Dilemas da ac?o coletiva: um olhar sociologico para as tens?es da experiencia

The collective action study field, especially, during the decades of 1970 and 1980, was marked by intense disputes between, at the one hand, approaches that emphasized the instrumental action of social movements aiming the scarce resources controlled by the State and, at the other, approaches that emphasized the ideological action of these actors aiming the creation of new cultural perceptions that could promote their autonomy in relation to the requests of the market and of the tradition. Since this period, synthetic efforts that aim to connect both of these collective action dimensions can be observed. These new perspectives can be characterized by the deconstruction of dichotomies and by the affirmation that different rationalities and motivations are always present in social action, highlighting that interactions between State and social movements do not imply, necessarily, in an autonomy loss for contentious collective actors. In this article, it is theoretically postulated that, if this synthetic project enables a withdrawal from normative assumptions about what is politics, it is necessary that the designed conceptual tools make possible the comprehension that this is a question that is, in a daily basis, put in dispute among contentious collective actors. It is proposed that the theoretical framework developed by the sociologist Franois Dubet provides important reflections for the construction of an appropriate model for this task. Through these reflections, it is proposed a displacement of the sociological approach for collective action, abandoning the task of theoretical resolution of dilemmas that are, essentially, empirical, towards a comprehensive stance about how these tensions are solved by actors that are actually involved in contentious collective actions.