Civil Society and Crisis: Culture, Discourse, and the Rodney King Beating

Narrative methods are used to analyze the cultural dynamics of civil society through a comparison of African-American and "main-stream" newspaper coverage of the Rodney King crisis in Los Angeles. The newspapers' different narrative constructions affected the selection and interpretation of significant crisis events, shaped social expectations about how the crisis would be resolved, and constrained the range of symbolic strategies available to local political elites. Through and application of narrative methods, this case demonstrates how the analysis of plot, character, and genre can help explain the interplay between the analytic and concrete forms of culture and the dynamics of social problems and social change more broadly.