Predate spre publicare la Studia Politica -
Adrian Hatos
1
University of Oradea ahatos@gmail.com
Many researchers consider that involvement in collective action can be hardly explained without some appeal to cultural or psychological factors. The article follows the results of a qualitative inquiry into the narratives of three types of small urban community members – leaders of community organizations, participants in collective actions and the by-standers and finds systematic differences in the stories provided by representatives of the three roles, in terms of self-description and motivation for action. Therefore, a significant effect of personality features or of attitudinal structure on availability for collective action can be taken into consideration.
Participation, in its’ various forms – political, associative, or in the community is a critical topic for the social sciences for at least two important motives. First, involvement is at the heart of claims of democratic legitimacy of institutions at all levels. From this regard, the demand for participation has a practical justification.
Second, involvement is at the border of the agency vs. deterministic views of social processes. Put more simply, from this point of view the question is if there is any participation actually and, if the answer is positive, how is it possible? Approaches to the issue of involvement tend to be solipsistic, omitting the alternate explanations that other paradigms provide. My paper endeavors a bridge between two focal issues of social participation: the cultural powers that are behind people’s decision to get involved or to stay aside and their relationships with the positions, or put in a more dramaturgical way, roles, people play in the communities and the collective actions that occur. The avatar of participation that plays the role of pretext for this inquiry is
1 The empirical research was completed while fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest (2004-
2005). Further theoretical research was done as holder of the research grant CEEX2/192/2006.
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the community activism of members of the close urban neighborhoods naturally delimited as scara de bloc (condominium)
2
. The aim of the paper is to describe, compare and theorize the discourses of the bearers of the roles that accompany the community initiatives at the level of condominium. I will start the article with a summary of significant social scientific conceptions linking participation to cultural factors and with a discussion of structural positions in community collective actions.
Thus the conceptual and the theoretical background will be prepared for the interpretation of my own research results.
In the 50s and early 60s there was a widespread view that action is determined by the individual’s reference to norms and values, abstract components of culture understood as an autonomous symbolic superstructure that determines individual judgments and choices. An assessment on the grounds of consistency and empirical evidence provide a rather negative result. On the level of basic assumptions, culturalist perspective had been accused of being idealistic or metaphysical (Alexander and Smith, 1993).
Research, on the other hand, had to admit that the ‘role of individual attitudes in shaping activism must be regarded as fairly limited’ (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald,
1988, p. 706). Moreover, even cases of match between attitudes and conduct are suspect of the endogeneity problem. Following the various critiques to culturalist analyses of social participation, in the last recent decades there have been several important works trying to delineate the cultural peculiarities that are conducive or opposed to a socially participatory life-style. Even a strict adept of the rational choice theory like Elster (1989) admits that the first to get involved in collective action does so driven by submission to norms and only those following their example make instrumental calculations.
There have been several attempts to conceptualize the systems of beliefs, norms or values and attitudes that explain participation, especially in the political or civil society field. Such is Almond and Verba’s well known ‘Civic Culture’ (1989) which distinguishes between participatory, dependent and parochial civic culture.
Bellah (1980), who speaks of civic religion, refers to claims for civic engagement as
‘secondary languages of social responsibility’ of practices of commitment for the public good. Others, like Inglehard (1990) refer to civic culture as an autonomous field that explains, among other things, the readiness to contribute to the public good.
In a noteworthy attempt to rejuvenate the culturalist paradigm using structuralist arguments, Alexander and Smith (1993) regard cultural codes as resources to make actions accountable on the one hand and see culture as part of the institutionalization of social structures to which it adds the power of the norm.
In the normative perspective of this current of thought, which is less concerned with the ontological autonomy of culture – that being the reason for calling it also durkheimian, involvement is the expression of solidarity that is derived from a set of collective obligations (Hechter, 1987). The compulsion to act can be derived either from norms or from identity (as in the case of the argument in superb essay by
2 In most of the article I prefer using the Romanian scara instead of condominium in order to avoid confusions. While condominium (block of flats) designates the entire commonly held building, scara de bloc refers to a subdivision of the condominium which can be identified through its common entrance.
Most of the blocks of flats built in communist times in Romania have several entrances, i.e. scari.
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Craig Calhoun on the Chinese students’ participation in the riot in the Tiananmen
Square (1991)).
