Analyzing Collective Actions: The Case of the Samen Distressed

Study of collective actions is related to some of the most important issues in contemporary sociology such as cooperation, collective decision making, emergence of social norms etc. this paper in four steps presents a framework for studying collective actions. These steps are related to characteristics of collective actions (cooperation and common good), factors effecting the emergence of collective actions (individual and meta-individual factors), factors effecting the maintenance of collective actions (central and dispread control), and approaches of actors in collective actions (imitation and computation) respectively. These characteristics are extracted from the available literature on collective actions and organized by the researchers. This framework could be used to study advantages and disadvantages of any collective action. Components of this framework are interrelated to each other and could produce a wide variety of different collective actions. Study of case of economic partnerships among householders in a neighborhood in Samen district in Mashhad is done to show the application of this framework.