Unlikely mobilisations: how ordinary Russian people become involved in collective action

This paper investigates the conditions under which improbable collective action happens. Traditional social-movement literature postulates, rather than problematises, the existence of communities, networks and resources available for mobilisation, and a political culture that values active citizenship. The literature mainly focuses on organised, contentious endeavours and infrequently analyses the types of mobilisation that are the object of this paper: ones that involve people without previous experience in activism and that are local, small-scale and rooted in the daily world.

Examining mobilisations of this kind in Russia, as well as other non-western countries, enriches understanding of the mobilisation process from the first stage of emergence (Alapuro & Kharkhordine, 2010; Alapuro & Lonkila, 2012; Bayat, 2013; Beinin & Vairel, 2013; Centemeri, 2015; Colin Lebedev, 2012; El Chazli, 2012; Jacobsson, 2015; Pleyers, 2010; Thompson & Tapscott, 2010). The case of Russia raises a question uncommon in classical social-movement theory: how can someone without previous experience or even knowledge of activism or contacts in existing activist groups suddenly select an activist path as a way to solve quotidian issues? An exception is Blee's (2012) study of emergent activist groups in the USA, which tackles similar problems: the difficulties of launching collective activism and the creation of a sense of commonality. However, the groups she studied seem quite different from those that are the objects of my analysis. First, there are specificities related to the general cultural and political context. At an abstract level, people in the USA seem more eager to value democracy and civic engagement than people in Russia. Second, the groups in my study are deeply rooted in specific local settings and linked to the specific problems they address. Hence, the study of emergent activism in Russia highlights divergences from those in the USA, although the processes of mobilisation may have common features. The question of emergent activism seems more puzzling in a country such as Russia, with its weak democratic tradition, semi-authoritarian political regime, limited number of activists, low level of activism, weak mobilising structures and dearth of institutions conducive to collective action. How do some people become activists in such unfavourable conditions?

To develop my argument, I reformulate my question as follows: how do ordinary people become activists in an apolitical society? While the debate on de-politicisation or ‘avoiding politics’ is international (Eliasoph, 1998), apolitical practices are strongly and deeply embedded in the everyday settings of interactions in contemporary Russia. Dominant socio-cultural attitudes in Russia include obedience, mistrust (of those not in one's own circle), conformism and state paternalism (Gudkov, 2012; Gudkov, Dubin, & Zorkaâ, 2008; Howard, 2003; Shlapentokh, 2007). Abundant statistical and quantitative evidence of the legendary Russian passiveness or submissiveness (Mamonov, 2012; Mersijanova & Korneeva, 2011; Obŝestvennaâ Palata Rossijskoj Federacii, 2014) gives rise to such research titles as ‘The Puzzle of Quiescence’ (Cook, Kozina, & Vinogradova, 2012), ‘The Anatomy of Patience’ (Ashwin, 1999) and ‘The Politics of Apoliticals’ (Erpyleva & Magun, 2015). Avoiding politics is a widespread rule of conduct, typified by the well-known folk saying: ‘Don't show yourself (Ne vysovyvajsâ’)’!

Many scholars cite historical explanations for this widespread political passivity, including a specific political culture rooted in the Soviet or tsarist autocratic past (Colton & McFaul, 2002). The empirical data in the present study also support the idea that the socio-cultural matrix is one of the factors impeding the development of grassroots activism in Russia. Mainstream Russian culture society promotes submissiveness to the status quo and hidden (informal) individual ways of dealing with problems without calling attention to oneself (Ledeneva, 2006).

Russians who are more or less active at an individual level still tend to avoid open, collective protest. I choose to call these subjects of this enquiry ‘ordinary people’. The term is a free translation of obyvateli, which refers to people who lead ‘an ordinary’ life (byt) – whom, according to Boym (1994), Russian intellectuals have long criticised as banal and vulgar, stuck in routine. The deployment of the term in this study is based on the fact that activists use it to distinguish themselves from civically-passive non-activists – and from their own past selves when they still led non-activist lives. I do not imply any value judgment or derogatory connotation, nor conceive ‘ordinary’ (obyvateli) people as a social category; this is a metaphor communally used by people to qualify others or themselves. In this text, to be an ordinary man (or woman) merely means avoiding public, collective action; it does not necessarily indicate passivity or submissiveness.

To address the question how ordinary people become activists, I analyse two contrasting cases selected on the basis of the two different spheres of everyday life they represent (home and work): the housing self-management movement of Astrakhan inhabitants (2006–2009) and the strike movement at the Ford car plant near St Petersburg (2007–2008).¹ Common features of these two cases guided their selection: their relative success in persistence over time, their achievements (improved housing conditions in one case, satisfaction of some of the strikers’ demands in the other) and their resonance (innovative practices experimented with at these two sites were disseminated to other audiences). The two sites – the home and the workplace – seemingly belong to different logics or regimes of engagement (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Thévenot, 2001): a more domestic, familiar, intimate logic versus a more industrial, market and civic logic; they therefore provide a fruitful comparison of the dynamics of mobilisation.

In both cases, mobilisation began among ordinary people reluctant to engage in collective action or join any activist organisation, residents’ committee or trade union. Before the mobilisation, future participants lived in ordinary, non-activist ways (‘A year ago, I was a normal guy,’ a housing activist said about himself). Then events pushed them to attempt an activist way of dealing with problems. How did this change happen, under what kind of conditions and circumstances, and with whom? These are the questions I address in the following sections.

The purpose of this paper is to show how, in unfavourable structural conditions, ordinary people come to engage in activism in their daily environment by trying out various solutions to problems. The ethnographic approach is the most appropriate for studying ‘ordinary people’ in their everyday settings. The most informative and important sources for this study were participant observation and informal conversations. Immersion in the field was possible due to my involvement in grassroots activism and my direct knowledge of the housing and labour legislation problems with which people at these sites struggled. I also conducted in-depth interviews with the leaders, fresh and confirmed activists, at the two selected sites, as well as short interviews with ordinary residents and workers who were not activists, and analysed secondary documents.

The analysis of the Astrakhan case focuses on one apartment building on the Sophia Perovskaya street, approximately two kilometres from Astrakhan city centre. The building was constructed in 1969 and has 98 apartments. It is now long established as a self-managing building (residents adopted self-management at the end of 2005), and I had the opportunity to examine the evolution of dynamics until 2009, when I completed field research at this site. From June 2006, when I first encountered activists from this building, to November 2009, I annually spent a period from two to four weeks in Astrakhan and stayed for part of that time in the apartment of Valentina, the head of the self-management committee. Due to this localisation and my developing friendship with Valentina, I accessed intimate knowledge of the local situation and witnessed street scenes, small daily conflicts, talks and discussions in stairwells and courtyards relevant to my work. Although I always introduced myself as a sociologist interested in housing problems, I had opportunities to talk with residents in a natural, spontaneous way.

