The current phase of western modernity, characterized by economic and political crises that express contradictions in the functioning and the quality of democracies, requires greater understanding of the theoretical connections between the problematic of collective action and social inequality, questioning the dominant theories of collective action and that will also serve to enrich the central theoretical debates in contemporary sociology. It is presented a theoretical program of holistic analysis of collective action, departing from the multidimensional space of inequality and its social consequences, applied and tested in recent empirical research that took Europe as an object of study. Defining as axes of problematization the concepts of structural positions, agency, interaction and social change, it is discussed the structural, cultural, organizational and institutional properties of individuals and collective actors, the constitution of collective action in the everyday life-spheres of agents, and the directions of the processes of change from a structure-actor-system perspective. The sociological research developed allowed us to achieve the following scientific theoretical knowledge: that an unequal distribution of the causal powers of agents, regarding economic, cultural, social and symbolic resources, reflects on the intensity of their practices of collective action and on the adherence of the main collective actors of western modernity; and that the link between structural positions and cultural systems is fundamental to understand the relationship between social inequality and collective action in contemporary societies.

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inequality,collective action,sociological theory