Collective Affordances

Abstract

This article develops an ecological framework for understanding collective action. This is contrasted with approaches familiar from the collective intentionality debate, which treat individuals (with collective intentions) as fundamental units of collective action. Instead, we turn to social ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory and argue that they provide a promising framework for understanding collectives as the central unit in collective action. However, we submit that these approaches do not yet appreciate enough the relevance of social identities for collective action. To analyze this aspect, we build on key insights from social identity theory and synthesize it with embodied and ecological accounts of perception and action. This results in the proposal of two new types of affordances. For an individual who enacts her “embodied social identity” of being a member of a particular collective, there can be what we call embodied social identity affordances. Moreover, when several individuals dynamically interact with each other against the background of their embodied social identities, this might lead to the emergence of a collective, which we understand as a dynamically constituted and ecologically situated perception-action system consisting of several individuals enacting relevant embodied social identity affordances. Building on previous work in social ecological psychology, we suggest that there can be genuine collective affordances, that is, affordances whose subject is not an individual, but a collective.

Acknowledgements

For very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, we would like to thank Gloria Mähringer, Jan Marschelke, Matt Rachar, Zuzanna Rucińska, Tyler Q. Sproule, the associate editor of Ecological Psychology, Jeffrey B. Wagman, and three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 Ecological psychology emphasizes relationality, but it is important to note that relations have relata. One relatum of an organism-environment-relation is the subject, organism, animal, or agent, while the other relatum is the environment, world, or situation. Thus, when we say that an affordance is subject-dependent, we mean that it depends on the organism, animal, or agent.

2 We roughly understand the term “embodied social identity” to refer to how a particular agent understands herself within her social environment at a particular moment in virtue of her past and on-going actions. For example, an agent leading a running group might at that moment enact her embodied social identity as a leader of that running group, while an agent on a football pitch might enact her embodied social identity of being the left defender of our team. We will below discuss the notion of embodied social identities in much more detail.

3 We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us clarify this point.

4 We thank two anonymous reviewers for urging us to clarify this point.

5 We thank an anonymous reviewer for urging us to clarify this point.