Riotous Citizens

Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain

Paul Bagguley, Yasmin Hussain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317062912
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In 2001, Britain saw another summer of rioting in its cities, with violent uprisings in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. This book explores the reasons for those riots and explains why they mark a new departure in Britain's racial politics. Riots involving racial factors are nothing new in Britain. Historically violent uprisings could be blamed on heavy policing of predominantly minority communities, but the riots of 2001 were more complex. With elements of 1950s-style race riots and echoes of the 1980s riots which saw South Asians confronting the police as the adversary, the spread of unrest in 2001 was also clearly linked to poverty, unemployment and the involvement of the political far-right. Linking original empirical research conducted amongst the Pakistani community in Bradford with a sophisticated conceptual analysis, this book will be required reading for courses on race and ethnicity, social movements and policing public order.

Chapter 1

Theorizing Crowds, Riots and Public Disorder

Introduction

Attempts to explain and understand riots have a long and dubious history. We begin our discussion with the emergence of attempts to construct explanations of crowd behaviour in the nineteenth century by Tarde (1969; 2001), and especially Le Bon (2002). These are marked by a deeply conservative bias, and largely lack empirical evidence to support their principal claims. They are worthy of consideration for several reasons. They were and still are influential on some sociological and social psychological accounts of crowd behaviour and riots, and bear a close similarity to many of the popular accounts of riots produced by politicians and others. Finally, there have been some calls recently for a resurrection of their ideas (for example, Borch, 2005; 2006; Toews, 2003).

We then examine how these ideas made their way into early American sociology and social psychology. This is the first wave of American work on the crowd and public disorder. Up to this point much of the sociological writing on the crowd was characterized by one especially surprising element: the lack of empirical evidence. The second wave of American sociological work is marked by a systematic attempt to gather data on crowd behaviour. It is at this point that genuine theoretical advances in the understanding and explanation of crowd behaviour begin to be made, in the light of empirical research designed specifically to examine the theoretical claims. Our discussion of the American literature ends with the third wave of work, which develops principally in response to the widespread riots in American cities in the 1960s. For the first time these events presented American sociologists with the opportunity to gather first-hand data about public disorder in a wide range of disturbances. Furthermore, the theoretical consequences of these research efforts were to finally throw off the shackles of the legacy of nineteenth-century attempts to theorize the crowd and collective violence.

Our discussion of theories of crowds and collective violence then considers the contributions of social historians. Authors such as Rude and Thompson transformed the view of the crowd in both industrial and pre-industrial Europe, and sociologists saw that their work cast doubt on the accepted classical sociological views of the crowd. We then move on to consider the major British efforts to understand public disorder that emerged in relation to the urban riots of the early 1980s. Many of these analyses emphasize the social structural position of ethnic minorities in Britain in their explanations of riots. Other approaches were mostly social psychological in persuasion and produced a distinctive British social psychology of public disorder, as exemplified in the work of Stephen Reicher and his colleagues (for example, Drury and Reicher, 2000; 2005; Reicher, 1984; 1996; 2001).

Reifying the Crowd

Before considering these theories in detail, we want to outline some general issues that affect many of these analyses of riots and crowd behaviour. Whether the approaches are North American or European in origin, we believe that they often share an overarching problem: an inherent tendency to reify the crowd. Whilst essentialism has become the central theoretical and methodological trap to be avoided at all costs in the humanities and the social sciences (Werbner, 1997), we do not feel that this is the only problematic issue with many academic analyses of riots and crowds. Rather we feel that the problem is one of a process of reification in the execution of these analyses that leads to essentialism. The problems that arise from the reification of riots and collective violence are both analytical and normative. Analytically, reified accounts fail to provide adequate explanations, whilst normatively they privilege the views of the powerful over those of the powerless (Keith, 1993: 81).

