1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Collective action refers to action taken together by a group of people whose goal is to enhance their condition and achieve a common objective.
Researchers Martijn van Zomeren, Tom Postmes, and Russell Spears conducted a meta-analysis of over 180 studies of collective action, in an attempt to integrate three dominant socio-psychological perspectives explaining antecedent conditions to this phenomenon – injustice, efficacy, and identity.
[2] An important assumption of this approach is that people tend to respond to subjective states of disadvantage, which may or may not flow from objective physical and social reality.
RDT focuses on a subjective state of unjust disadvantage, proposing that engaging in fraternal (group-based) social comparisons with others may result in feelings of relative deprivation that foster collective action.
Group-based emotions resulting from perceived injustice, such as anger, are thought to motivate collective action in an attempt to rectify the state of unfair deprivation.
[3] Meta-analysis results confirm that effects of injustice causally predict collective action, highlighting the theoretical importance of this variable.
[2] Moving beyond RDT, scholars suggested that in addition to a sense of injustice, people must also have the objective, structural resources necessary to mobilize change through social protest.
Meta-analysis results also confirm that social identity causally predicts collective action across a number of diverse contexts.
[citation needed] While there is sound empirical support for the causal importance of SIMCA's key theoretical variables on collective action,[2] more recent literature has addressed the issue of reverse causation, finding support for a related, yet distinct, encapsulation model of social identity in collective action (EMSICA).
Also, utopian thinking has been proposed as an antecendant to collective action, aside to the route affecting perceived injustice, efficacy, or social identity.
[13] Solutions to collective action problems include mutually binding agreements, government regulation, privatisation, and assurance contracts, also known as crowdacting.
[15] Poorer individuals will usually have little choice but to opt for the free rider strategy, i.e., they will attempt to benefit from the public good without contributing to its provision.
Since the late 20th century, analytic philosophers have been exploring the nature of collective action in the sense of acting together, as when people paint a house together, go for a walk together, or together execute a pass play.
These particular examples have been central for three of the philosophers who have made well known contributions to this literature: Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, and John Searle, respectively.
Searle does not give an account of we-intentions or, as he also puts it, "collective intentionality", but insists that they are distinct from the "I-intentions" that animate the actions of persons acting alone.
Common examples can be found from domains as diverse as biology (flocking, shoaling and schooling, and general collective animal behavior), economics (stock market bubbles), and sociology (social conventions and norms) among others.
[17] They have been used to both explain the emergence of spontaneous consensus and understand how to facilitate an equilibrium between individuals and can be grouped according to their role in the process.
These SNA models are theoretically grounded in the communication mechanism[19] of facilitating consensus and describe its emergence through the information propagation processes of the network (behavioral contagion).
The teachings of Confucius have led to a kind of collective action that is based on the principal of "saving face" and other behavioral norms found taught in the Analects.
[27] One of the largest instances of Confucian-style collective action took place 1867 in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, where Chinese workers protested peacefully and negotiated for an outcome in a way that clearly demonstrated a kind of spontaneous consensus that is based on Confucian face-saving behavior.