Dynamics Of Collective Action Research Articles

Compound players and emotional arenas: The self-identification of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity in Mexico

After the Mexican ex-president Felipe Calderón declared a ‘war’ against criminal organisations, the number of murders and people reported as disappeared increased steadily in the country. However, the authorities constantly ensured that these crimes occurred exclusively among criminals. This narrative was fractured when, after the murder of his son in 2011, the poet Javier Sicilia started leading the protests of activists, relatives of victims and social organisations from virtually all of Mexico. After some mobilisations, they adopted the name Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD). Following a ‘players and arenas’ understanding of social movements, I analyse the formation of the MPJD as a self-identified compound player. First, I explore the structural and agency elements in the participants’ backgrounds. Then, I discuss how the emotional content of the interactions in public demonstrations influenced their relationships developing a sense of community that fostered their identification as part of the MPJD. Overall, this study advances a micro-level perspective to understand the dynamics of collective action.

It’s getting dark, but we will see: Gaining collective momentum in face of existential environmental threat

Collective action to protect the environment is increasingly moving into the focus of environmental psychology. Also policy makers are well-advised to consider the dynamics of collective environmental action as a vehicle to swift ecological transformations of societies. A sense of collective environmental agency (vs. treating citizens as reluctant consumers) is proposed to drive people supporting collective ecological transformations and engaging in personal and political action against large-scale environmental crises, such as climate change. The Global Environmental Psychology special section, “Responding to the Socio-Ecological Crisis: Collective Action and Activism”, presents nine empirical research articles that help to assess the antecedences and consequences of collective environmental agency. The present commentary discusses what the specific contributions of these papers are to better understand the emergence of collective environmental agency and what their implications are for future research in the field of social environmental psychology.

Inclusive agro-industrial development and sectoral systems of innovation: insights from South Africa

ABSTRACT The agro-industries are widely viewed as important to inclusive industrial development due to their relatively low entry barriers and acessibility to small firms. However, the agro-industries are more technologically complex than commonly assumed. Small and young firms face challenges acquiring capabilities to compete effectively. The paper explores how differing sectoral systems of innovation (SSI) shape patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the agro-industries, and the factors shaping this. It analyses two contrasting South African agro-industrial sectors, maize processing and fresh citrus. It proposes a partial conceptualization of ‘inclusive’ SSIs (ISSIs) as sectoral configurations of actors and institutions that lower entry barriers and narrow capability gaps between small firms and dominant incumbents at the technological frontier. It argues that ISSIs rely on institutions that coordinate innovation-related activities in a manner benefitting small firms and new entrants, by aiding the broad diffusion of relevant technology and capabilities. Alongside state agencies, business associations can play an important role in this regard. It identifies the characteristics of state-business relations and inter-firm dynamics of competition and collective action as important underlying determinants of ISSIs. Thus, the paper highlights the need for attention to sector-level political economy in understanding the diverse outcomes of SSIs.

Fostering Collective Action in a Village-Tank Cascade-Based Community in Sri Lanka: An Illusion or Reality?

Collective action has inevitable importance for sustainable governance of shared resource systems with interactions across multiple social and spatial scales. Village irrigation tanks in Sri Lanka have been recognized as shared resource systems sustainably managed through the collective action of local communities throughout history. Increased population pressure on shared resources and expanded socio-economic relationships over time have led to extended resource-based interactions between people. This occurred beyond village tanks within the broader scale of Village-Tank-Cascade Systems (VTCS), in which village tanks are constituent sub-units. This demands the cross-scale collective action of local communities for sustainable governance of VTCS, which has become a challenging endeavor in the current context. This case study explores the dynamics of collective action across multiple social and spatial scales within a VTCS by identifying existing collective action arenas, drivers, and limitations for the local community to engage in collective action through a mixed-methods approach with reference to the Medde Rambewa cascade system in the dry zone of Sri Lanka. Findings reveal that collective action arenas of VTCS-based local communities occur in response to common challenges posed by disturbed environmental equilibria and as a part of people’s lifestyle, with outcomes contributing to climate change adaptation, livelihood support, risk or emergency preparedness, and promoting social identity. Economic incentives, rules, and fines imposed by Farmers’ Organizations (FOs) were found to be drivers of currently adopted collective activities at the scale of village tanks. While collective action prevails beyond the scale of individual village tanks when governed by community institutions, shared resource uses, and social relationships among actors, individualistic resource uses occur in the absence of legitimate regulatory mechanisms. The study highlights the need for legitimate, scale-sensitive solutions to long-overdue common problems experienced by VTCS-based communities in order to foster meaningful collective action on a broader scale.

