Action, Collecti
e
Weber M 1904 Die Objektivita$ t sozialwissenschaftlicher und
sozialpolitischer Erkenntis. In: Winkelmann M (ed.) Gesam-
melte AufsaW tze zur Wissenschaftslehre
on Max Weber, 1951.
Mohr, Tu$ bingen, Germany
von Wright G H 1971 Explanation and Understanding. Cornell
University Press, Ithica, NY
L. H. Eckensberger
Action, Collective
Collective action is the means individuals use to pursue
and achieve their values when individual action is not
possible or likely to fail. Collective action theory is
studied in all the social sciences: In economics, it is the
theory of public goods and of collective choice
(Stevens 1993); in political science, it is called public
choice (Mueller 1989); in sociology, it is linked to
rational choice, collective behavior, and social move-
ment theory. When markets fail because of imperfect
competition, externalities, transaction costs, collective
goods provision, and some other reasons, institutions
and organizationsgovernments, political parties,
corporations, universities, churches, kinship, social
movements, etc.structure collective action and al-
locate resources through nonmarket methods. Among
these institutions have been conventions, ethical codes,
morality, and norms which contribute to eciency
and welfare in social transactions (Arrow 1974). In the
broadest sense, collective action theory seeks to
explain the origins, evolution, and varieties of non-
market institutions.
Most collective action is undertaken by organiza-
tions that initiate, coordinate, control, and reward
individuals participation in a joint enterprise. In
a narrow sense, the theory of collective action deals
with the noncoerced, voluntary provision of col-
lective goods, the groups and organizations that
provide them, participation and contribution in their
pursuit, and contentious actions against targets that
resist collective goods attainment. The groups and
organizations are interest groups, civic associations,
advocacy groups, dissidents, social movements, insur-
gents, and more transitory social formations such as
crowds.
Collective and mass phenomena which result from
many individuals pursuing personal goals in spatial
and temporal proximity, as in a migration, a baby
boom, or the uctuations of public opinion, have been
viewed as aggregations of individual choices and
beliefs. Nevertheless, when there are strong external-
ities and when individuals choose strategically, col-
lective action theory provides powerful insights about
aggregation dynamics. Schelling (1978) has shown
that housing choices in a mixed-race residential neigh-
borhood can lead to more extreme patterns of racial
segregation than the racial preferences of the majority
of people in both groups. Similarly Boudon (1982)
showed how French higher education reforms meant
to increase the opportunities for working-class youth
led to the perverse eect of increasing it for auent
youth. Unanticipated consequences, positive and neg-
ative bandwagons, unstable equilibria, critical mass,
and threshold eects are common consequences of
collective actions and central to the theory (Marwell
and Oliver 1993).
1. Collecti
e Beha
ior
Collective behavior refers to fads, panics, crazes, hostile
crowds, riots, cults, moral panics, cargo cults, witch-
hunts, Ghost Dance, and the like. The conventional
explanation assumed a variety of social psychological
and psychodynamic processes such as consciousness
of kind, herd instinct, imitation, contagion, and
regression. Observers were struck by the spontaneity
and volatility, the emotional-expressive and transitory
character of such behaviors in contrast to normatively
structured everyday routines. Collective behavior was
thought to result from extreme deprivation and threat
perception in extraordinary situations when norms
and expectations fail to guide action. The best known
theorist in this tradition was LeBon ([1895] 1960),
who postulated three laws of crowd behavior: mental
unity, loss of rational and moral faculties, and hero
worship.
The problems with LeBons and kindred theories of
collective behavior is their highly selective character
and disregard for alternative explanations. For the
same episodes of crowd behavior in the French
Revolution that LeBon described, Rude (1959)
showed that they were atypical of crowds and many
could be explained as purposive action without as-
suming unproven social psychological processes. Later
theorists showed that uniform behavior and mental
unity are due to selective convergence of predisposed
participants, and that much variance of behavior
occurs, ranging from engagement by hardcore activists
to standing around by curious bystanders. Rather
than amorality, emergent norms structure crowd
behavior. Irrational crowd behavior results from the
n-person, single game, prisoners Dilemma aspect of
some collective behavior, as in panics of escape
(Turner and Killian 1987, Brown 1965).
