Collective action may be defined as any behavior that is directed at fulfilling a goal shared by two or more people. Examples of collective action include the chants and audience waves of sports crowds, race riots, language revival movements, political election campaigns, military action, and political protests. In essence, communication scholars have been concerned with the ways in which communication can serve to enable, or in fact stifle, collective action.
Social psychological theories have provided useful models for explaining the circumstances under which collective action will occur. According to social identity theory, people who are in subordinate groups are most likely to engage in collective action when they believe that access to a dominant group and its advantages is blocked, and when the basis for their subordinate status is perceived to be illegitimate and or subject to change. On the other hand, members of elites are often more concerned with maintaining their advantages, or in other words, stifling collective action that might undermine their position. One strategy of elites is to communicate an ideology of social mobility, such as promoting tokenism. What this means is that members of dominant groups can control the degree to which members of subordinate groups can enter their group, and even when the rate of entry is very low, this can be enough to prevent the subordinate group members from organizing collectively to address shared inequalities or legitimate grievances (Wright et al. 1990).
Communicatively, then, we can expect that protests will increase in size when there is much media coverage because this will give others a sense of the possibility that the group might be able to effectively challenge the dominant group. Similarly, elites will be particularly interested in communicating the ideology of social mobility in their efforts to maintain ascendancy. Particular attention can be expected to be directed toward the success of individual subordinate group members, or more simply avoidance of discussion of subordinate group grievances. In all of this, there is a dynamic interplay between intergroup forces and their mass communications that are designed to enable their side to prevail (Reid et al. 2004).
Because of this, the ways in which leaders communicate to followers is critical to understanding collective action (Reid & Ng 2003). Leaders who are most likely to influence followers are those whose language carefully and strategically frames people as sharing an in-group identity. By using language to create or manipulate such frames, a successful leader will be able to spur collective action because a critical ingredient in predicting whether people will engage in collective action is whether or not they identify with a cause. One way in which leaders do this is to demonize or attack members of a relatively defenseless out-group. This has been seen on repeated occasions historically, and continues to this day in democracies where leaders flagging in the polls attempt to gain a boost in votes.
Similarly, we can understand the success of collective action by self-determination groups with respect to the degree to which the leadership of those groups have effectively communicated an in-group (often shared multicultural) relationship with the colonizing group. By doing so, self-determination groups can increase the perceived legitimacy of their grievances in the minds of majority group members, and at the same time lead those members to feel a sense of collective guilt or anger over past injustices. The collective guilt and anger are aversive motivational states, which can be satiated through bringing attitudes into line with reconciliation, affirmative action, and land redistribution policies. This has proven to be the case in popular support for reconciliation movements in Australia (Reid et al. 2005) and may well prove to be the case in dozens of other similar situations involving colonization around the world.
The mass media continue to occupy an important position in both the promotion and stifling of collective action. Herman and Chomsky (1988) in their propaganda model outline a number of filters on the media which serve to promote elite interests, and thereby stifle collective action that might challenge ascendancy. These filters include the concentration of corporate interests in media ownership, the government sourcing of information, and ideological constraints on the expression of dissident opinion. What this means is that the deck is stacked against those who lack the power to disseminate information. In this connection, an important new thread of work aims at understanding how the changing face of the mass media is making these traditional control relationships change, if not decay. The advent of the Internet, mobile telephony, and texting has made it possible for people to organize without relying on elite-owned media. We can expect the future of the collective action enterprise to be affected by these new technologies, but the way in which this happens will continue to depend upon the nature of intergroup relations and the associated processes of communication, leadership, and control of information.
References:
- Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Reid, S. A., & Ng, S. H. (2003). Identity, power, and strategic social categorizations: Theorizing the language of leadership. In D. van Knippenberg & M. A. Hogg (eds.), Leadership and power: Identity processes in groups and organizations. London: Sage, pp. 210 –223.
- Reid, S. A., Giles, H., & Abrams, J. R. (2004). A social identity model of media usage and effects. Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie, 16, 17–25.
- Reid, S. A., Gunter, H., & Smith, J. (2005). Aboriginal self-determination in Australia: The effects of minority–majority frames and target universalism on majority collective guilt and compensation attitudes. Human Communication Research, 31, 189 –211.
- Wright, S. C., Taylor, D., & Moghaddam, F. (1990). Responding to membership in a disadvantaged group. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 994–1003.