Henry Mintzberg; Alexandra McHugh Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2. (Jun., 1985), pp. 160-197.
goal - show how strategy is formulated within an organization
Taylorian organization and Weberian bureaucracy dominate organizations (Taylor, Frederick W. 1947 Scientific Management. (First published in 191 1.) New York: Harper & Row. / Weber, Max 1958 From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds. New York: Oxford University Press.)
requirements for adhocracy: 1) dynamic and complex environment 2) demanding sophisticated innovation 2) need for highly trained experts in multidisciplinary teams 3) decentralization mutual adjustment preferred for coordination rather than rigid hierarchy
Arthur L. Stinchcombe's (1 965) proposition that structures tend to reflect the age of founding of their industry ("Social structure and organizations." In J. G. March (ed.), Handbook of Organizations: 142-1 93. Chicago: Rand McNally.)
NFB managers had their hands on some levers of decision, such as staffing levels and the design of the structure itself, but not on others, notably the content of specific films. Trying to manage in this situation is a little like trying to drive an automobile without controlling the steering wheel. You can accelerate and brake, but not determine direction.
seems quite fitting, with Jimbo giving directives and community working to implement them in their own way
strong leadership at various times, particularly during periods of little order -the chaos of the founding years
And this brings us to a final aspect of managerial work in adhocracy, perhaps the most critical one -the creation of ideology or missionary zeal
full-fledged adhocracies are rare, but to lesser extent adhocratic patterns are present in many organizations
Agents of Adhocracy (McKenna 1996)
[2] - Christopher D. McKenna, Agents of Adhocracy: Management Consultants and the Reorganization of the Executive Branch, Business and Economic History, Vol 25, No 1 (Fall 1996): 101-111.
- adhocratic approach has been used by US government as early as late 1940s, with federal government relying on outside consultants to quickly address certain issues -; this approach has continued till today with the use of management consulting firms.
Adhocracy in Policy Development (Rourke and Schulman 1989)
[3] Francis S. Rourke and Paul R. Schulman, Adhocracy in Policy Development - The Social Science Journal 26 (1989): 131-42. 4
as above; early 1930s. "creating a wide variety of instant organizations and charging them with the task of coming up with solutions to the most pressing problems of public policy"; used as "an instrument of policy innovation", bureaucracies are simply inefficient, they lack vision and authority.
research into temporary organizations has been neglected compared to research into bureaucracies; primary concentration on studies of organizational innovations in the private sector. - tie to Intellipedia
Among organization theorists, Warren Bennis has led the way in understanding the role that temporary organizations have come to play in the private sphere. Warren G. Bennis and Philip E. Slater, The Temporary Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1968)
the new environment changes too quickly for the bureaucracies to cope (and Internet accelerates this even more)
organizations must be "organized around problems to be solved by groups of relative strangers with diverse professional skills."
there is little indication as yet that they will supplant bureaucracies in the many areas in which these highly-structured permanent organizations deliver vital services.
bureaucracy is not so much supplanted as it is supplemented by the arrival of adhocracies.
criticized for stealth
uses: setting agendas, reviewing policies, resolving deadlocks, carry on operations
Power Shift Jessica T. Mathews
The most powerful engine of change in the relative decline of states and the rise of nonstate actors is the computer and telecommunications revolution, whose deep political and socialconsequences have been almost completely ignored. Widely accessible and affordable technology has broken governments' monopoly on the collection and management of large amounts of information and deprived governments of the deference they enjoyed becauseof it. In every sphere of activity, instantaneous access to information and the ability to put it to use multiplies the number of players who matter and reduces the number who command great authority..Internet connect people across borders with exponentially growing ease while separating them from natural and historical associations within nations. In this sense a powerful globalizing force, they can also have the opposite effect, amplifying political and social fragmentation by enabling more and more identities and interests scattered around the globe to coalesce and thrive.
Above all, the information technologies disrupt hierarchies, spreading power among more people and groups.
The British East India Company ran a subcontinent
The question now is whether there are new geographic or functional entities that might grow up alongside the state, taking over some of its powers and emotional resonance.
As the computer and telecommunications revolution continues, NGOS will become more capable of large-scale activity across national borders.
More international decision-making will also exacerbate the socalleddemocratic deficit, as decisions that elected representatives once made shift to unelected international bodies;
If current trends continue, the international system 50 years hence will be profoundly different.
Cultural Influences upon Marketing Intelligence Generation through the Internet and Value Creation in Business-to-Business
Organizations: An Empirical Investigation Dr. Despina A. Karayann
adhocracies are related to the cutting edge of technology innovation
adhocracies were highly succesfull, more so than the traditional types of organizations (based on hierarchy)
core values of adhocracies: innovation, collaboration
The Hidden Order of Wikipedia (Viégas et al. 2007)
article:
Viégas et al., The Hidden Order of Wikipedia, EOnline Communities and Social Computing (2007), pp. 445-454.[4]
self-governing institution similar to other offline self-governing institutions
collective creation of formalized process and policy instead of anarchy
Do As I Do: Authorial Leadership in Wikipedia (Reagle 2007)
Do As I Do: Authorial Leadership in Wikipedia / Reagle / WikiSym '07: Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Wikis [5]
Benevolent Dictator”
there is, as of yet, little (to no) literature on leadership in Wikipedia
wikipedia as a type of open content community
Leaders operate within a mix of governance models: meritocratic (setting the direction by leading the way), autocratic(acting as an arbiter or defender of last resort), anarchic (consensus) and occasionally democratic (voting).
“benevolent dictators” are often the founding author of open content projects
the end of an era? Zscout370 controversy ([6]) 32 against 11 for ?
"God-king"
Wikipedia organisation from a bottom-up approach (Spek et al. 2006)
Wikipedia organisation from a bottom-up approach / Spek et al. / Paper presented at the Research in Wikipedia-workshop of WikiSym 2006, Odense, Denmark [7]
other names: self-managing teams or groups, autonomous task groups, empowered groups
In Wikipedia, new developments are added uncomparably fast when related to other encyclopedias. To a reader, this gives Wikipedia an advantage over the other encyclopedias.
Dutch wikipedia which lacks "top-down control" (and presumably other encyclopedias in other languages) functions well
Dinosaurs in Cyberspace?: British Trade Unions and the Internet, S Ward, W Lusoli - European Journal of Communication, 2003 - intl-ejc.sagepub.com
ICTs have the potential to decentralize power within hierarchical union structures, enhancing participation.
to mobilize union members, foster more extensive national and international campaigning and democratize and decentralize union structures thus eroding Michel’s iron law of oligarchy (Diamond and Freeman, 2001a; Greene et al., 2000, 2001; Lee, 1997, 2000; Hogan and Grieco,
1999).
enhances individual members’ abilities to inform the leadership’s decisions and hold leaders accountable.
Assessing the Radical Democracy of Indymedia: Discursive, Technical, and Institutional Constructions
the ability of ICTs to alter both the vertical relationship between members/supporters and elites and also horizontal member-tomember relationships - leaders are more accountable, transparency increses, elites find it harder to control information, members communicate more easily,
Early days: Finally, it’s important to remember that in many respects we have barely started and that technology is evolving rapidly. Nor do we necessarily yet have the consistent long-term research evidence or research tools to understand the impact of new ICTs. Analysing the role of television in the 1950s, some 30 years after it first emerged, would have underestimated its eventual impact. In
Goodwin: growth of democracies which are less vulnerable to revolutions
Selbin: but growing ineqaulity (neoliberalism) will counteract that
Foran: some argue state is losing power, thus revolutionaries are less tempt it to engage state
Foran quotes Paige about importance of definitions. Some elements of the 'repertoire of contentions' are becomig obsolete - 'violent seizure of state power through class-based revolts from below'. Instead - peaceful change on social experience, conciousness and power relations.
non-violent revolutions - a growing trend? instead: education of the civil society which helds power in democracies. BUT Talibans/Al-Qaida - violent revolutionaries?
new trend - antiglobalization movement -> global revolution?
2-Paige:
need to redefine revolution - old Marxist-Leninit definition is no good
but more like - socioculutral/metaphysical change (american civil right revolution, etc.)
uneasy coexistence of neoliberalism with global humanism
3-Farhi
blurring between reform and revolution - refolution, non-revolutinary revolutions
condemn old definitions
new definitions - fluent, and will be changed
4-Parker
another definition - globalization
also notes not all revs target states and they have impact on non-political arenas
revolutionary narrative in a globalized imaginary - framing new ways
weakening states
states replaced by new forces
5-Goodwin
socialism - but reformist, not revolutionary
again: revolutions come from dissatisfaction with a present, not visions of the future
peaceful democracy more powerful than economical troubles: state may not bring social justice, but reform is easy
mass (social?) movements will be the force of change
6-Parsa
economic issues - cause for violence
students and academic - vanguard (education), innovative, use technology (Internent)
'at least in the developing world'
7-Selbin
never say never
power of stories - adapting global/foreign to local
revolutions differ
visions remain
8-Vilas
definitions can be variously interpreted, and same with trends
13-Kellner
power of internet -> cheap, asynchronous, indivudual->many, many->many, many->indvidual, etc.
Michels's iron law of anarchy is essentially equivalent to agency theory in microeconomics: just as the firm's agents tend to favor their own personal self-interest over the interests of the stockholders, political leaders tend to favor their own interests at the expense of their followers.
Democracy Online
Peter M. Shane, ed. Democracy Online: The Prospects for Political Renewal Through the InternetGPrint, Toc
Michael Froomkin, Technologies for Democracy
Beth Noveck, Democratic Solutions for a Wired World
Nancy Marder, Cyberjuries: A Model of Deliberative Democracy
James Bohman, Expanding Dialogue: The Internet, Public Spehere and Transnational Democracy
Peter M. Shane, TThe Electronic Federalist: The Internet and the Eclectic Institutionalization of Democratic Legitimacy
Oren Perez, Global Governance and Electronic Democracy: E-Politics as a Multidimensional Experience
Lori Weber and Sean Murray, Interactivity, Equality, and the Prospects for Electronic Democracy: A Review
Alexandra Samuel, Hacktivism and the Future of Democratic Discourse
Paul G. Harwood and Wayne V. Macintosh, Virtual Distance and America's Changing Sense of Community
p.169 - The speed of diffusion of the Internet has been substantialy greater than that of any other commercial technology, save for the television.
p.170 - once we control for higher education, the net users are indistinguishable from the rest in civic engagement
p.171 - Peter Kollock and Marc Smith: "To date, most communities have the structure of either anarchy (if unmoderated) or dicatorship (if moderated)."Communities in Cyberspace"
p.177 - The bandwith requirements necessary for even poor-quality video are so high that it is unlikely to be commonly and cheeply available for at least a decade or more
p.2-3 - transparency fosters trust and networking in businesses;
p.9-10 - business releases information risking competitors knowing it to foster free innovation
p.11-13 - collaboration WAS small scale; it is large scale now
p.15 - as with any revolutions, the demands on individuals, organizations and nations will be intense
p.18 - wikinomics is a new art of science of collaboration. It means more than just a new way to create documents. A wiki is more than software; is a metaphor for a new era of collaboration and participation. With peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity and intelligence more efficiently and effectively" then before
p.19 - the new Web (Web 2.0) is abbout communities, participation and peering.
will we look at this decade as a turning point in our history?
