ABSTRACT
It's amazing to me that the problem of accounting for collective behaviour has still not been solved. The phenomenon of elementary collective behaviour (riots, panics, expressive crowds, hostile mobs, fads, religious frenzies, etc.) has been kicking around the fringes of sociological theory for a long time. It has always seemed to be one of the potentially easier problems to solve even by the exacting and convoluted standards of the social sciences where every solution seems always to be up for rhetorical grabs. It looked like sociology was on the brink of fully explaining the phenomenon thirty years ago when Roger Brown (1965) threw a startling but brilliant light upon the subject by approaching it for the first time from an internally consistent perspective of rational action theory and methodological individualism. Brown's approach, though necessarily sketchy, provided a theoretical framework within which a concerted program of research could be launched with the aim of solving the problem of collective behaviour. But then, as so often happens in our discipline, the problem was half solved and we lost interest in it and went on to other things.
