Understanding strategy in contentious collective action: a research agenda

Understanding strategy in contentious collective action: a research agenda Luke Yates and Kevin Gillan The concept of strategy is central to work on collective action but is undertheorised and rarely directly investigated. This article begins by examining the extant literature, which understands strategic action in its adjectival form, as a qualifier for action which is seen to be goal-directed and effective or politically consequential. We argue that scholarship in this area could be advanced by considering strategy additionally as both noun and verb: strategies, forms of future orientation that guide practices; and strategizing, involving practices by which actors coordinate action. We show how strategies can be distinguished from other forms of future orientation through a specific configuration of dimensions of variability. Other forms of future orientation may also lead to social outcomes and specifying dimensions allows for examinations of both their form and their political contents, or coordinates. A further line of inquiry is analysing the elements of coordinating practices through requisite understandings, skills and materialities and investigating both dedicated and emergent modes of coordinating. Understanding strategies and strategizing in these ways opens up opportunities for comparison, historicising, and investigation of their relationship with particular types of action, actor and outcomes. The paper thereby contributes new ways of investigating which activities matter most in political organising and mobilisation, how we should understand the role of ideas, documents and decisions about the future, and what forms of coordinating collective action are possible and effective. It presents a research agenda for thinking about strategy analytically and critically. It is possible, but not guaranteed, that by the time I will be discussing this paper next there will be some additional empirical data to discuss alongside the (mainly secondary) examples that Kevin and I have so far been using to illustrate our perspective.