Collective Behavor and Social Movements in the Postmodern Age: Looking Backward to Look Forward

Abstract

This article specifies several ways in which the collective behavior portion of Collective Behavior/Social Movement (CBSM) studies may be revitalized in the near future. The revitalization will occur because repertoires of extra-institutional challenge emerging in the postmodern age seem to fall outside the way social movements have been theorized in the last twenty-five years. Today's postmodern trends—increasing consumerism and affluence, individualism, demographic complexity, ideological diversity, global migration, and constant innovation in communications technology—have proliferated new social identities and deconstructed social identities imposed by the Other. As a result, postmodernity's complexities are multiplying the number of small, diverse, and diffuse groupings defining themselves in challenging ways outside the corridors of politics. Indeed these groupings may in the years to come recast what some see as a social movement society into a CBSM Society of diverse challenges to the institutional order.