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 The Foundations of Collective Action written by Brian Jay Kroeger and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fairness Social Capital and the Commons written by Sanjeev Prakash and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Social Movements and Social Classes written by Louis Maheu and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1995-06-08 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Movements and Social Classes asks how integrative and expansive collective action is in the constitution of modern societies, and how we can articulate issues of collective action, social movement practices and class action within this integrative understanding.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Collective Action Inequality and Development written by William D. Ferguson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how a society that is trapped in stagnation might initiate and sustain economic and political development. In this context, progress requires the reform of existing arrangements, along with the complementary evolution of informal institutions. It involves enhancing state capacity, balancing broad avenues for political input, and limiting concentrated private and public power. This juggling act can only be accomplished by resolving collective-action problems (CAPs), which arise when individuals pursue interests that generate undesirable outcomes for society at large. Merging and extending key perspectives on CAPs, inequality, and development, this book constructs a flexible framework to investigate these complex issues. By probing four basic hypotheses related to knowledge production, distribution, power, and innovation, William D. Ferguson offers an analytical foundation for comparing and evaluating approaches to development policy. Navigating the theoretical terrain that lies between simplistic hierarchies of causality and idiosyncratic case studies, this book promises an analytical lens for examining the interactions between inequality and development. Scholars and researchers across economic development and political economy will find it to be a highly useful guide.
Download or read book Cooperation and Collective Action written by David M. Carballo and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Cooperation research] is one of the busiest and most exciting areas of transdisciplinary science right now, linking evolution, ecology and social science. . . this is the first major work or collection to address linkages between archaeology and cooperation research."—Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University Past archaeological literature on cooperation theory has emphasized competition's role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation have been under theorized in favor of models stressing top-down leadership, while evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans to effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. Cooperation and Collective Action is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand cooperation and collective action. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. The breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. In Cooperation and Collective Action, diverse case studies address the evolution of the emergence of norms, institutions, and symbols of complex societies through the last 10,000 years. This book is an important contribution to the literature on cooperation in human societies that will appeal to archaeologists and other scholars interested in cooperation research.
Download or read book Governing the Commons written by Elinor Ostrom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.
Download or read book Collective Action written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Coethnicity written by James Habyarimana and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2009-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnically homogenous communities often do a better job than diverse communities of producing public goods such as satisfactory schools and health care, adequate sanitation, and low levels of crime. Coethnicity reports the results of a landmark study that aimed to find out why diversity has this cooperation-undermining effect. The study, conducted in a neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, notable for both its high levels of diversity and low levels of public goods provision, hones in on the mechanisms that might account for the difficulties diverse societies often face in trying to act collectively. The Mulago-Kyebando Community Study uses behavioral games to explore how the ethnicity of the person with whom one is interacting shapes social behavior. Hundreds of local participants interacted with various partners in laboratory games simulating real-life decisions involving the allocation of money and the completion of joint tasks. Many of the subsequent findings debunk long-standing explanations for diversity's adverse effects. Contrary to the prevalent notion that shared preferences facilitate ethnic collective action, differences in goals and priorities among participants were not found to be structured along ethnic lines. Nor was there evidence that subjects favored the welfare of their coethnics over that of non-coethnics. When given the opportunity to act altruistically, individuals did not choose to benefit coethnics disproportionately when their actions were anonymous. Yet when anonymity was removed, subjects behaved very differently. With their actions publicly observed, subjects gave significantly more to coethnics, expected their partners to reciprocate, and expected that they would be sanctioned for a failure to cooperate. This effect was most pronounced among individuals who were otherwise least likely to cooperate. These results suggest that what may look like ethnic favoritism is, in fact, a set of reciprocity norms—stronger among coethnics than among non-coethnics—that make it possible for members of more homogeneous communities to take risks, invest, and cooperate without the fear of getting cheated. Such norms may be more subject to change than deeply held ethnic antipathies—a powerful finding for policymakers seeking to design social institutions in diverse societies. Research on ethnic diversity typically draws on either experimental research or field work. Coethnicity does both. By taking the crucial step from observation to experimentation, this study marks a major breakthrough in the study of ethnic diversity. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
Download or read book Collective Action in Organizations written by Bruce Bimber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine three organizations and show surprising similarities across them.
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 How Humans Cooperate written by Richard E. Blanton and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In How Humans Cooperate, Richard E. Blanton and Lane F. Fargher take a new approach to investigating human cooperation, developed from the vantage point of an "anthropological imagination." Drawing on the discipline’s broad and holistic understanding of humans in biological, social, and cultural dimensions and across a wide range of temporal and cultural variation, the authors unite psychological and institutional approaches by demonstrating the interplay of institution building and cognitive abilities of the human brain. Blanton and Fargher develop an approach that is strongly empirical, historically deep, and more synthetic than other research designs, using findings from fields as diverse as neurobiology, primatology, ethnography, history, art history, and archaeology. While much current research on collective action pertains to local-scale cooperation, How Humans Cooperate puts existing theories to the test at larger scales in markets, states, and cities throughout the Old and New Worlds. This innovative book extends collective action theory beyond Western history and into a broadly cross-cultural dimension, places cooperation in the context of large and complex human societies, and demonstrates the interplay of collective action and aspects of human cognitive ability. By extending the scope and content of collective action theory, the authors find a fruitful new path to understanding human cooperation.