Collection of data from the Ford car plant was facilitated by my comradeship with the trade union leader and long-time commitment to the Russian workers’ movement. The main fieldwork was carried out in February 2008, two months after the 20 November–17 December 2007 strike. I conducted semi-structured interviews with workers both participating and not participating in the strike as they left the factory and waited for the bus (N = 28). I also spent an extensive amount of time talking informally with union leaders at different levels and listening to their stories of the strike. Unfortunately, I could not participate in the strike itself but instead joined solidarity rallies and other activist events (such as working meetings, seminars and festivities) outside the plant. Finally, I had regular informal conversations with trade union activists before, during and after the strike, as I took part in many Russian trade union conferences and meetings in St Petersburg, Moscow and other places.

How was it possible to access the everyday worlds of ordinary people reluctant to talk to unknown researchers? How did I acquire an intimate knowledge of what it means to become an activist?

Before I settled in Russia and started a family there, I came from France in the 1990s to do my doctoral fieldwork (research on mobilisation in Russian factories), and to work with a team of researchers studying ‘Russians from below’ (Berelowitch & Wieviorka, 1996). At that time, I was a foreigner and an outsider, observing an odd world of impoverished, dispossessed workers who submissively went to work even though they had not been paid for months. They mostly described themselves as ‘unneeded people’, ‘cattle’ and ‘slaves’. Shocking to me too were newspapers and TV programmes depicting workers and other unsuccessful people at the bottom of society as obstacles on the glorious path towards ‘market democracy’, unwilling to adapt to the new era and protesting too much, instead of working hard and supporting the professionals of the ‘market democracy’. These discourses and their contradictions with the reality I observed aroused my indignation, and I found it impossible to conduct field research from the position of a distant scholar without becoming further involved.

Thus, I became an activist, devoting my efforts to helping new grassroots initiatives acquire information, help and knowledge. The public hub of these efforts was the website IKD.ru maintained by a team of young activists and scholars who founded the Institute of Collective Action in 2004. Through my work with the IKD, I enlarged my network of acquaintances among activists and became more involved in their day-to-day activities. From 1994 to 2011, I travelled to many regions across the country for my scholarly research and activities as an activist. During those years, I collected a large body of empirical material, including case studies, field notes, interviews, life histories and notes on informal conversations. Some results are published in two books I edited and co-edited, respectively, which contain analyses of dozens of local grassroots initiatives in many fields and Russian regions, as well as cases of nation and citywide social movements (Kleman, 2013; Kleman, Miryasova, & Demidov, 2010).

How does one evaluate the relevance of such a background to conducting research on social mobilisation? On the whole, the heuristic benefits outweigh the disadvantages. The collection of the material was possible because of the trusting relationships I developed during my involvement with activists across the country. Participant observation, including taking part in collective actions, conversations, gossiping and drinking, gave me a unique understanding of the ordinary life and experiences of the people studied. However, such an involved position raises the question of objectivity. I do not assert that I succeeded in keeping an absolutely neutral position while conducting research, but I attempted to maintain a distance from wishful thinking, using rigorous academic methods to analyse the material collected. I constantly moved back and forth between the positions of research observer, informed researcher and participant observer. This multiplicity of roles helped me to balance the analysis.

Traditional structural models of mobilisation appear to offer unsatisfactory explanations for all I observed, since the structural (political, economic and cultural) conditions in present-day Russia tend to constrain potential collective action. More contingent socio-cultural dynamics at the level of the everyday lives of ordinary people are needed to explain mobilisation, especially the first steps towards collective action which take place in their immediate environments and in close connection to their quotidian concerns.

In my field research, I found that becoming an activist consists first and foremost of becoming familiar with activist ways of acting, feeling and thinking. Tools useful for analysing this experience can be found in French pragmatic sociology (for a presentation in English, see Blokker, 2011). This school of thought studies people's critical capacity in situations of dispute (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) and their engagement with the world and each other on various levels, from familiar involvement to public commitment, as they cope with testing moments (Thévenot, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2014). The pragmatic approach, especially Thévenot's sociology of ‘regimes of engagement’, has been employed in much research on grassroots movements in contemporary Russia (e.g. Alapuro, 2011; Gladarev, 2011; Gladarev & Lonkila, 2013; Kleman et al., 2010; Koveneva, 2011; Lonkila, 2011; Tykanova, 2012; Zhuravlev, Savelyeva, & Erpyleva, 2014). The common feature of all these studies is the importance given to familiar or close attachments in the activist settings in question. Thévenot (2001, 2014, 2015) has noted that his conceptualisation of the role of the ‘regime of familiarity’ in everyday life was aided by its exceptional extension in the Russian field. Thévenot's ‘regime of familiarity’ describes a localised mode of co-ordinating human beings and material objects that is limited to familiar and close surroundings. ‘Regimes of engagement’ are valued ways of dealing with other people and things that enable agency through various modes of co-ordination with oneself, others and the material world. Regimes differ in the scope of this valued engagement, from small- to large-scale co-ordination with others.

In line with the field studies mentioned above, the case studies I present in this article demonstrate the importance of familiar engagement to understanding the logics of grassroots activism. Rather than studying NGOs or established activist groups, then, I concentrate on the dynamics of individual involvement in processes of group-making and mobilisation. In this paper, the regime of familiarity is not only a key feature of activist settings and practices but also a main dimension of the emergence of mobilisation, in combination with other logics or regimes of engagement.

The interactionist approach, especially Goffman's frame analysis on which this article builds, is also fruitful for understanding the Russian context. Goffman (1974, pp. 10–11) defines a frame as an intuitive understanding of a situation ‘built up in accordance with principles of organisation that govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them’. Frame analysis provides instruments to consider the improbable process through which ordinary people without previous activist experience or ties with activists come to act as activists in certain circumstances and situations. Goffman (1974) explains that people involved in ordinary situations and interactions perceive them as structured by a clear, shared frame, defining but also socially and culturally constrained. In fact, therefore, transformation of the usual frames of experience in everyday life settings is normally highly improbable. Infrequently, though, in some circumstances and under specific conditions embedded in daily life, practices and interactions, changes or breaks in frames of interaction or in perceptions on and involvement in situations can occur, opening paths to non-routine, unusual or unfamiliar experiences. These moments arise amid trouble, doubt and confusion about what is occurring in face-to-face interaction. People take for granted the usual definition of routine situations (termed a ‘basic’ or ‘primary’ frame) and have implicit knowledge of how they should behave there. However, basic frames are subject to transformation through ‘(re) keying’; in other words, when a ‘set of conventions, … a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by participants to be something quite else’ (Goffman, 1974, pp. 43–44). I call frame transformations ‘reframing’ processes and understand them as small-scale changes in ways of feeling, thinking and acting in certain situations and interactions. These changes can last only while the idiosyncratic situation or interaction setting endures, and they are situational or transient. Other changes may persist longer through repetition of the same kinds of interactions, acts or situations, and they may give rise to more routinised changes over time. Goffman does not address the question of diachronic transformation. However, he provides useful tools for analysing diachronic processes of transformation, including the process of activism, which are neither conscious nor cognitive but unfold through the interactions, discussions and concrete experiences of everyday life.

