 |
|
|||
|
|
|||
67 (Melucci 1989, 21-22)
(Melucci 1989, 21-22)
Philosophies of history, based on the belief that the course of history is guided to fulfilment by spiritual or material forces, to which human action is necessarily submitted, are a basic ingredient of modern thought. Dualistic thinking is the remaining legacy of this philosophy of history. In theories of collective action, it has been pointed out that dualism has been commonly formulated in terms of breakdown/solidarity models (Tilly, 1975; Useem, 1980). Breakdown theories - theories of collective behaviour and mass society - hold collective action to be the result of economic crisis and social disintegration, disregard its conflictual dimensions and thus reduce it to pathological reaction and to marginality. Solidarity models see collective action as an expression of shared interests within a common structural location, but are unable to explain the transition from social conditions to collective action. The Marxist dilemma mentioned above still persists and cannot be solved without taking into account how collective action is formed and maintained. It has been pointed out that approaches based on the structure/motivation dualism (Webb, 1983) are also problematic, in that they view collective action either as a product of the logic of the system or as a result of personal beliefs. The former stresses the social-economic context, while the latter emphasizes the role of ideology and values.
In Europe, during the 1970s, Touraine (1973, 1978) and Habermas (1976) tried to move beyond these dichotomies. Their analyses emphasized the need for a ’structural’ or systemic approach which linked new forms of social conflict to changes in post-industrial capitalism. Across the Atlantic, some American theorists focused on processes of resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald, 1973, 1977, 1979; Gamson, 1975; Oberschall, 1973; Tilly, 1978). This approach tried to explain how a movement is formed, how it persists through time, and how it relates to its environment.
Both theories leave certain problems unresolved. Structural theories, based on systems analysis, explain why but not how a movement is established and survives; they hypothesize potential conflict without accounting for concrete collective action. By contrast, resource mobilization models regard such action as mere data and fail to examine its meaning and orientation. [Melucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present. London: Hutchinson Radius.]
