The social dimension in relative deprivation

Abstract

Abstract It is now commonly accepted that in the past social psychologists have been na’ive in assuming that generalizations arising from research on individuals’ psychological processes may be used to explain, without difficulty, social behaviour in social contexts. Recent developments, particularly in Europe, have emphasized the importance of analysing social psychological phenomena in ways which respect their social nature (e.g. Tajfel 1984). This chapter takes relative deprivation theory as a case in point, comparing ‘individualistic’ with ‘social’ approaches in two rather different respects. The first involves the obvious comparison between individualistic measures and apparently social measures of relative deprivation, that is egoistic and fraternalistic relative deprivation respectively. The second entails the more radical argument that relative deprivation theory will only achieve really substantial predictive and explanatory power when it succeeds in moving towards a genuinely social perspective such as one incorporating assessments of widespread and shared beliefs in the populations in question.The central idea in relative deprivation is that militant collective behaviour is better explained by reference to people’s sense or feelings of deprivation rather than by their absolute level of deprivation. Historians and political scientists have employed the concept to account for a variety of episodes of collective action from the French Revolution to the urban riots in America in the 1960s, having found that purely economic accounts were insufficient. Over and above such considerations people’s feelings of despair, discontent, and frustration arising from changed economic circumstances, comparisons with others or the perceptions of intolerable discrepancies between what they had and what they wanted, had to be recognized. This development is an acceptance of the fact that a satisfactory explanation must include a psychological dimension. So Hobsbawm and Rude (1970) wrote about the Captain Swing riots in Britain in the nineteenth century: