this
case, the community organizers who were
theoretically responsible for the operation
in their individual communities were taken
out of their communities during the most
critical time of the campaign, something
that has been met with great astonishment
from every single person who has field
experience that I spoke with. This entire
process was described as disorganized
and frustrating by organizers, who shared
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol

stories of getting instructions late at night performance and that also it would
or early mornings of where they were to go produce the results that they wanted in
terms of delivering people. I mean it
to knock or deliver door packets. One day, was – you know we had the call every
all organizers from Tilton county were sent night with state and it was – we used
to Hansen county while all organizers from to call it the ‘woo call’ because they
Hansen county were sent to Tilton county. would woo about everybody’s results.
And I was like, we don’t know – this
On a larger scale, this removal of organizers person did 50 shifts, we don’t know
from their turfs demonstrated a de-emphasis how many of those people are going
of the relationship between the community to show up.
and the organizer.
Theoretically, if rigid focus on numbers
At scale, the practices of the organization
would achieve the desired campaign result,
were impersonal. Dana, who worked with
this would probably be the best decision
the organizers, explained her bewilderment
for the campaign to make. The problem
when she learned that the organizers could not
was that this created incentives to achieve
point out where their turf was geographically
low-quality numbers and that the relative
located on a map. Dana paused before
importance placed on numbers over
saying, “Anytime you have – you don’t
relationships caused organizers to invest
have like people who know their area or
less in relationships. This consequently
their turf that reflects back on you because
led to less commitment from community
as organizing director, your program is set
members and made it more difficult to
up in such a way that organizing isn’t even
develop self-sufficient volunteer teams that
organizing.” In contrast to field programs
would have actually helped the campaign
with an intrinsic focus on civic engagement,
achieve its bottom-line more effectively.
this organizing department seemed to be void
Tom who had recounted scheduling
of the core goals of organizing. Tom echoes
hundreds of shifts from a person who only
the lack of community organizing he got to
came to two of them and wished that a
do on this campaign. He described, based on
greater emphasis would have been played
his experience on previous campaigns, what
on cultivating relationships so volunteers
his instincts would have been to organize a
became more committed. There was a
community and how this campaign differed.
sense that spending more time developing
Tom expressed surprise in not being able to
stronger relationships with people would
do what he considered traditional forms of
have led to more dedicated volunteers.
organizing and relationship building on this
However, the bureaucratically set priorities
campaign. When asked why he thought this
of the organizing department which seemed
particular campaign did not allow for this,
to not recognize the value of appealing to
he alluded to the focus on numbers. There
individuals and individual communities
was a sense of confidence that reaching the
held organizers back from doing this. This
numbers was the ultimate path to winning
de-emphasis on relationships, people, and
which surpassed in importance the need to
communities was a defining characteristic
organize communities,
of the North Carolina ground game’s
I think they believed that numerical practices. That attitude towards individuals
metrics are a fairer way of measuring was consistently palpable in the various
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
actions of the campaign. Tam explained
his reaction to something that was repeated
in training and repeated throughout the
campaign
Where there might have been a little
bit more emphasis on – I was a little,
again based on my experience, a little
surprised at some of the language in
training that talked about ‘shifts, not
people’, in other words the emphasis
on metrics that were strictly number
based.
When I asked if this was something
that she questioned, she responded, “I think
that was for the most part viewed as the
approach. I don’t think it was questioned.”
While statements like these in themselves
may not be enough to understand the full
relationship between campaigns and people,
this was also reflected in micro-interactions
that were reported on multiple occasions,
particularly from volunteers who had been
involved during the 2012 election cycle.
Tim who was a staff member in a slightly
different role this time around shared what
he was hearing from his volunteers from
2012,
Volunteers who had been first my
volunteers with OFA in 2012 and
have remained my volunteers in
other campaigns in Landberg, NC…
they’re telling me when are you
coming back because I don’t want to
work with them. I don’t like how this
person works, I don’t understand this
person’s definition of organization.
That was disappointing.
Even Jamie who had previously
commended the efficiency of the campaign
due to its adherence to achieving outlined
metrics, admitted that community
organizing was lacking on the campaign
and observed that the locations where
124
communities happened to be closer were
most successful. But cultivating community
ties in order to execute on the voter contact
objectives was not done at scale on behalf
of the official field program’s operations.
This was not seen as problematic primarily
because it wasn’t seen as an objective of the
campaign. The bottom line of the campaign
was still hitting centrally determined
numerical goals. The irony here is that
stronger communities and more dedicated
volunteers who felt a call to action would
have helped the organization achieve those
goals more efficiently. Thus, the events of
this campaign present an example of the
problems that emerge from not having a
mission that brings people together based
on a shared vision and of a bureaucratically
run organizations that demands efficiency
and fails to value the role those relationships
and people have in mobilizing communities
around a cause. Applying a strict
bureaucratic structure without consciously
appealing to people and communities is
antithetical to grassroots mobilization.
No Room For Continued Rationalization:
Disempowered Organizers
One key characteristic of the field
program was the extreme hierarchical,
top-down nature of the campaign which
disempowered organizers and individuals
working in the field program. The organizers
on this campaign were able to execute
the goals set out by the leadership, but
the problem was that this pre-established
structure did not allow for organizers to
employ their own judgement or go beyond.
The distinction between being able to do
what the campaign told organizers to do
in a given day and being able to perform
the duties of a community organizer is
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
significant. The word ‘empowerment’ came
up multiple times in the conversation with
Lani, and when asked directly if she felt
empowered, she responded by saying,
I’m going to say no because my
view of organizing – I think may be
a little different than what organizing
was – and by that I’m talking about
the goals of organizing – the goals
of organizing in our program were
building volunteer pool, getting folks
out to vote. Organizing in my mind
also means community engagement,
it means getting out to community
organizations instead of individuals
and getting the organizations to help
spread the word and do work….So
were we empowered to make those
200 phone calls, you bet. Were we
empowered to organize a community
in the old school sense of what
organizing is, maybe not.
One first time organizer on this
campaign wished that he had somehow
engaged the community better. When asked
if he had talked to his supervisor about it,
he remarked that he hadn’t because these
were just his personal ideas and if he
had gone to his supervisor, it would have
had to go up a few levels in order to get
permission to do things that fell outside
of the outlined structure of the campaign.
This inability to suggest changes because
of a bureaucratically rationalized program
made it difficult for individual organizers to
feel empowered and use their own reason
in their work. Linda, an organizer who had
experienced other campaigns drew out the
contrast in being open to outside, innovative
ideas
I didn’t feel like I was empowered on
the Clinton campaign. On the Smith
campaign, it was like, okay everyone,
we don’t know what we’re doing, we
need ideas, if you have a good idea,
you’re going to take charge of it,
you’re going to run with it and you
can take ownership of it…and on
the Clinton campaign, it was more
structured and in a way it was kind
of very specific- so you couldn’t just
say, ‘I think this is what we should do
to get community involvement’ and
even if you did try to get approval for
it, you wouldn’t – it wasn’t that same
like ‘Go do everything, just give us
ideas, take it and run with it”. It was
like “oh no- that’s a good idea, but not
for this campaign.
When asked why she thought this was
the case, she referenced the campaigns
size and consequent need for structure and
regularity as the primary reason. However,
she also acknowledged that this did not fit
her conception of how grassroots campaigns
ought to be run, “It shouldn’t be about how
big an organization is, but about how small
you can make it.” Linda was referencing her
prior experience on campaigns which she
believed was comparatively more focused
on relationship building and touched on
the role of grassroots campaigns in making
something happening in the political space
seem more local.
The different philosophies regarding
the role of the organization extended to
other parts of the campaign. Dana who
had organizing experience beforehand
explained her astonishment about the lack
of organizing that organizers were doing.
She referenced talking to organizers and
learning that they didn’t know their turfs
I’m asking organizers for like hey,
could you – there’s a big map on
the wall, can you point out to me or
give me some street intersections
for where your turf falls in because
if I have to get a staging location for
your turf, I need to know where your
turf is. Because how the heck am I
going to get a staging location in it.
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Like ‘oh no, we don’t know, we don’t
know anything, I don’t even know
where my turf is, it’s in this general
direction.’ So I’m like what are y’all
doing all day? ‘Voter Registration’. I
think there should have been more of
an emphasis on the organizing aspect
– and I understand that this was the
presidential election, but at the end
of the day, you’re an organizer and
your job is to organize the community
so that they can turn out the vote, if
you’re not doing that, ain’t nobody
turning out to vote for your candidate
Comparing this to her own experience,
she listed her responsibilities as an organizer
on previous campaigns, exclaiming, “I feel
like, a far cry from what I did…I wouldn’t
honestly even consider them organizers,
because they didn’t organize nothing!”
One key way this lack of empowerment
and traditional organizing was exemplified
through a specific campaign practice was
through “Packetland.” On other campaigns
(namely the previous Obama campaigns,
congressional campaigns, and local
campaigns that the organizers compared
their experiences on this campaign to),
organizers had taken on full responsibility
over a given area and were responsible
for cutting turf, constructing packets, and
making sure they had sufficient numbers of
volunteers to walk those packets. On this
campaign, that responsibility for managing
their areas was taken off of them, with the
rationale that it would create a lift off of
the organizers. ‘Packetland’ was a singular
location that would print and put together
all of the packets in the particular location
and send them out to the various staging
locations. This led to a series of logistical
errors – organizers reported discrepancies
in packets being printed, packets not
getting to their intended locations, packets
going to a particular office that would send
126
volunteers to different counties, and more.
The rationale behind ‘Packetland’ was more
or less a mystery to a lot of organizers, but
had to be accepted. Beyond the logistical
consequences of ‘Packetland’, the problem
was in the removal of a locally focused
operation within local communities and
further diminishing the role of the organizer
in the communities they would have
theoretically gotten to know during the
months leading up to the election. This was
something that was traditionally done at
the local and community level but instead
became centrally controlled. The adoption
of ‘Packetland’ during this campaign
exemplifies the extent to which organizers
