The Process of Specialization of Collective Action Frames. A Contribution from Communication to the Perspective of Framing in Social Movements.

This paper reviews the framing perspective on social movements to explore the current state of framing studies in order to complement it with the idea of processes of specialization of collective action frames. While existing work focuses on different framing processes, the effects of framing or the interpretation of framing, little emphasis has been placed on the moments of specialization or complexification of the frames over time, contexts and the experiences of organized people. Over time, the space and experiences of organized people, the identification of problems and responsible actors (diagnostic framing), the proposal of solutions (prognostic framing) and the call to action (motivational framing) may not only change, but also tend to become more specialized and complex. Specialization can not only be understood in the way organized people identify issues and propose solutions, but can also be seen in the development of their vocabularies and their ways of communicating the same issue in a more complex way over time, which can also open the possibility for new forms of collective action, but also for new theoretical and practical discussions. Because of this, the starting point here is the idea that framing processes do not only occur in social movements, but that they develop at different levels and among the different organizations that may make up such movements, so it is proposed here that framing also depends on the size of the organizations or movements, and that it is also worthwhile to observe these processes at micro levels to complement the macro levels. For this, the text takes some qualitative and quantitative data that have been obtained through a current doctoral research, which approaches a social collective that emerged as a product of enforced disappearances in northern Mexico and that is understood here as a grassroots civil society organization, this due to the fact that these groups, as they tend to be local and generally community-based, improvised in the first instance or as a result of crisis situations -violence in this case-, and often have limited access to resources for mobilization and collective action, may show cycles of specialization in the way they communicate and build their collective action frames. This first approach, particularly from the perspective of communication, seeks to complement a perspective that is important for the understanding of collective action and social movements. If we add to the discussion the question of the specialization of frames, we can observe other dynamics of social movements, as well as the capacity of small organizations to construct meanings that, over time, can acquire greater weight and mobilization capacities that can later lead them to become larger organizations or social movements.