Abstract
Studies of the diffusion and translation of social movements has traditionally interpreted the adopting context of a movement as culturally homogenous and explained the adoption of a matter of similarity between transmitters and adopters. As a consequence, most existing theoretical and methodological approaches to diffusion and translation are ill-suited to interpret culturally fragmented cases in which adoption patterns do not reflect cultural similarities. Building on social movement field literature, this article introduces a field-translation approach to account for fragmented cases with ‘dissimilar’ adoption patterns – specifically the adoption of the temperance movement in Denmark at the turn of the 20th century. Using mixed-methods – Social Network Analysis on temperance leaders’ organizational affiliations and content analysis of key texts – the article shows how attention to field-specific doxa can provide a satisfying interpretation of why rural progressives embraced an originally evangelical movement, while evangelicals first rejected it and only later became its most ardent supporter – and why the movement could not make inroads with urban progressives.
Keywords
Introduction
‘Now we’ve got a new tailor’s shop here in town, now we’ll have to patch up the old suit.’ Rural parishioner about The Blue Cross, c. 1900 (Juhl, 1920: 23).
Today, the temperance movement in Denmark only exists as a service provider to the state with a neglible following in small evangelical communities, while a hundred years ago, the movement counted around 178,000 followers (Gundelach, 1988). At that time, however, the same conservative evangelical community that today keeps the movement alive rejected the cause as a ‘new tailor in town’ when what was needed was a new garment, in other words, a total conversion. Conversely, rural progressives initially embraced the cause while today, no liberals adhere to the movement. This adoption pattern presents a puzzle, since we would expect conservative evangelicals to be more similar than democratic progressives to the milieu of US/UK Christian evangelicals, Baptists, and Methodists from which the movement spread – and thus more likely to resonate with the interpretive frames and repertoires of action promoted by the temperance movement. Why did the temperance cause initially resonate with rural progressives but not conservatives? And why were religious conservatives eventually won over?
More generally, how do translations in fragmented fields contribute to shaping local adoption patterns of social movements in trans-national diffusion processes?
Cultural resonance has been viewed as an important condition for the diffusion of social movements to new contexts (Snow and Benford, 1988; McAdam and Rucht, 1993; McAdam et al., 2001, Strang and Soule, 1998). Traditionally, social movement literature tended to view resonance structurally as a matter of cultural similarity between transmitters and adopters, and diffusion as a matter of information flow (McAdam and Rucht, 1993; Saguy, 2003; Strang and Meyer, 1993). This can be explained partly by the literature’s empirical focus on the adoption of a single practice across a single community and partly by new institutionalism’s theoretical interpretation of culture as inert structures.
However, when seeking to understand fragmented cases in which similarity is first accompanied by dissonance and then strong resonance (and thus diffusion), we need to go beyond this theoretical and empirical focus. To this end, translation approaches that view diffusion as an agentic process of creative reinterpretation can account for how movements that are initially perceived as dissimilar can eventually come to resonate through learning and dialogue (Chabot, 2000, 2012, 2014). Sean Chabot (and other translation approaches), however, tend to underemphasize how translations are situated in an already striated social space.
To be able to interpret both structural and agentic dimensions of multi-positional diffusion processes, I introduce a field-translation approach that integrates insights from field theory (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014, 2019; Bourdieu, 1984; Crossley, 2003; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012; Mudge, 2018; Ray, 1998, 1999) and translation studies (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014; Chabot, 2000, 2012, 2014; Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Roggeband, 2007). The approach enables a relational understanding of potential adopters’ positions vis-à-vis a new movement as well as of the success or failure of translation strategies.
I first introduce the case and the historical context of Denmark at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th. I then review the diffusion literature with a focus on social movements and introduce the field-translation approach. In the data and methods section, I introduce Social Network Analysis (SNA) and interpretive methods, and the career and textual data used in the analysis. In the analytical sections, I first model the Danish field of moral reform and use SNA to show the clustered social field positions of movement leaders and their organizations. I then analyse each of the field-specific translation processes and show how and why certain translations succeeded while others failed. I conclude by reflecting on the potential of applying field and translation theory to the study of diffusion and translation processes.
Moral Questions at the End of the 19th Century
Denmark is a fitting case for studying cultural diffusion processes since at the turn of the 20th century, the country was structurally embedded in world society (cf. Pope and Meyer, 2016), yet at the semi-periphery of the international system: an ‘adopter’ more than a ‘transmitter’. Moreover, the question of temperance and abstinence in relation to alcohol consumption emerged at a historical juncture in which questions of morality – acceptable behaviour in relation to consumption, leisure, and sexuality – were struggled over. It is thus a ‘most likely’ case suited for testing a novel theory of fragmented diffusion (Yin, 2014).
In the 19th century, Danish society was rapidly changing. Enclosure reforms starting at the end of the 18th century broke up villages’ communal modes of production and organization. An independent farmer class became increasingly politically ambitious. The guild system was dissolved, and later in the century, workers were set free from their old way of life as they migrated to the city. The bourgeoisie became citizens with the introduction of the liberal 1849 constitution that gave the vote to propertied men who had turned 40 and had an untarnished reputation. Significantly, in this context, the constitution granted freedom of religion, and the state church became a privileged national church but without a religious monopoly. Politically, Denmark increasingly became a nation of formally free citizens, while economically, a market economy with great class divides emerged, just as the bourgeois nuclear family ideal changed its expectations of sexual relations, and new opportunities for consumption and leisure changed how free time was spent.
Political and moral questions were struggled over by elites as well as the broader population: Religious revivalist movements emerged at the end of the 18th century and flourished from the 1840s. Farmers joined together in consumption (1860s) and production cooperatives (1880s) – soon followed by labour cooperatives in the cities (1890s). Politically, farmers, peasants and workers joined forces during this period against the old elites of absolutism. The temperance movement emerged in the 1880s as part of this broader mobilization of civil society (Sevelsted, 2019).