were removed from the communities they
would have traditionally been trying to
develop a deep understanding of in order
to adequately mobilize. By removing
them from the process of both creating the
packets (which to do properly requires deep
knowledge of how neighborhoods are set up
within a given community) and often times
from distributing the packets, the organizers
were functionally distanced from their most
direct responsibility of activating their
particular communities. On a functional
level, this meant that the packets being
walked were not composed in the most
efficient way. On a deeper level, this
reflected the campaign’s lack of emphasis
on building strong, self-empowered
communities capable of activating their
neighborhoods on their own.
The organizer themselves admitted that
they were often left in the dark and asked to
blindly accept the rationale that was being
indirectly communicated to them. Abe
expressed his frustrations,
On occasions, I was asked if I had any
questions. But when I actually asked
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
questions or suggested alternatives,
I was told that nothing could be
done at this point. But that wasn’t
told to me until after I was asked if
something made sense and the person
I was talking to wanted to end the
conversation. So many times, my
boss plaid the ‘It’s already decided’
or ‘This is our program, this is how
it’s going to be’ card. It was like even
though the ‘program’ didn’t make
sense or I knew something they were
telling me I had to do wouldn’t work
out...we had to do it anyway, there
was no changing minds. And then
when it didn’t work out it was like
‘It’s okay, focus on what you can
control’. Like we could have had
different results if you listened to
what I was saying before. One time I
disagreed pretty strongly about what
was being suggested, so I proposed
an alternative and asked if it was
plausible. And [Bob] just said, ‘It’s
already been decided’ I asked one
more time and Bob told me to wait
one second. He started working on
something else and I waited for a
response. After a few minutes, he
looked up and changed the subject.
Either you would be ignored or told
that things had already been decided.
Abe’s words bring out how
rationalization was systematically limited
on a daily basis. There was a certain
expectation that what had been previously
rationalized by a bureaucratic authority
would be accepted by every member of the
organization. Any appeals to those decisions
were not entertained. It is difficult to see
these as individual cases or fringe cases
in such a hierarchical organization where
various layers constantly reinforce what
is being communicated down the chain of
command. This sense of uncertainty over
the reasoning behind certain strategies and
helplessness over what was happening was a
common sentiment amongst the organizers
I spoke with. They felt disempowered to
meaningfully influence their own work in
their individual communities and were met
with pushback when they questioned the
rationale established by the bureaucratic
campaign department. One organizer, Brent
said that at some level, they had to let go and
stop thinking and just trust the leadership
team, “You just have to trust HQ is going
to know –like know what they are talking
about or that when they relay something
down that it’s for a certain cause.” When
asked how often Brent trusted leadership,
he said ‘about half the time’.
Conclusion
The role that the ground of campaigns
and therefore the organizers play is
instrumental in mobilizing civil society.
While movements and mobilization efforts
may traditionally be seen as being guided
by charismatic authority, the Clinton
campaign’s divergent ground game,
provides a rich opportunity to understand
the impact of a bureaucratically run
organization which aims to mobilize civil
society.
One of the most interesting early
findings was that in the eyes of people
who had put their lives on hold to work on
this campaign, Clinton was unsuccessful
in becoming a clear symbol or collective
representation for a cohesive vision for the
country. As messengers and representatives
of a candidate or cause’s message to
everyday citizens, organizers are uniquely
positioned as agents for mobilization and
civic engagement. Yet on this campaign,
those on the ground had difficulty translating
exactly what Clinton represented or what
she was a symbol for. Why this was the case
is outside of the scope of this paper, but it
had very real and tangible implications on
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
the operation of the campaign. Because
there was no compelling or cohesive
mission which guided the operation of the
campaign, the culture was dominated by
the blind need to be successful and hitting
short-term numeric goals. The bureaucratic
functions and practices of a campaign may
have resembled other campaigns which
are guided by a charismatic authority,
however those organizations are first and
foremost guided by a sense of mission and
vision that is articulated by a charismatic
leader. The performance and execution of
those details doesn’t become the prevalent
defining characteristic of a campaign that is
performing certain tasks only in the name of
a greater purpose.
This had a tangible effect on the
practices of the campaign. The culture
being defined by performance and meeting
short term goals meant that the entire
focus of the organization was on the
campaign’s operations. As a result, there
was greater emphasis being placed on
things like numeric goals as opposed to
sharing personal stories and community
engagement. The organization became
overly rationalized and focused on how best
to meet the goals. But because there wasn’t
an intrinsic force pulling the organization
together for a well-defined mission, the
organization more heavily modeled its field
department practices on what was easily
replicable and had been proven by other
campaigns in different contexts.
North Carolina’s ground game, as a
case study, demonstrates the consequences
of an organizing department that is meant
to engage citizens around a cause when the
leader or face of the cause is not able to
become a clear symbol for a specific vision.
While this link between a candidate’s
128
symbolic representation and the campaign’s
resulting organizing practices on the ground
may seem difficult to make, this paper is
able to propose it because of its focus on
how staff perceived and related to the
candidate’s symbolic representation. My
ethnographic account of the ground game
in North Carolina shows both how those
on the ground, tasked with mobilizing and
communicating with people, were unable
to articulate the vision they were working
for and also how the campaign culture
and practices were not guided by a unified
vision.
Whether an organization is guided
by charismatic or bureaucratic authority
shapes the motivation of its supporters.
In organizations guided by bureaucratic
authority, that motivation has to be externally
generated and reinforced through regulatory
tools. The dichotomy also influences how
practices are executed. The nature of an
organizations activities is influenced by the
motivation of its members. Bureaucracies
have to work harder to motivate its members
and get them to innovate if they are not
internally guided by a singular, guiding
mission. While this may be okay for some
organizations, a lack of a clear vision or
mission poses a significant challenge for
organization that are traditionally meant
to be structured around a central mission.
It requires the organization to fill that void,
and absent a mission, the organization is
likely to rely more heavily on bureaucratic
mechanisms to do so.
At the end of the day, campaigns
cannot ignore number and metrics because
the ultimate sign of success is based on
the number of votes a campaign receives.
That being said, this research suggests
that this cannot come at the expense of the
 Hillary for North Carolina 2016: The Failure to Become a Collective Symbol
ultimate vision or goal that is achieved from
obtaining those votes. In particular, this
research demonstrates that the relation to
the ultimate vision can influence the way in
which the campaign achieves its end goal.
While there are numerous political science
studies on the statistical impact of various
measurable practices on a campaigns’
bottom line, there is need for a deeper
understanding of the methods that make
those practices effective. These methods
may not all be quantifiable and require
different approaches to study.
The findings of this paper have
implications for mission driven
organizations, especially those hoping to
mobilize people around that particular
mission. While there are countless advances
being made on the technical aspects of
any field of organizations, in this case
electioneering, it is critical to be centrally
organized around a charismatic authority
or vision. In the field of campaigns, more
advanced data analytics cannot act as a
substitute for inspiring people to mobilize
around a vision and for engaging with
communities through strong personal
relationships. The same lessons apply for
any social or political organization hoping
to inspire and mobilize people in civil
society.
Appendix A: Definition and Terms
· 1-1s – one -on-one meetings with people
for multiple different purposes including
but not limited to convincing someone to
volunteer, house out of state volunteers,
host events, become a volunteer leader, etc.
· Call time – typically 5-9pm each day
when calls are made
· Canvassing – going door to door for a
variety of possible purposes
· Direct Voter Contact – contacting voters
to vote (during OSEV or GOTV)
· DOD – Deputy Organizing Director;
oversees a set of RODs
· Field (Department) and Organizing
(Department) – are used interchangeably.
Both indicate the department of the
campaign responsible for ultimately
turning people out to vote. There are a
number of intermediary functions they
perform throughout the campaign in order
to do that, namely hosting events, engaging
with community members, building
neighborhood teams, recruiting volunteers,
hosting phone banks, hosting canvass
drives, and more.
· Flake rate – the amount of volunteers
who don’t show up for a shift divided by
the total number of volunteers who signed
up for a shift
· GOTV – Get Out The vote – last 4 days
of the election
· HFA –Hillary for America
· OD – Organizing Director, oversees the
entire organizing operation
· OSEV- One Stop Early Voting – North
Carolina has early voting which began
October 20th for some locations and
October 27th for other locations.
· Persuasion – efforts to persuade people
who fall on a scale of 1-5 to vote for a
particular person or cause
· Principal – Member of the Candidate’s
family, First Family of the United States, or
Second Family of the United States
· PTG – Percent to Goal
· Reshift Rate – the amount of volunteers
in a shift who signed up for a future shift
· ROD – Regional Organizing Director;
oversees a team of organizers
· Shifts – the unit of time a volunteer
signs up to come in to volunteer
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
· Staging Location – ‘mini pop-up offices’
during important days of the election,
OSEV and GOTV
· Surrogate – politicians or celebrities
that come to speak or host events on behalf
of the candidate
· Turf – geographic area given to an
individual organizer
o Cut turf – the packets that volunteers
were given for canvassing
o Cutting turf – dividing up a region
into appropriate sizes for a specific purpose
· VR – Voter Registration. Voter
registration is done by the campaign in
order to expand the electorate and is based
off of the assumption that most unregistered
voters are likely to vote along ‘Democratic’
party lines.
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Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent
Involvement in Education: A Model for
Chicago’s Local School Councils
Anna Rimlinger
B.A. Sociology

This study examines how the organizational structures of school governing bodies
contribute to and/or limit parent involvement at the school level in communities with
significant Latino/a and monolingual Spanish-speaking populations. Specifically,
this paper analyzes the case of Local School Councils (LSCs) in Chicago, which
are comprised of a majority of parents and school community members, and have
considerable authority over school-level policy. Ethnographic data from the observation
of LSC meetings at 35 schools is used to construct a typology of school councils based
on their adherence to bureaucratic and democratic models. While councils that are
at either extremely bureaucratic or extremely democratic tend to fail to meet policy
objectives, those that exhibit a combination of these attributes experience relative
success. However, even for councils that come closer to the ideal imagined by
policymakers, a tension remains between their capacities to comply efficiently with
mandated duties and to be fully inclusive and representative of parents from diverse
cultural and ethnolinguistic backgrounds. Implications are discussed for Latino/a
parent involvement in education, and recommendations are offered for future policy
and practice.

