Collective actions and social capital: implication of concepts

Collective actions are the basis of social interaction. Collective action is defined as the system of organized individuals, who are included in groups, which have a certain degree of organization. The pecularity of collective activities is the fact that almost all people are involved in them, in one form or another. One of the first sociologists, who started the study of collective activities, was M. Weber. It was him who designated a collective action as a social one. While studying consumer behavior, economists also paid attention to collective activities of people (E. Ostrom). The result was the emergence of the social action concept in Sociology and the theory of collective action in Economics. Later, the number of researchers and studied problems in the context of a collective action expanded. Economists and sociologists were joined by psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists, biologists, and others. The theory of collective action allows us to explain a wide range of social life phenomena. This concept is closely related to the theory of social capital, which emerged at the intersection of economic and social sciences. Social capital is a factor that determines the intensity, effectiveness, and mass scale of collective actions. However, social capital itself is formed under the influence of collective actions. In foreign science, the problems of collective action and social capital are considered interrelated. In domestic social science, it is yet to be achieved. The theory of social capital has the umbrella effect, which allows searching for opportunities of theoretical and methodological integration of social capital components and forms of collective actions. The purpose of this article is to show, on the basis of the overview of the main research areas of social capital and collective actions in scientific literature, the most promising points of their contact for studying social reality in Russia. It includes the research of subjects of collective actions, transformation of their goals, the enrichment of the repertoire due to the emergence of new practices and the usage of virtual space. The important aspect is the environment for the implementation of collective actions, which forms their target orientation. The implication of concepts of social capital and collective action should allow us to identify aspects of mutual influence between them.