People may choose to seek their ends either by individual or collective action. For immigrants the choice between these two strategies may be both important and problematic. Collective action in their new country may be a carry-over of common procedures in their old country or it may be based on a perception of common interests in their new one. Yet it is more difficult for them to organize collectively within the receiving society since they stand in different relations to that society and therefore have different interests. Some immigrants have a happier experience of the receiving society and try to conform to what they think that society expects of them. This is usually discussed as evidence of assimilation and that process has a major effect upon the possibility of ethnic mobilization.

The previous chapter criticized the popular misconception of assimilation according to which the majority sees itself as absorbing the minority. It maintained that the processes of cultural change are much more complex and affect members of the majority as well as the minority, but did not go into any detail. Nor did it make explicit the presumption that most cultural change can be understood in terms of the same principles as those which explain changes in consumer behaviour. People have taken to buying plastic kitchenware in place of enamel goods because the plastic gives them what they want more cheaply.