To essentialize is to suggest a necessary constitutive quality to a group or person that is timeless and unbounded. Consequently, it disguises and distorts social relations, processes and identities (Werbner, 1997: 228); hence the risk that any kind of analysis that seeks to speak of categories or groups sharing a characteristic may be essentializing. Here Werbner suggests that the distinction between objectification and reification becomes central. Many groups, through processes of constructing a collective identity, effectively engage in a process of objectification. Through this process, imaginary ethnic or religious communities are situationally constructed and treated as real, as out there for people to relate to. In contrast, reification is treated as something having characteristics or a reality that it does not in fact have (Werbner, 1997).

Whilst people in the crowd may talk as if the crowd had a clearly defined collective identity, as if it were acting in concert, as if there was consensus within it, then they are objectifying their beliefs and their impressions. However, the rather dull reality is that there is no magical collective identity that all are encompassed by, but rather an aggregate of groups, individuals and processes. The beliefs and actions within the crowd come from a diversity of positions, both before the gathering, during the gathering and afterwards, when it is remembered and talked about in situations such as interviews with social scientists. As a result we should pay more attention to this diversity of positions from which the participants in the crowd objectify themselves, and how they project their thoughts, feelings and beliefs onto the crowd as a whole. However, when we treat these as data, as an unmediated truth about the crowd, what it was thinking and doing and why, then we risk reification. When we pursue this argument a stage further and see all crowds as bearing the same formations, characteristics or patterns, then we risk the danger of essentializing them, of seeing all crowds as sharing some kind of essential characteristic or set of characteristics. This is precisely what we believe many analyses of riots have done. This does not mean there is nothing to learn from these studies – on the contrary many of them recognize the diversity of the crowd, and the role of interactive processes in generating behaviour – but ultimately they all constitute the object of their analyses as the reified crowd. They see the various crowds they have studied as all sharing essential characteristics. Precisely what these are and how they are generated varies from author to author, but they are there nevertheless. The consequence of reifying the crowd has the effect of failing to appreciate that: ‘… the range and variation of individual and social behaviours in which people engage in temporary gatherings, and the ongoing alternation between these different forms of behaviour, requires a full measure of conscious, purposive, and intelligent effort by participants’ (McPhail, 1991: 20).

Furthermore, many, in seeking to emphasize the common patterns and traits of the crowd, be they collective identity or common processes or forms of action, seek a coherent single description of what they believe ‘really happened’. However, the actors in the crowd are in a state of extreme narrative indeterminacy; they think they know what has happened (they probably do not, given that they are relying on rumour and have only experienced events from one position and possibly only for part of the time of the riot), they think they know what is happening, and they do not know what is going to happen next. In retrospect, eye-witnesses to such events naturalize these sequences into a logical and intelligible order. Building upon these with the benefit of hindsight, analysts come along and generalize them into patterns of disorder. This is not to deny that there is some pattern, some structure and some degree of collective purpose. The police, of course, have tightly regulated procedures for dealing with such situations, which are one obvious source of patterning. Within the crowd there are degrees of coherence, but these are multiple and mutate during the event.

Projections of the Bourgeois Mind: Nineteenth-century Views of the Crowd

The first contributions to systematic understandings of crowd behaviour can be found in the work of Le Bon, Sighele, Fournial and Tarde, but of these only the work of Le Bon and to a much lesser extent Tarde are still referred to (van Ginneken, 1992). If it were not for the subsequent and indeed contemporary pernicious effects of Le Bon’s views of the crowd, they would not be worth even a footnote. However, many of the themes of their discussions dominate politicians’ and journalists’ comments about collective violence today. In some cases the residue of their efforts still pollutes what Michael Keith (1993: 80) termed ‘potentially dangerous sources of academic charlatanism’.

Le Bon’s book on the crowd has been widely translated and was hugely influential upon the development of European fascism. Le Bon’s ideas themselves were largely derived from the earlier work of Sighele, the historian Taine, and Tarde. Whilst the Italian Sighele was a socialist whose ideas on the crowd were used by lawyers to argue that those accused of offences during political riots were not really responsible for their actions, Le Bon used his arguments, without due recognition, to criticize the socialist crowds of late nineteenth-century France (van Ginneken, 1992). This illustrates how these ideas about the crowd are not necessarily related to any particular political perspective, but through the efforts of Le Bon have been most strongly associated with right-wing ideologies.

