Clark McPhail – författare

Crowd behavior is one of the most colorful but least understood forms of human social behavior. This volume is a major contribution to the field of collective behavior, with implications for social movement analysis.McPhail's critical assessment of the major theories of crowd behavior establishes that, whatever their particular limitations and strengths, all share a general and serious flaw: their explanations were developed without prior examination of the behaviors to be explained. Drawing on a wide range of empirical studies that include his own careful field work, the author offers a new characterization of temporary gatherings. He presents a life cycle of gatherings and a taxonomy of forms of collective behavior within gatherings, as well as combinations of these forms and gatherings into larger events, campaigns and waves. McPhail also develops a new explanation for various ways in which purposive actors construct collective actions.

Crowd behavior is one of the most colorful but least understood forms of human social behavior. This volume is a major contribution to the field of collective behavior, with implications for social movement analysis.McPhail's critical assessment of the major theories of crowd behavior establishes that, whatever their particular limitations and strengths, all share a general and serious flaw: their explanations were developed without prior examination of the behaviors to be explained. Drawing on a wide range of empirical studies that include his own careful field work, the author offers a new characterization of temporary gatherings. He presents a life cycle of gatherings and a taxonomy of forms of collective behavior within gatherings, as well as combinations of these forms and gatherings into larger events, campaigns and waves. McPhail also develops a new explanation for various ways in which purposive actors construct collective actions.

In a rare fusion of literary sensibility with psychological research, Norman N. Holland brings to light important data showing how personality in the fullest sense of character development and identity affects the way in which we read and interpret literature. This book will show that readers respond to literature in terms of their own lifestyle, character, personality, or identity. By such terms, psychoanalytic writers mean an individual's characteristic way of dealing with the demands of outer and inner reality. Each new experience develops the style, while the pre-existing style shapes each new experience.The sub-title of this book, Five Readers Reading, reflects the fact that the author, a distinguished literary critic, worked with five student readers, using a battery of psychological tests and extensive interviews to study the ways they reacted to classic short stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, and others. Combining his own interpretation of the stories with his understanding of the readers and their reactions, Holland derives four principles that inform literary response. He then goes on to show how these principles apply, not just to literary response, but to the way personality shapes any experience.The book carries Holland's previous studies of creation and responsive recreation forward to a major theoretical statement. He rejects the artificial idea that one must think of a text (or other event) as separate from its perceivers, illustrating the dynamics by which perceiver and perceived mutually create an experience. For critics and students of the psychology of human behavior, this is challenging and seminal reading.