Collective Action : Tribes, Empires, Nations, and Protest Movements

This book examines how different levels and forms of human collectivity have interacted, voluntarily or coercively, and how these transformed societies and polities.

Every size and type of human collective involve co-operation among members and competition with other groups. The two most recent trends in human relations – individualism and economic globalisation – have contributed to authoritarianism in politics and inequality among citizens. This book analyses how collective action might offset the most destructive consequences for well-being of these two tendencies. It explores these manifestations of collective action and their impact on social relations and social policies in the developed world. Further, the volume sets out a programme for more progressive and egalitarian future for global populations.

Engaging, accessible and transdisciplinary, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics and public policy, sociology, social psychology, social policy and social work, as well as political philosophy, political economy and migration studies.

Bill Jordan is Honorary Professor of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Plymouth. He has written over 30 books on politics, economics, migration, social policy and social work. He worked for ten years in the UK public services and was also an activist in a union for claimants of welfare benefits, later acting as a consultant to several local authorities. He lectured in New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Since then, he has held visiting chairs in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. His books have been translated into Portuguese, Hungarian and Japanese.