Because of these shortcomings in the conventional
view, collective behavior has been explained with
collective action theory, even violent, destructive and
bizarre collective behavior, such as lynch mobs, riots,
and the witch-hunts of early modern Europe. Southern
US lynch mobs in 18801920 were structured, ritual-
ized, and predictable (Tolnay and Beck 1995). To be
sure, some collective behavior manifests a lot of
emotion, we-feeling, hate, fears, violence, and unusual
beliefs, yet participants do respond to the benets and
49
Action, Collecti
e
costs of actions, as they do in other situations.
Charismatic leaders are not needed to organize col-
lective behavior. Schelling (1978) has demonstrated
how convergence and coordinated behavior by
strangers comes about without prior leadership,
organization and communication. Tilly (1978) has
studied culturally learned and maintained repertoires
of collective action of ordinary people against elites
and the state. Because of empirical ndings and
explanations based on rational choice, collective be-
havior has been gradually integrated with collective
actions theory.
Other theories are also being pursued. For Melucci
(1996), emotions and identity seeking in small groups
eclipses rationality and strategic interaction. Smelser
(1963) denes collective behavior as mobilization on
the basis of generalized beliefs which redene social
action. Unlike ordinary beliefs, generalized beliefs are
about the existence of extraordinary forces, threats,
conspiracies, wish fulllment, utopian expectations,
and their extraordinary consequences for adherents.
Yet much institutionalized behavior, e.g., miracles in
organized religion, the born again Christian conver-
sion, have similar attributes, and the beliefs that inspire
political crowds and movements tend to express
conventional principles of popular justice, authority,
solidarity, and equity (Rude 1959, Tilly 1978). Some
political ideologies like xenophobic nationalism, the
racist ideology of Nazis against Jews, and religious
beliefs like the heresy of witchcraft in early modern
Europe, as well as lesser moral panics, are full of
threats and conspiracies, and instigate violent, cruel,
and fatal actions against thousands of innocent
people. Such belief systems and resulting collective
actions have been explained with reference to elite
manipulation and framing of mass opinion through
the communications media, social control of citizens
and repression of regime opponents, and conformity
to the majority and ones peers (Oberschall 1993,
Jenkins 1998). The most notorious genocides including
the Holocaust were well planned and thoroughly
organized by regime elites fully in command of the
state apparatus, the military, the agents of social
control, and the citizenry (Fein 1993).
2. Interest Groups
Interest groups, labor unions, professional and vol-
untary associations were assumed to form automati-
cally from the common interest shared among a
category of persons in reaction to deprivation and
blocked goal attainment (Truman 1958). In the path-
breaking Logic of Collecti
e Action where he applied
the theory of public goods to public aairs, Olson
(1965) argued that although individuals have a com-
mon interest in a collective good, each has a separate,
individual interest of contributing as little as possible
50
and often nothing to group formation and collective
good attainment, i.e., enjoy the benet and let others
pay the cost. Because collective goods possess jointness
of supplyif they are provided at all, they must be
provided to contributors and non-contributors
alikecollective action is subject to free-rider tenden-
cies. Because many public, cultural, and social issues
center on collective goodspollution free environ-
ment, social and political reforms such as non-
discrimination in employment and the right to abor-
tion, humanitarian causes, charities, listener sup-
ported music stationsOlsons deduction that many
collective goods will not be provided voluntarily and
some only in suboptimal amount has far ranging
implications.
Olsons conclusions applied strictly only to large
groups of potential beneciaries. In small groups,
especially when one member has a large interest and
obtains a large share, the collective good will be
provided by such an interested person, though in
suboptimal amount, while the others free-ride. This put
the accent on patrons and sponsors in collective good
provision, and the exploitation of the great by the
freeriding small in alliances and coalitions. In an
intermediate size population composed of a federation
of small groups, a very important category in real
world situations and applications, there is some
likelihood of contributions to collective good attain-
ment. In large populations, free-rider tendencies
dominate. To overcome them, and because voluntary
associations do not have the means to coerce contribu-
tions as the state can coerce its citizens to pay taxes,
groups and leaders induce participation and con-
tribution by oering selective incentives: these are
individual benets that non-contributors do not get,
from leadership in the group to travel and insurance
discounts, many other material and nancial benets,
and some non-material solidarity incentives and social
standing.
