Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Pamela Oliver and Gerald Maxwell

Authors of The Critical Mass in Collective Action: A Micro-Social Theory published in 1993

"Collective action usually entails the development of a critical mass - a small segment of the population that chooses to make big contributions to the collective action... that will tend to explode, to draw in the other less interested or less resourceful members of the population and to carry the event toward its maximum potential."

"Our central thesis is that technologies for mobilizing resources impose tight constraints on the forms of action that are possible. Once a person or group is using one technology, it is not easy to switch to another. Groups that are structured to raise money are not well structured to mobilize volunteers, and vice versa. Raising money through direct mail tends to concentrate power in a central national office, while raising money through canvassing creates large cadre of canvassers in local areas who need to be managed and motivated. Volunteers mobilized for a protest demonstration are not usually available for volunteer fund-raising"

"Activists are at the core of most collective action. Activists are people who care enough about some issue that they are prepared to incur significant costs and act to achieve their goals. Sometimes they act alone, but often they seek to draw others into collective action. "

"We do not want in any way to imply that professionalized mobilization has replaced "spontaneous" grassroots mobilization. Our arguments have made it clear that we do not think professionalized mobilizations generally can create grassroots mobilizations of volunteers, because mobilizing money is generally inconsistent with mobilizing action. But we also think that the processes through which new actions emerge are still in place and operating, although we seem to be in a "quiet" period. It is nevertheless worth asking whether these professionalized organizations will prove to be irrelevant to grassroots mobilization, supportive of it, or competitive with it"