Process Of Collective Action Research Articles

Polarization and hate speech based on fuzzy logic and transformers: the case of the 2023 Spanish general elections

ABSTRACT Affective polarization in the digital debate of the Spanish presidential election campaign (2023), following the sudden call of the Spanish president on July 23, was measured. Using transformers, topics were detected, and sentiment analysis techniques were applied in the political debate during the elections to measure the emotional valence of the debate. The topics that dominate most of the debate are Candidates (n1 = 17170) and Opposition (n3 = 15327). These topics also show the highest typical polarization deviances. Based on affective polarization, a polarization measure (JDJ) grounded in the fuzzy sets was applied. The topic activism has the highest polarization value, while the topic of voting has the lowest. This analysis highlights a dichotomy that defines the Spanish political reality: the positive image of conventional political participation in the face of the rejection of collective action processes.

The use of intersectional tactics by Tunisia’s multicultural movement to build social capital and sustain collective action: It is not what we say or think that defines us but what we do

ABSTRACT Multicultural movements can pursue strategies, like utilizing intersectionality, to overcome collective action problems created by diversity. Scholarship has shown how intersectionality has inspired the creation of common ideological frames among marginalized groups who come to see their causes as intertwined, but such rhetoric is insufficient for sustaining collective action when social capital is lacking. This is relevant in contexts where activists have never collaborated such as a democratic transition. Activists need to see that others practice what they preach so that trust can develop across communal networks. Intersectionality, as I will demonstrate, also inspires social-movement tactics that target intersectional minorities as beneficiaries and encourages activists from different backgrounds to coordinate resources. This builds social capital by strengthening trust and reciprocity across social networks – thereby, sustaining collective action. To demonstrate this, I analysed collective action processes within Tunisia’s multicultural movement after the revolution in 2010 by using historical process tracing and elite interviews. I show how a diverse movement representing women, racial minorities, migrants, and the LGBTQ community utilized intersectional tactics to build social capital and sustain collective action during a democratic transition.

Extremist, Multivocal, or Deliberative: Unpacking the Communicative Processes of Collective Action

Extremist, Multivocal, or Deliberative: Unpacking the Communicative Processes of Collective Action

Sequía, megaproyecto cervecero y agenda ciudadana del agua en Baja California

This article examines the processes of collective action for the defense of water in the Mexicali region. The study emphasizes on a recent episode that induced a socio-environmental conflict related to the Constellation Brands brewing megaproject, with intensive water use in a region experiencing prolonged drought. To analyze this issue, the conceptual framework of Democratic Environmental Governance and the Action Research methodology under a qualitative approach were used.

'Not a party to this crime': The reciprocal constitution of identity and morality by signatories of the Academics for Peace petition in Turkey.

In this paper, we examine how social identity, moral obligation and the relationship between the two shaped support for the 2016 Academics for Peace petition in Turkey. We examine the pre-trial statements of nine defendants charged for signing the petition and appearing in court on the same day in December 2018. We first conduct an inductive thematic analysis on one statement, and then, using the themes from this analysis, we conducted a deductive thematic analysis on the remaining eight statements. In line with the existing studies, we find considerable evidence that social identity and moral obligation are invoked as key reasons for signing in this highly repressive context. However, rather than these being separate factors, the two are reciprocally constitutive. That is, social identities define moral obligations and, at the same time, enacting moral obligations defines identity (both the position of the individual in the group and the nature of the group in the world). In discussion, we consider the broader implications of a moralized view of social identities for our understanding of both collective action and social identity processes more generally.

