THE LOGIC OF CONNECTIVE ACTION

Abstract

From the Arab Spring and los indignados in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street (and beyond), large-scale, sustained protests are using digital media in ways that go beyond sending and receiving messages. Some of these action formations contain relatively small roles for formal brick and mortar organizations. Others involve well-established advocacy organizations, in hybrid relations with other organizations, using technologies that enable personalized public engagement. Both stand in contrast to the more familiar organizationally managed and brokered action conventionally associated with social movement and issue advocacy. This article examines the organizational dynamics that emerge when communication becomes a prominent part of organizational structure. It argues that understanding such variations in large-scale action networks requires distinguishing between at least two logics that may be in play: The familiar logic of collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, and the less familiar logic of connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks. In the former, introducing digital media do not change the core dynamics of the action. In the case of the latter, they do. Building on these distinctions, the article presents three ideal types of large-scale action networks that are becoming prominent in the contentious politics of the contemporary era.

Keywords:

• collective action
• contentious politics
• digital media

Acknowledgements

The article builds on work supported by the Swedish Research Council grant Dnr. 421-2010-2303. It benefited from comments received on earlier versions, including those presented at the ECPR General Conference 2011 and the iCS/OII Symposium ‘A Decade of Internet Time’. The authors particularly wish to thank Bruce Bimber, Bob Boynton, Andrew Chadwick, Nils Gustafsson, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Annette Schnabel, Sidney Tarrow, and the anonymous referees for excellent comments.

Notes

Simultaneous protests were held in other European cities with tens of thousands of demonstrators gathering in the streets of Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris, and Rome.

US Vice President Joe Biden asked for patience from understandably upset citizens while leaders worked on solutions, and the British Prime Minister at the time, Gordon Brown, said: ‘… the action we want to take (at the G20) is designed to answer the questions that the protesters have today’ (Vinocur & Barkin 2009).

http://www.democraciarealya.es/

Beyond the high volume of Spanish press coverage, the story of the indignados attracted world attention. BBC World News devoted no fewer than eight stories to this movement over the course of two months, including a feature on the march of one group across the country to Madrid, with many interviews and encounters in the words of the protesters themselves.

For example, our analyses of the US occupy protests show that increased media attention to economic inequality in America was associated with the coverage of the occupy protests. While political elites were often reluctant to credit the occupiers with their newfound concern about inequality, they nonetheless seemed to find the public opinion and media climate conducive to addressing the long-neglected issue.

A Google search of ‘put people first g20’ more than two years after the London events produced nearly 1.5 million hits, with most of them relevant to the events and issues of the protests well into 75 search pages deep.

We would note, however, that carnivalesque or theatrical expressions may entail strategically de-personalized forms of expression in which individuals take on other personae that often have historically or dramatically scripted qualities. We thank Stefania Milan for this comment.

We are not arguing here that all contemporary analyses of collective action rely on resource mobilization explanations (although some do). Our point is that whether resource assumptions are in the foreground or background, many collective action analyses typically rely on a set of defining assumptions centered on the importance of some degree of formal organization and some degree of strong collective identity that establishes common bonds among participants. These elements become more marginal in thinking about the organization of connective action.

While we focus primarily on cases in late modern, postindustrial democracies, we also attempt to develop theoretical propositions that may apply to other settings such as the Arab Spring, where authoritarian rule may also result in individualized populations that fall outside of sanctioned civil society organization, yet may have direct or indirect access to communication technologies such as mobile phones.

Routledge and Cumbers (2009) make a similar point in discussing horizontal and vertical models as useful heuristics for organizational logics in global justice networks (cf. Robinson & Tormey 2005; Juris 2008).

We are indebted to Bob Boynton for pointing out that this sharing occurs both in trusted friends networks such as Facebook and in more public exchange opportunities among strangers of the sort that occur on YouTube, Twitter, or blogs. Understanding the dynamics and interrelationships among these different media networks and their intersections is an important direction for research.

We have developed methods for mapping networks and inventorying the types of digital media that enable actions and information to flow through them. Showing how networks are constituted in part by technology enables us to move across levels of action that are often difficult to theorize. Network technologies enable thinking about individuals, organizations, and networks in one broad framework. This approach thus revises the starting points of classic collective action models, which typically examine the relationships between individuals and organizations and between organizations. We expand this to include technologies that enable the formation of fluid action networks in which agency becomes shared or distributed across individual actors and organizations as networks reconfigure in response to changing issues and events (Bennett et al. 2011).

http://www.15october.net (accessed 19 October 2011).

We wish to emphasize that there is much face-to-face organizing work going on in many of these networks, and that the daily agendas and decisions are importantly shaped offline. However, the connectivity and flow of action coordination occurs importantly online.

We thank the anonymous referee for highlighting this subtype.

Our empirical investigations focused primarily on two types of networks that display local, national, and transnational reach: networks to promote economic justice via more equitable north south trade norms (fair trade) and networks for environmental and human protection from the effects of global warming (climate change). These networks display impressive levels of collective action and citizen engagement and they are likely to remain active into the foreseeable future. They often intersect by sharing campaigns in local, national, and transnational arenas. As such, these issue networks represent good cases for assessing the uses of digital technologies and different action frames (from personalized to collective) to engage and mobilize citizens, and to examine various related capacities and effects of those engagement efforts.

Technology is not neutral. The question of the degree to which various collectivities have both appropriated and become dependent on the limitations of commercial technology platforms such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube is a matter of considerable importance. For now, suffice it to note that at least some of the technologies and their networking capabilities are designed by activists for creating political networks and organizing action (Calderaro 2011).