The Unobtrusive Tactics of Religious Movements

Many religious and spiritual movements mobilize to establish sacred fields which influence everyday life in multiple social domains. Because these devout groups operate across many institutional fields, scholars of religiously motivated movements are uniquely poised to contribute to scholarship on m...

Description complète

Enregistré dans:  
Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Kucinskas, Jaime Lee (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
Vérifier la disponibilité: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Publié: 2014
Dans: Sociology of religion
Année: 2014, Volume: 75, Numéro: 4, Pages: 537-550
Accès en ligne: Volltext (JSTOR)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Édition parallèle:Non-électronique
Description
Résumé:Many religious and spiritual movements mobilize to establish sacred fields which influence everyday life in multiple social domains. Because these devout groups operate across many institutional fields, scholars of religiously motivated movements are uniquely poised to contribute to scholarship on multiinstitutional politics and on how institutional change can be initiated and influenced by external cultural movements. In this paper, I bring attention to how religious movements can mobilize through unobtrusive political tactics which build upon extant social structures in multiple institutional fields, rather than through contentious tactics which are the focus of most movement research. Based on prior scholarship on religious movements and my own research, I identify how religious movements can expand through unobtrusive, nonconfrontational tactics such as “discursive politics,” developing a “state within a state,” “burrowing into” targeted organizations, and “assimilating into” mainstream organizations. These mechanisms identified in religious movement scholarship contribute to underdeveloped areas of scholarship at the intersection of social movement mobilization, organizational change, and field development, and provide a platform upon which future research can build.
ISSN:1759-8818
Contient:Enthalten in: Sociology of religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1093/socrel/sru055