Understanding behaviour collectively

Methodological individualism begins from the premise that relationships and social structures have to be understood person by person. Methodological collectivism, a much less familiar idea, is based in an attempt to understand the relationships between people in terms of groups and social structures. In Chapter 1, I mainly discussed circumstances where it was obvious that people were acting in groups, but there are other situations where the choice between an individualist and collectivist approach is not so straightforward. There are aggregate behaviours – things that people apparently decide to do as individuals, but when they are considered all together, add up to a change in social relations. ‘Consumer demand’ consists of the aggregated behaviour of lots of consumers, all acting according to their own lights. When lots of agricultural workers leave the countryside and come to the city, it changes society; but the root of that change is the behaviour of large numbers of people. The movement of huge numbers of immigrants from Asia and Africa to richer countries in Europe is having a similar effect. Teenagers with eating disorders, people who claim social assistance, women choosing to delay childbirth to take advantage of education and economic opportunities – none of them has the identity of a social group, but people in those categories can be categorised together, analysed and responded to as if they were.

There is not much difficulty about taking a collective perspective when we are thinking about established social groups, such as families, schools and businesses. Collectivism is on much less certain ground when it reinterprets actions that might seem to be individual through a collectivist perspective – domestic violence, fleeing from a war, surviving a natural disaster. In such situations, it is possible to review the position either from the point of view of individuals, or collectively. Sociologists do both – there is no obvious intrinsic merit in always doing things exclusively in one way. But while the microsociology of interactionism can be seen in individualist terms, some patterns and relationships are not really visible at the level of the individual. Without a very high level of aggregation, we would not have known that there are patterns in the incidence of suicide.