Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Goodrick, Elizabeth

Abstract

Animal rights organizations, in attempting to affect institutional change in industrial animal agriculture, face an institutional mountain. I show how these organizations, though contesting institutions which are highly reified, tacitly endorsed, and historically inertial, leverage emotional experiences and regulation to incrementally move this mountain. Using a grounded qualitative study of interview data from animal rights advocates and archival data generated by animal rights organizations, this study finds that animal rights organizations have encoded both response- and antecedent-focused emotion regulation into two distinct strategies used to garner support for their institutional change project: transgression mining and seed planting. Furthermore, this study expounds upon the role of moral emotional experiences in the individual-level process by which persons alternate into support for animal rights organizations and their goals, here labeled autodidactic frame alignment. Drawing on Goffman’s backstage/frontstage distinction, this study illustrates how emotion’s role in institutional change efforts varies across both level of analysis and areas of interactive life. In doing so, this research adds empirical weight to and extends recent theoretical work expounding upon the emotionally-charged nature of the lived experience of institutions.

Extent

190 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00004645

Format

pdf

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