Download or read book A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change written by Luis Fernando Medina Sierra and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing examination of one of the most important unresolved problems in social choice theory: how do we best understand people's decision to pay the cost of a public good?
Download or read book A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change written by Luis Medina and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion that groups form and act in ways that respond to objective, external costs and benefits has long been the key to accounting for social change processes driven by collective action. Yet this same notion seems to fall apart when we try to explain how collectivities emerge out of the choices of individuals. This book overcomes that dilemma by offering an analysis of collective action that, while rooted in individual decision making, also brings out the way in which objective costs and benefits can impede or foster social coordination. The resulting approach enables us to address the causes and consequences of collective action with the help of the tools of modern economic theory. To illustrate this, the book applies the tools it develops to the study of specific collective action problems such as clientelism, focusing on its connections with economic development and political redistribution; and wage bargaining, showing its economic determinants and its relevance for the political economy of the welfare state. "Medina's study is a great step forward in the analytics of collective action. He shows the inadequacies of currently standard models and shows that straightforward revisions reconcile rational-choice and structural viewpoints. It will influence all future work." -Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University "Olson, Schelling, and now Medina. A Unified Theory deepens our understanding of collective action and contributes to the foundations of our field. A major work." -Robert H. Bates, Harvard University "Medina thinks that the main problem of social action is not whether or not to cooperate but how to do it. To this end he has produced an imaginative approach to analyzing strategic coordination problems that produces plausible predictions in a range of circumstances." -John Ferejohn, Stanford University Luis Fernando Medina is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia.
Download or read book Collective Action for Social Change written by A. Schutz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community organizers build solidarity and collective power in fractured communities. They help ordinary people turn their private pain into public action, releasing hidden capacities for leadership and strategy. In Collective Action for Social Change , Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy draw on their extensive experience participating in community organizing activities and teaching courses on the subject to empower novices to think like an organizers.
Download or read book Special Interest written by Terry M. Moe and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the history of teachers unions--their rise to power and the organizational foundations of that strength, use of collective bargaining and involvement in the political process, and unions' response to expanded use of technology in the classroom to teach children, and consequences for America's public schools"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Collective Action and Football Fandom written by Jamie Cleland and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws upon a relational sociological paradigm to explore the processes of collective action in football fandom across Europe and the UK. Through a range of case studies, the authors address pertinent themes in football fandom, including anti-discrimination, ‘home,’ ticketing, name changes, ‘ownership,’ and broader leftist politics. Each of these case studies engages with the theoretical framework of cultural relational sociology, highlighting the different social and cultural changes English and European football has undergone, often over a very short period of time.
Download or read book A Theory of Fields written by Neil Fligstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been an outpouring of work at the intersection of social movement thoery, organizational theory, economic, and political sociology. The problems at the core of these areas, Fligstein and McAdam argue, have a similar analytic and theoretical structure. Synthesizing much of this work, A Theory of Fields offers a general perspective on how to understand the problems related to understanding change and instability in modern, complex societies through a theory of strategic action fields.
Download or read book Digital Transformation and Global Society written by Daniel A. Alexandrov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-09 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two volume set (CCIS 858 and CCIS 859) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Digital Transformation and Global Society, DTGS 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May/June 2018. The 75 revised full papers and the one short paper presented in the two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 222 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-polity: smart governance and e-participation, politics and activism in the cyberspace, law and regulation; e-city: smart cities and urban planning; e-economy: IT and new markets; e-society: social informatics, digital divides; e-communication: discussions and perceptions on the social media; e-humanities: arts and culture; International Workshop on Internet Psychology; International Workshop on Computational Linguistics.
Download or read book Challenging Codes written by Alberto Melucci and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-12 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Challenging Codes Melucci brings an original perspective to research on collective action which both emphasizes the role of culture and makes telling connections with the experience of the individual in postmodern society. The focus is on the role of information in an age which knows both fragmentation and globalisation, building on the analysis of collective action familiar from the author's Nomads of the Present. Melucci addresses a wide range of contemporary issues, including political conflict and change, feminism, ecology, identity politics, power and inequality.
Download or read book Economic and Political Change in Asia and Europe written by Bernadette Andreosso-O'Callaghan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-08-10 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1973 publication of Alain Peyrefitte’s prophetic When China Awakens, developments in East Asia have outstripped even the wildest predictions. China has undergone the fastest industrialization and urbanization process in history, yet tensions there are rising as some realize how far they have been left behind. This volume explores the applicability of European economic and social models to our analysis of East Asia’s and, in particular, China’s situation. Though millions of Chinese and other Asian people have been lifted out of poverty, inequality is rising nonetheless, and contemporary Europe and Asia are both witnessing collective action against rampant economic neoliberalism in the former and the exclusion of minorities in the latter. It is difficult to overstate the relevance of this assessment, which seeks answers to some central questions: Can events in Europe serve as a model for those in East Asia? Are there similarities or differences between the two regions? To what extent do political, economic or social systems stimulate or inhibit collective action? How culturally equivalent are the collective actions of marginalized/ disadvantaged people in the two locations, or are events in Europe symptomatic of specific cultural attributes? Comparing and contrasting the research tools and dominant paradigms in the social and economic sciences in East Asia and Europe, as this volume does, throws out some revealing results.
