Social conflict and group mobilization

source: Du Shiyu and Qi Jiayan, "Multi-agent Modeling and Simulation on Group Polarization Behavior in Web 2.0"

An earlier post drew attention to the fact that there are sometimes powerful forces leading to the disintegration of previously peaceful populations of people into violent opposition across groups (link). A population concentrated in a geographical space (city, region) almost always represents a variety of sources of differentiation across groups: racial differences, economic differences, and cultural and religious differences, to mention several important ones. And virtually any sources of group identity and group wellbeing can potentially be a source of conflict and opposition within the population. So the earlier post asked the question, what are the factors that lead these latent conflicts to break out into active conflict? What leads individuals within a group to begin to mobilize together with the goal of resisting or attacking members of other groups?

Several factors are evident. First, there are multiple kinds of agents in play, both individual and collective. The cohesion-fission results are the complex consequence of the agency and strategies of these many agents and their strategic interactions. And there are agents working to secure cohesion at the same time as other agents work to bring about conflict across groups. Second, there are multiple sources of collective grievance that may serve to provide the raw materials for mobilization -- fields over which groups have different levels of access to outcomes that they want to control. And third, there are a variety of structural factors that appear to be relevant to the dynamic processes of mobilization that may occur. Let's look at each of these.

Agents

Leaders. Leaders sometimes have an interest in using inter-group conflict as a basis for mobilization of supporters around them, for the purpose of extending their power and the resources they control. (This is often referred to as "political entrepreneurship.") Political leaders can provoke polarization by giving particular salience to one set of group characteristics over another. Lies, distortions, and emotional exhortation can provoke rank-and-file followers to increase their emotional level of commitment to the program of this group or that. The history of BJP in India as a provoker of Hindu-Muslim antagonism is a case in point (Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability). (A good illustration is Sam Popkin's "Political entrepreneurs and peasant movements in Vietnam" in Michael Taylor, Rationality and Revolution.) Here is Popkin's description:

This chapter examines the mobilization of peasants during the Vietnamese revolution. It shows how, out of the rational choices of myriad individual, peasant society can be restructured and new institutions constructed. It shows in particular how peasant organizers, starting with limited material resources and using only their organizational skills, can "bootstrap" their organizations into existence and so "build something from nothing". Through small interventions in the patterns of daily life these political and religious organizers, here called political entrepreneurs, build institutions which generate a "revolutionary surplus" or profit, and financed by this surplus they then use their local bases to recruit people to a national struggle. (9) 

Organizations. Organizations have the ability to communicate with their members; they can supply resources to support mobilization (lease buses to transport demonstrators to the capital city); and they can educate and indoctrinate followers into a particular social world view. There is a wide range of organizations that are relevant to mobilization in a social environment:

• Community-based organizations
• Youth and student organizations
• Gangs and criminal organizations
• Business and industry
• Religious organizations and leaders

Organizations also have the opportunity of building a high degree of emotional adherence in their members. Michael Mann emphasizes each of these avenues of influence in his analysis of fascist paramilitary organizations in the 1930s (link). 

Ordinary rank-and-file actors. Most people at any given time are not actively engaged in protest or militant activity. So the success or failure of efforts to polarize a population depend on the ability of leaders and organizations to activate these ordinary actors.

Grievances

Now turn to the grievances that may lead actors to mobilize for action against another group. The primary source of conflict among groups within Marxist theory is property. Class conflict is the primary social conflict. But much social conflict seems to arise from non-material factors --

• Material conflict of interest across communities (property, wealth, income, jobs)
• Cultural and religious conflict of practice
• Conflict over political power within the state over resources
• Kinship relations and conflicts across kinship groups

So there is a wide range of potential causes for polarization. However, at most times and places these potential grievances remain latent rather than expressed. Leaders and organizations can extend efforts towards mobilizing the emotions and adherence of members of society for solidarity around one or another set of grievances.

Influences on the spread of conflictual mobilization

Proximity. The spatial distribution of people across a region influences the ease with which they communicate with each other. Neighbors are more likely to be influenced in their beliefs and motives for action than are strangers from widely separated parts of the city. C. K. Lee points out the impact that dormitory-style living arrangements had for workers in "sunset" industries in China; rumors and calls to action flowed easily through the residential buildings (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt).

Social networks of affiliation. Social networks create communications pathways; they also create differentiated networks of trust. The fact that Suneel's brother-in-law Atul attends the same temple as Suneel gives Suneel elevated grounds for trusting and relying upon Atul when it comes to learning current information and in responding to calls for action conveyed by Atul.

Incidents. Mobilization within a subcommunity is often triggered by an instigating incident -- a traffic accident, an incidence of police brutality, an ethnic slur, a rumor of bad behavior by a member of another subcommunity. The police raid on the blind pig in Detroit in 1967 unleashed a cycle of mobilization and counter-mobilization within Detroit's population and the state and federal governments.

Tools

Broadcast media. As was evident in the Rwanda genocide (link), control of radio or television stations is a major advantage for organizations and leaders who are seeking to mobilize their followers for a given kind of action.

Direct face-to-face mobilization. Organizations like labor unions, community-based organizations, and industry associations often have substantial personnel on the ground -- cadres -- who serve to communicate with and motivate the rank-and-file members and potential adherents. One important example is the GOTV efforts that various organizations are able to mount in times of elections. Another is the visibility and influence in urban neighborhoods that the Black Panthers created in the 1960s through their food programs.

Social media. It is widely believed, especially since the rapid mobilizations associated with the Arab Spring, that social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can serve as effective pathways of mobilization and activization. (link)

We still haven't gotten to a clear answer to the question: under what conditions does a community begin to fission into conflicting components? But this analysis of the elements of the situation sheds some light on the facilitating or inhibiting factors that are relevant to such a process of fissioning. When leaders and organizations emerge who have a political interest in creating division (not an uncommon situation); when genuine underlying tensions exist (pertaining to resources or identity markers); and when features of proximity, interrelatedness, and weakness of policing permit the spread of divisive messages of faction; then fissioning is increasingly like.

Fissioning community

What is a community, and what forces exist to either preserve the strands of community or to erode those strands?

To start, a community is a population within a defined geographical space. It is a group of people who have their own interests, identities, and affinities. It is a group of people who act in a variety of ways — work, garden, vote in elections, raise children, join protest movements, support the government, steal cars, and attend public events. It is a group of people who are located within a space of social relationships — a set of social network graphs detailing their relations to family, friends, co-workers, fellow worshippers, fellow members of sports teams and civic associations. It is a group of people who have strong ties and weak ties to a range of other people and organizations. And it is a group of individuals who have ideas about how society should work, what is fair, who benefits from current social and political arrangements.

What makes a collection of people into a community rather than a jumble of unrelated individuals? There needs to be something in common, something that ties individuals together so they are to some degree willing to act in consideration of others in the group—a set of values, a set of shared purposes, a set of shared commitments to rules and laws of action in society. A strong community demonstrates a high degree of common respect for these values, rules, and laws. A weak community is the society that Hobbes feared—an agglomeration of self-interested actors competing for power and wealth, in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.

We might specify that sometimes a population embodies a plurality of sub-communities, each of which has a set of shared values and purposes—the Catholics and the Protestants, the Hindus and the Muslims, the bourgeois and the proles. Sub-groups may have very different cultural and religious beliefs, and they may also have very different positions in the social-property system and the political system. These sub-groups may have strong links among themselves but only weak links with individuals in the other sub-group. They may have strong adherence to a set of values and norms shared by their group but not across groups, and their norms may specify different behavior towards in-group and out-group individuals.