Introduction these supposedly democratic governing

In an era of great turmoil in U.S. national
politics and looming questions about the
state of our democracy, local governments
remain full of potential to foment vital
grassroots initiatives in service of individual
communities and neighborhoods. It is at this
small-scale level that everyday citizens have
the opportunity to create real, noticeable
change in the lives of those closest to
them. For parents in Chicago, Local School
Councils (LSCs) present the opportunity to
contribute to decision-making processes that
will directly shape their children’s education.
Past research has shown, however, that
bodies do not always allow for full parent
participation because of the way that they
are socially structured (Bryk et al. 1998),
and that the councils are often not fully
representative of marginalized ethnic/racial
groups, and particularly Latino/as (Moore
2002). Moreover, little is known about the
degree of access to these decision-making
bodies for parents and community members
who do not speak English. This is a vital
question, given that, as of the 2016-2017
school year, more than one in six Chicago
Public Schools (CPS) students has been
classified as “Limited English Proficient”
(LEP).
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
This study examines how the
organizational structures of LSCs contribute
to and/or limit parent involvement at the
school level in Chicago communities
with significant Latino/a and monolingual
Spanish-speaking populations. After
reviewing the history around the formation
of LSCs, I generate a theoretical framework
examining classic notions of bureaucracy
and democracy and review the literature
on parent involvement as a mechanism for
academic improvement. Using ethnographic
data from the observation of LSC meetings
at 35 schools, I construct a typology of four
organizational structures based on the notions
of bureaucracy and democracy. Two of these
types, Rubberstamp and Dysfunctional,
represent the extreme ends of bureaucracy
and democracy (respectively). Ultimately,
both fail to function successfully as policy
originally intended, the former not giving
any real decision-making power to parents
and the latter giving parents too much power,
such that personal disagreements interfere
with meeting productivity. Meanwhile,
the other two types, Collaborative and
Invitational, feature a mix of bureaucratic and
democratic characteristics and produce more
successful results: Collaborative councils
have a strong democratic foundation but
seek to incorporate bureaucratic structures
to increase efficiency, while Invitational
councils exhibit strong principal power but
engage in an active effort to democratize. I
focus on Invitational councils specifically,
due to their particular emphasis on
cultural and linguistic inclusivity and its
importance for Latino/a communities. To
conclude, I tie these findings back to the
framework for parent involvement and offer
recommendations for policy and practice.
1. http://www.cps.edu/Pages/Localschoolcouncils.aspx
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The Creation of Local School Councils
and a New Role for Chicago Parents
In 1988, the Illinois state legislature
passed the Chicago School Reform Act, PA
85-1418, creating a Local School Council
(LSC) at each district-run school in Chicago.
Championed by the leadership of Mayor
Harold Washington, who was elected on
an anti-machine politics campaign in 1983
(Chambers 2006), this law “deliberately
sought to weaken centralized bureaucratic
control and replace it with a complex local
school politics” (Bryk et al. 1998, p. 21).
The main objective of the policy was to
improve school and student performance by
putting power back in the hands of parents,
communities, and school professionals.
These local stakeholders ostensibly would
have the most intimate knowledge of the
needs of their own neighborhood schools
and thus be in the best position to enact
plans for improvement. Anthony S. Bryk
and his colleagues at the Consortium for
Chicago School Research have described
this political theory as “democratic
localism,” which they view as a “lever” for
school change (1998).
LSCs are comprised of 12 members,
including the school’s principal, 2 teacher
representatives, 1 non-teacher staff
member, 6 parents of students at the school,
and 2 non-parent community members who
live in the school’s attendance boundaries.
With the exception of the principal, these
members are elected by their respective
constituencies every two years. The main
responsibilities of the councils, as they are
outlined on the Chicago Public Schools
(CPS) website1, are the following: “1)
Approving how school funds and resources
are allocated, 2) Developing and monitoring
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
the annual School Improvement Plan, and
3) Evaluating and selecting the school’s
principal.” Given the importance of these
duties to the running of the school, LSCs
are truly essential governing bodies vested
with real power. This was a purposeful part
of the design of LSCs that differentiated the
Chicago model from school-level councils
in other cities like New York and Detroit,
that had little or no decision-making
authority (Moore 2002).
However, at the time that LSCs were
first created, this was a new role for
parents and community members, who
had previously acted primarily as advisors,
either “praising or decrying” school policies,
but rarely having a hand in their formation
(Hess 1991, p. 157). An informant in one
study of parents’ initial reactions to their
responsibilities as LSC members explained,
“I don’t even know what this is about. I
know how to do bake sales for the schools.
I’m used to helping the teacher on field
trips. But what am I supposed to do with the
curriculum?” (Talbott 2004, p. 58). At some
schools, parents and school faculties took
years to mutually understand their roles
as democratic collaborators responsible
for allocating funds and analyzing school
performance (Talbott 2004). A decade
after implementation began, Bryk and
his colleagues (1998) observed different
patterns of organizational politics that had
emerged at different schools. Based on their
survey, they estimated that at most one-third
of LSCs had developed “strong democracy”
with sustained and productive participation
by parents, while about 40% were
dominated by the principal and featured
little parent input (Bryk et al. 1998, p. 83).
Meanwhile, a small number of LSCs were
characterized by “adversarial politics,”
with conflict erupting among members, and
about 20% showed mixed attributes from
these three types (Bryk et al. 1998, p. 83).
Clearly, the original goal behind
the creation of LSCs—to move from
a centralized, bureaucratic model of
governance to a localized, democratic
model—has been met with varying success
and, in some cases, utter failure. This study
explores the current state of bureaucracy,
democracy, and parent involvement on
LSCs, focusing on schools with a significant
number of Latino/a students.
Theoretical Framework
School Governance: Tensions between
Bureaucracy and Democracy
Bureaucracy has long been considered
the most efficient form of administration.
In his seminal work on the subject,
Max Weber (1946) wrote, “precision,
speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the
files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict
subordination, reduction of friction and
of material and personal costs—these are
raised to the optimum point in the strictly
bureaucratic administration, and especially
in its monocratic form” (Weber 1946, 214).
Bureaucracy was recognized from the start
to be in tension with democratic practice,
given its emphasis on appointed expert
officialdom, rather than free elections or
participatory decision-making (Weber
1946). While the purest of bureaucracies,
led by a small group of experts, operates
at the height of efficiency, the purest of
democracies, in which every voice must
be heard and duly considered, would by
Weber’s terms be deemed highly inefficient.
Historically, public school systems or
“common schools” in the United States have
witnessed a long trend of bureaucratization
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
in an effort to increase efficiency and avoid
control by non-experts. In the first half of
the nineteenth century, “the incompetence
of the urban poor as parents” was seen as
a major reason to mandate and systematize
compulsory education (Katz 1971, p. 315).
Because schools were said to be sites of
political and class neutrality, differences
in opinion among individual communities
were dismissed as trivial (Katz 1971). In
reality, however, the bureaucratic common
school from the beginning “exuded an
unmistakable chauvinistic pan-Protestant
tone” that effectively marginalized other
voices (Katz 1971, p. 317). In opposition to
the rising bureaucratic tide of the nineteenth
century stood democratic localists who
advocated for participatory governance as
the best way to manage diversity among
various schools and draw on community
resources, though they are often forgotten
due to the “thorough triumph” of
bureaucracy (Katz 1971, p. 305).
The concerns of these early proponents
of democracy in schooling, however, have
been echoed often, perhaps most notably
by John Dewey in his many writings on
education. Dewey strongly believes that “all
those who are affected by social institutions
must have a share in producing and
managing them” (1937, 58). Specifically
with regard to educational administration,
Dewey emphasizes that teachers must be
involved in curricular decision making
and administrators must “treat the school
itself as a cooperative community…[and]
be on the lookout for ways to give others
intellectual and moral responsibilities,
not just setting their tasks for them” (69).
For Dewey, in contrast to Weber, full
democratic participation is characterized
not as inefficient, but as morally imperative,
134
while bureaucratic organizational structures
are oppressive in that they suppress this
participation.
Snauwaert (1993) builds on Dewey’s
ideas, combining them with those of four
other social theorists, Rousseau, J.S.
Mill, Marx, and Gandhi, to synthesize a
conception of “developmental democracy.”
The four pillars of this model include
communication, association, nonviolence,
and community, and in the context of
education specifically, this requires both
the inclusion of parents in policymaking
and the professionalization of teachers as
administrative collaborators (Snauwaert
1993). Importantly, the goal of developmental
democracy is “empowerment,” as opposed
to “efficiency” (Snauwaert 1993). Apple
goes even further to say “In its quest for
efficiency, expert authority, rationalization,
and increased discipline, capital [and thus
its attendant bureaucracy] may undermine
the substance of democracy” (1995, p.
154). Thus, he calls for increased social
science research into alternative programs
of education that involve the input of both
teachers and working-class parents, as well
as scholarship specifically examining the
effects of these programs for marginalized
gender and racial groups (Apple 1995).
This study strives to answer this call at
least in part by untangling the complex
social phenomena driving the successes
and failures of Local School Councils
in Chicago schools with large Hispanic
populations.
Latino/a Parental Involvement and
Student Achievement
There is a large body of literature on
the positive relationships between parent
involvement at schools and Latino/a
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education

