Reframing the Community: How and Why Member Participation Shifts in the Face of Change.

Abstract

How and why do people reframe their understanding of the communities and organizations to which they belong? I draw on the case of a collegiate religious fellowship that moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine how individuals' frames and participation patterns evolved as their community underwent a collective shift. I argue that reframing is triggered by temporal disconnect between past frames and present circumstances, present circumstances and imagined futures, or all three. My findings add nuance to existing theorizing on how members' frames shape participation by revealing how positive frames that sustain high levels of participation in "settled times" can become a liability in "unsettled times." My findings have relevance for understanding participation trajectories in a variety of group contexts, and advance theorizing on micro-level framing as a dynamic, fundamentally temporal process.