From Strategic Hyperlink Networks to Cognitive Issue Networks: Advancing a Dual Structurational Model of Social Issue Emergence on the Web

The web is a forum for defining social issues and a source of information for evaluating them. As such, it is important to examine how its socio-technical properties influence how some groups relationally construct issue boundaries and others make subsequent decisions about them. While Web2.0 platforms make explicit the sociality of the web, the social capacity of Web1.0 technologies like websites and hyperlinks remain relevant, especially as they structure spaces of change. Recognizing the epistemological function hyperlinks play, scholars argue that “net presence” and perceived relevance is largely determined by an organization’s online relationships. Thus, hyperlinks are strategic tools used by claims-makers (e.g., advocacy groups) to demarcate their relationships and positions within the larger web ecology as well as heuristic mechanisms for decision-makers (e.g., funding groups) as they structure their perceptions of the issues they evaluate. In this paper I propose a novel structurational model of social issue emergence that outlines processes by which social issues are jointly enacted through claims-makers’ strategic use of hyperlinks to build their online presence and third party groups’ appropriations of those relationships in the decision making process. Thus, it provides a framework for viewing the relational patterns that emerge in an issue-oriented hyperlink network as an interpretive template that guides decisions makers’ comprehensions and judgments of that space. I verify these propositions using data collected from two groups of organizational actors – claims-makers and decision-makers – mutually involved in enacting an “environmental sustainability” issue space. Empirically I aim to demonstrate how the relational dynamics of this space shapes decision-makers’ cognitive maps of the issue. By design, issue boundaries include some voices and exclude others. For this reason, it is socially relevant to leverage insight gained from theoretical and empirical analysis toward interrogating what is often an uneven balance of power within online issue environments.