Understanding Strategy in Contentious Collective Action: A Research Agenda

Strategy is central to work on collective action, and to the way that we think about the future, but is undertheorised and rarely directly investigated. Our paper proposes a research agenda for addressing this. We disaggregate the term in three sections: strategic action, a qualifier to refer to goal-directed or effective activity; strategizing, involving practices by which actors coordinate; and strategies, a form of future orientation that guides practices. The first part argues that literature on strategic action, especially field theory, presents strategy as an important, yet opaque, quality. To address this and test assumptions about certain forms of future-coordinating being more efficacious, the next sections discuss the potential of analysing strategizing using theories of practice; and strategies using work on projectivity. To advance the agenda, we recommend several moves, including investigating both more and less formal modes of strategizing or dedicated and emergent coordinating practices, identifying and analysing the elements of coordinating practices; considering and measuring the form of future orientations using Ann Mische’s work on projectivity; and examining a wider range of the content of future orientations which guide and inspire action and cultural change.