principles of wikinomics:
being open - to talent pool outside organization, to sharing previously secret information with others (for example, to facilitate the creation of standards)
peering - moving away from the hierarchical structure towards a more horizontal form. There is still variance in authority, and underlying structure, those peer netwerks are quite different from traditional bureaucratic hierarchies
sharing - of intellectual property, free licences, pharmaceutics, software, contributing to the commons is not altruism but creates vibrant fundations accelarting growth and innovation everywhere,
acting globally -
previous technology driven revolutions took more than a acentury to unfold. Today - law of accelarating returns
disruptive technology
a new kind of economy where firms coexist with millions of individuals who collaborate through various networks and create value
organizations who don't adapt - who don't embrace collaboration - will perish (p.33)
p.37 - "Net Generation" - baby boom echo - for whom web is a glue that binds their social networks. MySpace, Facebook, Technorati, flickr, they are the future leaders ... p.59 they have a very strong sense of common good and collective social and civic responsibility
p.52 more than half of US teens (57%) are content creators ([13]), 2005 data, compared to 44% adults (2004 data) [14]; rougly twice as many teens have posted written material (32% to 17%)
new web - from newspaper to canvass
folksonomy - tagging - could people tag and rate government pages?
p.46 people are increasingly in command
they compare TakingITGlobal to UN due to size and membership, note they meet world leaders
p.240 - workplaces are being reformed; we are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaboarative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from outside of the organization
p.252 - bottom up approach: John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of XEROX, notes "A lot of corporations are using wikis without the top management even knowing it". It usually starts with the organization IT department, and migrates to other places. In Dresden Kleinwort - a German bank - after few months of wiki pilot program, they have dominated the company's intranet, cut down e-mail volume by 75% and meetings by 50%. Tantek Celik, Technocrati's chief technologist, states that in five years "knowledge of wikis will be a required job skill".
it used outside IT sector - from banks (DT) through universities ()
it is unorthodox and usettling to the older generations
Intellipedia - trusting our security to such a new way of thinking
the creation of adhocracies will become a norm (p.265)
the revolution will be gradual. Shifts in organizational paradigms are slow (p.266)
co-innovate with citizens, share resources that were guarded,
How Do Chinese Civic Associations Respond to the Internet: Findings from a Survey (Yang 2007)
Guobin Yang. 2007. "How Do Chinese Civic Associations Respond to the Internet: Findings from a Survey." The China Quarterly 189: 122-143.
how civic associations in China responded to the Internet
Internet is primarily used for publicity works, information dissemination and networking with peer and international organization
social change organization, younger organizations, and organizations in Bejing report more Internet use then business organizations, older organizations, and organizations outside Bejing
Internet seems to have special appeal to new organizations with few resources orient to social change
"a common message is that internet matters to civic organizations"... "yet current work focuses almost exclusively on internet use at the individual levels and ignores how civic associations respond to the internet"
"this article provides the [first] systematic empirical analysis of internet capacity and use in 129 civic associations in China.
"the internet is more then a technological tool, it is strategic resource and opportunity for small and resource poor organizations"
data and methodology:
"I collected data for this study through a survey of a purposive (?) sample of 550 urban civic associations from ... to ... ."
"An urban focus is essential as the use of internet in rural areas remains minimal"
"goal was to understand the level of internet capacity and use by those organizations"
"I used a proxy measure of internet capacity by adopting an informatization index as used by the International Telecommunication Union," measuring number of personal computers and that number to the number of staff.
Sample: although neither comprehensive nor representative they offer the best sample for such a study
the response rate for the entire survey was 25% (129 cases total)
outliers were removed (number of staff, number of computers and age of org compared to median)
organizations were grouped into: buisness, environment, women rights, social services, health and community development, and others (ex. religion and culture).
Findings
on average, each organization, has 5-6 computers, most linked to the Internet (hosts). 60% have 2-3 computers, 20% have 1. On average, there are about two staff members per computer.
organizational theory supports the idea that older organizations resent change and are less likely to use new technologies (ex. Doug Guthire, A sociological perspective on the use of technology: the adoption of internet technology by US organizations, 1999, Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 42, No. 4. (1999) p.586
From access to applications: how the voluntary sector is using the internet (Surman 2001)
Mark Surman, From access to applications: how the voluntary sector is using the internet, [15]: in many industrialized countries, access to the Internet is no longer a problematic issue; in 2000 97% of British voluntary organizations and 87% of those in USA had Internet access
this may not be the case in developing countries (Yang 2007) !
Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens, and Social Movements (de Donk 2004)
Wim van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, Dieter Rucht (ed), Cyberprotest: New media, citizens and social movements, Routledge, 2004, [16]
Peter Dahlgren, Foreword
retreat from public activism and such is counteracted by ad-hoc volunteering, often online
ICTs are enabling a forms of participation that would not have been possible without them
Internet promotes new type of public sphere, offering a new, empowering sense to what it means to be a citizen (although it is also used by hate groups and such)
little work has been done on how the newer means of communications that movements have at their disposal are used to negotiate their relationships with their surroundings
we need to know more about what impact the ICTs are having on the democratic character of the movements, how the use of ICTs affects recruitment and membership of new members, as well as relationship between online and offline activities and participation
information is power
eds: Introduction: social movements and ICTs
ICTs and social movements is a constantly exploratory research, as ICTS are still rapidly evolving and SMOs are often a fuzzy phenomena without well defined boundaries (often lacking formal structure, membership lists, statutes, chairpersons, and the like; often overlapping with others significantly)
use of ICTs by social movements is heavily under researched
many definitions: "symbolic construction and maintenance of a collective identity" (Melucci 1989:34) or the "network of networks" or "ensemble of interconnected SMOs striving for similar goals" (Zald and McCarthy 1980:3)
p.4 - young citizens prefer SMOs that use the 'net
p.8 - communication as a tool of resource mobilization
p.9 - communication as a structured interaction with external reference groups (political opportunity approach)
p.10-14 - ideology, identity, persuasion
p.15: hypothesis: use of ICTs is widespread and sophisticated in areas where transnational, let alone global, problems are tackled (ex. global warming and the Climate Action Network)
p.15-16: hypothesis: large and powerful groups with geographically spread members are more likely to adopt ICTs to make communication cheaper and more efficient ("informal networks with large geographical reach" and "big, powerful and more centralized SMOs)
p.18: "Our [preeliminary] observations suggest that ICTs are increasingly used by various kinds of SMOs, to remarkably different degrees and purposes, and with varying levels of sophistication."
p.19; hypothesis: ICTs are conductive to forging of temporary alliances between different SMOs
p.19: specialized structures supporting online communication and information spread have emerged: Indymedia, Institute for Global Communication
Dieter Rucht, The quadruple 'A': media strategies of protest movements since the 1960s
movement strategies are influenced by traditional media, and new media are still not overly powerful due to their fragmentation (although they are certainly having some impact)
Jacob Rosenkrands, Politicizing Homo economicus: analysis of anti-corporate websites
new targets for activism: corporations
Internet allowed anti-globalist to cheaply mimic their enemies, the transnational corporation. Many websites target people from more then one country.
In early 2000s, the many-to-many communication was still not very common.
Steve Wright, Informing, communicating and ICTs in contemporary anti-capitalist movements
Internal structire of SMOs is changing, as new ICTs not only supplement but change some traditional decision making processes
Peter Van Aelst and Stefaan Walgrave, New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the 'anti-globalization' movement
The anti-globalization sites mobilize people by providing a "how to become an activist" guide.
"The internet brings new opportunities for everyone, but at this moment, the international activists are benefiting more then their opponents."
Connections between movements are easier, but that doesn't imply they are merging
W. Lance Bannett, Communicating global activism: strengths and vulnerabilities of networked politics
In international politics, the Internet reduces costs, bridges distances, strengthens weak identity ties and loose networks.
It facilitates permanent campaigns.
Personal relations are still important.
Unprecedented public archives are created.
New type of organization may be emerging.
Gustavo Cardoso and Pedro Pereira Neto, Mass media driven mobilization and online protest ICTs and the pro-East Timor movement in Portugal
importance of new ICTs to pro-East Timor movement
Brigitte le Grignou and Charles Patou , ATTAC(k)ing expertise: does the internet really democratize knowledge?
Online social movements and Internet governance
Hans Klein, Peace Review; Sep2001, Vol. 13 Issue 3, p403-410
ICANN and how Internet users forced it to be transparent and responsible to them - the pro-democracy faction in ICANN
elements of adhocracy in the pro-democracy movement and faction; lack of top down control, lot of volunteering by individuals
Internet allows movements to overcame major barriers to effectiveness: it overcomes atomization of individuals, reduces perverse incentives of hierarchies (Iron Law?), overcomes barriers to information sharing and enhances ease of volunteering. Thus, rather then guranteeing success, Internet reduces possibility of failure.
Benkler and the Wealth of Networks
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms
"We are witnessing a fundamental change in how individuals can interact with their democracy and experience their role as citizens"... "They are no longer constrained to occupy the role of mere readers, viewers and listeners. They can be, instead, participants in the conversation".
Civic life online
W. Lance Bennett (ed.), Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, MIT Press, 2008
Introduction: Internet stimulates learning and gives rise to new forms of learning
Bennet: Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age:
Indymedia, February 12, 2003 protests with up to twenty million participants, the largest coordinated protests in human history
young people prefer new types of (lose) organization, with much online tools
movements and protest in virtual environments (p.11): in World of Warcraft, in Second Life
two paradigms: young people are interested in personally meaningful, lifestyle-related political issues, rather then traditional party politics. Thus while youth politics is growing, traditional areas such as voting and following foreign affair in traditional outlets may be decreasing. Thus the youth is seen both as engaged and disengaged.
Kathryn Montgomery: Young and Digital Democracy: Intersections of Practice, Policy and the Marketplace
Michael Xenos and Kristen Foot, NotYour Father's Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics
Local politics is more engaging online then national politics
Going part way - offering an illusion of engagement online - has counterproductive effects, as young savvy web surfers are likely to see through the illusion and be put off by it
Jennifer Earl and Alan Schussman, Contesting Cultural Control: Youth Culture and Online Petitioning
How traditional social movement tactics are used to comment on cultural products
Contesting cultural issues is a new outlet for movements activity, as cultural products of private entities rival the importance of government policies
Rise of youth protests in the sphere of pop culture may indicate the adoption of activist mentality by increasingly large faction of the youth
Youth are engaged in the issues they care about, not in the issues that the adults believe they should care about
Howard Rheingold, Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Ecourage
some kinds of online interaction can lead to more explicitly political online engagement
two criteria for the above: 1) connecting with others and 2) learning to express oneself
50% percent of 2006 teenagers have created digital media (source: PEW, 2006, Teen Content Creators and Consumers)
lack of response and recognition may limit participation
using new media to teach, includes examples of use of wiki (p.110-112)
Kate Raynes-Goldie and Luke Walker, Our Space: Civic Engagement Tools for Youtg
Overall, non-profit sites lag behind for profit-ones in terms of engaging the youth and offering well-designed collaborative tools
Computing in organizations: myth and experience
Computing in organizations: myth and experience, James B. Rule, Debra L. Gimlin, Sylvia J. Sievers, 2002, [17]
change in organizations is gradual, not revolutionary (although there are a few - very few - exceptions)
people (managers...) have certain positive myths (unfounded expectations) that adopting computer technology will always greatly help them; thus they adopt it without sufficient study with predictable effects of disillusionment; many decision makers (and regular members) tend to overemphasize the impact of computerization
here seem to be a common pattern that computing technology broadens the vision of organizations (and of their decision-makers), and allows them to do things previously thought impossible, or at the very least, be more efficient and innovative (although he notes, and I certainly agree, that this doesn't translate to "more wise").
many studies of the impact of computerization on social change suffer from what I understand as spurious effects - in other words, that scholars claim that computers caused change X, when in fact there are other plausible explanations
Electronic Democracy
Rachel K. Gibson, Andrea Rommele and Stephen J. Ward (ed.), Electronic Democracy: Mobilization, organisation and participation via new ICTs, Routledge, London, 2004
p.1-13: eds - Introduction: representative democracy and the Internet
two broad categories of actors: micro-level individual activism and meso/macro-level online mobilizing by different organizations
micro level: used as tools for politicial socialization (particularly by youth); patterns of participation are changing (again the youth should be observed) but no clear answers are yet visible
meso/macro level: several not fully contradictory hypotheses about use of ICTs: 1) erosion - disappearance of old structures 2) modernization and 3) reinvigoration
overview of use of ICTs by executive and legislative branches of the government, political parties and NGOs
p. 133- Oren Perez, Global legal pluralism and electronic democracy
extra-national legal actors operating beyond the traditional geopolitical boundaries have emerged in cyberspace
they are concerned with technical standarization, Internet governance, and other issues, such as transnational online commerce (but also culture spread, security and censorship, dealing with cybercrime, etc.). Net governance now extends to issues such as free speech and privacy.
there is a degree of democratic legitimacy that enables the transational regime to govern, as it does so only with the consent of the governed
hubs of NGO activity - protest.net, indymedia.org, webactive.com, corpwatch.org....
