This research investigates an often forgotten aspect of collective action, its imaginary dimension, by focusing on an overlooked concept: utopia. According to me, utopia is both a form of discourse and a set of particular practices. Thus, to be called utopian, a discourse has to include, first, a rejection of the existing society, and second, if not a clear conception of what another world might look like, at least the idea that another society is possible and desirable. And, to be called utopian, practices need to be an attempt to create here and now at least some of the features of this utopian discourse, in the hope of a spread in the rest of society. This definition of utopia has been inscribed in a theoretical reflection linking the concept to the other explanatory dimensions of social movements in order to see how bringing utopia in the debate can highlight some neglected aspects of collective action. In order to investigate the presence and the impact of utopia, I have decided to conduct a comparative case study within a single social movement: political consumerism. I understand political consumerism as a social movement in which a network of individual and collective actors criticize and try to differentiate themselves from traditional consumerism by politicizing the act of buying in order to search for and promote other types of consumption. Thus I have observed four groups from two countries, France and the UK: two convivia of the Slow Food organization, a group of de-growth promoters surrounding the Casseurs de Pub and an intentional community living with the principles of ecovillages called Redfield Community. Through the study of these groups, I have been able to uncover the “grammatical structure” of their utopias and, then, the content of these utopias. Once this done, I have observed the interactions between utopian discourses and utopian practices. Individually, utopias, through these interactions, end up shaping the whole life of the activists and, collectively, they have consequences for many of the choices groups make. They constrain them so that they choose means that are consistent with their ends, but they also help them move beyond some of the difficulties the groups meet. These interactions also involve an emotional work that is both directed towards the activists themselves and towards outsiders. Finally, I have looked at the dialectical relationship that exists between utopia and the involvement people have in collective action. Activists use their utopias more or less consciously to have an impact on society, convince others of the rightness of their cause and protect themselves against attacks from others. Moreover, utopia has a role in the positioning of these groups in the spaces of social movements and politics.

The independent and spontaneous mobilization of social movements during the late 1960s challenged political parties in their very fundamental function of political linkage and has often been deemed a symptom of a crisis of political parties as representative agents. For the first time, it seemed that ‘the political’ extended to other spheres of civil society beyond the traditional party channels. This thesis examines the responses of political parties to social movements in Italy and the Netherlands from the 1970s to the 1980s. Because of their closeness in terms of political identity, social movement scholars have tended to concentrate on the responses of left-wing political parties to social movements. This thesis, which also incorporates this common inquiry, also examines the responses to the social movements of the more distant center-right parties. The major questions that it attempts to answer are: did the observed political parties actually respond to the emergence of social movements? What types of responses did they engage in? What factors explain the variation in the parties’ responses? Each empirical chapter examines the individual party responses to the two most numerically significant social movements that emerged in the Italian and the Dutch national contexts. Drawing on Gamson’s typology of social movements’ success (1975) and on further elaborations of different types of social movements’ ‘impact’, the analysis classifies different party responses by dimension (party discourse and party organization) and type (direct and indirect). Empirical results reveal how, despite the fact that party identity explains variation in the degree to which parties responded to social movements, with parties on the left showing greater responsiveness as compared to center parties, the latter did not remain unaffected by the emergence of social movements. Moreover, results show how also for the case of the leftwing parties, a total adherence to the social movements’ demands did not take place. A two-fold conclusion can be drawn. On the one hand, political parties do channel social movements’ demands, therefore satisfying their function of political representation. On the other hand though, the two worlds of political parties and social movements remain separate, as the inherent constraints of representative government only allow parties to bring forward the social movements’ demands in a mediated form, distant from the movements’ original demands.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the adoption of network-centric warfare (NCW) by two military organisations – the British and the German Armed Forces – in the first decade of the 21st century. NCW stands for the belief that through the extended application of information technologies and the integration of intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, command and control systems and weapons into one single network, military organisations will be able to better collect crucial military information, thus reduce operational uncertainty and gain a decisive information advantage over their enemies, which thus would translate into superiority over the enemy on the battlefield. NCW was invented by U.S. senior military officers and Pentagon officials and was introduced into the U.S. Armed Forces as part of the U.S. military transformation during the tenure of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2006). Although NCW had been criticised from the beginning, initial military accomplishments in the Afghanistan war (2001) and the invasion in Iraq (2003) have been widely interpreted as success stories for NCW. Since 2001, a number of U.S. military allies and partners – among them the United Kingdom and Germany – have started to adopt this U.S. innovation. Yet, in a number of cases the adopted national versions of NCW diverged considerably from the original U.S. concept. This study seeks to uncover the reasons for the variation in concept adoption. Building upon an organisational institutionalist framework, I argue that, in the United Kingdom, NCW was adopted to increase the military effectiveness and efficiency of the armed forces, whereas the adoption in Germany was mainly driven by the aim to maintain the armed forces’ institutional legitimacy. Thus, in the case of NCW adoption, the British military was an efficiency maximiser whereas the German military was a legitimacy maximiser.