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The expression collective behavior was first used by Franklin Henry Giddings [1] and employed later by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, [2] Herbert Blumer, [3] Ralph H. Turner and Lewis Killian, [4] and Neil Smelser [5] to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure (laws, conventions, and institutions), but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way.
He argued that six things were necessary and sufficient for collective behavior to emerge, [1] and that social movements must evolve through the following relevant stages: [2] [3] Structural conduciveness: the structure of society must be organized in such a way that certain protest actions become more likely.
The term collective action problem describes the situation in which multiple individuals would all benefit from a certain action, but has an associated cost making it implausible that any individual can or will undertake and solve it alone. The ideal solution is then to undertake this as a collective action, the cost of which is shared.
More simply, as explained by Thompson and Hickey (2005), such groups are ones "that people refer to when evaluating their [own] qualities, circumstances, attitudes, values and behaviors." [9] Reference groups are used in order to evaluate and determine the nature of a given individual or other group's characteristics and sociological attributes.
Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. [3]
The concept of collective efficacy has been used to explain why urban neighborhoods differ in the amount of crime that takes place in them. In urban areas where neighbors monitor group behavior and are willing to intervene to break out fights or otherwise prevent disorder, violent crime is less likely to occur. [6]
Herbert Blumer was the first to specifically use the term "social contagion”, in his 1939 paper on collective behavior, where he gave the dancing mania of the middle ages as a prominent example. From the 1950s, studies of social contagion began to investigate the phenomena empirically, and became more frequent.
The impact of utopian thinking extends to both conventionally conceptualized collective actions and more generic civic behaviors. [2] The former indicates participation in a social movement toward a shared goal with others, [ 20 ] while the latter refers to heightened engagement in society in any domain, whether or not in the company of like ...