Internet can enable a more democratic environment but there is danger that it can be redesign to be less democratic (also see Lessig)
ICANN is a non-profit corporation founded to manage the Internet, bearing responsibility for managing the Internet Protocol (IP) and the domain-name system. The body is supposed to respect the egalitarian and free spirit of the Internet, and thus was founded on the principles of an inclusive governance structure and strategy, aiming to provide maximum transparency (via its website), invite public feedback (via its website, again) and incorporate larger public into its decision making process (the universal representative scheme, or the "at-large membership" program). There was however a lot of criticism of the 2000 election, seen as cumbersome and inefficient. While not fully realizing the potential offered by the Internet, ICANN is making an effort to be more participatory and accountable.
"the emergence of spontaneous cooperation over the Net cannot be taken for granted"
challenge of digital divide
Stuart Hodkinson, Problems@labour
Internet is an important tool for labor internationalism, but not a panacea that can resolve all issues
Jenny Pickerill, Rethinking political participation: Experiments in Internet activism in Australia and Britain
the use of ICTs has disproportionately benefited small grassroots groups and individual activists linked into fluid networks using cellular structures
such groups have few resources but are highly innovative because of their ideology and adhocratic structure
consequently such groups gained an advantage that allowed them to compete with larger, more estabilished hierarchically structured groups
Social movements and new media
Brian D. Loader, Social movements and new media, Sociology Compass, 2/6 (2008)
"social movements are a significant social force transforming societies through their engagement with new media"
"new media facilitate new power structures"
"how new media are shaping structure, identity, opportunity and protest dimensions of social movements"
conclusions
"new media offer important opportunities for cost-effective networking, interpretive framing, mobilization and (extends) repertoires of protest action"
this does not represent a creation totally new, virtual social movements but rather a new means of providing existing movements / activists with a trans-national capacity to collaborate, share information and communicate with wider audience
such social movement action may also be increasingly competing within a media environment saturated by user-generating content
new media offer opportunities of reduced costs and faster / more efficient communications
they diminish the number of face-to-face interactions
what is meant by a social movement
Manuel Castells, The Information Age:
SM can circumvent the traditional media
SM are facing a more globalized world
SMs are more concerned with non-class issues, such as lifestyle issues (environment, human rights, health and gender)
individual identity can be expressed through the collective and shared meanings and beliefs of SMs / collective identity formation
Castells: SMs are involved in "purposive collective action whose outcome, in victory as in defeat, transforms the values and institutions of the society"
interpretive framing - "the strategic attempts by SM actors to shape and transform social phenomena into culturally recognizable problems, the formation of ways to tackle them, and the related motivation to act and resolve them"
for example, global justice SMs frame globalization as "primarily an economic problem that has negative consequences on human beings and the environment"
Internet allows SM to develop and moblize as loose-coupled networks of local groups and individuals which when combined become a wider regional, national or transnational alliance
Theory of SMs
Tarrow: National politics and collective action
Sidney Tarrow: National politics and collective action:
rediscovery of important role of politics
social movements sector. Success of failure of SMOs is dependent on the entire sector (industry) and relations between SMOs within.
political opportunity structure.
cycles of protest - cycles of democracy? "at every upstart of a wave of conflict we shall be induced to think that we are at the verge of revolution; and when the downswing appears, we shall predict the end of conflict". Economic cycles. Pure cyclical models (nothing changes in the long run_ vs evolutionary models (steady change in the long run)
state as a social movement
In 'Power in movement' Tarrow notes how changes in communication have affected the diffusion of political ideas, news of citizen mobilizations and revolutions worldwide, expanded the importance of worldwide public opinion, and shrunk the distance between exiles and their home countries. Media have evolved as a powerful 'fourth power', able to shape public perceptions of the entire social movements. Media may help some social movements, but may also compund the damage done to others, especially if they transmit brutal repressions and thus discourage others from following in their footsteps.
Optimism: the potential of the weak to humble the powerful through social mobilization
Four requistes of sustainable social movements: 1) political opportunities, 2) diffuse social networks 3) familiar forms of collective action (aka Tilly's repertoires of contention) and 4) cultural frames that can resonate throughout popoulation.
Dieter RuchtThemes, Logics, and Arenas of Social Movements
logic of a movement - hidden, deep variables shaping the movement (in addition to more visible variables like faction struggle or leadership skills). The logic of the movement impacts forms of organization, methods of moblization and arenas of conflict. Logic is related to basic social changesthat produce new expectations, strains and conflicts. They in turn are refelect in global social struggles in a given historical period.
macrostructural approach: social movements are linked to deeply rooted structural changes that has been identified as modernization breakthrougths in the spheres of "system" and "life world". Those breakthrough create in turn demands, expactations and opportunities for action, as well as dangers and various side effects.
Various
geographical concentration increases the density of interaction between group members (Kornahauser 1959). This is less psychological and more structural/organizational: urbanization increases potential for collective action (McAdam 1982:: 94-98, Wilson 1973:140-151). Internet (Tilly 1975: 254)
Comment by Piotr: but Internet makes all distance meaningless... global village
environment shapes the organizations (Polsby 1983)
Comment by Piotr: thus existence od the Internet leads to Internet-centered social movements?
Benford & Snow ("Framing processes and social movements" ASR 2000): p. 630: audience effects: target of the message can affect the form and content of the message. Audience(s) targeted are one of the major contextual factors that help to explain modification of the collective action frames.
Comments by Piotrus: Can wiki be frame useful in reaching some, but not all? Can use of specific communication tools be part of a collective action frame - as in online/Internet SMOs are required/expected to use more advanced tools to look professional/attractive?
Minkoff & McCarthy (Reinvigorating the study of organizational processes in social movements) in Mobilization: "social movement sector is significantly composed of volunteer labor."
Comment by Piotrus: a new model of for-profit activism emerging? The Ecomomist
Aldrich (1999) Organizations Evolving (SAGE): two approaches have dominated literature on emergence of new organizations: entrepreneurship approach emphasizing leaders/founders, and sociological approach emphasizing societal and historical context (structure vs. agency?).
"innovative organizations" = started by entrepreneurs whose routines and competencies vary significantly from the existing ones; it can promote the development of new paradigms
Suzanne Staggenborg, Social Movements Communities and Cycles of Protest: The Emergence and Maintenance of a Local Women's Movement, Social Problems, 1998: the concept of a social community: SMO+supporting informal networks of activists sharing goals and sentiments. SMOs are explicitly concerned with cultural and political change and they have external targets such as governmental authorities; other organizations within SMC differ in that they exist to provide services or to educate or entertain participants of the community. Movement culture (symbols, rituals, values, ideology) is shared and developed, and creates a collective identity.
Comment by Piotrus: so is if something looks "kind of" like a movement, but not exactly, maybe it is a new type of a movement - or maybe a part of the SM community?
Craig CalhounNew social movements of the early 19th century
Lichbach: What makes rational peasants revolutionary
Mark Lichbach
Lichbach in "What makes rational peasants revolutionary"
peasants resist commercialization of agriculture
capitalism and imperialism = commercialization
what about serdom?
what are selected incentives? From personal experience I have to say that they do seem to work: I am much likely to support a movement which will give me a nice t-shirt or such. particularistic benefits / material self-interests
probably the largest peasant revolution in Poland (and likely eastern europe) was the Kosciuszko Insurrection, whose leaders (Kosciuszko) offered a powerful incentive to peasants: freedom from serfdom.
"Contending theories..."
economic approach: public good model, expected utility model, prisoner's dillema model,
Rebel's dillema - costs of action, chance of success
rational peasants should not rebel - so why do they?
Structure Oriented (SPOT) - movements are triggered by (incentives created by) political opportunities and are helped by mobilizing structures and cultural frames. Weberian approach. But also struggle for power to control scarce resources - Marxist approach.
For half a century a major stream of my work has concentrated on how, when, where and why ordinary people make collective claims on public authorities, other holders of power, competitors, enemies and objects of popular disaproval.
Major shifts in the array of means by which ordinary people made collective claims on others occured in WE and NA between 1750 and 1850 - and the new arrays can be colled 'social movements'
uses Economist as a reference (for events)
social movements: a form of contentious politics
sm: giving ordinary people the power: The rise and fall of sm marks the expantion and conctraction of democratic opportunities
can we find an exception to the rule?
The social movements, as an invented institution, could disappear or mutate into some quite different form of politics.
democratization promotes the formation of the social movements
Tilly: Social Movements 1768-2008
revised Chapter 5:
examples of sm using succesfully new tech in China: p. g95,[18], more and more Chinese citizens are engaging in political protest (p.109); the Internet is their window to the world (p.111); "smart mob" appear (p.111)
government control: governments are adopting quickly (p. 97) but globalization weakened states, including state control over communication (p.98-99)
research questions: are new technologies transforming social movement? How? Is the number of loose global relations growing> p. 97, are the changes significantly different/more important then previous? How are WUNC displays changing? (p.106)
warnings for researchers (p.98): 1) avoid technological determinism, 2) note digital divide (although this specific key term is not used...) 3) its evolution, not revolution (communication technologies that change SM didn't begun with the Internet...) 4) globalization is not everything
history of globalization (p.98-100)
avoid communication determinism (p.102): communications tools by themselves are not enough for social change (necessary, but not sufficient! - P.)
table of communication technologies important for sm (p.102): telegraph, telephone, radio, tv, satellite communication, mobile telephony, Internet
political circuits (p.103) - why specific communication tool matter: each comm tool empowers different types of social relations
overall trends for sm: comm tools reduce costs and increase range (geographical? number of people?) sm can affect
but tools also tie users to each other and exclude non-users (aspects of digital divide)
coordination of sm on global scale will not happen soon (p.104) but is possible in long term; in the meantime, transnational social movements organizations keep growing in number (p.118)
Bennet (2003, p.106): networks are becoming looser, local issues are becoming less important then global (or are being reframed?), traditional resources (wealth) are becoming less important, campaigns are becoming sustainable and targets easier to change, WUNC display include "virtual performances"
sm are becoming more vulnerable to challenges of coordination, control and commitment (how? perhaps because blurry boundaries between members, supporters and adherents discourage members? p.106)
Tilly and Goldstone: Threat (and Opportunity): Popular Action and State Responce in the Dynamics of Contentious Action
Charles Tilly and Jack A. Goldstone: Threat (and Opportunity): Popular Action and State Responce in the Dynamics of Contentious Action
opportunities (South Africa black activists, 1980s): international support, increase in black education enrollment, fewer color bans on employment, legalisation of black trade unions
interesting similiarity to Poland in 1980s: government steps up repression (state of emergency in South Africa, martial law in Poland), yet both countries see 'widespread formation of local civic associations and significant expansion of worker militancy' (also in both regimes trade unions are on the forefront of the fight: Congress of South African Trade Unions, Solidarity. 'Despite the state of emergency in most industrial cities, despite banning of many community organizations, and despite detention of thousands of activists without trial', mobilization accelerated in both countries. Question: why were those repressions not effective (enough)?
