Patterns Of Collective Action Research Articles

Healthcare Leadership with Political Astuteness and its role in the implementation of major system change: the HeLPA qualitative study

BackgroundThe implementation of change in health and care services is often complicated by the ‘micropolitics’ of the care system. There is growing recognition that health and care leaders need to develop and use types of ‘political skill’ or ‘political astuteness’ to understand and manage the micropolitics of change.AimThe aim of this study was to produce a new empirical and theoretical understanding of the acquisition, use and contribution of leadership with ‘political astuteness’, especially in the implementation of major system change, from which to inform the co-design of training, development and recruitment resources.MethodsThe qualitative study comprised four work packages. Work package 1 involved two systematic literature reviews: one ‘review of reviews’ on the concept of political astuteness and another applying the learning from this to the health services research literature. Work package 2 involved biographical narrative interviews with 66 health and care leaders to investigate their experiences of acquiring and using political skills in the implementation of change. Work package 3 involved in-depth qualitative case study research with nine project teams drawn from three regional Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships operating in different English regions. Work package 4 involved a series of co-design workshops to develop learning materials and resources to support service leaders’ acquisition and use of political skills and astuteness.ResultsThe concepts of political skills and astuteness have had growing influence on health services research, yet these have tended to emphasise a relatively individualised and behavioural view of change leadership. The interview study suggests that, although leaders certainly use individual skills and behaviours when implementing change, change processes are contingent on local contextual factors and the patterns of collective action in the forms of interlocking constellations of political interactions. The in-depth case study research further shows these interactive, contingent and collective processes in the implementation of major system change. The study finds that major system change occurs over several linked stages, each involving particular controversies for which skills, strategies and actions are needed. Informed by these findings, and through a series of co-design workshops, the study has produced a set of resources and materials and a workbook to support individuals and project teams to acquire and develop political skill.LimitationsThe study was complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and there were difficulties in recruiting in-depth cases for observational research, and also recruiting patient and community groups.ConclusionsHealth and care leaders can develop and use a range of skills, strategies and actions to understand and navigate the diverse interests that complicate change. Building on the literature, the study presents a novel empirical framework of these skills, strategies and behaviours, and shows how they are used in the implementation of major system change. This study concludes with a set of co-designed learning resources and materials to support future leaders to develop similar skills and strategies. Further evidence is needed on the contribution of the learning resources on leadership activities and to understand the contribution of political skills to other areas of service governance.Study registrationThis study is registered as researchregistery4020.FundingThis project was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme and will be published in full inHealth and Social Care Delivery Research; Vol. 10, No. 11. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.

Memorable tourism experiences and their consequences: An interaction ritual (IR) theory approach

Tourism experiences, memories thereof, and their consequences tend to be analysed separately, often focusing on the individual's perspective. This paper introduces Collins' (2004) interaction ritual (IR) theory to develop a micro-sociological interpretation of these phenomena as interconnected elements of IR chains. A longitudinal qualitative study of a multi-cultural festival held in Italy, the Mondiali Antirazzisti (Anti-racist World Cup), is used to show how emotional experiences and patterns of collective action are reproduced by the returning attendees in their home communities through the trans-local appropriation of the event's format. Findings lead to a revised model of IR chains to explain the trans-local dimension of transformational event tourism. The implications for wider application of IR theory within tourism are discussed.

Políticas públicas e mobilização social no contexto do desastre no Rio Doce

Visa a analisar as mudanças na ação coletiva da sociedade civil e nos seus padrões de relação com o Estado, emergentes no contexto pós-desastre socioambiental no Rio Doce. Busca compreender as ações do Estado e a participação da sociedade civil neste contexto, considerando os instrumentos de políticas públicas e o surgimento de diversos formatos de mobilização. O objeto empírico é definido pelas decisões dos atores estatais em diferentes arenas e níveis federativos e pelos fóruns de mobilização social e audiências públicas nos municípios de Linhares, Colatina e Baixo Guandú, no Espírito Santo. Assume-se o pressuposto teórico de que as mudanças na sociedade civil, no Estado e nas políticas públicas se constituem reciprocamente e incidem nos padrões de ação coletiva e de interação com o Estado. Em termos metodológicos, a pesquisa combina métodos quantitativos e qualitativos e um conjunto de técnicas de pesquisa e instrumentos de processamento de dados. Os resultados permitem apreender os processos de inovação organizacional e de mudança institucional que não seriam possíveis em outros contextos, dada a excepcionalidade das conjunturas críticas para a produção de novas oportunidades políticas tanto para a sociedade civil quanto para o Estado.

