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This article presents additional thoughts about collective behavior with reference to two papers on the Kent State University incident which papers were written as applications of theory of collective behavior. The author developed this theory to establish general analytic relations among a set of variables that he had discovered to be important in the genesis of hundreds of episodes of collective behavior. One of the most original and strongest aspects of the theory was its emphasis on the behavior of agents of social control as determinants of the timing, content, direction, and outcomes of episodes of collective behavior. The author stressed social-structural aspects, but he underplayed the importance of psychological mechanisms in the dynamics of episodes of collective behavior. In this article, the author developed a few new thoughts about the psychological and organizational characteristics of collective behavior in reading the two papers. These thoughts are developed under three headings, strategies to fix blame and assign illegitimacy in episodes of conflict; the relations among different agents of social control as these influence the development of an episode; and shifts in the definition of the situation, and the implication of these shifts for the application of the value-added model.

This paper employs a cybernetic model of a religious symbol system to explain the competition among Rabbinists, Hasidim, and Messianists in the Jewish communities of eighteenth-century Poland. Hasidism's ability to attract adherents is explained by the great flexibility of its constitutive belief, ‘communion with God’ when compared with Rabbinic Torah or the Messianic belief in the ‘lifting of sparks.’ This flexibility is traced through all levels of the cybernetic hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical activism in sociology can be explained as reaction against developments in American society, university structure, social theory and the American Sociology Association. Beginning in 1967 with a controversy over a Vietnam resolution, it has grown to include organized opposition through the Sociology Liberation Movement and the separation of the Black Sociologists Association. The assumptions behind sociology as an academic field and an occupation, have been and are being tested and found erroneous by an increasing number of sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the significance of women's movement in social history. The women's movement has given the society a sense of right to have women's interest represented in sociology, rather than receiving as authoritative the interests traditionally represented in a sociology put together by men. This article aims to explore women's perspective as a radical critique of sociology. From the point of view of women's place, the values assigned to different aspects of the world are changed. The world is taken as a model as it appears from the point of view of the afternoon soap opera. Supplementing sociology merely extends the authority of existing sociological procedures. The author suggests more reorganization which changes the relation of the sociologist to the object of her knowledge and changes also her problematic. According to the author the point to be considered is that bow sociology is thought, has been based on and built up within the male social universe. There is a difficulty of a disjunction between how women find and experience the world beginning though not necessarily from their place and their concepts and theoretical schemes available to think about it in.

This article applies the theoretical model of collective behavior developed by Neil J. Smelser to data derived from diverse sources dealing with events at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. In particular, it focuses on a period of two and a half hours on May 4, 1970, as it looks at events leading to and surrounding the killing of four undergraduate students and the wounding of nine other students. Smelser's system of thought is based on a set of concepts and propositions which can be used to order all variations in collective behavior. The five determinants of collective behavior are structural conduciveness, structural strain, growth of a generalized hostile belief, mobilization of participants for action and operation of social control. Smelser defines hostile outbursts as mobilization for action under a hostile belief. The analysis of the spread of a hostile outburst falls into two categories. Smelser says that any hostile outburst can be looked at as having a real and derived phase. The real or initial phase results from the build-up on conditions prior to the beginning of the outburst. In the derived phase, however, the hostility may become unrelated to conditions giving rise to the initial outburst.

This article examines the salient and relevant events surrounding the May 4, 1970 killings of four Kent State University students in Ohio that vividly illuminates mechanisms of social control employed by town officials. On Friday evening, May 1, 1970, the day after President Richard Nixon publicly ordered the U.S. troops into Cambodia, a crowd of youths in downtown Kent, Ohio, expressed their frustration over the broadening of the Vietnam War and broke windows at fifteen business places, setting into motion events which culminated in deaths of Kent State students on May 4. This hostile outburst in Kent was perceived as the planned action of a subversive and revolutionary movement, threatening foundations of the social order. But events which culminated in the Kent killings did not actually constitute a revolutionary movement. The crisis began as a spontaneous protest against the Cambodia invasion, and involved only a minute percentage of Kent State's 20,000 students. Most of youths involved were not revolutionaries. But the radical rhetoric of a few individuals and outbursts of violence led frightened townsmen and their officials to perceive the students' protest as the opening shots of a violent revolution, and to act accordingly.

The article describes the author's current research in comparative sociological analysis. The author's current research interests and plans focus around several concrete topics, which tend to converge around some common theoretical problems. This reorientation raises a series of general problems to the clarification of which some of the works undertaken in the researches enumerated above may make some contribution. First, there is the problem of the place of these societal goals in the universe of goals and wishes of the individual. Second, there is the problem of how and by whom such goals are crystallized and formulated. Among the concrete topics of research are: a reexamination of the relations between tradition, change and modernity; and an analysis of process of change in different types of micro-societal and macro-societal settings. The analytical assumptions or orientations of the said researches tend to merge into a broader analytical framework, the focus of which is the importance of the charismatic dimension in the process of institution-building, of the location of this dimension in the "center" or centers of society, and of the crucial importance of these dimensions in processes of institution-building and of social change and transformation alike.

The larger movement for racial equality in the United States has experienced considerable structural and ideological differentiation in the past decade, largely as a consequence of disagreement over tactics to be employed. Two direct-action sub-movements, the southern sit-ins and the urban riots, best illustrate the divergence with the former committed to tactical nonviolence and the latter to violent means of effecting social change. To regain the momentum lost through this differentiation, certain leaders must reorganize a major part of the black population around a tactical approach that acknowledges both the peculiar needs and temper of the potential protestors, and the nature and tolerance level of the system it seeks to change. Responding to these criteria, the approach may develop in the form of an extremely militant but basically nonviolent tactic of social disruption, combining all but the most violent techniques used to date by equal rights activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 1963 nonviolent mass demonstration for civil rights at Durham, N.C., is here described on the basis of interviews with participants, businessmen, and political figures. A utility model to help account for the personnel, form, and site of such a protest includes the processes of evolution, contagion, and reinforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concept of state among the ancient Aztecs. In this article the author draws primarily upon the wealth of documents recorded in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Although the historical sources provide material for studies of a wide range of Aztec institutions, this article concerns the effect of a radical political innovation, carried through in 1428 in the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, upon the Aztec conception of the state. The subject is important for sociological theory since it brings into relief the dynamic and heterogeneous character of Aztec society. The early Spanish chronicles recognized the mixed aristocratic and democratic political institutions of the various Nahuatl city-states. Only the Aztecs, who arrived late in the Valley of Mexico, undertook any radical reform of Nahuatl society. The mystical-military conception of the state was an outstanding means by which the Aztec community that in 1428 was an exploited tributary of Azcapotzalco became within a century the supreme ruler of Middle America.