Free-rider tendencies are especially strong when the
collective good is xed in supply and diminishes as the
size of the beneciaries grows, i.e., freeriders actually
diminish the amount of collective good available to
contributors, as is the case with tax cheaters in a
locality. For many non-market issues (humanitarian,
social reform, environmental), the collective good is
not subject to crowding, e.g., lower air pollution
benets all regardless of their numbers. Olson showed
how the properties of the collective good, and not the
psychological disposition and attitudes of individuals,
explain dierences in relationship between benec-
iaries and contributors, recruitment and exclusion
strategies of the group, and applied these insights to
labor unions and labor laws.
Olsons theory was designed for economic interest
groups though much of his model is broadly ap-
plicable. Because the accent is on obstacles to collective
good attainment and on freeriding, one expects fewer
voluntary associations than are actually observed in

democratic countries with freedom of association
(Hirschman 1982). His conclusions were based on
several assumptions: individuals dont think strategi-
cally and dont inuence one anothers decisions to
contribute; only primary beneciaries have an interest
in contributing, and not humanitarians, ideologues,
and identity seekers; the beneciary population is
composed of isolated individuals lacking a group and
network structure; the production function of re-
sources to collective good is linear and without
thresholds, and the good itself continuous and divis-
ible, not lumpy and indivisible; selective incentives are
material, and not moral, ideological, and social;
potential contributors and beneciaries dier only in
their interest in the collective goodtheir utility
functionand not on many other variables that make
for variation in the cost of contribution and the
expected benet.
Collective action theorists have modied and
relaxed these assumptions to suit particular topics and
applications in political science, sociology, and other
disciplines. In particular the theory was restated as an
iterated, open ended, N-person prisoners Dilemma
(PD) and integrated with the vast theoretical and
experimental PD literature (Hardin 1982, Lichbach
1995). A major empirical test conrmed some parts of
Olsons theory (Walker 1983). Walker studied over
500 voluntary associations concerned with national
public policy. Citizen groups promoting social reform,
environmental and ideological causes were frequently
sponsored and maintained by patrons and sponsors,
most often foundations, corporate philanthropy, and
government agencies in search of a citizen constitu-
ency. Many had few material selective incentives to
oer members, unlike professional and occupational
interest groups, and made instead moral appeals to a
conscience constituency who were not primary bene-
ciaries of the collective good. New communications
technologiesdirect mail, WATTS long distance tele-
phone lines (and most recently email and the Internet),
coupled with postal rates and tax laws favorable to
nonprots, have greatly reduced the costs of organiz-
ing and of communication with members and the
public (Zald and McCarthy 1987).
A further advance has come from Ostrom (1990,
1998) and her associates integration of collective
action theory with empirical ndings from case studies
all over the world of member-managed common-pool
resources (CPRs). CPRs such as sheries, irrigation
systems and shared groundwater basins, common
pastures and forests, share a tragedy of the commons
PD, yet can under some circumstances be exploited
and managed by beneciaries in limited fashion
without degrading or exhausting the CPR. Thus there
is an alternative between privatization of the CPR and
surrendering control to the state. Humans create and
learn rules and norms, and adapt them to solving their
problems. They learn to trust each other and abide by
reciprocity norms when their actions are monitored
Action, Collecti
e
and when compliance inuences their reputations.
Thus a PD is transformed into an assurance game.
Trust, reciprocity, reputation, positive feedback in
face to face groups, and a long time horizon make for
contingent cooperation that overcomes social dilem-
mas (PDs) and free-riding. Much research is advancing
collective action theory along these lines.
