What Is a Collective Operation?

Collective action is a common theme in the research of social psychology, economic sociology, political economy (especially the public choice school), and public management science. Any phenomenon involving group or collective behavior or action cannot be separated from collective action. Discussion of this category.

Work in group

Right!

Collective action is social psychology, economic sociology, political economy (especially

Group behavior in social psychology (Le Pen, 1895), the social movement category of sociology (Smelser, 1962; Thierry, 2004),

[Abstract] The research on collective action is becoming an interdisciplinary topic in the domestic academic community. This article aims to make a brief investigation of this research field and put forward some judgments. The author finds that in the current research on collective action, in terms of research orientation and method, structural analysis is mostly used and process analysis is less; rationalism analysis is mostly used but constructionism analysis is less; With the increasing use of analysis, multiple research orientations and methods have begun to merge with each other. On the research topics, the existing research mainly involves the causes of collective action, political opportunity institutions, mobilization structures, strategies and methods, discourse, etc. It is a bit regrettable that most studies lack sufficient theoretical care and necessary Support of empirical methods. It is worth noting that the emergence of new collective action or new characteristics of collective action has challenged many existing theories and requires more attention from researchers.

[Keywords] collective action; structural analysis; process analysis

Since 1990, with the rapid economic growth and rapid changes in society, new types of social contradictions or social conflicts, mainly concentrated on the economic and interest levels, have gradually increased, especially in the grassroots society, which is almost a more general society phenomenon. This social phenomenon has also attracted the attention of many researchers on social issues. Basic research in this area has gradually increased in recent years. In the process, researchers continue to study and learn from Western social movement theories, while also working on the construction of localization theories.

In this kind of literature, there is a group of concepts with "family similarity", such as "collective struggle", "rights action", "group incident", "social conflict", "social movement", "collective action", etc., and Each concept often contains a series of sub-concepts. Researchers often insist on the uniqueness of the concept in terms of its connotation or research method when elaborating on the concept they use.

In order to facilitate the academic dialogue or communication between researchers, this article uses the concept of "collective action" as a dominant concept for studying the contradictions or conflicts in the current Chinese society. [1] The documents that use the above concepts as "tags" are collectively referred to Research literature on "collective action". In short, this article examines the literature on domestic scholars' basic research on "collective action" in mainland China after 1990.

There are two methods of reviewing this article. First, it is based on Western social movement theory. First, because of the relative maturity of its theories and methods, the basic status of China's collective action research can be clearly understood in the reference; second, some researchers have borrowed and used some western social movement theories and started a dialogue; finally, Some explorations and perplexities in the development of western social movement theory may also be what Chinese researchers need to face. Second, this paper uses Laudan's "conceptual problem" and "empirical problem" perspectives to evaluate these documents in an interwoven manner. 2

This article is divided into two parts, "Research Orientation and Methods" and "Research Issues", and discussed in turn.

I. Research Orientation and Methods

Structural analysis and process analysis

The structural analysis method can be simply defined as "structure" as the core concept. The research object is all the collectives. It attempts to explain the behavior of these individuals and groups through the relationship between individuals and collectives and related collectives. A basic premise is that collectives Participation and action in action are consistent with the division of social organizations. [3] Among the literatures examined in this paper, the research using structural analysis methods is the most, and it is mainly focused on the analysis of the characteristics of the grass-roots government and social structure that produce rural collective action.

A representative study, for example, Zhao Shukai believes that the conflict in rural society is mainly caused by the "privileged deprivation of farmers" by the grass-roots government; [4] Zhang Jing analyzes the change in the structure of the interest relationship between the grass-roots government and society and its role , That the current grassroots government is a grassroots structure with a lower degree of stability, and is increasingly involved in social conflicts. [5] In the same context, Yu Jianzheng extended this analysis to the analysis of rural authority structures, arguing that the imbalance in rural authority structures caused by the differentiation of interests and conflicts and the behavior of grassroots government is out of line, which is a rural sociopolitical conflict. At the same time, the starting factor of this imbalance mainly depends on the specific evoked event. [6]

Subsequent researchers continue to expand this research. For example, Zhang Yulin believes that under the pressure-type political / administrative system that uses economic growth as the main term evaluation index, local officials and profit-seeking entrepreneurs form a community of interests, thereby forming a "political and economic integration system." In the context of the environmental conflicts engendered by this system, for farmers in a disadvantaged position, the group incidents accompanied by violence are almost the only way they can choose to promote business and government concessions. [7] Xiao Tangbiao believes that "since the mid-1990s, their (peasant) actions have become more and more" urgent ". [8] These documents have emphasized the determinant role of structural features in collective action. Under this rationale, Yu Jianzheng proposed an oppressive response interpretation framework. [9] believed that in some cases, the driving force of collective action was not based on the choice of the subject of the action, but on the group (participants) The group's response to internal and external pressures, and to use this to modify and complement the currently popular "selective incentive" theory of collective action. In a recent article, Yu Jianrong shifted this structural analysis method to the study of the "action orientation" in the internal structure of peasant rights defense activities. [10]

