Collective action as narrativity and praxis: Theory and application to Hong Kong’s urban protest movements

DOI10.1177/0952076717699262
AuthorRaul Lejano,Jovial Wong,Timothy Lam,Ernest Chui
Date01 July 2018
Published date01 July 2018
Subject MatterArticles
untitled Article
Public Policy and Administration
2018, Vol. 33(3) 260–289
! The Author(s) 2017
Collective action as
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narrativity and praxis:
DOI: 10.1177/0952076717699262
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Theory and application
to Hong Kong’s urban
protest movements
Raul Lejano
New York University, USA
Ernest Chui, Timothy Lam and
Jovial Wong
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract
Policy scholars need to better describe the diversity of actors and interests that forge
collective political action through nonformal social networks. The authors find extant
theories of collective action to only partially explain such heterogeneity, which is exem-
plified by the urban protest movements in Hong Kong. A new concept, that of the
narrative-network, appears better able to describe movements chiefly characterized by
heterogeneity. Instead of simple commonalities among members, a relevant property is
the plurivocity of narratives told by members of the coalition. Analyzing ethnographic
interviews of members of the movement, the authors illustrate the utility of narrative-
network analysis in explaining the complex and multiple motivations behind participa-
tion. Narrativity and the shared act of narration, within an inclusive and democratic
community, are part of what sustains the movement. The research further develops the
theory of the narrative-network, which helps explain the rise of street protest in Hong
Kong as an emergent, alternative form of civic engagement.
Keywords
Advocacy coalition framework, collective action, Hong Kong, narrative-network, social
movements
Corresponding author:
Raul Lejano, New York University, Room 424, 239 Greene Street, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Email: lejano@nyu.edu

Lejano et al.
261
Introduction
Notwithstanding decades of scholarship in multiple f‌ields of inquiry, a key question
for policy studies nonetheless remains: what explains collective action? That is,
what binds people, often drawn from many dif‌ferent walks of life, to a movement,
be it political protest or positive civic engagement?
As we will develop in this article, many theories that attempt to explain collect-
ive action place their prime focus on what we might call unimodality, i.e. something
common or shared among the participants. Such commonality, whether it be com-
monality in beliefs, cognitive frames, stories, or other aspects, is portrayed as the
thing that binds. However, when we probe into people’s motivations closely
enough, we may f‌ind that such presumed commonalities are, in fact, not that uni-
formly shared from person to person. People may bring a wide range of divergent
beliefs, frames of understanding, or stories to the movement.
Granted, most theories allow for a diversity of motivations. For example, a
theory based on commonality of beliefs will allow diverge across coalition members
along many beliefs, and a theory based on commonality of stories will allow
slightly diverging stories across members. But, invariably, theories can f‌ind, in
any actual movement, what they assume, especially if investigators allow wide
degrees of generality. Any group of members of a movement, when probed, will
express some common beliefs, e.g. they love their country, they care for their chil-
dren, etc. Any group of members of a movement will share a story if it is general
enough, e.g. they all converge on city hall because they are angry. Invariably, these
theories assume, and f‌ind, some degree of commonality, which researchers then use
to characterize the coalition. The issue is that one can always f‌ind commonality, if
one looks persistently or broadly enough, and it may not deeply explain why people
join a movement. A related issue is that these commonalities may be shared by
people who do not join (e.g. most people love their country, but not everyone f‌ights
for it).
This article takes a slightly dif‌ferent approach than looking for what is common
to all members of the coalition. Our approach is to simply ask someone, why did
you join? And we proceed to record what they tell as their accounts of their motiv-
ations for joining. If they express some belief, we record it as a belief. If they
express some strategic goal, then we record it as such. Interviewing members of
a movement with this ethnographic approach, we invariably f‌ind a plurality of
reasons given. Rather than sift through all the motivations to f‌ind the assumed
commonalities, our approach is to instead be faithful with what people say and
take them at their word.
What emerges is a theory that appreciates how people can join a movement for
richly dif‌fering motivations. Though other theories will allow dif‌ferences from
person to person, this theory takes the plurality of dif‌fering motivations as the
starting point for explaining how and why people join. The theory that has
emerged is known as the narrative-network, which was previously discussed in
Lejano et al. (2013). In this article, we further the theory by concentrating on
how it models dif‌ference across coalition members. In the next section, we discuss

