1st Edition
Crowds in the 21st Century Perspectives from contemporary social science
Crowds in the 21st Century presents the latest theory and research on crowd events and crowd behaviour from across a range of social sciences, including psychology, sociology, law, and communication studies. Whether describing the language of the crowd in protest events, measuring the ability of the crowd to empower its participants, or analysing the role of professional organizations involved in crowd safety and public order, the contributions in this volume are united in their commitment to a social scientific level of analysis.
The crowd is often depicted as a source of irrationality and danger – in the form of riots and mass emergencies. By placing crowd events back in their social context – their ongoing historical and proximal relationships with other groups and social structures – this volume restores meaning to the analysis of crowd behaviour. Together, the studies described in this collection demonstrate the potential of crowd research to enhance the positive experience of crowd participants and to improve design, planning, and management around crowd events.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.
Foreword David Canter
1. Contextualising the crowd in contemporary social science John Drury and Clifford Stott
2. The Madrid bombings and popular protest: misinformation, counter-information, mobilisation and elections after ‘11-M’ Cristina Flesher Fominaya
3. Public order policing in South Yorkshire, 1984–2011: the case for a permissive approach to crowd control David P. Waddington
4. Post G20: The challenge of change, implementing evidence-based public order policing James Hoggett and Clifford Stott
5. The crowd as a psychological cue to in-group support for collective action against collective disadvantage Martijn van Zomeren and Russell Spears
6. Crowd disasters: a socio-technical systems perspective Rose Challenger and Chris W. Clegg
7. Part of the solution, not the problem: the crowd's role in emergency response Jennifer Cole, Montine Walters and Mark Lynch
8. The experience of collective participation: shared identity, relatedness and emotionality Fergus Neville and Stephen Reicher
9. On modelling the influence of group formations in a crowd Gerta Köster, Michael Seitz, Franz Treml, Dirk Hartmann and Wolfram Klein
10. Contributions of social science to agent-based models of building evacuation B. E. Aguirre, Sherif El-Tawil, Eric Best, Kimberly B. Gill and Vladimir Fedorov
11. Mass action and mundane reality: an argument for putting crowd analysis at the centre of the social sciences Stephen Reicher
Biography
John Drury is Reader in Social Psychology at the University of Sussex, UK. His research interests include mass emergency behaviour and empowerment in collective action. He has carried out research on crowd behaviour at the July 7th London bombings, anti-poll tax and anti-roads protests, and collective responses to the 2010 Chile earthquake among other crowd events. His work on collective resilience in crowds has been used by a number of organizations including the Department of Health. He convenes a module on the psychology of crowd safety management at Buckinghamshire New University, High Wycombe, UK.
Clifford Stott is Principal Research Fellow in Security and Justice in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, UK.
