5.3 Collective Behavior, Social Movements, & Social Change

Collective Behavior

Collective behavior refers to voluntary, often spontaneous activity that is engaged in by a large number of people and typically violates dominant group norms and values. It lacks the institutionalized structure of formal organizations. Collective behavior can take many forms, including:

• Crowds: A relatively large number of people in close proximity (e.g., spectators at a concert).
• Mobs and Riots: Mobs are highly emotional crowds pursuing a violent or destructive goal directed at a specific target. Riots are violent crowd behavior directed at people and property in general, often sparked by a sense of injustice.
• Panics: A mass flight from a perceived threat.
• Mass Behavior: Dispersed collective behavior, including rumors (unverified information spread informally), fads (temporary, highly popular activities or items), and fashion.

Theories of Crowd Behavior

Sociologists have developed several theories to explain why people behave differently in crowds than they do individually.

1. Contagion Theory (Gustave Le Bon): Developed in the late 19th century, Le Bon argued that a crowd takes on a life of its own, developing a "collective mind." In a crowd, individuals lose their sense of self-awareness and rationality, acting on primitive impulses. Emotions become contagious, spreading rapidly through the crowd like a virus, leading to irrational and often violent behavior.

2. Emergent Norm Theory (Turner and Killian): Moving away from the idea of the irrational crowd, Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian proposed the Emergent Norm Theory. They argued that crowds are not inherently irrational. Instead, in ambiguous or novel situations where everyday rules don't apply, crowd members interact and construct new norms (emergent norms) on the spot to guide their behavior. This theory emphasizes that crowd behavior is a rational response to a unique situation, guided by newly established social rules.

Social Movements

While collective behavior is often spontaneous and short-lived, social movements are organized, sustained, and intentional efforts by a significant number of people to promote or resist social change.

Types of Social Movements

Sociologist David Aberle categorized social movements based on who they seek to change and the amount of change they seek:

1. Alternative Movements: Seek limited change in specific individuals (e.g., Women's Christian Temperance Union advocating against alcohol consumption among individuals).
2. Redemptive Movements: Seek radical, total change in specific individuals, often religious in nature (e.g., fundamentalist religious sects attempting to completely transform a person's life).
3. Reformative Movements: Seek limited change but target the entire society (e.g., the environmental movement aiming to change societal recycling habits, or the women's suffrage movement seeking the right to vote).
4. Revolutionary Movements: Seek radical, total change of the entire social structure (e.g., the American Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia).

The Lifecycle of Social Movements

Sociologists recognize that successful social movements tend to go through a predictable set of stages:

1. Emergence (Preliminary Stage): Widespread unrest is present, and people become aware of a social problem but lack organization.
2. Coalescence (Popular Stage): The movement begins to organize, define its goals, recruit members, and raise public awareness through protests or campaigns. Leadership emerges.
3. Bureaucratization (Institutional Stage): The movement becomes an established organization. It hires paid staff, develops a hierarchy, and relies more on political lobbying and formal procedures than on mass rallies. The fervor of the grassroots base often diminishes.
4. Decline: The movement may decline for various reasons: it achieves its goals (success), it fails due to poor leadership or lack of resources, its leaders are co-opted by the opposition, or it is violently repressed by the state.

Theories of Social Movement Success

Why do some movements succeed while others fail?

Resource Mobilization Theory: This theory argues that grievances alone are not enough to spark a movement; there is always discontent in society. What matters is the ability of movement leaders to mobilize resources. Resources include money, labor, media attention, alliances with powerful insiders, and a solid organizational structure. Without these resources, a movement will struggle to get off the ground, regardless of the righteousness of its cause.

Political Process Model (Political Opportunity Theory): This model builds on resource mobilization by adding the external political environment. It suggests that a movement's success depends heavily on the presence of political opportunities—vulnerabilities in the political system, shifts in political alignments, or a decrease in state repression. When the political structure opens up, movements can leverage their resources more effectively to demand change.

Social Change and Technology

Social change is the transformation of culture and social institutions over time. One of the primary drivers of social change is technology. Sociologist William F. Ogburn coined the term cultural lag to describe the phenomenon where material culture (technology, infrastructure) changes rapidly, while nonmaterial culture (beliefs, laws, norms) struggles to catch up. For instance, the invention of life-prolonging medical technology (material) rapidly advanced, creating a cultural lag as society struggled to develop ethical guidelines and legal frameworks (nonmaterial) regarding end-of-life care and the right to die.