Tilly notes the increased radicalization of SA activists. In Poland, there was also increasing number of people calling for violent action (although it never took place).
Tilly notes: 'over SA as a whole, this sort of interaction between repression and local activism produced a suprising pattern: when governmental threats increased, so did popular opposition.' Same thing in Poland in 1980s. Tilly: 'the threat was focusing resistance (...) - an anomaly'. Later he notes that empirical findings suggest (in some cases) a POSITIVE correlation between rise of repression and increased mobilization. Also other examples: Palestinians, Iran, Germany.
how opportunity is created? Tilly: external or internal factors weaken the state and/or changing social conditions increase the resources and confidence of popular groups seeking change. Opportunity is positivly correlated with actions and state concessions.
repression = threat = in theory, anti-opportunity. Tilly disagrees.
opportunity defined: the probability that social protest actions will lead to success in achieving a desired outcome (specificly weakening of state)
theat defined: costs that a social group will inccure from from action and inaction.
thus (perceived) chance of success is very important. Low costs also are important.
Gains = (Value of succes * chance for success) - costs of the protests; chance of success = state weakness + popular support; value of success = new advantages + avoiding current/anticipated threats (costs) of inaction
Graph - p.187
cost of concessions and repressions to the state is important in determining its responce. Here the political system becomes important: in democracies, repression is much more expensive then concessions, while a authoritarian system finds repression more cost-effective.
Scenarios
Conclusion: the correlation between rising opportunity and rising protests is not simple, as it is skewed by the threat factor. Similarly there is no simple correlation between concessions or repressions and lowering of protests. Basically 'not enough' concessions and/or repressions may have an effect contrary to the expected. Note: if we would try to draw a graph for this, it would likely have curves, not lines. Compare also to Elasticity (economics) and Indifference curve.
Goldstein vs Skocpol&Finegold on political opportunity
Goldstein
Background: Wagner Act: estabilished a legally enforcable right for US industrial workers to unionize by majority vote; outlawed company-run unions and explicitly protected the right of unions to engage in strike; set up the National Labor Relations Board to manage representation elections and explicitly proscribed methods by which employers might interfere with workers rights to unionize autonomously. Until it was upheld by US Supreme Court in April 1937 in the National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation case, it was usually disobeyed by corporations and thus in practice unenforced.
Political opportunities as resulting in the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, Wagner Act) in 1935: two different views on what created this political opportunity.
"class approach" - political opportunity for change (passage of NLRA) was created by increased radicalization and militilization of labor movements (S&F critique: impact of rad. is overrrated); state is heavily dependent on societal forces and those social forces forced the state to take action; social unrest from below triggered elite action designed at social control from above (give enough concession to prevent the escalation of demands) (S&F critique: it was only a minor factor).
Skocpol&Finegold: "state-based and electorally based approach" - political opportunity was created by political actors foremost. 2 main factors: 1) failure of previous political act (National Industry Recovery Act of 1933 and Public Resolution No.44) and 2) the growing strenght of the Democrats were instrumental for NLRA (Goldstein critique: it would've happened without them too and it was caused by social unrest anyway). It's puprpose was not to quell unrest but to promote economic recovery. Failure of the previous political acts forced political actors to try plan B ('do something') - especially as it weakened the previous opponents of the 'plan B', and as it increased the workers expectations (and repertoires of contension (?)). Growing strenght of Democracts (plan B supporters) was due to redestricting ("not increased labor militancy") - shift in electoral politics (Goldstein critique: no, it was due to depression). Wagner act was "the product of the administratively situated policy learning".
S&F about G: "his argument are not as novel as he suggests" "rest on selective evidence and can explain neither (of the two important issues)" "misinterprets the plain intentions of the law" "tries to shortcircuit many (...) factors" "scholars should not just present stories based on selective descriptions and counterfactual speculations"
S&F about G cont.:Goldstein correctly suggests that social movements can create an overall context in which political leaders feel they "must do something" [but errs] in attributing the motivations of political actors (who drafted and voted for the proposal) to pressure from social movements. Goldstein suggest that indirect influence from ongoing labor unrest is the cause of NLRA passage
G about S&F: "making a fetish of qualitative statistics" "repeating assertions over and over again (while supplying no evidence for them) does not make them so" "they have "discovered" a new set of statistics" "house of cards state autonomy approach"
Goldstein: S&F overstress the importance of "independent reformist intelectuall agendas and and a broad range of governmental and other phenomena, all mistakenly subsumend under the umbrella of state activity" while ignoring the reality ("growing strenght of radical organization not restricted to small segments of population"). They see state actors as autonomous, taking advantage for their own reasons
Goldstein: the 1934 elections cannot be understood just as an independent variable affecting the political actors, it is a dependant variable influenced by growing radicalization
Goldstein: the passage of NLRA was not merely a responce to particular events just before its passage but to an increasing wave of social protests and rapidly increasing importance of social organizations - a process that have been in development for number of years. Theory of state autonomy limits one's view of politics to exclude relevant societal and political influences.
Goldstein: repressions were not contemplated because they would create more dissent. S&F: no, they could've been used
nice conclusion of S&A: there are many factors that forced government to concede, and labor pressure was just one of them
nice conclusion of G too
Zald and McCarthy: Social Movements in an Organizational Society
Mayer N Zald, John D McCarthy, Social Movements in an Organizational Society:
social organizations as carriers of the social movements. Organizations are not stable beaurocracies oposed to lively movements, they are two sides of the same coin.
resource mobilization theory (resource mobilization): social movement activity is a behaviour with a goal. Organization is more important then acquisition of the resources, or the resources themselves. It focuses on interactions between social movement organizations (SMOs) and other organizations (SMOs, businesses, governments, etc.). Organization infrastructure is another aspect of study in this approach.
open systems view of organizations: need to adapt to enviroment. There is really no static enviroment, it's formed from other organizations. There are competitors for the same resource base (even though they may have similar goals). There are clear enemies: countermovements, authorities - who are often the target of change advocated by the SMO. Triad: movements, countermovements, authorities. Third party: media?
SMI: social movements industry: SMOs with similar goals. Economic approach: niches, positioning, product differentiation, growing or declining industries, social controls instead of government regulations,
social movement sector comapared to society. Different societies. Size. Classes. Life style. Politicization.
Organizational infrastructure can explain the differences in success rates of movements and countermovements. Adopting existing social networks can be a great boon (example: pro-life movement using established religious infrastrucure).
growth of rapid communication, general prosperity (McCarthy and Zald 1973) -> resource mobilization on the Internet
communication network can make or break the movement (McAdam, McCarthy, Zald 1988:715, 722:723); diffusion of the movement ideas - and diffusion of the technology (wealth, contacts) that make it possible
Rochon: p.57: One of the cultural change processes: "First step is the incubation of new values within a relatively small, interacting, self-conscious critical community. The second step is a diffusion of these values to a wider public through the creation of social and political movements."
p.87: "From the political perspective, critical communities are composed not just of innovative thinkers, but also of networks that have a particular ideology and (perhaps) a partisan orientation."
Rochon: p.89-90: "Changes in the physical world, in the structure of a society, or in the state of knowledge may context in which a particular problem area becomes visible to people, or more urgently visible, or in a different light."
Comment by Piotr: Sounds like a perfect explanation of the importance of communication technology in social interactions (and movement).
Tarrow: Power in Movement
contentious collective action (Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2nd ed, p.3): collective action can be sustained and undramatic. Can occur on the part of a group acting in the name of goals that "would hardly raise an eyebrow". It becomes contentious when people who lack regular actions to institutions, who act in the name of new or unaccepted claims, behave in a way that fundamentally change others or challenge authorities
Comment by Piotr: a way that funammentally change others or challenge authorities. The "or" is quite important here!
Tarrow, p.3: some movements are intensely apolitical (Craig Calhoun, 1994, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, pp.9-36), but they still encounter authorities who enforce laws (Wikipedia and copyright, privacy, legal challenges)
Comment by Piotr: indeed, re works by Jennifer Earl - movements to save TV shows and so on. Browncoats?
collective challenge through disruptive actions against authorities
Comment by Piotr: what about technological opportunities?
movements arose as people could more cheaply oppose the state
tools of movements are absorbed into traditional politics (elections, strikes), new arise
type of ties/connections between members influence their involvement
cycles of contention spread know-how, ideas, opportunities to other movements, new forms of contention are experimented with and diffused through the social movement sector
Comment by Piotr: is Internet (wikis...) being experiment with by new movements, and will be adopted by all at the end of this cycle?
Tarrow (p.36) lists three major changes leading to the rise of modern social movements, one of which is the expansion of roads and printed communication. P.41-42 he writes how modern repertoires of contention grew from day to day practice of contention, such as business practices. Comment by Piotr: Wikis may be such an enabler
importance of informal networks; communities and associations "of print": Tarrow, p.50: readers of Encyclopedie and other similar periodicals were conscious of common identity.
Comment by Piotr: common identity is build by organizations that are part of the "social movement community", perhaps? See workby Staggenborg (below)
when government controls over media weakens, social movements gain power (Tarrow, Eisenstein, see Tarrow, p.50)
Tarrow, p.54: primary associations and f2f contacts provide solidarity for social movements among people who know and trust one another. "Print" associations build structures among larger numbers, and allow the diffusion of movements to wider public. They allow formation of loose social coalitons, dealing with similar issues, giving shape to broad movement cycles.
Comment by Piotr: Can emergence or diffusion of new communication technology be seen as a new political opportunity? Or is it more of another resource for resource mobilization theory?
cycles of protests: Comment by Piotr: can new technologies form parts of the cycle?
media framing (Tarrow, p.114-116): structure of media industry affects movements: media like to report and thus encourage radicals, media can be biased and thus help or hurt the movement
iron law of oligarchy - one of the explanation for institutionalization of movements
Tarrow, p.138: "Movemements rest on the razor's edge between institutionalization and isolation."