If Goffman pays little attention to social mobilisation as a frame transformation, Tilly (1997, 1998), in his later writings, uses the interactional perspective to study processes enabling participation in contentious politics. He sees agency as appearing during interactions when the common understanding of a situation becomes problematic, permitting improvisation and breaks in routine. Although interactions take place within a frame of shared knowledge and existing scripts and narratives, a ‘social interaction wreaks its effect through script-adopting improvisation within limits set by existing social network and shared understandings’ (Tilly, 1997, p. 6). When agency appears during the process of improvisation, involvement in contentious politics becomes possible.

The third main theoretical framework for this paper is cultural sociology, ‘that form of sociology that concerns itself with the shaping or constitutive impact of cultural formations and discursive practices upon other aspects of social life’ (Silber, 2003, p. 442). Frame theory, Tilly's sociology, and pragmatic sociology are all concerned with the cultural dimension of social life. Goffman (1974) constantly stresses that framing processes are dependent on the national culture and social belonging of the population studied (in his case, the American middle class of the sixties and seventies). Tilly (1986) conducted well-known historical, cross-cultural comparative studies and developed the concept of ‘repertoire of collective action’, referring to the set of means available to a group to make claims within a culturally sanctioned and empirically limited set of options. In collaboration with colleagues from different countries, Thévenot (2014, 2015; Lamont & Thévenot, 2000) conducted comparative studies based on which he developed the concept of ‘cultural repertoires of evaluation’, common ‘schemas’ or ‘grammars’ that shape the process of community-building.

Before turning to the case studies, I must emphasise that I focus on the local, the close-to-home or the practical dimension because it is at this level that ordinary people can become involved in politicisation processes. Therefore, as in other studies, this paper's theoretical and methodological framework consists of an ethnographic approach anchored in pragmatic sociology and a focus on practices and culture in local and ordinary settings (Eliasoph, 1996; Luhtakallio, 2012).

To account for the process of residents’ mobilisation, we must first consider the general state of the housing sphere in Russia and Astrakhan in particular. At the federal level, the implementation of the new housing code on 1 March 2005 initiated changes. The main goals of the new housing policy were to eliminate the state's responsibility for the condition of apartment buildings, to transfer the cost of their upkeep and repair to residents and to direct the operating profits to private management companies. Although the new housing code allows the apartment -owners the opportunity to organise themselves in condominiums or self-management committees,² private companies³ manage the vast majority of apartment buildings, due to the cumulative effects of inertia, bureaucratic and economic pressure, lack of information and fear of change and responsibility. This context, particularly the conflict with local authorities in order to achieve self-management, accounts for the description of management organisations as activist groups (see also Vihavainen, 2009).

Some specific conditions in the case of Astrakhan, a town in southern European Russia at the upper end of the Volga River delta near the Caspian Sea, warrant mentioning. Until the recent reform, the housing sphere was characterised by an advanced degree of decay in most buildings and neglect by the municipal management services (ŽEK in Russian) responsible for maintenance, leading to a high level of discontent and desire for change. This situation gave rise to strong incentives to choose another form of management: widespread grievances against the dilapidated housing stock and the ineffective operation of state-owned management companies undergoing privatisation. However, there were also strong incentives not to do so. Local authorities were perceived as controlling not only politics but also the economy and therefore as reluctant to allow the development of housing self-management. These authorities could make life unbearable for rebellious residents, all the more so as the majority of residents had not even heard of the housing reform at the time and remained passive.

Why then did a few residents begin to make efforts to do more than simply wait and see? Most residents preferred to wait for others to take the initiative or for state authorities to take care of the buildings. Who were those who took the initiative? What did they do, with whom and for which goals?

In the case of the apartment building on Ulitsa Sophia Perovskaya, Valentina initiated the movement towards self-management. Since early childhood, she has lived in the three-bedroom flat that the Soviet government allocated to her parents. Recently retired, she had a long career in naval and mechanical construction. In retirement, she continues to lead an active social life. She manages her son and daughter-in-law's hair salon, reads avidly, follows the news and regularly attends her local church. Nevertheless, before the struggle for the right to manage the building, she had not participated in any form of activism.

Valentina became active in the housing issue because of the confluence of three circumstances: she retired and had more time; she intended to renovate her apartment and became concerned about the condition of the building (especially the leaking roof); and she heard about the new housing code on television, as well as learning about the possibility of self-management through an article in the leaflet Žitel signed by Oleg Shein, a member of Parliament she trusted highly. Valentina gathered information about direct management, talked to people around her about the topic, looked for others with experience in the field and met and took advice from Shein. She also talked with neighbours in the stairwells, courtyards and nearby kiosks and shops, sharing her concern about the condition of their building and the risk that it could pass into the hands of an exploitative private management company, arguing that they must act to avoid this danger. Through these conversations, Valentina became convinced that acting in this situation was worthwhile and communicated her disquiet and thoughts to others who shared her feelings. She and a few concerned neighbours went from door to door to discuss the new housing code and the necessity for residents to make a choice. After several weeks of preparatory work, they organised a formal vote by all residents, who chose direct management and elected Valentina as the official representative (upolnomočennyj) of the self-managed building.

She thus became more deeply involved in the process of management, which led to increasing participation in neighbourhood relationships. She became a specialist in technical housing problems, as well as in her neighbours’ psychological and social problems. As the process of self-management advanced and some results became visible, residents of nearby buildings sought information and advice from Valentina. These activities, together with close relationships with other activists and emotional attachment with new people, drew her into further activism. In 2007, she founded the Astrakhan Union of Residents for activists of self-managing houses to support each other, promote the idea of self-management and defend residents’ rights to govern their buildings and combine against repeated attempts by local and federal authorities to thwart them.

Valentina has succeeded in encouraging others to join her and mobilise due to several circumstances. She is deeply rooted in the neighbourhood and is familiar to her neighbours. She enjoys talking with people and has the skills to communicate her conviction that action needs to be taken. She is also unafraid to shake up others’ routine ways of thinking. Many times, I have heard her convince her neighbours in terms such as these:

Thus residents of the apartment building at Ulitsa Sophia Perovskaya began to share information, opinions and emotions about their homes and housing reform in informal, everyday conversations in stairwells, courtyards, kiosks and shops. Information disseminated in the media was scarce and neutral or technical, stressing only that the government had implemented a reform of the management system of apartment buildings. In contrast, information spread by word of mouth was emotionally charged, and rumours circulated about the threat of the takeover of apartment buildings by greedy and unscrupulous management firms. Information communicated in such a way impressed and worried the people living in the building. Using Thévenot's categories (2007, p. 416), we can see this personal and emotional ‘information format’ as well-suited for sense-making in everyday settings.

Consequently, when Valentina called for a general information meeting about the reform in December 2005, placing posters at the building's entrances, half of the residents attended. They shared their concerns about the building's future and collectively formulated the main threat: the decay of the building caused by the management firm's dereliction of its responsibilities. They agreed that something had to be done and chose to manage on their own without an intermediary, although doing so was perceived as risky, untested and troublesome. They decided that Valentina should take on the burden of management: the ‘cards [are] in your hands’, a man who lived in the next stairwell from her told her at the meeting, ‘since you have already begun’. Valentina argued that she could not do everything alone, so she asked for other residents to help her. Not without difficulty and hesitation, six volunteers were found and elected to the house committee (all women, one for each stairwell).

