Collective Action In Organizations

Explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine three organizations and show surprising similarities across them.

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.

Explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine three organizations and show surprising similarities across them.

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.

Organizing for Collective Action investigates the political and economic behaviors of national associations, including trade associations, professional societies, labor unions, and public interest groups. It focuses upon the ways that these organizations acquire resources and allocate them to various collective actions, particularly for member services, public relations, and political action. This analysis is structured around three broad theoretical paradigms for collective action: (1) the problem of societal integration which concerns the ways that people are tied to organizations and the ways that organizations connect their members with the larger society; (2) the problem of organizational governance which considers how individuals become unified collectivities capable of acting in a coordinated manner, and (3) the problem of public policy influence which involves interactions among public and private interest groups to formulate the binding decisions under which we all must live.

This books analyses the role of public opinion for generating genuine citizen demand for accountability, providing case studies from around the world to illustrate how public opinion forces governments to be accountable.

"This book explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn, and show surprising similarities across these three organizations"--Provided by publisher.

This book analyzes civil society as a field of organizations mobilizing on collective goals. Drawing upon field work on citizens' organizations in two British cities, this book combines network analysis and social movement theories to show how to represent civil society as a system of relations between multiple actors.