Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement

Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement PDF Author: Dennis Chong
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226104419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a theoretical study of the dynamics of public-spirited collective action as well as a substantial study of the American civil rights movement and the local and national politics that surrounded it. In this major historical application of rational choice theory to a social movement, Dennis Chong reexamines the problem of organizing collective action by focusing on the social, psychological, and moral incentives of political activism that are often neglected by rational choice theorists. Using game theoretic concepts as well as dynamic models, he explores how rational individuals decide to participate in social movements and how these individual decisions translate into collective outcomes. In addition to applying formal modeling to the puzzling and important social phenomenon of collective action, he offers persuasive insights into the political and psychological dynamics that provoke and sustain public activism. This remarkably accessible study demonstrates how the civil rights movement succeeded against difficult odds by mobilizing community resources, resisting powerful opposition, and winning concessions from the government.

Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement

Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement PDF Author: Dennis Chong
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226104419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a theoretical study of the dynamics of public-spirited collective action as well as a substantial study of the American civil rights movement and the local and national politics that surrounded it. In this major historical application of rational choice theory to a social movement, Dennis Chong reexamines the problem of organizing collective action by focusing on the social, psychological, and moral incentives of political activism that are often neglected by rational choice theorists. Using game theoretic concepts as well as dynamic models, he explores how rational individuals decide to participate in social movements and how these individual decisions translate into collective outcomes. In addition to applying formal modeling to the puzzling and important social phenomenon of collective action, he offers persuasive insights into the political and psychological dynamics that provoke and sustain public activism. This remarkably accessible study demonstrates how the civil rights movement succeeded against difficult odds by mobilizing community resources, resisting powerful opposition, and winning concessions from the government.

Collective Action

Collective Action PDF Author: Russell Hardin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135433097
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Public choice, an important subdiscipline in the field of political theory, seeks to understand how people and societies make decisions affecting their collective lives. Relying heavily on theoretical models of decision making, public choice postulates that people act in their individual interests in making collective decisions. As it happens, however, reality does not mirror theory, and people often act contrary to what the principal public choice models suggest. In this book, Russell Hardin looks beyond the models to find out why people choose to act together in situations that the models find quite hopeless. He uses three constructs of modern political economy--public goods, the Prisoner's Dilemma, and game theory--to test public choice theories against real world examples of collective action. These include movements important in American society in the past few decades--civil rights, the Vietnam War, women's rights, and environmental concerns. This classic work on public choice will be of interest to theoreticians and graduate students in the fields of public choice, political economy, or political theory--and to those in other disciplines who are concerned with the problem of collective action in social contexts.

Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action

Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action PDF Author: Aseem Prakash
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139492489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
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.

Collective Action for Social Change

Collective Action for Social Change PDF Author: A. Schutz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118534
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
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.

Reading as Collective Action

Reading as Collective Action PDF Author: Nicholas Hengen Fox
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 160938525X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Reading as Collective Action examines literature's power to reshape our world in very public and very active ways. Whether through readers publicly posting poems of Shakespeare and Amiri Baraka to criticize the Bush administration, forming a community reading program using Grapes of Wrath to organize support during the recent Great Recession, or taking to public transit to talk with strangers about working-class literature, this book challenges dominant academic modes of reading. For adherents of the "civic turn," it suggests how we can create more politically effective forms of service learning and community engagement grounded in commitment to tactical, grassroots actions. -- from back cover.

Global Collective Action

Global Collective Action PDF Author: Todd Sandler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139454269
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This book examines how nations and other key participants in the global community address problems requiring collective action. The global community has achieved some successes, such as eradicating smallpox, but other efforts to coordinate nations' actions, such as the reduction of drug trafficking, have not been sufficient. This book identifies the factors that promote or inhibit successful collective action at the regional and global level for an ever-growing set of challenges stemming from augmented cross-border flows associated with globalization. Modern principles of collective action are identified and applied to a host of global challenges, including promoting global health, providing foreign assistance, controlling rogue nations, limiting transnational terrorism, and intervening in civil wars. Because many of these concerns involve strategic interactions where choices and consequences are dependent on one's own and others' actions, the book relies, in places, on elementary game theory that is fully introduced for the uninitiated reader.

Governing the Commons

Governing the Commons PDF Author: Elinor Ostrom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107569788
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.

The Critical Mass in Collective Action

The Critical Mass in Collective Action PDF Author: Gerald Marwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521308399
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
The problem of collective action is that each group member wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she 'free rides', reaping the benefits of collective action without doing the work. Therefore, no one does the work and the common interest is not realized. This book analyses the social pressure whereby groups solve the problem of collective action.

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development PDF Author: William D. Ferguson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503611973
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
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.

Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States

Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States PDF Author: Richard Blanton
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387738762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Anthropological archaeology and other disciplines concerned with the formation of early complex societies are undergoing a theoretical shift. Given the need for new directions in theory, the book proposes that anthropologists look to political science, especially the rational choice theory of collective action. The authors subject collective action theory to a methodologically rigorous evaluation using systematic cross-cultural analysis based on a world-wide sample of societies.