Communication, organisation, and action: Theory-building for social movements

Abstract

This paper addresses the need for new approaches to understand the processes through which communicative interactions create, re-create, and change transnational social movements. It proposes that CCO, the communicative theory of the constitution of organisation, provides useful concepts for analysing the communication practices of social movements in an organisational field dominated by global market integration and supranational governance. The author draws on a case study of La Vía Campesina, a transnational network of over 160 rural peoples’ organisations in more than 70 countries. Through applying the four-flow model of CCO – focused on communicative processes including membership negotiation, organisational self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning – she explores how the global social movement is communicatively constituted and suggests directions for future research.

Keywords:

• social movement organisations
• communication
• activism
• transnational
• networks
• La Vía Campesina

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Erratum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Alana Mann

Alana Mann (PhD) is Senior Lecturer and Degree Director in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on political communication, specifically the power relations between media, governments, institutions, and civil society actors in the field of food politics. She is a member of the University of Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) project node ‘Food, People and the Planet’ and the global food security and nutrition node within the Charles Perkins Centre. She sits on the executive committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), an organisation dedicated to creating a more ecologically sound and fairer food system for all Australians, and is the author of Global activism in food politics: Power shift (2014).