Editing Collective behavior (section)

====The social movement====
{{Main|Social movement}}
We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement. He identifies several types of these, among which are ''active'' social movements such as the French Revolution and ''expressive'' ones such as Alcoholics Anonymous.  An active movement tries to change society; an expressive one tries to change its own members.

The social movement is the form of collective behavior which satisfies least well the first definition of it which was offered at the beginning of this article.  These episodes are less fluid than the other forms, and do not change as often as other forms do.  Furthermore, as can be seen in the history of the labor movement and many religious sects, a social movement may begin as collective behavior but over time become firmly established as a social institution.

For this reason, social movements are often considered a separate field of sociology.  The books and articles about them are far more numerous than the sum of studies of all the other forms of collective behavior put together.  Social movements are considered in many Wikipedia articles, and an article on the field of social movements as a whole would be much longer than this essay.

The study of collective behavior spun its wheels for many years, but began to make progress with the appearance of Turner and Killian's "Collective Behavior"{{r|TurnerKillian1957}} and Smelser's ''Theory of Collective Behavior''.{{r|Smelser1962}} Both books pushed the topic of collective behavior back into the consciousness of American sociologists and both theories contributed immensely to our understanding of collective behavior.{{r|Locher2002|Miller2000}} Social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the late '60s and early '70s inspired another surge of interest in crowds and social movements.  These studies presented a number of challenges to the armchair sociology of earlier students of collective behavior.