The implementation of compulsory relationships and sex education in English secondary schools: qualitative research in the 2022–23 school year

ABSTRACT The quality of sex education varies. In England from 2020, the government attempted to improve provision by making lessons a statutory requirement. We assessed implementation in 25 secondary schools in 2022–23, framed by May’s general theory of implementation. This identifies processes of sense-making, cognitive participation, collective action and reflexive monitoring, influenced by an intervention’s capability, stakeholder potential (individual and collective commitment), and institutional capacity (norms, and material and cognitive resources). Interview data from staff leading relationships and sex education (RSE) were coded thematically informed by May’s concepts. Those leading implementation ‘made sense’ of statutory guidance, finding it relevant and clear. ‘Cognitive participation’ among participants was strong, promoted by individual support for RSE but undermined by social norms prioritising academic attainment, limited skills among non-specialist teachers, and lack of ‘collective commitment’ among some staff and students. ‘Collective action’ varied across schools, influenced by availability of material resources and specialist staff. Schools undertook internal the ‘reflexive monitoring’ of provision, supported by school leaders’ awareness work would be assessed by government inspectors. On its own, statutory status is likely insufficient to achieve a step-change in RSE implementation. Other forms of support may be needed including training and offering support to more specialist teachers.

Afterword: The Refugee Tales Walking Inquiry into Immigration Detention

The purpose of this afterword is to provide an update on the recent actions of the Refugee Tales project against the background of new developments in UK policies on asylum and immigration. The afterword reports on the parliamentary launch of the Refugee Tales Walking Inquiry into Immigration Detention. It then considers the implications of the UK government’s proposal to offshore asylum processing to Rwanda and, more broadly, of the new powers to detain and deport established by the Illegal Migration Bill. The afterword details the development, process, and findings of the Walking Inquiry and shows how those findings relate to and extend the remit of the official Public Inquiry into ‘the mistreatment of individuals who were detained at Brook House Immigration Removal Centre in 2017’. In conclusion, it comments on the importance of Refugee Tales’ practice of walking, as a process of collective action and deliberation, and as counter to the politics of hostility.

Market-oriented solutions for groundwater commons through collective-action

Groundwater scarcity poses threats to communities across the globe, and effectively managing those challenges requires designing policy that achieves institutional fit. Collective action is well-suited to match rules with local context, and multiple pathways exist for communities to achieve reductions in groundwater use. To better understand how local conditions influence rule design, we examine two groundwater-reliant communities in the Western US that engaged in collective-action to arrive at distinct groundwater management rules. We consider: what drove stakeholders in Northwestern Kansas (NWKS) and San Luis Valley, Colorado (SLV) to adopt local groundwater policies, and why were different management pathways chosen? Further, why is more heterogeneity observed between local management organizations in SLV as compared to NWKS? To investigate these questions, we employ grounded theory to interpret the rules in reference to local hydro-agro-economic statistics and interviews with stakeholders (n = 19) in each region selected by expert sampling. We find that the additional goals of groundwater rules in SLV, partially driven by key contrasts in the resource system compared to NWKS, and higher resource productivity in SLV, creates both the need for and efficacy of a price-centered policy. Furthermore, variation in the resource systems and associated farm characteristics between subdistricts drives higher heterogeneity in rule design between local management districts in SLV compared to NWKS. More generally, we find the local flexibility afforded through the collective-action process as critical, even if it were to arrive at alternative, non-economic based incentives.

Climate Change-Related Distress Within the Dominant Mental Health Paradigm: Problems, Pitfalls, and a Possible Way Forward

Climate change-related distress (CCRD) is a salient discourse, with contemporary resources for addressing CCRD currently dominated by positivist ideology. Such resources are problematic as they instil individualistic notions of behaviour change to combat climate change and CCRD, oversimplifying the problem and shifting focus away from systemic power imbalances and injustices that overwhelmingly contribute to climate change and CCRD. Addressing CCRD should involve a shift from an individualistic focus to collaborative conversations and frameworks that have the capacity to consider inherently complex issues of cultural and epistemological diversity. One such framework that incorporates non-pathologising understandings of CCRD is the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF). Critical use of the PTMF to describe and support experiences of CCRD can be relevant for marginalised communities as it centres political, social, and relational contexts and assists in the cocreation of meaningful narratives while addressing systemic power imbalances and injustices, thus making way for collective action and empowerment processes for marginalised communities disproportionately affected by anthropogenic climate change.

