Rethinking the Social Movement Organization in the Digital Age

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have made an enormous impact on contentious politics. The global wave of protests that included the Arab Spring, Occupy, and the anti-austerity movements in Southern Europe cannot be explained without the use of digital technologies and their affordances. However, social movement theory does not offer satisfying answers to the digitalization of protest organization. Data from the Spanish Indignados movement demonstrates the limitations of the main theoretical approaches: Resource mobilization theory is too narrowly focused on classic, formalized social movement organizations (SMOs) and does not account for processes and practices beyond these groups. Concepts such as network, multitude, and collective have replaced the SMO to describe the dispersed dynamics of contention, but these perspectives offer little explanation how activists overcome the collective action problem and manage to mobilize large numbers of protesters. In response to these issues, this paper offers a new conceptualization of social movement organization in the digital age. This concept is based on four ontological propositions: First, it postulates that organization is a process rather than an entity. As digital networks make it increasingly difficult to draw boundaries around activist groups, the concept focuses on the processes-in-relations by which an organization comes into being, transforms, and falls apart. Second, processes of organizing consist of a series of decisions, which represent attempts at stabilizing an order. This decidedness is the central element which distinguishes organization from unorganized digital networks. Third, while traditional organization theory sees communication as occuring within organizations-as-entities, a procedural view of organizations recognizes communication as consitutive of organization. In the digital sphere, organization comprises communicative acts that are conveyed through the technological environment. Fourth, a procedural view of organization stresses its contingent and conflicutal character. Power struggles characterize both the discourses and practices in organizational decision-making. As a result, decisions are always temporary, and organizations are subject to change. In the final section of the paper, I demonstrate how to operationalize these propositions and how this concept advances of our understanding of protest organization in the digital age.