Social action in india pdf

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It gives people responsibility for their own lives and actions, and brings out their leadership potential. When you want to catch the attention of the public — and the media — and galvanize public opinion in your favor about an issue or about your organization or community. Social action can make people aware of your cause and your community. Who should engage in social action? Preparing for social action Get to know the community. Learn community history, passions, relationships, and culture.

Get acquainted with as many individuals as possible — have conversations not just about politics or social issues, but about families, sports, relationships, and your own histories. In other words, make friends as you would in any other circumstances. Identify the issues that are likely to lead the community to social action. The assumption behind organizing is that this is a community that has traditionally felt powerless.

What is important enough to move people to act? Identify and contact key individuals and groups. Starting with trusted and respected individuals and groups gives you automatic access to much of the community. In addition, these individuals and groups can help you avoid making damaging mistakes by informing you about relationships within the community, past failures and successes relating to organizing and the issues at hand, and other factors that might affect your effort.

Where groups exist — churches, unions, community-based health and human service organizations, fraternal and service organizations, etc. Where there are no or few functioning groups, key individuals are much more important, both in gaining access to others in the community, and in bringing people together.

Recruit community members to the effort. This is the heart of any community organizing campaign. There is no substitute for face-to-face communication, for honesty about your purposes and goals, for personal openness and lack of pretension, and for treating people with respect.

As you recruit individuals and groups and start to plan and carry out a social action strategy , it becomes crucial that people be able to contact one another, and that news can be spread quickly and efficiently to everyone. Having a way to make that happen — whether by phone, e-mail, or personal contact — will make your work possible.

Encourage leadership from the community from the beginning. They are already leaders, with or without the title. In addition, many others have the potential for leadership, or exercise leadership in certain situations or with certain groups.

Planning for social action Sometimes, social action arises from circumstance. Develop a strategic plan for social action. A social action campaign is just that. We recommend the VMOSA process — develop a shared Vision; establish the Mission of your organization or initiative, based on the community vision; choose Objectives that reflect your vision and mission; formulate a Strategy for reaching those objectives; and devise Actions that will implement your strategy.

Each element of this process should be carried out with the participation of — and, ideally, under the leadership of — the community, so that all of the plan is theirs. Organizers can play an important role as consultants and facilitators here, using their experience and expertise to help community members envision both short- and long-term goals, as well as what kinds of strategies and actions they might employ to reach those goals. Decide what kinds of actions will work best in your community, and what kinds of actions the community is and is not willing to take part in.

There is a broad range of possible actions that a community can take. At one end are those actions that simply announce that the community exists as a unified force — letter-writing, calls or visits to officials relating to a legislative issue, etc. This will depend on: What is likely to be effective. Acts of violence against property are highly symbolic, but seldom convince the opposition of anything, and often split your own group, so that their effectiveness in most communities is questionable.

What community members see as ethical or moral. The whole concept of nonviolent resistance, used by Gandhi and emulated by Martin Luther King and his colleagues in the American Civil Rights Movement, is based on the premise that violence against others is simply wrong, and would rob their movement of any moral force if they used it. What they will accept and are ready for.

This is related to the bullets both above and below, but has more to do with the social and cultural norms of the community. Some groups may have strong taboos against confrontation or against individuals standing out from the group, for example, and social action strategies may have to work around or counter these.

People have to be psychologically ready to do whatever is planned. What kinds of risks they are willing to take. Some will be willing to expose themselves personally and politically; others, at least at first, may not. It is sometimes important to push people beyond their comfort zones You may be dealing with a community that has suffered the consequences of public protest before, and those consequences may have been severe.

Even if circumstances are different now, the community has to start at a level of risk that seems reasonable to it. What has already been tried. A community unwilling to engage in civil disobedience at the beginning of a campaign may feel differently after its milder efforts have been ignored.

Sometimes a social action effort works on the first try. Sometimes it takes several tries, a change in procedure, an increase in intensity, or some other factor to bring success. Your contingency plans can encompass almost anything.

One possibility, for instance, is to simply let that particular issue drop and switch your efforts to something more winnable, in order to build strength and morale. Another is to change tactics — going at the issue from another angle, or aiming your action at a different target.

At the current writing, for example Fall, , just one organization, ACORN, has recently: Mobilized voters — through door to door canvassing, voter registration, and participation at rallies, along with many elected officials — to defeat a number of California ballot initiatives.

