Social Change, Movements, and Collective Behavior
Change
Social change arises from technology, demographic shifts, social movements, and conflict. Evolutionary theories see gradual differentiation; cyclical theories see rise and decline; conflict theories see change driven by contradiction and struggle. Modernization describes industrialization's spread, while globalization integrates economies and cultures and provokes resistance.
Collective Behavior
Collective behavior is relatively spontaneous and unstructured. Crowds may be casual, conventional, expressive, or acting; mobs and riots are acting crowds. Early contagion theories (Le Bon) are largely discredited; emergent norm theory holds that participants create new norms during the event. Panic, fads, fashions, rumors, and public opinion are other forms. Relative deprivation explains unrest among those whose expectations outrun conditions, not simply the poorest.
Social Movements
Movements are organized, sustained efforts to promote or resist change. Types: reform (limited change), revolutionary (fundamental), reactive/regressive (restore the past), and alternative/redemptive (change individuals). Resource mobilization theory stresses money, organization, and networks; political process theory stresses opportunity; framing explains how leaders diagnose problems and propose solutions. Movements pass through emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline (which may come through success, failure, repression, or co-optation).
Traps
Do not confuse relative deprivation with absolute poverty, or reform with revolutionary movements. Contagion theory is a distractor answer in modern questions.
Rule of Thumb
Ask who is changing and how much: individuals (redemptive), limited structures (reform), whole systems (revolutionary), or reversing change (reactive).