Comment by Piotr: Great quote, period.
adhocracies - through Tarrow (p.129-130) never uses the word - can "break the iron law": "loosely connected organizations... decentralized democratic movements...". Gerlach and Hine (1970): decentralized, segmented and reticulated groups: decentralized - lack of leadership and absence of card-carrying membership; segmentation - independent local groups which can combine or further divide when needed; reticulated - weblike connective structure, where ties between groups are mostly through unofficial personal relationships. Those decentralized movements help the movement survive periods of demobilization, keep people involved and interested, educate members...
internal innovations (Tarrow, p.132) include communication technology, which in the past movement organizers have been quick to adopt, and thus increase the mobilization power of the movements.
professionalization - when everybody is a professional, movement organization can avoid professionalization by relying on professional volunteers, not employing the
Markoff
Markoff artcicle:
interaction of powerholders (elites) and challengers (social moveemtns)
this interaction is crucial to understanding the actions of both actors
not everything can be explained by long term processes, for example: alliances of opportunity
social movements leading to change in social politics
Sidney Tarrow: interlinked cycles of protest and reform
Charles Tilly: social movements consist of "sustained interactions among group of individuals" (Social Movements Old and New)
Example: early revolutionary France: peasants revolutions and power elites legislation
political campaign for peas
peasants interact with non-peasants, learn of anti-segineural sentiments and plans
if long term processes may realign interests and resources, short term processes may provide vital opportunities
nice conc (top 28)
Course notes
geograpical concentration increases the density of interaction between group members (Kornahauser 1959). This is less psychological and more structural/organizational: ubranization increases potential for collective action (McAdam 1982:: 94-98, Wilson 1973:140-151). Internet (Tilly 1975: 254)
growth of rapid communication, general prosperity (McCarthy and Zald 1973) - resource mobilization on the Internet
environment shapes the organizations (Polsby 1983) - Internet leads to Internet social movements
communication network can make or break the movement (McAdam, McCarthy, Zald 1988:715, 722:723); diffusion of the movement ideas - and diffusion of the technology (wealth, contacts) that make it possible
protest in a world without borders? sounds like Internet
contentious collective action (Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2nd ed, p.3): collective action can be sustained and undramatic. Can occur on the part of a group acting in the name of goals that "would hardly raise an eyebrow". It becomes contentious when people who lack regular actions to institutions, who act in the name of new or unaccepted claims, behave in a way that fundamentally change others or challenge authorities
Tarrow, p.3: some movements are intensely apolitical (Craig Calhoun, 1994, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, pp.9-36), but they still encounter authorities who enforce laws (Wikipedia and copyright, privacy, legal challenges)
collective challenge through disruptive actions against authorities
common purpose
solidarity and collective identity
sustainable contentious politics
political opportunities: what about technological opportunities?
movements arose as people could more cheaply oppose the state
tools of movements are absorbed into traditional politics (elections, strikes), new arise
type of ties/connections between members influence their involvement
cycles of contention spread know-how, ideas, opportunities to other movements, new forms of contention are experimented with and diffused through the social movement sector
Tarrow (p.36) lists three major changes leading to the rise of modern social movements, one of which is the expansion of roads and printed communication. P.41-42 he writes how modern repertoires of contention grew from day to day practice of contention, such as business practices. Wikis may be such an enabler
importance of informal networks; communities and associations "of print": Tarrow, p.50: readers of Encyclopedie and other similar periodicals were conscious of common identity.
when government controls over media weakens, social movements gain power (Tarrow, Eisenstein, see Tarrow, p.50)
Tarrow, p.54: primary associations and f2f contacts provide solidarity for social movements among people who know and trust one another. "Print" associations build structures among larger numbers, and allow the diffusion of movements to wider public. They allow formation of loose social coalitons, dealing with similar issues, giving shape to broad movement cycles.
Can emergence or diffusion of new communication technology be seen as a new political opportunity? Or is it more of another resource for resource mobilization theory?
cycles of protests: can new technologies form parts of the cycle?
media framing (Tarrow, p.114-116): structure of media industry affects movements: media like to report and thus encourage radicals, media can be biased and thus help or hurt the movement
iron law of oligarchy - one of the explanation for institutionalization of movements
Tarrow, p.138: "Movemements rest on the razor's edge between institutionalization and isolation."
adhocracies - through Tarrow (p.129-130) never uses the word - can "break the iron law": "loosely connected organizations... decentralized democratic movements...". Gerlach and Hine (1970): decentralized, segmented and reticulated groups: decentralized - lack of leadership and absence of card-carrying membership; segmentation - independent local groups which can combine or further divide when needed; reticulated - weblike connective structure, where ties between groups are mostly through unofficial personal relationships. Those decentralized movements help the movement survive periods of demobilization, keep people involved and interested, educate members...
internal innovations (Tarrow, p.132) include communication technology, which in the past movement organizers have been quick to adopt, and thus increase the mobilization power of the movements.
professionalization - when everybody is a professional, movement organization can avoid professionalization by relying on professional volunteers, not employing them
Rochon: p.57: One of the cultural change processes: "First step is the incubation of new values within a relatively small, interacting, self-conscious critical community. The second step is a diffusion of these values to a wider public through the creation of social and political movements."
p.87: "From the political perspective, critical communities are composed not just of innovative thinkers, but also of networks that have a particular ideology and (perhaps) a partisan orientation."
Rochon: p.89-90: "Changes in the physical aworld, in the structure of a society, or in the state of knowledge may context in which a particular problem area becomes visible to people, or more urgently visible, or in a different light." Sounds like a perfect explanation of the importance of communication technology in social interactions (and movement).
Benford & Snow ("Framing processes and social movements" ASR 2000): p. 630: audience effects: target of the message can affect the form and content of the message. Audience(s) targeted are one of the major contextual factors that help to explain modification of the collective action frames. Can wiki be frame useful in reaching some, but not all? Can use of specific communication tools be part of a collective action frame - as in online/Internet SMOs are required/expected to use more advanced tools to look professional/attractive?
Minkoff & McCarthy (Reinvigorating the study of organizational processes in social movements) in Mobilization: "social movement sector is significantly composed of volunteer labor."
Aldrich (1999) Organizations Evolving (SAGE): two approaches have dominated literature on emergence of new organizations: enterprenurship approach emphasizing leaders/founders, and sociological approach emphasizing societal and historical context (structure vs. agency?).
"innovative organizations" = started by enterprenouers whose routines and competencies vary significantly from the existing ones; it can promote the development of new paradigms
Blee and Courier (2005): Character Building: The Dynamics of Emerging Social Movement Groups, Mobilization
Suzanne STaggenborg, Social Movements Communities and Cycles of Protest: The Emergence and Maintenance of a Local Women's Movement, Social Problems, 1998: the concept of a social community: SMO+supporting informal networks of activists sharing goals and sentiments. SMOs are explicitly concerned with cultural and political change and they have external targets such as governmental authorities; other organizations within SMC differ in that they exist to provide services or to educate or entertain participants of the community. Movement culture (synbols, rituals, values, ideology) is shared and developed, and creates a collective identity.
methodology: this case study compares... drawing on archival data, participant observations and surveys...we examine... having estabilished... I draw on theory to conduct a grounded analysis of my data to indeity conditions that could account for... I focus... this comparison reveals... the data on which this analysis is based is drawn from sources and my experiences... I explain...
Hadden and Tarrow: the "social movement spillout" idea touches upon something discussed previously: is there a finite amount of social movement activism (resources)? Even more so, if channeled into a given cause, does it always detract from others? Is social movement sector a zero-sum game? Since historical trends in SM suggest that they have grown over two centuries, this wouldn't necessarily be the case, I think. Sure, spillout occurs, but does it mean there is no spillover and other more positive outcomes?
Porta and Fillieule: Incidentally, the obsservation from p.231: "under the benevolent eyes of the police, demonstrators are allowed to set fire to a bus-shelter or a truck with the sole objective of allowing photographs to be taken by media, before everyone packs up and peacefully goes home" was quite interesting, as it implies a high degree of cooperation between social movement activists, police officers and media representatives, both aiming at... deceiving the public. I wonder if this also represents some form of institutionalization? PS. I think the article suffers from focus on democratic regimes only.
Almeida: an interesting observation on p.386 - "sustained period of political opportunity deposited in organizational infrastructure persisted after the opportunities perished". I wonder if this is however not missing something: what about resources/etc. deposited outside organizational infrastructure? In Poland, there is some interesting research comparing Poland to Soviet Union/Russia, claiming that democratic tendencies in Poland vs. relative lack of them in Russia are the result of 20 years of interwar democracy in Poland vs. few months of demoracy in 1917 Russia. Yet few decades of communist rule have demolished many Polish organizations. Is it possible that resources outside organizations - passed through family traditions, for exmaple - are as important, or more?
Earl: social controls of protest - an interesting and indeed important counterpart to state repressions. I'd assume that countermovements would fit well into those social controls - and indeed, Earl discusses them. The table on p.63 is quite interesting, too. Question: how to classify state-supported but officially non-state actions? Ex. in Russia, demonstrations organized with help of the government, but officially, by NGOs?
p.12 distinguishes e-mobilizations (web used to facilitate offline action, mostly through information sharing), e-tactics (low cost, don't reply on co-presence), and e-movements (organization and participation of the movement occurs entirely online)
p.16 (also p.179-181) new, digital repertoire of contention, formed around cheap (even zero-cost), no co-presence required activities
p.20 due to lowering costs, resources are less important, and the central role of SMO has declined
p.21-38 overview of research on Internet activism; introduction of supersize (gather more people) and theory 2.0 (new, changed processes, for example - organization around non-political causes) effects
p.32-38 importance of new technology being easier to use ("technological affordance")
p.92-93 notes the difference between participants (site visitors) and activists. Participants looser set of connection and commitment can have benefits, as knowing they can stop participation easily, they are also more willing to join in the first place.
p.93-97 do low-cost actions matter? It is not certain that targets consider cost, that offline prostest is more effective (or how). Low-cost activities can also be enabling high-cost, as a form of a gateway activism.
p.107-108, also p.151-162 organization can occur without an organization, this may be one of the most significant of the "2.0 effects". Some activist websites have only a solo organizer.
p.117-118 SMOs still are important, they are needed when costs are higher, or when organizing is dangerous (p.120)
p.160-161 many solo organizers do not see themselves as activists, seeing their work as so cheap and easy as not to deserve the (serious) label of activist
p.193 e-tactics are increasingly popular
p.194 also, popular worldwide
p.195-197 online sites like PetitionOnline are important enough to be attacked
p.198 e-tactics (web) allow low-cost participation, and reduce the need for physical co-presence (also, Chapter 4, p.66-97)
p.198-199 significant costs and organizational structure are not necessary for (some) e-tactics
p.199 technology matters
p.199 collective identity is harder to build online than offline, but e-tactics still work without a significant collective identity behind them
p.200 e-tactics can supersize offline activities (gather more people) or create web 2.0 effects (new, changed processes, for example - organization around non-political causes)
p.200 no need for co-presence increases the role and activity of individuals without background in activism and social movements
p.201 in e-tactics copresense is changed to coordinated collective action
p.203-204 pace of change is rapid, new innovations can appear within years
p.205 lone wolf organizers are gaining importance, alongside typical SMOs
Cognitive Surplus book theme: people are now learning how to use more constructively the free time afforded to them since the 1940s for creative acts rather than consumptive ones, particularly with the advent of online tools that allow new forms of collaboration; people used to share culture much more till the advent of the TV, but the few decades of the TV were only the exception to the otherwise common norm of shared and participatory culture we are now re-learning;
p.2-3 social change / changes in economy lead to changes in lifestyle
p.4 what alcohol has been to populace in the midst of industrialization, TV has been to them during deindustrialization
p.4-5 we have much more free time than we used to
p.6-7 watching tv leads to less happiness/is not as satisfying as certain other activities; it replaces socialization, see social surrogacy
p.10 Wikipedia represents the investment of 100 million hours (up to 2009), compared to 2 billion hours we spend watching TV every year
p.11 Internet is beginning to replace TV as a way to spend free time
p.14 "some people are still astonished that individual members of society, previously happy to spend most of their free time consuming [TV], would start voluntarily making and sharing things [on the Internet]"
p.19-20 Internet allows people to once again create and share culture
p.21-22 active participation in culture is more constructive (contributing to the society) than passive; example: gaming with others (rpg, MMORPG) is more constructive than watching TV
p.22 people like to consume, but they also like to produce and share
p.25 "When you aggregate a lot of something, it behaves in new ways, and our new communications tools are aggregating our individual ability to create and share, at unprecedented levels of more."
