Collective Behavior Theories

1
Collective Behavior Theories

• Contagion
• Value-Added
• Emergent Norm

2
Types of Involvement in Social Movements

• Why?
• Ego-Involved
• Concerned
• Insecure
• Spectator
• Exploiter

3
Origins of Social Movements

• Crowd
• Mob
• Riot
• Panics
• Rumors
• Urban Legends
• Mass Hysteria
• Fashions and Fads

4
What is social change?

• Significant alteration of social structure and
  cultural patterns through time
• Distinction between cultural aspects and social
  structure
• Social structure network of relationships in
  which people are embedded
• Culture is social software that people share
  that provides meaning to social life
• Social change v structural change

5
Social Movements/Social Change

• Reform movements seek more modest changes within
  existing system
• Revolutionary movements seek fundamental changes
  of system rather than changes within the system.
• Instrumental movements seek to change the
  structure of society
• Expressive movements address problems and needs
  of individuals or seek to change the character of
  individuals and individual behavior.
• Progressive movements are future oriented or
  utopian
• Conservative movements prevent further change or
  perhaps want to reconstruct the past

6
Social Movements

• They are basic avenues by which social change
  takes place in societies like the United States.
• They are often the carriers of innovation,
  particularly in non-technical realms.
• They shape attitudes, define public issues, and
  affect social policy in a variety of ways.
• They may seek to affect only the lives of
  individuals, but most become political at some
  point in their career.

7
Characteristics of Social Movements

• Develop multiple segmental organizations within
  them that complete for the loyalties of
  sympathizers in a multi-organizational field.
• Recruit sympathizers in face-to-face encounters
  in small groups. Large rallies and demonstrations
  publicize the issues of the movement, but they
  are not the settings that make converts
• Adherents are motivated by strong personal
  commitments rather than by external rewards like
  money
• Seem to need opposition--real or imagined--that
  provides external pressure to create solidarity
  within the movement.

8
Social Movements

• Civil Rights
• What kind of movement is this?
• Who participated in this movement?
• What is the origin of this movement?
• Womens Rights
• What kind of movement is this?
• Who participated in this movement?
• What is the origin of this movement?

9
Civil Rights

• 1905 Niagara Movement
• 1910 NAACP
• 1941 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
• 1942 CORE
• 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott
• 1957 SCLC
• 1961 Freedom Rides
• 1963 March on Washington
• 1960s SNCC
• 1965-67 Watts Riots
• 1966 Black Power integrated into SNCC
• 1966 Black Panthers

10
Womens Movement

• 1848 Seneca Falls Convention
• 1869 Suffrage Associations
• 1874 Womens Christian Temperance Union
• 1870-Present Womans Relief Corps
• 1890 National American Womens Suffrage
  Association
• 1962 HUAC
• 1963 The Feminine Mystique
• 1964 SDS
• 1967 Firestone resolutions before SNCC
• 1960s NOW