In my talk I will sketch the contours of a relational approach to collective action processes
within civil society. Drawing upon network analytic tools, and my work on civic networks
in British cities (The Cement of Civil Society, Cambridge UP, 2015), I will introduce the
concept of “mode of coordination” to illustrate the multiple ways in which collective action
gets organized in specific local settings. I will suggest in particular that a relational
approach to the study of organizational populations provides a different, more nuanced
comparison between local civil societies, than the one provided by aggregative approaches
to collective processes.