Crucially, a population with nested sub-communities may also possess an overarching unifying identity. That is, a mixed society may contain sub-groups that have their own norms and affinities, but that also share higher-level norms and commitments with other sub-groups. "We X’s live our lives differently from those Y’s; but we all accept the legitimacy of law and the freedom of worship." Those higher-level commitments might include items along these lines:

• recognition of the legitimacy of government
• commitment to the rule of law
• commitment to rights of association, speech, religion, movement
• commitment to the equal rights and worth of all members of the community
• a compassionate regard for the lives and flourishing of members of other communities

It is very appealing in our multi-cultural world to conceive of a mixed community — a city or a region, say — as a harmonious and stable set of relationships among groups who differ in many important ways but who recognize the basic legitimacy and rights of the other groups, and who strive towards better inter-group understanding and cooperation. And we do in fact have good examples of such communities.

But all too often this ideal of a tolerant and stable community embracing multiple racial and ethnic groups is broken on the rocks of inter-group mistrust and violence. Groups polarize, individuals in one group develop mistrust or animosity against members of other groups, isolated instances of disrespect or violence escalate into conflict or pogroms. The civility that existed in one period breaks down into hostility and violence in another period.

It is important to understand the social mechanisms and strategies that exist in this arena in both directions: the strategies that exist for promoting mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation, and the mechanisms that exist that have the potential for undermining peaceful relations among groups in a population.

There are a number of familiar strategies and mechanisms that work in support of civility within a multi-ethnic or multi-religious community: organizations devoted to promoting inter-group understanding, institutions that encourage the formation of ties across group lines (like universities), leaders who promote the values of civility and mutual respect, effective law enforcement that quickly addresses violent actions by individuals in one group against those of another. The ways that these strategies work are also fairly plain. Equitable law enforcement enhances confidence that everyone will be treated fairly, no matter what group they identify with. Good leadership is exerted to make salient the unifying collective commitments that extend across all groups, and these commitments become motivationally effective. Cross-group organizations create new ties among individuals from different groups which gives them resilience in resisting the impulse of hostility when conflicts arise.

What are some of the mechanisms that come into play in multi-group populations that lead to instability and conflict? Here are some common factors that lead to the breakdown of community: mistrust, failures of assurance, political entrepreneurship, media incitement, rumor, and conflicts of interest over property and political arrangements. Some groups and leaders have a political interest in elevating tensions between groups. Rumors of bad actions by members of the other group lessen the resolve of group members to maintain their stance of solidarity. (Atul Kohli considers some of these mechanisms in India in Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability.)

It seems apparent that the mechanisms and impulses towards fission are perennial and need to be contained if a multi-ethnic or multi-religious community is to be sustained over time. Work by scholars like Donald Horowitz (Ethnic Groups in Conflict) and Ashu Varshney (Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India) illustrate the historical processes through which mixed communities have broken down into ethnic violence. It would be very interesting to attempt to use agent-based modeling to model the workings of pro- and anti-solidarity mechanisms in a mixed population, along the lines of a public health simulation of disease, to evaluate the conditions that favor or disfavor the survival of community in a population incorporating a number of groups.

What is a European?

One of the great achievements of the establishment of the European Union was the beginnings of a broader transnational identity from Spain to Finland — or so it seemed for a decade or so. But is this even a coherent idea? Is it credible to imagine that the citizens of Spain, Greece, Latvia, France, and Finland would come to see themselves as fellow “Europeans” rather than Spaniards, Greeks, Latvians, Frenchmen and women, and Finns? What would be the content of such a pan-European identity? How would it come about?

One of the theorists who believed that a pan-European identity was possible was Karl Marx. His view was partial but emphatically trans-national: he believed that international working men and women could come to have a shared class identity that transcended national boundaries. But the mobilization of working class men and women into the armies of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia in 1914 provided a harsh reality check on that notion, at least in the historical circumstances of the early twentieth century. It appeared that nation and patriotic feelings trumped class and international solidarity. (Here is a very interesting collection edited by Marcello Musto, The International Workingmen's Association, that provides some of the founding documents and later discussions of Marx's version of internationalism.)

Willem Maas has given thought to this topic. Maas is the author of Creating European Citizens and Democratic Citizenship and the Free Movement of People. Maas's work focuses on an emerging consensus about rights and citizenship that transcends the various national cultures of the continent.

Since the end of the Second World War, an extensive set of supranational rights has been created in Europe. These rights extend entitlements, impose obligations, and have increasingly been designated with a term traditionally reserved for the relationship between individuals and states: citizenship. (Creating European Citizens, vii)

One part of this very interesting analysis is the notion that people develop their political affinities through the concrete work of building institutions and legislation. So the simple fact that the European Parliament convenes in Strasbourg is itself a potential pathway to a growing collective identity around the civic values articulated within that institution. The establishment and enforcement of civic rights for individuals qua citizens of Europe -- including crucially the right of free movement from one country to another -- created a basis for civic bonds that could play a much larger role in precipitating a European collective identity. And the creation of transnational educational institutions -- the Erasmus project in particular -- has perhaps laid a basis for a more full movement of people and ideas across the face of Europe (link).

An Ur-text on social identities is Ben Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition). According to Anderson, national identities are made, not discovered; social and collective identities are social constructs. In order to understand the collective identities of "Basques", "socialists," or "Tennesseans", we need to identify the mechanisms and pathways through which common political ideas and cultural images are adopted by a group of people. Emmanuel Todd and others describe such a process for the case of France (link, link). And it is not incredible to imagine a social-cultural process through which a thread of “European-ness” could come to play an important role across all these national settings.

At the same time, it is striking to take note of the very great diversity that exists in local cultures and identities across the map of Europe, in terms of values, moral frameworks, personality characteristics, and social perceptions. This is true across countries; but it is also true within countries, with substantial regional, religious, and class differentiation within each country. So it is challenging to speak of a "Spanish identity" without asking, "Which region of Spain? What social class? What ethnic or national minority?" And even more challenging is the idea that there is an emerging "super-identity" that may serve to unify the political consciousness and values of the people of the continent.

What might constitute the core elements of a pan-European identity? We might think of shared beliefs and values; we might think of ideologies and political movements; and we might think of key elements of culture that transcend national boundaries. But it is clear that there is enough diversity across the face of Europe to make substantial convergence around any of these large axes not very likely. Are Europeans more sympathetic to the plight of the poor? Some are -- but some are not. Are Europeans more progressive and liberal than North Americans? The resurgence of the right in Europe makes this dubious as well. Are Europeans more tolerant and accepting of others? The rise of anti-immigrant parties and movements in almost every European country makes that idea dubious as well.

Several of these considerations suggest that there are institutional and legal changes underway in Europe through the institutions of the European Union that may slowly permit a greater cultural and political integration of the people of the continent. Perhaps the very idea of "Europe" may come to play a larger role in the more specific identities that people have in the various countries of Europe -- as the idea of "Canada" serves to bring together the people of British Columbia and Nova Scotia, and the idea of "France" unifies Bretons, Alsatians, and Provençals. But it is also clear that there are cultural and political forces working against European integration that are powerful as well. So the future of the "European" in place of the Briton, the German, or the Spaniard is still in doubt.

(See an earlier discussion of an exchange of views between John Rawls and Philippe van Parijs on the topic of a European identity; link. See also this discussion of Andreas Wimmer's theory of methodological nationalism; link.)

A sense of injustice in China?

Quite a few years ago Barrington Moore explored in his book Injustice the idea that a sense of justice sometimes plays an important role in history. Here is how he put his central question:

This is a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at other times they become very angry and try with passion and forcefulness to do something about their situation. For the most part, the book focuses on people at or near the bottom of the social order: those with little or no property, income, education, power, authority, or prestige. (xiii)

Moore is interested in a particular moment in history, the moment when ...

... people come to believe that a new and different set of criteria ought to go into effect for the choice of those in authority and the manner of its exercise, for the division of labor, and for the allocation of goods and services... In this chapter we are looking for general processes that occur at the level of culture, social structure, and individual personality, as groups of people cease to take their social surroundings for granted and come to reject or actively to oppose them. (81)

We might summarize this idea in these terms:

• A sense of justice is a broadly shared set of factual and normative beliefs about how existing society works when it comes to fair and equitable treatment of individuals by institutions and groups.
• People are likely to mobilize in an effort to change the social order when their sense of justice is profoundly offended.