3. Social Mo
ements
Social movements consist of groups, organizations,
and people who advocate and promote a cause or issue
and associated collective goods. They confront oppo-
nents, who are frequently governments and privileged
groups. They use a mixture of institutional and
unconventional means of confrontation, at times even
coercive and violent means. In recent decades a large
variety of movements have been studied: nationalist,
ethnic, separatist, anticolonial, peace, democracy,
human rights, environmental, ethnic minority, civil
rights, womens rights and feminist, animal rights,
labor, peasant, student, for and against abortion,
temperance, antismoking, religious revival, religious
fundamentalist, and so on. Many social, political, and
cultural changes have resulted in part from social
movements, even when they have failed in the short
term. Olsons work, a reinterpretation of the Nazi
movement based on new historical scholarship, and
the social turmoil and explosion of popular par-
ticipation in protests in the 1960s stimulated a recon-
ceptualization of social movement theory.
Olsons assumptions were modied to suit the social
contexts of collective action while adhering to the core
of Olsons thinking. Sociologists embedded partici-
pation in social networks and groups. Moral, social,
and ideological incentives were added to the material
selective incentives, which put the accent on nonbene-
ciary contributors and a conscience constituency.
Seeking and fullling an identity through protest was
added. Between spontaneous, unstructured crowds
and social movement organization loosely structured
collective action was discovered (a variety of the
federated group). Participation became variable with a
division of labor between activists, part-timers, sup-
portive conscience constituency, and a sympathetic
by-stander public. Issues were socially constructed
through framing; varieties of contentious actions by
challengers against opponents were studied, some of
which were learned and culturally transmitted in
protest repertoires. The trigger mechanism provided
by small groups of activists and dissidents for large-
scale collective action diusion was discovered. Pro-
duction functions for collective goods became non-
linear as well as linear, depending on the character of
the collective good and the tactic of confrontation.
Just as important, there was an outpouring of em-
pirical research based on observation, social surveys of
participants, case studies and comparative studies
51
Action, Collecti
e
from history, the testimony of movement leaders and
rank-and-le participants, news coverage, systematic
content analysis of news media, video documentaries,
and much else, from a growing number of countries
and especially the USA and Western Europe, with
many researchers and writers using the same ter-
minology, concepts, viewpoints, hypotheses, and
methods (Diani and Eyerman 1992). Although some
maintained that the Europeans adhered to new social
movement theory (Dalton and Kuechler 1990) and
the US sociologists to resource mobilization (Zald
and McCarthy 1987), the dierence was a matter of
emphasis and only slight theoretical import. These and
other labels obscure the fundamental unity and co-
herence of collective action theory.
Social movement theory operates at two levels
simultaneously, the micro and the macro, both of
which have a static and a dynamic dimension
(Obserschall 1993). At the macro level, there are four
conditions for initiation and continuance of social
movements: (a) discontent, when institutionalized
relief fails; (b) beliefs and values that lter, frame, and
transform discontent into grievances calling for action
(Snow et al. 1986); (c) capacity to act collectively, or
mobilization (Gamson 1975, Tilly 1978); (d) oppor-
tunity for successful challenge, or political oppor-
tunity. Some analysts have emphasized one or another
of these dimensions, as Gurr (1970) did with relative
deprivation, a grievance variable; Zald and McCarthy
(1987) did with social movement organizations, a
mobilization variable; and McAdam (1982) and
Tarrow (1993) did with political process. In actual
studies, these and other theorists address all four
dimensions. Many case studies and comparative
studies of social movements can be accomodated
within this four-dimensional approach, though causal
theories of discontent, grievance, ideology, mobilizing
capacity, and political opportunity are still incom-
plete.
At the micro level, the decision to participate in
collective action is based on the value of the collective
good to beneciary multiplied by the probability of
attainment, a subjective estimate. This term and
selective incentives constitute the expected benet. On
the cost side there are opportunity costs and costs of
participation, including expected costs of arrest, in-
jury, blacklisting, and the like. Participation is chosen
when net benet is positive (Klandermans 1997,
Oberschall 1993, Opp 1989). Because probability of
attainment and some costs are a function of the
expected number of participants, there is strong
feedback among individual decisions. Dramatic shifts
in net benet can occur in a short time, which
precipitates cascades of joining, or negative band-
wagons. Empirical research, and in particular survey
research based on participants responses compared to
nonparticipants, conrms the micro model for a
variety of social movements and several countries
(Klandermans 1997).