It is quite evident; however, that moving from description of discourses to explanation of action is a long way. Therefore, looking for the causes of action in attitudes, motivations or, more generally, in discourses of the subjects bear heavy methodological risks that can be avoided only by taking into account all the aspects that play a role in a collective action. On the other hand, is legitimate to look for the way people account they acts in situation of social dilemmas, as reflective of possible discourse of engagement and disengagement.
All this methodological discussion bears on the relationship between discourse, action and the actor. According to the aforementioned views, discourse is instrumental in making actions accountable and providing consistency to identities and culturally configured roles. Adopting a more ‘realist’ stance, one can say that discourse is reflective of the speaker’s personality. Psycho-sociological factors are relevant in many models of social participation as mediators between socio-cultural factors and involvement. Some of such important factors are: self-efficacy, a concept approached by Bandura (1995), which is in reciprocal relationship with actual and successful engagement and self-esteem (Itzhaky, York, 2003) and which has a direct and positive effect on community participation (Perkins, Brown and Taylor, 1996; see
Conway and Hachen, 2005, for contrary results). Both self-esteem, understood as a sense of self-worth and self-efficacy, operationalized as one’s feeling of autonomy with regard to the environment’s challenges are regarded as direct motors of social engagement or/and disengagement.
An important contribution to the cultural analysis of collective action has been brought in by the focus of social movement research on movement frames. Cultural communality and/or frequent interactions may be conducive to the configuration of a collective identity i.e. distinctiveness from other groups, on the one hand, and promotion of internal solidarity, on the other, encourages the emergence of homogenous ways of viewing group interests and regarding the groups’ position relative to others’. Mobilization for collective action supposes judging one’s group’s situation as being unjust, undesirable and the passage from self-blaming to blaming the system for that situation (McAdam, 1982). Such a shift requires certain worldviews, certain ways of assessing life situations against criteria of fairness and of attributing causes. The sets of “beliefs and meanings orientated towards action which inspire and justify the actions and the campaigns of social movement organizations”
(Snow and Benford, 2000, p. 614) have been called “collective action frames”.
Collective action frames sustain the mobilization of consensus and action in the case of protesters through identifying the problems and attributing causes to them, through pointing to the solutions and to the actions that are required to remedy the situation and, finally, through a supply of vocabulary of motives which support involvement
(Snow and Benford, idem). Recruitment of participants and sustainable involvement requires often the alignment of collective action frames to the more general frames, systems of beliefs and interpretation accepted by larger number of people.
In the literature one can find several attempts at ordering the various motives invoked to sustain involvement in collective action. According to Clark and Wilson (1961), these motivations are of three broad sorts: 1) Material motivations, most close to the idea of extrinsic reward of action; 2) Solidarity motivations, which refers to involvement constrained by judgments of solidarity, reciprocity, norm following and
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face saving and 3) Functional motivations, which reflect the satisfaction induced through the contribution to the realization of socially positively valued objective.
Reasoning along the stages of moral development theorized by Kohlberg, Gross,
(1994) proposes a similar typology of motivations for involvement in highly costly collective action: 1) motivations linked to pecuniary rewards or fear of punishment, featuring a preconventional moral outlook; 2) following various social norms, be them religious, or community in order to obtain social approbation that correspond to the conventional phase of moral development and 3) submission to universal moral principles, that are above the community norms and are based on a conception of human autonomy, objectivity and moral responsibility (Gross, idem, p. 467). Among the more recent classification of motives for involvement in community level collective action is Batson’s (1994) which distinguishes among egoism, altruism, collectivism and principlism .
In the Romanian literature there can be found Dodescu and Hatos’ (2004) classification of motives for being an active citizen. Analyzing motivations for deeds of active citizenship the authors have used a framework that differentiates them into self-oriented motivation and social oriented motivation . Self-oriented motivation is also divided into intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Intrinsic motivations include satisfaction and pleasure provided by work or by team, by fulfilling one’s dreams or vocation or by coping in a game-like manner with activism.
Extrinsic motivations are much more diverse. They include, in the approximate order of their importance, incentives like:1. need for approval, prestige, or for social advancement; 2. fear of failure; 3. need for autonomous achievement; 4. feeling useful
5. duty or commitment to mission; 6. material (economic) drivers; 7. example provided by parents; 8. Competition; 9. formal responsibility; 10. need for a change in one’s way of life; 11. disappointment with previous activity; 12. making good use of personal resources; 13. responding to another motivating actor; 14. need for evasion
15. travelling. Social oriented motivations collected from our subjects may be divided into three broad categories. One of them includes the idea of focusing on changing things, as a general wish; the other records the accomplishment of change, and the last one derives from the concrete needs of others that have to be fulfilled.
