Download The “Breakdown” Debate in Social Movements

CBSM Prelim, question No. 1, October 11, 2002
The “Breakdown” Debate in Social Movements
The metaphor of “breakdown” has been used by a number of scholars to capture
some of the cnditions underlying the emergence of various forms of collective
actions. Some scholars argue that tht term and its associated ideas should be
jettisoned; others find it an apt metaphor which helps to acount for the collective
phenomena they seek to explain. What is your position on this debate? ...
“Breakdown” approaches to collective behavior and social movements were
among the earliest scholarly attempts to explain the motivation and mobilization
of protest. Although these early conceptions were largely social psychological,
they incorporated some elements of structure and structural strain, such that the
term “breakdown” arguably applies to at least two sociological phenomena: The
organization (or disorganization) of minds and of states. This essay discusses
the development and use of breakdown theories to explain collective behavior on
these two levels. Although I note that breakdown approaches have mostly fallen
out of favor due to both changing perceptions of social movements and numerous
empirical criticisms, I will suggest that, when used carefully, the metaphor of
breakdown may yet have some utility for sociologists.
Breakdown theories, like all approaches to social movements, are the result of the context-sensitive intellectual development. Buechler (2000) suggests
that progenitors of breakdown perspectives such as Le Bon (1960) and Blumer
(1951) were dramatically influenced by the historical episodes of protest and
rebellion they witnessed, such that they could only perceive crowd behavior as
performed by individuals who had somehow taken leave of their rational capabilities. McPhail (1991) suggests that, in particular, Le Bon’s view of crowds and
protesters as irrational stems from Le Bon’s unease with popular movements,
and as a result, Le Bon suggested that the only reasonable explanation for such
activity was that participants were transformed by their membership in a crowd
into uncritical actors. From a more contemporary point of view, breakdown theories were, ironically, given credence by liberal and leftist academics who saw
breakdown explanations as the best way to explain the terrifying behavior of,
for example, lynch mobs — groups committing frightening acts of violence.
Although both of these explanations serve to denote crowds and protesters
as a kind of “irrational other,” the duality between them is somewhat striking: The same academics who could countenance lynch mobs no other way
than as episodes of collective irrationality were frequently left-leaning scholars
who might have been distinctly sympathetic of the episodes of crowd behavior
explained by figures such as Le Bon. Nonetheless, both eras of scholars characterized what was contemporary to them as reflecting the breakdown of social
order and the dismissing of reason.
Given some historical context for the development of breakdown approaches,
it still needs to be explained what breakdown approaches are. As suggested
above, breakdown theories function on at least two levels, the earliest of which is
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the social psychological — were Le Bon, Blumer, and Smelser (1963) primarily
operated. However, it should be made clear that these social psychological
approaches never concerned themselves exlusively with crowds; rather, both
Blumer and Smelser included crowds and crowd behavior within a scheme that
sought to explain phenomena ranging from milling crowds, to riots, to “social
movements.” As I will suggest later, one important criticism of these approaches
is their breadth — scholars have argued that increasingly complex phenomena
are less amenable to breakdown approaches than are crowds and riots.
As the name implies, breakdown approaches to collective behavior tend to
involve two critical features: The abdication of rational thought and excessive strain placed on conventional mechanisms that would otherwise constrain
behavior. The strain arguments are key here, because they imply that collective behavior is about grievances. According to Smelser (1963), individuals are
guided by norms and values that provide “the broadest guides to purposive social
behavior” (24). Strain, caused by unmet needs or dashed expectations (Davies
1962) challenges the orderly mechanisms through which individuals normally
pursue objectives. Blumer makes the confrontation of strain explicitly public,
arguing that strain gives focus to groups, converting milling behavior to excitement and eventually to contagion, at which point crowd members no longer act
of their own volition but are acting in “circular reaction” to one another, the
culmination of a process that results in actors no longer critical of suggestion
— it is precisely this perception of the unthinking crowd that led scholars such
as Le Bon and Blumer to characterize crowds as simple masses without reason.1 Crowd collective behavior then, is a distinctly non-institutional kind of
behavior, different from and removed from “everyday” behavior.
Although it is a significant piece of the breakdown model, the social psychological approach does not complete the model. As suggested earlier, one part
of breakdown theories have to do more with structure than with personality,
cognition, or disposition. At this level, breakdown theories cease to be about
crowds, and instead apply to regimes, the weakness of which is suggested by
many authors (e.g., Skocpol 1979, Tilly 1978, Jenkins and Perrow 1977) to be a
critical component in the transition from crowd — in which it is frequently argued that local elements of social control, for example the police, fail to operate
effective — to social movement and even revolution — in which the breakdown
or visible vulnerability of state regimes are central features.
