Narrating Social Structure: Stories of Resistance to Legal Authority

Abstract

Using stories of citizens’ resistance to legalized authority, the authors propose that the act of storytelling extends temporally and socially what might otherwise be an individual, discrete, and ephemeral transaction. Adopting a concept of power as a contingent outcome in a social transaction, they emphasize that not only dominant, institutionalized power but also resistance to institutionalized authority draws from a common pool of sociocultural resources, including symbolic, linguistic, organizational, and material phenomena. Although such acts of resistance may not cumulate to produce institutional change, they may nonetheless have consequences beyond the specific social transaction: the authors propose that a chief means for extending the social consequences of resistance is to transform an act of resistance into a story about resistance. Based upon an appreciation of the structural conditions of power and authority, stories of resistance can become instructions about both the sources and the limitations of power. Because such stories are told in interaction with other stories, they become part of a stream of sociocultural knowledge about how social structures work to distribute power and disadvantage.