Movements were divided along two key dimensions: Progressives seeking to expand citizens’ rights and conservatives seeking to contract these as well as urban movements and rural movements.
Counting all organizations, the temperance movement would reach around 178,000 followers (c. 6% of the population, Gundelach, 1988) in 1917, before slowly declining and all but dying out. An observer familiar with how revivalists in the UK and USA first promoted the temperance cause as a ‘special sin’ requiring specialized methods and organizations (Young, 2006), would assume that Danish revivalists would jump at the chance to mobilize on the issue. However, the movement was first adopted by rural progressives organized in Dansk Afholdsforening (DAF, Danish Abstinence Association), counting around 69,000 at its peak, while rural conservative evangelicals first rejected the evangelical Blue Cross (that would reach around 33,000 members). In the city, the Nordic Independent Order of Good Templars (NIOGT, around 35,000), and urban evangelicals and socialists (no notable following) would struggle to gain a following (see Table 1). Today, however, only the initial sceptic, the evangelical Blue Cross has survived.
Overview of fractions of the Danish temperance movement, early 20th century.
An explanation of this adoption pattern would have to go beyond the immediate similarities between US/UK evangelicals and Danish evangelicals to include the movement’s status as a newcomer to an established but changing field of moral reform (Eriksen, 1988), the role of cultural doxa (Eriksen, 1988), as well as translation strategies of socialists (Eriksen, 1992) and especially urban evangelicals who managed to overcome rural evangelical scepticism.
Diffusion and Translation: Developments and Remaining Issues
The concept of diffusion (Rogers, 1962) has long been a staple in the social movement literature where the most prominent scholars in the field have expanded on the concept (McAdam et al., 2001). The cultural turn in social science meant increased attention to cultural resonance as a precondition for diffusion, most influentially through the concept of frame alignment (Snow and Benford, 1988; Snow et al., 1986). Cultural resonance has been studied in the diffusion of ‘new’ social movements of the 1970s (McAdam and Rucht, 1993) and later the anti-apartheid movement of the mid-1980s (Soule, 1997), and the alter-globalization movements of the 1990s and 2000s (Della Porta, 2006; Della Porta et al., 1999; Smith and Johnston, 2002).
Much diffusion literature presents the adopting context as culturally monolithic without consideration of its internal divisions (see Gallo-Cruz, 2016; Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002). This is partly because diffusion studies often are country-based case studies that focus on a single adopting activist group per country (McAdam and Rucht, 1993; Roggeband, 2007; Soule, 1997). This has been pointed out by Ferree (2003) and Strang and Soule (1998: 279): ‘The most common design in diffusion research treats variability in the timing of adoption of a single practice across a single community’.
Some simply assume that movement actors are similar across national contexts as they share the same struggle (McAdam and Rucht, 1993). Alternatively, ideas diffuse because the adopting context is made similar to the transmitting context (Strang and Meyer, 1993), or the adopting context appears as an essentially different national culture into which movement ideas and repertoires will have to be translated (Saguy, 2003; Stambolis-Ruhstorfer and Saguy, 2014). In each case, the adopting context is black-boxed as either similar or different. This leaves researchers unable to interpret cases in ‘unsettled times’ in which no hegemony or consensus is established (Ray, 1998). In fact, scholars have pointed out that it is exactly in moments of uncertainty in which new problems emerge that resonance with new cultural objects is most likely as new interpretive tools are needed (McDonnell et al., 2017). This was true for the context in which the question of temperance arose in the 19th century, but it is clearly also the case for other ‘life politics’ issues in the present (reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change etc.).
Comparative designs (Ferree, 2003; Ray, 1999; Saguy, 2003; Stambolis-Ruhstorfer and Saguy, 2014) have enhanced our understanding of how differences between cultural structures compel movements to prioritize certain frames and issues over others, but between-case comparisons of separate contexts do not account for within-case variance, that is, the specific intra-national (or intra-urban etc.) adoption pattern that emerges as a new movement struggles to gain a foothold among established actors.
Theoretically, the pervasiveness of (new) institutionalism in diffusion studies (Strang and Soule, 1998) has led to structural accounts of cultural contexts as established normative order with high inertia and a thrust towards similarity (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; McCarthy and Zald, 1977; Saguy, 2003; Strang and Meyer, 1993). The adopting context is thus perceived as unified even when multiple levels and dimensions of diffusion are recognized (Pope and Meyer, 2016). Cultural issues such as sexual harassment (Saguy, 2003) and ‘coming out’ (Stambolis-Ruhstorfer and Saguy, 2014) thus need to be translated differently according to the local context to achieve resonance. Another concept, discursive opportunity structures (Ferree, 2003), is potentially open to such structures being distributed in social space but is used much in the same way to indicate how ‘institutionalized forms of discourse’ (Ferree, 2003, 305) offer certain opportunities to speakers.
Dissatisfaction with structural accounts of diffusion and resonance has led researchers to emphasize agency in bringing about resonance. As pointed out by McDonnell et al. (2017), resonance processes are not fully understood simply by referring to congruence between a cultural object and an audience. Scholars need to show how resonance comes about. In the diffusion literature, key actors in bringing about resonance were considered ‘brokers’ who aligned cultural frames (McAdam et al., 2001: 331). Since then, scholars have shown how brokers not only align but creatively translate frames to new cultural contexts through processes of adaptation (Doerr, 2018; Roggeband, 2007: 255), localization (Roggeband, 2010), domestication (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014) or field-weaving (Gallo-Cruz, 2016). Especially Chabot’s (2000, 2012, 2014) analysis of how Gandhian repertoires of protest were adopted by the US peace movement, has been central in showing diffusion as a translation process in which initial awareness of a new movement repertoire can spur reactions of assuming over-likeness or hyper-difference between the transmitting and adopting contexts but may then be followed by a learning process encompassing translation, experimentation and application in a new context. Chabot’s pointing to different actors’ perception of a new repertoire (or movement) as similar or different in the initial stages of a diffusion process points towards – but does not elaborate on – how movement actors are situated in social space. To fully grasp the relational aspect of situated translations, the translation approach should be complemented by the more contentious dimension of field battles (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014, 2019) as well as the embodied practices and experiences (Bourdieu, 1984; Crossley, 2003) that follow translations to fragmented fields.