Harnessing the State: Social Transformation, Infrastructural Development, and the Changing Governance of Water Systems in the Kangra District of the Indian Himalayas

Despite a proliferation of programs and policies aimed at promoting local resource management, we still have limited knowledge of the conditions under which state interventions can be a supportive force in everyday aspects of common pool resource governance. This article explores growing state involvement in community-managed irrigation systems of the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh, India. Here, agriculture is dependent on water channeled from glacial streams through networks of irrigation canals that have been sustained by local traditions of collective action for centuries. In recent years, however, growing off-farm employment has shifted the center of the agrarian economy and undermined shared norms of collective resource governance, just as state institutions have increasingly identified water systems as an object of development intervention. In this article, I document how irrigation management has been incrementally reinvented through changing institutional arrangements and new infrastructural forms over the past three decades, as existing patterns of collective action have increasingly found expression by leveraging development resources of the state. To the extent that socioeconomic changes associated with broader processes of development are likely to strain commons governance systems in mountain and other regions in the coming years, such collaborative engagements between local collective management and state support systems could become increasingly prevalent. This case suggests the need for new theoretical tools to guide analysis of evolving relationship between communities and state institutions in common pool resource governance.

Movimentos sociais e instituições participativas: Efeitos do engajamento institucional nos padrões de ação coletiva

Este artigo analisa os efeitos do engajamento institucional de movimentos sociais em instituicoes participativas sobre seus padroes de acao coletiva, no que concerne as dimensoes organizacional e discursiva. Os efeitos institucionais sao examinados a partir da comparacao entre quatro organizacoes localizadas no Espirito Santo, entre 1980 e 2010, mediante instrumentos dos metodos qualitativo e quantitativo. A correlacao entre o nivel de engajamento institucional dos movimentos e as mudancas nos padroes de acao coletiva, no contexto pos-1990, demonstra efeitos organizacionais e discursivos caracterizados por processos de complexificacao da estrutura organizacional e interacoes cooperativas e contestatorias na relacao sociedade-Estado.

Vertical Inequality, Land Reform, and Insurgency in Colombia

AbstractHow can we understand the origins and resilience of Colombia’s long-running insurgency? A leading theory emphasizes the feasibility of insurgency, identifying drug trafficking as the main culprit. I propose an alternative theory of civil violence that emphasizes how bargaining over property rights in the face of deep vertical inequality deepens the subordinate group’s social identity, heightens its sense of grievance, and facilitates collective violence. An examination of the history of land reform struggles in Colombia echoes this pattern. Struggles over land reforms in the 1920s and 1930s created new patterns of collective action that helped sustain campesino groups in the “independent republics” of the 1950s and 1960s and the creation of the FARC in 1964. This analysis suggests that the Colombian state’s lack of credibility on issues of land reform demands a significant third-party enforcement of any peace agreement and confidence-building measures between the FARC and the Colombian government.

Path Dependency and Patterns of Collective Action: Space, Place, and Agency in Long Beach, California, 1900–1960

Drawing on the insights of the geography, structural, and social movement literature this study analyzes the interactive effects of structure, space, place, and agency on patterns of collective action in Long Beach, California. Long Beach and Los Angeles occupy the same regional landscape with similar economies, yet the logic of collective action varies considerably. It is argued that preceding 1960, pro-business elites in Long Beach allied with their Los Angeles counterparts to spatially restrict labor organizing and foster patterns of noncontiguous interdependencies within and among labor and community groups. Through violence, cultural references, local and extralocal political policies, and regional coalition building before 1960, the Long Beach ruling elites fragmented the labor and community sector and inhibited the emergence of an organizational infrastructure necessary to foster community-based change after 1960. The legacies of this period are reflected in a fragmented labor and community sector set against a powerful ideologically driven, business-led opposition.