Then began preparation for voting in order to officialise people's choice of self-management. Volunteers coached by Valentina prepared all the necessary documents and official letters for the apartment owners. They went door to door in the building to meet and speak with residents and collect their grievances and proposals. Volunteers found that the residents included an electrician, a heating engineer and an accountant, and persuaded them to work for the management committee for modest fees. After the formal vote in January 2006, Valentina and her team still had to struggle for the recognition of the residents’ choice by the municipality. For six months, Valentina went to the city hall almost twice a week, talking with various officials, arguing, pressing and pleading. After at last obtaining official recognition, the self-management committee kept fighting to secure new, conventional commercial relationships with gas, water and heating companies and to get state aid for roof repairs.

Last but not least, Valentina and the others started the heavy work of rehabilitating their building, plastering and painting stairwells and entrances, cleaning and drying the basement, changing pipes and risers and testing water pressure. Other residents joined in the restoration work: some gave physical help, and others shared advice and contacts with professionals and businesses. The main burden fell to members of the house committee, especially Valentina, but the first visible results pushed others to aid them. When I conducted a poll of residents in May 2007, all the interviewees said they found the new management form satisfactory. Some were more enthusiastic, and others more critical, but none expressed any desire to stop the experiment.

A key moment in the rooting of the experience was the first subbotnik, a volunteer workday in the Soviet tradition. Afterwards, a babushka exclaimed, ‘It was the first time in a long time that I saw so many people in the courtyard. It was as if I had woken up after a 20-year-long hibernation!’ Such experiences hint at an unfolding process of making social ties and building a solidary community.

Through the process of restoring the house and overcoming other obstacles, many residents became acquainted and talked with each other, and some changed their view of the neighbourhood. A statement from a woman on the management committee illustrates the process of forming the collective: ‘Before that, our relationships were no more than “hi-bye” relationships, whereas now, we are like a big family.’

How did Valentina become an activist? Analysing the development of individual involvement in collective action as a reframing process helps us to understand the way that pathfinders or pioneers initiate collective action. Drawing on Goffman's (1974) frame theory, I view the reframing process as occurring in practices and throughout daily interactions in concrete situations. Transformation is neither purely psychological nor necessarily conscious, but is embedded in the practical experience of a specific person or people, which includes routines and structural constraints. The process itself is not strictly individual but involves encounters, conversations, shared emotions and other interactions.

Valentina's case is characterised by the deterioration of her apartment building and the inefficiency and high cost of the management company's services. For a long time, she did paid no particular attention to the situation and regarded it as normal and common to everyone. What then prompted her to transform her view? Significant moments in her life included her retirement and plans to renovate her flat. Striking events included reading a leaflet and hearing news about housing reform. Growing concern about the situation allowed her to perceive a threat in this reform and an opportunity to act upon it. Then, favourable conditions provided incentives for her to act understanding and support from close relatives, encounters with like-minded people and emotionally laden conversations.

In the process of experiencing activist practices with volunteers who agreed to help her, she became what I term ‘a learner activist’ involved in situational frame transformation. In situations linked to housing management and through interactions with people from whom she gained a sense of confidence, she developed a feeling of the feasibility of another way – an activist way – of dealing with the building's maintenance. Learner activists’ beliefs about what should and should not be done, what can and cannot be accomplished, are reshaped and extended. Their personal relationships are widened, and their scope of action increased. However, they retain doubts about the validity of the new path they have taken. In other words, their ordinary frames of experience (in a specific situation) are fractured, but their activist frames have not yet been consolidated. Although Valentina had already gained self-confidence in June 2006, half a year after the launching of the initiative, at the time when I first met her, she still confessed to having doubts whether she could ‘make it’. Likewise, people in other initiative groups just beginning to form at the time of our first encounter expressed strong doubts and anxiety: ‘We were really scared before the first building assembly. Were the residents going to come? How were they going to react? I did not get a minute of sleep that night’ (a 40-year-old housewife from a nearby building); ‘We have so much work to do. We have to do up the entire building, and the state isn't helping us at all. I ask myself sometimes if we will be able to get it done’ (a retired woman who was helping with the preparation of the first meeting of her apartment building).

Doubts arise from the unusual character and risky nature of new practices and from the obstacles that new activists face when they start to act counter to the usual flow of things. Obstacles are posed not only by external actors – the federal government, town hall and newly privatised communal services – but also internal actors, such as neighbours who oppose self-management. In this context, the Russian federal government intervenes through the legislative framework. Activists heavily criticise legislation on housing management as contradictory. A man at the head of a self-management committee said at a conference of the Astrakhan Union of Residents in September 2008 about the legislation: ‘It concedes with one hand and takes away with the other’, after which he was loudly applauded. The legislation validates government malpractices denounced in similar terms by most residents; the above-mentioned retired woman said: ‘For years, we have been paying communal companies for the maintenance of the building, yet it hasn't been done up once in the last 30 years! Now the state tells us that we have to take on the renovation costs!’

National and local authorities in fact acted to prevent residents from organising self-management and to maintain their own direct or indirect control over the management of the housing sphere. However, in cases like Valentina's, these very obstacles could, paradoxically, encourage mobilisation by fostering indignation, giving rise to suspicions about the government's true intentions and undermining illusions about a paternalist state. In other words, these obstacles could contribute to the drawing of social boundaries between, on the one hand, residents defending their apartment building and, on the other, state representatives seeking to protect their individual interests: ‘us versus them’. As a volunteer in Valentina's house said in an interview, ‘The misfortune of our people is that they expect that someone is going to do the job for them. We have decided to wait for no-one.’

Endogenous obstacles are more difficult to overcome. In the majority of cases I have studied, some residents opposed self-management for various reasons (such as doubts about the activists’ honesty, fear of changing routines or of leaving government care). Reluctant residents might spread rumours discrediting the initiators of direct management, provoke scandals or send complaints to the town hall. I even saw acts of physical sabotage. Internal opposition, especially when consolidated and supported by local authorities, can impede collective mobilisation. In Valentina's house, the opponents of self-management were isolated and did not wield great influence, which suggests that the reframing process was advanced and rooted in the residents’ community.

However, some tensions remained, which demonstrate how difficult the process of sustaining an activist group and, particularly, creating trusting relations among neighbours is. The following extract from my field notes illustrates the precariousness and fragility of communality and collective commitment towards self-management, even one and a half years after the initiative's launch:

All the residents of the Sophia Perovskaya building met on the evening of 7 May 2008. With the other members of the house committee (the accountant and the heads of the six stairwells), Valentina had spent a long time preparing for the meeting to make sure the bookkeeping was neat and the accounting impeccable. As the evening approached (6 o’clock), approximately 50 people assembled in the courtyard. They conversed in small groups at first and then gathered around Valentina as she started her annual report on the group's past and future projects (the meeting is about re-electing the head of the management committee). The representatives of the control commission then took the floor to indicate that they had discovered no irregularities in the bookkeeping or any other documents. This central question of money stimulated the most questions and reactions. Some asked for more details on the nature of expenses; others questioned the payment discipline of certain residents (which is high in this building in self-management; the free-riders are few). A woman of sloppy appearance (all the other women were neatly dressed) and visibly tipsy (which became obvious afterwards) interrupted the discussion by yelling that ‘She (Valentina) can talk all she wants, she's still lining her pockets!’ A few people made ironic comments, while others attempted to calm the woman down, but suspicion arose. Whispers turned into loud voices, and a number of attendees challenged Valentina to reveal what she earned as the head of the self-management committee and her funding sources for the renovation of her own flat.