Download or read book The Evolution of Social Institutions written by Dmitri M. Bondarenko and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-12 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a novel and innovative approach to the study of social evolution using case studies from the Old and the New World, from prehistory to the present. This approach is based on examining social evolution through the evolution of social institutions. Evolution is defined as the process of structural change. Within this framework the society, or culture, is seen as a system composed of a vast number of social institutions that are constantly interacting and changing. As a result, the structure of society as a whole is also evolving and changing. The authors posit that the combination of evolving social institutions explains the non-linear character of social evolution and that every society develops along its own pathway and pace. Within this framework, society should be seen as the result of the compound effect of the interactions of social institutions specific to it. Further, the transformation of social institutions and relations between them is taking place not only within individual societies but also globally, as institutions may be trans-societal, and even institutions that operate in one society can arise as a reaction to trans-societal trends and demands. The book argues that it may be more productive to look at institutions even within a given society as being parts of trans-societal systems of institutions since, despite their interconnectedness, societies still have boundaries, which their members usually know and respect. Accordingly, the book is a must-read for researchers and scholars in various disciplines who are interested in a better understanding of the origins, history, successes and failures of social institutions.
Download or read book The Genesis of Rebellion written by Steven Pfaff and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of Sail has long fascinated readers, writers, and the general public. Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Jack London et al. treated ships at sea as microcosms; Petri dishes in which larger themes of authority, conflict and order emerge. In this fascinating book, Pfaff and Hechter explore mutiny as a manifestation of collective action and contentious politics. The authors use narrative evidence and statistical analysis to trace the processes by which governance failed, social order decayed, and seamen mobilized. Their findings highlight the complexities of governance, showing that it was not mere deprivation, but how seamen interpreted that deprivation, which stoked the grievances that motivated rebellion. Using the Age of Sail as a lens to examine topics still relevant today - what motivates people to rebel against deprivation and poor governance - The Genesis of Rebellion: Governance, Grievance, and Mutiny in the Age of Sail helps us understand the emergence of populism and rejection of the establishment.
Download or read book Beyond the Turnout Paradox written by Luis Fernando Medina Sierra and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-10 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Brief uses game-theoretic analysis to debunk the turnout paradox and offers an alternative economic model to elucidate the patterns behind the socioeconomic bias in turnout. The author argues that the turnout paradox—the idea that rational, strategic actors would not vote in an election—is an overstated problem, and that, contrary to widespread belief, game-theoretic models of elections with highly realistic parameters are compatible with high turnout. The author applies the method of stability sets to the study of voting games so as to characterize the behavior of electoral turnout in response to the game’s structural parameters. To illustrate the power and potential of this framework, the author then develops a politico-economic model that generates testable theories about the way in which the modern welfare state and redistribution of wealth can shape the patterns of biased turnout that exist in most democracies. By turning a classic problem of rational choice into a source of new methods of analysis this Brief allows game theory to intervene in relevant conversations about the political economy of electoral participation, creating an opportunity for formal methods to make a welcome contribution to the discipline. As such, this Brief will be of use to scholars and student of political science, economics, political economy, and public policy, especially those who work in the tradition of formal methods.
Download or read book Why Bother written by S. Erdem Aytaç and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? The authors of Why Bother? offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. They develop the idea that just as there are costs of participation in politics, there are also costs of abstention - intrinsic and psychological but no less real. That abstention can be psychically costly helps explain real-world patterns that are anomalies for existing theories, such as that sometimes increases in costs of participation are followed by more participation, not less. The book draws on a wealth of survey data, interviews, and experimental results from a range of countries, including the United States, Britain, Brazil, Sweden, and Turkey.
Download or read book Connecting Taiwan written by Carsten Storm and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taiwan has often been characterised as an isolated society in its search for sovereignty and security. Its contact with the world in an era of globalization and post-modernity, however, has increasingly led to Taiwanese actors successfully participating in many regional and global fields. In this book an international team of scholars presents cases studies and theoretical debates emphasising agency in coping with the effects of globalisation. In so doing, they contest the image of Taiwan’s marginalization and seek to understand it in terms of its connectedness, whether globally, regionally or trans-nationally. Taking a multi-disciplinary, comparative approach, it covers themes such as markets and trading, diplomacy and nation-branding, collective action, media, film and literature, and religious mission. It thus combines perspectives from several disciplines including media studies, sociology, political science, and studies in religion. Using Taiwan as an example of how to conceptualise connectivity and think differently about comparative studies, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Asian Politics and Cultural Studies, as well as of Taiwan Studies more specifically.
Download or read book Why Governments and Parties Manipulate Elections written by Alberto Simpser and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents the widespread use of blatant and excessive manipulation of elections and explains what drives this practice. Alberto Simpser shows that, in many instances, governments and parties manipulate elections not only to gain votes, but also to transmit or distort information. This manipulation conveys an image of strength, shaping others' behavior to the benefit of the manipulators, increasing the scope for the manipulators to pursue their goals while in government and mitigating future challenges to their hold on power.
Download or read book Positive Changes in Political Science written by John H. Aldrich and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard McKelvey's classic papers, accompanied by original essays by leading names in the field
Download or read book Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens written by Pascal Boyer and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’. Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens spans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences.
