Studying collective action problems in academic research

A question that came from a recent conversation: Is there published (meta)research on solving collective action problems in academic research?

Context

We've been doing many interviews over the past 1.5 years with different stakeholders in academia, and one of the most common barriers to changing behavior (such as doing more open research or changing research culture) is that “no one else is doing it and it doesn't benefit me”, but actually if everyone does it, then everyone benefits. Is solving such collective action problems something that has been studied in the academic context? If so, where and by whom?

I posed this question to the Turing Way and NASA TOPS Slack groups. Here's my attempt at collecting the responses so far.

Turing Way

So far, I haven't heard from someone who knows of research specifically about collective action problems in academia. But, a few theoretical frameworks were suggested as ways to examine the problem.

Agent-based modelling of individual vs collective behaviour

(from Shern Tee)

This is interesting to me in the sense that I first of agent-based modelling in my intro ecology course during undergrad, but haven't considered it in the context of collective human behaviour.

Organisational theory

(from Liam McGee)

Economic theories

(from Liam McGee)

Religions

(from Liam McGee)

The Collective Action in Science Committee

(Julien Colomb) You may ask the people behind. https://freeourknowledge.org/committee/

Note:

I see that it proposes the model of “We will all do X (the ‘action’) when Y people have pledged (the ‘threshold’)”. This reminds me of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

Thinking about common pool resources

(from Jonah Duckles)

A bit of a different tack on collective action, but still VERY related is Elanor Ostrom's work on Common Pool Resources, detailed in her book “Governing the Commons”. If you think about the work of an academic as working to advocate for and gather common pool resources (grant money) for themselves, I think it is an informative model for imagining a way that grant money could be considered less “contested” and more of a common pool of resources. The open science movement does kind of implicitly treat information as a common pool resource. Ostrom's work, I think, helps think about ways to build structures and systems around governing it for the benefit of many. A summary of “Governing the Commons” is her 8-point “Design principles illustrated by long-enduring Common Pool Resource (CPR) institutions” which is under the Research header on the Wikipedia page about her.

Thinking about “doers” and “thinkers”

(from Anne Lee Steele)

I think there are a few ways to approach this question: as sometimes the people doing the collection action & organising may not necessarily being the ones studying it, and vice versa. (Similarly for example: the work of community management is different from the act of studying communities!)

Regarding broader theories and ideas of social change at the individual level, the trans-theotical model (coming from medicine) is a very popular one: https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/SB/BehavioralChangeTheories/BehavioralChangeTheories6.html

There's also the studies of 'innovation diffusion' that talks about how systems change more broadly, studied by quite a few folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations#Process

Regarding the tension between 'doers' and 'thinkers' (which of course is not necessarily cut and dry), it might be helpful to think through a few examples:

Organisers of collective action (for example – there are so many!): * https://movementecology.org.uk/ * https://scienceforthepeople.org/ * https://techworkerscoalition.org/

Studies of collective action:

Hope this helps!

Note:

Interestingly, the innovation diffusion model by Rogers is cited in the Center for Open Science's theory for behaviour change: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-114157#f3

NASA TOPS

Similar to the Turing Way responses, nothing specific to academia here. But there's a very interesting one about learning from climate action suggested by Jamaica Jones:

This is such an interesting question! I am not sure if it's exactly what you are looking for, but you might find Sheila Jasanoff's work to be informative. She contributed a chapter to a book called Human Choice and Climate Change that may be relevant. I also found another climate change-focused citation that seems similarly aligned: the article is called “Doing What Others Do: Norms, Science, and Collective Action on Global Warming”, by Bolsen et al.

Here's the Bolsen et al. paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20240522100857/http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64670/1/Leeper_Doing what others do_2016.pdf

For the book Human Choice and Climate Change, it's available to borrow online from the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/humanchoiceclima0001unse

It reminds me of my past life studying environmental sciences and learning about the concept of collective action problems and the tragedy of the commons. I wonder if anyone's done research on how to take lessons solving collective action problems in one domain (e.g. climate action) and applying them to another (e.g. academia)?

#metaresearch #ideas

Unless otherwise stated, all original content in this post is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).