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The authors try to set out the conditions for the emergence of collective action for employment. If there are no movements of the unemployed then, it is because the collective identity of the unemployed disappears with their work community. The unemployed even refuse to identify with their condition and blame themselves for it. Struggles for employment are developed by those workers who are still in the plants. Another reason for demobilisation among the unemployed is the absence of a political representation of unemployment. The latter is perceived as an individual accident or a social plague, and no social actor is identified as responsible for the situation.

This paper juxtaposes two important political solutions to the collective action problem in the context of a common set of core assumptions. Once the core assumptions have been discussed, the distinction between the consumption and the production problems associated with public goods provision is elaborated. These assumptions and this distinction are applied to a comparison between a theory of individualistic anarchy, and a theory of competitive political entrepreneurs. Revisions of both are required to enable them to be placed within this framework. While the two theories are neither exclusive nor exhaustive they can, between them, be used to understand public goods provision in a number of different circumstances.

Historians of the Russian labor movement have been slowly chipping away at the stereotypes about Russian workers created by generations of intellectuals quick to generalize from eye-catching impressions. The result has been the stereotyped, bipolar working class. On the one hand is the "peasant yokel" who too frequently resorts to the violent and mindless behavior indigenous to his original rural swamp. On the other hand, we find the skilled urban worker, sometimes a "half-literate intellectual," sometimes a labor aristocrat who disdains to cooperate with his socialist mentors. Daniel Brower's look at labor violence attempts to help reshape the familiar stereotype by exploring the cultural roots of the Russian worker's predilection for violence and by showing that such behavior is less mindless and more political than its critics have accepted. By not adequately specifying the contours and especially the frequency of violence, however, he leaves us ultimately with the old image of a Pugachevshchina in the factories. Brower in effect takes the pieces of the stereotype he has chipped away and glues them back in approximately the same pattern.

The problem of whether the rational, self-interested individual will voluntarily subscribe to a large group providing collective benefits is examined, using the perspectives of Hardin's application of game theory and Olson's application of economic theory. The arguments in each case are held to be unsatisfactory, and the same analysis cannot automatically be applied to all problems involving collective action. The subscription to large groups normally represents a distinct sub-class of problems, the solution to which, contrary to the established wisdom, is that the rational, self-interested individual with a net benefit (together, perhaps, with the irrational one with a net loss) will voluntarily subscribe to a group providing a collective good.

This article presents a theory to explain the frequency of ethnic collective action. Based on rational choice premises, it represents an alternative to currently popular structural theories. We demonstrate why an individual will not necessarily join a collective action even if its end is beneficial to him, and why collective action does not always occur among the most seriously disadvantaged ethnic groups. The strength of ethnically based organizations is held to be an especially powerful determinant of the likelihood of ethnic collective action.

The article considers the success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in con trolling the price of crude oil as a possible example that the destructive logic of collective action may be circumvented. It is argued that the OPEC countries have succeeded in the pursuit of their collective cause due to the ability and willingness of Saudi Arabia to make good the damage perpetrated by free-rider conduct. Yet, the recent (March 1982 — March 1983) conflict over pricing- and production policy was a war of nerves, from which an accord emerged only after a painful game of threats and brinkmanship.