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A great deal of the opposition rhetoric revolved around the metaphor offighting the government. The
conciliatory language of the pro-negotiation side is absent here. Instead, union-government relations are
framed as an endless struggle:
Now I'm no' naive enough to think that at the end of the day ... there'll
be nae redundancies. I realize there would be. But at the same time, the
fight here, the thing that's kept us together is the fact that we've decided
that not one of these sections will close down. (UCS transcripts: 10)
I think myself it's a terrible mistake to listen to Kelly because Kelly's
ideas divide to me, are nae to us, no' in the fight that we 've put up, that I
don't, the fight that we 've put up is quite simple. (UCS transcripts: 10)
You're no fighting the Government, you're only fightin ' private
enterprise. The government's aff the hook. He's given this job getting
them off the hook. (UCS transcripts: 15)
Jimmy, mainly because we 're in afight against the government and
they're attempting to do away with the Upper, with the shipbuilding in
the Upper Reaches .... (UCS transcripts: 18)
It disnae matter what plan you're doing, or what development of the
plan, if it in any way attacks the livelihood of our fellow workers then
we 'll fight it and fight it again. (UCS transcripts: 26)
Thus, fighting imagery was common in the discourse of members of the faction opposing negotiation. It
captures their assessment of the problem, namely, that confrontation with the government and private
capital was the real issue, and the stewards' goal should be to defend the union brotherhood.2 This, of
course, was not the position of the stewards in favor of negotiation (see Table 3), who used imagery more
appropriate to talks-i.e. pressure metaphors.
Table 2 about here
Taken-for-granted categories
Questions of the reflexivity of social movement culture speak to issues of cultural coherence. If
movement participants are continually reevaluating and openly questioning each other's tropes and other
rhetorical practices, then conceiving of culture as internally coherent and intersubjectively homogenous is
