Organizing for Collective Action: The Political Economies of Associations(Social Institutions and Social Change Series)

Organizing for Collective Action investigates the political and economic behaviors of national associations, including trade associations, professional societies, labor unions, and public interest groups. It focuses upon the ways that these organizations acquire resources and allocate them to various collective actions, particularly for member services, public relations, and political action. This analysis is structured around three broad theoretical paradigms for collective action: (1) the problem of societal integration which concerns the ways that people are tied to organizations and the ways that organizations connect their members with the larger society; (2) the problem of organizational governance which considers how individuals become unified collectivities capable of acting in a coordinated manner, and (3) the problem of public policy influence which involves interactions among public and private interest groups to formulate the binding decisions under which we all must live.

Table of Contents:
PART I Introduction. PART II Theory and Data. PART III Organsational Ecomony PART IV Organisational Polity PART V Conclusion.

About the Author :
David Knoke is Chairman, Department of Sociology. University of Minnesota, and was Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Christian-Albrechts-Universitat, Kiel (1989). Dr. Knoke was co-founder and acting chair of the American Sociological Association's Section on Political Sociology, served as its newsletter co-editor, and is on the editorial board of Administrative Science Quarterly. In addition to numerous journal articles, his most recent books include Organized for Action (with J.R. Wood, 1981), Network Analysis (with J.H. Kuklinski, 1982), The Organizational State (with E.G. Laumann, 1987), and Statistics for Social Data Analysis (withGW. Bohrnstedt, 2nd Ed. 1987) and Political Networks: The Structural Perspective (1990). Dr. Knoke received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1972, and taught for 13 years at Indiana University. His main area of research is political sociology, with special interests in organizations and social networks.

Review :
-Beginning and ending with the same quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville, Knoke asserts the importance of pluralist combat among collective action organizations in national policymaking. He concludes that -national membership organizations nourish our best hopes for fate control in a society whose state is increasingly dominated by powerful institutions that are unaccountable to the citizenry-... [T]hese chapters will be valuable when designing new research on incentives, member interest, association governance, member involvement, and member mobilization... Graduate readership.- --J. Bearden, Choice "Beginning and ending with the same quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville, Knoke asserts the importance of pluralist combat among collective action organizations in national policymaking. He concludes that "national membership organizations nourish our best hopes for fate control in a society whose state is increasingly dominated by powerful institutions that are unaccountable to the citizenry..". [T]hese chapters will be valuable when designing new research on incentives, member interest, association governance, member involvement, and member mobilization... Graduate readership." --J. Bearden, Choice "Beginning and ending with the same quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville, Knoke asserts the importance of pluralist combat among collective action organizations in national policymaking. He concludes that "national membership organizations nourish our best hopes for fate control in a society whose state is increasingly dominated by powerful institutions that are unaccountable to the citizenry..". [T]hese chapters will be valuable when designing new research on incentives, member interest, association governance, member involvement, and member mobilization... Graduate readership." --J. Bearden, Choice