Agroecological transition strategies and collective action dynamics within geographical indication systems: case study of the Loire valley wine basin

Agroecological transition strategies and collective action dynamics within geographical indication systems: case study of the Loire valley wine basin

The specialization of informal social control in a selective community: Fighting in the National Hockey League from 1947 to 2019

Decentralized sanctioning arises from a demand for governance that is not adequately provided by the state or another strong and centralized institution. While the dynamics of collective action and sanctioning have been well-examined theoretically, experimentally, and empirically, this work typically assumes community membership is a given. In selective or elite communities, pro-social behavior of one kind or another may be a prerequisite of community membership, which may create perverse incentives for the implementation of peer-sanctions. This article quantitatively examines this phenomenon in the case of professional ice hockey, a highly selective community where fist-fighting between players has long existed as a form of self-help for players to address rule infractions or violent play otherwise unaddressed by officials. An empirical examination of over 70 years of player statistics and play-by-play data from the National Hockey League shows not only the evolution of this system from one of peer-sanctioning to one of specialized-sanctioning, as might be predicted from experimental results showing the favorability and efficacy of more centralized punishment regimes, but also reveals how specialization has led to self-serving sanctions. Less-skilled players who are presumably hired to fight are disproportionately likely to participate in fights that appear to occur for non-retaliatory reasons, and more likely to fight one another in a bid to maintain their status and reputation as sanctioners, and consequently their membership in an elite community.

A Computational Turn in Policy Process Studies: Coevolving Network Dynamics of Policy Change

The past three decades of policy process studies have seen the emergence of a clear intellectual lineage with regard to complexity. Implicitly or explicitly, scholars have employed complexity theory to examine the intricate dynamics of collective action in political contexts. However, the methodological counterparts to complexity theory, such as computational methods, are rarely used and, even if they are, they are often detached from established policy process theory. Building on a critical review of the application of complexity theory to policy process studies, we present and implement a baseline model of policy processes using the logic of coevolving networks. Our model suggests that an actor’s influence depends on their environment and on exogenous events facilitating dialogue and consensus-building. Our results validate previous opinion dynamics models and generate novel patterns. Our discussion provides ground for further research and outlines the path for the field to achieve a computational turn.

Law and the Moral Dynamics of Collective Action

Law and the Moral Dynamics of Collective Action

Networks of commitment: The dynamics of collective action

Networks of commitment: The dynamics of collective action

The Social Dynamics of Collective Action: Evidence from the Diffusion of the Swing Riots, 1830–1831

Social unrest often begins suddenly and spreads quickly. What is the information that drives its diffusion? How is this information transmitted? And who responds to this information? We present a g...

Revealing the manifestations of neoliberalism in academia: Academic collective action in Turkey

Academic Collective Action (ACA) stands as a small-scale collective action for social change toward liberation, independence and equity in academia. Academic collectives in Turkey, as an example of ACA, prefigure building academia outside the university by emphasizing the extent to which neoliberal academia has already prepared the groundwork for more recent waves of oppression. In this research, we aim to reveal the manifestations of neoliberalism in ACA as captured with prominent social/political psychological concepts of collective action. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 dismissed academics to understand the social and political psychological processes in academic collectives. The narrations of ACA were accompanied by manifestations of neoliberalism as experienced by dismissed academics. We found that, as follows from the existing conceptual tools of collective action, neoliberalism serves as an embedded contextual factor in the process of ACA. This becomes mostly visible for grievances but also for collective identifications, politicization, motivations, finding/allocating resources and sustaining academic collectives. We provide a preliminary basis to understand the role of neoliberalism in organization, mobilization and empowerment dynamics of collective action.