Collective action is, actually, often a heterogeneous process in what regards the individual input as well as the form in which the contribution is made. Social movement and collective action analysts have usually recognized the importance of leaders as organizers (McAdam, McCarthy, Zald, 1988; Gamson, 1990, Ostrom
1990; and Ostrom and Ahn, 2001) and distinguished among three types of movement participants: leaders (or elite), members and adherents. It is commonsensical when considering instances of collective action, to make the distinction between leadership and membership. Another useful distinction to be made considers the passive members, defined as those that involve in collective action the latest.
Those that play leadership roles are able to alter the motivations of the members of the communities, on the one hand, and are themselves beneficiaries of a distinct pattern of rewards.
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Popkin (1977), for example, acknowledges the weight of leadership for the organization’s success. He calls the person that organizes a collective action “political entrepreneur” and defines its’ role as that of a person “which is available to invest time and resources in order to coordinate others’ inputs for the production of collective goods” (p. 190). These features are most clearly, and commonsensically, emphasized in leadership theories according to which (Kouzes and Posner, 1995) leaders a) challenge the processes, b) inspire a common vision c) allow other to act d) model the paths of action and e) encourage the hearts of the members of an organization. The same authors define leadership as “the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations” (idem, p.30).
According to social movement theorists, leaders are those that have important contribution to processes of collective attribution and organizing the collective action
((McAdam, McCarthy, Zald, 1989). Moreover, leaders not only modify the adherents’ function of utility for involvement but they have additional benefits from participating compared to the rest of the community. The most important is the prestige, honor one gets from leading a collective initiative, along with a better or strengthened position in the collective network. From start, the motivations of the leaders appear to be different from those of the adherents.
Knowledge on the sources of leadership in community organizations is not very settled. Popkin (1977) has noticed in his fieldwork in Vietnam that, for the purposes of leadership to be achieved, leaders have to be chosen among the most trusted and capable members. This goes hand in hand with a central position in the community network structure, evocative of the highest prestige and competencies.
(McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1988)
Involvement is an issue, i.e. besides leaders and activists, most of community members are not significantly more than simple by-standers, or passive members. In a former paper (Hatos, 2006) I have highlighted several ways in which a community member becomes a spectator of collective initiatives. The bulk of them is formed of those that lack various resources required for involvement: time – for the busy ones, health for the older ones especially, motivation, for those weakly integrated in community networks and some sort of symbolic capital, that can be called will in vernacular, for the socially excluded. This last category, that one may regard as that of the defeated, or of the helpless, comprises usually people rich in leadership and activist points in biography but which have suffered, apparently, downward social mobility.
Although the researches invoked so far contributed a lot to the clarification of any of the conceptual domains referred to little has been done in order to reveal the relationship between structural positions in community initiatives and the intervening actors’ discourses. Consequently, my paper attempts not only to describe the accounts of community members related to their involvement or non-involvement in community collective action but to interrogate the way their structural position in society and, more specifically in the community, articulates the discourse they provide concerning specific instances of community initiatives.
My choice was for a qualitative inquiry in which I kept under control as many of the intervening variables. I realized 28 biographical interviews with subjects distributed
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evenly in three main analytical categories, of leaders, activists and passive members, selected from the same mobilization contexts, elected as sampling unit, the scara
(condominium) . The 10 leaders were identified as the elected scara leaders – with the exception of a former leader that acts as a replacement in a situation in which the collectivity has blocked the appointment of an official representative. Nine active members were selected randomly from lists of nominees by the leader containing residents of the scara that participate constantly and consistently in the collective actions carried out by the community. The same selection procedure was used for the identification of the passive members, which were described as neighbors that contribute the least to the achievements of the scara .
The presumed impact of cultural factors on social involvement was emphasized in the theoretical section. Meanings of action within the context of the community were reflected through the narratives produced in interviews. In the next pages I approached three important topics reflective of the cultural dimension of community engagement: self-descriptions of the three categories of actors, as indicators of identities and feelings of self-efficacy, representations of family socialization practices and accounts of action within the collectivity mainly in terms of motivations.
Involvement in action and initiative is correlative, among other things, with a positive image of self. In the same time actions perceived as successful enhance ones’ image of self. These two relations are well reflected in our interviews which were good opportunities to manifest specific degrees of self-esteem in at least two ways: explicit statements of positive worth and relative weight of positive and negative qualities.