Figure 1: Theoretical Model of Latino/a Parent Involvement

Mechanisms that Support Student Achievement

children’s academic success. Figure 1 their students’ culture improves through

presents a summary of the interrelated
mechanisms of parent involvement that lead
to increased student achievement, as they
have been explored in previous studies and
theoretical work. Many studies have focused
on the value of trusting relationships between
parents and school staff as a foundation
for school improvement efforts. Jasis and
Ordoñez-Jasis, for example, found that
Latino/a immigrant parents’ engagement
at schools was “more meaningful” when
their life experiences and cultural values
were acknowledged and “incorporated
into school communities” (2012, p. 84).
Many authors, upon finding a lack of trust
between school faculty or administration
and Latino/a parents, recommend increased
cross-culture interaction to create or
revitalize staff-parent dialogue and promote
greater understanding (e.g. Córdova 2005;
Marschall 2006; Donnel and Kirkner 2014;
Crea et al. 2015; Jiménez-Castellanos
et al. 2016). Furthermore, as teachers’
and administrators’ understanding of
positive interactions with parents, student
achievement is also likely to increase,
given strong correlations between cultural
sensitivity in the classroom and children’s
academic performance (Henderson and
Mapp 2002; Civil et al. 2005).
The opposite pattern—in which
negative interactions between parents and
school staff produce tense relationships
that exacerbate cross-cultural clashes to
the detriment of student performance—
has also been observed in previous
research, perhaps even more frequently
than the positive model. Petrone (2016),
for instance, found that schools that don’t
encourage parent-staff dialogue in practice
force Mexican parents to assimilate to
Anglo culture in order to participate at the
school. Similarly, Moreno and Lopez found
through a survey of 158 Latina mothers
in Los Angeles that those who displayed
lower levels of acculturation reported “less
knowledge about school activities and
more barriers to involvement” (1999, p. 3).
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Meanwhile, Monzó (2013) uses Bourdieu’s
concept of symbolic violence to describe
the experiences of working-class Latina
mothers, whom school administrators
routinely assume to be incompetent to
understand and provide for the needs of their
own children. In response, these mothers
often withdraw from the school altogether
to avoid stigma, reinforcing educators’
beliefs that they do not value education
(Monzó 2013). Educators’ ignorance of
Latino/a culture and educational practices
leads then to what some scholars have
called “subtractive schooling,” whereby
non-Latino/a teachers fail to connect with
their students and thus fail to inspire growth
in academic performance (Valenzuela
1999).
According to Valenzuela, one element
of this ignorance is educators’ incomplete
understanding of the Spanish-language
word “educación,” which is “a conceptually
broader term than its English language
cognate” (1999, p. 23). In addition to
denoting formal schooling, the word also
“refers to the family’s role of inculcating
in children a sense of moral, social, and
personal responsibility [that] serves as
the foundation for all other learning”
(Valenzuela 1999, p. 23). On a larger scale,
the Spanish-English language barrier has
emerged as a critical feature of schools
that fail to promote cultural understanding
between parents and staff. Ramirez (2003)
describes the frustration of many parents
he interviewed about the lack of Spanish-
speaking staff and/or interpreters at school
events, school board meetings, and parent-
teacher conferences. Moreover, English
2. In addition, white representatives held 26% of parent and community member seats at schools whose student
body was over 85% Hispanic, and 85% of seats at so-called “integrated schools” with white populations of over
30% (Ryan et al. 1997).
136
proficiency is often viewed as a prerequisite
for parental involvement in U.S. schools,
especially in areas with recent influxes of
Spanish-speaking families (Petrone 2016).
Turning now to the right side of the
mechanisms diagrammed in Figure 1,
parent representation on school governing
bodies is another, related factor contributing
to student achievement. In line with the
theory of democratic localism discussed
above, parents know the particular needs of
their children better than anyone and thus
have a strong capacity to decide on policies
that will best suit their schools and lead to
improvements in performance (Bryk et al.
1998). Here, the question of who exactly
is represented in school governments is of
great importance. In the Chicago context,
Local School Councils that serve primarily
Latino/a communities have historically
underrepresented the population of Hispanic
students at their schools. In 1997, Hispanic
students comprised 31% of CPS students,
but only 14% of LSC members were
Hispanic (Ryan et al. 1997)2. Marschall
(2006) also noted a long trend of Latino/a
underrepresentation on LSCs, but showed
that schools with greater representation
were more likely to feature strong parent-
staff relations and break through cultural
barriers. However, other research has
shown that at racially and economically
integrated schools, low-income Latino/a
representatives on school governing bodies
tend to be steered by school professionals,
generally in the direction of powerful white,
middle-class interests, due to lack of trust
and communication among all the parties
(Gordon and Nocon 2008).
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education

Thus, as shown in Figure 1, there school’s bilingual program, and the percent
is a tight relationship between trustful of students from low-income families5. In
relationships with school staff, the building addition, I obtained each school’s School
up of parents’ capacity to participate in Quality Rating Policy (SQRP) score,
their children’s education, and productive which is based on several factors including
efforts by parents to contribute to school standardized test achievement and growth,
governance. All of these factors, in turn, student attendance, and a survey of the
are powerful mechanisms through which school community. The sample of 35
parents contribute to school improvement schools in this study (31 primary schools,
efforts to increase student achievement. 3 high schools, and 1 K-12 school) was
By the same token, they can also mutually drawn from a population of the 208 schools
impact one another in negative ways that in Chicago whose student population was
detract from Latino/a students’ experiences at least 25% Hispanic and 10% ELL based
at school. This study combines theories on data from the ’15-’16 school year6. This
of bureaucracy and democracy with this population excludes charter, turn-around
framework for Latino/a parental involvement (AUSL), contract, and alternative schools,
to create a deeper understanding of how most of which do not have LSCs.
particular organizational power structures I attended 39 meetings at the 35 schools
both depend upon and limit certain types in my sample, mostly during the month of
of parent engagement with their children’s September 2016. My main method of data
schools. collection was ethnographic participant
observation. In addition to pure observation,
Data and Methods I spoke casually with principals, teachers,
This study analyzed Local School parents, and community members before the
Council (LSC) meetings at Chicago public meetings began. Because this study examines
schools with either significant minorities or questions of mechanisms and meaning,
majorities of Latino/a students. I retrieved a qualitative approach is appropriate
demographic data on all district schools and necessary to capture nuances that
from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) demographic data and survey items alone
district website for the 2015-2016 and 2016- could not measure. At almost all the meetings
2017 school years3. This included school- I attended, I was either welcomed or politely
level information on the percent of students ignored, and my presence had no obvious
of each racial/ethnic category (Hispanic, effect on the course of the meeting. Because
white, black, Asian, and others4), the percent LSC meetings are open to the public, my
of English language learners (ELLs) in the attendance was never controversial, even
3. http://cps.edu/SchoolData/Pages/SchoolData.aspx
4. For the purpose of data reporting, CPS classifies Hispanic students who identify as white, black, or any other
race, simply as “Hispanic.” Thus, “white” and “black” are used as short-hand terms for “non-Hispanic white” and
“non-Hispanic black.” For convenience, I use this convention throughout the paper.
5. “Low-income” families are defined as those whose income is less than or equal to 185% of the federal
poverty line.
6. Data from the 2016-2017 school year, which became available after I began data collection, showed that the
student population of two schools in my sample dipped slightly below 25% Hispanic in this year.