A field-translation approach to resonance processes
To be able to interpret resonance processes in fragmented cases with surprising temporal adoption patterns, I suggest we integrate theoretical insights from field theory and translation theory which enable us to understand both the multi-positional and temporal dimensions of translation and resonance processes. This approach builds on previous movement, translation and domestication research and expands upon it theoretically and methodologically.
The natural theoretical starting point for interpreting multi-positional cases is Bourdieusian field theory since it offers inherently relational concepts such as field, capital, doxa and habitus.
With Bourdieu, I understand resonance as the congruence between a set of proposed beliefs and practices and the embodied beliefs and practices of individuals and groups. This definition is similar to the definition inspired by American pragmatism put forward by McDonnell et al. (2017): An ‘experience emerging when affective and cognitive work provides actors with novel ways to puzzle out, or “solve,” practical situations’ (McDonnell et al., 2017: 3). Pointing to embodied experience, beliefs, and practices allows researchers to go beyond the cognitive connotations of frame alignment processes such as bridging – connecting congruent ideological frames – or extension – including new issues under existing frames (Snow et al., 1986).
Phenomenologically, resonance implies a sense of ‘feeling at home’ in one’s relations with the world – as opposed to a sense of alienation in these relations (Rosa, 2019), and it is undergirded by rituals and performances that facilitate experiences of collective effervescence and emotional bonds (Alexander, 2011). However, the home in which one feels at home is not always of one’s own making, and researchers should consider that ‘power differentials structure the dynamics of resonance’ (McDonnell et al., 2017: 7). McDonnell et al. indicate but do not show how field theory can help interpret the role of hierarchy in resonance processes – between established and newcomer or between positions of different kinds and volumes of resources (or capital) (Bourdieu, 1984).
Field theory explicitly considers how embodied cultural experiences structure perceptions of ‘belonging’ in social space (habitus) (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Moreover, embodied experiences are not only shaped by nationally institutionalized beliefs but also by subgroups inhabiting specific positions in social fields in which certain basic beliefs (doxa) dominate (Crossley, 2003).
A field is a social ‘space of objective relations between positions’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 97); these positions are defined by the type and volume of resources (or capital) available to an actor that inhabits a certain position. Fields are relatively stable and are reproduced through the constant struggle for position within the field – between incumbents and challengers, insiders and outsiders (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012), or established actors and newcomers (Bourdieu, 2008). Actors share an understanding of the rules and stakes within the field, just as certain core beliefs or doxa underlie fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012: 88). In fragmented fields, doxa may be embodied differently depending on field position.
Beyond diffusion and translation studies, Ray (1998, 1999) has shown the implications of field structures (fragmented vs. hegemonic) for framing strategies. With reference to political fields, Ray applies field theory to explain why politically unaffiliated feminist movements in Calcutta and Bombay, two cities with comparable level of violence towards women, poverty, illiteracy and unemployment, focused on different aspects of gender issues and adopted different rhetoric on the issues. Ray explains the difference by showing that the hegemonic field structure (dominated by a politically affiliated feminist organization) in Calcutta let women’s groups pursue framing strategies that converged with the hegemonic political party there, while the fragmented political field in Bombay allowed women’s groups there to differentiate, in other words, to push alternative frames that in some cases were then adopted by the politically affiliated feminist organization – an organization that was then relatively weak due to the more fragmented political field.
While Ray is not concerned with the translation of movements from abroad, her study illustrates how a fragmented field provides more ‘field opportunity structures’ (Ancelovici, 2021) for different translation strategies. Now, institutionalized political fields are not identical to moral fields (a field in which struggles over cultural norms take place). Similar to other life politics movements, the temperance movement mobilized primarily in civil society in a ‘field of contention’ (Crossley, 2006). Alongside other movements that shared an interest in the cause with similar or opposing goals, they struggled for civic capital – members, adherents, and donations of time and money – (Sevelsted and Johansson, 2024).
While field opportunity structures shape newcomers’ (or in Ray’s case autonomous civil society organizations (CSOs) translation strategies, they do not determine them. Some groups may prefer radicalism over resonance (Ferree, 2003), and first reactions to a new movement may be hyberbolic: Sexual harassment is viewed as a ‘Puritan’ invention from the USA (Roggeband, 2007), while Gandhian repertoires of non-violent resistance were viewed through the lenses of hyper-difference and over-likeness (Chabot, 2012). Within fields, translators struggle to shape either the established field structures or the movement – or both.
This understanding of resonance in fragmented fields requires us to rethink the related issues of translators’ agency and temporal models of diffusion. Similar to how processes of domestication of international policy have been described, we need to be able to articulate processes of translation and resonance as positional intra-national field battles (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014). In such battles, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) position themselves vis-à-vis other actors not only to gain immediate results but also to accumulate ‘epistemic capital’ (resources that enable an actor to define a situation) and gain moral authority over specific issues (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2019).
In Bourdieusian parlance, within a certain field-specific national doxa there are orthodox and heterodox positions, embodied in habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), with which any movement translation must engage. Fields of contention will most often mirror larger conflicts in society – they are ‘homologous’ to the broader social field (Bourdieu, 1984).
Movement translators may pursue different translation strategies to achieve resonance: rejection, accommodation, adaptation, or mutual adjustment (see Dewey, 2013 [1934]; Ferree, 2003; Ray, 1999). Incumbents may simply reject a movement with reference to certain held beliefs. Alternatively, translators may seek to accommodate to the new field by relinquishing certain cultural beliefs or forms (e.g. framing women’s issues in convergence with an incumbent), or they can seek to make the existing field adapt and accept the new cultural beliefs. Finally, a mutual adjustment can take place in which both movement and environment ‘translate’ each other, allowing something new to emerge (e.g. the institutionalization of the labour movement in the Nordics).