Rural Women and Collective Action for the Decolonization, Depatriarchalization, and Democratization of Knowledge in Quindío, Colombia

The objective of this research is to describe the processes of collective action that rural women sow in Quindío-Colombia, to advance toward decolonization, depatriarchalization and democratization of knowledge, revealing how women re-exist on their land, make their struggles visible and every day utopias, to make other ways of life possible. The theoretical framework is based on the Epistemologies of the South, as a metaphor for exclusion; it seeks to value the knowledge of the peoples, who during history have systematically suffered dispossession, discrimination, and structural violence, within the framework of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Some issues about gender are linked, diverse Latin American women, black, indigenous, peasant, who in conversation, problematize against patriarchy, the establishment of power relations, inequalities and precariousness processes. The methodology is based on the analysis of situated theories, contemplates the biographical-narrative method and the critical-dialogical method of intercultural translation with social groups of women, which emerge from an immersion in context, from the experiences walked with women who they go on foot’ and who share their daily struggles, their militant pedagogies in rural areas, to write stories in the plural. The qualitative analysis was carried out using the Atlas. Ti software, which made it possible to recognize, through semantic networks, the significance of women’s social, cultural and community practices, their cries for re-existence despite the prevalence of hegemonic discourses, and the construction of emancipatory knowledge that comes from local pedagogical knowledge.

‘Design for policy’ from below: grassroots framing and political negotiation

Whilst design politics is an increasingly topical focus in the design field, in practice, design for policy has been normatively presented as a people-centric approach to public policymaking devoid of political or ideological agendas. Up to now, design for policy has exclusively been conceived as embedded within governmental structures, thus adopting a technocratic, internal, and top-down approach to, and understanding of, public policymaking. We argue that most often, this understanding and practice of design for policy establishes and mediates public problems from the standpoint of the government body addressing those problems. In this paper, we take a new and distinct point of departure to design for policy in which design is implicated in the practice of policymaking from below through processes of collective action. Design for Policy from Below moves from an intra-governmental lens to a negotiated exchange between social actors and government. In turn, this informs strategic collective action required to gain political support and leverage efforts to pressure power structures to acknowledge and adopt policy frames and options. To this end, we examine the conflictual power dynamics and negotiation-based approaches to influencing government policymaking processes and model the messy interplay between government-led policymaking and the activities of social innovators aiming at changing policy outcomes. Finally, we synthesize these insights into a conceptual model offering a novel viewpoint on how we can more critically understand the politics at play in design theory and practice engaged with policymaking.

Commons and Bio-Cultural Learning: An Environmental Humanities View on Evolution, Materiality and Society

This article aims to critically contribute to contemporary commons scholarship, using the lenses of the environmental humanities. Linking existing literature on collective action to a vast amount of literature from both the social sciences and the natural sciences could contribute to a new epistemological framework to understand anthropogenic processes of collective action. Both recent biological evolution theories and ontologically oriented philosophical perspectives have insisted on the endemic collaborative nature of coexistence processes as the embodiment of a larger ecological, material, and cultural whole. Looking at these processes through the lenses of coexistence could potentially reshape commons scholarship, overcoming what I define as the “long shadow of Hardinism,” while simultaneously further stimulating dialogue, and hopefully consilience, between the social and natural sciences.

Introducing the Collective Action Recursive Empowerment (CARE) Model: How Small‐Scale Protests Led to Large‐Scale Collective Action in Armenia's Velvet Revolution

The current study examined the motivations and outcomes of the Armenian Velvet Revolution through the voice of 18 protesters with qualitative interviews, exploring their motivations for joining the collective action, their perceptions of its implementation, and resultant psychological changes. Participants distinguished between individual‐ and group‐level processes and bypassed social divisions through a shared belief in the value of “Rejecting Serzh” (i.e., opposing then President Serzh Sargsyan). Results also illustrated a recursive process of collective action supporting the development of a new theoretical CARE (collective action recursive empowerment) model. The model understands successful social change as a function of both individual and group identity informing collective‐action processes: Smaller acts of protest increase individual feelings of shared group identity and empowerment/efficacy beliefs, thus strengthening motivations for continued protest and making large‐scale collective action achievable. By linking together multiple time points of a collective‐action process in one recursive model, the current work maps out one specific case of successful collective action in recent history, which serves as a basis for broader theoretical generalization and future empirical research.