Clearly, breakdown approaches to collective crowd behavior are different in
kind from such approaches to revolutions and “social movements,” but the link
is not spurious; for breakdown theorists, crowds were the tip of the collective
behavior iceburg that represented rebellion and revolution. This approach is
somewhat less problematic for authors such as Le Bon, whose negative perceptions of crowds extended to popular movements, but it presents problems for
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is interesting to note that the “mass society” breakdown approach accompanied the
perspective that individual crowd participants were “alienated,” as in Kornhauser’s accounts,
or particularly predisposed to crowd activity, as in Allport and Dollard’s explicitly psychological conception. These conceptual inconsistencies would later be another critique of the broad
family of psychological breakdown approaches.
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later scholars who realized that increasingly complicated phenomena — such as
events spread out in time and space, no longer limited to single scenes of activity
— called for explanations that did not rely on temporally-limited instances of
loss of reason. Explaining durable mobilization proves to be a significant and
important criticism of breakdown models.2
However, more directly relevant criticisms of breakdown come from McPhail
(1991, 1994), who offers extensive arguments against the ideas of irrational
collective behavior. McPhail provides detailed empirical evidence that, for example, lynch mobs previously characterized as spontaneous and lacking any
social order were actually highly organized, planned, and carried out extremely
purposively. Oberschall (1973) similarly argues against such explanations of collective behavior in pre-WWII Germany and U.S. McCarthyism. In other words,
an important argument against breakdown approaches is that, empirically, they
fail to explain collective behavior; McPhail’s (1991) indictment of breakdown
approaches is that they are largely supported by “armchair” evidence — that is,
theorists such as Le Bon, he argues, never actually observed crowds in action.
This line of argument reflects even more strongly Buechler’s (2000) contention
that the development of movement theory is more closely aligned with contemporary political perspectives than it does intellectual development. Further,
Snow et al (1981) forcefully make this argument, that too much conceptualization of collective behavior was done without extensive field work.
McPhail (1991, 1994) and Snow et al (1981) both argue that collective behavior, contrary to breakdown models, is characterized by strong rationality,
planning, and reflexivity — both with regard to “crowd” behavior and to the behavior of authorities, as in Snow et al’s account of football celebrations. McPhail
argues that, in fact, crowd behavior does not reflect breakdown of rationality
or any kind of predisposition, but that an accurate understanding of crowd behavior — and, by extension, movements in general — hinges on treating such
behavior as common, self-governing, and goal-seeking;3 in other words, “collective behavior” should be understood as no less rational than everyday behavior.
In making these claims, McPhail is explicitly arguing that scholars “keep” collective behavior as part of an intellectual repertoire, in essence echoing Oliver’s
(1989) urge that researchers “bring the crowd back in.”
Because of empirical difficulties, academic shifts of focus to enduring movements, and changing currents of intellectual favor, breakdown theories of collective behavior have largely fallen out of favor. However, as McPhail and
Oliver has urged, some researchers, notably Useem (1985) have attempted to
reformulate breakdown ideas. In particular, Useem argues that the gradual,
then increasingly strong, buildup of grievances, combined with erosion of social
2 Resource
mobilization and organizationally-based approaches, suggested in early formulation by Oberschall 1973, Gamson 1975, and McCarthy and Zald 1977, explicitly criticized the
grievance and breakdown approaches by arguing that social movements are better explained
by their organization, not their disorganization.
3 McPhail concedes that the goals and norms present in crowd behavior may be emergent
(Turner and Killian 1978), but he argues that such norms and goals do not change the rational
processes by which crowds structure themselves.
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control — both from within and from authories — contributed significantly to
violent New Mexico prison riots. In situations such as these, breakdown approaches seem to be appropriate and explanatory. As in the case of prison riots,
is it possible that “true” breakdown theories work best in situations where total
institutions dominate behavior, and groups lack the ability to seek redress in
the ways that other actors might.
Breakdown approaches to collective behavior are certainly no longer dominant, which is probably a positive feature of contemporary theory. As Buechler
(2000) argues, modern theories of social movements were only made possible by
the dissolution of the unitary view of collective behavior. However, to the extent
that the artifacts of breakdown theory — consideration of the role of grievances,
the importance of understanding, as McPhail suggests, the detailed processes
that actually structure group behavior — remain salient, I think they make a
significant contribution to social movement understandings. Beyond being used
as a mark of intellectual progression (“scholars used to believe X, but we are enlightened enough now to believe Y ”), it appears that contemporary scholarship
still owes some debt to the breakdown approach; despite the efforts by some,
such as Le Bon and Kornhauser, to dismiss collective behavior as politically or
psychologically devient — or both — their attention to it not only added some
future legitimacy to the very study of movements and collective behavior, but
identified issues which remain important.
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