Co-sponsored a rally in New York City attended by over 1, home childcare workers to highlight low wages and lack of support. Held numerous actions of various kinds around the country to try to convince Congress to change a budget bill that would cut programs for the poor in order to help pay for disaster relief. Taken part in actions and court deliberations that led to the postponement of a permit renewal for a smelter in El Paso, Texas, that emits heavy metals into the air.

Choose the time, place, target s , and nature of your action based on its purpose, and on how it fits into your overall strategy. If you want a bill passed, your action should aim at legislators; if you want a corporation to change its policies, your action should target the offices, or the officers, of that corporation. Think carefully about what you want to accomplish, and who actually has the power to make it happen. By the same token, consider what kind of action will be most effective for the purpose at hand, and for your long-term strategy.

Provide the training and other support necessary to carry out a successful action before you engage in it. There are a number of different kinds of support that you may be able to provide: Training. They should understand their range of choices — to engage in civil disobedience, to support those who are engaged in civil disobedience, merely to be present, etc. People may need rides to a public meeting, or to polling places.

For some actions, costumes or clothing imprinted with appropriate slogans may have to be supplied. Participants may need maps or other information. For a media session or rally, you may need photos or pictures, sound equipment, newsprint, computers, a movie screen — the list of possibilities is nearly endless.

Anticipating and supplying what organizers and participants need is an important part of organizing an action. Coordination and support. Having people designated to provide directions, instructions, information, etc. Plan the action in detail, then follow your plan. The more stake participants have in a social action strategy — which includes the planning of individual actions — the more likely it is to continue over the long term and to be successful.

The planning of an event should cover every possibility you and everyone else involved can think of. Organize for action. This means activating your communication network, going door to door, calling meetings, and doing whatever else it takes to get the right people to the right place at the right time. Whether you want 20 people to write letters to the Editor, or 2, people in front of City Hall at on Monday, they need to be contacted and coordinated.

Carry out the action. Follow up and evaluate. Watch it […]. Watch it here, or scroll down for the slideshow. Social action is an aggregation of efforts by various individuals to address what they see as the social problems of their times. Thus, before we think about the future of social action in India for the next 30 years, we need to think more fundamentally about our role as individuals in society. Unfortunately, the overwhelming concerns for survival and securing livelihoods, and the growing influence of market institutions have converted most relationships between individuals into mere transactions.

We have reduced ourselves to producers and consumers, sellers and buyers. The interactional aspect of relationships has taken a back seat. Today, a citizen is nothing more than the relationship they hold with the state. In a recent speech, Rajesh Tandon, founder of Participatory Research in Asia PRIA , argued that we need to broaden the concept of citizenship from being a vertical relationship between the individual and the state, to numerous horizontal relationships among individuals.

The third level at which people relate is one that encompasses the natural world or environment, as well as the spiritual—the need to find meaning and purpose in our daily lives. Therefore, an individual who is not only engaged in transactions and interactions, but has humane relationships with others, cares for nature, and cultivates their spiritual side is more evolved than the mere producer-consumer archetype. The central challenge of the 21st century then, is to build robust eco-social action-oriented institutions that can nurture such individuals across income, caste, and class levels.

Although Weber himself used the word ' agency ', in modern social science this term is often appropriated with a given acceptance of Weberian conceptions of social action, unless a work intends to make the direct allusion. Similarly, ' reflexivity ' is commonly used as a shorthand to refer to the circular relationship of cause and effect between structure and agency which Weber was integral in hypothesising.

Another example would be most economic transactions. Value Relation is divided into the subgroups commands and demands. According to the law, people are given commands and must use the whole system of private laws to break down the central government or domination in the legal rights in which a citizen possess. Demands can be based on justice or human dignity just for morality. These demands have posed several problems even legal formalism has been put to the test.

These demands seem to weigh on the society and at times can make them feel immoral. The rational choice approach to religion draws a close analogy between religion and the market economy.

Religious firms compete against one another to offer religious products and services to consumers, who choose between the firms. To the extent that there are many religious firms competing against each other, they will tend to specialize and cater to the particular needs of some segments of religious consumers. This specialization and catering in turn increase the number of religious consumers actively engaged in the religious economy.

This proposition has been confirmed in a number of empirical studies. It is well known that strict churches are strong and growing in the contemporary United States, whereas liberal ones are declining.

For Iannaccone's religious experience is a jointly produced collective good. Thus members of a church face a collective action problem. Strict churches, which often impose costly and esoteric requirements on their members, are able to solve this problem by weeding out potential free riders, since only the very committed would join the church in the face of such requirements.

Consistent with the notion that religious experience is a collective good, Iannaccone et al.