What Drives the Structural Anchoring of ESD? Network Theory-Based Considerations

The structural anchoring of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) can be considered as a process of collective action. From a network theory perspective, the question arises as to which network structures promote the implementation of ESD in municipalities. Although network analysis has gained some attention in the research on ESD at a transregional level, it still lacks a theoretically grounded study at the municipal level. Against the background of corresponding theoretical and empirical contributions, we therefore present a derivation of relevant hypotheses. More specifically, argue that ESD is more likely to be implemented in municipal networks that feature medium density and intersectoral as well as intermunicipal bridges. Additionally, we assume that highly centralized municipal networks promote the structural anchoring of ESD in the initial phase, with decentralized structures being more conducive the more advanced the implementation. In other words, municipal structures which allow actors from various fields of action and municipalities to communicate with each other and exchange their specific ideas and experiences on a regular basis should foster ESD implementation. Furthermore, focal actors or fields of action may be advantageous for initiating ESD implementation in a municipality, but should lose significance as adaptation processes increase over time.

Organizações sociais civis em tempos de pandemia: um relato a partir do conceito de reconstrução ocupacional coletiva

ABSTRACT Introduction This article reports collective actions developed by participants of two Civil Society Organizations representing people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, located in southern Brazil, during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective To highlight the strategies and actions that comprised part of the collective occupational reconstruction process of the Civil Society Organizations. Therefore, it describes the results of collective processes, based on reflection on the phenomena observed by the authors. Method This is a descriptive, qualitative research based on an experience report. The practices occurred remotely during the pandemic period (March to December 2020). Results It was found that social media platforms contributed to maintain the collective occupations of the group, facilitating the process of collective occupational reconstruction of Civil Society Organizations. Among the used tools, instant messaging and video calling applications stood out, which facilitated the development of collective practices, thus minimizing the impacts of physical distance. Conclusion Social media platforms are powerful resources to maintain collective action and occupational reconstruction processes.

From production to reproduction: Pension strikes and changing characteristics of workers’ collective action in China

Workers in the global South are becoming increasingly sensitive to their pension rights. In recent years, rural migrant workers in China have staged a series of protests to fight for pension protection. Drawing from two in-depth case studies conducted in the Pearl River Delta, we explain why workers staged pension strikes, what these protests looked like, how the employers and the government responded, and how these protests differed from previous strikes. Building upon insights from the sociology of collective action and labour process theory, we formulate a new framework for examining labour protests. In addition to seeing workers’ collective action as defensive or offensive, this framework helps us interpret these actions in relation to the spheres of production and reproduction. It classifies pension strikes in China as defensive actions located in the sphere of reproduction, which are distinct from previous strikes that were either defensive or offensive actions situated in the sphere of production. This synthesised framework assists us in theorising that workers’ protest activities, especially in the global South, are not restricted to the traditional production sphere but can also be found in the reproduction sphere.

