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16 - Collective Action through Social Media: Possibilities and Challenges of Partial Organizing

from Part 4 - Social Movements and Collective Action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2019

By
Noomi Weinryb ,
Cecilia Gullberg  and
Jaakko Turunen
Edited by
Göran Ahrne  and
Nils Brunsson
Göran Ahrne
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
Nils Brunsson
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

This chapter is about how the concept of partial organization can contribute to our understanding of the specificity of organizing collective action through social media. Empirically, it is a story about how a small group of activists via Facebook could raise 9 million Swedish crowns (around 900 000 Euros) in just over a week to a private bank account, and also about the ensuing challenges involved in allocating the funds and packing and distributing the tons of clothes and other items they collected. Theoretically, we want to propose that the undecided order of a social media initiative may hold sufficient power to initiate it, but it may become too strenuous to manage in the long run without legitimate authority. In turn, pressures to incorporate standardized practices of membership, leadership, and monitoring may risk the very basis of the large-scale engagement that the partialness of the social media initiative has enabled.

Keywords

social mediaFacebookundecided ordercollective actionrefugee crisispartial organizationlegitimate authorityaffordancesnetnographyVi gör vad vi kan
Type
Chapter
Information
Organization outside Organizations
The Abundance of Partial Organization in Social Life
 , pp. 334 - 356
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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