Processual Perspectives LORENZO BOSI 1 AND STEFAN MALTHANER 2 1 Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy 2 Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Germany Collective action is an inherently dynamic phenomenon. Social movements, protest cam- paigns, or episodes of political violence, as well as the trajectories of movement leaders and grassroot activists unfold over time, in sequences of events, which not only entail changes in the forms of action, but also the transformation of identities, goals, and the political setting in which they take place. Arguing that “temporal objects should be subjected to processual analysis” (Bidart, Longo, and Mendez 2013, 743), processual perspectives seek to reconstruct the dynamics and inter- twined trajectories of episodes of collective action or of activists’ lives, how they unfold in interactions shaped by strategy, conjuncture, and contingency, and as situated in their partic- ular historic context, in social time and space. Processual perspectives, then, stand in contrast to static or a-temporal variable-based approaches, which presume fxed entities, unambiguous meanings, the absence of sequence efects, and independence of context. As Nick Crossley (2016, 157) has importantly pointed out, processual ontologies are closely linked to relational ontologies, which means that collective actors, such as social movement organizations, armed groups, grassroot associations, political parties, or trade unions, are not seen as stable entities punctuated by episodes of change, but as fuid, perpetually becoming, interactively produced, and defned by shifing relationships within specifc contexts. More- over, the sequence and timing of events matter, since “what happens, how it happens, why it happens, what results it brings about is dependent on when it happens, the location in the pro- cessual sequence, the place in the rhythm of events characteristic for a given process” (Pettigrew 1997, 339). By emphasizing complex temporal- and interaction-efects as well as contingency, processual perspectives also stand in contrast to perspectives based on teleological or linear conceptions of change over time, as evolving in fxed, invariant sequences of steps (e.g. “mod- ernization”). Instead, the underlying conception of processes is that they possess “autonomous causal efcacy” (Bosi, Demetriou, and Malthaner 2014, 3–4); that is, that processes of collective action are shaped by dynamics that they themselves generate. While recognizing the relevance of structural conditions, processual approaches emphasize their less-than-determining char- acter and the need to look at the relational processes put in motion by the strategic choices of multiple collective actors in dynamic confgurations. Tey attribute an important role to agency and to the creativity of collective actors, who can start new processes and take unexpected deci- sions, with a capacity to transform social structures, while also recognizing the limits of this creativity. Processual perspectives do not aim to test hypotheses or seek determinant external and internal factors, nor do they search for single grand theories, but they rather aim to provide plausible analytical explanations of how the interactions of multiple actors shif, unfold, and change over time, producing particular outcomes or patterns of transformation. Te Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Second Edition. Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Doug McAdam, and Bert Klandermans. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9780470674871.wbespm613