Being the Change: Prefiguration and Moral Exclusion in a Refugee Relief Organization

Abstract

Many social movement organizations embrace a prefigurative mandate, enacting a desired future of social equality in the way they organize. While researchers have long recognized the difficulties these organizations face in realizing their egalitarian pursuits, the dynamics underlying a recurring puzzle remain unclear: how members of organizations explicitly committed to equality can negotiate meanings in their micro-level interactions in ways that cumulatively produce exclusionary dynamics. Our longitudinal qualitative field study of a refugee relief organization draws on an interactional framing perspective to explain this puzzle. We identify and theorize a phenomenon we term “moral exclusion”—the marginalization of heterogeneous perspectives through moral frames—even as members uphold an explicit commitment to equality. We elaborate the interactional dynamics through which moral exclusion emerges and becomes entrenched over time. Our model of moral exclusion has direct implications for literature on prefigurative organizing and interactional framing, while also offering conceptual clarity regarding broader organizational processes such as silencing and decoupling.