Social Action on a personal note is about trying to bring out a desired result. This desired result maybe personal to us or it may not be so personal. Nevertheless it is something we do to bridge gap between our personal understanding of a situation and explanation in relation to a situation.
We see many people in society that deeply care about people and lives. They try their best to bring about a positive light to everything around them. They fight for themselves and their society rights. They believe in fighting for a just and good society. These are all part of social action.
People form their identity and their place within society by taking action. By being part of the society, making decision and considering the relationships they have with others. Individual interactions with each other is what determines our place in the society. Social action is about coming together and try and improve community and wider society. Participating in social action also helps improving wellbeing, boosts confidence and enhances skills.
According to social action theory there are four types of social actions. First is to work out most efficient way to achieve a goal, second is action towards a goal that is desirable for its own sake, third is routine thoughts that are done without thoughts or consideration, and fourth is actions that express emotion. All these types of social actions play important part in our life and our decision making.
Social action is about people coming together to tackle certain issue. It is about inviting others to care about each other. Care about justice, equality, culture, human rights, environment and many other important issues. We as humans are social beings and indeed that means it is our duty to commit to looking after each other. It is about having a sense of duty to start small (at home), look after our selves, our family, our neighbour, our community and then our society. We need to start from a micro level and move ourselves towards a macro level of social awareness and understanding.
Pragmatically there are two ways of taking social action, one is to provide resources and money to support a cause and the other is to invest time and energy to build our community. End goal to have the right plan in place in order to provide relevant resources to empower communities to face challenges and support individuals.
We behave in the way we do because of external and internal factors. There are forces such as social structure that influence us, but our interpretation of these factors and our subjective motivation is what drives us towards certain changes. People are equipped and have the power to make their own choices. This will shape their lives and contribute to social change through their action. We therefore need to help people in an individual level to grow as well as helping them in a community level to grow. We need to remember that we are part of this group and our growth contributes to the community growth.
Our societal actions are dependant to the meaning we assign to our actions and how we interpret it. In other words our motivation and our interpretation is important factors in the process and outcome. Overall social change can happen through cumulative actions of individuals, as individuals are not passive recipients of social structures and they engage actively and interpret these forces.
At a micro level social action helps with individual empowerment, behavioural change, psychological wellbeing, social network and civic engagement. Therefore individuals become active participants in and around what impacts them and their community. This helps with boosting person confidence and wellbeing, improving people behaviour and prospective and engaging them in social network and taking active part in the society.
In a macro level social action helps with policy change, institutional change, cultural shift, social movement formation, and structural transformation. Groups of individuals taking action gradually results in policy change where social action influences change in policy or institutional change. Another impact of social action is shifting cultural norm such as social justice or gender equality. Social action can catalyse social movement by resisting or promoting an action. Lastly sustained social action can result in structural transformation in the society, which is partly effecting all points mentioned above.
Social action impacts on both individual and societal level because there are interconnected. There is social action influence in both micro and macro level of society. Therefore we need to appreciate and try to understand the complex ways in which social action shapes our lives and society. Taking social action is partly showing that we care about ourselves and our community. By taking social action we would be able to feel that we are part of a larger community and that we are contributing to society outcome. This provides us with feeling self assured that we are doing something that we value as well as something that we believe in.
In turn individuals become more self confident when they are part of the community. Also when people contribute to societal outcome that helps with their decision making and engaging with other parts of the society. We need to find what will provide us purpose, what makes us feel that we are part of a larger community. When we find this purpose, when we find our place to contribute to society, this is when we should try and impact the society by taking social action. This does not mean that we have one cause or purpose that we fight for, in everyday life we have many causes that we need to take social action towards.
Ultimately we don’t have a single purpose in life, part of our purpose maybe to look after our family, teach, innovate, help others, impact our community, or even hold government accountable. All these can be part of our purpose in life, they all contribute to who we are. We take social action towards our society, partly to impact the society and partly to impact ourselves within the society that we live in.