Collective behavior

The term collective behavior was first used by Robert E. Park, and employed definitively by Herbert Blumer, to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure (laws, conventions, and institutions) but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way. The category excludes conforming events, such as religious rituals and conversation at the dinner table, and also deviant events, such as crime or the exercise of bad manners. Collective behavior episodes are, for example, religious revivals, panics in burning theatres, outbreaks of swastika painting on synagogues, a change in popular preferences in toothpaste, the Russian Revolution, and a sudden widespread interest in body piercing. The claim that this set of seemingly diverse episodes constitutes a single field of inquiry is, of course, a theoretical assertion--one with which not all sociologists will concur. But Blumer's classic article, "Collective Behavior," in A. M. Lee, ed., Principles of Sociology (1951), Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian's textbook, Collective Behavior (Third Edition, 1987), and Neil J. Smelser's Theory of Collective Behavior (1963), testify to the viability of the field in some sociological minds.

Most of the examples of collective behavior mentioned above are instances of crowd behavior, which both Park and Blumer treat as one but not the only form of collective behavior. The classic treatment of crowds is Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), in which LeBon writes as a frightened aristocrat. He interprets the crowd episodes of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, which he sees as characteristic of crowds in general. Freud expressed a similar view in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922). Park and Blumer see crowds as emotional, but as capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear.

All of these writers acknowledge the that there are crowds in which the participants are not assembled in one place. Stock market booms and panics, and Red scares, are what Turner and Killian call "diffuse crowds." The work of some psychologists suggests that there may be three fundamental human emotions, fear, joy, and anger, which confirms the suggestion of sociologists who distinguish three corresponding kinds of crowds, the (fearful) panic, the (joyful) craze, and the (angry) hostile outburst. Since each of these emotions can characterize either a compact or a diffuse crowd, we find there to be six types of crowds.

Blumer distinguishes the crowd, in which a common emotion is disseminated, from a "public," in which a single issue is discussed. For every issue being discussed at a particular time there is a public; there are thus many publics, each coming into being when its issue is first raised and going out of being when the issue is resolved. Turner and Killian follow Blumer in treating the public as a form of collective behavior, but few others have done so.

The "mass," Blumer's third form, differs from the crowd and the public in that it is not defined by a form of interaction. Masses came into being with the mass media (newspapers being the first). Participants in the mass receive messages from the media attempting to persuade them to choose, let us say, some brand of refrigerator. The operation of the mass is not discussion, as with the public, but simultaneous and independent action of the participants. Their aggregated choices can have poweful effects on society. Contrary to Blumer, evidence shows that consumers frequently discuss their choices, which leads Turner and Killian to suggest that the mass is what Max Weber calls an "ideal type"--not an accurate description of many empirical cases, but a concept which is useful in interpreting particular events insofar as they approximate it.

Blumer's final form of collective behavior is the social movement, whether for revolution, the World Calendar, or release from some addiction suffered by the movement's members. Since social movements typically have a structure and persistence which distinguish them from other forms of collective behavior, they are better considered as a separate topic.

There have never been many specialists in collective behavior, and those who have studied it have often been students of Park and Blumer at Chicago, or, more recently, of Blumer and Smelser at Berkeley. Thus, collective behavior has been a school of thought as well as a subfield of sociology. The social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the late 60's and early 70's prompted a renewal of interest in crowds, and out of this interest has come a number of empirical challenges to the "armchair sociology" of the traditional study of collective behavior. Richard Berk uses "game theory" to suggest that even a panic in a burning theater can reflect rational calculation: If members of the audience decide that it is more rational to run to the exits than to walk, the result may look like an animal-like stampede without in fact being irrational. In a series of empirical studies of assemblies of people, Clark McPhail (The Myth of the Madding Crowd) argues that such assemblies vary along a number of dimensions, and that traditional stereotypes of emotionality and unanimity often do not describe what happens. pl:Tłum