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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
if it was somewhat anomalous at certain
schools. Sitting in the designated audience
area as any concerned citizen might, I took
nearly constant notes on index cards at each
meeting, taking care to note the location of
the meetings within the school building, the
(perceived) race/ethnicity and gender of those
in attendance, and who said what in which
language. The average racial break-down of
all those in attendance was 54.9% Hispanic,
35.8% white, and 6.3% black. In terms of
language, 15 meetings (43%) were conducted
in English only, 13 (37%) were bilingual (in
varying ways), and 7 (20%) were in Spanish
only. The length of the meetings ranged from
20 minutes to over 2 hours, but they were
usually about one hour long.
I later transcribed my notes into a 100-
page typed document of bullet points. I
coded this data using a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet. Most of my codes pertained
to topics discussed at the meetings, such as
parent involvement, the school’s budget,
fundraising, academic programs, and student
health and safety. Other codes had to do with
social phenomena that I noted during the
meeting, such as linguistic code-switching
and translation, and the emotional climate of
the room. After this preliminary analysis, I
recoded my notes to capture more nuanced
patterns under the larger umbrella of
common codes. For instance, I recoded many
subcategories under “parent involvement,”
including communicating with parents,
specific requests for parent participation, and
events and resources for parents. I then used
these codes to systematically sort through
my data and discover trends that emerged in
the form of a typology, described at length in
the following section.
7. All school names are pseudonyms. See the Appendix for a complete list of schools with demographic char-
acteristics.
138
Results
Based on ethnographic data collected
at Local School Council meetings, I
elaborate a typology of LSCs focusing on
the original intent behind their creation: to
move from a bureaucratic, top-down style
of leadership consolidated at the district
level, to a democratic, grassroots style of
leadership devolved to the school level. To
evaluate the success of this policy three
decades in the making, I identify two types
of councils that have clearly failed to live
up to the original hopes, either because
they have given little or no real power to
parents, or because they have given parents
too much power. I then examine two other
types of schools that fall somewhere in
between and discuss the intricacies of
their relative success with special regard
to the needs of a bilingual Latino/a school
community.
Organizational/Leadership Structure: A
Typology
Though LSCs were designed to give
democratic power to local parents and
communities, the actual results have
varied considerably. The meetings I
observed were roughly evenly split
between those that were run entirely by
the school’s principal and those that were
run collectively by the council members,
including parents, community members,
and teachers, facilitated by the chairperson
(who by law must be a parent). The former
group of schools exhibited top-down,
bureaucratic—and more specifically,
monocratic—authority, as seen by this
example from Cabot Elementary7:
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
The principal walked in, asking
“how is everybody?” and making
sure everyone had signed in on the
sign-in sheet. She passed around
some papers to each council member
before taking her seat at the middle of
the long table. After a few moments
of idle chatter, the principal prompted
the chairwoman to call the meeting to
order, which she did in an extremely
soft voice. Referring to one of the
papers she had passed around, the
principal explained, “So this is the
agenda,” and instructed the council
members to make a motion to approve
it after giving them a few moments to
look it over. Then, self-reflexively
seeming to recognize her own
authoritative position, she remarked,
“We’ll learn together—well, I already
know—but I’ll teach you.”
Thus, LSCs with bureaucratic authority
structures sometimes superficially followed
parliamentary procedures, but always at
the behest of the principal, whose primary
role throughout the meeting was one of
explaining. In contrast, the second set
of schools were controlled by bottom-
up, democratic authority: throughout the
meeting, both LSC members and, at times,
audience observers participated actively
in sustained dialogue. Often, different
individuals presented reports (or aired
grievances) about a particular school-
related topic, such as fundraising or safety
measures.
However, the LSCs also varied in their
stance towards their status quo authority
structure. While at some meetings, everyone
appeared to go along with the status quo, at
others, those in power sought to transition
to a different mode of organization. That
is, some principals who held bureaucratic
control over their councils actively sought
to democratize their meetings and elicit
more parent involvement. Meanwhile,
some schools with strong democratic
participation tried to bureaucratize certain
aspects of their meetings in order to run them
more efficiently. Thus, a fourfold typology
of LSCs emerges along two axes: the status
quo organizational structure and the target
organizational structure. The four types,
which I have the school. Interestingly, it is the
principal termed Rubberstamp, Invitational,
Collaborative, and Dysfunctional, are
defined in Table 1. Two of these types,
Rubberstamp and Dysfunctional, which
represented, respectively, the bureaucratic
and democratic extremes of organization,
ultimately have failed to live up to original
policy goals. I will first examine the reasons
for these failures before turning to analyze
the other two types of councils with “mixed”
structures.
Rubberstamp LSCs
I arrived a little early to the meeting at
Winnebago Elementary as the parents
took their seats around four tables
that formed a square and exchanged
familiar chatter about their kids. Four
of these children sat by me in the
corner, amusing themselves with their
swivel chairs. The principal walked
in right on time for the meeting, the
sharp click of her heels matching the
matter-of-factness of her tone as she
announced that she hoped this would
be a quick meeting: “We just have
one fundraiser to approve, and then
we can get out of here.”
…
The first agenda item was public
comment. The principal turned to me
and asked me to introduce myself.
My presence as an audience member
was apparently a rarity: “Usually it’s
just the boys,” one councilmember
chuckled, referring to the children
seated near me. Then the principal
began her report, while the parents
followed along on their printed hand-
outs. She spoke fast, touching on each
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
Table 1: Typology of the Organizational Structures of Local School Councils
topic without pause for questions or
comments. She reported on student
attendance, medical compliance,
teachers’ schedules and observations,
the student code of conduct, student
organizations and clubs, new hires,
an upcoming high school fair, and the
dates for upcoming meetings of the
Parent Advisory Council (PAC) and
Bilingual Advisory Council (BAC).
After the LSC voted unanimously to
accept the report, the principal briefly
described a PTO fundraiser selling
cookie dough, which was approved
unanimously without discussion.
Winnebago Elementary was perhaps the
most quintessential case of the Rubberstamp
LSC that I observed. From the beginning
of the meeting, the principal assumed in a
very routine manner that the LSC would
approve (i.e. rubber-stamp) the proposed
fundraiser, and that this was really the only
140
matter of importance, since it is a legal
obligation that fundraisers be approved
by the council. Lasting only twenty
minutes, the meeting was the shortest of
all those in my sample and was marked
by an urgent energy of efficiency. Indeed,
because Rubberstamp LSCs are led by the
principal, who is the best-informed about
CPS policies and administrative matters,
they tend to comply with their strict legal
mandates, but nothing beyond that. As at
all Rubberstamp meetings, the principal
at Winnebago did the vast majority of the
talking. That the council was unaccustomed
to having an audience was indicative of a
general lack of regard for substantive parent
input on school matters. Though most
LSCs did have audiences, Rubberstamp
meetings had on average fewer than four
observers, compared to the overall average
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
from the schools in my sample, which was
nine audience members. As was the case at
Winnebago, parents—including those on
the LSC—usually had nothing to say; when
they did speak, it was almost always to ask
a question, which was then followed by an
explanation from the principal.
Thus, Rubberstamp councils are
thoroughly bureaucratic/monocratic. They
focus on the principal as an educational
“expert” and forgo democratic participation
by parents in the name of expedition and
efficiency. In the case of Winnebago,
this process was aided by ignoring the
complexities of the diverse cultures of
parents at the school. About 70% of the
schools’ students are Hispanic and at
least one in seven parents in the school’s
community are likely monolingual Spanish
speakers, but only 2 of the 10 LSC members
present at this meeting were Hispanic and the
meeting was conducted entirely in English.
By greatly underrepresenting the Latino/a
population and failing to provide access to
non-English speakers, the school increased
its bureaucratic efficiency at the expense
of neglecting its democratic mandate.
Clearly, Rubberstamp LSCs present a
persistent example of implementation
failure for a policy that supposedly sought
to decentralize and democratize school
decision-making at the community level.
Dysfunctional LSCs
At the other extreme, my study also
revealed the existence of LSCs with an
excess of democracy, at which parents
abused their power to maintain control of
the council. By far the most extreme case
was that of Monterrey Elementary, where
I attended three meetings in the fall of
2016. Much was at stake in these meetings:
the LSC had yet to approve the school’s
budget, which it was supposed to do over
the summer; the school was currently in
the process of hiring a new principal and
did not have a steady administration; and
there were two parent vacancies on the LSC
that needed to be filled by appointment.
It was the last (and arguably the least
consequential) of these issues that sparked
conflict at the first meeting I attended: a
bloc of three parent representatives staged
a walk-out just as the meeting was getting
underway:
The meeting began late, after a steady
stream of audience members rushed
in—too many to count, but perhaps
40 to 50 in total—some with children
in tow, whom they had just picked
up at the end of the school day. The
room was packed with people, and an
uneasy sense of anticipation hung in
the air. The first item on the agenda,
as per usual, was the approval of the
agenda itself. The secretary glanced
around the council, asking if anyone
would like to make revisions. One
mother, after whispering in Spanish
with the two others sitting next to her,
requested that the item for appointing
new councilmembers to the vacant
positions be removed from the agenda.
She argued that not all parents at the
school had been sufficiently informed
that the seats were available, given
that the information had not been
distributed in Spanish. When the
other LSC members objected to this
idea, all three parents stood up and
walked out of the meeting in resolute
protest, to the sounds of uproar among
the audience.
This walk-out effectively filibustered
not only the issue of filling vacant
positions, but also all other LSC business,
including budget approval and principal
selection, because after these parents left,
there was no longer a quorum of at least
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
seven members present to vote on official
action items. This was not lost on the large
audience gathered at the meeting: many
parents and teachers loudly expressed their
opinions on the situation in a mix of English
and Spanish that was not fully translated in
either direction.
In the case of Monterrey, two factions
formed on the LSC along clear racial and,
to an even greater extent, linguistic lines.
Four Spanish-speaking Latina mothers8,
each with little or no English proficiency,
formed one faction. The other was
principally comprised of the chairperson,
a black mother; the secretary, a white,
male community representative; and a
teacher representative, a Hispanic woman
who spoke “unaccented” English. At a
school whose student body was almost
entirely Hispanic and over a third of the
students were English language learners,
ethnolinguistic differences seemed to be a
significant (though tacit) source of conflict.
This was the case even though all of the
members seemed to care deeply about the
school: the chairperson exclaimed at one
point, “I work three jobs, and I miss one
every time I come here!”
Most of the Dysfunctional LSCs I
observed did not exhibit racial tensions;
rather, all had different sources of conflict,
generally arising from petty disagreements
on seemingly trivial matters that did not fall
under their official purview. At one school,
one parent representative’s involvement
with an advocacy group of which another
parent disapproved sparked a long,
unproductive detour from the council’s
8. A fourth parent representative came late to the meeting and left almost immediately upon realizing that the
others had already walked out.
9. The SQRP takes several factors into account, including standardized test achievement and growth, student
attendance, and 5Essentials Survey items from students, parents, teachers, and other school staff members.
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agenda. At another, parents in both the
audience and on the LSC engaged in a long
debate over the issue of whether children
at the school should be able to go to the
bathroom whenever they want, or if they
must wait for a break in the schedule when
all the students go together. Yet another
school that I included in this category
exhibited implicit conflict in that only
four councilmembers, only two of whom
were parents, bothered to show up at all,
so the meeting went on without a quorum.
In general, the defining feature of these
councils is the counterproductive disruption
of normal LSC business. Though parents
are actively involved in most cases, their
negative relationships with one another
and/or with the school administration
seriously detract from the efficiency of the
meeting, or the ability to get anything done
at all. Moreover, my data suggest that the
presence of a Dysfunctional LSC might
be related to a school’s low performance:
all three of the schools in my sample that
experienced the greatest decrease in their
School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP)9
scores from the ’15-’16 to the ’16-’17
school year had Dysfunctional councils,
each dropping two full levels in CPS’s five-
tier ranking system. Thus, just as excessive
bureaucracy fails to fulfill the goals of
LSCs, too much democratic participation
also leads to failure.
Collaborative LSCs
In contrast, Collaborative LSCs
were grounded in democratic principles
but also made use of some bureaucratic
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
organizational structures. They made use
of collective brainstorming and discussion
to tackle important issues at their schools,
while respecting the roles of the school’s
principal and the chairperson, and at
times forming subcommittees to address
various issues. For example, many schools
across my sample were concerned about
low enrollment numbers; because of the
district’s per-pupil budgeting formula,
these schools stood to lose about $4,300
per student if they could not increase their
enrollment to meet the district’s projection
by the tenth day of school. Czarniecki
Elementary School’s Collaborative LSC
put a particularly large amount of time and
energy into discussing this issue:
The discussion on enrollment
continued for at least ten minutes.
The principal had calculated that with
their current number of students, the
school’s budget would decrease by
just over $100,000, which would
result in the dismissal of at least one
auxiliary staff person. One particular
parent on the council, citing his
background in business, went on and
on about calling students currently on
the waitlist to see if they were still
interested in coming to Czarniecki.
He even suggested that those who
might lose their jobs should be the
ones to do the calling, since they
would have the most incentive; one
of the teacher representatives shook
her head in disgust at this idea.
Others agreed that they needed to
think outside the box, however, and
another parent suggested that they try
split-level classrooms combining kids
from different grades who were at the
same level in order to make more
efficient use of the teaching staff.
Some councilmembers nodded, but
the principal rejected this idea since
10. In this case, there was no lasting animosity between these two councilmembers: moments later, in fact,
when the meeting moved on to another lengthy conversation about strategies for communicating with parents, the
teacher actively supported the businessman’s idea about creating a school-wide online portal for parents.
it was not in line with CPS policies.
Throughout the discussion, most
members contributed various ideas,
though the two Hispanic women on
the council remained silent. In the
end, it was decided that the principal
would inform the LSC members
each day how the enrollment
numbers have shifted, since, as the
businessman claimed, “the first rule
of Management 101 is that the thing
you have to report on each day is the
thing that’s most important.”
As is shown in this case study, rich
discussion was a distinguishing feature
of Collaborative meetings. Though
disagreements sometimes broke out
between members, such as between the