“We Roll our Sleeves up and get to Work!”: Portraits of Collective Action and Neighborhood Change in Atlanta's West End

Collective action is one strategy urban neighborhood residents use to address community issues. However, collective action dynamics in rapidly changing urban neighborhoods are not well understood. This study used photovoice to examine perspectives on collective action and neighborhood change among residents of an urban neighborhood experiencing redevelopment in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Residents indicated that place attachment motivated and reinforced participation in collective action efforts to address neighborhood issues and to reconstruct narratives that challenged place stigmatization. Findings suggest that residents have heterogeneous perspectives about neighborhood change and local development, and simultaneously balance desires for neighborhood improvement with concerns about displacement, gentrification, and equitable development.

Financial incentives to poor countries promote net emissions reductions in multilateral climate agreements

Financial incentives to poor countries promote net emissions reductions in multilateral climate agreements

Revealing the Manifestations of Neoliberalism in Academia: Academic Collective Action in Turkey

Academic Collective Action (ACA) stands as a small-scale collective action for social change toward liberation, independence and equity in academia. Academic collectives in Turkey, as an example of ACA, prefigure building academia outside the university by emphasizing the extent to which neoliberal academia has already prepared the groundwork for more recent waves of oppression. In this research, we aim to reveal the manifestations of neoliberalism in ACA as captured with prominent social/political psychological concepts of collective action. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 dismissed academics to understand the social and political psychological processes in academic collectives. The narrations of ACA were accompanied by manifestations of neoliberalism as experienced by dismissed academics. We found that, as follows from the existing conceptual tools of collective action, neoliberalism serves as an embedded contextual factor in the process of ACA. This becomes mostly visible for grievances but also for collective identifications, politicization, motivations, finding/allocating resources and sustaining academic collectives. We provide a preliminary basis to understand the role of neoliberalism in organization, mobilization and empowerment dynamics of collective action.

Dynamics of collective action to conserve a large common-pool resource

A pressing challenge for coming decades is sustainable and just management of large-scale common-pool resources including the atmosphere, biodiversity and public services. This poses a difficult collective action problem because such resources may not show signs that usage restraint is needed until tragedy is almost inevitable. To solve this problem, a sufficient level of cooperation with a pro-conservation behavioural norm must be achieved, within the prevailing sociopolitical environment, in time for the action taken to be effective. Here we investigate the transient dynamics of behavioural change in an agent-based model on structured networks that are also exposed to a global external influence. We find that polarisation emerges naturally, even without bounded confidence, but that for rationally motivated agents, it is temporary. The speed of convergence to a final consensus is controlled by the rate at which the polarised clusters are dissolved. This depends strongly on the combination of external influences and the network topology. Both high connectivity and a favourable environment are needed to rapidly obtain final consensus.

“We Shall Overcome”: First-Person Plural Pronouns From Search Volume Data Predict Protest Mobilization Across the United States

Collective action is a key driver of social and political change within societies. So far, the main factor mobilizing individuals into collective action remains the extent to which they feel identified with a protesting group (i.e., social identification). Although the link between social identification and collective action is well-established, current evidence relies mostly on self-report data. To tackle this issue, we combined real-life protest counts in the United States (2017–2020) with online search data (Google Trends) for pronouns indicating a “group” mind-set (first-person plural pronouns; e.g., “we,” “us”). Time series analyses indicated that weekly fluctuations in searches (N = 164) predict both protest and protester counts over time. Confirmatory mixed models then showed that a 1% increase in pronoun searches was linked with +13.67% protests (95% CI [4.02, 23.32]) and +47.45% protesters (95% CI [26.54, 68.36]) the following week. These original results have important implications for the ecological study and quantification of collective action dynamics in psychology.

