Talking Collective Action
Talking Collective Action

Author: Ole Pütz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-17

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0429627076

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An ethnographic study of anti-nuclear movement groups that both challenges assumptions of traditional social movement studies of strategic action and shows what can be gained through microanalysis of talk in meetings, this book advances social movement studies methodologically and theoretically through the application of a new method of sequential analysis. Drawing on both conversation analysis and objective hermeneutics, it builds on microanalysis to scale up from sequences of talk to meetings, from meetings to groups, and from groups to the anti-nuclear movement, thus addressing a common criticism of analyses of face-to-face interactions: that they fail to demonstrate how their findings are relevant for questions beyond the interaction itself and thus for a broader sociological audience. A demonstration of the ways in which strategic deliberations by activists are subject to dynamics of face-to-face interaction, Talking Collective Action shows how groups adopt different styles of planning to engage with their environment and affect the groups’ development over time. As such, it will appeal to social scientists with interests in social movements, organizations and conversation analysis.

Reading as Collective Action
Reading as Collective Action

Author: Nicholas Hengen Fox

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2017-10

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 160938525X

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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.

Sweet Talk
Sweet Talk

Author: J. P. Singh

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2017-01-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780804794121

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Developed nations strive to create the impression that their hearts and pockets bleed for the developing world. Yet, the global North continues to offer unfavorable trade terms to the global South. Truly fair trade would make reciprocal concessions to developing countries while allowing them to better their own positions. However, five hundred years of colonial racism and post-colonial paternalism have undermined trade negotiations. While urging developing countries to participate in trade, the North offers empty deals to "partners" that it regards as unequal. Using a mixed-methods approach, J. P. Singh exposes the actual position beneath the North's image of benevolence and empathy: either join in the type of trade that developed countries offer, or be cast aside as obstreperous and unwilling. Through case studies, Singh reveals how the global North ultimately bars developing nations from flourishing. His findings chart a path forward, showing that developing nations can garner favorable concessions by drawing on unique strengths and through collective advocacy. Sweet Talk offers a provocative rethinking of how far our international relations have come and how far we still have to go.

Political Turbulence
Political Turbulence

Author: Helen Margetts

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0691177929

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How social media is giving rise to a chaotic new form of politics As people spend increasing proportions of their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are being invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, or downloading. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighborhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence reveals that, in fact, most attempts at collective action online do not succeed, but some give rise to huge mobilizations—even revolutions. Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. To better understand this unruly new force in the political world, the authors use experiments that test how social media influence citizens deciding whether or not to participate. They show how different personality types react to social influences and identify which types of people are willing to participate at an early stage in a mobilization when there are few supporters or signals of viability. The authors argue that pluralism is the model of democracy that is emerging in the social media age—not the ordered, organized vision of early pluralists, but a chaotic, turbulent form of politics. This book demonstrates how data science and experimentation with social data can provide a methodological toolkit for understanding, shaping, and perhaps even predicting the outcomes of this democratic turbulence.

Working Together
Working Together

Author: Amy Poteete

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-04-12

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1400835151

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Advances in the social sciences have emerged through a variety of research methods: field-based research, laboratory and field experiments, and agent-based models. However, which research method or approach is best suited to a particular inquiry is frequently debated and discussed. Working Together examines how different methods have promoted various theoretical developments related to collective action and the commons, and demonstrates the importance of cross-fertilization involving multimethod research across traditional boundaries. The authors look at why cross-fertilization is difficult to achieve, and they show ways to overcome these challenges through collaboration. The authors provide numerous examples of collaborative, multimethod research related to collective action and the commons. They examine the pros and cons of case studies, meta-analyses, large-N field research, experiments and modeling, and empirically grounded agent-based models, and they consider how these methods contribute to research on collective action for the management of natural resources. Using their findings, the authors outline a revised theory of collective action that includes three elements: individual decision making, microsituational conditions, and features of the broader social-ecological context. Acknowledging the academic incentives that influence and constrain how research is conducted, Working Together reworks the theory of collective action and offers practical solutions for researchers and students across a spectrum of disciplines.

Collective Action
Collective Action

Author: Russell Hardin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-03

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1135433097

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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.

From Individual to Plural Agency
From Individual to Plural Agency

Author: Kirk Ludwig

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0198755627

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Kirk Ludwig develops a novel reductive account of plural discourse about collective action and shared intention. He argues that collective action is a matter of there being multiple agents of an event and requires no group agents, while shared intentions are distributions of intentions across members of the group.

Revolutionary Feminisms
Revolutionary Feminisms

Author: Brenna Bhandar

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1788737784

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A unique book, tracing forty years of anti-racist feminist thought In a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism, there is a compelling and urgent need for radical paradigms of thought and action. Through interviews with key revolutionary scholars, Bhandar and Ziadah present a thorough discussion of how anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminisms are crucial to building effective political coalitions. Collectively, these interviews with leading scholars including Angela Y. Davis, Silvia Federici, and many others, trace the ways in which black, indigenous, post-colonial and Marxian feminisms have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another. Focusing on migration, neo-imperial militarism, the state, the prison industrial complex, social reproduction and many other pressing themes, the range of feminisms traversed in this volume show how freedom requires revolutionary transformation in the organisation of the economy, social relations, political structures, and our psychic and symbolic worlds. The interviews include Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware on Diaspora, Migration and Empire. Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici on Colonialism, Capitalism, and Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis on Abolition Feminism.

From Plural to Institutional Agency
From Plural to Institutional Agency

Author: Kirk Ludwig

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0198789998

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Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states. He argues that it can be fully understood in terms of the agency of individuals, and concepts derived from our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism.

Collective Intelligence in Action
Collective Intelligence in Action

Author: Satnam Alag

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 609

ISBN-13: 163835538X

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There's a great deal of wisdom in a crowd, but how do you listen to a thousand people talking at once? Identifying the wants, needs, and knowledge of internet users can be like listening to a mob. In the Web 2.0 era, leveraging the collective power of user contributions, interactions, and feedback is the key to market dominance. A new category of powerful programming techniques lets you discover the patterns, inter-relationships, and individual profiles-the collective intelligence--locked in the data people leave behind as they surf websites, post blogs, and interact with other users. Collective Intelligence in Action is a hands-on guidebook for implementing collective intelligence concepts using Java. It is the first Java-based book to emphasize the underlying algorithms and technical implementation of vital data gathering and mining techniques like analyzing trends, discovering relationships, and making predictions. It provides a pragmatic approach to personalization by combining content-based analysis with collaborative approaches. This book is for Java developers implementing Collective Intelligence in real, high-use applications. Following a running example in which you harvest and use information from blogs, you learn to develop software that you can embed in your own applications. The code examples are immediately reusable and give the Java developer a working collective intelligence toolkit. Along the way, you work with, a number of APIs and open-source toolkits including text analysis and search using Lucene, web-crawling using Nutch, and applying machine learning algorithms using WEKA and the Java Data Mining (JDM) standard. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.