Valentina took offence and remained silent. The accountant started reiterating the balance sheet (‘Every kopek is accounted for. The money collected by the stairwell heads, what this money is used for, everything is written down; you can check for yourselves’) and reminding everyone that ‘Valentina does not get paid to take care of the building; she volunteered to do so.’ Paradoxically, many were surprised (even though the subgroups of the building's residents vote for all the positions): ‘What do you mean, she isn't paid? She should at least be compensated for her work!’ Valentina, who had been mute until this time, visibly offended by the lack of trust of some members of the meeting, took the stand, revived by the last intervention, and stated, ‘The costs I incur when taking care of the house are covered –phone calls, transport, etc. – and all of this is included in the books. But I do not want to be paid yet, not before this building is back in shape. I do not want people to suspect me of taking on this role for the money.’ Then the retorts flew on unabated, but this time they were in her favour: ‘Accept at least a symbolic salary!’ Finally, most of the assembly took Valentina's side, the tone of the comments changed and gratitude and assertions of trust filled the air once more. Valentina stood up straight, and the meeting resumed. Throughout, the tipsy woman, who had not calmed down, continued to make scathing remarks to members of the committee and Valentina in particular. However, people rebuffed her and asked her to keep quiet and to stop heckling. A man of distinguished appearance proposed, in order to avoid any future misunderstandings, posting the accounting books every month in the hallway of every stairwell. Everyone agreed, and Valentina, after having clarified that the accounts are in any case always available for consultation, promised to put them up. The problem was solved, the tipsy woman was taken away by two policemen, probably alerted by a member of the association or one of the neighbours, and the discussion began tackling other themes, such as the preparation of the building for winter.

Again and again, trust and commitment to collective direct management need to be reasserted, and not only through words; visible acts and documents are required. Again and again, the leaders or the most active people are pushed to the limit because of trust withdrawal and loss of confidence in what they are doing.

Still, there is a chance for the reframing process to unfold more sustainably, which forms the stage of institutionalisation, the embedding or routinisation of an activist initiative, characterised by increased resilience and situations in which activist options can appear relevant to the people involved and the residents sharing an activist frame. Drawing on comparisons with other cases of other apartment buildings where mobilisation for self-management was less institutionalised or embedded, I identify the conditions of institutionalisation, explained as follows.

Collective mobilisation depends on the process of community-building, which involves the redefinition of group bonds. Resident activists develop a sense of belonging to a community of neighbours committed to self-management. The following extracts illustrate how some residents viewed the changes in their social environment: ‘As we started all this, we realised that some of our neighbours are fantastic people, and often, they weren't those we would have guessed.’ ‘Now all the neighbours help each other.’ ‘The building today is one big family.’ ‘I feel good in my apartment block now. I feel at home.’

Collective action also depends on the production of emotions, which play a key role in opening windows to other possible ways of feeling, thinking and acting. Emotions may be aroused when people face a threat and are personally concerned by it. These feelings are further developed through emotional conversations with people who share similar sentiments. Then, in the face of obstacles or contemptuous opponents, they may be transformed into moral feelings of indignation (at injustice), anger (at presumptuous power) or pride (at having stood up for one's views or against resistance). Emotions also develop from new attachments to people or places with which one becomes more familiar. Emotions are strengthened in the process of acting together, experiencing and practising new things with significant others. For instance, when residents participated in collective work such as cleaning, painting, planting or plastering to physically improve their building, they were not only working together. They were helping each other, talking to each other, sharing joy and pain, becoming more familiar with each other and acquiring the sense that the situation was developing and could be changed, especially when the results were visible or tangible (as when they could see a beautiful entrance to the building, a new front door, or flowers and bushes in the courtyard). Overall, emotions can convince people that they are moving in the right direction and provide them with a sense of confidence and agency.

Collective mobilisation also unfolds through the collective appropriation of common places. In the case of apartment buildings, common spaces are physical spaces in and around the building that are intended to be places of common use (such as basements, attics, mechanical hallways, stairwells and courtyards), as mentioned in the housing code. However, residents were not accustomed to truly seeing these places as common. Interviewees often recalled the motto of Soviet life (‘common means no one's’) and complained about the lack of collective concern for these places. Indeed, most residents restricted the sphere of personal care to their own apartments. How could the sphere of caring be extended? Housing activists often described the process as a progressive enlargement of the sphere of personal attachment to places: first, people take care of their own apartments, then of places for common use, then the whole housing area and eventually (but not frequently) the whole district or city. Ethnographic studies that I have conducted show that personal attachments to common places develop through practices, encounters, conversations and the common work of care, so these places become ‘ours’, which means ‘mine, too’. Key to this might be a bunch of flowers put in the building entrance. It might be a requalification of one's relationship to what is ‘my home’, which becomes ‘the whole building’, ‘our common home’ or ‘the neighbourhood’. We see here an expression of the ‘personal affinities to common places’ that Thévenot (2014, pp. 18–25, 2015) associates with the regime of engagement in familiarity. In this case, the construction of personal attachment to common places and the making of a commonality (the community of neighbours committed to self-management) were intertwined processes. There was no personal attachment, say, to the courtyard before some residents began to invest personally and emotionally in it as a common place.

Under what conditions can shared personal affinities to common places become a basis for civic mobilisation, beyond familiar engagement? Residents were pushed towards activism and public debate by the obstacles they faced. Although the law afforded them the right to exercise collective ownership over the building's common places, implementation of this right was far from evident on a practical level. In Valentina's house, the cellar was flooded and covered in mud and debris. In a nearby house, a firm had already privatised a hall which officially belonged collectively to the residents. Thus, in practice, exercising the right of collective ownership had to involve collective action to recover the use of common places.

This necessity was related to another aspect of the dynamics of collective mobilisation: that against the opponents of the initiative concerned. Those already engaged in the movement for self-management reacted to obstacles with greater determination. The following quotations exemplify this tendency: ‘They keep on putting spokes in our wheels, but we will fight till the end!’ ‘We are engaged in positional warfare with the municipality. We have our own war council, and we will force them to give in!’ ‘Giving up now that we are under threat is out of the question. The process has been launched. I won't be intimidated!’

Another dynamic underlying grassroots mobilisation is the production of a sense of collective empowerment fuelled by emotions and shared experience. In my view, collective empowerment refers to the collective, shared feeling that one has experienced the ability to act, influence one's circumstances and change at least one's immediate surroundings. A 40-year-old woman who turned from a quiet housewife to the leader of another self-management committee near Valentina's house expressed this sense of competency and power in typical terms: ‘I can't believe we have done this, and we did it all by ourselves without anyone's help!’