Resisting the coastal squeeze through village associations? Comparing environmental, organizational, and political challenges in Philippine seaweed‐growing communities

AbstractThis article investigates collective action dynamics and local politics amidst Philippine seaweed‐growing communities. Government agencies and civil society organizations generally encourage collaboration at village level through the formation of cooperatives and associations, often on the assumption that it facilitates the translation of economic growth into rural poverty reduction. Here, we explain how the formation of associations is entangled with the local and central state politics. We argue that civil society initiatives cannot be analysed separately from local and community‐level politics. This contribution reveals a gap between the objectives of rural, coastal associations, and the organizational capacities of communities to sustain such initiatives. Utilizing community support as a means to compensate for market and government failures does not only depend on a facilitative policy environment and start‐up support but also on household‐level capabilities. It also demonstrates that in addition to the interests of big business and national‐level politics, village‐level politics can obstruct effective and sustained implementation of value chain interventions.

Cascading disasters, information cascades and continuous time models of domino effects

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the dynamics through which cascading disasters evolve, spread and come to control in situations of uncertainty and vulnerability. The framework first establishes the idea that disasters are inherently a social phenomenon rooted in the social structure and reflects the processes of social change. The core of such social structures and processes is the mechanism of collective action. We then explain the ways in which formal mathematical models in general, and game theoretical models in particular, can help analyze the dynamics of collective action, detect the core parameters through which they evolve and, in particular, identify the interactions between these parameters. We show that these dynamics may have different forms of development, which are usually non-linear and cyclic. The framework also emphasizes the major role of information and social learning in these dynamics.

Combining social media affordances for organising collective action

AbstractSocial media provide new opportunities for supporting the dynamics of collective action (CA), allowing for the mobilisation of people into debates and involving them in new forms of collective decision making. Although current studies focus on opportunities offered by social media for collective action, there is still a need to deepen the understanding of how social media support the organisation of CA and to study the effects of individual actions performed on social media in complex organisational settings. We here explore how social media are used to manage CA by the Italian political movement Movimento Cinque Stelle, using the concept of affordances as the conceptual framing. Based on the qualitative case analyses, our study contributes to the knowledge base by identifying a typology of nine affordances supporting CA and exploring how the combined actualisations of some affordances of the typology create antecedents of the fundamental processes of CA. On the basis of the study analysis, we suggest a model to describe how social media support CA through affordances, their combinations, and the creation of antecedents and then formulate implications for research and practice.

Charity vs. Revolution: Effective Altruism and the Systemic Change Objection

Effective Altruism (EA) encourages affluent people to make significant donations to improve the wellbeing of the world’s poor, using quantified and observational methods to identify the most efficient charities. Critics argue that EA is inattentive to the systemic causes of poverty and underestimates the effectiveness of individual contributions to systemic change. EA claims to be open to systemic change but suggests that systemic critiques, such as the socialist critique of capitalism, are unhelpfully vague and serve primarily as hypocritical rationalizations of continued affluence. I reformulate the systemic change objection, rebut the charges of vagueness and bad faith and argue that charity may not be worth doing at all from a purely altruistic perspective. In order to take systemic change seriously, EA must repudiate its narrowly empiricist approach, embrace holistic, interpretive social analysis and make inevitably controversial judgments about the complex dynamics of collective action. These kinds of evidence and judgment cannot be empirically verified but are essential to taking systemic change seriously. EA is thereby forced to sacrifice its a-political approach to altruism. I also highlight the importance of quotidian, extra-political contributions to perpetuating or changing harmful social practices. Radical efforts to resist, subvert and reconstruct harmful social practices, such as those involved in economic decision-making, could be just as effective and demanding as charity. But such efforts may be incompatible with extensive philanthropy, because they can require people to retain some level of affluence for strategic reasons but to repudiate both the acquisition of significant wealth and charity as is currently organized. The wealth and status of some critics of charity may indeed be incompatible with effectively contributing to social change, but the altruistic merits of charity are neither as obvious nor as easily demonstrated as EA believes.