Moore offers examples of how offenses to a prevalent sense of justice can influence collective behavior, mostly drawn from German working class history. But for other examples we can also turn to E.P. Thompson's concept of the moral economy of the crowd (link; also included in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture) and James Scott's application of this concept to the situation of rebellion and mobilization in SE Asia (The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance).

This set of ideas raises two different sets of questions. First, can we confirm the idea that the motivations that arise from the experience of justice and injustice are in fact important in influencing the outcomes of specific cases of social life? Or is the sense of justice simply an epiphenomenon? And second, can we empirically investigate the particulars of the sense of justice and injustice of a particular people at a point in time? Is the sense of justice itself a social fact that can be investigated and mapped?

These ideas seem especially relevant to the case of China since the Revolution. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Revolution depended upon a set of values that couched social justice in terms of equality across classes. On the other hand, China's economy and society have witnessed an explosion of inequalities of income and influence since the 1980s. It is natural to ask, then, whether people who came to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s in China acquired an egalitarian sense of justice and injustice; and whether they and their children experience today's inequalities as being unjust. And in fact, some observers believe that rising inequalities in China are contributing to dangerously high levels of dissatisfaction and outrage among ordinary citizens. Or in other words, China is ripe for the kind of morally induced protest and resistance that Barrington Moore described. China is a "social volcano" in the early stage of venting and steaming, with an eruption to follow.

Martin Whyte's recent study of this question leads to surprising findings (for me, anyway). In Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China Whyte sets out to use the tools of survey research to assess and measure the contours of the assumptions about justice and inequality that are shared by several generations of Chinese men and women. He and research colleagues (including Shen Mingming and Yang Ming) conducted a national survey in 2004 aimed at probing Chinese attitudes towards inequalities. The survey involved responses from about 4,344 individuals, stratified in terms of region and rural/urban status.

Here is Whyte's assessment of the survey data (chapter 3):

How can we summarize Chinese citizens' feelings about issues of inequality and distributive justice? Which aspects of current inequalities in China do they accept and view as fair, and which do they see as basically unjust? In general, our survey results indicate that the majority of respondents accept and view as fair most aspects of the unequal, market-based society in which they now live. There is little sign in our results of strong feelings of distributive injustice, of active rejection of the current system, or of nostalgia for the distributional policies of the planned socialist era. (kl 1191)

In fact, Whyte describes a set of attitudes that place China squarely within what we might call the values of social democracy, favoring a social safety net and a market society that provides widespread opportunities for advancement. Here is a particularly relevant chart (figure 3.3):

The results in this chart display an intriguing blend of liberal and socialist commitments. Equal distribution (the Mao principle) receives 29.1% support, significantly lower than the 44.7% who oppose the principle. But another anti-liberal principle, government guarantee of jobs, receives higher positive than negative support (57.3% in support, 23.9% against). And there is overwhelming support for the idea of a government guarantee of a minimum living standard (80.8%).

Whyte singles out a number of principles of legitimacy and justice that he discerns in the survey findings (quoting from chapter 3, kl 1191 ff.):

• There should be government-sponsored efforts to provide job and income guarantees to the poor ...
• There should be abundant opportunities for individuals and families to improve their livelihoods ...
• There should be equality of opportunity ...
• Material advancement and success should be determined by merit factors ...
• The pronounced social cleavage between China's rural and urban citizens ... are unfair
• Since individuals and families vary in their talents, diligence, and cultivation and deployment of merit-based strategies for success, society will have a considerable amount of inequality ...
• Upper limits should not be set on incomes ...
• It is acceptable for the rich to use their advantages to provide better lives for their families
• People in positions of political power should not be entitled to special privileges ...

It is the generally optimistic character of these findings that leads Whyte to doubt that China is a "social volcano". He finds that the bulk of the Chinese population possesses a conception of justice and economic expectation that aligns fairly well with China's current social and economic realities. He does not find a rising sense of injustice and resentment that might fuel anti-regime mobilization. So China is not approaching a social eruption driven by a deepening sense of injustice among ordinary people; or at least this is how Whyte reads the data.

But it seems possible to read the data in another way as well. The principle of equal distribution -- the Maoist principle -- does actually correspond to the moral sense of a very large number of Chinese men and women in the survey (29.1%). (This number falls to 11.3% if it is specified that inequalities derive from a system of equal opportunity; figure 3.5.) How strongly does this minority hold this egalitarian view? Who are they? Is there a generational split on this question? And how about perceptions of conflict? Figure 3.7 presents opinions about the severity of conflict between various groups in Chinese society; there we find that 38.5% of respondents find large or very large conflicts between poor and wealthy people. Is this a large number or a small number?

In fact, there is an alternative reading of Whyte's data that comes to a somewhat darker conclusion. It is true that there is a large majority in Chinese society who are optimistic about the direction of change China is undergoing, and who are optimistic about their futures and those of their children. But there also seems to be a meaningful percentage of China's population who do not share these attitudes and beliefs. And perhaps this group is large enough to portend the kind of social conflict that Whyte is so skeptical about. When it comes to the likelihood of social unrest, perhaps it is not the modal individual but the disadvantaged minority who is most salient. So maybe a Moore-ian crisis is brewing in China after all.

Deliberation for activists

What is involved in deliberating within an activist group? This isn't quite as simple a question as it might appear. Deliberation has to do with a discussion among a number of people aimed at arriving at a degree of consensus about facts, policies, and strategies. But it grades off into several other collective activities: contention over power and influence, efforts to deceive or manipulate, efforts to mobilize people over emotional issues.

I am led to think about these questions by a very stimulating seminar by a colleague, Lara Rusch, in which she presented some of her current research on the specific features of collective decision-making by activist groups in Detroit. (Here is an article of Lara's on one aspect of the issue, the challenge of creating trust within a group of activists; link.)

What I'm interested in examining here is grassroots activist deliberation -- the kinds of decision-making and action that are associated with movements like the anti-globalization movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and a variety of grassroots environmentalist movements. This kind of deliberation seems to be structurally different from those that are often highlighted within the literature of deliberative democracy. (Erik Olin Wright and Archon Fong's Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (The Real Utopias Project) (v. 4) is a great statement of current thinking about deliberative democracy. Here is an earlier post on deliberative democracy and here is another post on the Real Utopias project.)

Most examples in the deliberative democracy literature involve processes in which the task is simply to arrive at a majority recommendation about a fairly well defined issue, with the process increasing in persuasive force according to the strength of the majority. But a process like this doesn't have to cope with the issue of maintaining the coalition after this one action. Activist groups, by contrast, are not regulated by formal rules of voting leading to a single adopted resolution, they are not bound by majority vote, and they are not concerned about simply coming to a decision about a single resolution.

So let's consider one aspect of activist debate: the communicative effort by members of a group to sort out what they should do collectively, given the framing goals and values they share. The individuals and groups have come together because they share commitment to some purpose or goal. (Though there is always the possibility of uncommitted visitors and even provocateurs whose goals involve side-tracking the purposes of the rest of the group.) So how can individuals and sub-groups engage in a process that leads to a degree of consensus about future actions?

Here I take it for granted that activists share goals and values. But this is not wholly true. They may share a high-level concern -- ending racism, pushing for sustainability -- but may disagree sharply about finer details. So reaching consensus about action is often made more difficult by the fact of disagreement about important goals and values. For example, an environmental activist group may disagree about the scope of their collective efforts -- global sustainability or improvement of their own region's environmental quality.

Another important source of disagreement arises a step closer to action, deriving from differing theories of how social change works. One segment may think that the primary tactics should involve getting effective messages to the broader public through media coverage, whereas another group may think that it is essential to get the attention of policy makers through consequential and visible direct action. With broad disagreement about efficacy of various possible strategies, it is difficult to achieve consensus.

