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Since tourism is viewed as being a fast-growing industry, researchers are keen to investigate the negative impacts brought by an increasing number of visitors. As one of the derived social impacts, crowding has been proven to have a negative effect on tourists’ visiting experience. Thus, this study aims to understand tourists’ perception of crowding and its subsequent effect on their loyalty. A theme park in China called China Dinosaur Land, located in Jiangsu Province, is selected as the research site and 296 valid questionnaires are collected from the visitors. The results illustrate that psychological states, such as perceived crowding, emotional response, and coping behavior are much more complex than the study initially proposes; therefore, the hypotheses of the study are amended according to the research results.

The ubiquity of digitally intermediated interactions is changing the ways in which social interaction creates the cognitive and institutional underpinnings of new markets. Logics that define markets used to be localized, but they now emerge from crowds that span – and persist – across time and space. This article builds a theory of how crowds emerge and evolve in a way that influences the emergence of shared logics and helps explain why some markets are viable while others are not. What is revealed is that a crowd has a hidden niche structure that determines the fate of a new market.

This chapter integrates both structural and symbolic interactionist perspectives used in the study of collective behavior to provide a thorough examination of the campus culture and student–police interactions that precipitated a riot near James Madison University (JMU). While the analysis is anchored by Smelser’s (1971 [1962]) “value-added” model, it also accounts for cultural conditions common on college campuses. Importantly, the dynamics associated with this case may be similar to other riots – at sporting events, at religious processionals, etc. – occurring when authorities disrupt gatherings that have strong cultural resonance among participants. In these cases, attempts at disruption may be seen as an assault on norms strongly associated with a group’s identity. The study also used a unique data source – 39 YouTube videos posted of the riot event – that made it possible to capture the interactive and emergent quality of rioting behavior in real time from multiple vantage points.

A hockey riot occurred on June 15, 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Riots involve crowds. The presence of social media changes the spatial and temporal elements of the crowd, a process that contributes to online collective interpretations of social events, including riots. A key element of this process concerns the definition of the situation. Using Qualitative Media Analysis, we illustrate how the researcher of everyday life can retrieve and examine an accumulation of “definitions of situations” from social media, a process that provides insight into collective interpretations, including how online users made sense of the Vancouver riot. We begin with a short overview of the riot, briefly profile collective behavior in relation to the definition of the situation, and contextualize the importance of media in this process. We then examine what select posts made on social media can tell us about collective meaning making in relation to the Vancouver riot. We conclude by suggesting some directions for future research.

The fields of virtual reality and microworld simulation have advanced significantly in the past decade. Today, computer generated personas or agents that populate these worlds and interact with human operators are now used in many endeavors and avenues of investigation. A few of many example application areas are Hollywood animations for movies, cartoons, and advertising (von-Neuman & Morganstern, 1947); immersive industrial and safety training simulations (Fudenberg & Tirole, 2000; Silverman et al., 2001); distributed, interactive military war games and mission rehearsals (Johns & Silverman, 2001); and personal assistant agents to reduce technologic complexity for the general public, among others (Weaver, Silverman, Shin & Dubois, 2001).

In this chapter we explore the key contributions made by the Authority In Contention (AIC) Project and suggest paths for extension and development of new research and theorizing based on these contributions. We place the AIC project in historical context, discuss three important clusters of ideas suggested by broadening our understanding of authority (the concept of authority, the impact of multiple authority structures, and social control of challenges), discuss the implications for challenger tactics and outcomes, and conclude by calling for a fluid definition of what counts as a social movement.

Today Lionel Penrose is recognised as the co-author of one of the two leading indices of power in voting legislatures – a field of study that game theory in general, and cooperative game theory in particular, has been reclaiming from sociology and political science since the 1950s. The main claim of this paper is that Penrose developed his index so as to tackle questions that go vastly beyond the narrow domain of voting; namely, acute social issues during the Cold War such as the outburst and propagation of panics, the ideological susceptibility of populations, the escalation of military conflict and the successful installation of authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, by revisiting the history of the Penrose power index, the paper re-evaluates some of its key underlying assumptions: assumptions that have been heavily – and unfairly, as the paper argues – criticised over the last decade.