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ARTHUR S. ALDERSON
WILLIAM A. CORSAROCROWDS AND RIOTS
Crowds are a ubiquitous feature of everyday life.
People have long assembled collectively to ob-
serve, to celebrate, and to protest various happen-
ings in their everyday lives, be they natural events,
such as a solar eclipse, or the result of human
contrivance, such as the introduction of machin-
ery into the production process. The historical
record is replete with examples of crowds func-
tioning as important textual markers, helping to
shape and define a particular event, as well as
strategic precipitants and carriers of the events
themselves. The storming of the Bastille and the
sit-ins and marches associated with the civil rights
movement are examples of crowds functioning as
both important markers and carriers of some larg-
er historical happening. Not all crowds function so
significantly, of course. Most are mere sideshows
to the flow of history. Nonetheless, the collective
assemblages or gatherings called crowds are ongo-
ing features of the social world and, as a conse-
quence, have long been the object of theorizing
and inquiry, ranging from the psychologistic ren-
derings of Gustav LeBon (1895) and Sigmund
Freud (1921) to the more sociological accounts of
Neil Smelser (1963) and Ralph Turner and Lewis
Killian (1987) to the highly systematic and empiri-
cally grounded observations of Clark McPhail and
his associates (1983, 1991).
Crowds have traditionally been analyzed as a
variant of the broader category of social phenome-
na called collective behavior. Broadly conceived,
collective behavior refers to group problem solv-
ing behavior that encompasses crowds, mass phe-
nomena, issue-specific publics, and social move-
ments. More narrowly, collective behavior refers
to ‘‘two or more persons engaged in one or more
behaviors (e.g., orientation, locomotion, gesticula-
tion, tactile manipulation, and/or vocalization)
that can be judged common or convergent on one
or more dimensions (e.g., direction, velocity tem-
po, and/or substantive content)’’(McPhail and
Wohlstein 1983, pp. 580–581). Implicit in both
conceptions is a continuum on which collective
behavior can vary in terms of the extent to which
its participants are in close proximity or diffused
in time and space. Instances of collective behavior
in which individuals are in close physical proximi-
ty, such that they can monitor one another by
being visible to, or within earshot of, one another,
are constitutive of crowds. Examples include pro-
test demonstrations, victory celebrations, riots,
and the dispersal processes associated with flight
from burning buildings. In contrast are forms of
collective behavior that occur among individuals
who are not physically proximate but who still
share a common focus of attention and engage in
some parallel or common behaviors without devel-
oping the debate characteristic of the public or the