Chapter 3: Collectives May Protest, but How do Authorities Respond?

By what means does collective action lead to social change? How does a group of people become a sufficiently powerful force to persuade those in authority to make changes to laws, policies or regulations? The social identity tradition (as elaborated in the chapter by Drury, Reicher, and Stott, this volume) has offered rich and nuanced understandings of the constitution and transformation of crowd behavior and the psychology of crowd members. This commentary seeks to further explore the issues of psychological and social change raised by Drury and colleagues, through the lens of George Herbert Mead’s (1925) concept of ‘the social act’. Considering protest as a social act, I hope to show, expands the purview of social psychological theorizing about the crowd, to include not only a focus on crowd members, but also on the authorities who are the targets of the crowd’s protest, and consequently, on the eventual result of the protest—that is, whether the crowd successfully brings about a social change or not.