Thus being a leader seems to work well for self esteem. Only among the leaders are persons that plainly state their positive self-perception:
“I was never ashamed and I will never be”
(leader)
“
Q. What are the qualities you miss as a scara leader?
A.
I cannot figure out any ”. (leader)
In discourse, positive or negative perceptions of self are less visible through the admittance of some defects rather than through the readiness to attach to him/ herself positive traits. While people seem to be reluctant to categorize themselves in negative terms, there are meaningful differences regarding the weight and, as will be further discussed, content of positive attributes. Actually, the number of positive traits autoattached decreases from leaders to active members of scara and is lowest for the inactive members. Although this might be partly a simple effect of the discursive scarcity of the inactive members it may reflect also a lower self-perception of those classified as inactive by their neighbors.
Such a contrast between the positive self-evaluation of leaders and the pastloving, self-denying image of the inactive members of scara is indicative of the variation of self-efficacy among the groups in the study which is known as being in circular relationship with practical effectiveness.
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Although the characterizations that can be reconstructed on the basis of out narratives are far from homogenous, some meaningful patterns can be found comparing the three basic classes used in our analysis. The most clearly structured self-image is that of the leaders whose descriptions are centered on leadership. They consider themselves characterized by involvement (activism, participation), good leadership
(management and organizational skills too) and perseverance (determination and ambition included). Their defects, if mentioned, refer to their performance as leaders, members of this category accusing lack of communication skills, bad health or being too soft with people:
“Q. Which are the qualities that you lack?
A. I don’t quite know how to talk to people…That is I am not able to become closer to people. This is the way I am.
…
A. Besides the fact that they say that sometimes I speak too loud, that I quarrel to quickly…”
(leader)
“Maybe I should be tougher on man, but I do not succeed because I am too understanding”
(leader)
Involvement, good leadership and perseverance of leaders are completed sometimes with normative traits like honesty and a sense of duty.
Sharply defined as they are, the contours of the leaders’ self-image provide evidence of an identity in which taking the lead is an important marker.
Active members of scara have a more blurred self-image. They consider themselves involved persons as well but the rest of image is less clear. One important aspect is their weaker stress on leadership and determination. This feature is emphasized by the fact that all defects mentioned in this category are linked to a lack of determination, ambition or courage. In other words, active persons seem to be, at least partially, persons socially engaged who lack guts to be able to advance to leadership status. The emphasis on the lack of personality traits required for leadership suggests that activism is on the same continuum with passivity and leadership.
“Q. Tell me about the fact that you did not like to be a leader. Why is that so?
It very much depends on the person’s temper. I am a timid person and I didn’t like to become involved very much” (active).
“ I rather give up than striking back…and I am sorry of this because they think I am fool
” (active)
The way inactive persons describe themselves says a lot about the way they became excluded from instances of collective action. Briefly, they display a positive orientation to the past (paseism) and a negative orientation to the present. The positive traits they mention, rare as they are, refer to the past, suggesting a kind of nostalgia and break with the least glorious present. In contrast with the past, the present is the
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ground of manifestation of defects and shortcomings like feelings of powerlessness, defeat, inactivity or lack of ambition shortly, feelings of low self-efficacy and low self-esteem.
We have identified several trajectories of exclusion. The differences among them are visible in the way inactive people talk of themselves, besides the already recognized pattern of paseism and negative assessment of present. Those I have called the defeated show clearly the syndrome of depressive realism (Alloy and Abramson, 1979) and external locus of control while exuberantly describing the achievements of past and accounting for the misery of today.
“Unfortunately yes, at 32 I brought a 3 years old kid with me here in Oradea and I came along my husband to the place where he moved with his job and my fate changed totally. I got cut off from my friends, from my native town, from my friends and I started from nothing. ..I have learned, I had will, stranger, alone and I managed myself…not really because here I was no more leader…I felt cut from reality, not being in the right place, like a flower that you move from a place to other and…dries out…”
(inactive)
To recapitulate, self images supplied in the interviews give evidence of the feelings of self-efficacy of leaders especially and, on a lesser scale of active members. In contrast with them, passive actors find little positive things about themselves but praise highly the past or show signs of depressive realism. In addition, past experience have endowed leaders with a special identity whose characteristics explain their actions, and is reflected in the self-attribution of some peculiar personality traits like ambition and determination.
