My involvement in an anti-racist social movement organization has led me to become involved with a tactic employed by the SMO in question against neo-Nazis referred to as "outing."

An outing occurs when members of the SMO converge on a particular neo-Naziâs neighbourhood. Posters consisting of his photo, address and a list of crimes and other transgressions are put up throughout the neighbourhood and distributed to homes and businesses. Small groups of activists canvass door-to-door, informing his neighbours of his activities and political leanings. The outing culminates when SMO members mass at the neo-Naziâs doorstep, at which point they knock on his door and inform him of how their evening was spent.

This activity is worth considering for a number of reasons. In doing so, the social movement challenges the claims of official social control agents to be the appropriate authorities to competently deal with problems associated with neo-Nazism (violence, for example). I will be particularly interested in providing examples that illustrate a dissatisfaction with the effect of formal sanctions on these problems.

The SMO also appears to be attempting to invoke shame in the target by encouraging his neighbours to enact informal social sanctions upon him, for example placing him in the role of non-person (Goffman, 1959). This activity bears striking similarities to the charivari, popular in rural French communities over a century before (Tilly, 1986). Essentially, "outing" can be seen as the re-introduction and re-invention of shaming by a radical SMO. The effectiveness of this tactic is therefore dependent to some extent on the degree to which the neighbourhood can be characterized as one with a Gesselschaft or Gemeinschaft character to it. If outings are taken to be an effective employment of shaming strategies to mitigate deviance, some of the alienation of modern society is called into question.

This choice of tactic may be approached from the perspective of resource mobilization. Why did the SMO in question choose this tactic? I expect to argue that a lack of access to the polity and other resources, but with abundant support in other resources, informed the decision to choose to do outings because they are the most effective ways of achieving movement goals using the resources available. This may have to do with economic changes (Elias, 1978). Alternately, I will examine "outings" from a functionalist perspective, in which the tactics serves latent functions, such as uniting community members in a ritualized enforcement of the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

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To back my hypotheses empirically, I hope to employ content analysis of movement literature with some small-scale interviewing of SMO members, and, should the opportunity present itself, participant observation fieldwork.

POSSIBLE SOURCES:

Bierbrauer, Gunter. Reactions to Violation of Normative Standards: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Shame and Guilt. International Journal of Psychology, 1992, 27, 2, Apr, 181-193.

Braithwaite, John; Daly, Kathleen. "Masculinities, Violence and Communitarian Control". in CRIME CONTROL AND WOMEN: FEMINIST IMPLICATIONS OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY, Miller, Susan L. Ed , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998, pp 151-180.

Elias, Norbert, The History of Manners, (New York, Pantheon), 1978.

Erikson, Kai, Wayward Puritans: A Study In The Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley), 1966.

Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday), 1959).

Gulotta, Ronald Gerard. Persistence and Desistence in Delinquent Careers: A Test of Braithwaite's Reintegrative Shaming Theory. Dissertation Abstracts International, 1994, 55, 1, July, 156-A.

Hay, Carter. "Parental Sanctions and Delinquent Behavior: Toward Clarification of Braithwaite's Theory of Reintegrative Shaming". Theoretical Criminology, 1998, 2, 4, Nov, 419-443.

Heller, Agnes. The Power of Shame. Dialectical Anthropology, 1982, 6, 3, Mar, 215-228.

Tilly, Charles, The Contentious French (Cambridge: Belknap Press), 1986.

Wehowsky, Andreas. Making Ourselves More Flexible Than We Are - Reflections on Norbert Elias. New German Critique, 1978, 15, fall, 65-80.

(Please note that this list is obviously incomplete.)