At midnight on 20 November 2007, the assembly line stopped as 1500 of the 2200 workers at Ford–Vsevolozhsk, a district of Saint Petersburg, went on strike. ‘The longest of the decade’, as mobilised workers proudly reported, the strike lasted almost a month until 17 December 2007. Despite some specificities related to the labour field, this grassroots mobilisation can sustain comparative analysis with the development of the self-management committee. But in contrast to the Astrakhan housing movement, the workers’ mobilisation benefited from a strong organisation vehicle: a new trade union organised at the end of 2005 by a team of relatively young worker activists determined, as they said in interviews, to ‘shake things up’.

To understand the extent of changes that took place at Ford, it is necessary to put them in the context of the contemporary Russian labour field. In the first decade of the twenty-first century when Vladimir Putin came to power, strikes practically disappeared from the repertoire of collective action. However, with the improvement of the economic situation and social recovery, the workers’ movement begin to revive in 2007 and 2008, with the Ford strike leading the way. In practice, relations between rank-and-file workers and the management in factories are strongly unbalanced because of the weakness of the trade union movement and widespread scepticism among workers about formal rights. The Russian trade union movement remains dominated by former Soviet official unions, renamed the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), and this collaborates with management in most cases. The alternative or free trade unions more frequently focus on the defence of labour rights and confrontation with employers, but face difficulties gaining recognition and support among workers (Ashwin & Clarke, 2003; Robertson, 2010). This situation explains the high level of distrust towards and the delegitimisation of trade unions in general.

At Ford, the initial configuration of labour relations did not differ from those traditionally dominant in Russia. In this perspective, the changes that occurred at Ford in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century acquire their proper importance. The most striking change occurred in the way in which trade unions were conceptualised. In interviews, Ford workers stated that, before the mobilisation was launched in 2005–2006, they mostly viewed trade unions as useless, alien organisations cooperating with management. At the time of the main fieldwork (February 2008), however, workers described the new trade union as exclusively their own organisation, enabling them to defend their rights. Clearly, a significant shift in the perception of the situation had occurred.

At the opening of the plant in July 2002, a small, traditional trade union affiliated with the FNPR operated, following common perceptions and practices at Russian companies. Then, in 2005, Alexei Etmanov, an ordinary union member who had begun working as a welder at the Ford plant in 2003, was accidentally invited to a seminar for Ford union activists in Brazil. ‘Of course I accepted,’ Alexei remembers. ‘Why wouldn't I go to Brazil and have fun for free?’ Ultimately, though, this trip changed his conception of the union – and his life. He found the contrast between Brazilian and Russian trade unionism startling:

Alexei returned home determined to revive the union at his plant. He began by persuading his close colleagues to change the trade union. He recalls that

In early 2007, Alexei proudly told me, ‘With my comrades, we have taught them to use the union as a weapon of struggle and to say “we” when they are talking about the union.’

Did rank-and-file workers share Alexei's perceptions? During my fieldwork, I spent an abundant amount of time standing at the plant entrance and approaching workers at random (all the interviewees appeared to be union members, except for one young man recently hired). To my inquiry about union membership, they exclaimed: ‘Of course!’ ‘It goes without saying!’ A rank-and-file member who had participated in the entire strike struck me with his description of his commitment:

What are the main components of this new attitude towards unionism? First, it is activism; workers constantly repeated that specific word: they became ‘active’ people. Second, this attitude encompasses self-organisation and self-identification with the union: ‘The trade union is all of us and every one of us in particular.’ ‘The trade union has been reinforced. We are respected now.’ ‘The development of the union depends on all of us. It doesn't depend on the 15 people of the union committee but on every single one of us.’

How did such a transformation occur? First there arose a feeling that the immediate situation was changing, then, from observations of new practices and encounters with new types of people, views of the circumstances changed, and meaning-making began to emerge. A worker stated, ‘It's a bit like when someone wakes you up from a deep sleep. You don't understand immediately what's going on around you, but you see only that something is happening. However, you can't really make sense of it.’

Communication and conversations played a crucial role in promoting change. Importantly, not only conversations between leaders and rank-and-file union members but also horizontal communication among colleagues and discussions in small groups took place. A worker involved in the revival of the union gave an elaborate account of the early mobilisation:

Real results helped workers believe in ‘real prospects’. Already, in 2006, the renewed trade union committee had launched a work-to-rule strike, which won a 14% wage increase, the abolition of regular overtime and a new bonus system. A one-day strike in February 2007 resulted in an agreement to prevent outsourcing work and provided the workers with some social improvements. The result of the November–December 2007 strike was a new collective agreement and other improvements, including pay raises ranging from 16% to 21%.

Union leaders played key roles in the reframing process, especially Alexei, who exemplifies empowering leaders. A simple welder with a direct manner and a familiar, informal way of speaking, he is recognised by the workers as ‘our guy’. Due to this recognition and to his charisma (embodied in a strong temperament, loud voice, vivid gesticulations and emotional performance), he convinced the workers that all of them are the trade union and that together, they are powerful. He recalled that this success took much time and effort: ‘I have repeated all the time that the union isn't Etmanov or anyone for that matter. The union is all of you; without all of you, we are nothing!’

In addition to the reframing process, other dynamics, intertwined with reappraisal of the situation, contributed to worker mobilisation and made such a long strike possible. Emotions fuelled mobilisation, especially at the beginning of the strike. Almost every day, hundreds of workers held meetings in front of the factory, trying to discourage strike-breakers from going to work. In an atmosphere of enthusiasm, the strikers danced, sang and played football. The canteen employees distributed tea and sandwiches. The tactical creativity of the trade union committee sustained the ‘high emotional energy’ (‘a feeling of confidence and enthusiasm for social interaction’ (Collins, 1990, p. 32)) aroused by these collective protests and celebrations. Interviewees described their feelings at that time: indignation at management contempt for rank-and-file workers, pride at standing up for their rights and the exaltation and enthusiasm of being among so many people participating in the strike action. From these emotions, people got a sense of solidarity and collective empowerment. They felt able together to force management to respect workers and their organisations: ‘All of us together, we can do it.’ ‘The trade union became a force that had to be dealt with’.

The appropriation of common places also played a role in mobilisation. These included physical spaces in the workplace and the words and ideas linked to the workers’ movement. Union activists achieved a visible presence on the shop floor by putting up posters throughout the factory and distributing leaflets. During the strike, they fought for access to the factory and the surrounding territory when management reacted by prohibiting striking workers from entering it. Symbolic terms, such as ‘working class’, ‘trade union’ and ‘strike’, also became common places. Workers invested these words with new meanings unrelated to Soviet or post-Soviet definitions but, instead, based on the pride involved in participating in the workers’ movement.

Through involvement in trade union activities and talks with activists, workers acquired a sense of competence as they gained information and greater awareness of their rights. These cognitive changes, in turn, motivated them to become more involved in union activism. Many workers stressed this point in interviews: ‘I simply wanted to know my rights, so I joined the union.’

