A great deal of what people wish to accomplish cannot be achieved alone, either by private, individual actions or through markets and their modern instrument for aggregating private interest, the corporation. Only through some form of collective action can people realize important individual and group goals and produce the myriad shared benefits associated with social life. Acting collectively requires associating voluntarily with others who share interests or identities, and it can mean participating in solving problems at the local, national, or global scale. Collective action can involve advocating for causes or goals, recruiting others, and banding together to gain voice and representation before public institutions, corporations, and other bodies, or it can entail producing something of value that is shared beyond those who created it. Whether the goal is the creation of public parks or pathways, health care or human rights, environmental sustainability or electoral accountability, or information databases and communication systems, the need for at least two people to act together toward the establishment of some shared “public good” is an enduring fact of human life.

For a long time, scholarly literature placed organizations, not individuals, at the center of collective action. Olson's 1965 classic, The Logic of Collection Action, is an account of the choices faced by individuals to participate in collective efforts or not, and in his widely accepted view, it is organizations that solve the problem of individuals free riding on the efforts of others. Organizations act on behalf of groups of people, embodying and representing their concerns, empowering them as collectivities, and organizing them. Success at collective action in the end is not so much a function of the complexity or individualism of people's choices, which are constrained by the unvarying logic of free riding, but a function of how well organizations perform at overcoming that logic. Likewise, Truman (1951), in his own classic work, viewed latent interests on the part of citizens as being manifest only when expressed in organizational form. Similarly, Knoke defines an association, which can range from a trade association to a civic group, as “a formally organized, named group” and emphasizes the importance of the “acquisition and allocation of organizational resources to collective objectives” (Knoke, 1986, 2).