businessman and the teacher, they did not
distract from the conversation at hand, but
rather enlivened it with a greater diversity
of opinions10. Though the principal was not
in charge of these meetings, her role as the
school administrator was still recognized,
and councilmembers sometimes ceded to
her greater knowledge of district policies,
as in this example. A common pattern
at Collaborative meetings was that the
principal talked briefly about each subject
on the agenda and then a discussion would
follow. Generally, the discussions involved
most, but not all, of the LSC members. Those
who spoke the least, as in this case, were
often ethnic, racial, or linguistic minorities
in the group: a sole black man, a Hispanic
woman who spoke English “with an accent,”
or the only Muslim on the council. Though
this pattern held across all types of schools,
it was most noticeable at Collaborative
meetings, because of the greater amount of
conversation in general. Another notable
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aspect of this meeting, which was far more
prominent in Collaborative LSCs than
others, was that the council spent a large
amount of time discussing issues that were
not specifically within its mandated purview.
These topics ranged from enrollment, as
in this case, to school security, to planning
fundraisers and other school events and were
generally raised by parents under the agenda
items of “public comment” or the vague
“new business.”
Collaborative meetings most
successfully seemed to bridge the divide
between democratic and bureaucratic
practices. While they allowed for
discussion and parent participation in
decision-making, the meetings remained
efficient because the chairperson ensured
the conversation did not wander from the
topic at hand. However, this system is not
perfect, and three important caveats must
be noted. First, as mentioned above, there
were almost always members who did
not share any thoughts during the entire
meeting, usually those who were ethnic/
racial or linguistic minorities on the council.
This suggests that minority interests
were not always considered. Second,
Collaborative schools with higher numbers
of economically disadvantaged students
and parents tended to discuss substantive
subjects, such as academic programming
and the school budget, in less depth. And
third, the democratic thrust of these LSCs
did not usually extend to the entire school
community: voter turn-out for the 2016
LSC elections was abysmally low across all
but a handful of schools in my sample, and
most of the elections were non-competitive.
Nevertheless, these schools can be seen as
at least partial success stories of the 1988
wave of Chicago school reform.
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The Invitational LSC
The three organizational types
described thus far—Rubberstamp,
Dysfunctional, and Collaborative—
loosely align with the three types of
school politics enumerated by Bryk
and his colleagues, discussed briefly
above. Rubberstamp LSCs clearly fit
their depiction of consolidated principal
power: “The monthly LSC meetings…
that are mandated by legislation may duly
take place. Participation and discussion
is generally minimal, however, and
principals dominate the activity that
does occur” (Bryk et al. 1998, p. 54).
Meanwhile, Dysfunctional councils match
their category of adversarial politics,
displaying “long-simmering resentments
between professionals and parents, and a
latent struggle for power and control” (p.
48). And Collaborative councils roughly
correlate to strong democratic politics in
which “citizens work together to articulate
and advance a locally defined common
good” (p. 48). However, the fourth type in
my typology, the Invitational council, has
not drawn great attention in the literature
on LSCs. For these councils, the status quo
organizational structure is fundamentally
bureaucratic/ monocratic, in that the
principal leads the entire meeting, and the
other LSC members seem largely content
with this. At the same time, the principal
makes a clear attempt to shift the structure
to a more democratic model, actively
trying to engage parents in democratic
practices. In this section, I elaborate on
the unique tensions within Invitational
LSCs between their attempts to spur
parent involvement and their ultimate
failure to address certain essential school
policy issues.
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
Parent Involvement
Invitational LSCs are defined first
and foremost by their great attempts to
involve parents in school decision-making
and, more generally, to provide resources
for parents that better enable them to
be active in their children’s education.
Principals make many gestures, small and
large, to promote parent participation.
For example, at Laurent Elementary,
the bilingual principal encouraged one
Spanish-speaking parent to try to practice
her English by translating a comment that
her friend and fellow councilmember had
made in Spanish. On a larger scale, the
principal at United High School, along
with other members of his administration,
held a very well-attended (and, presumably,
well-advertised) LSC meeting with a pizza
dinner and thick folders stuffed with school
information for all the audience members.
They recruited parents to join the Parent
Advocacy Committee (PAC) and the
Bilingual Advocacy Committee (BAC),
two organizations that are required by law
for schools receiving certain funds under
the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. In
urging parents to get involved, the bilingual
coordinator at the school stressed, “Todo
es de nombre prácticamente. [Everything
is basically in name only.]” By this, she
meant that the school administration helps
parents run the meetings and supports them
in any way necessary. However, despite
great efforts to help parents take on more
leadership roles, principals were often
met with bashful resistance: the parent at
Laurent was ultimately too shy to test her
English, and only a handful of parents at
United agreed to join the PAC or BAC.
Perhaps in part as a response to low
levels of enthusiasm among parents,
principals on Invitational LSCs emphasized
a wide variety of programming available for
parents. For example, Churchill Elementary
coordinates a weekly market where parents
can pick up groceries. These resources
often took form through partnerships with
community organizations and businesses.
Hewitt Elementary, for instance, provided
free mammograms for mothers without
health insurance through the non-profit
Mujeres Latinas en Acción; they also
partnered with a local Walgreens to provide
free flu shots at the school for adults and
ran a mentorship program for parents
in conjunction with the Resurrection
Project, another community organization.
Together with a local high school, Hewitt
coordinated a parent conference to connect
parents with human services agencies
in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the
principal at Laurent boasted of the Parent
College that the school runs, which is a
series of workshops on topics of particular
interest to parents. He cited an example
of a presentation given by a police officer
about online safety that parents had found
particularly useful in the past. Though
clearly outside the regular parameters
of LSC meetings, these resources were
highlighted by principals in an attempt to
activate parent participation at the school
level.
By making these many resources
available, Invitational LSCs send a message
to parents that they are valued members of
the school community whose development
is worth investing in, while at the same
time recognizing that parents often struggle
because of the inaccessibility of health care,
legal services, and other supports. In doing
so, they attempt to position parents to play a
powerful role in their children’s education.
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A case study from Arias Elementary most
clearly underlines this point:
After explaining the role of
restorative justice practices in the
recently updated CPS Student
Code of Conduct, the principal and
assistant principal, who was also at
the meeting, provided an activity for
the parents in the audience, which
was comprised of 27 Latina women
(and, of course, myself). The goal of
the little project was to get parents
more acquainted with the violations
outlined in the Code of Conduct and
the punishments that accompanied
them. The mothers were split up
into four groups, and each group
was given a set of paper strips with
the descriptions of offenses printed
on them (in Spanish), ranging from
cell phone use to pulling the fire
alarm and from running in the halls
to starting a strike in school. The
parents were supposed to match each
offense to the corresponding level of
severity of punishment, but they were
often surprised when their judgments
did not align with those in the Code.
The main take-away from this lesson
was supposed to be that parents
were responsible for understanding
the code and helping to correct
their children’s behavior when they
strayed. The principal emphasized
that out-of-school suspensions are
a time for parents to talk seriously
with their children and not a time
“for going to McDonalds,” and that
everyone shares the work of creating
a school-wide culture of respect.
Thus, at Arias, parents were given a
hands-on task and were very intentionally
armed with a thorough knowledge of the
Code of Conduct that their children were
expected to abide by. In this way, they
were seen as co-educators, responsible
for extending school rules into their own
homes. The very effort taken to provide
the materials and accompanying slide
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presentation shows a sincere consideration
for parents that was distinctly unlike the
more formulaic, dry type of explanations
of policies and procedures provided by
bureaucratic Rubberstamp principals to
their LSCs.
In some cases, parents on Invitational
LSCs were successfully inspired to voice
opinions when the principals explicitly
asked about a certain topic. For example,
at two of these schools, Judd Elementary
and Meade Elementary, parents engaged in
a somewhat fruitful conversation about the
school policy on uniforms. At Judd,
The principal brought the issue
of school uniforms to the table on
behalf of a group of eighth graders
who had asked for some changes. In
addition to blue pants and joggers,
they wanted to be allowed to wear
black pants and joggers, as well as
stretchy warm-up pants. One teacher
representative commented that this
sounded easier and more economical
for parents to find uniforms, while
another teacher thought this would
help eliminate the headache of being
the uniform police. A community
member on the LSC offered that he
had had a hard time finding a uniform
for his granddaughter, so this policy
would help alleviate those challenges.
Once the councilmembers had voiced
their opinions, the principal opened
up the question to the dozen parents
in the audience, who all expressed
agreement with the change. Upon
hearing this, the principal said she
would happily report back to the
eighth graders that they had helped
make a difference.
In this example, parents were
encouraged to speak up at the invitation
of the principal. A similar conversation
ensued at the Meade LSC meeting, where
the proposals were to allow shirts with no
collar, to add royal blue to the list of school-
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
appropriate colors, and to allow hoodies
and jeans to be worn at school. The debate
over these suggestions continued for quite
a while, with communication between the
parents and the principal mediated through
a translator. Parents expressed a multiplicity
of concerns, including cost, convenience,
and safety, before coming to a decision.
While these two scenarios portray parents
openly voicing their opinions, the content
of these discussions remained at a surface
level, failing to touch on the deeper issues
affecting students’ school performance.
In terms of parent involvement,
then, a fruitful comparison can be made
between Invitational LSCs, which aspire
to a democratic model but fall short, and
Collaborative LSCs, which come the closest
to ideal democratic bodies of the councils
I observed, as described in the previous
section. In addition to clear differences in
the extent to which parents actively and
meaningfully participated in the meetings,
these two types of councils also had distinct
ways of talking about parent participation.
While principals on Invitational LSCs
often made general statements about the
importance of coming to meetings and other
events at the school, such as Open Houses,
Collaborative LSCs provided more specific
ways that parents could get involved. Some
schools requested that parents sign up to
volunteer in the lunch room or the library,
or to help provide manual labor for various
school repair or beautification activities.
Often requests for involvement had to do
with fundraising efforts, such as helping
with a car wash event or joining a “Friends
of” non-profit that worked to raise monies
for the school that were not regulated
by CPS. Though Invitational LSCs
occasionally suggested ways that parents
could support the school, the relationship
was generally the reverse. In addition,
Collaborative Councils tended to have more
comprehensive plans for communicating
with parents than Invitational Councils. For
instance, at Czarniecki, the Collaborative
school discussed above, the principal
presented an entire slideshow on this topic,
which was followed with comments from
councilmembers. Because Collaborative
LSC members are already fairly active
at the school themselves, they are more
easily able to reach out to other parents
to “activate” their participation as well.
Meanwhile, at Invitational schools, this
effort is led primarily (and, for the most
part, exclusively) by the administration.
Essential Duties and Productivity
Sadly, my data show that, in prioritizing
their energies toward increasing parent
involvement, Invitational councils tended
to neglect several of the important duties
that LSCs are required to perform by law.
One essential, high-stakes task of the LSC
is to review and approve the school’s
budget to ensure that funds are being
properly appropriated in the students’ best
interest. While many principals across my
typology cited the CPS budget crisis as a
grave concern, Invitational councils spent
less time talking about the budget compared
to other schools. At Meade Elementary, for
instance, the principal mentioned merely
that due to low enrollment numbers, the
school would lose a large sum of money,
so they would have to adjust the budget
while trying to protect teachers from being
laid off. At Laurent Elementary, one slide
in the principal’s presentation had the word
“Budget!” in bold red letters at the top, but the
principal gave few details about the specifics
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
of the accounting. Thus, despite principals’
repeatedly stated desires for increased
parent involvement, councilmembers were
actually less informed about the budget at
Invitational schools than at Rubberstamp
schools, where principals would usually
explain each budget bucket line by line.
Similarly, Invitational LSCs spent
little time discussing academic student
programs, an essential aspect of the
school improvement plan, which LSCs
are officially charged with developing and
monitoring. Rather than sharing details
about a particular curriculum or initiative,
principals tended to share vague goals
for students’ academic success. Again at
Laurent Elementary, the principal stressed
that it was very important to him that
students be provided with the best options
for high school and even beyond. This
required a greater focus on critical thinking,
not just drilling and memorization.
However, beyond this statement, which
has become a cliché in U.S. education, the
principal provided no details as to how
teachers might achieve this.
Furthermore, professional development
(PD) activities for school faculty are another
vital part of the school improvement
plan, but only two Invitational schools
made even brief mention of this subject.
Both instances were rather trivial, stating
only that teachers had taken part in PD
sessions, but not providing details as to
their nature. In contrast, both Rubberstamp
and Collaborative councils tended to
discuss PD in a more concrete manner,
focusing on how teachers would apply
newly learned skills in the classroom to
improve students’ outcomes. For example,
at Kazmir Elementary, a Collaborative
school, the principal explained how
148
teachers planned to leverage data to
evaluate students and plan their lessons
around their performance. In addition to
this general skill, teachers were also trained
on a specific new math curriculum that the
school was rolling out called Go Math! In
this case, the principal explicitly connected
professional development activities to
academic programs for students with
the goal of ultimately improving student
achievement in math. It was precisely this
sort of rich detail that was absent from
Invitational meetings, with respect to
school improvement outcomes, as well as
the budget.
Ethnolinguistic Representation and
Exclusion
With a clear picture of the four types
of LSC organizational structures—
Rubberstamp, Collaborative,
Dysfunctional, and Invitational—in mind,
I now turn to examine problems specific
to the Latino/a communities in which
the meetings I observed took place. As
shown above in the examples from the
first three types of councils, each exhibited
problems of disproportionate ethnic/racial
representation and linguistic exclusion.
Below, I examine these problems in greater
detail and show that Invitational councils
were an exception to this trend.
Figure 2 plots the proportion of white
and Hispanic LSC members against the
proportion of students and (presumably)
parents at the school of each of these
racial/ethnic categories. The diagonal
line represents a theoretical, perfectly
representative ratio, and the vertical distance
between each point and this line depicts the
degree of under- or over-representation
of each group on the council. In almost
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education