Download or read book The Social Order of Collective Action written by Matthew Kearney and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wisconsin Uprising of 2011 was one of the largest sustained collective actions in the history of the United States. Newly-elected Governor Scott Walker introduced a shock proposal that threatened the existence of public unions and access to basic health care, then insisted on rapid passage. The protests that erupted were neither planned nor coordinated. The largest, in Madison, consolidated literally overnight into a horizontally organized leaderless and leaderful community. That community featured a high level of internal social order, complete with distribution of food and basic medical care, group assemblies for collective decision making, written rules and crowd marshaling to enforce them, and a moral community that made a profound emotional impact on its members. The resistance created a functioning commune inside the Wisconsin State Capitol Building. In contrast to what many social movement theories would predict, this round-the-clock protest grew to enormous size and lasted for weeks without direction from formal organizations. This book, written by a protest insider, argues based on immersive ethnographic observation and extensive interviewing that the movement had minimal direction from organizations or structure from political processes. Instead, it emerged interactively from collective effervescence, improvised non-hierarchical mechanisms of communication, and an escalating obligation for like-minded people to join and maintain their participation. Overall, the findings demonstrate that a large and complex collective action can occur without direction from formal organizations.
Download or read book Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action written by Aseem Prakash and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advocacy organizations are viewed as actors motivated primarily by principled beliefs. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, proposing a model of NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfil normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with other advocacy actors. The analogy of the firm is a useful way of studying advocacy actors because individuals, via advocacy NGOs, make choices which are analytically similar to those that shareholders make in the context of firms. The authors view advocacy NGOs as special types of firms that make strategic choices in policy markets which, along with creating public goods, support organizational survival, visibility, and growth. Advocacy NGOs' strategy can therefore be understood as a response to opportunities to supply distinct advocacy products to well-defined constituencies, as well as a response to normative or principled concerns.
Download or read book Collective Action under the Articles of Confederation written by Keith L. Dougherty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-18 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than focusing on why the states did not contribute to the national government under the Articles of Confederation, Collective Action under the Articles of Confederation asks why they, in fact, did - even when they should not have been expected to contribute. Why did states pay large portions of their requisitions to the federal government when problems of collective action and the lack of governmental incentives suggest that they should not have? Using original data on Continental troop movements and federal debt holdings within each state, in this 2001 book, Dougherty shows that states contributed to the national government when doing so produced local gains. Such a theory stands in stark contrast to the standard argument that patriotism and civic duty encouraged state cooperation. Material incentives and local interests bound the union together and explained the push for constitutional reform more than the common pursuit of mutual goals.
Download or read book Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements written by Karl-Dieter Opp and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-04-08 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political protest and social movements are ubiquitous phenomena. This book focuses on the current theoretical approaches that aim at explaining them: the theory of collective action, the resource mobilization perspective, political opportunity structure theory, the identity approach, the framing perspective, and the dynamics of contention approach. The book has three objectives: (1) Many basic concepts like political opportunities or identity are not clearly defined. It is further often a matter of interpretation what factors are supposed to affect which phenomena. The first aim is therefore to provide a detailed introduction to and a clear restatement of the theories. Only then is it possible to assess and improve them. (2) For each theory the major strengths and weaknesses are discussed, and various modifications and extensions are suggested. (3) Building on these analyses, it is shown how the theories can be integrated into a single theoretical paradigm: the structural-cognitive model.
Download or read book Collective Action in East Asia written by Gregory W. Noble and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one Asian economic crisis follows another, sending shock waves through the global market, questions about the making and conduct of industrial policy in the East take on a special urgency. Observers are sharply divided as to whether the ubiquitous attempts at cooperation among competing firms in Asia have been a key to competitiveness or a corrosive form of collusion. This timely book offers a close look at the impact of industrial policies on collective action in East Asia—in Japan and Taiwan and, more briefly, in South Korea. Systematically comparative and based on interviews and original research in the local languages, it focuses on forms of collective action such as cartels, standardization, and research and development consortia in the consumer electronics and minimill steel industries. The book combines detailed case studies with analyses of the political, bureaucratic, and industrial environments in which policy is crafted. It also considers how these environments have evolved in the past decade as long-ruling conservative parties have been challenged in all three countries.Among the book's findings is a surprising disparity between the ways in which Japan and Taiwan have handled collective action policy, despite their many historical, demographic, and economic similarities. Collective Action in East Asia also brings to light unexpected inconsistencies in the effectiveness of Japanese policy, which frequently succeeds with R&D consortia but struggles with cartels. Studying both the rapid-growth period of the 1980s and the more recent economic slowdown in East Asia, this book provides crucial information for an understanding of today's global economy.