Le Bon sees the emergence of crowds as rooted in two features of what contemporary sociologists would call modernity. The first is the decline of traditional sources of authority, such as religion, and the second is the emergence of new forms of thought derived from science (Le Bon, 2002: ix–x). He writes of crowds developing a ‘collective mind’ oriented towards a common goal, such that each individual’s self-conscious personality dissolves within it (Le Bon, 2002: 2). This is what Le Bon terms an organized or psychological crowd:

Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation (Le Bon, 2002: 4).

This is the core of what has been subsequently termed the transformation hypothesis (McPhail, 1991: 13–20). Under the influence of the crowd mind Le Bon contends that unconscious emotions come to the fore to the detriment of self-conscious rationality. In this way he compared the crowd participant to someone who had been hypnotized. Furthermore, in the anonymity of the crowd, individuals can throw off their self-control and behave in quite unrestrained ways. Consequently, those in the crowd become suggestible and influenced by the contagion of ideas and actions that characterize the crowd. These include: impulsiveness, irritability, credulousness, suggestibility, exaggeration, intolerance and conservatism. Yet he also saw crowds as having a moralizing role. In a manner typical of nineteenth-century European intellectual racism, Le Bon compared crowds, presumably of European men, to the behaviour of women, children and ‘savages’ (Le Bon, 2002: 10).

Whilst Le Bon is by far the best known and influential of the late nineteenth-century writers on the crowd, it is now widely accepted that he was little more than a highly skilled popularizer of ideas developed by others (Nye, 1975; van Ginneken, 1992). One who was influential on Le Bon and vice versa was Tarde who applied his theories of imitation to the crowd. Imitating but not citing Le Bon, he argued in a passage that was to be widely imitated by later North American writers that:

A mob is a strange phenomenon. It is a gathering of heterogeneous elements, unknown to one another; but as soon as a spark of passion, having flashed out from one of these elements, electrifies this confused mass, there takes place a sort of sudden organization, a spontaneous generation. This incoherence becomes cohesion, this noise becomes a voice, and these thousands of men crowded together soon form but a single animal, a wild beast without a name, which marches to its goal with an irresistible finality. The majority of these men had assembled out of pure curiosity, but the fever of some of them soon reached the minds of all, and in all of them there arose a delirium (Tarde, 2001: 323).

The work of Le Bon, Tarde and those like them is now widely seen as the expression of bourgeois intellectuals feeling under threat from the rising socialist movements of the time. As a French conservative, Le Bon was also highly critical of the crowds of the French Revolution and much of his book is littered with sometimes inaccurate descriptions of French crowd behaviour (van Ginneken, 1992; Nye, 1975). Aside from this normative critique of Le Bon, there are other important weaknesses in his work. Crowds are rarely if ever composed of socially uprooted anonymous individuals. Typically they are aggregates of sub-groups of friends or even relatives (Aveni, 1977; McPhail, 1991). The idea that social unrest leads to a loss of self-control has been similarly contradicted by the evidence. When people are confronted with novel situations, they normally exercise their typical forms of decision making and self-control (McPhail, 1991). The theory of social contagion and suggestibility operating within the crowd has also been widely challenged (Couch, 1968). Furthermore, McPhail suggests that contagion and suggestibility are based on faulty reasoning, as the underlying psychological mechanisms are inferred from the behaviours they are seeking to explain, so that the arguments are tautologous (McPhail, 1991: 15). Finally, how exceptional are crowds? As Couch and McPhail are at pains to point out, many of the behaviours that occur within crowds are extensions of routine behaviour. However, in those instances such as riots that involve violent conflict with the police, they clearly are not routine. Nevertheless, such behaviour does have a social patterning and rationale to it, as has been most clearly demonstrated by the contributions of the studies of US riots in the 1960s (McPhail, 1971), and the work of social historians (Rude, 1981; Thompson, 1991).

