SOC 1105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Collective Behavior, Social Movement Theory, Resource Mobilization

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1105
• Professor: Joseph Sawan

Document Summary

Week 2 lecture 3 and 4: theories and issues in studying movements. Chapter 2: theories of social movements and collective action. Symbolic interactionism: a social psychological theory that focuses on how actors construct meanings through social interaction. Collective behaviour develops in situations where established systems of meaning and sources of information have broken down, forcing participants to construct new meanings to guide their behaviour. Concerned with how participants in social movements manage to act collectively, creating goals, new organizational structures and new culture. Focus on the emergence of social movements and the creation of new forms of activity and organization. Collective behaviour is a means of bringing about social change and emergent forms of social order develop through the interaction off individuals in social movements. Criticisms: relies too heavily on structural strains to explain social movements, no clear criteria exist for identifying strain in a society, assumes societies are normally stable and that strains and social movements are unusual.