means / how: the ability of anyone to publish online
p.41 example of Shirky Principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" (bus company fighting a carpooling service)
motive / why: "labor of love"/intrinsic motivations, entering the public arena is easy, discovering others with similar interests is easy,
opportunity / what: social production - p.119 "work that is jointly owned or accessed by its participants, and created by people operating as peers, without a managerial hierarchy"; p.129 "the ability of loosely coordinated groups with a shared culture to perform tasks more effectively then individuals, markets or governments"
p.162 social production is steadily becoming more efficient
p.180-181 creating, understanding and managing a culture that rewards its members for doing hard, civil work (like Wikipedia) is "one of the greatest challenges of our era"
p.185 Steve Weber in The Success of Open Source also notes that technology is not enough, what is needed is for the participants to have "a positive normative or ethical valance toward the process"
p.191 people are bad at predicting impact of technology (like the Internet)
highly skilled and educated editors are attracted to the idea
Given enough eyballs, all bugs are shallow
NPOV
Dealing with vandalism
Wales and Sanders were influential in setting the original direction and guiding policies, but now the community operates effectively with very little menagerial intervention"[21]
"It success so far shows that amazingly loose hierarchies can can create impressingly large and complex results".
"The success of Wikipedia shows that noneconomic motivations can cause people to do what one would have though would require financial investment".
"Suprisingly the desire for personal recongnition doesn't appear to be the primary motivation. For most people, the attraction is the intellectual addictive pleasure of the task itself, the remarkable freedom everyone has to improve the product and the satisfaction of working together towards a grand vision".
Wikis allow to participate in horizontal information assemblies
the largest example of participatory journalism to date[29]
Dariusz Jemielniak
the largest collaborative project in history of humankind
overview of criticism (misconceptions about Wikipedia)
critique of Editcountitis
adminship is a big deal, "administrators constitute a privileged caste" (due to lack of recall)
cabals
Articles
Becoming Wikipedian
based on interviews (@/phone) with 9 Wikipedians
"many of the individuals involved in the site’s genesis initially had little confidence that an openly-editable website could ever come to resemble an encyclopedic information resource" (see also Sanger, L. The early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia: a memoir. In DiBona, C., Stone, M. and Cooper, D., editors, Open Sources 2.0, O'Reilly Press: Sebastopol, CA,)
"Wikipedia entries are stylistically indistinguishable from those found in a traditional, print source" (see also Collaborative authoring on the web: A genre analysis of online encyclopedias.)\
"Application of the history flow method to Wikipedia allowed the researchers to recognize and describe four patterns of cooperation and conflict on the site: vandalism and repair; anonymity versus named authorship; negotiation; and content stability." (see also Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations.)
"individuals come to understand Wikipedia as a community of collaborative authorship and claim membership through participation and self-identification."
LPP: newcomers do small tasks and are drawn in to more central and involved issues ("a move from encyclopedia consumer to encyclopedia creator")
"At the periphery of Wikipedia, novice users contribute by reading articles out of interest, noting mistakes or omissions, and correcting them."
"Even as they contribute to the articles, new users tend to make only minor changes. Several of the participants reported a reluctance to make drastic changes when they first began contributing to the Wikipedia" (this may explained why editors more active in WP:V are generally more experienced)
"as they moved toward fuller participation, participants adopted a caretaker role with respect to some collection of articles. Over time, these collections grow. Eventually, Wikipedians identify with the community as a whole, adopt the goals of building a sound information resource, and see themselves as managers or creators"
"In the move from novice to Wikipedian, goals broaden to include growing the community itself and improving the overall quality and character of the site." (per above)
"When asked why they contribute to the Wikipedia, many Wikipedians recognized the project’s overarching goals, the appeal of community, and perceived contributions to society" - also altruism is critizied by several studies
"All participants reported that the first thing they do when logging into the Wikipedia is check their 'watch list'."
"How the Interface Helps"
"It is only as individuals are drawn into the Wikipedia community that they begin to understand that Wikipedia is a community and begin to recognize the richness of community standards and roles." "In Wikipedia, a part of moving from the periphery toward fuller participation is becoming aware of the community that you are joining."
"Whereas all users are subject to community punishment (from chastisement to banning) if they act inappropriately, Wikipedians are expected to give new users some leeway. As one participant noted, “We have a policy of don’t bite the newcomers and forgive and forget.”" "Another convention that is understood by Wikipedians but not by novices is that anonymous contributions are inherently suspect, so new users are encouraged to register and get usernames and to always sign their contributions to discussions."
"Some Wikipedians assume the role of system administrator. Administrators are not meant to hold privileged positions in the community. According to our interviewees and to the Wikipedia site, obtaining administrator status is not difficult. It is available to any established and therefore trusted member of the community and provides access to functions such as removing vandalism from page histories, blocking IP addresses or ranges from editing, and editing secure pages such as the top page of the site."
"These patterns suggest a new emerging genre, not only of information resource, but of collaborative activity" (new genre)
Preferential attachment
"In particular, we found here one of the first large–scale confirmations of the preferential attachment, or “rich–get–richer”, rule."
positive correlation between number of edits and high-quality contributions
"In the only systematic study of the quality of content that we are aware of, Wikipedia is found to be comparable in quality to traditional encyclopedias (Lih 2004)."
"two types of contributors, the strongly committed expert and the passerby contributor" - found in open source and on Wiki
"A different type of incentive for contributors is the desire to be part of the Wikipedia community."
"According to this discussion, contributors to Wikipedia are motivated by two different factors: (1) reputation and/or (2) commitment to the group identity of the Wikipedia community."
"For each contributor, we use the Wikipedia differencing algorithm3 to compare the differences between three documents: (1) edit, the edit submitted by the contributor, (2) previous, the version of the article prior to the edit, and (3) current, the current version of the article as it exists on the day the sample was drawn.". "We measure the quality of an edit by calculating the number of characters from a contributor’s edit that are retained in the current version, measured as the percentage retained of the total number of characters in the entry (retained in current/total in current)."
Organization
"Wikipedia can be considered as an ex-treme form of a self-managing team, as a means of labour division."
"The traditional way to coordinate was by means of a superior, who had either to simply divide labour and to monitor it, or to manage a team of people. In the literature from the past decennia, an alternative to this tradition has arisen: self-managing teams. The Wikipedia community can perhaps be seen as an ultimate kind of self-management."
history flow
One pattern we call firstmover advantage. The initial text of a page tends to survive longer and tends to suffer fewer modifications than later contributions to the same page. Our hypothesis is that the first person to create a page generally sets the tone of the article on that page and, therefore, their text usually has the highest survival rate.
talk before you type
we find that these pages serve many purposes, notably supporting strategic planning of edits and enforcement of standard guidelines and conventions. Our results suggest that despite the potential for anarchy, the Wikipedia community places a strong emphasis on group coordination, policy, and process.
Despite this far-reaching discussion, at this point little empirical data has been published about the fundamental inner workings of Wikipedia.
Growth rate of namespace pages: Wikipedia namspace: 1211 in 2003 to 81738 in 2005 (68x growth rate, the second largest in the project (after user talk discussions))
"The existence of such projects plus the growth of differentnamespaces suggests that a growing amount of activityhappens in auxiliary spaces where users coordinateaction rather than edit articles. This pattern echoes thetendency of active Wikipedians to move from having alocal focus—editing individual articles—to a more highlevelconcern for the quality of content and the health of the community, as described by Bryant et al."
"Each page was analyzed by two separate researchers to ensure coding consistency; when the classifications disagreed, they were resolved through mutual discussion."
"The next notable category of postings is made up of references to official Wikipedia guidelines, which account for 7.9% of the activity in Talk pages. This indicates that policies and guidelines are actively used by the Wikipedia community."
"we found that conversation on Talk pages is in some respects formalized and policydriven. Special etiquette has evolved for the Talk pages, and explicit references to written guidelines are frequently invoked. Overall, the kind of process and policy enforcement that happens in Talk pages seems to play a crucial role in fostering civil behavior and community ties"
"Finally, it would be worthwhile to investigate the evolution of the policies and processes that serve as reference points during discussion. Such trappings of bureaucracy are often seen as the result of the exertion of power from the top down, yet in Wikipedia they seem to emerge, to some degree, spontaneously. It would be fascinating to explore whether Wiki technology— seemingly antithetical to bureaucracy—actually supports or even encourages conventional forms of organization."
"wiki facilitates a collaborative document editing effort relying on the contribution of multiple authors in a concurrent system. This enables combining the contributions in an effective and democratic way allowing all the ground knowledge about the article/lemma to be present in the most recent revision of the article. By democratic, we also refer to the ability of anyone who uses the wiki to contribute or to make modifications to content contributed by someone else."
Visualization of the Social Network of the Contributors for the individual article
"frequently sub-communities covering more specific topics or smaller groups of friends are established", rule of 150
Community Building
deaths, space mission example for rapid updates
describe benefits of user community for encyclopedia building project
Public sphere
Perhaps the most exciting use for wikis, however, is for political documents like petitions, resolutions, or manifestos. Using wikis, a community of rational-critical debaters could develop documents that would represent their truly collective interests; any private interests would quickly be deleted by the vigilance of other wiki participants.
Because they continuously subject writing to constant scrutiny, wikis can perhaps be more trusted than content from commercial publishers.
phantom authority
ease of reverting vandalism
administrators = experienced and trusted users/developers. administrators can exercise a certain degree of institutional authority. Indeed, they are allowed to ban IP addresses and permanently delete pages and their history.
In the past: "Wikipedian must send an e–mail to the English Wikipedia mailing list (WikiEN–L), giving his or her login name and requesting access"
In this sense, Wikipedia is characterized by a system of "distributed authority" (Mateos Garcia and Steinmueller, 2003a [32])
Final policy decisions are up to one of the founders, Jimmy Wales [13]. However, if this sort of benevolent dictator attempted to deviate from a neutral and objective policy towards content (for example, in order to push a specific political agenda), then the license [14] provides a strong counter–balance to his power. The contributors may and should, in such a case, take the database and the software and set up a competing project (Larry Sanger, the other founder of the project and former chief editor, left Wikipedia on 1 March 2002 and set up the Citizenpedia project). Also, Jimbo quote: ""[I]n order to hold the project together, and in order to keep the largest possible group of people working together on the central project, I must listen carefully to all elements of the community, and make decisions that are satisfactory to the best interests of the encyclopaedia as a whole""
similarities and differences between the motivation of contributors to Open Source projects and Wikipedia: F/OSS projects provide clear individual incentives for contributors -> Wikipedia is an even more extreme example of voluntary engagement in Internet-based projects.
The results reveal that satisfaction ratings of contributors are determined by perceived benefits, dentification with the Wikipedia community, and task characteristics. Contributors’ engagement (e.g., hours per week) was particularly determined by their tolerance for opportunity costs and the experienced characteristics of their tasks, the latter effect being partially mediated by intrinsic motivation. Most relevant task characteristics both for contributors’ engagement and satisfaction were autonomy, task significance, and skill variety. Additional motives reported by Wikipedia contributors suggest the importance of generativity.
network analysis
some interesting facts about the cultural biases underlying the overall structure of Wikipedia. Not surprisingly it seems clear that it is a resource strongly biassed towards Western culture and history.
