Crowd Events Research Articles

The Continuity of the English Revolution (The Prothero Lecture)

In our history, the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 are, at first sight, years of desperate, even meaningless change. It is difficult to keep pace with those crowded events or to see any continuity in them. At the time, men struggled from day to day and then sank under the tide. Even Oliver Cromwell, the one man who managed, with great agility, but spluttering all the time, to ride the waves, constantly lamented his inability to control them. When all was over, men looked back on the whole experience with disgust. It was a period of ‘blood and confusion’ from which no one had gained anything except the salutary but costly lesson of disillusion. How different from the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that straightforward aristocratic revolt against a king who had so considerately simplified the issues, and ensured a quick neat result, by seeking to convert the nation, like himself, to Catholicism!

Community leaders: A device for warranting versions of crowd events

This paper examines the use of the category ‘community leaders’ in media accounts of the ‘uprising’ or ‘riot’ which occured in Handsworth, England in September, 1985. The analysis concentrates on three features. First, it identifies a category-based attribute of ‘knowledgeability about the community’, which can be exploited in media accounts for warranting factual claims. Second, it shows ‘community leaders’ are taken to possess category-constitutive features entailing potency and the ability to initiate change in the community, which can be exploited in calls for remedial action by politicians. Furthermore, this change is characterised through a limited set of adjectives and metaphors from the ‘community repertoire’ (Potter and Reicher (1987)). Third, it examines the role of ‘community leaders’ in legitimating causal versions, which, in turn, form a basis for blamings. It is argued that the recurrent use of the category ‘community leaders’ in media and political discourse concerning crowd violence is partly a consequence of its provision of a powerful combination of a strongly inferential categorization and weak incumbency criteria - these make claims warranted by the category particularly resistant to criticism.

The Crowd in Contemporary Britain.

Foreword - Lord Scarman The Crowd in Context - George Gaskell and Robert Benewick Violent Disorders in Twentieth Century Britain - Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy, Tim Newburn and Ivan Waddington Street Life, Ethnicity and Social Policy - John Edwards, Robin Oakley and Sean Carey Front Line Supervision in the British Police Service - Michael Chatterton Flashpoints of Public Disorder - David Waddington, Karen Jones and Chas Chritcher The Peaceful Crowd - Robert Benewick and Robert Holton Crowd Solidarity and the Pope's Visit to Britain The Crowd and Community - Geraint Parry, George Moyser and Margaret Wagstaffe Context, Content and Aftermath Sources for the Study of Recent Crowd Events - John Stevenson

Audiences, actors and congress dramas: Crowd events in Bombay city in 1930

Audiences, actors and congress dramas: Crowd events in Bombay city in 1930

Psychological Theory as Intergroup Perspective: A Comparative Analysis of “Scientific” and “Lay” Accounts of Crowd Events

The central argument of this paper is that the popular success of crowd psychology is in part due to its correspondence with the perspective of outgroup members. This is supported by a comparative analysis of traditional crowd psychology and lay accounts of crowd events drawn from street disturbances in St. Pauls, Bristol, in 1980. Five basic types of error are identified in crowd psychology past and present. These are: (1) the abstraction of crowd episodes from their intergroup conflicts, (2) the failure to deal with underlying dynamic processes, (3) exaggeration of the anonymity of crowd members, (4) failure to understand the motives of crowd members, and (5) an overwhelming emphasis on the negativity of crowd events. Analysis of accounts of the St. Pauls disturbance reveals the centrality of these forms of error in outgroup members' versions of events. In contrast, crowd members tended to draw upon very different accounts which stress the meaningfulness of crowd action, solidarity, and positive emotional feelings. The implication of these findings for crowd psychology, the study of everyday accounts, and the genesis of ideological explanations is discussed.

Emergencies care for mass gatherings

PreviewPrimary care physicians and those involved in emergency medical services are frequently called upon to provide medical care at large crowd events. For the most rapid and effective emergency assistance—and to help ensure a positive outcome—on-site emergency medical teams are recommended by Dr Whipkey and associates. However, they stress the importance of having an overall plan for delivery of emergency care at mass gatherings, and their article serves as a guide through this essential planning process.

OFFENCES AND OFFENDERS IN FOOTBALL CROWD DISORDERS

aspects of the problem. The various reports and studies usually only give impressionistic accounts of offences and offenders. In the rare cases in which hard data are presented no distinction is made between the various kinds of offence committed. Offences are undiscriminatingly lumped together under the label Football Hooliganism1; control samples are seldom used. R. Ingham points out that even the Home Office working party on soccer hooliganism—a government body with ready access to all available data— have no figures at all to support their proposed policies (Ingham, Hall, Clarke, Marsh and Donovan, 1978, p. 80) and the Joint Sports Council/ Social Science Research Council Panel (1978) report that: During its discussion the Panel was constantly hindered by a lack of basic statistical information about hooligans and hooliganism. As a result it cannot be claimed that it has achieved a thorough understanding of the nature of the problem or of its extent. It appears that much of the data needed might already be available in police records, but not in a readily accessible or systematised form. The information that the Panel considers it useful to have includes the legal definitions of persons convicted, number of incidents of vandalism, age of offenders, etc. If we hope to deal effectively with the problem of football hooliganism definite information must be secured. This paper reports on a research project carried out with the following objectives: 1. To ascertain for what offences arrests are made in football crowd events. 2. To examine the characteristics of the offenders. 3. To compare them with the characteristics of offenders arrested for the same kind of offences in situations other than football matches. After the presentation of the data, a number of theoretical perspectives and popular stereotypes on football hooliganism are discussed in the light of the findings of the study.

Charles Samuel Myers, 1873-1946

Charles Samuel Myers was born in London on 13 March 1873. He died at Winsford in Somersetshire on 12 October 1946. Myers wrote the story of his own life, and it was published in the third volume ofA history of psychology in autobiography. In this notice, therefore, I shall not attempt to describe in detail and in full chronological sequence the crowded events of a very busy and diversified career. I shall attempt, rather, as well as I can, to pick out and comment upon what seem to have been some of the main formative influences in his life and critically to appraise the value of his achievements. In this I am aided, not only by a long and close personal association, but also by the detailed ‘Personal record’ which he wrote for the Royal Society.