“Doing It for Yourself”: Collective Action at a Personalist Blended Social Movement Organization

Social movement scholars assert that collective action depends on the construction of a robust collective identity within social movements. Yet the author witnessed a particularly weak collective identity over two years of observation and interviews at an immigration clinic. This article explains that counterintuitive finding, demonstrating how field and organizational policies and practices can limit collective identity work among movement participants, inhibiting collective identity development even in organizations whose public self-presentation would seem to provide a ready-made source of collective identity, like an exclusive commitment to Christianity. Given the importance in the literature of collective identity to collective action, these findings suggest a puzzle: how can social movement manifestations characterized by limited collective identity mobilize participants? The findings show that volunteers and staff members use clinic labor to verify their personal identities as moral people, which provides feelings of authenticity, self-efficacy, and self-esteem that motivate ongoing mobilization. The clinic’s reliance on participants’ personal identities, rather than collective identity, for mobilization—alongside its blended service, civic, and activist labor—exemplify a novel but increasingly important form of social movement organization, which the author conceptualizes as a personalist blended social movement organization. These findings have implications for the study of mobilization and collective action, particularly politically liberal religious mobilization.