One option that exists in this case is for each camp to make an empirical or historical argument supporting its claims of efficacy; to the extent that opponents are open to rational assessment of evidence at this level, it is possible to narrow disagreement about efficacy.  In other words, rational persuasion based on evidence and inference is one possible avenue of communicative interaction within a group of similar-minded activists. But often partisan groups are as committed to their models of social action as they are to the ultimate outcomes.

The whole situation of activist deliberation is complicated by the fact that a social movement at any level of scale depends on the willing participation of individuals and sub-groups. So a degree of consensus is a practical necessity, if the movement is to maintain itself as an active and activist conglomeration capable of any form of collective action. To the extent that a proposed plan of action diverges substantially from the preferences and interests of a sub-group, there is the likelihood of defection of that group.

There are a couple of features of collective action that seem to make the problem of factions somewhat more manageable than it first appears. First,there is a degree of solidarity involved in almost every social movement; and a widespread feeling of solidarity provides some degree of motivation for each individual to join the collective action even if it is not one's first choice.  In other words, activists often have a degree of willingness to support the decisions of the group even if they are on the losing side -- unless the differences are sufficiently fundamental! Second, individuals and groups are capable of compromising: they can agree to an action plan in which Group A gets most of what it wants, but it promises to pursue part of what Group B wants as well.  And if there is a degree of inter-group trust, this may be sufficient to get both A and B to work together on the agree-upon plan.

David Graeber's Direct Action: An Ethnography is a fascinating ethnography of anti-globalization activists preparing for a complex series of actions at the 2001 Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec. As Graeber makes clear, these loosely affiliated anarchist groups were effective at planning and coordinating action. Here is an earlier discussion of Graeber's book (link).

Race, perception, and reality

Several recent themes come together in Ron Jacobs' very interesting 2000 book, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies). There is the recurring theme of racial separation in American society, this time with respect to divergent perceptions of important historical events. There is the role of representation and framing as a component of identity and agency. And there is the question of realism: given the fact of divergence, what sense can we make of the question, what really happened?

Jacobs is a cultural sociologist, within a group of theorists who believe that social imagination, representation, and framing are interesting and appropriate objects of sociological inquiry. Like theorists in the broad field of social mobilization, he believes that an understanding of these "subjective" features are key to understanding mobilization and action. But he also takes very seriously the idea that an individual's (or group's) mental framework is constructed by concrete social processes, including the media. And, finally, he offers a sophisticated framework in terms of which to analyze and dissect the media itself. This is an approach that blends the methods of the social sciences and the humanities in a very constructive way.

His specific goal in this book is to try to identify crucial differences of framework between African-American and white publics in the United States at several important junctures. He studies the African-American and mainstream press in their reporting of the Watts uprising (1965) and the disturbances that followed the Rodney King beating and court findings. The African-American press serves an important "fragmented public", and Jacobs wants to identify in detail the differences in perspective that exist between it and the mainstream press.

The theoretical frame for Jacobs is Habermas's thinking about communication, discourse, and the public sphere. He largely buys into Habermas's notion that a populace constitutes itself as a collective identity through discourse in public spaces. And the media represent some of those spaces. But he diverges from Habermas's views in emphasizing that there are multiple publics and multiple discourses. And this point is particularly important when it comes to race in the United States. The OJ Simpson trial illustrated this point very sharply, with widely divergent opinions about the trial among African-Americans and white Americans.

Jacobs' primary method is narrative analysis. He analyzes several thousand news stories with respect to plot, characters, and genres. And he finds there are substantial and consistent differences between mainstream and African-American press accounts of Watts, Rodney King, and the innocent verdicts for the police assailants of Rodney King.

What Jacobs doesn't assert, and what probably isn't true, is that the perspective found in, say, the Chicago Defender, is a faithful, exact expression of the collective perspective and framing of the black public of Chicago at a point in time. Rather, the Defender is a media publication with an editorial perspective and a small group of writers and editors. They have their own perspectives. As Jacobs points out, the Defender helps to influence black perspective in Chicago, but it isn't identical to the mentality of the black Chicago public or publics. (One might speculate that much of Chicago's black youth took a more radical and less patient view of police harassment than the Defender.) In order to probe these mentalities on the ground, a different kind of research would be needed -- ethnographic rather than documentary.

So this invokes one of the themes of realism we've surfaced in recent posts: what can we say about the truth of the matter when it comes to assertions about social perceptions and representations? And here I'm not thinking of the veridicality of the black teenager's perceptions of the police, but rather the veridicality of the sociologist's representations of that group's perceptual scheme about race and the police. How does critical realism come into the picture when we are discussing intangible, subjective features of imagination and representation by a social group? Can we be realists about mentalities?

I believe that the answer is "yes". There are research methods that permit a degree of confidence in assessing the forms of thinking associated with a given group at a given time. These range from participant-observer methods, to ethnography more broadly, to the kind of historical ethnography practiced by Robert Darnton, to survey methods attempting to measure attitudes and values. These methods generally require interpretive skills and judgments on the part of the investigator -- in this respect the sociologist is also a humanist--but it is reasonable to think that evidence-based inquiry can lead to reasonably confident conclusions about facts of subjectivity.

And this leads to another connection to realism: subjective schemes of interpretation are linked to actions as well. Mentality and action are linked. So the fact that Chicago teenagers in 1968 perhaps shared a narrative of police brutality very plausibly played a causal role in their behaviors in Chicago's uprising. So realism about the causes of contentious politics requires a degree of realism about mentalities as well.

(All of the action in Jacobs' book involves Los Angeles, a city with a very specific racial history. Readers will find the Easy Rawlins novels of Walter Mosley a vivid representation of African-American life in LA in the 1950s -- e.g. A Red Death (Easy Rawlins Mysteries). But even here a question of realism arises: can we gain realistic understanding of a historical moment through a novel? Does Mosley offer a true depiction of race in LA?)

Protest in Wukan

A period of demonstration and protest in the Chinese village of Wukan has caught the attention of world media in the past several weeks (link, link). The village is in Guangdong, the dynamic coastal province.  The demonstrations began in September against major land seizures by local government in alignment with developers, and became more intense in the past week when leader Xue Jinbo died in police custody.  (Here is a good Wikipedia article on the village.)  Land seizures seem to be the most volatile issue in China today, producing a large proportion of the roughly 90,000 civil disturbances the country currently faces a year.

Analysts are interested in probing the causes and dynamics of protest and resistance in contemporary China, including C. K. Lee (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt) and Kevin O'Brien (Rightful Resistance in Rural China).  Here, though, it may also be interesting to compare the current situation with the occurrence of similar incidents during the Qing Dynasty.

Fortunately, it is possible to do so on the basis of a recent relevant study. Ho-Fung Hung's recent Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty addresses exactly this issue in historical context. He looks at the period 1740-1839 and finds that the character of protest and resistance varied throughout the period. This is the early modernization period of Chinese history, and Hung believes that the subject of popular unrest has been overlooked in this period. The grasp of the central power of the state increased during this period, and it also represented a major advance in commercialization of Chinese society.

The main source of data on protests during this period that Hung analyzes is the Veritable Records of the Qing, a compendium of shortened versions of edicts and memorials from the emperor and other officials. Out of the 2,096 volumes of this archive Hung identifies 514 events of popular protest and 450 events of petitions to higher officials (55).  His empirical work involves coding hundreds of contentious events during the period, classifying them, and looking for patterns of change over time.  But how to categorize?  Here is his overview description of his approach:

I classify the documented protest events into different types according to their claims and repertoires. A protest's claim is a set of articulated demands advanced by the participants. The repertoire of a protest is the set of learned or invented acts that the protesters performed to attract the attention of potential participants and the authorities, as well as to persuade or force the authorities to meet their demands. (58)

One distinction between events that he draws from the existing literature on contention and rebellion is between backward looking and modernizing protests. Essentially the former represent demands to secure existing rights (or re-establish recently extinguished rights). The latter take the form of proactive protests aimed at creating new opportunities and rights within an emerging set of economic or social institutions. Hung rightly rejects the idea that European experience can provide a full theory of contentious politics. So he insists on using the evidence of non-western movements as an alternative basis of analysis and theory. China's experience in the mid-Qing provides an ample basis for arriving at such a scheme.

