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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 1 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 1 It 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. 2 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. 3 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. 4