Beyond the politics of demand: Prefigurative politics and the future of collective action research

Social psychology usually approaches collective action as an outcome of cognition and affect. While this instrumental approach has made important contributions, its dominance threatens to limit the social psychological analysis of collective action. Specifically, it has obscured the uniqueness of politics of the act (e.g., direct action and emergent prefigurative politics), has limited relevance beyond liberal democracies, struggles to grasp the recursive nature of social transformation, and has favoured utopian thinking over the experience of concrete utopia and temporality. As a way out, we propose four paradigms of prefigurative politics which can guide future research on collective action. This includes acknowledging the vital role of spontaneous experimentation, the recursive nature of provisional adaptation, the breadth of constitutive emotions (such as awe, hope and joy), and the importance of considering radical imagination and temporality as inherent properties of political struggle. Understanding and supporting these paradigms promises to enrich social psychological theory, thereby heeding calls for a really social social psychology and fostering the transformative power of collective action.