Mutual Aid
the community itself. One might characterize it according to the definition Kropotkin wrote of in his Britannica article on anarchism: “harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups.”
Not surprisingly, Wikipedians sometimes disagree: each contributor resisting the other's influence on the joint outcome of a contested article,
hesitation in drawing too sharp a line between agreement and conflict ("in the Wikipedia context it is difficult to distinguish between agreement and disagreement"). - particulary in discource
we investigate the relation between users' behavior in Wikipedia and their cultural backgrounds as defined by the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede (1991).
"How, if at all, do differences in the cultural backgrounds of Wikipedia contributors influence their behavior?"
"An analysis of all edit operations performed on the French, German, Japanese, and Dutch Wikipedia pages about the topic game shows that there are correlations between Hofstede's cultural dimensions and the nature and frequency of specific edit operations made by contributors."
Hofstede applies the term culture primarily to national groups, admitting that while nations are not the best way to study culture, "they are usually the only kind of units available for comparison and [thus are] better than nothing" (Hofstede, 2002, p. 1356).
His dimensions have been found to be relevant to web design (Marcus & Gould, 2000; Robbins & Stylianou, 2002; Sheridan, 2001) and aspects of web-based communication (Tsikriktsis, 2002; Wilson, et al., 2002). Although Hofstede's work has attracted criticism (e.g., McSweeney, 2002), like others (Callahan, 2005; Hofstede, 2002; Singh, Zhao, & Hu, 2003) we feel that his cultural dimensions represent a significant contribution to cultural research and theory. A comprehensive summary of the arguments for and against the use of Hofstede's dimensions can be found in Callahan (2005).
It can be inferred that in countries with a higher PDI, most people are used to following orders. Important or powerful decisions are made by a few powerful people and not by the citizens themselves (Hofstede, 1991). People from a country with a relatively high PDI are not used to taking the initiative and do not feel that they have the power or right to make the decision of deleting somebody else's work.
" To arrive at a set of categories, we followed the process of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We processed the pages and extracted possible categories as they emerged. By doing this several times in an iterative cycle, the categories were refined according to the data until saturation was reached. "
very useful Table 1
The findings of this exploratory study show that content analysis methods can be useful for investigating cultural differences in wiki communities. The methodology further demonstrated that valuable information can be extracted from the history page of a wiki, by categorizing and then relating it to cultural dimensions.
What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure
content areas by top categories in proportion to Wikipedia content
conflicts by areas of content
Open movements
Felipe Ortega and Kevin Crowston. Introduction to open movements: Floss, open content and open communities minitrack. In Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2009), January 2009.
Qualities of an open movement:
They are built around a community of (frequently) volunteer contributors, who participate in the project without economic rewards, and who follow a self-organizing policy to organize the community and share the different responsibilities among their members.
The main goal of these initiatives is to produce knowledge outcomes, supported in digital formats, which may come in multiple flavors: multimedia content, software, documentation, news, comments and editorials, and so forth.
They must provide complete access to the outcomes of their production process, without imposing any limits to non-members of their respective communities to retrieve, display and learn from those outcomes. However, there may be some previous requirements to participate in the content creation process (though some of these projects, for instance Wikipedia, do accept contributions from any interested individual, disregarding her previous background). Usually, this benefit comes by means of licensing knowledge outcomes under any kind of open license (like GFDL, CC, etc). Most of times, these licenses preserve the right of original authors of receiving attribution when derived works are produced based on their previous content.
FOSSM on the other hand concentrates on producing software solutions. Wikipedia is much larger and has a much larger scope than any FOSSM project (presumably, even Linux)
overview of research done on FOSSM: Gregorio Robles. Software Engineering Research on Libre Software: Data Sources, Methodologies and Results. to read
The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System
"Like any volunteer community, open collaboration systems need to maintain an inner circle of highly invested contributors to manage and direct the group. However, with statistical predictability, all contributors to such systems will eventually stop contributing" (ref to Panciera, K., Halfaker, A., & Terveen, L. (2009). Wikipedians are born, not made: A study of power editors on Wikipedia. In GROUP ’09: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (pp. 51-60). New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery)
Projects that fail to recruit and retain new contributors tend to die quickly (Ducheneaut, N. (2005). Socialization in an open source software community: A socio-technicalanalysis.Computer Supported Cooperative Work,14(4), 323-368).
Newcomers are socializied moving from the periphery of the community to the center (Bryant, S. L., Forte, A., & Bruckman, A. (2005). Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of par-ticipation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. InGROUP ’05: Proceedings of the 2005International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work(pp. 1-10). NewYork, NY: Association for Computing Machinery.).
Around 2007 the numbers of editors stabilized, and may even be declining (there is a significant discussion in the field of Wikipedia studies regarding this).
A number of studies point to failed socialization systems.
it is difficult for newcomers to find work to do (Krieger, Stark, & Klemmer, 2009)
depersonalized interaction has been criticized by (Choi, B., Alexander, K., Kraut, R. E., & Levine, J. M. (2010). Socialization tactics in Wikipedia andtheir effects. InCSCW ’10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer SupportedCooperative Work(pp. 107-116). New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery.) and Halfaker et al. 2012. Halfaker et al. notes that newcomers’ contributions are being rejected at an increasing rate., and the community’s formal mechanismsfor norm articulation are increasingly resistant to change proposed by new editors.
some have argued that Wikipedia does not need more volunteers, but this is easily disputed (estimates of missing articles, quality assessments)
(Suh, B., Convertino, G., Chi, E. H., & Pirolli, P. (2009). The singularity is not near: Slow-ing growth of Wikipedia. InWikiSym ’09: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposiumon Wikis and Open Collaboration(Article 8). New York, NY: Association for ComputingMachinery.) argues that the rising rate of reverts among all editors (including newcomers) could be attributed to increasing conflict regarding the amount of available work, which naturally decreases as the encyclopedia reaches completion. The encyclopedia nears completion argument has been criticized (ex by Halfaker et al.) but it can be partially salvaged.
As the editor community grew, implicitnorms were formalized into a growing corpus of official rules and procedures (Butler, B., Joyce, E., & Pike, J. (2008). Don’t look now, but we’ve created a bureaucracy: Thenature and roles of policies and rules in Wikipedia. InCHI ’08: Proceedings of the SIGCHIConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(pp. 1101-1110). New York, NY:Association for Computing Machinery.), and rule creation and enforcement became increasingly decentralized (Beschastnikh, I., Kriplean, T., & McDonald, D. W. (2008). Wikipedia self-governance in action:Motivating the policy lens. InProceedings of the 2008 AAAI International Conference onWeblogs and Social Media(pp. 27-35). Palo Alto, CA: Association for the Advancement ofArtificial Intelligence; Forte, A., Larco, V., & Bruckman, A. (2009). Decentralization in Wikipedia governance. Jour-nal of MIS,26(1), 49-72).
evidence suggests that both decen-tralization and norm formalization have slowed (Halfaker et al 2012)
Wikipedians’ editslast longer; Wikipedians invoke community norms more of-ten to justify their edits; on many dimensions of activity,Wikipedians start intensely, tail off a little, then maintaina relatively high level of activity over the course of theircareer. Finally, we show that the amount of work done byWikipedians and non-Wikipedians differs significantly from their very first day.
We define Wikipedians as editors who have made at least250 edits over their lifetime.
Effectiveness of shared leadership in online communities.
aversive leadership behaviors may modify valence bydecreasing the intrinsic attractiveness of the work. Aversive leadership tends to negativelyimpact subordinates’ satisfaction in conventionalorganizations. These negative effects on intrinsicmotivation may be especially problematic in volunteerorganizations where extrinsic motivators (e.g., money) areless powerful
aversive leadership messages(negative feedback) decreased members’ contribution by 14%.
aversive leadership is the least effective style and should be avoided
Cyberactivism: online activism in theory and practice
p.14 - discuss and refuse to define the very concept of "online activism"
my definition: "any intentional action aiming to bring about social change"
Transnational social movements
to appear in The International Studies Association Compendium Project
Technology has been critical. Transnational corporations, drivers of economic globalization, and transnational activists rely on the same communication infrastructure to get their work done. The technology that enabled transnational corporations’ globalization enabled social movement organizations’ globalization, and necessitated it (Buttel and Gould 2004). - Buttel, F. H. and K. A. Gould. 2004. Global Social Movement(s) at the Crossroads: Some Observations on the Trajectory of the Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement. Journal of World Systems Research 10 (1), 36-66.
social conditions that enable transnational networks (232-237): the capacity for regular communication between national movements, Bandy, J. and J. Smith, eds. (2005) Coalitions Across Borders: Transnational Protest in a Neoliberal Era. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Can You Really Study the World-system in Second Life?
The big five movements in Table 1 are civil rights, labor, peace, feminism and environmentalism....
Six of the movements display what appear to be significant differences between web texts and numbers of activists at the World Social Forum. Human rights, global justice, indigenous and fair trade are better represented at the WSF than on the web. Labor, peace and feminism are significantly less represented at the WSF than on the web.
Protest in an Information Society: a review of literature on social movements and new ICTs
Garrett, R. Kelly. 2006. “Protest in an Information Society: a review of literature on social movements and new ICTs” Information, Communication and Society 9(2): 202-224
Few works are commonly cited across the field, and most are known only within the confines of their discipline... The scholarly community would benefit from a broader view of the field.
Mobilizing structures (most popular field of study) refer to the mechanisms that enable individuals to organize and engage in collective action, including social structures and tactical repertoires
Participation levels: reduction of participation costs, promotion of collective identity and creation of community.
Social structures encompass both formal configurations, such as social movement organizations or churches, and informal configurations, such as friendship and activist networks.
Tactical repertoires describe the forms of protest and collective action that activists are familiar with and able to utilize.
Opportunity structures refer to conditions in the environment that favor social movement activity, and include factors such as the relative accessibility of the political system, the stable or fragmented alignments among elites, the presences of elite allies, and the state’s capacity and propensity for repression
Framing processes are strategic attempts to craft, disseminate and contest the language and narratives used to describe a movement. The objective of this process is to justify activists’ claims and motivate action using culturally shared beliefs and understandings
These technologies allow very small contributions to be effectively aggregated (donations).
Prominent critique: Bimber (1998 ‘The Internet and political transformation: populism, community, and accelerated pluralism’, Polity, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 133– 160) argues that human beings have a limited capacity to absorb information systematically. Having access to more information at lower costs, therefore, will not significantly influence participation levels. But on demand access to information, which mode of delivery can be flexibly customized may facilitate information absorption.
cycles of mobilization and response will be more rapid, causing issue support to wax and wane more quickly.
will the information be less (GIGO) or more accurate (wisdom of the crowds)?
ICTs are also producing changes in repertoires of contention, allowing activists to engage in new forms of contentious activity and to adapt existing modes of contention to an online environment. Comparable transformations have occurred before. For example, the availability and mobility of print enabled by the printing press helped move protest from transient local direct action to more flexible and sustained national contention (Garner, R. T. (1999) Virtual social movements, paper presented at the Zaldfest: a
conference in honor of Mayer Zald, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, MI.).
changing repertoires:
street-based contention / evolving street protest tactics (coordinating / directing protesters via mobile phones and online maps)
influence public opinion and create political pressure through publicity - accelerated to hours after an organization has received information (ex Amnesty Int. on human rights violation)
electronic civil disobedience - virtual sit ins as in DOS attacks
critique: elites control and can disrupt some ICTs (cellphones in Belarus)
Several scholars suggest that ICTs will contribute to a decline in the importance of hierarchical organization and established institutions. An example given is the Zapatistas movement, which is fairly decentralized and uses modern ICTs.