Modes of Collective Action in Village Economies: Evidence from Natural and Artefactual Field Experiments in a Developing Country

In a canonical model of collective action, individual contribution to collective action is negatively correlated with group size. Yet, empirical evidence on the group size effect has been mixed, partly due to heterogeneities in group activities. In this paper, we first construct a simple model of collective action with the free rider problem, altruism, public goods, and positive externalities of social networks. We then empirically test the theoretical implications of the group size effect on individual contribution to four different types of collective action, i.e., monetary or nonmonetary contribution to directly or indirectly productive activities. To achieve this, we collect and employ artefactual field experimental data such as public goods and dictator games conducted in southern Sri Lanka under a natural experimental situation where the majority of farmers were relocated to randomly selected communities based on the government lottery. This unique situation enables us to identify the causal effects of community size on collective action. We find that the levels of collective action can be explained by the social preferences of farmers. We also show evidence of free riding by self-interested households with no landholdings. The pattern of collective action, however, differs significantly by mode of activity — collective action that is directly rather than indirectly related to production is less likely to suffer from the free rider problem. Also, monetary contribution is less likely to cause free riding than nonmonetary labor contribution. Unlike labor contributions, monetary contributions involve collection of fees which can be easily tracked and verified, possibly leading to better enforcement of collective action.

Modes of Collective Action in Village Economies: Evidence from Natural and Artefactual Field Experiments in a Developing Country

In a canonical model of collective action, individual contribution to collective action is negatively correlated with group size. Yet, empirical evidence on the group size effect has been mixed, partly due to heterogeneities in group activities. In this paper, we first construct a simple model of collective action with the free rider problem, altruism, public goods, and positive externalities of social networks. We then empirically test the theoretical implications of the group size effect on individual contribution to four different types of collective action, i.e., monetary or nonmonetary contribution to directly or indirectly productive activities. To achieve this, we collect and employ artefactual field experimental data such as public goods and dictator games conducted in southern Sri Lanka under a natural experimental situation where the majority of farmers were relocated to randomly selected communities based on the government lottery. This unique situation enables us to identify the causal effects of community size on collective action. We find that the levels of collective action can be explained by the social preferences of farmers. We also show evidence of free riding by self-interested households with no landholdings. The pattern of collective action, however, differs significantly by mode of activity—collective action that is directly rather than indirectly related to production is less likely to suffer from the free rider problem. Also, monetary contribution is less likely to cause free riding than nonmonetary labor contribution. Unlike labor contributions, monetary contributions involve collection of fees which can be easily tracked and verified, possibly leading to better enforcement of collective action.

Introduction

The European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) allows one million European citizens to request the European Commission to introduce a legislative proposal. The article locates the boundaries of the mechanism as a means of identifying what it is, and is not, before introducing the concepts on which the subsequent articles focus. The ECI is a significant extension of EU participatory mechanisms in that it is the first to be based around the participation of individual citizens. In this sense it has the potential to develop a ‘public space’ for the EU and to engage new constituencies of actors. Whilst the substantial organisation involved in collecting one million signatures will inevitably draw upon the resources of established interest organisations, it will broaden the range of organisations involved in EU policy advocacy beyond established constituencies in Brussels, and create new patterns of collective action. Whilst it is remarkable in being the first transnational measure of its kind, it is an agenda-setting mechanism rather than one with binding effect upon political institutions.

Collective Action Dynamics under External Rewards: Experimental Insights from Andean Farming Communities

Summary This paper explores the potential effects of external reward systems on conservation behavior by accounting for their interactions with patterns of collective action. In order to simulate such dynamics, we conducted framed field experiments in farming communities from the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. These game-based simulation exercises were framed around agrobiodiversity conservation decisions the participating farmers were very familiar with. We find that collective rewards could be ineffective and crowd-out social norms. Promisingly though, individual rewards appear to increase conservation levels through a crowding-in effect that stabilizes collective action.

'Keeping the Peace': Social Identity, Procedural Justice and the Policing of Football Crowds

This paper explores the relevance of the Elaborated Social Identity Model of Crowd Behaviour and Procedural Justice Theory to an understanding of both the presence and absence of collective conflict during football (soccer) crowd events. It provides an analysis of data gathered during longitudinal ethnographic study of fans of Cardiff City Football Club—a group of supporters with a notorious history of involvement in ‘hooliganism’ within the English domestic Football Leagues. The analysis suggests that the perceived legitimacy among fans of the way they were policed affected the internal dynamics, patterns of collective action and overall levels of ‘compliance’ among the fan group. On this basis, we contend that these processes mediated both a long-term decline but also the sporadic re-emergence of collective conflict during crowd events involving the fans. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of our analysis for informing policy, practice and theory, particularly with respect to the importance of policing with consent as a route to conflict reduction in domestic football.

