Neil Joseph Smelser has been an influential mind in the study of collective behavior for four decades. In 1956, he published Economy and Society with Talcott Parsons and in 1959, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, a historically-oriented piece of research on Victorian Britain. Since the publication of his Theory of Collective Behavior in 1963, a highly theoretical exploration of the nature and causes of collective behavior, Smelser has pushed for objective consideration of the social sciences. His two most influential works have been Theory of Collective Behavior and The Handbook of Economic Sociology, which he edited with Richard Swedberg, published in 1988.

Smelser's work is highly definitional, seeking exact specification of the components of social action, whether that action be collective behavior or economic behavior. Smelser sought ways that a sociological perspective might assist in our explanation and understanding of these phenomena. In his Theory of Collective Behavior, Smelser explores components...