Lastly, workers mainly learned labour activism through experiencing it in practice. Even performing small tasks, such as reading and discussing a pamphlet with colleagues, delivering leaflets or attending a seminar or a meeting, promoted a sense of labour activism. Sometimes, too, familiarisation with activist practices arose from observing respected colleagues who acted as labour activists.

Relational and organisational dynamics mattered, especially in the case of the workers’ movement at Ford. Workers interviewed clearly suggested the formation of collective agency. They commonly used the pronoun ‘we’ (‘we, the workers … ’), frequently in opposition to ‘them’, the managers: ‘They want us to believe that we are all in the same team, but we know very well that each of them is thinking about his wallet and that there is a struggle.’

But who are ‘we’ really? How did the workers talk about themselves? One sentence illustrates the thoughts expressed in most interviews: ‘We [are] the workers who stand together and form a tightly knit collective.’ Not all workers are part of the collective. Interviewees focused on several necessary qualities (all quotations are from interviews):

• Workers must be ‘active’.

• They have to demonstrate ‘solidarity’.

• They must possess a sense of ‘dignity’, be able to defend their dignity and earn respect, first of all for their ‘professionalism’ and labour skills.

• They should be ‘adults’ (people who think and decide for themselves), ‘educated’ (people who know their rights) and ‘self-sufficient’ (independent of the management).

The boundaries of this community are quite inclusive: the workers’ collectivity includes not only those who are trade union members but also non-members, as long as they took part in the strike. Even non-strikers and non-members are worthy of respect if they had ‘good reasons’ or ‘objective’ ones to act as they did (active workers specifically mentioned single mothers and temporary workers). For example, a union activist told me that he appreciates discussions with non-union members ‘who have their opinion and can defend it’. Some workers, however, are excluded from the active worker community: those who are ‘passive’, ‘servile’ or ‘loyal’ (‘ass lickers’), who have no opinion or who think in exclusively materialistic or egoistical terms (‘those who don't look beyond their wallet’).

Lastly, it is worth stressing that, even if making group bonds and drawing group boundaries were mainly the products of repeated interaction, leaders played important roles in these processes. The most committed worker activists enlarged the scope of their aims, which became more general. They sought to defend not only the particular interests of Ford workers but the broader interests of the workers’ movement: ‘Establishing contacts with workers from other companies is indispensable because one trade union is one trade union, but the whole workers’ movement is something entirely different. One should not exist without the other.’ ‘It's important to express solidarity with all those who are trying to change something.’ The mobilisation process at Ford achieved a more general meaning and scope: the civic worth of and solidarity with strangers who share the same conditions and attitudes. Indeed, the Ford strike inspired workers at other sites to transform their own trade unions and to mobilise.

In this concluding section, I synthesise and conceptualise the findings from these two case studies regarding the main question of how ordinary people become involved in collective action. I draw on general dynamic and processual explanatory models from social-movement scholarship (McAdam, 2003; McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001) and complement them with more empirically grounded findings from an ethnographic approach anchored in pragmatic sociology. Both individual and collective processes can influence the entire development of grassroots mobilisation at all stages. They can contribute to or hinder collective action, which, regardless of success, can have impacts on the whole mobilisation process. The process might strengthen or weaken, stop or continue. At all stages, the process faces huge obstacles arising in the broader context or the world of ordinary people. Mobilisation remains highly improbable.

Mobilisation is linked to broad processes of change long considered a primary explanation for contention in social theory. Structural changes, to a certain degree, transform the conditions that shape people's lives. In these two case studies, these conditions include legislative reform, socio-economic changes and the deteriorating condition of apartment buildings or labour relations. However, by themselves, these changes did not lead to mobilisation, since most people passively suffered them, ignored them or resorted to individual coping actions.

A crucial intermediary dynamic is a break in immediate, familiar surroundings that is visible or tangible to ordinary people in everyday life. This break might be a crack in the wall or a leaky roof, increasing wage inequality or the arrogant contempt of management. These changes might be read as a threat if they affect and trouble individuals and if they resonate with individuals’ concerns in daily life. Not all people are equally affected by a threat and impelled to act to counter it. The degree of momentum depends on individuals’ biography, their subjectivity and feelings and especially events that alter the courses of their lives and can open them up to new feelings, experiences or thoughts. In this respect, Thévenot's (2001, 2007) regime of familiarity is important to understanding the mobilisation dynamics arising from testing or trying moments in one's familiar world or personal life. These circumstances, events and trying moments can lead some participants to wonder about a situation and to engage in reflection on a larger scale that opens the path to public criticism.

Doubts about the usual understanding of a situation and questions about the necessity of acting are strengthened by emotional communication and conversations, especially among people in close surroundings. Some social-movement analysts (McAdam, 2003; Mische, 2003; Tilly, 1998) have stressed the importance of talk in the mobilisation process:

Talk might strengthen or weaken a vague willingness to act, depending on who is talking to whom in what kind of conversational settings. As appears in the two case studies, the most efficient communication for mobilisation in present-day Russia is the informal, emotionally charged conversation of people belonging to the same ordinary world.

A single individual is usually reluctant to carry the whole burden of mobilising and so seeks support and help from others, which might lead to the gathering of an active group. Scholars of the politics of dissent define this phase as the process of ‘social appropriation’, which depends on the ‘challenger's capacity to appropriate sufficient organization and numbers to provide a social/organizational base’ (McAdam et al., 2001, p. 47). In our cases, the provision of a social or an organisational base for mobilisation is not necessarily an intentional strategy on the part of leaders but, rather, the result of a need and the feeling that ‘I cannot make it alone.’

In what follows, I consider the main dynamics by which mobilisation might spread from a small initial group to a larger community. These dynamics are largely activated by initiators’ actions but can also strengthen their personal commitment in turn.

Relational dynamics refer to coordination, solidarisation and acting in common to make new social ties or transform existing ties. They take shape during the very act of collectively attempting something new and unfold in the very process of emergent mobilisation. Generally, arousing mobilisation depends on the construction of a ‘we’ versus ‘them’, which Eliasoph and Lichterman (2003) analyse as group bonds and group boundaries. Group bonds are based on mutual expectations for the behaviour of group members. In both cases studied here, group members needed to be active, responsible, dignified and self-sufficient. At Ford, the notion of solidarity had more importance, and a sense of collective belonging emerged around the identity of ‘active workers’. In the Astrakhan housing movement, the notion of ‘doing this by ourselves’ was more relevant, and the emergent collective identity was that of ‘active inhabitants [žiteli] of our house [dom]’.

Group boundaries, on the other hand, are linked to what group members see as the main differences between themselves and others. In the case studies, activists drew a clear boundary between active individuals and those people who habitually only wait for external help. However, this boundary was inclusive. Group members understood that ordinary people might be passive for objective reasons and tried to enlarge the group beyond its core participants. The boundary that was exclusive was the one between ordinary residents and workers on the one side and representatives of local authorities or businesses who were opposing grassroots mobilisation on the other.

