Establishing the Essential Building Blocks for Understanding Collective Behavior

It has been argued by researchers that collective behavior, as a field of study in sociology, lacks important theoretical and methodological developments. This has resulted in limited empirical knowledge of collective behavior. There exist many inadequacies in our present theoretical development. These include a failure to not only specify a social dimension of collective behavior, but also, to separate cause and effect, and to describe collective behavior. Scholars have argued that in the study of collective behavior, we are lacking sound, theoretical perspectives and definitions of collective behavior, which have resulted in poor and unsystematic observations of phenomena. As a way of resolving these problems, it has been hypothesized that researchers must pay attention to the elementary features of collective behavior, which are essential for an understanding of collective behavior. These elementary features can provide empirical data on the crowd, per se, and include variables such as the physical conditions created by dense aggregates of people, crowd shape, crowd boundaries, and crowd movement. In sum, this thesis reviews what many argue are the essential elements of collective behavior which have been ignored or not clearly researched, and using two well-known events, attempts to assess whether this is true or not. The two events chosen are the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Kent State University (May, 1970). In this thesis, the concern focuses on where studies stand in regard to coverage of these events. An evaluation of these episodes will indicate what we did and what we did well; what needs to be done in the future; and finally what can and cannot be dealt with adequately. If we attended to gathering information of the type suggested in this thesis, would we be better able to empirically evaluate occurrences of collective behavior? An analysis of Kent State University on May 4, 1970 and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement on October 1-2, 1964, in light of the elementary features of collective behavior, indicates that researchers have a valid argument that we have little theoretical or methodological knowledge pertaining to the crowd. When these events took place, researchers made an inquiry into collective behavior on a level at which general information concerning the crowd and its participants was given. What needs to be done in the future is to bring research to a level at which analysis includes the examination of the crowd as an empirically distinct phenomenon. Two major implications of this research are that: (1) A more comprehensive description of the crowd would be produced, and (2) Such information should help us to account for the occurrences of violence in such episodes. In conclusion, to establish the social properties of collective behavior, future research must consider the elementary features of collective behavior