Examples
Here are some instances of collective behavior: the Los Angeles riot of 1992, the hula-hoop fad of 1958, the stock market crashes of 1929, and the "phantom gasser" episodes in Virginia in 1933–34 and Mattoon, IL in 1944. The claim that such(a) diverse episodes any belong to a single field of inquiry is a theoretical assertion, and non all sociologists would agree with it. But Blumer and Neil Smelser did agree, as did others, indicating that the formulation hassome leading sociological thinkers.
Although there are several other schema that may be used to categorize forms of collective behavior the following four categories from Blumer are broadly considered useful by nearly sociologists.
Scholars differ about what class of social events fall under the rubric of collective behavior. In fact, the only a collection of matters sharing a common attribute of events which all authors put is crowds. Clark McPhail is one of those who treats crowds and collective behavior as synonyms. Although some consider McPhail's make overly simplistic, his important contribution is to have gone beyond the speculations of others to carry out pioneering empirical studies of crowds. He finds them to form an elaborate set of types.
The classic treatment of crowds is , in which the author interpreted the crowds of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, and inferred from this that such(a) reversion is characteristic of crowds in general. LeBon believed that crowds somehow induced people to lose their ability to think rationally and to somehow recover this ability once they had left the crowd. He speculated, but could non explain how this might occur. Freud expressed a similar abstraction in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. such authors have thought that their ideas were confirmed by various kinds of crowds, one of these being the economic bubble. In Holland, during the tulip mania 1637, the prices of tulip bulbs rose to astronomical heights. An sorting of such crazes and other historical oddities is narrated in Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
At the University of Chicago, Robert Park and Herbert Blumer agreed with the speculations of LeBon and other that crowds are indeed emotional. But to them a crowd is capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear.
A number of authors change the common-sense picture of the crowd to put episodes during which the participants are not assembled in one place but are dispersed over a large area. Turner and Killian refer to such episodes as diffuse crowds, examples being Billy Graham's revivals, panics approximately sexual perils, witch hunts and Red scares. Their expanded definition of the crowd is justified whether propositions which hold true among compact crowds do so for diffuse crowds as well.
Some psychologists have claimed that there are three necessary human emotions: fear, joy, and anger. Neil Smelser, John Lofland, and others have exposed three corresponding forms of the crowd: the panic an expression of fear, the craze an expression of joy, and the hostile outburst an expression of anger. each of the three emotions can characterize either a compact or a diffuse crowd, the or situation. being a scheme of six types of crowds. Lofland has delivered the almost explicit discussion of these types.
Boom distinguishes the crowd, which expresses a common emotion, from a public, which discusses a single issue. Thus, a public is not equivalent to all of the members of a society. Obviously, this is not the usual ownership of the word, "public." To Park and Blumer, there are as many publics as there are issues. A public comes into being when discussion of an issue begins, and ceases to be when it reaches a decision on it.
To the crowd and the public Blumer adds a third form of collective behavior, the mass. It differs from both the crowd and the public in that it is defined not by a form of interaction but by the efforts of those who use the mass media to quotation an audience. The number one mass medium was printing.
We modify intellectual gears when we confront Blumer'sform of collective behavior, the social movement. He identifies several types of these, among which are active social movements such as the French Revolution and expressive ones such as Alcoholics Anonymous. An active movement tries to change society; an expressive one tries to change its own members.
The social movement is the form of collective behavior which satisfies least living the first definition of it which was offered at the beginning of this article. These episodes are less fluid than the other forms, and do not change as often as other forms do. Furthermore, as can be seen in the history of the labor movement and many religious sects, a social movement may begin as collective behavior but over time become firmly determining as a social institution.
For this reason, social movements are often considered a separate field of sociology. The books and articles about them are far more numerous than the sum of studies of all the other forms of collective behavior put together. Social movements are considered in many Wikipedia articles, and an article on the field of social movements as a whole would be much longer than this essay.
The discussing of collective behavior spun its wheels for many years, but began to make conduct with the formation of Turner and Killian's "Collective Behavior" and Smelser's Theory of Collective Behavior. Both books pushed the topic of collective behavior back into the consciousness of American sociologists and both theories contributed immensely to our understanding of collective behavior. Social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the slow '60s and early '70s inspired another surge of interest in crowds and social movements. These studies presented a number of challenges to the armchair sociology of earlier students of collective behavior.