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Social Change

Park conceived of the process of social change as involving a three-stage sequence, or "natural history," beginning with dissatisfactions and the result- ing disturbances and social unrest, leading to mass movements, and ending in new accommodations within a restructured institutional order. Social unrest "represents at once a breaking up of the established routine and a preparation for new collective action." Crowds as agents of unrest were, as Park said in a discussion of the French social psychologist Le Bon, "not merely any group brought together by the accident of some chance excitement." They were "the emancipated masses whose bonds of loyalty to the old order had been broken." The crowd, in Park's view, is an elementary and rudimentary social formation. It "has no tradition. . . . It has therefore neither symbols, cere- monies, rites, nor ritual; it imposes no obligations and creates no loyalties.'' Yet religious sects and social movements have their origin in the excitement of the crowd. To the extent that leaders emerge from previously amorphous crowds, ephemeral and unreflective actions give way to more stable and per- manent forms of organization. The leaders of emerging social movements or religious organizations impose social control on the previously unstructured collective behavior of the crowd, thereby transforming it into an audience. "The crowd does not discuss and hence it does not reflect. It simply 'mills.' " In contrast, "in the public, interaction takes the form of discussion. Individuals tend to act upon one another critically; issues are raised and parties form. Opinions clash and thus modify and moderate one another." When un- thinking crowds are transformed into reflective publics, there emerge new social entities that may, if conditions are propitious, make successful claims which break the cake of custom and thus prepare the way for novel accom- modations characterizing a new social order.

The notion of "natural history" conceived as a sequence of stages is central not only to Park's account of the rise of social movements but to many other of his analyses as well. He attempted to write a natural history of the press, "not a record of the fortunes of individual newspapers, but an account of the evolution of the newspaper as a social institution. He inspired his student Lyford Edwards to write a natural history of the stages of revolution, with each stage inevitably triggering the emergence of the next. Above all, his urban sociology is anchored in his conceptualization of various stages in the process of invasion and succession through which various groups carve out their ecological niches, their natural areas, in the urban environment.

From Coser, 1977:362-363.