Whereas much existing field theory tends to explain the discursive strategies chosen by a movement through the opportunities available in the field (Ferree, 2003, Merry and Levitt, 2017; Ray, 1998, 1999), the field-translation approach emphasizes how opportunity structures may change as the result of the work done by translators. The field-translation approach is illustrated in Figure 1. The illustration shows how a dislocated movement is translated by multiple actors that target different positions in a field each with their own interpretation of field doxa. A movement may be translated multiple times.
Field translation model.
By integrating field analysis with translation strategies, a field-translation approach allows the researcher to develop analyses of translation processes in fragmented cases in which resonance hinges not only on similarity with one institutionalized/hegemonic culture. It also does not explain translation strategies only through field structure. Rather, resonance (or dissonance) is the outcome of ‘field effects’ – the meeting between a translation and the doxa of local constituents and their elites.
Method and Data
In order to capture both structural and agentic dimensions of intra-national field of temperance adopters, I follow a mixed-methods approach that combines field-specific Social Network Analysis (SNA) and textual analysis. SNA modelling has been used to show or emulate diffusion patterns (Centola, 2015; Valente, 1995). The intention in this article, however, is not to show how formal properties of network structures (board interlocks, structural holes etc.) enable a flow of ideas. Instead, my approach is similar to that of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) that aims to show how entities (actors, organizations, cultural preferences) are distributed in a social space. In this way, we gain a first sense of the ideological positions in the field – the kind of organizations that illustrate individuals’ positions – and thus the cultural opportunity structures for adoption of the temperance cause.
The SNA is a so called two-mode network that shows connections between two ontologically different entities (here individuals and organizations) that are then visualized as a network of connections between organizations and individuals. Individuals and organizations constitute ‘nodes’ in the network (the dots in the illustration) connected by ‘edges’ (the lines in the illustration). In other words, we can see how individuals are connected through formal positions in an organization. When individuals cluster around certain organizations, I interpret this to mean that they belong to the same cultural space.
The SNA is constructed by gathering available career data on the leaders of the three temperance movements. Then, a database was constructed in excel consisting of two tables: A node table with the names of all organizations and individuals and a nodes table with two columns containing all connections (member, founder, leader etc.) between individuals and organizations. From this, the social network analysis software program Gephi created a network visualisation of alle connections between individuals and organizations.
To construct the SNA, I rely on biographical data of 19 temperance leaders – founders, chairmen and prominent members – of the three organizations with most members (most civic capital) during the period 1880–1920: DAF, Blue Cross, and NIOGT, as well as the individuals’ 123 organizational affiliations. By showing the ties between leaders affiliated with these organizations and other organizations, we gain a sense of the cultural space of which the organizations are a part.
The 19 leaders were selected by searching data from the entire Danish Who’s Who (volumes 1910–1920) for entries containing reference to the three organizations, using search words with different variations and abbreviations of the organization names. The initial search gave 16 results, 9 affiliated with DAF, 7 with Blue Cross, and 1 with IOGT (Henrik Voss). The latter was excluded, since the IOGT is not part of the study. The co-founder of Blue Cross, Harald Westergaard, was included, even though he does not mention Blue Cross in his Who’s Who entry.
Since there were no results for NIOGT, I also included the three chairmen (ordenschefer) of the NIOGT that shaped the organization in this period. I searched NIOGT members’ magazines and the Danish national newspaper database (Mediestream) for career data on the NIOGT chairmen. This resulted in fewer entries than for those accepted into the Who’s Who.
The Who’s Who was used as the primary data source since individuals accepted into the publication can be expected to be especially well-connected as they constitute a moral elite in society (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2019; Sevelsted, 2023). Individuals were accepted into the publication based on the advice of an independent expert panel. It may also mean that there are missing data, for instance individuals who were not accepted into the Who’s Who or affiliations not mentioned in the entries. Nonetheless, the sample includes individuals with so many affiliations that I do not expect a few extra individuals (expectedly with fewer ties than those accepted into the Who’s Who) to change the results significantly.
The sparse data on the NIOGT can be explained by the fact that this organization had fewer members than DAF and less support among the elites than both DAF and Blue Cross. This is thus less a question of missing data and more a reflection of the more locally anchored leadership in the organization.
The second part of the analysis applies interpretive methods to investigate cultural translation strategies. For Blue Cross, I make use of membership magazines published bimonthly from 1900 to 1920 as well as minutes of board meetings from the period obtained through the Blue Cross’ archive. The membership magazines contain reports from the annual meeting of representatives where strategic and principal issues were discussed and put to a vote. The minutes from board meetings provide insight into how the board sought to navigate the organization’s internal discussions, state authorities and other temperance organizations. For DAF, I analyse leaders’ public writings and anniversary publications that chronicle the organization’s history. These sources provide insight into the organization’s stances and reflections on battles fought. For NIOGT, I also make use of temperance leaders’ writings and anniversary publications, supplemented by newspaper articles and historians’ accounts of the development of the organization. The material enables a reading of resonant and dissonant translation strategies from the perspective of the organizations.
Leadership data can solely tell us about the integration of the temperance cause at the very top of the organizations. All leaders in the population are male which testifies to the fact that the women’s movement and the temperance movement were not as closely intertwined as in the USA. Still, women played a significant role locally and in second-tier leadership positions, which is why female voices have been integrated into the second part of the analysis.
The Multipositional Translation of Temperance
The fragmented nature of the Danish temperance movement can be illustrated by mapping the organizational affiliations of the movement’s leaders, helping to make sense of the translation strategies pursued by key translators of a movement that emerged among US and UK evangelicals and free churches.
