When Narratives Become a "We": Formalizing Narrative WEME as a Process Theory of Collective Actorhood

Why do some circulating narratives remain diffuse fields of meaning-making while others help constitute a recognizable collective actor? Research already explains narrative-to-action processes, collective-action motives, communicative actorhood, cultural transmission, and feedback. What remains underspecified is their coupling within a prospectively bounded population of changing communicative variants and a selective return path from attributed outcomes to identifiable content components. This article provides the first formal English-language academic formulation of narrative WEME, one of three WEME modes introduced in Persian in Man, Manam [I Am Who I Am] (Mohammad Hosseini, 2025). Narrative WEME is defined as a time-indexed, meso-level communicative process in which a traceable lineage preserves a motivated identity–action schema—Why, What, Who, and How—and becomes coupled to audience-legible enactment and audience-specific collective attribution, before being reproduced or revised across carriers. Seven graded evidentiary thresholds distinguish WEME formation and persistence from exposure, virality, coordinated behavior, or formal organization. The diagnostic claim concerns the return path: consequences attributed to “us” and linked to an enacted narrative role should selectively alter the reproduction, transformation, recombination, fission, institutionalization, or decay of later variants. Seven falsifiable propositions, boundary conditions, and a longitudinal research program test WEME against integrated collective-action, diffusion, cultural-evolution, narrative, and communicative-constitution accounts. The framework explains how communication can make a collective socially addressable without assuming a literal group mind, a fixed narrative, or universal audience consensus. Priority note: The WEME construct was first introduced in the Persian-language book Man, Manam [I Am Who I Am] (Mohammad Hosseini, 2025 [1404 SH]). This preprint provides the first formal English-language academic formulation of WEME’s narrative mode. Preprint status: This manuscript has not undergone peer review.