Hung doubts the utility of the concept of "backward-looking" protest in the mid-Qing period. Instead, he argues that protests throughout the period were proactive and aimed at securing better outcomes in the future for the protesters, in light of changing political and economic conditions. The large distinction that Hung favors as a way of categorizing contention has to do with the purpose and style of the mobilization. "Filial protest", or "state-engaging" protest, involves collective action intended to implore the state to honor its obligations. "State-resisting" protest involves action deliberately designed to challenge the authority and power of the state, often with the threat or reality of violence (58). And Hung believes this scheme is valuable for China, in part, because some surprising patterns emerge through these lenses. In particular, he finds the frequency of state-resisting protest varies significantly along this timeframe, from a high point in 1600-44 of 94% to a low in 1740-59 of 40%, rising again between 1776 and 1839 (figure 6.1).

Hung's account highlights several important things about Chinese protest. First is the point that protests exist within a set of material social arrangements that provide the interests that lead to mobilization. So an important dimension of analysis for uncovering the causes of a wave of protests is to analyze the changing economic and political circumstances that created new pressures and opportunities for ordinary people.  Second is the point that culture and repertoires of resistance give form to the protests that emerge.  Here he gives causal importance to Confucian ideas about the state, but also to heterodox ideas stemming from non-Confucian traditions (for example, White Lotus Buddhism).

A very old feature of Chinese protest involves the delivery of petitions to the central government (emperor) to protest abuses by local officials, tax farmers, or other scourges of peasant life.

In Qing times (1644-1911), a common remedy for powerless subjects abused by local officials was to travel all the way to Beijing to appeal to the emperor as their grand patriarch, hoping he would sympathize with their plight and penalize corrupt local officials. (1)

And, as Hung points out, this tradition continued through 1989 and beyond.

So what about Wukan?  Does Hung's analysis of mid-Qing protest shed any light on the nature of protest there?

Accounts make several things clear.  First, the cause of popular unrest that precipitated the first round of protest in Wukan had to do with an important material issue (land seizures) and the actions of potentially corrupt local officials in collusion with powerful developers.  Second, the protest intensified dramatically in the past 10 days after security officials took violent action against elected leaders of the protesters, leading to the seizure of Xue Jinbo and his death in police custody. Third, it appears through news reports that protests took the form of non-violent appeals for relief against corrupt officials -- similar to the tradition of filial protest.  The tradition of taking the protest to higher officials is also illustrated here, with the stated intention of marching to Lufeng, the local administrative center. Here is an indicative passage from the New York Times:

Almost to a person, the villagers are holding out hope that leaders in Beijing will intervene to settle the dispute and to investigate what they contend is widespread corruption in local affairs, including land sales. Saturday’s rally, laced with chants like “We love the Communist Party,” stressed the villagers’ loyalty to the central government. One prominent banner begged the central government to come to their aid. (link)

But the same article raises the possibility that this protest may move from state-engaging to state-resisting as villagers come to believe that they have no recourse from the central government:

“Our original intent was just to get our land back,” a 29-year-old homemaker who identified herself only as Mrs. Zhu said as she stood under a Chinese flag, mounted on a makeshift pole at a protesters’ checkpoint on the village outskirts. “We never intended that things would get into such a situation.”Asked what could be done, she replied: “We have to fight to the end. That’s the only way out. If we retreat now, all the hardships the government imposed on us will come true.”

Hung provides an interesting tabulation of several important characteristics of protests in mid-Qing China that I've reproduced below. I've supplemented the table in two ways.  First, I've included in this table the data Hung reports on the incidence of state-resisting protests, which vary significantly throughout the period he studies (figure 6.1). Second, I've added an additional column of my own indicating how Wukan seems to measure up on these criteria.  The finding that I've come to is that Wukan began as a "filial protest" through which villagers sought to engage the state to obtain relief from local officials.  The protest has been pushed into a more "state-resisting" posture, however, as a result of the violence and intransigence of local and county officials, and the fact that Beijing has so far ignored the villagers' demands.

Transnational labor activism

One of the characteristics that observers notice when they consider the anti-globalization protests of the past decade or so is the extent of transnational relationships that exist among activists and activist organizations. Sidney Tarrow provides a scholarly examination of these kinds of movements in The New Transnational Activism, where he tries to understand the organizational and situational circumstances that either facilitate or impede calls to popular action concerning large issues that affect many countries.  (Here is a post on transnational activism and an earlier post on anti-NATO protests in Strasbourg a couple of years ago.)  This is important work, and transnational activism is certainly an important feature of the world scene today.  Our attention, though, is often restricted to the recent past when we think about transnational activism.  So it is useful to consider earlier periods in the twentieth century in which movements succeeded at some level at bringing together multi-national coalitions in support of an important social or political cause.

One important instance is the international alliances that emerged in the radical end of the non-Communist labor movement in the 1950s.  Nicola Pizzolato's recent "Transnational Radicals: Labour Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950-1970)" in a recent issue of international review of social history (link) is a great case study in this light. Pizzolata provides a very useful and detailed account of the political and theoretical developments that transpired in Detroit and Turin among activist workers and thinkers during this period. It is well worth reading for that reason alone. But it also provides a concrete instance of a situation in which workers and activists, located within the industrial system in different parts of the world, were able to form their own understandings and strategies concerning those industrial realities, and the degree to which there was meaningful interaction among these groups.

The piece is particularly interesting to me for the light it sheds on the development of an important strand of radical African-American thought during the 1950s and 1960s. (Also because I had the remarkable pleasure of meeting one of the principal players in the story a few years ago, Grace Lee Boggs.) African-American militancy took a different shape within the industrial labor force than it did in much of the rest of America, and it is a story worth understanding. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin's Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution is a valuable monograph on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.  Manning Marable provides a thoughtful foreword.  Marable provides a quick sketch of the development of the movement:

By 1968, more than 2.5 million African Americans belonged to the AFL-CIO. Yet the vast majority of black workers were marginalized and alienated from labor's predominantly white conservative leadership.  In 1967, black militant workers at Ford Motor Company's automobile plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, initiated the United Black Brothers. In 1968, African-American steelworkers in Maryland established the Shipyard Workers for Job Equality to oppose the discriminatory policies and practices of both their union and management.  Similar black workers' groups, both inside and outside trade unions, began to develop throughout the country.  The more moderate liberal to progressive tendency of this upsurgence of black workers was expressed organizationally in 1972 with the establishment of the Coalition of Black Trade Unions.

A much more radical current of black working-class activism developed in Detroit. Only weeks following King's assassination, black workers a tthe Detroit Dodge Main plant of Chrysler Corporation staged a wildcat strike, protesting oppressive working conditions.... The most militant workers established DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement.  DRUM soon inspired the initiation of other independent black workers' groups in metro Detroit, such as FRUM, at Ford's massive River Rouge plant, and ELRUM, at Chrysler's Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant. (ix-x)

Here is how Pizzolato describes the situation:

In Detroit and Turin, these radicals saw the car factories as the key loci for change -- laboratories for a possible "autonomist" working-class activity that could take over industrial production and overhaul the societal system -- and urged workers to develop their own forms of collective organization, beyond existing labour organization. (5)

The "Correspondence" was a post-Trotskyist version of anti-capitalist theory and activism, rooted in the Detroit auto industry and involving names that are still familiar in Detroit: James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, General Baker, Martin Glaberman, Charles Denby, William Gorman and George Rawick (6). (Parenthetically, Wayne State University enters the story at several junctures as a locus for theory and debate.) This segment of politically engaged workers was as critical of organized labor as they were of the companies. A key part of the political activism of the Correspondence consisted in its willingness to confront the racial divisions that existed in society and within the factory.  "[Charles Denby's Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal] took a particularly strong stand in support of both the possibility of interracial co-operation among workers and the necessity of an autonomous black struggle" (10).