Involvement is evidently the central concept in our research. How do people justify their involvement in solving collective good provision problems, or vice versa, their refrain from action, are thus important questions for this paper and were approached as the key issues by the interviewers and their subjects as well. One important observation due here is that involvement (implicare) concerns both contribution to the collective action and engagement in leading the action. Conceptually, at this level the two domains are regarded quite similarly.
Our analysis will approach first the structure of discourses on involvement then will endeavor making in-depth interrogation of the interpretation of participative acts for several important groups of subjects.
If we analyze in detail the motivations and benefits invoked for acting or for restraining from involvement we obtain a picture that is quite suggestive of the well known weberian distinction between instrumental and axiological rationality. While people heavily explain participation using normative frames of references, abstaining is justified mainly ‘rationally’. More exactly, people engage themselves in collectively beneficial actions driven, apparently, by values or norms but stay aside following calculations involving resources, secondary outcomes or the conditions for actions.
Table 1. Justification for action and inaction
Involvement Non-involvement
Intrinsic motivations (action related gratifications)
- entertainment - bad memories of involvement
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- pleasure - pleasure
Cultural drives – values related gratifications
- love for cleanness - family first, then the scara
- to do good things for fellow citizens
- social responsibility
- responsibility for the collective good
- to educate the others
Cultural drives – norm related gratifications
- shame - promotions based on connections
(perceived unfairness)
- duty, norm
- something has to be done
Secondary benefits (extrinsic motivations)
- financial
- social approval, appraisal
- independence
- coercion
- benefits of leadership
- no pay
- lack of appreciation
- authenticity
- being the leader means problems (costs of leadership)
Resources
- has time - no time
- bad health
- lack of cultural resources (being from country-side)
Group problems
- lack of solidarity/ cohesion
- difficulties in organizing the group
The above table gives apparent credit to conventional theories of collective action
(Elster, 1989). It suggests that abstaining from action is instrumentally rational while participation can be justified only with reference to norms and values. Using the moral development language, one can say that conventional and mainly postconventional morality is accountable for participation while a preconventional, low level of moral sophistication explains abstaining from contribution to the provision of the public good.
A practical consequence of this would be that participation could be fostered through ideological socialization or the practice of moral reasoning whereas too calculative points of view can hinder the realization of collective action. Moreover, extrinsic motivations – i.e. selective incentives, be them positive or negative, can influence largely the outcome of collective action along with the more recently discussed factor of group structure (McAdam 1986, Kim and Bearman 1997).
Seen like this the results are still stunning as engagement is explained basically through moral complexity, cultural motivations or extrinsic motivations while passivity is grounded on lack of resources or made meaningless because of the
“side effects’ of activism or non-activism. Are the ones that are more involved morally more developed or socially more responsible or, at least, more sensible to the issue of social acceptability? As with all post-hoc accounts of action, the results listed in the table may be reflective of mere justifications. To the culturally or morally
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substantivist interpretation described above we can oppose at least two alternative ones.
If we consider the structural conditions in which engagement and disengagement occurs the normative force behind the involvement of active members and leaders is less curious. Norms are social because compliance to them is socially sanctioned. In other words, in some instances, reference to norms can be an indicator of social integration. Knowing that the active and leading members of the scari are caught in dense networks, which I called ‘core’ we understand the salience of the normative justifications for involvement of those from these categories. Much of the normative phrases, are reflective of what we could put under the heading ‘social responsibility’, or put in another ways, postconventional morality or principlism: ‘to do good for fellow citizens’, ‘responsibility for the collective good’ or simply, ‘social responsibility’. Concepts that reflect the coercive force of the norm are no less reflective of practical social interaction: duty, shame, something has to be done.
This peculiarity of the active members’ discourse can be explained nevertheless in an, apparently, more cynical way, which entails fewer strong presumptions concerning personality, cultural construction or moral development. We know now that they have better communication skills which include a greater capacity to elaborate socially desirable or legitimate accounts, part of the art of mobilizing for action – of oneself or of the others. It is possible then that the focus on norms, i.e. on non-egoist motivation for involvement, to be just a practical enactment of their social communication (or social accountability) skill exercised with the interviewer.
Many of the categories above support the hypothesis of rational involvement, according to which the actors take into account the costs and the benefits of the engagement. Non-active members provide as explanation their lack of resources for engagement, especially of time or of good health. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, leaders and active members complain the most about the costs that involvement, especially in the case of leaders, entails.
“Q. Did you like being better than the others, to lead?
