Introduction: the Shifting Global Frames of Collective Action

Abstract

This collection of essays is about collective action and globalization. To even utter this juxtaposition belies a certain prejudice or acquiescence to a mindset of globalization problematics in their many similar and opposing voices. But, is globalization as a process, event or discourse conceivable without the deeply evocative nature of collective action? We doubt it is. Indeed, as is pointed out in many of the contributions to this collection, globalization and collective action are in deep dialogue, if not fused to one another’s future practical and theoretical agenda. This integrality may be the only way to escape the discursive minefields which accompany the varying portraits of globalization in economics, political science, sociology and a litany of other social sciences. Hence, our starting point is that collective action can never be far from an analysis of global phenomena or a global focus on human organization and its complex arrangements. Nor should it, if globalization is to be viewed as a way to better understand this period of late modernities, and the spinning of human action beyond the local, or conversely deeply spun within the local, and the cross-border implications these entail for global democratic practices.