Collective action and social capital in family livestock in uruguay

Although the image of dispersed farms and isolated producers prevails over traditional Uruguayan livestock, in the case of family livestock, collective action is a frequent practice and constitutes the economic basis for their permanence and reproduction. The economic, political and social transformations of the 21st century, framed in progressive governments (2005-2019), launched a series of policies that promoted forms of collective action from a vision of integral rural development. This research seeks to contribute to the understanding of the collective action processes of family livestock producers on the North Coast of Uruguay. It proposes to apply Elinor Ostrom's analytical approach to coordination of collective action based on three modes: delegation of power, rule management and learning. The methodology follows three stages that combined different types of information gathering and analysis techniques. The results show the existence in the region of at least 50 groups of family ranchers, which were characterized and represent four categories or types (Integral, Economic, Basic and Productive). Regardless of the type, in all groups the processes of coordination of collective action differ in the degree of maturity reached according to the trajectories traveled. Some show an endogenous process of collective action that reflects a greater involvement of producers, more sustainable organizational processes and greater returns for the rural community and the territory. In others, this process is exogenous, encouraged by public policies, the construction of common objectives being more expensive and social interaction processes difficult. However, in all of them it is evident that the processes of formalization or institutionalization of groups legitimize, in a new context, practices anchored in the lifestyles of family ranchers such as mutual aid or shared management of assets. They are reciprocal practices and relationships that strengthen social capital and, in particular, trust and solidarity, and make it possible to overcome conflicts and crises of collective action. The three modes of coordination of collective action also depend on the social capital of individuals (network of inter-knowledge, educational and political resources, leadership capacity) and the capacity to strengthen collective social capital.

The Role of Online Media in Mobilizing Large-Scale Collective Action

This study investigates the role of online media in mobilizing large-scale collective action. Adopting the theoretical framework of collective action space, we formulated the organizing process of collective action into a model with two dimensions—hierarchy and closure—and analyzed how they influence mobilization. The model was tested against Twitter data collected during the 2020 Hong Kong protest, including a total of 54,365 tweets posted by 14,706 distinct users between 1 May and 31 May 2020. Social networks analysis metrics— k-coreness and brokerage of individual users in their following networks—were employed to quantify the organizing process of the protest and estimate their effects on message virality. The results showed that messages generated by users who occupied peripheral positions (i.e., lower k-coreness) and by those connecting others within closed communities (i.e., lower brokerage) were more likely to diffuse than those generated by central users or those who bridged different communities. That is, online media facilitate mobilization in a decentralized yet fragmented fashion. This article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the current findings and suggests the directions for future research on collective action on online media.

Combining participatory action research and emerging ways of collective action to promote institutional change toward social commitment: Groundings, strategies, and implications of an experience.

This study reports the foundations, strategies, and results of an institutional change experience based on the combination of participatory-action-research and new currents of collective mobilization and political participation. It aimed to achieve the institution's greater social commitment and a more participatory and transparent management. The process took place in a Spanish public university and was promoted and coordinated by a Work Group that emerged from grassroots university community. Collective diagnosis was performed through face-to-face strategies (global, sectorial, and faculty meetings) and virtual tools (web-blog, on-line surveys, shared documents). Collective action combined nonformal with formal institutional participation and applied hybrid activism, self-organization in horizontal structures and integrative conflict management. A sequential process of diagnosis, collective action, and negotiation was implemented. As a result, the university Governing Team, representatives from different sectors and members of the Work Group worked jointly to define several institutional actions that were thereafter launched. Those actions aimed to improve institutional participation and transparency, and greater institutional social commitment. The combination of participatory-action-research and new ways of collective action can be an excellent tool to draw institutions towards greater social engagement, thus contributing to sustainable social change. A model to guide institutional change is drafted.

‘There Is Nothing There for Us and Nothing for the Future’: Deindustrialization and Workplace Occupation, 1981–1982

This article draws on research into three female-led occupations that occurred across central Scotland in 1981 and 1982. The actions at Lee Jeans, Lovable Bra and Plessey Capacitors were each in response to closure and relocation and, crucially in the context of this time period, were at least partly successful in opposing full closure. The piece considers the uses and limitations of mobilization theories in accounting for the collective action that emerged at the plants. Rejecting the individualistic frameworks that place extensive importance on injustice, it is suggested that the immediate impacts of manufacturing decline through the process of deindustrialization were a crucial factor in sustaining the action. Through an analysis of the statements made by the workers, their leaders and supporters at the time, along with an examination of oral-history interview narratives, the argument develops that these disputes were not localized actions at one site against one plant closure. By placing the factories and the workers within the social and economic contexts in which they took action, the research indicated that the process of collective action was dynamic and motivations were inevitably multiple, but that the detrimental impacts of deindustrialization - particularly as they related to the future of the localities - was crucial.