Structural analysis is also applied to the analysis of urban collective action. Representative studies, such as Feng Shizheng, have examined the impact of unit heterogeneity on the collective resistance mechanism (or control mechanism, in other words), which is the segmentation effect of unit characteristics. Feng's contribution is that instead of adopting a simple correspondence model such as "structure-action", he integrated some of the mainstream interpretation frameworks of western social movement theories, and added the mechanism link between structure and action to form a "structure." The "mechanism-action" model, the mechanisms of which are summarized as "creating relative deprivation", "providing political environment", "facilitating resource mobilization" and so on. [11] However, Feng did not give a valid explanation of how the three mechanisms mentioned above are related to each other in a specific segmentation effect. At the same time, this study is still a general The static perspective cannot take care of the complex interactive process of the protest.

Researchers are also reflecting on the shortcomings of this structural analysis method. For example, Sun Liping proposed the "process-event analysis" research strategy for the shortcomings of "structural invisibility" in static structural analysis, that is, "an attempt to change the object to be studied from a static structure to a dynamic process composed of several events. And see the process as an independent explanatory variable or source of interpretation. " [12] Ying Xing extended this research method, thinking that the "narrative" method and logical-scientific discourse are also a basic cognitive method, which is of great significance for enriching the sociological imagination. [13] In specific research, Ying Xing and Jin Jun told the story of a collective petition by a migrant from a hydropower station in the southwest, showing how the weak can be conveyed in the unique mechanism of social power in contemporary China through "problematic" technology, and In the process of collective petitions and the collective "outrage" accompanying it, the strategies and boundaries of the respective actions of farmers and the state can be found. [14] Later, Ying Xing's "The Story of Dahe Migrants' Petitions" revealed the way in the new era when collective encounters such as collective petitions encountered positive power, how power was practiced from top to bottom and bottom to top. Operation. [15] Li Huai showed his "uncertainty" in a study of collective action caused by urban demolition. [16] He criticized the "structural" explanation for exaggerating the constraints of social policy and other structural conditions on the behavioral choices of stakeholders (actors), and ignored the cognition and behavioral capabilities of actors, in fact, the interests of The active "actors" of diversified goals, and at the same time, there is an unequal power relationship between the "actors", and their expression of interests naturally appears complex and uncertain.

The "process-event analysis" hypothesis of actors is in line with the constructivist perspective in Western social movement theory, that is to say, actors are embedded in society and socially constituted beings, and change in interaction with other actors Its boundaries and characteristics. Yang Jitao used this method to conduct a detailed study of the social conflicts caused by the development of a scenic spot in southwestern Shandong, showing a mechanism and process that cannot be found by structural analysis, that is, "a series of conflicts that occur in traditional rural communities are not only of interest. Contention is a contest between two concepts based on different types of knowledge. In this conflict, with the use of various struggle strategies, a new type of power network is gradually formed. This power network does not reflect the conflict of one party. Compromise or victory is the process by which both parties 'learn' from each other to create a new relationship. "[17]

At the end of this article, it seems to give the reader the impression that they have a restrained attitude towards "structural analysis" and "process-event analysis". In fact, in this article, these two methods have their own strengths and weaknesses, and the former can provide Some key initial conditions and situations of collective action, but often fail to give an effective explanation of the "junction" between structure and action; the latter shows some of the key mechanisms and processes of collective action, but it cannot explain why exactly It is these mechanisms that work, not those. According to Charles Tilly, the former is a large-scale cause, and the latter is a small-scale cause. [18] Therefore, this article believes that the combination of the two methods seems to be more beneficial to our research. Scholar Zhang Jing, when applying structural / institutional analysis, said that he needs to pay attention to "process" ("event") factors, and believes that they are inseparable. [19] Recently, more and more researchers advocate the fusion of these two methods. For example, Qu Jingdong put forward a discipline perspective that adheres to the combination of structural analysis and mechanism analysis to deal with major issues in the transformation of modern Chinese society. [20] And the current research status is that most researchers use structural analysis, and the research using "process-event analysis" is still very weak. This paper argues that the study of collective action requires more "process-event analysis" methods and the fusion of multiple methods on this basis. At present, researchers have begun to try to integrate the two methods, such as Zhang Lei's use of resource mobilization and political process theory at the meso and micro levels, and the socio-political phenomenon of the interest group theory at the macro level, and combine these two levels. Investigate the underlying cause and mobilization mechanism of the owners' rights protection movement. [21] Meng Wei demonstrated the behavioral characteristics of the strategic collective action of urban owners in their rights protection activities when they inspected the collective actions of the owners of Laishui Mountain Villa.