The spontaneous discontent breeding in the factories and in the working-class neighbourhoods of Detroit and Turin in the late 1960s was captured by some radical groups that had incorporated into their programmes many of the insights gleaned in the previous fifteen years by the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Correspondence, Quaderni Rossi, and Classe Operaia -- groups that could engage in a dialogue because, notwithstanding local differences, they located themselves in a similar position within a global opposition to capitalism. (21)

Essentially the developments that Pizzolato describes in Detroit and Turin represent a sustained, theoretically powerful attempt by radical thinkers and activists to rethink the role of working people within a progressive vision. There were a number of strands, but core was the "Johnson-Forest Tendency", deriving from C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. The perspective is "autonomist" -- it rejects the idea that Communist parties, workers' states, or bureaucratic union organizations do a good job of furthering workers' interests. Rather, workers need to self-organize, both in terms of production and in terms of strategies and actions. Pizzolato makes the point that it is anti-Fordist, anti-Soviet, and anti-bureaucratic union. And, like the Occupy Wall Street movement today, its theorists attempted to go beyond existing radical dogma for a new radical diagnosis.

The narrative of theory, publication, and activism that Pizzolato offers for both Detroit and Turin is fascinating in its own terms. But equally interesting, and crucial to his argument, is his documentation of the transnational connections that existed within this period of radical thinking and action. C. L. R. James was an internationally recognized voice. But the influence of the Detroit radical groups on European and Italian working class activism required more direct linkages. What were they? Here are a few of the specific linkages that Pizzolato cites.

For six months in 1948 Grace Lee Boggs resided in Paris and established a "daily collaboration" with the members of the group[Socialism ou Barbarie]. (12)

In his native Cremona, Montaldi founded in 1957 a group called Unita Proletaria, that distanced itself from the Communist Party and established direct contact with Socialisme ou Barbarie, Correspondence, News and Letters, And European groups that espoused the same line: the British Solidarity for Workers' Power, the Belgian Pouvoir Ouvrier, the Dutch Spartakus and others. (13)

In addition to theoretical debates and developments that extended across these specific transnational networks, the examples of large labor actions in 1967 and 1968 -- Renault in France, FIAT in Turin, and the Big Three in Detroit -- served to communicate strategies, tactics, and a spirit of boldness from one group to another.

It was in this context that the intellectual and personal contacts between Detroit and Turin radicals dating back to the 1950s were rekindled by the almost simultaneous workers' struggles in the car factories. (24)

The Italians were also keen to know about Detroit, as very little leaked out in the Italian press about labour unrest in the American cities. "Everyone is asking [for] information about the auto strikes in [the] States," wrote Gambino to Glaberman in 1970. (26)

African-American activist John Watson soon traveled to several cities in Italy in 1970 (his second trip), to share the news about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

What is fascinating about this whole story is the light it sheds on the formation of efforts at understanding and challenging a complex social order. There is an emphasis throughout much of this movement on taking workers' experiences within the factory as the starting point. This implicitly challenges the preoccupation of the Old Left on the canonical ideas of Marxism and Leninism -- the structure of capitalism, the vanguard party. But parallel to this independence of thinking is an independence in acting. The activists within this loose transnational community put the emphasis on workers' actions, not the actions of bureaucratized organizations (parties, unions, states). And both aspects of this seem to have some resonance with the anti-globalization movement of the past 20 years.

Aggregation dynamics

The social world starts with social individuals. So how do we get more complex social outcomes out of the actions and thoughts of independent individuals? How do the actions and thoughts of individuals aggregate into larger social happenings? How did the various religious, political, and relational attitudes of rural Kenyans aggregate to widespread ethnic violence a few years ago? What sorts of conditions lead to interactions that bring about unexpected outcomes? And, of course, how do larger social happenings impinge upon individuals, leading to characteristic kinds of socialized behavior?

These are questions I've usually addressed from the other angle -- the "dis-aggregation" angle. I've asked how large social entities and processes can be disaggregated into actions and relationships pertaining to socially situated individuals. This is what we're aiming at when we ask for microfoundations for things like state power or the changing impact of Islam. Here, though, let's look at the upward-facing processes.

Here are some examples of the kinds of happenings and situations that we might be interested in:

• collective social behaviors: riots, uprisings, boycotts, protests, panics, runs on the bank
• coordinated actions by differentiated but organized groups: design of a new model vehicle at General Motors, movement of a tank squadron through a battle zone, actions by squads of fire fighters in a large forest fire
• shifts of valuations and attitudes: styles, slang, inter-ethnic attitudes, diffusion of religious beliefs, dissemination of rumors through a population
• preservation of stable organizations and structures: maintenance of the rules governing shop-floor behavior in a factory, sustaining command authority within a military organization, keeping a sustainable level of parent involvement in a cooperative childcare center, keeping a reasonably high level of taxpayer compliance within a mass society

How do the reasonings, thoughts, and choices of socially situated individuals aggregate and link together in ways that constitute these higher-level phenomena?

Some social outcomes are essentially agglomerative. A riot sometimes occurs when a small group of people have a grievance and a provocation; a larger group share sympathy with the original rioters; others see the behavior and join for their own reasons; and in a few hours thousands of people are breaking windows, setting cars on fire, and blocking the streets.

Second, some outcomes are the result of strategic behavior by a number of individuals. Competition leads agents to tailor their actions in such a way as to take advantage of the expected behavior of others; cooperation leads individuals to attempt to coordinate their behavior so as to bring about an outcome that the group prefers. These are the kinds of aggregative processes that Thomas Schelling describes in Micromotives and Macrobehavior; and, of course, some of the outcomes of both competitive and cooperative behavior are paradoxical with respect to the interests and intentions of the individuals who take part in them.

Third, some outcomes come about because individuals have constituted themselves as collective agents; they have come to identify themselves as members of a group and they behave deliberately out of consideration for what other members in the group will do. Their behavior is oriented to the behavior and intentions of the others in the group. They specifically strive to coordinate their actions with others through a shared set of social goals, identities, and attitudes. Raimo Tuomela explores this perspective in The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View.

Other outcomes are largely structured by imperatives (rules or commands) conveyed through delineated social relationships from a group of decision makers to a group of agents. This is the key subject matter of the study of organizations and institutions. The Midwest account manager for a national bank issues instructions to loan officers throughout the region to do this or that; communications are sent out, supervisors are instructed to observe compliance, and loan officers change their behavior. This process too works through the incentives and purposes of a set of dispersed agents; but in this case there is a substantial degree of top-down coordination that is secured through communication channels and a supervisory structure.

The dynamics of competition and cooperation are well understood; the ideas of a prisoners' dilemma, tragedy of the commons, and race to the bottom capture some of the logic of independent individuals each seeking to maximize their own interests (Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior). But cooperation too has its logic; even when a group of individuals are seeking to find a common strategy to further their group interests, it is easy to spot the organizational obstacles that stand in the way: lack of consensus, imperfect communication, etc. These are aggregation dynamics that derive from the logic of individual agency.

And the dynamics of organizations and systems of rules likewise have some obvious characteristics. Costs of enforcement mean that an institution's rules are only imperfectly enforced. Conflicts of interests among powerful actors lead to inefficient behavior within the organization (e.g. ministry of steel and ministry of railroads). Well known organizational shortfalls like the principal-agent problem, imperfect and costly communications transmission, and costly information all lead organizations to fail in somewhat predictable ways. Robert Bates (Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies) and Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters) each capture some of the imperfections of organizations in their works. These are aggregation dynamics that derive from more structural features of systems of rules, roles, and actors.

