Theory of Collective Behavior (Classics of the Social Sciences)

The golden anniversary edition of THEORY OF COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR from Quid Pro Books is a modern take on a sociological and social psychology classic. Neil J. Smelser is university professor emeritus of sociology at the University of .
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Clark McPhail is one of those who treats crowds and collective behavior as synonyms. Although some consider McPhail's work overly simplistic Locher , 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. A Study of the Popular Mind , in which the author interpreted the crowds of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, and inferred from this that such 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.

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He speculated, but could not explain how this might occur. Freud expressed a similar view 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.


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In Holland, during the tulip mania , the prices of tulip bulbs rose to astronomical heights. But to them a crowd is capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear. A number of authors modify the common-sense notion of the crowd to include 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 about sexual perils, witch hunts and Red scares. Their expanded definition of the crowd is justified if propositions which hold true among compact crowds do so for diffuse crowds as well.

Some psychologists have claimed that there are three fundamental human emotions: Neil Smelser, John Lofland, and others have proposed three corresponding forms of the crowd: Each of the three emotions can characterize either a compact or a diffuse crowd, the result being a scheme of six types of crowds. Lofland has offered the most 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.

COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Obviously, this is not the usual use of the word, "public. 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 address an audience.

The first mass medium was printing. We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement.

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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. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Theory Of Collective B Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem.

Theory of Collective Behavior by Neil J. Smelser on Apple Books

Return to Book Page. Theory Of Collective Behavior 3. Featuring a reflective new Preface by the author and an extensive, analytical Foreword by MIT's Gary Marx, it is an authorized and painstaking edition-not just scanned and forgotten like most such reprints today. As part of the "Classics of the Social Sciences" Series, it features quality formatting such as original notes, legible tables, complete index, and extensive bibliography including updating references for the new Foreword.

Theory of Collective Behavior

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