ABSTRACT
Be careful what you wish for. More than a quarter of a century ago, I wrote From Mobilization to Revolution (henceforth FMTR) in the hope of advancing the vexing, if vital, inquiry into causes of collective action. To that end, the book identified five components of any such analysis: interest, organization, mobilization, opportunity, and collective action itself. Opportunity, in my 1978 formulation,
concerns the relationship between a group and the world around it. Changes in the relationship sometimes threaten the group’s interests. They sometimes provide new chances to act on those interests. The trouble with studying opportunity is that it is hard to reconstruct the opportunities realistically available to the group at the time. Knowledge of later outcomes makes it too easy to second-guess a group’s action, or inaction. We can minimize that disadvantage by looking only at contemporary collective action or by concentrating on situations in which the opportunities are rigorously defined and strictly limited. But then we lose our ability to follow large-scale changes, in their real complexity, over considerable periods of time. (Tilly 1978: 7)