Let's look at an example of an aggregate-level phenomenon a bit more closely. Take style change over space and time. There are several different types of actors: street-level people who wear clothes with some degree of intentionality (want to look cool); street-level innovators (the first person to wear droopy jeans); clothing designers who want to influence the market for clothes through innovations that will be adopted by the public; "cool" finders who are looking for emerging innovations in hot places; marketers who specifically design strategies for proliferating new designs at Banana Republic or Abercrombie and Fitch. In this space of actors, consumers, and creators it sometimes happens that a new fashion emerges and quickly spreads to a larger population; how does this occur? What are the mechanisms of diffusion and adoption that lead to the success of a new look in denim jackets deriving ultimately from Seattle skateboarder culture? Stan Lieberson looks at some of these surprising dynamics in A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change.

I won't try to catalogue here all the pathways through which individual actors aggregate into larger social happenings. But it seems clear that several factors are key to any such discussion: communication channels, organizations, and social networks.

The math of social networks

A social network is constituted by a number of units (nodes) that are connected to each other by a defined relationship -- for example, "x cites y", "x sends 5 email messages a week to y", "x and y belong to an organization in common." There are a few wrinkles -- the units may be persons, organizations, cities, journal articles, or other types of entities; the relationships may be uni-directional or bi-directional; and the linking relationships may represent categorical relationships or intensity relationships. "x and y are friends" is a bi-directional relationship; "x and y are close friends" is a bi-directional relationship recording intensity.

Some of the basic questions about a social network are easy to formulate but difficult to assess. Basically, we would like to know what groups of individuals are unusually closely interconnected with each other, relative to the average for the population as a whole.  Here are a few basic questions that we may have about networks of people.

• Who is connected to whom? 
• Are there a subset of persons who are unusually well connected? 
• Are there sub-groupings of individuals who are more closely connected to each other than they are to others in the network? 

This last point may be put into the language of "communities": are there communities of individuals that can be identified on the basis of mathematical features of their positions within the graph of relationships defined by the data recording pairwise connections?

This question is especially important for sociologists because it goes to the heart of the reason why network maps are of sociological interest in the first place: we think that the social relationships among individuals explain important features of social action -- readiness to mobilize for a political cause, for example; this intuition derives from the idea that individuals influence each other through the exchange of information and the observation of each other's behavior; and so subgroups of persons with especially dense social connections with each other may have distinctive social characteristics as a group. So identifying the "communities" within a social network is an important sociological discovery.

This is where the mathematics of network graphs comes in. We need to have justifiable procedures for partitioning a network into sub-networks. These procedures need to make sense in terms of the intuition that there are often subgroups of nodes more closely related to each other. The procedures need to be non-arbitrary. They should be robust with respect to where we begin -- it shouldn't matter whether we begin analysis with this node or that node. And they need to be consistent with the fact that all the nodes are related to everyone else at some degree of separation. Neighborhoods that are entirely detached from the rest of the population are a trivial case; normally network ties extend transitively throughout a whole society.

Greek mathematician and social scientist Moses Boudourides is focused on this problem in his current work. (Follow him on Twitter at link.)  Boudourides is deeply sensitive to the sociological importance of the questions, so his work does a great job of bridging the two fields of thought. Some of his current work is available online, and it is very useful for people who want to understand more about the mathematics of social networks. It falls into the field of graph theory in mathematics, and it serves as a good tutorial to current thinking about the mathematics of social networks.

Worth reading first is "An Introduction to Community Detection in Graphs" (link). Here Boudourides offers a clear exposition of the mathematical problem of identifying a set of neighborhoods within a complex graph and lays out three approaches that have been taken.

Our aim here is to present an introductory and brief discussion of the formal concept of community in the context of the theory of complex networks (and social network analysis) and to describe (mostly by examples) a few of the many computational techniques which are commonly used for the detection of communities in a graph-theoretic background. (1)

Here is his definition of a community in the context of a network graph:

By a community structure of such a graph, we mean a partition of the set of nodes into a number of groups, called communities, such that all nodes belonging to any one of these groups satisfy a certain property of relative cohesiveness. Note that one may consider partitions, which are not necessarily strict, i.e., one may allow the case of overlapping communities, when there exist graph nodes belonging to more than one groups (communities) of the partition. (1)

The three iterative techniques he describes for analyzing a complex network into sub-communities are --

1. Betweenness -- Centrality-based community detection
2. k-Clique percolation
3. Modularity maximization

In each case the analysis proceeds by working through the graph iteratively, identifying notes and links with certain characteristics, and arriving at a series of stages of community definition.  This process can proceed from above (divisive) or from below (agglomerative).

The "betweenness" approach derives from an application of the idea of "betweenness centrality" of edges: "the number of shortest paths between pairs of nodes that run through that edge" (3).  On this approach, edges are ranked by their betweenness measure; the highest ranked edge is removed; and the process is repeated for the reduced graph.  This is a divisive method.

The k-clique model is an agglomerative approach, or what Boudourides refers to as a "local community-finding approach" (6).  And modularity maximization approach begins with the graph as a whole and looks for regions that are locally higher in density than the graph as a whole.  Boudourides' explanation of each of these methods is technical and clear.  He indicates that the MM approach is most widely used; but that it falls in a class of particularly intractable optimization problems like the traveling salesman problem (NP-complete).  Consequently it is necessary to design heuristic algorithms on the basis of which to arrive at approximate solutions.  (As I understand the point, however, there is no guarantee that the approximate solution will be close to the ideal solution.)

With these tools at hand, he offers a detailed example: analysis of a data set of individuals who participated in peace demonstrations against the war in Iraq and the organizations and issues with which they were associated. Data on these activists are included in the International Peace Protest Survey (IPPS).  And the resulting neighborhood maps are fascinating.  These results are described in detail in a detailed research report on "Communities in the IPPS Survey Data" [link] and a theoretical paper on "Why and How Culture Matters in Community Interorganizational Structure" [link]. These presentations show the real power of mathematical network theory, in that they bring out social relationships among individuals within this population of activists that couldn't be discovered otherwise.  Here are a pair of network graphs for 972 activists in Italy presented in "Culture Matters":

Boudourides' particular goal here is to demonstrate the difference it makes to incorporate "cultural" affiliations into the structural analysis of the first figure.  Incorporating attitudes permits simplification of the community structure of this network, from nine communities in figure 5 to four communities in figure 6.  But more generally, the analysis demonstrates the analytical gain that is possible through this analysis, allowing us to discover important patterns of affiliation among these 900+ activists.  And this, in turn, appears very relevant when we come to trying to understand their behavior within a complex process of collective action. It allows us to give some rigorous detail to the idea that a social movement has a refined micro-structure underlying its macro-level actions and demands.

What is especially useful about these papers is the help they offer us non-specialists in understanding the mathematical techniques on the basis of which we can extract sociologically meaningful information from a network graph. This is a bit analogous to the gain we get from using statistical techniques to analyze and summarize a large data set. The statistical techniques allow us to winnow the data into a few statistical measures. And the techniques of graph theory that Moses Boudourides demonstrates allow a similar analytical power for the task of making sociological sense of a large network of connected individuals. In both cases it is necessary for us to understand the basics of the mathematical techniques if we are to use the tool appropriately.

Social networks as aggregators

We think of social phenomena as "relational" in some important respect. Individuals contribute to social outcomes through structured and dynamic relationships with other individuals. So outcomes are not just heaps of aggregated individual behavior; rather, they are the filigreed result of interlinked, coordinated, competitive and sometimes unintended actions of people who have intentional and structural relationships to each other. And we think of these relationships, often, in terms of the metaphors and analytics of social "networks." So it is worthwhile giving some thought to how the machinery of social network theory can help us in better understanding the ways that social processes unfold. Here is a nice passage from Mario Diani's introduction to Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action.

