From margin to mainstream

"In this dissertation, I examine the process by which social causes go from margin to mainstream--that is, how ideas once considered undesirable and unimportant become accepted as norms, either by a specific target audience or by society at large. I investigate the case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which advocated for debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries. This highly successful effort attracted a wide variety of powerful supporters, from Pope John Paul II and Bono (the musician) to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Not only did it succeed in reforming international financial policy; it also tangibly set the stage for a variety of visible successor initiatives that have expanded resources and support from western countries to combat issues of global poverty. I combine scholarship on innovation and its diffusion with theoretical perspectives from performance studies to trace the series of interactions by which actors of (generally) lower status were able to convince more powerful institutions and individuals to take on the idea of debt cancellation as their own. The major argument of this study is about transforming the politics of scale inherent to current thinking about intentional social change efforts. I attempt to counter unrealistic expectations of about the magnitude and speed of social change by identifying the many complex forms of agency involved in such efforts, and delineating their relationship to the overall process by which a new idea becomes normative. Criticizing dominant trends in social entrepreneurship literature (which tends to focus mostly on the agency of 'heroic' individual leaders) and social movements literature (which tends to focus on collective agency), I frame the pursuit of social change as a granular, socially-embedded and contingent process that is always incomplete. Small negotiative performances between actors of unequal power, can, in the best of cases, create openings for further steps forward towards transformation of existing structures."--Leaves iii-iv.