Emerging Institutions: Pyramids or Anthills?

In the present text, an institution is understood to be an (observable) pattern of collective action, justified by a corresponding norm. By this definition, an institution emerges slowly, although it may be helped or hindered by various specific acts. From this perspective, an institutional entrepreneur is an oxymoron, at least in principle. In practice, however, there are and always have been people trying to create institutions. This article describes the emergence of the London School of Economics and Political Science as an institution and analyzes its founders and its supporters during crises as institutional entrepreneurs. A tentative theory of the phenomenon of institutional entrepreneurship is then constructed by combining elements of sociology of translation, actor-network theory and garbage can model. The article concludes with a suggestion that the way institutional enterprises are narrated may differ from the way they are built, and a genre analysis can be of further help in understanding this phenomenon.

Responding to Disaster: Two Logics of Demands and the Politics of Hybridity

Two similar disastrous fires struck concert venues in the USA (The Station, 2003) and Argentina (República Cromañón, 2004). We explore similarities and contrasts in public responses to these tragedies to better understand two patterns of collective action. One pattern (‘insider’) revolves around the deployment of forms of action and organization aimed at working within the constraints and opportunities already available or easily attainable within prevailing institutional arrangements. The other (‘outsider’) involves a reliance on forms of action and organization that seek to gain leverage by challenging prevailing institutions, often by way of protest, direct action, and the threat to disrupt existing arrangements. These ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ patterns bear the imprint of accumulated repertoires of action and organization, are very often in tension, and involve trade-offs that participants in civil society organizations constantly weigh in considering alternative courses of action. Moreover, choices between the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ strategies are made vis-à-vis complex arrays of constraints and opportunities embodied in prevailing institutional arrangements. We also argue that pure ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ patterns constitute theoretical constructs or ideal types, and that neither the ‘insider’ nor the ‘outsider’ modes of mobilization are inherently superior to one another in ensuring greater wellbeing or a stronger civil society. Moreover, in the actual terrain of collective action, such as in the two situations at hand, most often we find that actors deploy complex combinations of strategies, to constitute ‘hybrid’ modes of mobilization. To further illustrate this point, we briefly discuss populism as a form of mobilization that ultimately combines both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ strategies, and is in fact defined by a conflictive relationship between both sets of strategies.

Re-forming the state: the politics of privatization in Latin America and Europe

With evidence drawn from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Great Britain, and Hungary, Re-forming the State examines the processes leading to, and the political effects of, market reform experiments and focuses specifically on the patterns of collective action and coalition building that drive privatization. The author's argument calls into question established approaches in the discipline of economics and in the fields of comparative and international political economy.The experience of privatization shows that the public and the private are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive spheres, and that power relations between them are not necessarily zero-sum. To stress the point, the author borrows from the literature on state formation, which has extensively examined the historical processes of key private groups. The evidence presented shows why and how, by restructuring coalitional and institutional arenas, the state uses marketization to generate political order and to distribute political power. Thus, the author specifies the conditions under which political change is conceived in terms of and channeled through economic policy; in other words, how the state is re-formed through privatization. Re-forming the State thus highlights how privatization is simultaneously a movement from public to private, but also a movement from non-state to state, as the reduction of state assets leads to institutional changes that increase state capacities for defining and enforcing property rights, extracting revenue, and centralizing administrative and political resources.Hector E. Schamis is Assistant Professor of Government, Cornell University.

