"The Media as Spur and Spoiler: A Theory of Multiple Influences on Collective Behavior" 
David A. Siegel, 
Abstract: "I present a model of interdependent collective behavior under the influence of both local social networks and a mass media. Individual interests are heterogeneous, and people choose whether or not to participate in the behavior based on a comparison of subjective costs and benefits. Costs are updated in response to the activities of both their social neighbors and the population as a whole; people obtain information about the latter from the media. I find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, neither increased connectivity in local networks nor an increased role for the media uniformly increases participation in collective behavior: in many cases both can decrease participation rates. Social elites who are unified in their interests can play an outsized role in determining participation, as can a biased media. The model I develop to derive these results additionally provides a powerful methodological tool for analyzing the impact that qualitative network structures can have on mass outcomes." - stanford.edu/~dasiegel/ Siegel-networks-and-media.pdf

"When Does Repression Work? Collective Behavior Under the Threat of Violence" 
Abstract: Detailed model involving adaptive social learning, shaped by the network structure, targeted repression, and mass media, with some applications to the Iraqi elections at the start of 2005. One wonders if there isn't some way of extracting analytical results, rather than just simulations... - http://www.stanford.edu/~dasiegel/Siegel-repression.pdf

Society: Collective Behavior, News and Opinion, and Sociology and Modern Society. by Robert E. Park, Everett Cherrington Hughes 
Review author[s]: Rudolf Heberle
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Jul., 1956), pp. 97-98

The Collective Dynamics of Belief
Duncan J. Watts, Department of Sociology, and Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University
One of the themes that dominates the Protestant Ethic is that belief precedes rationality; that the values by which one economic order can be judged superior to another are neither universal nor exogenous, but arise endogenously within a specific historical and social context. Although this line of thought has been enormously influential in sociology, it has attracted considerable criticism as well. How is it then, that people, collectively, come to believe the things that they do? In this chapter, I first review briefly the debate between what I call “rationalist” and “historicist” views of human behavior, and argue that both perspectives suffer from different versions of the same problem—that of explaining collective behavior in terms of a representative individual. 
I then motivate and describe a very simple class of decision making models, from which I conclude that rules which are simple, intuitive, and even rational from an individual's perspective, can generate collective dynamics that are complex, unpredictable, and counter-intuitive. As a result, collective outcomes are ambiguously related both to individual preferences and also contextual variables, and causality in historical processes is rendered elusive. I conclude by describing how thinking about collective belief formation may shed light on some phenomena of contemporary capitalism. - cdg.columbia.edu/uploads/papers/ watts2007_collectiveBeliefs.pdf 

A Test of the Emergent Norm Theory of Collective Behavior 
Authors: Aguirre B.E; Wenger D; Vigo G.
Source: Sociological Forum, Volume 13, Number 2, June 1998, pp. 301-320(20)
Abstract: Objective: The paper uses the timing of evacuation behavior of occupants of the World Trade Center at the time of the explosion of February 26, 1993, to test predictions from Emergent Norm Theory. Method: It uses ordinary least square multiple regression analysis to examine data from a survey done in the first week in May 1993 of 415 people who worked at the World Trade Center. Results: The theory's predictions regarding the additive effects of size of group and preexisting social relationships on the timing of evacuation are supported. However, the findings document important and unexpected interaction effects of these two variables on the effects of perceived threat, resources, and cooperativeness on the timing of evacuation. Conclusion: The results augment the theory by showing the continued importance of enduring social relationships as determinants of collective behavior. Enduring social relationships are not only useful to differentiate collective behavior from institutionalized behavior but also specify the dynamics attending the occurrence of collective behavior. - ingentaconnect.com

BREAKDOWN THEORIES OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
Bert Useem ­ Department of Sociology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131 
Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 24: 215-238 (Volume publication date August 1998) (doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.215)
Historically, breakdown theory dominated the sociological study of collective action. In the 1970s, this theory was found to be increasingly unable to account for contemporaneous events and newly discovered historical facts. Resource mobilization theory displaced breakdown theory as the dominant paradigm. Yet the evidence against breakdown theory is weak once a distinction is made between routine and nonroutine collective action. Several recent contributions affirm the explanatory power of breakdown theory for nonroutine collective action. Breakdown theory also contributes to an understanding of the use of governmental force against protest and of the moral features of collective action. Breakdown and resource mobilization theories explain different types of phenomena, and both are needed to help account for the full range of forms of collective action. - arjournals.annualreviews.org

