Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Mobilization of Emotions and Their Effect on Commitment to a Social Movement

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal Title: Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Mobilization of Emotions and Their Effect on Commitment to a Social Movement Principal Investigator: Benjamin D. Zablocki, Rutgers University Proposal Number: 0702141 Abstract Social movements are ideal places for studying the intense emotions evoked during the process of embracing or renewing political or religious commitments. This dissertation examines the role emotional events play in strengthening such commitment. The data collection sites include recruiting events produced by local organizations within an international political and religious movement. The movement as a whole is a case where emotions can be studied away from the influence of factors such as charismatic leadership present in previous studies of commitment. Few movements consciously and openly plan, as this one does, rituals that evoke strong emotions as tools for building and sustaining participants' commitment and even fewer do so for an entire week. These sites provide the opportunity to study emotion dynamics in situ, create my own theory of emotions based on multiple sources of data, and test hypotheses about how emotion types, chains of emotions over time, and emotion transition processes affect commitment outcomes. This project has significance for understanding the emotions that emerge during commitment processes, the techniques the movement uses to provoke these emotions, and the factors that affect commitment outcomes. There are two research questions about the relationship between the independent and dependent variables: 1) What is the effect of emotion dynamics on post-event commitment? 2) How much of the effect is explained by organization-level control variables: A) the range of people, only adults versus families, allowed at each event and B) each event's degree of openness to innovation on the relationship between emotion dynamics and post-event commitment? My overall research design has two components: 1) a longitudinal study from 2004-2006 of two weeklong recruiting events held in West Virginia and North Carolina, and 2) a cross-sectional round of data collection in 2007. During the cross-sectional phase of the study, ethnographic data will be gathered on six other recruiting events in the United States and Canada. The PI will use the data to test hypotheses about how emotion types, chains of emotions over time, and emotion transition processes affect commitment outcomes. This final phase of the research involves assessing the impact of organization-level variables so as not to overestimate the influence of ritual structures and individual-level factors on emotion processes and commitment. This project contributes to the cumulative cross-disciplinary knowledge on emotions and emotion management. The research also contributes to theories about social movements drawn from disciplines such as religion, anthropology, and political science. Work in this area may be applied to life-coaching, stress management, and business organizations attempting to build strong work cultures. This research is part of the doctoral training of a female graduate student who plans to disseminate the data via writing and teaching.