52
The dynamic theory of challengertarget confron-
tations, though richly dealt within case studies, lacks a
developed theory. McAdam (1983) has demonstrated
innovation, learning, and adaptation by both chal-
lengers and targets in confrontation sequences.
Oberschall (1993) has shown that social control in
contentious confrontations gives rise to new issues and
grievances, e.g., police brutality, that mobilize new
participants, and that news media coverage of protests
can make for rapid protest diusion by signaling focal
points and issues for convergence and providing
vicarious expectations of participant numbers. Con-
frontation dynamics show promise for analysis with
game theory and simulation (Marwell and Oliver
1993) but much remains to be done.
4. Norms and Institutions
Together with the new institutional economics (North
1990) transaction cost theory (Williamson 1975) co-
operation theory (Axelrod 1984), and public choice,
rational choice\rational actor theory in sociology
seeks to explain norms, institutions, group formation,
social organization, and other products of collective
action, from elementary principles. The most am-
bitious eort to date is Coleman (1990). The el-
ementary units of analysis are actors, resources,
interests, and control. From these both systems of
exchange and authority relations and structures are
constructed, based on the right to control resources
and other actors actions, e.g., a norm to which the
actors conform. The demand for norms arises when
actors create externalities for one another, yet a
market in rights of control cannot be easily estab-
lished. The realization of norms occurs when social
relationships among actors enable them to share the
benets and costs of sanctioning. Among system
properties discussed by Coleman are agency, social
capital, and trust. Slowly evolved and inherited inst-
itutions such as kinship and the family (Ben-Porath
1980) and village communities (Popkin 1979) can be
understood with these theories. Ascriptive relation-
ships, as in kinship, are instances of specialization by
identity, when individuals transact only with the same
person or small groups in bilateral monopoly. This
mode of transacting enables huge asymmetric invest-
ments in other human beings, as with raising children
by parents, that are not expected to be paid back for a
long time. To break out of kin encapsulation with
limited opportunities for specialization, kin groups
forge horizontal alliances through marriage and build
political leadership through these networks. A per-
verse aggregate consequence, under conditions of ex-
treme resource scarcity and competition, discovered
by Baneld (1958) in a South Italian district, is amoral
familisman instance of PDwhich impedes com-
munity wide civic organization and leadership, and
hinders social change. There is no civic culture. Among

other topics studied are sharing groups (Lindenberg
1982), state formation (Levi 1988) and varieties of
religious organization and behavior (Iannaccone
1988).
The major social inventions of modernity for
Coleman are roles, oces, and corporate actors
from the colonial trade joint stock companies and
chartered towns to the modern corporation, labor
unions, and professional associationswhich are re-
sistant to people mortality and turnover and allow
investment in and transacting with a corporate venture
and between corporate actors, not just specic
persons. Corporate actors create entirely new oppor-
tunities for social change as well as problems of
governance, agency, and asymmetries of power. They
generate hitherto unknown modes of impersonal trust
based on certied skills and professional ethics codes.
These and other related topics on the evolution of
institutions, based on rational choice and collective
action theory, are published in Rationality and Society
and similar journals. Together with advances in the
other social sciences, in evolutionary biology, and in
cognitive and evolutionary psychology, collective ac-
tion theory is becoming a part of an integrated and
comprehensive social science with a wide reach.
See also: Action, Theories of Social; Coleman, James
Samuel (192695); Collective Behavior, Sociology of;
Disasters, Sociology of; Fashion, Sociology of; Inter-
est Groups, History of; Olson, Mancur (193298);
Panic, Sociology of; Rational Choice Theory in
Sociology; Social Movements, Sociology of; Violence,
History of; Violence: Public
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All rights reserved.