There are predictions that ICTs will make individuals engage in actions on their own, without feeling the need to form/join an SMO. (Earl, J. & Schussman, A. (2003) ‘The new site of activism: on-line organizations, movement entrepreneurs, and the changing location of social movement decision-making’, Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change, vol.
24, pp. 155–187.) Similar prognosis / early findings are offered by Edwards (Edwards, A. (2004) ‘The Dutch women’s movement online: Internet and the organizational infrastructure of a social movement’, in Cyberprotest: New Media, citizens and Social Movements, eds W. van de Donk, B. D. Loader, P. G. Nixon & D. Rucht, Routledge, New York, pp. 183–206.), Bimber (1998)
ICTs make collaboration between social movements more likely (Cleaver 1999; Ayres, J. M. (1999) ‘From the streets to the Internet: the cyber-diffusion of contention’,Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 566,pp. 132–143.). Cleaver, H. (1999) Computer-linked social movements and the global threat to capitalism. [Online] Available at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/ faculty/Cleaver/polnet.html (8 April 2005).
an argument for opportunity structure: new ICTs are increasingly more resilient to elite (state) regulation and interference (Kidd, D. (2003) ‘Indymedia.org: a new communications commons’, in Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, eds M. McCaughey & M. D. Ayers, Routledge, New York, pp. 47–69.) (Scott, A. & Street, J. (2000) ‘From media politics to e-protest’, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 215–240.)
the capacity to bypass censorship is not easy and not unchallengeable, yet as Garrett notes, it is possible for dedicated individuals and organizations to break the censorship on a semi-regular basis
framing processes: the net gives the movements the ability to bypass traditional media and their reporting biases
new ICTs have created an environment in which it is not always possible to determine an organization’s size or wealth based on its website, or to distinguish between the websites of elites and their challengers.
Though case studies focusing on specific organizations and individual actions have been effective in identifying innovations and adaptation associated with new ICTs, their utility is in decline. As the field matures, approaches yielding more generalizable results should move to the fore.
Questions for further research:
under what conditions can activists use new ICTs to:
increase participation and commitment by facilitating the aggregation of small contributions or action?
enhance people’s ability to absorb and retain political information by making information more accessible, providing more context, and affording more flexibility with regard to learning styles?
increase elite accountability?
successfully bypass regulatory regimes? When successful, are the benefits of these (temporary) evasions significantly different than the benefits of offline evasions?
create messy hybrid organizational forms, combining hierarchical and non-hierarchical structures as fit their needs?
under what conditions do new ICTs:
encourage the indiscriminate circulation of claims?
facilitate cross-referencing and fact checking?
promote more rapid and intense mobilization efforts?
enable more sustained activity?
prove to be a liability? For example, when might they become the target of demobilization efforts?
promote non-traditional movement organization?
reinforce traditional SMOs?
enhance the perceived legitimacy of activist claims by raising their profile to a level comparable to that of elite claims?
undermine the legitimacy of activist claims by promoting the circulation of inaccurate information and overwhelming potential supporters
The Evolution of Media
A. Michael Noll, The Evolution of Media, 2007, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
p.13: blurry boundaries between media include that between broadcast (one->many) and interpersonal (one<->one) and between text, audio and video
chapter 2 - history of communication
p.57: Shannon–Weaver model - communication can be divided by source, receiver and medium. There are further subdivisions that can be made for various purposes.
The Handbook of New Media
Leah A. Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone (ed.), The Handbook of New Media, SAGE, 2002
good textbook, if a bit old (2002... check for new edition)
p.2 definition of a new media should incorporate technologicial, but also social, political and economic factors, thus we should talk of "ICTs and their associated social contexts".
p.230 - Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey C. Bowker, How to Infrastructure, concentrate on three components: (1) the artifacts (devices) used to communicate (2) the practices (activities) in which people communicate and (3) social arrangements (organized forms) that develop around those devices and practices
p.8 - definition of communication as "coordinated action that that achieves understanding or shares meaning" and information as "the organized expressed and intelligible representation or a product of communication process"
p.25 - Leah A. Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Introduction to the First Edition (2002. The Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs. - litreview and historical perspective for new media studies
p.36 - Nancy K. Baym, Interpersonal Life Online. Notes that individual characteristics are important and underresearched, as most research concentrates on groups.
p.55 - Nicholas W. Jankowski, Creating Community with Media: History, Theories and Scientific Investigations. Discusses the reinvigoration of community via ICTs. Historical overview (pre-Internet).
p.59 - Serious academic concern for the Internet can be traced to a publication of a joint issue prepared by the Journal Communication' and the new electronic Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 1996.
there is no consensus on the definition of community, and scholars disagree with regards to its importance. It has however became central to the present day studies of the Internet. Historical overview of the conceptualizations of community.
p.60 - social network analysis proposes an alternative to the use of the term community. SNA is the examination of the relationships (ties) between individuals groups or institutions (nodes). Focus is on the relation, not individual. Questions asked include - density of relations, degree of similarity between them and units, their impact on individuals and collective action.
p.62 - there is an overwhelming feeling that new communities, and new forms of community (virtual community), are being created
brief note on social capital
p.67 - discussion of research methods. Extensive periods of fieldworks are recommended but rare.
David Buckingham, Children and new media, p.75
discussion of computer games (and other issues)
Ronald E. Rice, Caroline Haythornthwate, Perspectives on Internet Use: Access Involvement and Interaction, p.92
digital divide (access), civic involvement, social interaction and identity
notes that impact of ICTs on society is usually studied retroactively; Internet offers the opportunity to study it as it is occurring
Andrea B. Hollingshed, Noshir S. Contractor, New Media and Small Group Organizing, p.115
definition of a "small group" as numbering 2-15 people
groups can be reconceptualized as knowledge networks, where nodes (people but also data files) contain knowledge
Mark Poster, Culture and New Media: A Historical View, p.135
Jennifer Daryl Slack, J. Macgregor Wise, Cultural Studies and Communication Technology, p.141
Timothy W. Luke, Power and Political Culture, p.163
Electronic Frontier Foundation; Global Internet Liberty Campaign - examples of transnational movements online
p. 173 - arguments for the net being difficult to govern by the traditional authority
an overview of a relationship between history and technology
Sally J. McMillian, Exploring Models of Interactivity from Multiple Research Traditions: Users, Documents and Systems, p.203
conceptualization of interactivity
Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey C. Bowker, How o Infrastructure, p.230
design is often superseded by modifications
Leah L. Lievrouw, New Media Design and Development: Diffusion of Innovations v Social Shaping of Technology, p. 246
technology includes not only the devices themselves, but also practices and knowledge related to them and the social arrangements that form around them
p.248-250: both enjoyed widespread influence in studies of technology and social change, both study the origins and use of new technologies, both address the evolution and rate of technological development, both contextualize technology relative to human action, social relationships and culture, both examine the choices people make about technologies and both are concerned with the consequences of technology adoption and use. They focus on information flows and communication relationships that fosters new ideas.
both trace roots to the Chicago School of sociology and to [[Georg Simmel]
SST: technological determinism is an inadequate description or explanation of technological innovation and development, and of social change in general; in contrast, it emphasizes the importance of human choices and action in technological change, rather then seeing technology as politically and ethically neutral, an independent force with its own inevitable logic and motives. It stresses that if technology affects society, it is in turn affected by it as well.
SST takes the view that knowledge and its products (science and technology) are essentially social phenomena. A related field, sociology of scientific knowledge, has identified critical points in the process of scientific research that depended on socially-mediated human behavior; in other words, situations where scientists own beliefs, opportunities and relations are as important as the natural phenomena they study.
stated aim of SST is to formulate policies to guide technology development so that its benefits are more human-centered
extreme (strong) SST perspective proposes that creation and acceptance of all knowledge claims must be explained in social terms, rather than by reference to natural world; the weak SST perspective examines only the social conditions of knowledge growth
p.252: SST is based in constructive epistemology, compared to diffusion it emphasizes the consumption and everyday use of technology
SST advocates intervention in the development of technologies before they are pushed on society
Philip Cooke, New Media and New Economy Cluster Dynamics, p.266
Terry Flew, Stephen McElhinney, Globalization and the Structure of New Media Industries, p.288
Heather E. Hudson, Universal Access to the New Information Infrastructure, p. 305
Stefan G. Verhulst, The Regulation of Digital Content, p. 329
p.338 - Lessig and argument how the Internet is being regulated not only by law but by software (code)
Francois Bar, Caroline Simard, From Hierarchies to Network Firms, p.350
on change in organizational structure enabled by new ICTs
litreview, p.351
p.360: who controls the code (designs software) controls a lot of other relationships in the organization
Don Lamberton, New Media and the Economics of Information, p.364
Anders Henten and Knud Erik Skouby, New Media and Trade Policy, p.386
Bella Mody, Harry M. Trebing, Laura Stein, The Governance of Media Markets, p.403
Laura Stein, Nikhil Sinha, New Global Media and the Role of the State, p.413
p.417-418 - discussion of copyright laws, notes that the Internet intensified the already present conflict between the good of the society and the good of profit-making actors
discussion of privacy and freedom of expression follow
p.423 - notes that government finds control of information online difficult, overview of censorship and similar practices
Frank Webster, The Information Society Revisited, p.441
discussion of the concept
interestingly mentions science fiction (p.449)
World society and the nation state
John W Meyer; John Boli; George M Thomas; Francisco O Ramirez, World society and the nation state=, The American Journal of Sociology; Jul 1997; 103
world-society models shape nation-state identities, structures and behaviors via worldwide cultural and associational processes
world-cultural institutions (some of which are focused on local issues but can have global reach) are getting stronger
Wikipedia as an example of a world-cultural institution...
also explains partially greater mobilization of individuals and organizations in the modern world
governmental and non-governmental associations (organizations) are on the rise
social movements are one of the most notable offshoots of those associations in the modern day and age
List of social movements
Table 1: List of Movements in the 2005 WSF Survey
Alternative media/culture
Anarchist
Anti-corporate
Anti-globalization
Alternative Globalization/Global Justice
Human Rights/Antiracism
Communist
Environmental
Fair Trade/Trade Justice
Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer Rights
Health/HIV
Indigenous
Labor
National Sovereignty/National Liberation
Peace/Anti-war
Food Rights/Slow Food
Socialist
Women's/Feminist
Source: The contours of solidarity and division among global movements, International Journal of Peace Studies, Summer-Winter, 2007 by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Christine Petit, Richard Niemeyer, Robert A. Hanneman, Ellen Reese
nsf review notes
implications for debates about implications of internet technologies for democratization & to developers of the communications technologies
The technologies might alter understandings of the roles in movement organizations and create new roles.
it would hit Mannheim's theory of generations and the possibility that the younger generation could run away with these new technologies leaving other generations in the dust
How is a "member" defined? Is it simply an individual listed on the organization's records as a "member" due to an annual financial contribution? If so, is the member/non-member distinction important? Why would a finding that non-members are increasingly active "contradict well-established findings on professionalization of traditional movements," given that most members are not professionals?