Relational dynamics fuel and are fuelled by emotions, especially affective attachments or loyalties to an emergent active community or, conversely, by distrust or anger towards its opponents. Such emotions help overcome the tendency to distrust others and withdraw into oneself. Collins (2001) theory of emotional energy generated in face-to-face situations posits that emotions, especially those that are shared and collective, are what ‘make up solidarity’ (p. 29). In both cases analysed here, the formation of social ties provided a feeling of happiness and a sense of comfort and familiarity, which strengthen social ties. Emotions play highly important roles during the phase in which mobilisation is launched, too, especially when collective action is not part of ordinary patterns of behaviour. As Jasper (2011, p. 294) notes, emotions ‘help us to understand those rare but important moments when people question or abandon routine action in favour of new ways of acting and thinking.’

Emotions have a further function: they can produce collective empowerment, at least if negative emotions (fear or anger) are balanced by positive ones (pride, pleasure, affective attachment and a sense of personal dignity), as in these two cases. Della Porta (2014, p. 63) emphasises the intertwinement of relational and emotional dynamics and the arousing of a feeling of collective empowerment, which she understands as collective agency built upon strong emotions felt during massive protest actions. Paying more attention to micro-politics, I view collective empowerment as the collectively-shared feeling of confidence in the ability to change one's immediate surroundings. Collective empowerment results not only from emotions but also from the first steps into collective action and the empowering effect of leaders’ behaviour or style.

Collective mobilisation develops in the process of effort, and of experiencing something new with others. Cleaning a backyard or discussing a leaflet with colleagues are typical examples of the dynamics of trial-and-error learning, of exploring a new and unfamiliar way to do things in familiar, everyday settings. Such new experiences can disrupt the routine social arrangements of daily life. More importantly, they sustain a process of familiarisation with what initially appears alien and strange to ordinary people in their day-to-day lives. Through the continued practice of activism and interaction with other activists who look just like everybody else, people begin to experience activism as normal.

Collective mobilisation also unfolds through the appropriation of physical or symbolical common places that would-be activists together invest and fill with new meanings or uses. The pragmatic sociology of engagement conceptualises the appropriation of common places as occurring through the development of ‘personal affinities to common places’ (Thévenot, 2014, pp. 18–25, 2015). These common places become a basis for mobilisation if individuals persist in fighting to appropriate them despite obstacles. In this case, it might be more relevant to call them ‘free spaces’, which Boyte (2011, p. 61) defines as follows: ‘Free spaces, rooted in everyday life settings, are places in which powerless people have a measure of autonomy for self-organisation and engagement with alternative ideas.’

Although mobilisation does not only happen on the mental level, cognitive dynamics sustain it. In the early stage of mobilisation, cognitive transformation is weak, and it is barely possible to speak of ‘cognitive liberation’ (McAdam, 1982, p. 51). However, cognitive changes may develop during the mobilisation process. The experience of mobilisation can give rise to feelings of competence and a sense of responsibility; it can spread information and knowledge about issues that concern individuals and create greater awareness of rights.

In accordance with resource-mobilisation theory, organisations play an important role, more in sustaining than initiating the mobilisation process. In the Ford case, the trade union was the main vehicle of mobilisation and the main instrument for the creation of solidarity. In Astrakhan, the organisational vehicle (the housing self-management committee) was weaker, which might explain why there was relatively less contention and publicity in this case.

Drawing on Goffman's theory of frame analysis, I conceptualise the process of individual involvement as a reframing process, or the infrequent process of transforming usual ways of thinking, feeling and acting in concrete situations and interactions, mostly in practice, through the repetition of interactions over time. Based on the empirical data, I identify two stages of the reframing process. In the early stage, the transformation process can lead to the emergence of what I call learner activists who experiment with new practices and have doubts about the adequacy of their activism. At this stage, they might easily give up activism if they face obstacles from either the external environment or their immediate surroundings. In the second stage, new activist practices undergo a process of institutionalisation, embedding or routinisation. Confirmed or veteran activists, especially leaders, may appear. At this stage, it becomes easier to overcome obstacles. New activist frames begin to regulate a number of practices and interactions. Activism becomes the dominant way of being for some leaders. The leader of the Ford trade union, for instance, confessed that he has become ‘addicted’ to activism.

The starting-point of the reframing process is the ordinary frame shared by people in ordinary situations. Specific events in one's personal life or in local settings can disrupt the routine of daily life. In these circumstances and under certain conditions, an individual might question the ordinary frame of interaction. The two cases studied here show the importance of the following conditions: encounters, emotional communication and conversations, the first results of small deeds and the positive or negative emotions which arise in the process of attempting to do something new. Consequently, some individuals may shift from the ordinary frame to the learner-activist frame. At this stage, initiators and fresh leaders arise and launch the mobilisation process.

In the second stage, if additional conditions (the collective dynamics of mobilisation analysed above) are fulfilled and if obstacles do not discourage learner activists, the reframing process advances, and some, especially leaders, may become confirmed or veteran activists. This process of becoming an activist is pragmatic and experiential, unfolding through practices and interactions. In a typical utterance, a new activist exclaims: ‘I could never have imagined that I’d one day be acting like this [as an activist]!’

Returning to Blee's study of activist groups in Pittsburgh, USA, (2012) and comparing it to the present findings raises three points to be addressed. The first is the necessity of studying emergent activism by using ‘process-based accounts or trajectory models’ (Blee, 2012, p. 40). There is no definite relationship of cause and effect. Activist groups are constantly forming because of changing settings for interactions, contexts, situations and problems, which give rise to different processes of meaning-making and mobilisation. Processes of activism are not only structural; they are mundane, rooted in everyday life and close interactions. Thus, in Blee's (2012) words, ‘small factors, including those of happenstance and idiosyncrasy, also can matter a great deal’ (p. 41). It seems possible to argue that Russian activist groups, because of the lack of activist norms or models in Russian society as well as the high number of novice activists without any prior experience or knowledge of activism, are more subject to fragility and fortuitous events, encounters or emotions.

That is why the ‘path-dependency’ explanation of the process of activism is not very relevant to the activist groups that I study here, which is the second point to be addressed. Blee does not mean that the choices the groups’ members make at the beginning determine their paths, but she does argue that the starting configuration constrains what a group may identify as doable and desirable in the future. At the beginning of the process, the activists in my case-study are far from even imagining the possibility of making groups; the starting configuration itself is fragile and contingent. Thus, changes in patterns of activism and individual involvement can occur easily.

This brings us to the third point, which is that intentional action seems to be less relevant in the Russian case; most people have no intention to ‘do activism’ before starting to try to improve a situation they experience as troublesome or as affecting them negatively. Unlike American activist groups, the groups in Astrakhan and at Ford began engaging in activism with pragmatic tasks, a narrow scope and timid imagination, far from the world of politics. Only later did they enlarge their scopes and get involved in more general and public-minded movements (on this evolution, see Clément, 2015). Activist groups in Russia do not always arise ‘from the bottom up’; there are also ‘top-down’ groups, like the local groups that participants in the mass movement ‘for fair elections’ (2011–2012) formed after gaining experience in political activism at the national level (Zhuravlev et al., 2014). However, bottom-up groups that are reluctant to become involved politics are far more widespread in Russia, so it is crucially important to understand their dynamics and processes of mobilisation.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Karine Clémenthttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-2710-928X