A. No, I have always wanted to stay on secondary positions as I thought that being in charge means trouble.”
(active)
“I have never put pressure on anyone but I said it is OK if they choose me as well as if they didn’t…Because there no real gain as there [at the labour union] if you get involved in problems you have to argue with the bosses, to discuss with everybody the issues because there are people who do not understand some problems…You explain them once, twice, three times but they still do not understand. But there are also people who know and understand the problems… and I have to quarrel with the management and with other people, so I do not have much to earn.” (active)
“All agree that since we don’t have a formal scara leader nobody argues, there are no more shouts like: you are 3 wage earners and wait from me, who I am a retired?
And I give you 4000 [leis] so you can earn 300.000? It was really offensive to tell this for 4000 lei. Therefore, not only they have changed him but he [the former leader] said: no more, I don’t stay any more, I am no one’s rag.
” (leader replacement)
The quotations already suggest that engagement in leadership of community actions is challenging not only because is elicits additional investments of time and other resources but because of so-called “transactional costs” – mentioned in the institutional literature – that can be translated into the costs produced by low
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community social capital. Members of the community do not trust each other or their leaders at least so they are hardly willing to contribute. Others are simple free riders, who can be also judged in terms of civic attitudes, who do not contribute or, worse, destroy the goods produced through collective effort and work of the leadership. As predicted by the theory of collective action, this type of situation deters engagement.
However, leaders derive many gratifications from their engagement, besides the civic gratification, labeled as such after Brady, Verba and Schlozman (1995), of doing one’s duty. These rewards are for instance, simply financial, or social – as social prestige but they can be effective in keeping up the commitment for the common interest. The last category cannot be overestimated: given the costs of involvement and leadership, the outcomes of following collectivist or principlist motivations could be assessed on the relational level using a well-known term, symbolic capital, which translates the prestige and recognition one is receiving from doing his/her own duty.
Analysis of discourses of scara leaders, active members and socially inactive inhabitants of scari displayed patterned accounts of involvement and noninvolvement. One can speak of discourses of activists and non-activists as clearly discernable. However the demarcations in the narratives of the three categories are not always clear cut, but rather variable, so we can talk of a continuum of various discursive dimensions whose combinations make the specificities of the interviews from the three groups. Thus, leaders are placed at the one edge of the continuum and inactive members at the other while active members are somewhere in the middle displaying characteristics of leaders and inactive members in the same time.
First, the discourses are reflective of different feelings of efficacy and self esteem which correlate positively with availability for involvement. The passive members of the scari are the less likely to communicate generally, which is evident in their shorter and rather poor interviews, they praise the past and are not able to find positive attributes of self.
Specific social identities correlative with patterns of engagement could have been discerned especially in the leaders’ accounts, who defined themselves mainly using features of a resilient personality like determination, ambition and courage.
Resilience is the factor that adds light to the negative reference of leaders to their social background. Their social success, expressed in the sentiments of self-efficacy and not in factual indicators of social status, has been achieved at odds with the cultural and material determinations of their social background. In this regard, the situation of active members is at least curious. Instead of activists’ identities we have insinuations of fallen leaders: when talking of themselves, active members of the community seem to regret the lack of traits that leaders can boast of.
Justification of action or non-action is also specific to the three categories.
Involvement is justified primarily through compliance to norms and universal principles like social responsibility while abstention from contribution to the collective good through rational computation. This might be the Romanian correspondent to the ‘secondary languages of social responsibility’ mentioned by
Bellah and Hammond (1980), or the discourse of civic engagement, to paraphrase the theories of Smith and Alexander (1993). In any way, leaders’ and active members’ narratives are clearly focused on social norms, principles and duties, contrary to the
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egoism of free-riding and abstention. For both types of active roles, , though, secondary gratifications play a great importance.
I have to be considering to reject a simplistic culturalist or psychological conclusion regarding the factors of engagement in collective action. What is evident, however, is that the culturally articulated account of activism and non-activism are clearly discernable. In a culturally or pedagogical optimist vein, my research suggests that net of structural factors, moral sophistication, self-efficacy and attitudinal complexity can bring leadership and involvement in communities. The alternative understanding of recorded discursive patterns, proposing a structural determination of justification that would epitomize various degrees of community integration, pressure and individual accountability skills should also be considered. Further research should inquire the causal place of motivations, identity or self-efficacy in the process of neighborhood collective action controlling for significant factors as the community network structure or the distribution of resources and constrains.
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