The study explores collective action in Sweden between 1980 to 1995 using time-series data from the European Protest and Coercion Database. In spite of severe hardship during the crisis of the early 1990s, Swedish strike-rates declined. However, contention merely shifted from workplaces into the streets; there was indeed a protest movement against austerity, as shown by a series of large demonstrations, and some riots, between 1989 and 1993. Further analysis indicates this movement faded as it was increasingly chanelled into the electoral campaign of the labor pary; having won the 1994 election, the organised labor movement no longer had an interest in sustaining the protest movement against austerity.

Formation of voluntary collective action provides a synergy whereby communities can accomplish environmental management improvement. To study this formative process, I asked four research questions:. How does group learning happen and how is it distributed among individuals in a collective?. How does voluntary collective action form, particularly around environmental issues?. What is the relationship between these first two questions?. What themes emerge that might inform communities or environmental managers who wish to promote voluntary collective action in communities?To answer these questions, I conducted a five-year case study of one community during which I observed the teaching and learning process and the formation of voluntary collective action arrangements. Data include over 5000 emails, minutes from 135 community meetings, observations of meetings and community gatherings, documents (bylaws, policies, guidelines, covenants), and 46 personal interviews with community members. I describe the community learning process through four characteristics: a setting in everyday life; a shared and constructed perspective among learners; a context where process is more important than product; and roles that are non-hierarchal and flexible. I propose the term co-facilitated community learning for this learning process, and provide evidence that it played a critical role in the development of voluntary collective agreements. I describe the typical chronology whereby voluntary collective action arrangements were formed in the case study community, and list the major environmental collective action arrangements developed. Many arrangements negotiated and approved by the case study community address significant environmental problems that have proven intransigent to other forms of management such as regulation and financial markets.I name collective action competence as the link between collective awareness and collective behavior change, and define it as the readiness of a group of people to behave towards a common goal based on a collective awareness, and a collective set of skills and experiences.Four themes emerge that might inform those who wish to promote voluntary collective action in communities to improve environmental management: (1) use of consensus-type governance, (2) reducing costs of cooperation, (3) use of normative pressures, and (4) good information communication and reinforcement. / Dissertation

Collective Action , National Teachers' Association R.O.C

Although much national and international attention has been given to the disastrous effects of oil spills in indigenous, Amazonian communities, virtually nothing is known about the effects of oil refinement, storage and shipping that takes place in the urban, largely Afro-descendent communities of Esmeraldas. This work addresses the near disregard of environmental suffering and injustice experienced by people in Esmeraldas and provides an understanding of both their resistance and acquiescence to the burdens created by the oil economy. I look at how these perspectives feed (and do not feed) collective action to demand protections from the environmental harms of the refinery and other industrial facilities in the area. In addition to exploring questions of mobilization, my hope is that this work gives voice to the environmental suffering in the city of Esmeraldas and that it adds to a growing body of work that considers the urban environmental suffering in Latin America. / text

A wealth of research on social life has examined the causes and consequences of social identity. I build on this literature by expanding the study of the concept beyond its current focus on how social identity manifests in the individual to a collective-level understanding of social identity as it manifests in groups. This is achieved by bridging the study of social identity with the study of social networks. In this dissertation, I argue that sharing a social identity that meets certain criteria serves as a type of connection which binds group members together into a collective unit. I refer to these connections as symbolic social network ties. Symbolic social network ties exist in social entities characterized by entitativity, which is the property of a social group that defines it as a coherent social unit—a social object in and of itself. Three criteria are necessary for a set of individuals to possess entitativity: boundedness, membership-based interaction, and the capacity to act and be acted upon as a manifest corporate actor in relation to other (individual and corporate) actors. Entitativity varies by degree across entities due to differences in the extent to which the entity exceeds minimal levels of the criteria defining entitativity. The effects of symbolic social network ties are a consequence of the combined effects of entitativity and social identity. To provide an initial assessment of the effects of symbolic social network ties on social life, in this dissertation I use a two-study approach to examine their impact on cooperative collective action. In Study 1, I use the experimental method to test the effects of symbolic social network ties, and social identity more broadly, on cooperation in generalized exchange. Generalized exchange is a form of collective action that is risky but has a number of benefits for collectivities and their members. I compare effects across three levels of social identity: no social identity, category-based social identity, and entity-based symbolic social network ties. Results strongly support my theoretical argument; entity-based symbolic social network ties have a stronger impact on cooperation than category-based social identity. Indeed, the level of cooperation in the category-based social identity condition is not significantly different from the level of cooperation found in the no social identity control condition. The second study uses survey data to assess whether the causal findings from Study 1 hold in the context of real world entities. In Study 2, I examine the relationship between symbolic social network ties and community involvement in small towns. Community involvement is a contextually specific form of collective action that can be vital to the success of a community. Specifically, I examine how variations in each of the three criteria of entitativity—boundedness, interaction, and corporate actor capacity—relate to residents’ propensity to participate in two forms of community involvement: voluntary participation in community improvement activities and active membership in local organizations. As predicted, I find that boundedness and interaction are positively related to both forms of community involvement; corporate actor capacity, however, was not found to be significantly related to either form of community involvement. Implications of these results and potential directions for future research are discussed.

