Impresarios of identity: How the leaders of Czechoslovakia's ‘Candlelight Demonstration’ enabled effective collective action in a context of repression

This paper presents an analysis of identity leadership (Haslam et al., The new psychology of leadership: Identity, influence and power, Routledge, 2020) in the 1988 ‘Candlelight Demonstration’ in Bratislava which was a precursor to the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The analysis is based on interviews with the five remaining leaders of the demonstration and addresses three core issues. First, how leaders use performative means (identity impresarioship) as well as limited rhetorical means (identity entrepreneurship) to assemble protestors and create a sense of shared identity amongst them. Second, how these strategies of mobilization are linked to the highly repressive context in which the demonstration took place. Third, we analyse the extent to which these strategies are rooted in a psychological understanding of the processes of mobilization. We conclude by addressing the implications for our general understanding of leadership and the mobilization of collective action and the need for more research into these processes under conditions of repression

Impresarios of identity: How the leaders of Czechoslovakia's ‘Candlelight Demonstration’ enabled effective collective action in a context of repression

This paper presents an analysis of identity leadership (Haslam et al., The new psychology of leadership: Identity, influence and power, Routledge, 2020) in the 1988 ‘Candlelight Demonstration’ in Bratislava which was a precursor to the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The analysis is based on interviews with the five remaining leaders of the demonstration and addresses three core issues. First, how leaders use performative means (identity impresarioship) as well as limited rhetorical means (identity entrepreneurship) to assemble protestors and create a sense of shared identity amongst them. Second, how these strategies of mobilization are linked to the highly repressive context in which the demonstration took place. Third, we analyse the extent to which these strategies are rooted in a psychological understanding of the processes of mobilization. We conclude by addressing the implications for our general understanding of leadership and the mobilization of collective action and the need for more research into these processes under conditions of repression

A warrant for violence? An analysis of Donald Trump's speech before the US Capitol attack

On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump's speech during a ‘Save America’ rally was followed by mass violence, with Trump's supporters storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election. In its wake, there was a great deal of debate around whether the speech contained direct instructions for the subsequent violence. In this paper, we use a social identity perspective on leadership (and more specifically, on toxic leadership) to analyse the speech and see how its overall argument relates to violence. We show that Trump's argument rests on the populist distinction between the American people and elites. He moralises these groups as good and evil respectively and proposes that the very existence of America is under threat if the election result stands. On this basis he proposes that all true Americans are obligated to act in order prevent Biden's certification and to ensure that the good prevails over evil. While Trump does not explicitly say what such action entails, he also removes normative and moral impediments to extreme action. In this way, taken as a whole, Trump's speech enables rather than demands violence and ultimately it provides a warrant for the violence that ensued

A warrant for violence? An analysis of Donald Trump's speech before the US Capitol attack

On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump's speech during a ‘Save America’ rally was followed by mass violence, with Trump's supporters storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the presidential eletion. In its wake, there was a great deal of debate around whether the speech contained direct instructions for the subsequent violence. In this paper, we use a social identity perspective on leadership (and more specifically, on toxic leadership) to analyse the speech and see how its overall ar-gument relates to violence. We show that Trump's argument rests on the populist distinction between the American peo-ple and elites. He moralises these groups as good and evil respectively and proposes that the very existence of America is under threat if the election result stands. On this basis he proposes that all true Americans are obligated to act in order prevent Biden's certification and to ensure that the good prevails over evil. While Trump does not explicitly say what such action entails, he also removes normative and moral impediments to extreme action. In this way, taken as a whole, Trump's speech enables rather than demands vio-lence and ultimately it provides a warrant for the violence that ensued

Introduction

States of affairs raise, among others, the following questions: What kind of entity are they (if there are any)? Are they contingent, causally efficacious, spatio-temporal and perceivable entities, or are they abstract objects? What are their constituents and their identity conditions? What are the functions that states of affairs are able to fulfil in a viable theory, and which problems and prima facie counterintuitive consequences arise out of an ontological commitment to them? Are there merely possible (non-actual, non-obtaining) states of affairs? Are there molecular (i.e., negative, conjunctive, disjunctive etc.) states of affairs? Are there modal and tensed states of affairs

