| Inspired by the popular mobilizations that erupted in the late 1960s, the study of social movements has produced an extensive sub-discipline within the field of sociology. The same, however, cannot be said about the study of mass mobilizations such as riots. In this dissertation, I argue that this lack of academic interest in such mass mobilizations as a field of study is due to the role that the normative designation of legitimacy---the ability of a movement to achieve social and/or political change---has played in their analyses or lack thereof. Affected by this normativity, collective behavior that either failed to achieve concrete social change or considered an act of deviance has been overlooked by both the sociology of social movements and the sociology of crime and deviance; two subfields under whose analytical purview this social phenomena falls. In light of this fact, I propose a new cultural sociological approach that unifies mass mobilization analysis. In particular, a contribution is made to the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology (Alexander, and Smith, 2004) which, despite placing culture at the heart of its analysis has, thus far, overlooked the micro-interactional level at which meaning making processes determine the textures of social life. Central to this new cultural sociological approach is a combination of 'thick' ethnographic description (Geertz, 1973), semiological analysis (Barthes, 1968) and contextualization within an 'eventful sociology' (Sewell, 2005). I then demonstrate the effectiveness of this new cultural sociological approach to the study of mass mobilizations through a comparative analysis of two such illegitimate enactments---Occupy Wall Street and the 2011 English Riots. The chapter on Occupy Wall Street presents the nuanced struggles of a mobilization that failed to consummate due to its contradictory relationship to structures of legitimacy. The chapter on the 2011 English Riots shows how, contrary to widespread condemnation, these popular uprisings were an act of solidarity. In conclusion, I discuss a common alienation experienced by the participants of both Occupy and the English Riots and reiterate the importance of developing new tools that can accommodate the analysis of contemporary mass mobilizations with characteristics that cannot be captured by the analytical frameworks hitherto employed for the explanation of collective behavior. |