262
Public Policy and Administration 33(3)
how this theory compares to previous theories of policy coalitions and what new
insights emerge from said theory.
We then illustrate how the theory is used to analyze real-world movements. To
illustrate the insights af‌forded by the narrative-network model, we employ it in
analyzing urban protest movements that occurred in Hong Kong around the demo-
lition of iconic structures in the city as part of large-scale redevelopment plans. The
Hong Kong protests exhibited the kind of plurivocity for which the narrative-net-
work model is best suited for analyzing. In the following discussion, we describe the
Hong Kong case and give the reader some background behind the urban protest
movement. Later in the article, we reinterpret the narrative-network model, as a
bridging of narrativity and praxis, and show how it helps us understand the
movement.
Theory and literature review
In this section, we summarize the main features of the narrative-network model
and distinguish it from other theories.
Narrative-networks
In a recent book (Lejano et al., 2013), scholars began to construct an alternative
theory of heterogeneous networks (i.e. networks where we are hard pressed to f‌ind
commonalities). Beginning with a search for shared narratives that characterized
these networks, they instead found a multiplicity of story lines weaving the groups
together. And they concluded that one thing that allowed the groups to cohere and,
in fact, f‌lourish, was the capacity of the group to accept these dif‌fering story lines
and still tell a story as a group. They often found no common story line character-
izing any of the groups they studied. But they found a capacity of each network to
have each person tell their story and, at the same time, be part of the ‘‘story of
stories’’ that characterized the group. They refer to these groups as ‘‘narrative-
networks,’’ ref‌lecting the fact that the group is constituted by the shared act of
narration. The chief characteristic of collectivization was plurivocity, which we
might def‌ine as the multiplicity of stories (told by multiple storytellers) that char-
acterize a group account or, alternatively, the multiplicity of interpretations of one
story (see also Thatchenkery, 1992).
As will be further discussed below, the narrative-network dif‌fers from Hajer’s
notion of a discourse coalition, where actors share a common discourse or story
line (1993; also Jones and McBeth, 2010). There is common story being told inside
the narrative-network and, when the above authors wove a meta-narrative that
gave a general account of the group, this narrative (or fabula, in their terminology)
was, in general, not told by any member of the group but constructed only by the
analysts (Ingram et al., 2015; Lejano et al., 2013). The problem with the idea of a
shared discourse is that it does not have enough explanatory power, e.g. at a very
abstract level of generality, there will be shared sentiments (such as a sense of

Lejano et al.
263
outrage), but this does not allow us to explain why some join the network and
others with similar sentiments do not. In doing so, we further the use and study of
narrative in public administration (e.g. Dodge et al., 2005).
As mentioned above, each of the theories of collective action overlap consider-
ably. In these brief notes, we will discuss how the narrative-network dif‌ferentiates
itself from these other concepts—for lack of space, we will compare it against the
notion of the discourse coalition. How do researchers of discourse coalitions inter-
pret and use the concept of a discourse, which is often equated with the word, story
line? When they allude to a discourse or story line as characteristic of a coalition, it
is in terms of something shared, something common among the coalition members.
Our notion of a narrative-network veers away from this strong notion of common-
ality. This is easy to see when one thinks of the research method behind narrative-
network analysis, which is mostly sitting down with informants and encouraging
them to tell us their stories, i.e. stories about themselves and the movement they are
part of. Now, as it turns out that, if we listen long enough, we f‌ind that each
informant invariably tells a dif‌ferent story, one that only they can tell. And, so,
we f‌ind that what binds the group together is not commonality of a story line per
se, but plurivocity—the latter term pertaining to the...

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