Figure 2: LSC Representation of White and Hispanic Populations

Figure 3: Student Demographics of Schools by Language of the LSC Meeting

all cases, Latino/as are under-represented
and whites are over-represented: while
Hispanic and white students comprised, on
average, 74.4% and 11.8%, respectively, of
the student population at each school in the
sample, those in attendance at each LSC
meeting were on average 53.2% Hispanic
and 39.7% white. Thus, on average,
Latino/as were under-represented by 21.1
percentage points, while whites were over-
represented by 27.9 percentage points.
This issue is amplified by the overlap
of ethnic and linguistic marginalization.
Of the 35 meetings attended, 15 were
conducted solely in English, 13 were
facilitated bilingually through Spanish-
English translation, and 7 were held in
Spanish only. Figure 3 presents several
school-level demographic patterns of
interest related to the language in which the
meeting was conducted. First, schools with
vast majorities of low-income, Hispanic
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology

Figure 4: Racial/Ethnic Representation on LSCs by Language(s) of the Meeting

students and tiny minorities of white
students tended to hold either bilingual or
Spanish-only meetings that were accessible
to parents with low English proficiency.
The major demographic difference between
these two groups of schools is in the percent
students who are English language learners
(ELLs): 33.8% of students at schools with
bilingual meetings were classified as ELLs,
compared to 46.0% at “Spanish-only”
schools. This suggests that these schools
cater directly to the needs of parents with
low English language proficiency and
also accommodate English speakers when
appropriate11.
In contrast, schools that conducted
meetings in English without providing
translation were those with more diverse
student bodies, namely a mix of Hispanic
and white students. On average, the student
bodies at these schools were about half
Hispanic and a quarter white. Startlingly,
11. It is worthy of note that at each meeting conducted entirely in Spanish, I was specifically asked, almost
certainly due to my perceived white racial background, if I needed English translation.
however, the LSC members present at
the meeting were on average only 21.7%
Hispanic and 67.8% white. The large
overrepresentation of whites at these
schools (shown in Figure 4) suggests that
white parents tend to dominate the sphere of
school politics in mixed-race environments.
As they do so, they speak in the language
that is most comfortable to them, cementing
the exclusion of Spanish speakers. This is a
significant problem, given that the average
rate of English language learners (ELLs)
at these “English only” schools was 25.5%
(see Figure 3). This measure is a rough
heuristic for the proportion of monolingual,
Spanish-speaking parents at each school.
It is important to note that the actual
proportion of parents with low English
proficiency is likely greater, given that
children tend to learn English more rapidly
than their parents (Deng and Zou 2016). In
other words, many Hispanic students with

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 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education

