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Coloured youths were fatally wounded. In the ensuing violence three shops,a house, a garage, and several cars were destroyed by fire.What actually led those involved to behave as they did? In a qualitative studywhich was conducted immediately after the incident (the data were collectedon 11 and 12 May), Schutte and Van Wyk tried to find an explanation for theseevents.Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaThe research data were collected by means of discussions with members of theCity Council of Boksburg, members of the Boksburg station of the SouthAfrican Police, inhabitants of Reiger Park, and from an analysis of newspaperreports. In the newspaper reports a number of different causes were suggestedfor the revolt: racial conflict between Coloureds and Indians was suggested byone source whereas another attributed the events to the chronic housingshortage which was also deteriorating in the area concerned. After the datahad been collected they were analyzed and interpreted in terms of Smelser’stheory of collective behaviour. A brief exposition of this analysis is presented.Smelser regards uninstitutionalized collective behaviour as the uninstitutionalizedmobilization of a community to act towards the reduction of one or moreconstraints in a social system by changing a component of behaviour. In thisdefinition uninstitutionalized behaviour refers to acts that deviate from what agiven society has come to regard as acceptable; constraint to factors in thesystem which place intolerable restrictions upon the community; andcollectivity to a group of people within a community or to the community as awhole.According to Smelser’s theory, six social circumstances or determinants arerequired before a given type of collective behaviour will be manifested. Apartfrom this it is necessary that the determinants should be present at a sufficientlevel of intensity, and that they should combine in a specific pattern. Thereason for this is that successive stages will make successive contributionstowards reaching the ultimate stage which is the actual incident of collectivebehaviour.The six determinants of collective behaviour are:• structural conduciveness, a determinant which occurs when theinstitutional patterns within a given society have greater potential to lead tocertain types of collective behaviour (the possibility of race riots aregreater in those societies in which racial differences are accentuated);• structural strain which occurs when certain circumstances within a socialstructure result in strain or the disturbance of the relationship betweendifferent components of behaviour;100