In old-regime Europe, for instance, the unauthorized popular courts that repeatedly formed to judge violators of the public interest always drew their members from previously established political networks and regularly mimicked routines of royal courts. Second, exceptional bodies of participants and unusual modes of action always depend in part on previously existing social relations and known models of making claims. First, no sharp dividing line exists between "routine" and "extraordinary" demonstrating and attacking ethnic rivals, for example, sometimes become everyday activities. No one should adopt the narrower definition without recognizing four important qualifications. The narrower definition of collective action refers to discontinuous but collective contention, whether conflict-bearing or cooperative. When those implications are negative we can speak of conflict, whereas when they are positive we can speak of cooperation. It differs from other collective action in being discontinuous and contentious: not built into daily routines, and having implications for interests of people outside the acting group as well as for the actors' own shared interests. Collective action in this narrow sense resembles what other analysts call protest, rebellion, or disturbance. Social historians and social scientists often reserve the term "collective action" for episodes engaging participants who do not routinely act together or who employ means of action other than those they adopt for day-to-day interaction. Over that same history, nevertheless, the great bulk of collective action took less spectacular forms such as local celebrations, jury deliberations, or the everyday production of goods or services by households and workshops. Some of European social history's most vivid moments centered on this sort of claim making: Florentine workers rising against the oligarchy in the name of crafts excluded from municipal power newly converted mountaineers resisting demands of their Catholic lords in the name of Protestant sects Parisian residents attacking the Bastille in the name of the whole citizenry. Participants in collective action, furthermore, regularly claim to speak in the name of such structures-our guild, our confraternity, our lineage, our neighborhood, and so on-or in the name of more abstract collectivities such as workers, women, Huguenots, pacifists, or environmentalists. Collective action rarely involves all members of such ongoing social structures at the same time, but often draws currently active participants disproportionately from one or more existing structures. Collective actors sometimes include corporate bodies such as craft guilds and religious confraternities, but on occasion they also include friendship networks, neighbors, and participants in local markets. To treat an episode as "collective action" is therefore an analytic simplification it singles out the perspective and behavior of just one participant in complex interactions. Much collective action actually consists of conflict or cooperation, which imply two or more interacting parties. In European social history, collective action has ranged from communal bread baking to electoral campaigns, from idol-smashing to revolution. Collective action applies pooled resources to shared interests.
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