Chapter 2: The Psychology of Collective Action: Crowds and Change

Crowd events are sites of both social determination and social-psychological change. On the one hand, the form of crowd behavior is a function of the culturally and historically given norms and values of crowd participants. On the other hand, crowd events can be psychologically and socially transformative: they can change the very culture from which they took their meaning. In this chapter we argue that most models of crowd behavior deny and hence are incapable of explaining either social determination or change. We describe the elaborated social identity model (ESIM) of crowd action, which we suggest has at its core a concept of self or identity adequate to explaining the dynamics of cultural reproduction and change in crowd events.