Local Scenes of Global Action: Group Styles of Local Collective Action and the Place of Politics

Abstract

French and Finnish grass roots politics represent two opposite ends of a spectrum of common stereotypes: the expressive, emotional, and conflict-driven French rage on the streets of their cities for whatever reason, while the reserved and consensual Finns quietly lobby in their thousands of associations, rarely acting any more spectacularly. Yet the globalization of collective action, the intensification of global social movements, and the international diffusion of action repertoires have resulted in more and more uniform images of collective action. In order to understand how these differences and convergences are articulated and what the articulations mean to the people involved in these actions, a closer look is necessary.