Imagined Communities

Abstract

As we have seen in Chapter 2, selective incentives are insufficient to explain high intensity participation such as conference attendance and it is necessary to invoke collective incentives as well. This highlights the need to use varied theoretical approaches to provide a more complicated picture of what goes on. It is surprising, for instance, that the insights provided by research on new social movements is so rarely used when dealing with more established organisations. It is as if collective party identities in such cases are taken as given rather than as constantly worked on and reproduced as is assumed in the case of the Green Party or new social movements. One of the challenges of social analysis is the integration of micro- and macro-perspectives and the articulation of the continuities and discontinuities between the individual level and the social context within which actions take place. The institutionalisation of practices contributes to the construction of social structures that influence in return the ways in which an individual behaves and thinks about the world that she inhabits.