Transmitters: The US and UK Temperance Movement
Originating in the USA rural frontier among evangelicals, the temperance movement expanded rapidly in the USA during the first half of the 19th century (Young, 2006). Organizations such as the US Foreign Missionary Society, the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the British evangelical Religious Tract Society, and the British Foreign Bible Society along with Baptist, Methodist and Quaker missionaries helped spread the temperance cause abroad (Eriksen, 1988). This early translation failed as the movement’s Calvinist origins led it to be rejected by a Danish establishment devoted to Lutheran doxa. Only after the constitution of 1849 did the movement proliferate. During this period of political and spiritual upheaval, the Blue Cross and the Good Templars were established.
The international Blue Cross organization was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1877 by Reformed Protestants inspired by the temperance movement in the UK. During the 1850s, the Independent Order of Good Templars was established in New England, built on the template of freemasonry, stressing equality and applying the freemasons’ traditional rites and regalia. Like the Calvinist pioneers, they would send out missionaries, print tracts and establish connections to centrally placed individuals (Johansson, 1947).
The different temperance templates were translated by different groups according to the central axes of struggle in the Danish field of moral reform, divided between progressives and conservatives and urban and rural areas (see Table 1). Temperance translators in different roles would have to develop different translation strategies to achieve resonance and win over the incumbent movements in the field.
The Field of Moral Reform
The temperance movement was a newcomer to a field of moral reform in which socialist, Christian, and peasant and farmers’ movements had already organized large parts of the population. The movement was translated according to the established positions in the field.
To understand how the movement was translated, let us turn to SNA, the analysis of the mutual organizational connections of temperance leaders at the time. SNA visualizes the moral field as a social space: The clustering of temperance organizations with other organizations reveals both the structure of this space and the temperance organizations’ place within it (see Figure 2). We thus gain a first sense of the field and its alliances.
Danish temperance leader network 1910-1919. Constructed in Gephi. Node sizes are weighted by betweenness centrality. Node colors by modularity. Only nodes at degree 2 or higher included. Label size by degree. Distances do not signal social proximity. Lay-out: Force Atlas 2.
Unsurprisingly, the network is divided into three clusters around the three temperance organizations. More interestingly, the clusters are almost unrelated to each other, indicating a highly divided social space. The Blue Cross cluster (top-right, 9 individuals) has no relations to the other two, and the DAF (bottom-left, 7 individuals) and NIOGT (top-left, 3 persons) clusters are only related through the parliamentary lower house (Folketing), that is, through a place of political struggle rather than agreement.
The internal ties of the clusters are telling. Blue Cross (Blå Kors) is strongly linked to urban evangelical organizations such as the Church Association for Inne Mission in Copenhagen (Kirkelig Forening for Indre Mission i København, KIM), including The Copenhagen Church Foundation (Det Københavnske Kirkefond). Conversely, the leadership has no organizational ties to Indre Mission (Home or Inner Mission (IM), est. 1861), the established rural evangelical organization.
Similarly, the ties of the DAF cluster are clearly linked to progressive organizations in the countryside: Danish Peace Association (Dansk Fredsforening) and the Social-Liberal Party (Venstrereformpartiet/Det Radikale Venstre). Individuals also have ties to folk high schools related to the increasingly progressive Grundtvigian revivalist movement, named after theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig (Ryslinge, Staby, Nørre Ørslev, Hadsten, Kjerteminde Højskoler).
The cluster around the NIOGT is more difficult to place and visualize, since biographical data on the cluster is sparser. However, what unites the cluster besides temperance is the Liberal Party (Venstre), a progressive but also increasingly economically liberal party. From the scarce biographical notes on members and leaders of the boards, it is possible to see that the leadership is recruited mainly from skilled and self-employed workers, sometimes in managing positions. This image of an urban-progressive upper-lower class movement is confirmed by the literature (Eriksen, 1992).
The social space in the network reflects two central cultural-political cleavages in societal struggles at the time: Progressive expansion vs. conservative contraction of citizens’ rights and rural vs. urban. In SNA terms, the field was highly consolidated with overlapping social roles (Centola, 2015). To illustrate the ideological structure of the field, we may map the network onto a model based on these two dimensions (see Figure 3).
Temperance clusters adapted to the field of moral reform, early 20th century Denmark.
The illustration in Figure 3 shows how leaders of temperance organizations gravitate toward certain positions in social space, just as certain positions are conspicuously empty.
Seeing that the temperance movement was a newcomer in a field of moral reform that was already populated by political and religious movements, the model seems to suggests that the movement had made inroads with some established actors but not others. From the historical literature, we know who the established actors were in Denmark at this time. Figure 4 shows the incumbents in each of the quadrants of the field of moral reform.
Dominant movement actors in the field of moral reform, early 20th century Denmark. Inspiration from Bourdieu (1984).
Comparing Figures 3 and 4, a story of selective adoption emerges: Leaders of the urban-progressive and the rural-conservative incumbents (the Social Democrats and IM, respectively) are missing, while urban revivalists have adopted the Blue Cross template, rural progressives the DAF template, and the liberal urban progressives the NIOGT template.
From the viewpoint of purely formal similarity, one would expect the rural conservative evangelicals to resonate with and embrace a template rooted in evangelical revivalism. Why did they not? Conversely, why would rural progressives embrace a movement that spread via evangelicals and conservative free churches? Moreover, we know that conservative evangelicals eventually embraced the movement and kept it alive, while rural progressives abandoned the cause.
To understand this adoption pattern, we need to move beyond formal similarity and investigate how subfield-specific movement actors translate the movement to seek resonance with subfield-incumbents over time.
