Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

morning football club, where the same (or similar) set of individuals
gathers every Sunday.
There exist various kinds of groups. First, voluntary and involuntary
groups: the latter are normally groups into which we are born,
not ones we choose or can exit at our own discretion; the former, are
groups we join by choice and also exit freely. Then there are cooperative
groups, in which the members are jointly committed to some agreed
goal and non-cooperative groups where this shared commitment does
not exist. An example of the former is a class-based pressure group
and the later a group of actual or potential creditors. Finally, groups
can be agents and non-agents. The former have the capacity to act in
ways that resembles individuals: they can define goals for themselves,
perform tasks, appoint representatives, and so on, for example, committees,
governments and joint stock companies. Groups that are
non-agents lack any formal organization and have no capacity to
coordinate their efforts, although they share common interests, for
instance the unemployed. These three kinds of distinctions often cut
across one another: so a group can be voluntary and cooperative and
have agency, such as a labour union, and a group can be involuntary,
cooperative and not have agency, such as those born into a group of
unemployed but cooperatively organized shack dwellers on the margins
of Johannesburg, and so on and so forth.
The assumption is often made that for groups to act they must
have clear and explicit rules for the election or selection of representatives,
which is only therefore possible for groups with agency. But
this is to miss the most important fact of the nature of many groups
and their relation to various forms of economic and political representation:
groups normally acquire agency by virtue not of direct
rules for the selection of representatives but more informal forms
of representation that arise as a consequence of shared identities or
interests or both; and, given the contested nature of identities and
interests, these more common forms of group representation are
characterised by the fact that often the representatives themselves are
important in determining the relevant identities or interests (about
which more below).
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FREEDOM, POWER AND
REPRESENTATION
Lawrence Hamilton