Landmark Article in the British Journal of Social Psychology

Professor Clifford Stott (Centre for Policing Research and Learning) has published a Landmark Article in the British Journal of Social Psychology, one of the discipline’s leading international journals. The article forms part of a forthcoming special issue on co-production, edited by Professor Shelley McKeown Jones (University of Oxford) and Dr Sammyh-Khan (Örebro University), and has been published open access. Landmark Articles are commissioned from scholars whose work has significantly shaped the development of a research field.

The paper examines the historical relationship between social psychology, crowd theory, and the governance of public order.

It argues that social psychology has often claimed neutrality in explaining collective behaviour, yet many of the discipline’s foundational theories of crowds were developed in close alignment with institutions concerned with maintaining social order. From nineteenth-century crowd theory through to modern psychological models such as de-individuation theory, collective action has frequently been framed as irrational, volatile, and prone to violence. These ideas have travelled well beyond the academy, shaping doctrines of crowd control and legitimising coercive approaches to public-order policing.

Against this background, the article highlights how the Social Identity Approach and the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) provide a fundamentally different account of collective behaviour. Rather than viewing crowds as pathological, this perspective conceptualises them as normatively organised social groups whose behaviour emerges through interaction with authorities, particularly policing institutions.

Drawing on more than two decades of ethnographic and participatory research with police organisations across the UK, Europe, and the United States, the article argues that social psychology cannot plausibly claim political neutrality. Psychological concepts shape institutional practice and have real consequences for how collective protest and public dissent are governed. The challenge for the discipline is therefore not whether its knowledge is co-produced with institutions of power, but to what ends that co-production is directed.

The publication reflects the Centre for Policing Research and Learning’s wider commitment to research that addresses pressing societal challenges around conflict, governance, and public safety, demonstrating how social psychological theory can inform more legitimate and effective approaches to public-order policing.

The article - Crowd psychology and the politics of co-­ production: Social control, democratic order and the consequences of theory - is available Open Access.