Action, Theories of Social
1. The Interpreti
e Theory of Social Action
Social action has become an important topic in
sociological theory under the inuence of the great
German sociologist Max Weber. To him, social
action, which includes both failure to act and passive
acquiescence, may be oriented to the past, present, or
expected future behavior of others (Weber 1922, p. I).
To Weber, explaining a social phenomenon means
analyzing it as the eect of individual actions. He says
explicitly in a letter addressed the year of his death to
a friend, the marginalist economist Rolf Liefmann:
sociology too must be strictly individualistic as far as
its methodology is concerned (Mommsen 1965, p.
44). The too means that sociology should, according
to Weber, follow the same principle as economics, a
principle later christened methodological individu-
alism by Joseph Schumpeter, and later popularized
by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper. This principle
states simply that any collecti
e phenomenon is the
outcome of indi
idual actions, attitudes, beliefs, etc.
To methodological individualists, as Weber, a crucial
step in any sociological analysis is to determine the
causes of individual actions. Weber introduces then a
crucial second postulate: that the causes of any action
lie in the meaning to the actor of his action. Thus, the
cause responsible for the fact that I look on my right
and my left before crossing a street is that I want to
avoid the risk of being hit by a car. To the operation
aiming at retrieving the meaning to the actor of his
action, Weber gives a name: Verstehen, to understand.
Given the importance of the Verstehen postulate,
Weber calls the style of sociology resting upon these
two postulates comprehensive sociology. To Weber,
by contrast with notably Dilthey, the notion of
comprehension characterizes exclusively individual
actions, attitudes or beliefs.
Weber (1922) has proposed in famous pages of his
posthumous work Economy and Society a distinction
between four main types of actions. Actions can be
inspired by instrumental rationality (Zweckrationa-
litaW t): when an actor does X because he perceives X as
54
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
an adequate way of reaching a goal G. They result
from axiological rationality (WertrationalitaW t) when
an actor does X because X is congruent with some
value he endorses. Actions are traditional (tra-
ditionell) when they are oriented to the fact that such
actions have been regularly performed in the past, and
are perceived as recommended by virtue of that fact.
Finally, an action is aective (aektuell) when it is
inspired by some feeling or generally emotional state
of the subject.
2. The Functional Theory of Social Action
An important contribution to the theory of social
action is Parsons The Structure of Social Action
(1937), a work where the American sociologist at-
tempts to combine some seminal ideas on social action
developed by Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Alfred
Marshall. Parsons devotes much attention to the point
that, to Weber, action is dened as oriented to the
behavior of others. He is notably concerned by the
idea that social actors are embedded in systems of
social roles. To him, roles rather than individuals
should be considered as the atoms of sociological
analysis. This shift from individuals to roles was
inspired to Parsons by his wish of combining the
Weberian with the Durkheimian tradition, individual
actions with social structures. The most popular aspect
of Parsons theory is his typology of the pattern
variables. These pattern variables are a set of four
binary attributes by which all roles can in principle be
characterized. Thus, the role of a bank clerk is
specic in the sense where his relation to his
customers is limited to well-dened goals, by contrast
with the role of, say, mother, that is diuse. The
role of mother is ascribed, while the role of clerk is
achieved. The former is particularistic in the sense
where it deals with specic individuals; the latter is
universalistic: the clerk is supposed to apply the
same rules indistinctly to all customers. Ralf
Dahrendorf (1968) saw in the Parsonian theory a
denition of the homo sociologicus and a proper basis
for making sociology a well-dened discipline, resting
on a well-dened set of postulates. While economics
sees the homo oeconomicus as moved by his interests
and as able of determining rationally the best ways of
satisfying them, the Parsonian homo sociologicuswas
described as moved, not only by interests, but by the
norms and values attached to his various roles. Merton
(1949) developed ideas close to Parsonss, insisting on
the norms and values attached to roles but also on the
ambiguities and incompatibilities generated by the
various roles an individual is embedded in. It must be
recognized, though, that the idea according to which
the parsonian homo sociologicus would guarantee to
sociology foundations as solid as the homo oecono-
micusto economics has never gained recognition.
More precisely, while most sociologists accept the idea
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7