Psychoanalytic Sociology: An Essay on the Interpretation of Historical Data and the Phenomena of Collective Behavior: By Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
Review by: Jerome D. Oremland, M.D. 
(1979). Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 27:238-247
When evaluating a study that crosses interdisciplinary lines, it is necessary to avoid chauvinistic criticism stemming from a feeling that one's own territory is being invaded, and chauvinistic pride coupled with premature acceptance that comes from reading familiar words and phrases. Perhaps inevitably, attempts to integrate major disciplines or even theoretical viewpoints lead to reservations and deficiencies.
Some of the deficiencies of Psychoanalytic Sociology point to a central dilemma of psychoanalysis. In order for psychoanalysis to be a scientific discipline which can be utilized by other disciplines, it must be codified, integrated, and systematically presented. Yet, as a developing, clinically oriented science, psychoanalysis runs the risk of premature closure by such codifying tendencies. - pep-web.org/document.php?id=apa.027.0238a

“Neuro-Psychological Social Theorizing and Simulation with the Computational Multi-Agent System Ethos”, invited paper at Proceedings of the Congresso em Neurociências Cognitivas, Évora, Portugal, 2003. 
Jorge Simão, Luís Moniz Pereira
Abstract: Human social behaviour, culture change, and emergent social organization are amongst the most intricate phenomena studied by science. Aided by theoretical and computational tools developed to 
study emergent phenomena in complex systems, social theorists aim to develop a unified body of knowledge that helps to shed light on long lasting question of human sociality. With this intent in mind, we have been developing a new conceptual framework, in the form of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) based on a simple abstraction of individuals' cognitive hardwired neuro-psychological behaviour, and implemented as an object-oriented computational paradigm. This framework, named Ethos, extends the traditional features provided in current MAS for agent-based modelling, with new abstractions specifically designed to model psychologically determined human social behaviour, culture, and organization. These include support for flexible behaviour selection mechanisms, including individual experience based learning, the transmission of information and social facilitation of learning, the management of agents' social networks, and the definition of the task-environments that structure an agent's action and interaction. This is accomplished by providing an object-oriented framework with a relatively small set of main interfaces and top classes abstracting key theoretical constructs, and having the modeler selectively sub-class filling the basic object structure to implement her/his own model. Thus the Ethos class structure provides a meta-model, which can be instantiated in a flexible manner to implement each concrete model of individual human social behaviour. In addition to presenting the general framework, we report on our own experiences in using Ethos to (re)implement several models we have developed. This includes models of human mate choice strategies and emergent human mating systems, and of the cultural dynamics of preferences such as identification of fashion-like product careers. We argue that providing the type of functionality afforded by Ethos, off-the-self, substantially improves theoretical integration and facilitates model comparison. It can also be of great help to students of social and cognitive science who wish to develop theoretical work based on tested, established, and accepted computational building blocks.

Jorge Simão, Peter M. Todd, Luís Moniz Pereira, “What's Cool? - Modelling Fashion-like Collective Behavior Emergence from Individual Neuro-psychological Conditioning”, submitted. 
Abstract: In this article we have presented a simple model that shows how mechanisms of neuro-psychological conditioning at the individual level can generate the emergence of fashion-like collective behavior. The model shows that for even moderate levels of social assortment, trait usage can oscillate continuously between stable periods of near full trait use to near total trait avoidance. 

