In response to Helena's comments, yes I agree there are implications for
collective action. There was a branch of sociology in the early 1960s that I
think was called "collective behavior"; they studied fads and trends and mob
behavior. Then that evolved into the study of "social movements" and now there
is an ASA section on "collective behavior and social movements." A lot of
those theorists had interesting things to say about emergence. Then there was
Mancur Olson's 1966? book on "collective action" that represents the rational
action, bottom-up version of emergence in collectives. Jim Coleman talks about
emergence in his big 1990 book about rational action.
This is the tricky thing about emergence, that Jay has also pointed out: that
the term is used both by methodological individualists like Olson and Coleman,
and by more holistic systems theorists. (That contrast is the theme of my
forthcoming article "Emergence in sociology".)
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