Meso-level leaders as brokers of horizontal and vertical linkages in feminist networked social movements

ABSTRACT

With recent research emphasizing different leadership roles that characterize networked social movements, brokerage has received renewed attention as one of the key responsibilities of networked movement leadership. However, in limiting the role of brokering to creating horizontal connections among decentralized actors, previous research is missing an account of grassroots movements that were able to make vertical connections with the power structures and grow to have a significant political impact. By comparing two cases of feminist networked social movements from South Korea, I examine brokerage and conditions that enabled brokerage through the lens of leadership. I argue that brokerage is a crucial dimension of movement leadership and propose the concept of meso-level leadership to elaborate how some grassroots leaders could facilitate grassroots representation in mainstream legislative agenda-setting by forming relationships with actors across a broad organizational and institutional spectrum.

KEYWORDS:

• Meso-level leadership
• connective leadership
• connective action
• brokerage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Semiautonomous civic associations are organizations registered with the state that retain a high degree of operational autonomy (Lu & Tao, 2017).

2 The requirement for the National Assembly Petition has since been reduced to 50,000 signatures from 100,000 signatures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yena Lee

Yena Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University. She studies the emerging forms and processes of networked social movements and the technological, political, and organizational conditions and strategies that may open grassroots accessibility to political processes.