Collective Action: The Problems and Solutions
An Extended Essay
The essay aims to discuss the problems surrounding collective action. The term collective action is best defined in terms of relationships between individual choices and collective outcomes. This is a situation whereby participants or stakeholders in a cause of action are motivated by the potential consequences of their partaking in it as well as the potential personal benefits they will derive from the expected outcome of the cause. This is exemplified in the example of a student or activist, who is supposed to be worried about the consequences of spending a little around 5 hours in detention for civil disobedience, with the prospect of having a bill that is being agitated for to garner more publicity in the course of expediting its passage.
The course of collective action is indeed one that is surrounded by numerous factors that demand different vehicles or means towards the eventual outcome that is being sought. That means that a broader set of motivations can be included or incorporated into the strategy or decision making that necessitates cooperation. However, an actor is expected that they must make sacrifices which are the cost or the risks of getting their extrinsic reward. Moreover, from a holistic point, ‘individual cooperation’ must trump the desire to defect. Such a virtuous action, however, will still always be marred by factors that are human and for that, the article will be discussing them subsequently.
The idea of collective action cannot be explicitly rationalized as it favors defecting than to do so on a normal day. However, the first dilemma is a situation where participants are faced with the same action problem. The way to go about in such a case is to rationalize the risks and then embrace a tit-for-tat measure. Participants therein easily defect once their equal does the same. These are perhaps measures that keep mutual agreements together in real life between rival cliques or even WMD pacts. However, it doesn’t apply to “one-shot movements” where the case of repeated interactions is hardly ever a possibility, for example in a victorious opposition post-civil war coalition. The other dilemma where rationality can suffice is in a case whereby there are external agents to put in check non-cooperators through fines and threats or even through extrinsic rewards. This may be a possible solution for an example of oppositional coalitions, whereby rivals are given positions in the post-civil war/revolutionary government, but the major factor for such enforcement is a desirous “centralized enforcement” in place. There are however still dilemmas to this solution, such as inadequate compensation to factions. Also, you find situations whereby former regime members are retained by the new government, which may result in “bad blood” among cabinet members or from the revolutionary council. One must also mention that in a decentralized system, cooperation doesn’t occur if all parties express their full rationality due to every party pursuing an “outcome-oriented” purpose or motivations behind them. It leads to saying that a successful collective action is not attained by a guild of like-minded folks, rather it is a product that is a concoction of mixed motivations from across the structures of the movement.
This leads to the point, that the problem of collective action doesn’t have to be resolved through the dual analysis of motives and outcomes. It is possible that individuals might simply be motivated by a transient variable, which is the possible “impact” of the movement and within its ranks. Agents of such are termed as “utilitarians” — comprising of “full utilitarians” who only contribute if they are sure it will increase the average benefit of the movement and “selfless utilitarians” who cooperate fully, so long as the costs of such contribution do not outweigh the benefits if at all. This must also imply that there will be no direct unexpected consequential harm to others, whereas the full utilitarian takes note of the potential use cases of such collective action. Having this in mind, student movements for example, must be hardworking enough to move their colleagues from the position of self-utilitarianism to full utilitarianism by tackling fears such as repression or reprimanding expected from school authorities or their employers. In the absence of self-utilitarians or existence of too few of them, the task required is to recruit unconditional cooperators to help meet the threshold required to trigger full utilitarians. In other words, allyship consisting of utilitarians is a function of the expected consequences of the respective individual’s actions, which goes on to make a formidable collective.
There are also those whose actions are basically triggered by ‘observation’, rather than being “the first to act”. They can also be triggered by the mere knowledge that the leadership or organizers are observing them. Such may be motivated by principles of fairness, requiring that “the burden” of the cause should be shared. Others who do not fall into the category may be motivated by customs and social norms such as “guilt tripping”, “shaming” or potential social ostracism. In such cases, we see the full function of peer pressure playing its role. Other forms of motivation include “process benefits” which is about “herd mentality”, or “following the crew” because it feels good to belong. Their influences are common as part of marches, singing and entertainment, independent of the cause, even within organized protests. It is not always opportunistic however as people may join for the sake of “character building” and “consciousness raising” motives.
In conclusion, due to the ambiguous nature of these individuals from the outside, they can collectively serve to push up the adhesive nature of the collective even reaching those of high thresholds, therefore overlapping the problems of collective action. However, the understanding of these kinds of diverse motivation doesn’t necessarily result in reaching the outcome or result in the organizational success which is termed as a “snowball effect”. It doesn’t compensate for organizational leadership. But what can be known is that the outcome indeed is contingent upon the distribution of these various motivated actors within the movement, and thus understanding such a framework helps in understanding towards actualizing the requisite goals and aspirations.
Reference: Elster, John. Explaining Social Behavior More Nuts and Bolts for Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2007.