This thesis examines recent events in Oaxaca, Mexico that demonstrate the continued relevance of the spatiality of resistance for understanding social movement activism and alternative political projects. Arising out of a violent confrontation between state police and the striking teachers union, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca created spaces of autonomy and resistance that challenged the legitimacy of the state. The fluid movement between a politics of demand, in which social actors force changes in the state apparatus, and a politics of the act, in which movements construct new forms of social relations in their own sites of activism, represents the dual nature of practices that attempt to alter spaces of resistance while at the same time negotiating with broader social structures. The movement in Oaxaca is an example of the possibilities of political projects that recognize the need to move beyond mere resistance to form creative alternatives.

Inquiry into how social movements affect change has historically been grounded in either sociology or communication studies and has focused primarily on collective action in public spheres. However, important movement activity also takes place in the private sphere between individuals. Such interactions fall outside of traditional definitions of collective action and are often absent from contemporary social movement theory.One social movement that cannot be studied adequately using existing theory and methods is the American ethical vegetarian movement. To correct this oversight in social movement theory, this dissertation undertakes a rhetorical study of the ethical vegetarian movement, focusing not only on collective action but also on the role of personal interaction in identity formation, participant recruitment, and participant mobilization. A major finding of this study is that personal interaction is the primary reason why individuals choose to adopt and advocate a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. In order to establish how movement rhetoric works, the dissertation includes rhetorical analyses of cookbooks, organization literature, media representation, interviews with movement advocates, and vegetarian conversion narratives, collected through a national survey. The author explores the use and consequences of unintentional, religious, and embodied rhetoric as means of confrontation and conversion in the ethical vegetarian movement.In this dissertation, Patricia Malesh argues for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of social movements that includes inquiry into personal interaction as movement activity. Such an inquiry clarifies the relationship between personal and collective identities and deconstructs the dichotomy between private and public spheres. She also establishes a rhetorical definition of individual movements, which exposes the interplay between movement goals and methods of persuasion and helps differentiate between similar movements (e.g., vegetarian and animal rights movements) and align those that are seemingly unrelated (e.g., vegetarian and feminist movements). The author concludes by discussing the future of the ethical vegetarian movement in the face of globalization and incorporation. She argues that rhetoricians--those who study the practice and implications of communication--should contribute more consistently to the study of how social identity is negotiated through language and action in social movements.

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This thesis examines the emergence and evolution of ‘progressive activism and organisation’ between 1976 and 2006 in the African township of Guguletu and the coloured township of Bonteheuwel within the City of Cape Town. In doing so it compares both how activism has changed over time (including as a result of democratisation) and how it differed between and within these two communities. Whilst at heart an empirical study of activism it seeks to move beyond the specificities of the cases studied to also draw broader conclusions about the nature and causes of collective action and organisation. Drawing on both social movement and class theory it aims to shed some light on the fundamental question of the relationship between structure and agency - why do people act and what defines the form of action they take? It combines a quantitative study of the changing relationship between race, class and state policy with qualitative studies of activism in Guguletu and Bonteheuwel. These two studies cover in detail: the development and unfolding of the riots of 1976; the great boycott season of 1979/80 which saw large numbers of Africans and coloureds across Cape Town drawn into school, bus and consumer boycotts; the development of activism between 1980 and 1985, including the impact of the United Democratic Front; the township unrest of 1985-7; the transition period between 1988 and 1994; and post-apartheid activism in the two communities. It draws on theories of class which recognise the importance of peoples’ positions within the state’s distributional networks (citizenship), experiences and expectations of social mobility and the impact of historical experience of class formation on expectation (moral economy). In doing this it shows how differences in race, education, age and labour market position all interacted to pattern activism in the case studies. Struggles in Cape Town throughout the period 1976-2006 were not dualistic conflict between classes, races or between the oppressed and forces of global capital, nor were they mechanistic responses to the opening and closing of political space. They were complex coalitions of competing and collaborating class forces which were defined by the underlying nature of the city’s political economy and which emerged in interaction with changing opportunities for action.

Political scientists have largely overlooked the issue of effort. It is a seemingly simple concept with great implications for the study of political behavior. With intuition alone we can often classify behaviors as more or less effortful. And many of the behaviors that interest political scientists concern this fundamental concept, but, somehow, we have failed to formally incorporate effort into our theories. Indeed, normatively speaking, citizens will engage the democratic process effortfully, not effortlessly. But what makes a behavior more or less effortful? How does the amount of effort expended in pursuit of a behavior affect the likelihood of actualizing that behavior? To answer these questions I have developed a resource model of political cognition which posits that effortful behaviors are essentially fueled by a limited, but renewable, supply of cognitive resources. In this dissertation I report the results of a series of experiments in which I apply the resource model to collective action behaviors as well as information processing. The results suggest that these behaviors, and mostly likely others as well, are, to a significant degree, dependent upon the sufficient availability of cognitive resources.