1. SOC 525: Social Movements
Collective Behavior (or collective action) as a component of social movements

2. What are Social Movements?
Clearly are not:
Students moving from class to class
Shoppers in a mall
Workers in a factory
Clearly are:
Labor movement
Women’s suffrage
Civil Rights

3. Fuzzy Areas Communes Religions Fashion and fad Riots and panics
Civil wars and revolutions

4. Elements of Social Movements
Social Action: takes others into account
Collective Action (or Collective Behavior)
May involve organizations
But also includes flesh and blood human beings, physically co-present and acting together
Some degree of tension or deviation if not conflict from the conventional/routine world

5. Conventional and Collective Behavior Across Settings
Mass
Crowd
Formal Organization
Conventional
Behavior
Routine national stock market transactions
Card tricks at a football game
Factory assembly line
Collective
Wearing yellow ribbons during Iran hostage crisis of
March on Washington in 1963
Wildcat strikes, many social movements
Source: Marx and McAdam, p. 13

6. Emergence Collective Action/Behavior and Social Movements Emerge
Change
Effect change
Respond to change

7. Model of Social Movements, Collective Behavior, and Social Change

8. Comparing Theories Resource Mobilization tends to
Exaggerate difference between scheduled and emergent events
Minimize difference between collective behavior and collective action
LeBon and collective behavior theorists
Exaggerate difference between routine and non-routine (crowd/mob) behavior
Minimize scheduled/emergent distinction

9. Hegel’s Riddle Hegel: to be and not to be: to become
Tilly’s social movement includes scheduled events: marches but not riots
But marches can become riots
Chicago 1968 Democratic convention riot was a police riot resulting from a march
And riots can start movements
Police raid on Blind Pig in Detroit inspired 1968 “ghetto [urban] riot”

10. Theories of Social Change
Mass Society
Social Change
Collective Behavior
Early Resource Mobilization
Collective Behavior
Social Change
Dynamics of Contention
Collective Behavior
Social Change

11. Riots and Demonstrations
Elaborate performance that involves rioters or demonstrators (participants) plus
Constituents: whom they claim to represent
Sympathetic witnesses: conscience constituents (not “us” but sympathetic)
Antagonists
authorities

12. Some Definitions Tilly (1986, p. 381)
Collective action: “acting together on shared interests”
Contention: action “bears directly on interests of [others]”
Social movement: “a series of challenges to established authorities” (p. 392)

13. Riots versus Panics?
Demonstrations, crowds and riots are, in varying degrees
Organized
Disciplined
contentious
When police confront crowd, challenge is likely if crowd has interest, organization, and opportunity to challenge

14. The Danger of Emergence
Marches, demonstrations and large public gathering frighten police
Possibility of police losing control
Panic
Riot
Possibility of effective challenge: leadership and organization
Hitler’s (or MLK, Jr.’s) speeches to mass audience
Malcolm X confronting police with his Lieutenants