It is difficult to grasp the nature of social movements. They cannot be reduced to specific insurrections or revolts, but rather resemble strings of more or less connected events, scattered across time and space; they cannot be identified with any specific organization either, rather they consist of groups of organizations, with various levels of formalization, linked in patterns of interaction which run from the fairly centralized to the totally decentralized, from the cooperative to the explicitly hostile. Persons promoting and/or supporting their actions do so not as atomized individuals, possibly with similar values or social traits, but as actors linked to each other through complex webs of exchanges, either direct or mediated. Social movements are in other words, complex and highly heterogeneous network structures. (1)

This passage emphasizes quite a few themes that have been important throughout UnderstandingSociety -- the heterogeneity of social phenomena, the difficulty of formulating a clear understanding of social ontology, and the challenge of representing the processes of aggregation through which individual social actions contribute to mid- and large-scale social outcomes.

So how do the analytical resources of network theory contribute to a better understanding of the ways that actions aggregate into outcomes?  Diani emphasizes several ways in which network analysis has contributed to the study of contentious politics. 

Network analysis as it is best known developed with reference to a 'realist' view of social structure as networks which linked together concrete actors through specific ties, identifiable and measureable through reliable empirical instruments. This view represented an alternative to both views of social structures as macro forces largely independent from the control of the specific actors associated with them ...., and views of structure as aggregates of the individual actors sharing determinate specific traits (5).

So if we take it as a plain fact about the social world that individuals have a range of meaningful and material relationships with other individuals, both proximate and distant, then it is plainly important to understand the effects that those relationships have on their consciousness and behavior.  These causal relationships are likely to extend in both directions -- from the network to the actor, and from the actor back into the network.

What kinds of social relationships are most relevant to understanding social processes like contentious movements?  Particularly important are "personal ties linking prospective participants to current activists or dense counter-cultural networks affecting rates of mobilization in specific areas" (3).  Diani mentions "personal friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbours; ... people who share with prospective participants in some kind of collective engagement, such as previous or current participation in other movement activities, political or social organizations, and public bodies" (7).  To this list we might add membership and interaction within the kinds of civic and communal organizations that Robert Putnam emphasizes in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Here is the key point: different people find themselves in very different networks of social connections, and these relationships contribute to their social and political consciousness in diverse ways.  If we are interested in the spread of militant civil rights activism, as Doug McAdam is in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, or in the spread of fascist activism and mobilization in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, as Michael Mann is in Fascists, it is highly relevant to discover the relationships and organizations through which individuals come into contact with each other and with the ideas of the nascent movements.  Likewise, if we are interested in the proliferation of support for the Deacons of Defense in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s, as Lance Hill is in The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, then it is important to identify the personal and organizational linkages through which ordinary people became aware of this response to white supremacy and violence.  Communication of ideas and political emotions requires a mechanism connecting the "signallers" and those to whom the messages eventually percolate, and this is not a depersonalized, homogeneous process.

Recruitment and mobilization is one aspect of contentious politics where social networks are plainly important.  Relationships in the workplace, the neighborhood, or the church or mosque are a likely location for the diffusion of a range of socially relevant material -- news, gossip, indignation, shared views about politics.  And these relationships are a potential vector for the recruitment of followers and activists for a range of new political ideas -- from civil rights to Tea Party to fascism.  

Identifying coalitions of collective actors is another area of current research.  Once a topic has gained some degree of visibility and salience, it is likely enough that multiple groups will begin to focus on it.  Anti-tax activism is a good example -- dozens of "citizen-based" organizations emerged in California in the 1950s and 1960s with the overall goal of limiting property and income taxes in the state, and it is useful to track the emerging relationships that developed among these organizations and their activists.

Diani also highlights the role that concrete social networks play in "framing and tactical adaptation of action repertoires" (4).  Framing has to do with the ways that issues are understood by the participants; so this topic unavoidably has to do with culture and social interpretation.  But the ways in which cultural frames are conveyed to people through a population are material processes that can be studied empirically.  And social networks play a key role in these processes.  As people interact with their friends and associates, they develop their political and social representations of the society around them.  These interactions are the direct embodiment of their social networks.  Diani singles out "communitarian and subculture networks" for particular attention: "communitarian ties operate at a minimum to strengthen the identity and solidarity among movement activists and sympathizers. At the same time, though, they provide the specific locus of social conflict in those cases where the challenge is eminently on the symbolic side and where, in other words, the definition of identities and the preservation of opportunities for the enactment of alternative lifestyles are mainly at stake" (9).  These features of identity-based mobilization, through networks of like-minded individuals, are important in Michael Mann's analysis of the rise of fascism in Fascists as well: 

The fascist core consisted everywhere of two successive generations of young men, coming of age between WorldWar I and the late 1930s. Their youth and idealism meant that fascist values were proclaimed as being distinctively “modern” and “moral.” They were especially transmitted through two institutions socializing young men: secondary and higher education, encouraging notions of moral progress, and the armed forces, encouraging militarism. Since the appeal was mainly to young men, it was also distinctly macho, encouraging an ethos of braggart, semi-disciplined violence, in peacetime encouraging militarism to mutate into paramilitarism. The character of fascism was set by young men socialized in institutions favorable to moralizing violence and eventually to murder. Yet the similarity of values between paramilitarism and militarism always gave fascism a capacity to appeal to armed forces themselves, not to the extent of inducing military rebellions but to the extent of generating sympathy there that at its most extreme could immobilize the army. (26)

“Fascists” were not fully formed at the moment they entered the movement. People may formally sign up for a movement and yet possess only a rudimentary knowledge of it – sympathy for a few slogans, respect for a charismatic F¨uhrer or Duce, or simply following friends who have joined. Most recruits joined the movement young, unmarried, unformed, with little adult civilian experience. On them, fascist parties and paramilitaries were especially powerful socialization agencies. These movements were proudly elitist and authoritarian, enshrining a pronounced hierarchy of rank and an extreme cult of the leader. Orders were to be obeyed, discipline to be imposed. Above all, they imposed a requirement of activism. Thus militants experienced intense emotional comradeship. Where the movement was proscribed, clandestinity tightened it. Many activists lost their jobs or went into prison or exile. Though this deterred many of the more fainthearted, among those remaining active such constraints further tightened the movement. (28)

The social processes that Mann describes here have to do with all three aspects -- recruitment, mobilization, and framing; and they depend on the networks of relationships through which the core fascist values and worldviews were transmitted to new recruits.  Institutions were key in this transmission -- the military, the workplace, the youth organization -- and a large part of their influence was their ability to create a significant cohort of young men with a specific set of set of social relationships.

The lens of social networks, in short, seems to be a very powerful tool for understanding the processes of aggregation -- upward, downward, and lateral -- through which ideas, grievances, and actors come together into major social upheavals and movements.

What is perhaps more difficult to see, though, is how to engage in empirical research on the concrete networks of social relationships that have important effects on outcomes we care about.  As the United States moved towards civil war in 1860 and 1861, there were hundreds or thousands of individuals in the U.S. Army officer corps who had antecedently mixed loyalties -- Southern birth, family still residing in the South, but a tradition of education and service within the U.S. Army.  So what accounts for the choices that were made by various officers when they had to decide -- North or South? It is intuitively plausible that each officer's concrete social network played an important role in his decision -- appeals from family and friends, business relationships in Virginia, long-standing relationships with senior Northern officers, an education and cohort at West Point.  But it is not entirely clear how to turn this plausible view into a feasible research plan.

This is one reason why the Diani volume is such a worthwhile contribution.  Most of the contributors focus their work on specific empirical problems in the field of social contention.  Maryjane Osa looks at activist networks in the Polish People's Republic; Christopher Ansell looks at community activism in the San Francisco Bay environmental movement; Jeff Broadbent looks at social networks in the Japanese environmental movement; and Chuck Tilly and Lesley Wood look at networks in contentious episodes in British history around 1828.  These are concrete, empirical-historical efforts to take the guiding ideas of network analysis and discover some substantive insights into the specific ways that a variety of protest movements unfolded.  And they give a better understanding of the contribution that social network analysis can offer to concrete historical research.