An Outline on Social Action. Application to the Rules of Soccer

Abstract

In this article, we present the reader an outline to explain human collective action, whatever its content might be. The original outline, first developed in order to analyse Military Drill, is now being presented in a more current and advanced version, including its empirical verification. Due to its universal scope, its terminology is necessarily abstract. Therefore, we will attempt to facilitate reader comprehension of this outline by resorting to a specific, well-known and well-documented example of social action: soccer. To this end, we will apply step-by-step our outline in an analysis of soccer’s segregation out of rugby and the subsequent process by which soccer came to be quickly and efficiently institutionalized in England throughout the last third of the 19th century.