Talk:Introduction to Sociology/Social Movements

The Aberle graph has a spelling mistake. Should be alternative.

And the four areas for social movements in the modern world should also include religious movements.

Some notes from Reicher, Stephen - in Group Processes:

p. 183 "However, these hostile and external observers never took care to investigate the patterns of crowd action and the conceptions of crowd members to see if their suppositions were warranted. If one did - and there is a growing literature by historians and social scientists that does (e.g. Feagin & Hahn, 1973; Krantz, 1988; Rude, 1964; Williams, 1986) - then two things would become immediately apparent. The first is that crowd action is patterned in such a way as to reflect existing cultures and societies."

p. 183 "The second obvious feature of crowd phenomena is that they are not only shaped by society but also that they in turn bring about social change. Indeed the changes wrought by crowds exist at three levels. There is change in the ways that crowd members see themselves as social actors. Autobiographies and studies of activists (e.g. Biko, 1988; Burns, 1990; Cluster, 1979; Haley, 1980; Teske, 1997) repeatedly show that people do not enter collective movements with fully fledged movement ideologies but that they develop their understanding of society and who they are within it as a consequence of participation."

p. 186 "Both are equally represented in the core concept of submergence which, for Le Bon, marked the transition from individual psychology to crowd psychology. Simply by being part of the crowd, individuals lose all sense of self and all sense of responsibility. Yet, at the same time, they gain a sentiment of invincible power due to their numbers. "Once individual identity and the capability to control behavior disappears, crowd members become subject to contagion. That is, they are unable to resist any passing idea or, more particularly and because the intellect is all but obliterated, any passing emotion. This may even lead crowd members to sacrifice their personal interests - a further sign of irrationality."

p. 186 "The majority of his crowd text is, in fact, essentially a primer on how to take advantage of the crowd mentality, how to manipulate crowds, and how to recruit their enthusiasms to one's own ends. In brief, Le Bon exhorts the would-be demagogue to direct the primitive mass by simplifying ideas, substituting affirmation and exaggeration for proof, and by repeating points over and again. It is important to acknowledge this stress on the power and the potential of crowds as a strength in Le Bon's work which has often been overlooked..." Sounds like a page in the Republican playbook.

p. 189 "Such acceptance is easily obscured by the ferocity with which Allport condemned any notion of a group mind. He considered any reference to a mind that was separate from the psyche of individuals as a meaningless abstraction or even as "a babble of tongues" (Allport, 1933) and, in his seminal text on social psychology (Allport, 1924) he asserted that: "there is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals" (p. 4). When it came to collective action, Allport declared, still more famously: "The individual in the crowd behaves just as he would behave alone only more so" (p. 295)." I knew there was a reason I didn't like Allport.

p. 190 "Riots tended to happen in towns and in areas that were stable and had well-established social networks. Feagin and Hahn (1973) provide similar evidence for the American urban revolts of the 1960s. "Next, there are considerable data that show migrants were under-represented and long-standing residents were over-represented in riot events."

p. 194 "To start with, the social identity tradition assumes identity to be multiple and to constitute a complex system rather than being unitary. Most notably, a distinction has been made between personal identity, which refers to the unique characteristics of the individual, and social identity, which refers to an individual's self-understanding as a member of a social category (Tajfel, 1978; Turner & Giles, 1981)." Apparently, social identity theory is 'da bomb in social psychology.

Additional Topics may include:

 * Joining Movements
 * Frame resonance
 * Emotional Motivation and Resonance