Rewards of activism and paradoxes of collective action

It is easy to observe that activism in a collective organization is rewarded. Rewards are an important component of activism. They help to understand investment and disinvestment in collective action. Such hypotheses are however iconoclastic and heretical. Indeed, activists are volunteers and volunteers are officially disinterested. Voluntary organizations censured specific interests of their members. They are supposed to be totally devoted to the collective aims of the organization and other concerns might endanger the authenticity of beliefs in these aims. But resistances may also be a consequence of the difficulties of social scientists to analyze flow individuals deal with and vaguely perceive their censured interests. The idea that rewards are "unconscious" is as inadequate as the cynical assumption that activists deliberately strive for them. Analogy with scotomisation (blocking out) helps to understand how rewards may be vaguely perceived and repressed at the same time. Rewards, as well as charges and costs, are not intrinsic to collective action. They are set up and experienced in the course of volunteers' careers. Importance given to rewards and charges of activism varies according to changing stages, positions and viewpoints of each activist's career. The sheer existence of rewards also depends on suitability of benefits potentially provided through activities in a collective organization on the one hand, and of expectations of its members on the other hand. Devotion to the cause of a collective action is, in most cases, a reward in itself. It gives value to activism and set it up as a source of satisfactions and incentives. But rewards of a collective action are in competition with those of the other spheres of everyday life. They may stimulate collective action as long as beliefs in its cause are strong enough to bear comparison with other appeals.