I’m currently doing my sociology homework and wanted to share the reading. More specifically, I want to connect some of the ideas to trying to change Roblox as a Roblox developer.
Citation of the reading:
Schwartz, M. (1999). Radical Protest and Social Structure (pp. 19-27, 129-133). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The reading largely talks about how farmers and landlord use power -institutional and not- for their interest. Note that this is about the United States and can involve its government related ideas. I will focus on the farmer aspect of non-institutional change.
To make change, the reading states that “an organization must have some leverage, or power, over the system it wishes to change” (p. 30). A farmer alone cannot strike against the landlord. Rather, making change as the farmer “require[s] mass organization” (p. 32). The example is given that “if one tenant [or farmer] quit he was easily replaced”, but that “if all quit, the landlord was in trouble” (p. 32). It is also mentioned that with more people, there needs to be a more “strenuous effort” to organize (p. 32).
For a large group of people to have power though, there needs to be “organizational discipline”, or the "willingness of the bulk of members to agree to act [together] (p. 133).
The writing on page 133 lays out more definitions which are helpful. I’ll mention one of them as I’ve covered most of the others briefly: “Non-institutional power does not depend on laws and law enforcement. This power, and the power of groups which exercise it, is alegal (if not illegal)” (p. 133).
Connecting this to Roblox is difficult and can be lengthy, so I’ll try to be concise. I often think of Roblox as a government. They make the rules and enforce the rules. The people who use Roblox -the community- have the ability to make change via the institution or otherwise. But, for the purpose of the connection: Roblox is the land-owner and the community are the farmers.
For institutional means, we have this Roblox Developer Forum. We can make change via Bug Reports and Feature Request. Well, some of us -due to historical and current reasons-, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
Focusing on the non-institutional means, the community can collectively come together to try to make change. Yet, as discussed in the reading, we’d need a large enough group of people with similar interest -who are loyal to the cause-. By that I mean the developers and players of Roblox would have to strike -by not playing or making or taking down their games- to have enough power. Messing with income of top creators -the popular ones- would likely need to be involved, and thus, that would be really difficult to organize.
The reading also mentions that some lose in a groups effort to make change. Well, the reading speaks about the ‘land-owners’ -or Roblox themselves in this example. But, the reading, from what I’ve read, fails to see the people who do not strike. Those people are also impacted negatively I’d say, or at least in the Roblox example of protest en mass. Players not protesting would likely be mad that their favorite game isn’t playable, maybe even mad at that creator and the act of protest itself.
Because of those reasons (the above paragraph), I assume making change on Roblox via the institutional means (feature requests) is a lot easier. But, is it more effective? Probably not in the current state of things. (which, again is a whole other topic… sorry.)
To close this, even though I could probably expand more: Making change on Roblox is challenging due to many reasons. I assume looking into governmental change process, history, and ideas would be more relevant to making change on Roblox. That said, the reading I’m connecting to here gives good insight and ideas I wanted to share with the Roblox Creator community. Thanks for reading!