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Here I present a theory of collective action that emphasizes the role of status. I argue that collective action contributions earn individuals improved status by signaling their concern for the group's welfare relative to their own. Having received greater prestige for their contributions to group goals, individuals’ actual motivation to help the group is increased, leading to greater subsequent contributions to group efforts and greater feelings of group solidarity. This “virtuous cycle” of costly contributions to group efforts and enhanced standing in the group shows one way in which individuals’ prosocial behaviors are socially constructed, a consequence of individuals’ basic concern for what others think of them. I discuss a variety of issues related to the theory, including its scope of application, theoretical implications, relationship to alternative models of reputation and prosocial behavior, possible practical applications, and directions for future research.

Purpose – This chapter investigates the role of enabling organizations in the processes whereby institutional investors collectively influence corporate managers on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues. We develop a framework combining stakeholder and collective action theory to explain how institutional investors influence corporations through collective engagement and to specify how enabling organizations influence this process.

Methodology/approach – To evaluate our framework, we investigate the role of the organizational platform provided by the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) initiative in supporting institutional investors’ collaborative engagement with corporations on ESG issues.

Findings – Our findings clarify how investors enhance their sources of power, legitimacy and urgency and attract managers’ attention through collaborative engagement, and show how they manage these attributes to reshape the legitimacy and urgency of their claims in the eyes of managers. Our results also show how enabling organizations such as the PRI initiative facilitate the emergence of collective action by lowering barriers to entry and providing a mobilizing structure, support collaborative efforts by adding their own legitimacy, normative power and persistence to the collaborative engagement, and create conditions for a lasting dialogue between investors and managers by providing a hybrid organizational space.

Social implications – In explaining how to enhance institutional investors’ collective action on ESG issues, this paper shows how we could reorient financial market forces toward sustainability.

Originality/value of paper – The paper benefited from a unique access to confidential and internal data from the UN-PRI initiative and provides a new framework.

Previous research combining corporate political activity and collective action theory has focused solely on industry structure and its role in predicting group lobbying or PAC participation. The purpose of this paper is to use a different context—franchise systems—to apply Olsonian collective action theory to political activities.

Using a random-effects technique in STATA on an unbalanced panel data set, this paper empirically models the effects of franchise system size and degree of franchising on the level of lobbying intensity.

Since franchise systems are made up of differing unit ownership structure, the author first model if those systems that are fully franchised lobby less than those with franchisor unit ownership (supported). Next, since collective action theory predicts that more participants in a space will lead to less collective action, the author predict that franchise systems with larger unit counts will lobby less than those with smaller counts (not supported). Finally, the author test the interaction of these two effects as systems that are fully franchised and of higher unit totals should have an even greater negative relationship with political activity (supported).

This paper uses both a novel data set and a novel context to study collective action. Previous research has utilized an industry structure context to model the level of lobbying and collective action, while the current research uses an analogous logic, but in the context of franchise systems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different actors influenced the implementation of an environmental management system (EMS) and a performance measurement system (PMS) in a case company when the systems are eventually integrated. Another purpose is to illustrate how the frameworks of Gibson and Earley and Lovaglia et al. can be utilized to investigate the implementation of different management systems in practice.

This paper is an interpretative case study, which utilizes qualitative methods such as semi‐structured interviews and internal documents.

The results indicate the importance of maintaining a separation between the power and status of an actor in EMS and PMS implementation processes, and the ways in which the power and status of actors in the EMS and PMS implementation differed. The status and role of an actor can change although the power may be static during the implementation of different management systems. Therefore, the paper confirms the classification of Lovaglia et al. and proposes that their classification should be added to the framework of Gibson and Earley.

Earlier accounting studies using the institutional theory framework of Burns and Scapens did not specifically investigate the role of actors, or their power and status in implementing two different management systems. The collective action frameworks of Gibson and Earley and Lovaglia et al. have not been practically utilized before in EMS and PMS studies. Furthermore, EMS and PMS integration studies have usually been normative without empirical case data.

We develop elements of Network Exchange and Expectation States Theories to explain the relationship between power and status. While power and status are highly correlated, demonstrating that power can be used to attain high status has proven difficult, perhaps because negative reactions to power use limit power users’ influence. We propose three ways to reduce negative reactions to power use. One of them, philanthropy, suggests a solution to the “free-rider” problem in collective action. If philanthropic contributions increase status, then contributing to a public good may also. Thus, status attainment may be an incentive motivating public goods contributions.