The Translators of Temperance: Rejections, Adaptations and Accommodations
In Denmark, the temperance movement challenged ingrained Lutheran doxa that individual moral change should come about freely from inner conviction rather than be manufactured through techniques or special organizations. Good deeds and righteousness were the fruits of faith (Eriksen, 1988). Moreover, the movement challenged the emerging doxa of the labour movement that social progress could only come about through structural change. More than a mere single issue, the temperance cause challenged dominant cultural beliefs. While the Lutheran doxa were ingrained across movements in different ways, the fragmented field of moral reform opened opportunities for different translations to resonate with organizations in established positions. Map 1 illustrates the different routes of translation.
Translation routes. Map illustrating the three routes along which the temperance cause was translated (1920 borders). All routes originate in the UK/US context west of Denmark. Route 1: The translation of the NIOGT in Copenhagen (and other urban areas). Route 2: The initial translation of the evangelical temperance movement by Blue Cross. Route 2.1: Blue Cross’ subsequent translation to the IM evangelicals. Route 3: Quakers and Baptists translate the cause to rural Lutheran evangelicals. Route 3.1: Progressives’ subsequent translation of the cause as social and democratic.
The Rural Progressive Position: Accommodating the Cultural Doxa of Rural Liberals
The temperance movement first made inroads with farmers in the countryside. This part of the field (bottom-left quadrant in figures 2–4) was dominated by the progressive movement who had leveraged theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig’s ‘freedom gospel’ (that placed the congregation rather than the church or pastor at the centre of Christianity) to argue for expanding political rights – itself a political translation of the Lutheran doxa.
An alliance developed between left-Grundtvigians and the progressive wing of the farmers’ movement (politically organized around the Liberal Party (Venstre) and the Social-Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre)) as well as the peace movement (armament being a central question in the constitutional struggle). The US-UK evangelical temperance movement did not resonate with rural progressives’ democratic ideals of parliamentarism and political and social rights or their critique of the church and state inherited from absolutism. In fact, two generations of translators were necessary to achieve resonance.
The first translation was performed by the pioneers of the movement. In 1879, US American Methodist missionary Carl F. Eltzholtz (1840–1929) and Norwegian Quaker missionary John F. Hanson (1840–1910) set up competing local chapters of what would become the largest Danish temperance organization, DAF. The central question was whether the movement should retain its native religious tongue or be translated into a mainly secular endeavour. The translators faced a Lutheran revivalist elite that was reluctant to embrace the movement (Eriksen, 1988). In this situation, should they opt for adaptation, which would mean challenging local doxa, or accommodation, which would involve changing the movement to fit local doxa? In fact, they opted for both: chapters founded by Methodist Elzholtz opted for literal translation, retaining the religious content of the movement, while chapters founded by Quaker Hanson opted to translate temperance as a secular matter.
The secular translation won as Methodists and non-national church revivalists were ousted in elections to the central board in 1883 and religious references were removed from the statutes (Balle and Nielsen, 1904). In turn, this first translation paved the way for a more radically democratic-secular translation. The first president of DAF, Claus Johannsen (1841–1931, president 1881–1921), a farmer who belonged to the progressive left, was a member of the upper house of parliament for the (mostly) progressive Liberal Party and was engaged in the causes of peace and education. Johannson framed alcoholism as a ‘pernicious social evil’ that affected people’s sense of what is right (retsbevidsthed) (Johannsen, 1928: 42).
Thora Ingemann Drøhse (1867–1948), too, translated temperance as a social and political cause. Drøhse was a high-ranking member of the liberal party, a public speaker for DAF, and in 1906 one of the first three women to be elected to the board of DAF. To Drøhse, female suffrage and temperance were intrinsically linked: Women suffered the most from men’s alcohol consumption as this affected the life and economy of the family, and the right to vote and be elected was a means to promote and enact regulations of alcohol production and consumption. Women were the salt that would clean the rotting social body (Nielsen, 2023).
Johannsen’s successor, supreme court judge C.C. Heilesen (1886–1943, president 1921–1924) framed the movement as a democratic endeavour for the people and by the people: ‘From the outset, the movement set local self-government and immediate popular government as the goal’ (Heilesen, 1929: 6). Consequently, DAF’s action repertoire focused not on individual or collective techniques for abstinence but on achieving bans on distribution and consumption of alcohol through local and national direct referendums. The two consecutive translations – from religious to secular and from secular to democratic – made temperance resonate with the democratic beliefs of the progressive subfield; progressives who had already reinterpreted Lutheran doxa within a progressive freedom frame.
The Conservatives: Urbanites Accommodating Rural Evangelical Cultural Doxa
The network analysis revealed a close overlap in affiliations between urban revivalist conservatives and the Blue Cross temperance organization (top-right quadrant in figures 2–4), while the rural-conservative incumbents, IM, were absent. From the viewpoint of formal similarity, this is puzzling as one would assume evangelicals would embrace an evangelical temperance movement.
However, even as the IM promoted a literal reading of the Bible and abstinence in relation to sex and consumption, they were strictly Lutheran in their views on morality. Sin, as the influential leader of the organization Vilhelm Beck (1829–1901) put it, could not be gotten rid of through external action. In a central sermon, Beck compares the corn cockle (a type of beautiful weed) in the wheat field to the sins in man. Corn cockles have been planted by the devil, and since we do not know weed from wheat until the Last Day, the true Christian should be vigilant and watch for the corn cockles within himself every day (Beck, 1872) – rather than believing that it is possible to get rid of sin by joining an association.
That the IM eventually embraced the temperance cause was the result of brokerage by translators from the Copenhagen KIM between the international movement and rural incumbents.
In 1895, a group of pastors and laymen from the circles around KIM founded Danish Blue Cross in Copenhagen with inspiration from the international Blue Cross organization. International Blue Cross was introduced by Copenhagen theologians in articles published in the 1880s and 1890s (Dalhoff, 1893; Petersen, 1886). Blue Cross leader Arnold Bovet then visited the Copenhagen evangelicals in the late 1880s (Lange, 1920: 6).
