Collective Action

Consider people walking in the street. As such, this is not normally regarded as collective action even if there are many agents acting in the same location—some of them are going for lunch, others are shopping, and so forth. By collective action we typically mean action by several agents who are suitably socially connected (e.g., are acting on the shared goal to go for lunch to a certain restaurant or are acting on the belief that there will be a traffic jam because of a sports event). Here, the same type of action is being performed with the knowledge that the others are also performing it or a related type of action. This entry discusses collective action from a conceptual point of view and also considers the structural motivational aspects inherent in situations of collective action. Collective actions are studied especially by social psychologists, sociologists, and economists as well as philosophers and researchers in computer science. Below the central conceptual features of collective actions are focused on and some relevant classifications are made.

The social connectedness of participants in a collective social action can, in its most central sense, be taken to refer to the social attitude, especially “we-attitude,” shared by the participants. The attitude can be a want, goal, intention, belief, wish, hope, feeling, and so on. A person's we-goal can be schematically explicated as follows: A participant is said to have a we-goal G if and only if (a) he or she has the goal G (partly) because (b) he or she believes that the other participants have the goal G, and (c) he or she also believes that it is a mutual belief among the participants that the participants have G. The genuineness condition (a) is obvious. The conformity condition (b) serves to connect the participants subjectively, and the social awareness condition (c) connects them intersubjectively (if the belief is true). In the case of intentional action, the because will typically express a reason, in other cases a mere cause. For instance, people may contribute to a collective good (here, a goal) where the (expected) goal satisfaction will be a shared reason for action. Note that the social awareness of kind (c) is needed to exclude nonsocial cases such as Max Weber's of people in the street simultaneously opening their umbrellas when it starts to rain. Also, fads and fashions clearly require mutual awareness. Note still that there is also weak collective action with a shared we-attitude where the because is replaced by and.

Let us consider some subcases of collective action performed because of a shared we-attitude. We concentrate on intentional cases (and ignore, e.g., invisible hand cases) and those in which the agents are [Page 159]in a symmetric position. Our classification consists of four main classes of collective action constituted, respectively, by (1) independent participant action, (2) interdependent participant action, and (3) joint action. Also (4) group action, especially action performed by an organized group (e.g., business company) and attributed to a whole group—rather than to some persons collectively—is also a kind of collective action. (1) and (2) consist of actions based on the participants' shared personal interests (“I-mode” interests) whereas at least in the full-blown cases of (3) group interests (“we-mode” interests) will serve as the participants' reasons for action, such as Tom's and Jane's joint action of cleaning the house. With some exceptions, analytical philosophers have concentrated on (3) and cases with a small number of participants closely intentionally connected (in contrast to what we have in the case of large groups).

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