Figure 5: Racial/Ethnic Representation on LSCs by Organizational Type

Figure 6: Summary of LSC Meetings Observed by Organizational Type and

Language

Spanish-speaking parents may have already
exited the bilingual programs at the school
and are thus no longer classified as ELLs.
A very conservative estimate, then, is that
at least one in four parents were excluded
from participating in LSC meetings at
“English only” schools, which comprised
over 40% of this sample (15/35 schools).
Evaluating the Organizational Typology
by Representation and Inclusivity
Figure 5 shows Rubberstamp,
Dysfunctional, and Collaborative LSCs
all severely underrepresent the Latino/a
proportion of the student body and
overrepresent the white population, as
was suggested by the anecdotes above. In
contrast, Invitational LSCs better represent
their Latino/a communities than councils
of other types. This makes sense given
the very low proportion of white students
among schools with Invitational LSCs
(2.1% on average). In other words, there
were not enough white parents at these
schools, in most cases, to usurp control of
the LSC, compared to “mixed” schools with
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larger white minorities.
In addition to being more representative
of the racial demographics of their schools,
Invitational councils are more accessible to
Spanish speakers, either through translation
or, when appropriate, by being conducted
entirely in Spanish (Figure 6). The sole
English-only Invitational meeting was at
Judd Elementary, a school with a very diverse
student body with significant minorities of
Hispanic, Asian, and Black students. The
school prided itself on its diversity and
devoted a substantial amount of time during
the meeting to presenting an organization,
the Chinese Mutual Aid Association
(CMAA), where parents and community
members of all language backgrounds
could take English classes. The principal
even mentioned that 22 of the school’s
students were from refugee families who
had recently arrived in the US; she hoped to
welcome them by “surrounding them with
love.” Thus, generally, though this school’s
meeting was conducted only in English,
it made a great effort to accommodate the
diverse backgrounds of both students and
parents.
These quantitative findings resonate
with the defining feature of Invitational
LSCs—the special effort that their
principals put into encouraging parent
involvement. This effort reveals their
firm belief that parents play a key role in
children’s education. This belief, in turn,
invokes the culturally specific notion of
educación, which, as explained above,
refers not only to formal schooling, but
also to the family’s role in raising a child
to be a well-mannered, respectful citizen
12. Here, I use the word “citizen” in the broadest sense of the term, for not all LSC members are formal U.S.
citizens. In fact, a couple of Invitational principals explicitly encouraged non-citizens and undocumented parents
to get involved at the school—another example of their aims for inclusivity.
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(Valenzuela 1999)12. By investing much
time and effort in reaching out to parents,
Invitational principals validate this cultural
sentiment, creating a sensitive environment
for Latino/a parents. Given that over 90%
of parents at Invitational schools were
Hispanic and 40% had children who
were still learning English, this cultural
understanding seems to be an essential
component for building a solid foundation
for democratic participation.
A Final Look: Organizational Structure
and Parent Involvement
Figure 7 summarizes the parent
involvement mechanisms most utilized
by each type of LSC using the framework
developed above. The one addition to the
diagram is the principal, who is a vital
player on the Local School Council, but
rarely singled out in literature on parent
involvement. As is shown, Rubberstamp
councils (in dark orange) tend to bypass
genuine parent involvement all together:
policies made by the principal are directly
“rubberstamped” by the council in the hope
that the principal, as an expert, knows best
how to raise student achievement. Next, the
red oval for Dysfunctional councils represents
the fact that these LSCs are grounded in
discordant, untrusting relationships among
council members. This discord negatively
highlights cultural differences, while
ensuring that meetings are unproductive or
even counter-productive to creating policies
for the students’ and school’s advancement.
Thus, both of these LSC types must be
considered failure compared to the original
ideal of democratic localism.
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
Figure 7: Parent Involvement Mechanisms by LSC Organizational Type
As shown in this model, Collaborative
LSCs, in teal, differ from Rubberstamp
councils in one essential way: though the
principals’ expert input is considered, it
is ultimately the elected representatives
who make the final decisions on school
policies, after rich discussion and the
consideration of several options. Finally,
Invitational LSCs, in the opposite
manner of Dysfunctional LSCs, focus
on developing positive relationships and
trust with parents by attempting to engage
them in dialogue. These relationships
are grounded in a strong understanding
of Latino/a cultures, and parents are
supported in developing capacities as
partners in their children’s educational
journeys. Though Collaborative councils
more closely follow the path to increasing
student achievement that was originally
conceived by policymakers, Invitational
LSCs present an alternative, more
inclusive model that has not yet been
thoroughly explored in the literature. The
relative strengths and weaknesses of these
models are worth considering as I turn to
conclude this paper.
Discussion
Using ethnographic methods, this
paper examines Local School Councils in
Chicago schools with significant Latino/a
and Spanish-speaking populations and
proposes the hypothesis of the Invitational
LSC, a type not previously examined in
detail. My data suggests that these LSCs
may be most common in communities that
are highly marginalized in mainstream
culture, and that they respond with great
linguistic and cultural inclusivity and
sensitivity. However, a serious problem that
this study highlights is the lack of efficiency
and productivity among Invitational LSCs,
compared to Rubberstamp LSCs, which are
more monocratic, and Collaborative LSCs,
which combine a strong participatory,
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The Chicago Journal of Sociology
democratic foundation with bureaucratic
notions of efficiency and expertise.
Many questions remain with regard to
the Invitational LSC, which are important
for policymakers to consider. For example,
given that this study was not longitudinal
in nature, it was not possible to track
changes in LSCs over time, to see if
Invitational LSCs ever actually “succeed”
in becoming Collaborative, or if principals
at Rubberstamp LSCs ever transition into
an Invitational state. If principals really
are able over time to thrust shy parents
into more active roles by providing them a
welcoming and inclusive environment, then
the eventual gain in democratic participation
(which was the original purpose of the
creation of LSCs) would likely outweigh
the temporary cost of lost efficiency.
In addition, due to the ethnographic,
unrepresentative nature of this study, it
is not possible to accurately estimate the
prevalence of these four different types
across CPS schools. However, the typology
I have elaborated can be used to construct a
survey to be administered to LSC members
across the district. Survey items would
ask questions that capture key distinctions
among the types, such as the degree of
participation of parents, the role of the
principal, the proportion of time devoted to
discussing essential school issues, and the
overall mood of LSC meetings. This survey
would provide data on the prevalence
of each of the four types of councils to
help determine the overall effectiveness
of LSCs, i.e. whether there are more
Rubberstamp and Dysfunctional councils
or more Collaborative and Invitational
councils. In addition, the survey could be
used to tailor different types of support to
needs of different types of councils.
154
Support for Rubberstamp councils
should focus on the principal: without a
strong democratic tradition, it is unlikely
that parents will spontaneously take it
upon themselves to democratize. Instead,
the evidence suggests that democratizing
efforts at bureaucratic schools tend to be
led by the principal. Meanwhile, support
for Dysfunctional councils should center on
group mediation to resolve internal conflicts
and build skills for collective problem-
solving during times of disagreement.
Restorative justice practices, such as
peace circles, which are currently gaining
traction in CPS’s student code of conduct
(as referenced in an earlier example), could
just as well be applied to LSCs and school
communities wrought with conflict. In
contrast, Collaborative councils, which are
already accustomed to communicating in
a civil manner, should receive training on
cultural sensitivity and inclusion, to ensure
that they are considering all viewpoints
and creating policies that truly benefit
all the schools’ children. Finally, extra
training should be provided to parents on
Invitational LSCs with regard to how the
school’s budget works and how to craft
meaningful plans for school improvement.
Currently, mandatory training is
provided to LSC members by the district,
either through online modules or in person.
According to data obtained from the CPS
Office of Local School Council Relations,
the vast majority of councilmembers choose
to complete training online. However, given
that LSC representatives are ultimately
responsible for performing their duties
face-to-face around a physical table, and
that conversation and negotiation is at heart
of democratic practice, councilmembers
should have the opportunity to practice
 Organizational Structure and Latino/a Parent Involvement in Education
talking about the complex matters of
school governance in person. This is
especially important for Rubberstamp,
Dysfunctional, and Invitational LSCs,
whose parent members are not accustomed
to discussing such topics and expressing
respectful disagreement with others’ ideas.
Furthermore, since individual school
councils are ultimately responsible for
local policymaking, training should not be
dictated from above, but rather generated
within and among local representatives
themselves. Instead of dictating the training
that councilmembers must complete in
a top-down, bureaucratic manner, the
district should follow through with the
original spirit of the Local School Council
by trusting that LSCs can learn from one
another at the local level, in a democratic
manner. The district could then provide
facilitation, rather than top-down directives,
to support councils as needed, based on the
recommendations outlined above.
Indeed, as my data show, there is
much that LSC members could learn
from one another. Each different type
possesses a unique perspective, whether a
cautionary tale, a successful how-to guide
for considering crucial policy matters, or
an essential take on cultural sensitivity
and inclusivity. Creating a space for LSC
representatives from nearby schools to join
together every few months and discuss the
particular dynamics and challenges of their
school would allow for a greater sharing
of these ideas. Due to their intensely local
nature, LSCs seem to be quite isolated from
one another in their current state. Even with
a relatively small sample size, it was clear
that some schools that were geographically
close to one another had radically different
organizational structures and outcomes.
Bringing councils together and allowing
them to “cross-pollinate” their ideas could
lead to more fervent and productive parent
involvement across all types of LSCs. That
such parent involvement and democratic
participation are vital to educational
progress has been expressed perhaps most
poignantly by John Dewey, to whom I grant
the following last words:
“We are beginning to learn that
learning which develops intelligence
and character does not come about
when only the textbook and the teacher
have a say…that enlightenment
comes from the give and take, from
the exchange of experiences and
ideas” (1938, p. 36).
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Appendix
The chart below shows descriptive
statistics for each LSC observed. The data
on the percent of Hispanic, low-income,
ELL (English Language Learner) students
at each school, as well as the SQRP (School
Quality Rating Policy) score and change in
SQRP score are presented as quintiles of my
sample, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being
the highest. Higher quintiles are shaded in
darker colors.
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