Key figures in the KIM milieu actively sought to integrate Calvinist ideas of social work and self-organization into the Lutheran context (Sevelsted, 2018). They envisioned a society built on voluntary religious organizations in which Danish society and international revivalist currents would be mutually adjusted to create a self-organized society built on faith. Blue Cross and similar organizations such as YMCA, Church Army, and Salvation Army were part of such visions.
Charlotte Sannom (1846–1923), one of two women who were part of the first board of the Blue Cross (in 1895) emphasized temperance as a moral mission. As chairperson of the White Band women’s temperance organization, she emphasized that women should not imitate men but rather fight for ‘purity in life and thought, soberness, and justice for the weak’ (cited in Vammen, 2023). However, to receive a national following for their moral mission, the Blue Cross would have to accommodate rural conservative Christians who rejected the temperance cause, Calvinism (Eriksen, 1988).
The very choice of adopting the Blue Cross organizational template was made to signal the organization’s Christian foundation; to ‘overcome prejudice in the congregation’ as one of the founders put it (Lange, 1920: 7, all translations are mine). The chairman from 1900, pastor Niels Juhl, was a good fit in terms of habitus: He was chosen because of his good relations with the rural Home Mission and his non-confrontational style (Lange, 1920: 10). Blue Cross would also exclude rivalling Methodists and Baptists from leadership positions, and Pentecostalists were denied membership (Annual Report, 1910: 24, 31f).
To accommodate the ‘vigilance framing’ of sin, the leadership of Blue Cross would argue that even if they focused on a particular sin, abstinence could never guarantee absolution. It was only a means to achieving the real goal: the conversion of people to God (Members’ Magazine, 1900: 19). The organization would further accommodate the rural incumbent in terms of ritual: in order not to pose as a religious competitor, the temperance pledge (løfte) was rebranded as a secular-sounding temperance ‘declaration’ (erklæring) (Lange, 1920: 11), the initiation ceremony was kept to a minimum (Members’ Magazine, 1902: 52), and public confessions should be ‘sober and truthful. Exaggerations and ornaments should be shunned like the plague’ (Lange, 1905: 181).
Finally, the urban brokers would seek to translate the movement in accordance with the central Lutheran doxa of ‘justification by faith alone’, while accusations of self-righteousness and ‘law-Christianity’ were refuted: members of the secular temperance movement indeed often became proud, it was admitted, but this was exactly the reason why the temperance work should be placed in the hands of solid believers who knew that abstinence did not in itself provide absolution (Members’ Magazine, 1900: 17–20, 1902: 49ff, 1904: 109, 1915: 169f). Translations of international Blue Cross publications helped make the case: a key 1879 text by founder L.L. Rochat cited Paul (1 Cor. 6:12): ‘All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient’ (Rochat, 1912: 5), in other words, Blue Cross was not advocating un-Lutheran ‘Law Christianity’ but rather a pragmatic solution to a moral-religious crisis.
The brokers’ cultural and organizational accommodation strategies proved successful, as the movement was adopted by rural conservatives. As early as 1902, Blue Cross was granted permission by IM to use their chapels (Members’ Magazine, 1902: 55). In 1908, a home missionary at the annual meeting was able to declare that ‘the ice has been broken’ (Annual Report, 1908: 13). This is reflected in the membership numbers which swiftly increased in the rural mainland of Jutland during the first decades of the 20th century (Sevelsted, 2017).
Different from the consecutive translations of the Calvinist movement aiming to become a secular movement resonant with rural progressives, the KIM managed to accommodate rural evangelical doxa regarding ritual and teachings, and achieve a mutual adjustment in which central elements – the special association, the temperance declaration and the temperance meetings – survived: by compromising on form, the radical core of the movement was maintained.
The Urban Progressives: Failed and Self-Translations
The urban progressive translation story is largely one of failure. The SNA field analysis showed that the urban progressive space was occupied by the NIOGT with ties to the democratically progressive Liberal Party (top-left quadrant in figures 2–4). Conversely, there were no ties to the emerging Social Democratic movement. The leadership of the NIOGT was dominated by craftsmen business owners who recruited labourers to the temperance cause. An estimated 75% of those organized in the NIOGT belonged to the working classes (Eriksen, 1992). Why did no one succeed in translating the movement to be comprehensible to the urban-progressive, and now incumbent, Social Democrats?
Like rural progressives, early Social Democrats promoted an agenda of democracy and social justice. While not anti-religious, the party was inspired by the German Gotha programme that declared religion to be a private matter (Lahme, 1976). Social progress would not come about through charity but through structural change of society, that is, the abolishment of capitalism. In this sense, temperance was largely viewed as typical bourgeois philanthropy.
A few leading Social Democrats would argue the temperance cause but not as part of the party platform: Social Democratic member of parliament, Peter Sabroe (1867–1913), and Social Democratic minister of social affairs (1924–1926) and education (1929–1935), Frederik Borgbjerg (1866–1936), were both temperance adherents, but were not central figures in any temperance organization. Sabroe was known for his religiosity, pragmatic politics and moral outrage over the conditions of children and the elderly but no ideologue capable of making the cause resonate with the emerging class consciousness of workers (Voss, 2022). Borgbjerg was mostly silent on the subject.
The party also lacked female voices in leadership positions that could otherwise be expected to link temperance and women’s social conditions. But figures like Nina Bang (1866–1928), Social Democratic minister of education (1924–1926) and the world’s first parliamentary elected female minister, were equally sceptical of separate single-issue organizations as such issues should be viewed in the light of the general class struggle in society (Christensen, 2023). The movement thus lacked translators that could integrate temperance with socialist doctrine.
On top of the emerging socialist doxa that resonated with structural transformation rather than philanthropy and self-help, urban workers had also been brought up with the doxa of Lutheranism that demanded that moral change should come about unforced and from within. Moreover, Danish workers had traditionally consumed light beer and even temperance adherents were reluctant to renounce this ‘temperate’ consumption.
