Friends, I am trying to understand Popkin's belief of collective action failure even in small communities through some concepts in economics.
Lets go through this example: If an individual farmer reaps a bumper crop, he is happy (quite rationally), but if all the farmers reap a bumper crop, all of them could be unhappy. This in economics is known as "misery under plenty" and it arises because the farm produce may be perishable and too much of production may lead to a throw away price.
Hence individually a farmer wants a bumper crop (so does every other farmer), but collectively they may not want to have a bumper crop. Hence all farmers would end up with having less production. Hence there seems to be a conflict in individual and group rationality.
I invite comments on this so that we can have a discussion..
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
You are right, but collective action can start only if people feel they feel the brunt of non-cooperation...
to take your example, this means that farmers somehow realise that if they dont cooperate, all of them will have losses..this leads them to cooperation...but when they cooperate they see that some derive more benefit than others...still they stick to it, as they know that whatever little benefit that they are getting will disappear if they dont cooperate...
this is just my viewpoint...
You might be right Joe but can we look on other aspect of collective action that is the cultural aspect. Why is it so that people belonging to a particular area, class ,caste ,community etc shows collective action more frequantly than others? One good example of it is the success of cooperatives in Gujarat and a bad example of this is the participation of particular community in terrorist activities. It may be the need of the people to show collective action. Because of the negligance of government,the socio-economic condition of muslims in India is worst among all other communities.So the plight of this community may have resulted in their involvement in terrorist activities.Same may be case of gujarat where agriculture may not have been that much profitable so they have gone for dairy farming so the cooperatives succeed.
so what i feel that there are some positive or negative pressure which makes one community to go for collective action.
i agree with you Santosh...but let me try to apply some of Giddons theory (time and space) in this context...i'm doing so bcos this will help me better understand what Giddon is talking bout....
According to Giddon, social systems are both temporally and spatially binding and time-space constitutive (Pg 47, 3rd para of TAU)..I think this is directly related to what you have mentioned, that collective action can only be evaluated in a particular context...
also, the duality concept of Giddon talks about bidirectional interaction between structure and agent...i think society interacts with agents and vice versa...in your example, terrorists might be agents and wider world is the society...
I know I might be making wild guesses, but that is the best I can do given my relative inexperience with sociology...just using your example to make head and tail out of Giddon...
Post a Comment