Educational systems and perceived social inequality

This paper investigates the effect of intra-generational mobility patterns on collective social action. We start with the assumption that employees tend to collective action in pursuing their economic interests only if their social position is homogeneous, stable in time and characterized by privileges (or structural disadvantages). We believe that patterns of intra-generational mobility (and not only those of inter-generational mobility) are crucial for these preconditions of collective action. These conditions can come into effect only in systems of 'closed positions', where intra-generational mobility is restricted. In systems of open positions, a high degree of intra-generational mobility prevents the existence of homogeneous, stable and privileged social positions. In addition, the institutional arrangements of a given society, especially the educational system, determine to a great extent whether occupational positions are closed or not. In societies with standardized, stratified and differentiated educational systems, intra-generational mobility is restricted by credentialist allocation regimes so that the three conditions are fulfilled and patterns of collective action have a high probability of arising. This hypothesis is tested by an international comparison of effects on perceived social inequality using data from the International Social Justice Project (1991, 1996). It turns out that, as expected, in credentialist countries, educational titles and class position have stronger effects on perceived social inequality than in non-credentialist societies. But it was found that the economic system also plays an important role in the structuring of perceived inequality.

The Evolution of Heterogeneity in Biodiversity and Environmental Regimes

Biodiversity and environmental protection are examples of international public goods problems that comprise a symmetrical system of rights and obligations. Moreover, the underlying scientific, economic, and political conditions do not necessarily lead to a prisoner's dilemma. Yet from this symmetrical beginning, voluntary (Nash) equilibria often require heterogeneous actions, the resolution of which is often couched as a North-South or East-West issue. The author uses evolutionary game theory to examine how heterogeneous behavior can emerge over time and finds that asymmetries need not be universally determined in terms of economic or technological differences. In particular, the author finds that the evolution of international environmental protocols is a function of scale: the ability to achieve a cooperative solution depends on the distribution of signatories (namely, nonparticipants in the population at large). Such scale considerations reveal an organizational pattern of collective action that does not require across-the-board contribution or abatement levels.

La rue africaine en mouvement : politique et action collective

The african street on the move. politics and collective action. The street has become the place to express public power since independences, either directly through the use of force, or less openly, through the circulation of informers, or in a metaphorical way through the organization of demonstrations to the glory of the State’s power. A few events turned the street into a territory reaching saturation point over the last years. The tremendous development of an informal market with pedlers and the increase of city gangs resulted in the physical and symbolical invasion of the street. But what remains most important is the part played by demonstrations, a pattern of collective action often chosen by the actors for democratic claims. Thus the street established itself as a preeminent means to project multiple meanings in political space as soon as it made possible the display of live protest.

Islam, Politics and Social Movements

This book contains thirteen well-researched case studies on social movements in North Africa, India, the Middle East, and Iran. Each movement differs,as the issues and concerns vary according to area. This diversity is mademanageable by a neat categorization taking into account geography, periodization,and problematics, for example, and by the editors' clear explanation,in the first part of the book, of how the articles are arranged. In the second partare articles by Von Sivers, Clancy-Smith, Colonna, and Voll. Each authoranalyzes resistance and millenarian movements in precolonial (i.e., nineteenthandearly twentieth-century) North Africa. Part three, with articles by Frietag,Gilmartin and Swdenburg, deals with more contemporary issues, such asIslam and nationalism in India and Palestine. Part four discusses labor movements in Egypt and northern Nigeria (Beinin, Goldberg, Lubeck), while partfive looks at the Iranian revolution and the mles of Imam Khomeini and AliShari'ati in defining and inspiring it (Algar, Abrahamian, Keddie).One of the main issues that must be addressed when dealing with socialmovements in Islamic societies is whether they are really "Islamic" or whetherthey just happen to be taking place in Muslim Societies. Lapidus, in his introductoryessay, brings out the main issues when he says that the movements arestudied "in order to explore their self-conception and symbols, the econofnicand political conditions under which they developed, and their relation toagrarian and capitalist economic structum and to established state regimes andelites" (p. 3). The authors look at social, structural, and ideological featureswithout giving exclusive primacy to one or the other. Burke stresses this point.In his article, he discusses methodological issues and places the studies in thecontext of contemporary modes of analyses such as the "new cultural" and the"new social history" methods inspired by E. P. Thompson and others. Thisessay is an invaluable introduction to the case studies. Placing the movementsin the context of changes occurring in the Islamic world as well as in the contextof wider political and social events, the essay allows one to make comparisonsacmss the different areas covered in terms of popular culture, patternsof collective action, the problem of Islam and secularism, and other aspects.The articles range from the role of Islamic symbols (i.e., the mosque inIndia) in articulating new political organizations designed to deal with the ...