The First Wave of American Theories of the Crowd

The two key figures in the first wave of theorizing about the crowd in American sociology were Park (Park and Burgess, 1924) and Allport (1924). Whilst both were influenced by the earlier European writers such as Le Bon, and to a much lesser degree Sighele and Tarde, they took their ideas in rather different directions. Park developed a more sociological account of the crowd, apparently similar to the ideas of Le Bon, whilst Allport saw the characteristics of the crowd in more psychological terms, being quite critical of Le Bon.

Allport sees the crowd as a group of individuals who are responding to some common object. Subsequently their emotions and actions are aroused by leaders and others in the crowd, amplifying their response to the common object of attention. He sees their responses as grounded in what he calls ‘prepotent drives’ such as fear, defence of the family, and so on. Consequently, he sees crowds largely in terms of some kind of violent struggle. The individuals in the crowd are acting as they would alone; it is simply that the crowd situation amplifies their feelings and actions. Although crowd members are suggestible, this must relate strongly to their prepotent drives. As those in the crowd have similar drives, then this is the real origin of crowd behaviour, rather than any social factors. Allport is thus very critical of Le Bon’s suggestion that some kind of collective crowd mind explains their behaviour. He presents an alternative explanation as follows in terms of a circular stimulation ‘reverberating’ between individuals (Allport, 1924: 301).

In contrast to this, Park’s approach to the crowd follows that of Le Bon’s more closely, although he was also influenced by Sighele and Tarde. Park wrote of the significance of ‘social unrest’, where the unrest of an individual passes to others through social interaction becoming a collective, social phenomenon. This signifies the break-up of established social relationships and the possibility of the creation of new ones (Park and Burgess, 1924: 866–7). In comparison to a public that he sees as engaging in rational debate, the crowd for Park is irrational and impulsive, ‘milling’ to produce a ‘collective impulse’ (Park and Burgess, 1924: 869). Throughout his writings, Park cites and quotes Le Bon’s claims with approval, and for the most part his analysis of the crowd and its effects upon those within it does not depart from that of Le Bon.

The earliest and most sustained attempt to understand riots sociologically in an elaborated and systematic way lies in the work of Herbert Blumer; however, his arguments bear the mark of many continuities from the contributions of Le Bon and similar writers. McPhail (1991) shows how Blumer’s contributions were elaborations on the work of Park (Park and Burgess, 1924), whose efforts were themselves based upon those of Le Bon and Tarde. Blumer saw riots as an instance of crowd behaviour that he termed ‘elementary forms of collective behaviour’. He sees this as the simplest form of social action, even animalistic and instinctive in cause. Its causes are seen as being situations where social disruption has led to a lack of normal social rules operating. Much of Blumer’s account of elementary forms of collective behaviour is strikingly reminiscent of Tarde’s account of imitation. Here as elsewhere in Blumer’s work, Tarde’s influence is exerted through Blumer’s reliance upon Park’s earlier efforts.

Blumer sees a riot as emerging: ‘spontaneously and is not due to pre-established understandings or traditions’ (Blumer, 1969: 68). Although he often describes crowds in negative terms, for example, as an ‘excited mob’ (Blumer, 1969: 68), they still exhibit definite patterns of social behaviour that, although they are not routine, can still be said to be in a certain sense a primitive or natural form of social order:

We use the term ‘elementary collective behaviour’ to refer to the incipient and primitive forms of human interaction … They are an antecedent condition to crowd behaviour, social unrest, collective excitement, crazes and manias, public discussion, mass behaviour and social movements … They represent basic forms of group interaction that are natural and indigenous in human association (Blumer, 1969: 70).

