Articulating responses to society’s most pressing problems requires collective action. Yet, recent studies have found that collective action increasingly produces detached responses and reinforces vicious dynamics. How and when does collective action become (non)generative? To answer this question, we unpack the processes of collective action through a Habermasian lens that puts communication front and center. With this approach we can unpack how collective action unfolds over time, getting impacted and impacting the polarized context. Our argument renders three idealized paths through which collective action unfolds: the extremist, the multivocal, and the deliberative. Accordingly, for each of these paths we take our point of departure from a polarized context characterized by the starting disposition of collectives that varies along their interests, power, and identities. We then proceed to unpack the processes of collective action by explaining how the different aims of communication, the structures of communication, actions, and reflexivity lead to different systemic effects. We contribute to the literature on collective action in three ways: (1) by taking communication as a lens, we go back to the communicative roots of collective actions; (2) we unpack the underlying processes through which collective action unfold; and (3) we highlight the deliberative path as the normatively desirable path.