Due to the influence of complex and intersecting factors, self-governed public open spaces (POSs) (managed by local communities) are subject to collective action dilemmas such as tragedy of the commons (overexploitation), free-riding, underinvestment and mismanagement. This review paper adopts a multi-dimensional and multi-tier social-ecological system (SES) framework proposed by McGinnis and Ostrom, drawing on collective action theory to explore the key institutional-social-ecological factors that impact POS self-governance.

In this paper, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) was utilized to systematically screen and review the relevant literature for the period from 2000 to 2023 in three databases: Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. A total of 57 papers were chosen for in-depth analysis.

The literature review identified and categorized several variables associated with the self-organizing system of POS; consequently, an SES-based POS management framework was developed for the first time, consisting of 114 institutional-social-ecological sub-variables from different dimensions and three levels. Compared to ecological factors, among others, governance organizations, property-rights systems, socioeconomic attributes and actors' knowledge of SES have been commonly and primarily studied.

There is still room for the refinement of the conceptual SES-based POS collective action framework over the time (by adding in new factors), and indefinitely empirical research validating those identified factors is also worth to be undertaken, particularly testing how SES factors and interaction variables affect the POS quality (collective action).

The findings of this study can provide local policy insights and POS management strategies based on the identification of specific SES factors for relevant managers. Moreover, this research makes significant theoretical contributions to the integration of the SES framework and collective action theory with POS governance studies.

The purpose of this paper is to operationalize theories of social learning and collective action for campus sustainability practitioners at higher education instititions (IHEs) to enhance their work, and to introduce the concept of collective action competence as a practical tool.

This paper presents a theoretical argument based on the concepts of learning and collective action for stronger consideration of social learning, action competence and voluntary collective action in campus sustainability initiatives.

Many important sustainability outcomes depend heavily on voluntary behaviors by groups of campus stakeholders, making voluntary collective action an important, although underused, tool for campus sustainability practitioners. The term “collective action competence” is introduced and defined as the capability of a group of people to direct their behavior toward a common goal based on a collective literacy, a collective competence, and a collective need or goal.

The term “collective action competence” is introduced as a novel unifying concept that articulates a critical capability needed for collective behavior change in social settings such as HEIs. Collective action competence is based on the theories of collective action and of social and free-choice learning and on the concepts of action competence and strategic competence.

The purpose of the study is to examine the interaction between the structure of the top management team, takeover defense mechanisms and firms rate of collective actions.

The study uses elements of agency theory, prospect theory and competitive dynamics research to develop a model for examining heterogeneity in the rate of collective actions among firms in the technology sector. A sample of 299 firm-year observations arrayed into panel regression analyses is used.

The findings from this study show a positive relationship between the size of the top management team and the count of collective actions when takeover defense mechanisms are present. Further this study finds a negative relationship between top management team ownership and collective actions when these same takeover defense mechanisms are present. Additionally, the female ratio of the top management team is negatively related to collective actions.

This study was conducted using a sample of technological firms. These relationships may not be generalizable to firms in other contexts. Further, other elements of the firm’s governance structure (i.e. board of directors or shareholders) may play an important role in the strategic decision-making process.

This study expands on existing research by linking several blocks of literature, top management team literature, competitive dynamics literature and corporate governance literature, into a model to examine firm structural characteristics on the heterogeneity in the propensity to formulate collective actions among firms.

In China, rural-to-urban migrant workers who are from the same place of origin tend to concentrate in the same workplace. If the concentration is sufficiently dense, it means that these migrant workers build up a social network which could be defined as native place enclave (NPE). In this paper, the authors discussed whether there are behavioral differences between enclave workers and non-enclave workers when they have conflicts with their employers.

The authors put two questions to empirical tests. First, do enclave workers experience less sense of deprivation than non-enclave workers? Second, compared to non-enclave workers, are enclave workers more willing to participate in collective action against their employers? Using data from a survey of migrant workers in Pearl River Delta and Yangzi River Delta in 2010, the authors made a comparison between enclave workers and non-enclave workers with respect to sense of deprivation and willingness-to-participate by using a propensity score matching method.

The authors found that the relationship between NPE and sense of deprivation was negative, so was the relationship between NPE and willingness-to-participate. Meanwhile, the two relationships were stronger than what had been found after the propensity score matching method was used.

The results implied that employers can reduce labor conflicts by using NPE to mitigate migrant workers’ sense of deprivation and by lowering the risk of their collective actions. In this way, NPE may contribute to the upkeep of workplace order and even social order.

There have been hot debates on how NPE would affect migrant workers’ collective action. Resource mobilization theory pointed out that NPE was positively related to workers’ collective action while production politics theory held an opposite view. Our findings provided empirical evidences for the debates.