Obedience as “Engaged Followership”:A Review and Research Agenda

Milgram’s Obedience to Authority (OtA) studies have long been understood as demonstrating that people are prone to blindly follow the orders of authority. More recently, we have proposed an engaged followership model of obedience, which suggests that a person’s willingness to go along with the requests of an authority figure is predicated on their identification with that person and/or the cause they represent. In this paper, we present a review of our rationale for this perspective and take stock of the current evidence we have to support it. We also highlight gaps in this evidence, and set out an agenda for future research

Perception, Action and the Social Dynamics of the Variable Self

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Contemporary understanding of riots: classical crowd psychology, ideology and the social identity approach

This article explores the origins and ideology of classical crowd psychology, a body of theory reflected in contemporary popularised understandings such as of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This article argues that during the nineteenth century, the crowd came to symbolise a fear of ‘mass society’ and that ‘classical’ crowd psychology was a product of these fears. Classical crowd psychology pathologised, reified and decontextualised the crowd, offering the ruling elites a perceived opportunity to control it. We contend that classical theory misrepresents crowd psychology and survives in contemporary understanding because it is ideological. We conclude by discussing how classical theory has been supplanted in academic contexts by an identity-based crowd psychology that restores the meaning to crowd action, replaces it in its social context and in so doing transforms theoretical understanding of ‘riots’ and the nature of the self

The context-variable self and autonomy : exploring surveillance experience, (mis)recognition, and action at airport security checkpoints

This paper critiques and extends the notion of autonomy by examining how common autonomy definitions construct selfhood, with the support of an analysis of airport surveillance experiences. In psychology, autonomy is 1) often oriented around volition and action rather than the-self-that-acts and 2) the-self-that-acts is construed in singular terms. This neglects the multiple, context-variable self: while others may confirm our self-definitions (recognition), identity claims may also be rejected (misrecognition). The autonomy critique is sustained through an ethnographic analysis of airport security accounts (N = 156) in multiple nations with comparable security procedure (e.g., identification checks, luggage screening, questioning). Such procedures position people in multiple ways (e.g. as safe/dangerous, human/object, respectable/trash). Where respondents felt recognized, they experienced the security procedures positively, actively assisted in the screening process (engaged participation), and did not adapt their behaviors. Where respondents felt misrecognized, they experienced surveillance negatively, were alienated, and responded by either accommodating their behavior to avoid scrutiny, seeking to disrupt the process, or else withdrawing from screening sites. In misrecognition, the strategies that are open to the subject are incompatible with autonomy, if autonomy is defined solely in terms of volition. Accordingly, the concept of autonomy needs to be analyzed on two levels: in terms of the subject’s ability freely to determine their own sense of self, as well as the actor’s ability freely to enact selfhood.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Engaged followership and toxic science:Exploring the effect of prototypicality on willingness to follow harmful experimental instructions

Drawing on the ‘engaged followership’ reinterpretation of Milgram's work on obedience, four studies (three pre-registered) examine the extent to which people's willingness to follow an experimenter's instructions is dependent on the perceived prototypicality of the science they are supposedly advancing. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, participants took part in a study that was described as advancing either ‘hard’ (prototypical) science (i.e., neuroscience) or ‘soft’ (non-prototypical) science (i.e., social science) before completing an online analogue of Milgram's ‘Obedience to Authority’ paradigm. In Studies 1 and 2, participants in the neuroscience condition completed more trials than those in the social science condition. This effect was not replicated in Study 3, possibly because the timing of data collection (late 2020) coincided with an emphasis on social science's importance in controlling COVID-19. Results of a final cross-sectional study (Study 4) indicated that participants who perceived the study to be more prototypical of science found it more worthwhile, reported making a wider contribution by taking part, reported less dislike for the task, more happiness at having taken part, and more trust in the researchers, all of which indirectly predicted greater followership. Implications for the theoretical understanding of obedience to toxic instructions are discussed