Book contents
- The Psychology of Radical Social Change
- The Psychology of Radical Social Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Toward a Psychology of Revolution
- Part I Roots of Revolution
- 2 The Conservative Crowd?
- 3 Economic Inequality and the Rise of Civic Discontent
- 4 The Globalization-Revolution Paradox
- 5 From the Age of the Crowd to the Global Age
- Part II Evolution and Involution in Social Transformations
- Part III Representations of and in Revolution
- Index
- References
2 - The Conservative Crowd?
How Participation in Collective Events Transforms Participants’ Understandings of Collective Action
from Part I - Roots of Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2018
Book contents
- The Psychology of Radical Social Change
- The Psychology of Radical Social Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Toward a Psychology of Revolution
- Part I Roots of Revolution
- 2 The Conservative Crowd?
- 3 Economic Inequality and the Rise of Civic Discontent
- 4 The Globalization-Revolution Paradox
- 5 From the Age of the Crowd to the Global Age
- Part II Evolution and Involution in Social Transformations
- Part III Representations of and in Revolution
- Index
- References
Summary
The events of the 1871 Paris Commune, when the working class of that city declared a revolutionary republic separate from the French state, were the stimulus for one of the most influential social psychology books ever written, Gustave Le Bon’s (1896/1947) The crowd: A study of the popular mind. The book was an attempt not simply to explain the kinds of (violent) crowds that Le Bon had witnessed during the Commune and read about in accounts of the 1789 French Revolution, but to control and combat these crowds. Yet while Le Bon and others in his class feared that crowds threatened civilization, he also argued that their violent revolutions were incapable of bringing about real social change because of the primitive mentality of crowd members. This chapter challenges Le Bon’s argument first by briefly surveying some of the literature on social change. Here we find that the crowd often figures as a central actor. In a number of cases, social change and psychological change seem to be connected, so in the second section of the chapter we describe some of the psychological transformations that have been documented among participants involved in social change and in collective action more generally. These transformations involve embracing new ideas about the self, politics and the world, and so tell against Le Bon’s claim that crowd events are associated with a conservative or regressed psychological state. We then outline an elaborated social identity model (ESIM), which specifies the intergroup processes through which many of these psychological changes occur. The remainder of the chapter illustrates the usefulness of the ESIM in explaining how participation in crowds struggling to create social change can itself change crowd participants’ understandings of the meaning of their actions. The illustration consists of evidence from an ethnographic study of pacifists’ experiences conflict, which served to challenge their humanistic rationale for their collective actions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Psychology of Radical Social ChangeFrom Rage to Revolution, pp. 11 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018
References
Ackerman, P., and Kruegler, C. (1994). Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger.Google Scholar
Anon. (1984). The Experience of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution. Cardiff: Scorcher.Google Scholar
Boesel, D., Goldberg, L. C., and Marx, G. T. (1971). Rebellion in Plainfield. In Boesel, D. and Rossi, P. H. (Eds.), Cities under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968 (pp. 67–83). New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Drury, J., and Reicher, S. (1999). The intergroup dynamics of collective empowerment: Substantiating the social identity model of crowd behaviour. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 2, 381–402.Google Scholar
Drury, J., and Reicher, S. (2000). Collective action and psychological change: The emergence of new social identities. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 579–604.Google Scholar
Drury, J., and Reicher, S. (2005). Explaining enduring empowerment: A comparative study of collective action and psychological outcomes. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 35–58.Google Scholar
Drury, J., and Reicher, S. (2009). Collective psychological empowerment as a model of social change: Researching crowds and power. Journal of Social Issues, 65, 707–725.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drury, J., Reicher, S., and Stott, C. (2003). Transforming the boundaries of collective identity: From the “local” anti-road campaign to “global” resistance? Social Movement Studies, 2, 191–212.Google Scholar
Drury, J., and Stott, C. (2001). Bias as a research strategy in participant observation: The case of intergroup conflict. Field Methods, 13, 47–67.Google Scholar
Gregoire, R., and Perlman, F. (1969). Worker-Student Action Committees: France May ’68. Detroit: Black and Red.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E. J. (1964). Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Google Scholar
Jordan, J. (1998). The art of necessity: The subversive imagination of anti-road protest and Reclaim the Streets. In McKay, G. (Ed.), DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Modern Britain (pp. 129–151). London: Verso.Google Scholar
Malatesta, E. (1989). The occupation of the factories in Italy in 1920. The Raven, 8(2), 353–355.Google Scholar
Mann, M. (1973). Consciousness and Action among the Western Working Class. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
McKay, G. (Ed.) (1998). DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Modern Britain. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Oberschall, A. (1968). The Los Angeles Riot of August 1965. Social Problems, 15, 322–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reicher, S. (1996a). Social identity and social change: Rethinking the context of social psychology. In Robinson, W. P. (Ed.), Social Groups and Identities: Developing the Legacy of Henri Tajfel (pp. 317–336). London: Butterworth.Google Scholar
Reicher, S. (1996b). “The Battle of Westminster”: Developing the social identity model of crowd behaviour in order to explain the initiation and development of collective conflict. European Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 115–134.Google Scholar
Reicher, S. (2001). The psychology of crowd dynamics. In Hogg, M. A. and Tindale, R. S. (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes (pp. 182–208). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Reicher, S., and Drury, J. (2011). Collective identity, political participation and the making of the social self. In Azzi, A., Chryssochoou, X., Klandermans, B., and Simon, B. (Eds.), Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (pp. 158–176). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rudé, G. (1981). The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. Rev. ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart.Google Scholar
Stott, C., and Drury, J. (2000). Crowds, context and identity: Dynamic categorization processes in the “poll tax riot.” Human Relations, 53, 247–273.Google Scholar
Stott, C., and Reicher, S. (1998a). Crowd action as inter-group process: Introducing the police perspective. European Journal of Social Psychology, 28, 509–529.Google Scholar
Stott, C., and Reicher, S. (1998b). How conflict escalates: The inter-group dynamics of collective football crowd “violence.” Sociology, 32, 353–377.Google Scholar
Tajfel, H., and Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup relations. In Worchel, S. and Austin, W. G. (Eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole.Google Scholar
Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., and Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Waddington, D. (1992). Contemporary Issues in Public Disorder: A Comparative and Historical Approach. London: Routledge.Google Scholar