Exploratory design of collective behavior
Eric Bonabeau, eric@icosystem.com, Icosystem Corporation
Agent-based modeling (ABM) enables us to reproduce emergent phenomena in collective human (and non human) systems. With a properly validated and calibrated model it therefore becomes possible to explore the range of emergent phenomena made possible by the individual-level rules of behavior and interactions between agents. While the "forward problem" of determining which emergent pattern will result from a set of individual-level rules is greatly facilitated by ABM, the inverse problem, which consists of designing the rules to create certain collective patterns, is still very difficult for a variety of reasons including: desired patterns may be difficult to formalize, the collective-level pattern landscape may be rugged, one may not know ahead of time what kinds of collective-level patterns to expect from the individual-level rules, rule space is extremely large, etc. By combining ABM with interactive evolution, a form of exploratory optimization whereby a human observer provides the (subjective!) objective function, it is possible to explore the space of emergent collective-level patterns with a view to designing "interesting" patterns. The combination of ABM with interactive evolution will be demonstrated using a simple game that can be played by a group, small or large, of human beings. Co-authors of this work are Pablo Funes and Belinda Orme, both at Icosystem Corporation. 

Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network
ABSTRACT: Models for the processes by which ideas and influence propagate through a social network have been studied in a number of domains, including the diffusion of medical and technological innovations, the sudden and widespread adoption of various strategies in game-theoretic settings, and the effects of "word of mouth" in the promotion of new products. Recently, motivated by the design of viral marketing strategies, Domingos and Richardson posed a fundamental algorithmic problem for such social network processes: if we can try to convince a subset of individuals to adopt a new product or innovation, and the goal is to trigger a large cascade of further adoptions, which set of individuals should we target?We consider this problem in several of the most widely studied models in social network analysis. The optimization problem of selecting the most influential nodes is NP-hard here, and we provide the first provable approximation guarantees for efficient algorithms. Using an analysis framework based on submodular functions, we show that a natural greedy strategy obtains a solution that is provably within 63% of optimal for several classes of models; our framework suggests a general approach for reasoning about the performance guarantees of algorithms for these types of influence problems in social networks.We also provide computational experiments on large collaboration networks, showing that in addition to their provable guarantees, our approximation algorithms significantly out-perform node-selection heuristics based on the well-studied notions of degree centrality and distance centrality from the field of social networks. - portal.acm.org

Collective Behavior and Social Movements - CBSM Workshop 2007
Movement Cultures, Strategies, and Outcomes
Call for Papers
The Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association is issuing a call for papers for a workshop to be held at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, during the summer of 2007. The theme will be "Movement Cultures, Strategies and Outcomes." The purpose is to explore how movement cultures shape movement strategies, and outcomes. Scholarly work has increasingly recognized the varied nature of movement cultures. Movement cultures have roots both in and outside of institutions; are nurtured in both facilitative and hostile circumstances; and can provide solidarity links among local, national, and transnational movements. The particular character of a movement culture reflects and affects the overall strategies and specific tactics developed by activists as well as the outcomes aspired towards and arguably achieved. 
Thinking about the varied nature of different movement cultures generates a host of new questions, with attendant theoretical and methodological challenges for our field. Scholars interested in the symbolic, emotive dimensions of movements may ask: What primarily differentiates one movement culture from another? How are key components of movement cultures interrelated? For instance, what roles do art, emotions, historical narratives, and rituals play in nurturing movement identities? Do movement cultures operate differently in local, national, and transnational contexts? Do subcultures exist within movements? Scholars focusing upon agency and efficacy may ask: What roles do movement cultures play in formulating goals and strategies, framing, and choosing collective action tactics? How do different movement cultures contribute to varying perceptions of political opportunities? In what ways do activists deliberately and selectively draw upon discourses, emotions, collective identities, and norms in efforts to affect social change? Are there aspects of movement cultures that constrain activists from utilizing discursive and emotional opportunities to generate support among elites and bystanders? To what extent do movement cultures replicate or transform identities and power relations found beyond the movement? 
We invite submissions from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, history, political science, anthropology, communications, and cultural studies. We particularly encourage submissions using methodologies that, while underutilized, lend insight into these relationships and processes. 
The workshop will consist of four components: 
Plenary sessions featuring work by scholars active in the field of collective behavior and social movements; 
Concurrent panel sessions also featuring work and presentations by scholars active in the field; 
Thematic sessions on a variety of topics (e.g., emotional cultures and movement strategies; collective action and cultural outcomes, etc.). These sessions will be organized around short discussion statements rather than papers and are intended to promote equal participation and open-ended discussion. We are especially interested in sessions that are co-organized by graduate students and faculty members as well as sessions that bring together activists with researchers who study their movements; and 
A workshop Web site that will post workshop papers and discussion statements and promote online discussions among workshop participants.

