Pathways to Direct Social Actions. Collective Agency in Times of Crisis in Italy.

Collective actors with different identities and organizational structure frequently select similar forms of actions to advance their agendas, despite almost no academic investigation. This paper, drawing on social movement studies and relying on interview and website data of collective actors, singles out four general paths toward direct social actions in Italy in times of crisis: the social path, the political-social path, the socio-political path and the political path. Direct social actions are forms of actions that do not primarily focus upon claiming something from the state or other power holders - whether this might be seen in revolutionary or reformist terms - but that instead focus upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself. Each path is characterized by three main factors: context, organizational structure and identity; that combine together differently to shape the selection of direct social actions.