Constructing Collective Identities For Change With Aesthetic-affective Power: A Rhetorical Approach

Collective identity construction is the mobilizing motor to movement-driven institutional change. Yet, rarely has collective identity construction been understood with regards to its moral-emotional forces, given the heavily skewed attention of extant literature towards cognitive mechanisms. Drawing upon Brown et al.'s (2012) theorization on rhetoric justification, we investigate how institutional entrepreneurs deploy logos-ethos-pathos with their dynamics to mobilize potential followers to take on new collective identities for action and change. We do so by exploring the entrepreneurial discourse of French New Wave in Cahiers du Cinéma. Our findings lay bare three distinctive but intertwined layers of discursivity underpinning New Wave entrepreneurs' collective identity construction, including two-kind textual relation (intratextuality and intertextuality), six-type discursive work (characterizing, interweaving, deconstructing, canonizing, alliancing, and antagonizing), and three-element rhetorical justification (logs, ethos, and pathos underpinning discursive work). In particular, we illustrate the indispensability and inseparability of ethos-pathos to identity-based movement mobilization and institutional change. Our research makes two contributions. First, our study contributes to the identity movements literature by foregrounding the significance of morality and emotionality to the mobilizing mechanism of collective identity construction. Second, our study builds on but goes beyond existing rhetorical research by unpacking the dynamics among logos-ethos-pathos, especially the adrenalizing effects of negative aesthetic-affective power, which ultimately constitute the attractiveness of an anti-institutional "we."