A Method for Systematically Observating and Recording Collective Action (1999)
By David Schweingruber and Clark McPhail - public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/abstracts.html

Abstract
The collective action observation method is a method for systematically observing and recording collective action across temporary gatherings, such as political demonstrations. It uses trained observers, distributed across a gathering, who complete a code sheet during time-interval samples. The code sheet allows the observers to record participation in up to 50 elementary forms of collective action by members of seven actor categories. These elementary forms were inductively generated from extensive prior observations of temporary gatherings. The data collected provides a rich record of collective action across space and time. The method can also be used to code video records of temporary gatherings, such as television news reports.
This paper appeared in Sociological Methods and Research 27(4): 451-498.

Simulating Arcs and Rings in Gatherings (1999)
By Charles W. Tucker, David Schweingruber and Clark McPhail - public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/abstracts.html
Abstract
A theory of collective behavior must be able to account for simple and common collective phenomena such as arcs and rings. Using a computer simulation designed according to the principles of Perceptual Control Theory, based on a model of how a human being, as a living control system, engages in movement alone and with others in temporary gatherings, we produced a highly symmetrical ring that remotely corresponds to the non-simulated world because it is made up exclusively of individuals. When we simulated the pairs that compared to non-simulated gatherings, the outcome was an arc but was still unlike those we have observed in many temporary gatherings. When we introduced disturbances into the gatherings in the form of other simulated actors they more closely represented what we have observed in the non-simulated world of parks, plazas, state fairs and school yards as well as those at political, religious and sports rallies. We offer several proposals for future research.

This paper appeared in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 50:581-588.

Policing Protest in the United States: 1960-1995 (1998)
By Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber and John McCarthy - public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/abstracts.html

Summary
The United States has historically been committed to both the freedom to dissent and to "domestic tranquillity." This dual commitment has posed a paradox for police, who are charged with defending both First Amendment rights and social order. For the nation's first 190 years police settled this paradox in favor of social order and used force to suppress protest. The turning point in the development of a non-violent resolution to the paradox was the presence of repeated, sizable and disruptive protests in the civil rights and anti-war movements nationwide, but particularly in Washington, D.C., all of which took place against the background of a more than half-decade of widespread urban rioting. During this period, there was a clear change in policing practices from those based on "escalated force" to those which rely on "negotiated management." The development of the contemporary protest management system was affected by a series of commission investigations on riots and demonstrations, court decisions which developed a "public forum" doctrine, the evolution of a sophisticated permitting system and training programs for police officers. This protest management system has increased the frequency of demonstrations in the U.S. and decreased the proportion that are disorderly or violent. However, these commendable consequences are perhaps gained at a high cost. Because protest is less disruptive and because demonstrators increasingly rely on the media to present their grievances, political demonstration has become a less effective means of effecting social change.
This paper appeared as a chapter in Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies. 1998. Donatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter (ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Unpacking Protest Events: A Description Bias Analysis of Media Records with Systematic Direct Observations of Collective Action--The 1995 March for Life in Washington, D.C. (1998)
By Clark McPhail and David Schweingruber - public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/abstracts.html

Introduction
Despite the extensive use of newspaper archives to study protest events over past two decades, three methodological problems remain. We do not know if descriptions of the large protest events the media report accurately represent the actors and actions of which those events are composed; we do not know if the large events that the media report differ from the more frequent smaller events that are not reported; and, until recently we have not had a methodology by which to generate the basic descriptive information about protest events necessary to address and resolve the first two problems.
In this chapter we briefly discuss the history of efforts to unpack protest events so as to make these problems more empirically accessible. We describe a taxonomy of collective action used to develop an observation and recording system with which we have trained and deployed observers to systematically sample collective actions in protest events. We then report extensive data generated by this system in the study of one large protest event, the 1995 March for Life. We compare our empirical representation of this protest event with newspaper and television news reports of the same event. We briefly discuss the implications of our data for "the illusion of unanimity" which surrounds much theoretical and empirical work on protest events. Finally, we advocate both further research with our observation and recording system as well as more education of media workers on the complex and social nature of the protest events which are of interest to both social science and the media.