The NIOGT (est. 1880) did in fact translate core beliefs of the movement to accommodate the mores of Danish workers. The temperance templars accommodated the workers’ affinity for beer by allowing the consumption of light beer, while promoting abstinence from the consumption of the stronger industrially produced Bavarian beer.
The NIOGT, however, were structurally ill-suited as translators because the organization was controlled by employers who could hardly develop a socialist translation of the movement. The biographical data available on the three most influential chairmen of the organization in the period (1892–1934) reveal that they all had ties to the employer-dominated Liberal Party (Grønvold, 1942). While the growing socialist movement could have attempted to co-opt the organization, socialist leaders chose different strategies.
In 1889, Social Democrat and later MP (1895–1932) A.C. Meyer (1858–1938) co-founded The Abstinence Society (Afholdssamfundet) along with Social-Liberal MP Herman Trier (1845–1925). The society sought to convert workers to temperance mainly through education and enlightenment. Meyer (1891) sought to perform a translation by describing the temperance movement as a tributary to the great river that was the workers’ movement. The society did not manage to attract many followers.
In 1903, socialists launched a coordinated attack on the NIOGT, urging workers organized here to join the Verdandi organization, established the same year on the template of the Swedish Social Democratic temperance organization by the same name (Eriksen, 1992). While the organization did weaken the NIOGT, it only managed to organize a small number of workers.
At the same time, Social Democrats pursued another organizational ‘temperance’ translation strategy. This consisted in changing focus from consumption habits to modes of production: the socialists started their own cooperative brewery in 1902 to compete with the established capitalist breweries. Here, they would produce weak temperance beer as well as stronger industrial beer (Eriksen, 1992).
However, the most successful urban-progressive translations would consist of a strategic self-translation by the socialists. Just as the rural-conservative incumbent IM had presented themselves as a de facto temperance organization (faith in God would lead to abstinence), so did the urban-progressive socialist incumbent. In 1903, shoemaker N.C. Christensen (lower house MP 1903–1932) expressed what seems to have been the prevalent attitude among the Social Democrats: moderation would come about as the result of workers becoming organized and achieving greater social esteem as a class, as they rallied and educated themselves within the socialist movement: ‘Once the socialist state is here, the era of alcoholism will be over’ (Social-Demokraten, 1903). Social Democrats argued that the labour movement was indeed a temperance movement since it had a civilizing and thus moderating effect on workers (Meyer, 1891).
The urban progressives thus never developed a translation strategy that would enable temperance to resonate with the doxa of class struggle. The strategy of education and the association of the movement with employers weakened the cause. Temperance was not perceived as a means toward emancipation for workers, rather socialism was a means towards temperance but with no need for separate action.
Given that the reformist socialists would soon become the central political power, the failure to translate the movement to this incumbent would prove fateful. Today, only Blue Cross survives as a service provider to the state, backed by a rural revivalist constituency (Sevelsted, 2017).
Conclusion and Discussion
The adoption pattern of the Danish temperance movement was counter-intuitive if one perceives it from the assumption that diffusion and translation of movements hinge on similarities in cultural beliefs between transmitters and adopters: Rural progressives first adopted the highly evangelical movement while rural conservatives rejected it – only to later become its most ardent supporters.
Introducing the field-translation approach allows us to make sense of this pattern as its vocabulary of field, capital, habitus and doxa is well suited for interpreting unsettled and fragmented cases in which multiple adopters struggle to translate a movement and achieve resonance with central beliefs of their adherents. Moreover, a field-translation approach allows researchers to apply mixed methods to understand both structural and agentic dimensions of translation and diffusion processes. Methods such as Social Network Analysis and Multiple Correspondence Analysis can assist in outlining the structure of fragmented fields and thus identify adoption patterns that can consequently be explained using interpretive methods.
Having applied this approach, the Danish adoption pattern of the temperance movement can be interpreted as the result of emerging cultural resonance or dissonance between, on the one hand, the doxa of competing movements in specific positions within a field of moral reform dominated by rural–urban and progressive–conservative divides and, on the other hand, the translation strategies applied to achieve different types of resonance.
While Lutheran doxa – stating that moral change should come about through individual conviction rather than be enforced from the outside through moral techniques and organizations – were widely shared at the turn of the 20th century in Denmark, they were interpreted differently within different positions in the field, allowing for specific translations of the temperance cause to resonate with specific positions.
The success or failure of certain strategies cannot be attributed to either the structure of the field or the agency of translators but rather to the meeting between the two. Whereas strategies of mutual adjustment worked only in the urban evangelical setting, the translation to the progressive and the conservative rural contexts required accommodation to local doxa. Progressives framed temperance as a social and democratic issue whereas conservative translations required an accommodation to Lutheran doxa concerning religious-moral techniques and rituals.
Urban progressive Social Democrats lacked translators that could go beyond educational efforts and make class struggle doxa resonate with temperance. Whereas urban evangelicals managed to win over rural evangelicals by framing temperance as a means to conversion, to Social Democrats ‘conversion’ to socialism was the means to a temperate population in a socialist society.
In general, cultural resonance or dissonance in fragmented fields of multiple adopters can thus be understood by considering how cultural doxa are represented differently according to positions within a given field and how translators manage to translate key dimensions of the movement to address these positions. As in field theory in general, not one single cause carries the explanatory burden. Rather, resonance is the result of ‘field effects’ as actors struggle to position themselves and their movements.
Approaching translation processes from a field-perspective allows the researcher to nuance the ‘resonance dilemma’ that presents activists with the binary choice of either compromising their mission to achieve resonance or continuing to push radical frames but then remain irrelevant (Ferree, 2003). Doxa is not only related to ideational ‘content’ but also ritual and performances and, as the case of the translation of the Blue Cross shows, relinquishing the latter may allow an organization to remain radical on the former. Organizational accommodation, therefore, need not equal organizational hypocrisy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the following grants: ERC Starting Grant: 101114850 MORALITES.