The idea that there is something instinctive, animalist or inhuman about elementary collective behaviour runs right the way through Blumer’s discussion, effectively naturalizing crowd behaviour rather than explaining it in social terms. This is evident in his account of his core idea of ‘circular reaction’, which is essentially action based on a simple response to other individuals’ behaviour without any conversation, interpretation or reflection. It generates collective behaviour based on imitation rather than shared understandings or rules. Consequently, people behave in similar imitative ways, and they become more alike rather than different to one another, like a herd of cattle:

One sees this process clearly at work amidst cattle in a state of alarm. The expression of fear through bellowing, breathing, and movements of the body, induces the same feeling in the case of other cattle who, as they in turn express their alarm, intensify this emotional state in one another (Blumer, 1969: 70).

So people in a crowd are no different from a herd of bellowing stampeding cattle! Blumer suggests that elementary collective behaviour arises when the normal routines of social life are disrupted, and where people are sensitized to each other’s mental states. However, he describes the behaviour involved as ‘random’, ‘erratic’ and ‘aimless’ (Blumer, 1969: 73). Yet people are also emotionally excited, alarmed and suggestible, feeling an urge to act. Thus Blumer sees the crowd as moving from simple milling behaviour expressing a common mood to a state of collective excitement around a common object of attention where they are so emotionally excited that they are more willing to break normal social rules. At this stage social contagion may emerge where the irrational spread of an action may rapidly occur. In this way common patterns of behaviour emerge in crowds.

Blumer then goes on to discuss the characteristics of a range of types of crowd. For our purposes his account of the acting crowd is most significant, and he defines this as an aggressive crowd whose actions are oriented to a specific objective. Such crowds are formed initially by: ‘the occurrence of some exciting event which catches the attention and arouses the interest of people’ (Blumer, 1969: 79). As a result of this he suggests that individuals lose their self-control, and the whole crowd behaves in a similar manner as they are all stimulated by the same object and their previously repressed impulses drive them all to act in the same way. Through the subsequent process of milling, the mood of the crowd is disseminated amongst all of those present, and they come to define a common object of their aggression. The acting crowd is above all spontaneous, emerging momentarily as a product of the impulses aroused amongst its members.

As such it is not a society or a cultural group. Its action is not preset by accepted conventions, established expectations, or rules. It lacks other important marks of society such as an established social organisation, an established division of labour, a structure of established roles, a recognised leadership, a set of norms, a set of moral regulations, an awareness of its own identity … (Blumer, 1969: 80).

Individuals in such crowds have lost their critical faculties and capacity for self-control, responding immediately to events around them without reflection or moral judgement. He excludes from this those individuals who may be present, but not take part in the actions of the crowd. Those who do participate are likely to experience a sense of power and invincibility (Blumer, 1969: 81).

There is in Blumer’s account the most extreme kind of reification of the crowd. It is perceived, classified and considered as a pure social form, as a purely meaningless mass of human bodies and actions. Furthermore, it is discussed from a very particular normative perspective that denies the crowd any meaning, rationality or volition that in effect de-humanizes the participants. It is in no way or form a sociological account of the crowd. The psychological model underlying Blumer’s pronouncements essentializes the participants down to mere base animal instincts. The consequence is to wrench the crowd from any social, cultural or political context.

There is indeed a central contradiction at the heart of Blumer’s argument. Although he wants to emphasize the imitative, instinctual and animalistic character of circular reaction, many of the characteristics of the crowd must of necessity involve interpretation. For instance, if people are emotionally excited, they must have interpreted the situation as one that is emotionally disturbing. Furthermor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Theorizing Crowds, Riots and Public Disorder
• 2 The Riots of 2001: An Overview and Comparison of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford
• 3 Accounts of How the Bradford Riot Began
• 4 Diversity, Motivations and Targets: The Dynamics of a Crowd of Citizens
• 5 ‘Take Me to Your Leader’: Reflections on Power, ‘Race’ and the Politics of Rioting
• 6 ‘Outsiders in Our Own Country’: The Interpersonal Consequences of Rioting
• 7 Disciplined and Punished: Strategic Repression and the Shaming of a Community
• 8 Citizenship, Generation and Ethnic Identity
• 9 The Emergence of Community Cohesion
• Conclusion: Another Famous Victory?
• Bibliography
• Index