This paper appeared as a chapter in Acts of Dissent: New Developments in the Study of Protest. 1998. Dieter Rucht, Ruud Koopmans and Friedhelm Neidhardt (eds.). Berlin: Sigma Press.

A Computer Simulation of a Sociological Experiment (1995)
By David Schweingruber - public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/abstracts.html
Summary
The GATHERING program, which is based on the principles of perception control theory, is used to simulate a simplified form of McPhail and Wohlstein's (1986) collective locomotion experiment. The main finding of the experiment--that more reference signals in common resulted in greater coordination of collective behavior--was replicated in the simulation. The ability of the GATHERING program to reproduce collective behavior observed in the field and in an experiment provides evidence for the usefulness of the theory of individual behavior on which the program is based. The simulation reported here also demonstrates how a key hypothesis--that collective behavior is a result of similar or related reference signals in common--can work in some instances of collective behavior.
This paper appeared in Social Science Computer Review 13(3):351-359.

"Books = Money"?: Doing Money Work in a Door-to-Door Sales Organization
By David Schweingruber and Nancy Berns - public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/abstracts.html

Abstract
Previous sociological accounts of money have focused on meanings that attach to types of money but have given insufficient attention to how these meanings arise out of and are sustained by their use in interpersonal interactions. In this case study of a door-to-door sales company, a "cultural toolbox" conception of money meanings is used to show how managers and salespersons draw upon these meanings to get things done. We conceptualize the meanings of money at Enterprise as three overlapping circuits, each created by the attempt of some set of social actors to accomplish a particular interactional or intra-actional task. These circuits involve (1) the salesperson-sales prospect interaction, where the presentation of self takes center stage, (2) the managerial relationship between the salesperson and his or her manager, and (3) the dealers' efforts to motivate themselves to continue working. These circuits overlap one another and constrain one another. The result of this "money work" is not a set of money meanings that is shared by all actors in the situation. Instead, these interactions are characterized by contested attempts to frame the situation in terms of competing money (or non-money) meanings.

Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude: A Case Study of Motivation
By David Schweingruber and Nancy Berns - public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/abstracts.html

Abstract
This case study focuses on the use of a motivational philosophy called "positive mental attitude" (PMA) by door-to-door salespersons. While agreeing with Leidner's (1993) finding in her study of a similar company that PMA functions as a form of worker control, we show here how the flexibility of PMA makes it useful to salespersons, who draw upon it to deal with everyday work problems. Dealers draw upon their personal goals and values to form motivational foci--the content of the positive thinking they attempt to maintain--and attempt to keep these thoughts in mind through motivational practices learned during their training.

"If I Had A Hammer": The Changing Methodological Repertoire of Collective Behavior and Social Movements Research - John T. Crist and John D. McCarthy - infonex.com/mobilization/ArticleAbstracts/crist.html - Abstract
During the 1970's a theoretical shift occurred in social movement and collective behavior scholarship. Movement was away from grievances, relative deprivation, and interactional processes and towards organizational, structural and political factors. Dramatic changes in the research methodologies were also associated with the shift.

Oliver and Johnston. ... Collective Behavior and Social Movements
ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/PROTESTS/PROTESTS.HTM

American Sociological Association's Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements - Working Paper Series - 19 papers available for download - nd.edu/~dmyers/cbsm/

"The subject matter of sociology, simply stated, is the human group" - Introduction to the Collective Behavior Tradition - Abstract - This study evaluates the Collective Behavior approach that was the dominant approach in the studies of social movements from the 1920s to the 1970s. - cc.joensuu.fi/~muukkone/colbeabs.htm

Sociologists Lang and Lang have described the fashion process as "an elementary form of collective behavior, whose compelling power lies in the implicit judgment of an anonymous multitude" (Lang and Lang, 1961, p. 323). oregonstate.edu/instruct/aihm577/intro2b.htm