ABSTRACT
It should come as little surprise that so many aspects of politics have been touched in some way by the internet and related technologies. Much of politics, from the highly democratic to the rigidly authoritarian, is fundamentally communicative and informational in nature, and the internet is central to changes in the environment of communication and information that are of historic proportions. In the disciplines where politics is studied, questions of change and stasis associated with the internet appear across many topics: public opinion and behavior, campaigns and elections, political institutions, social movements, global political economy, security studies, and democratization, to name only a few. Among the most compelling topics
associated with the internet and politics is
political organization and its relationship to collective action. Because so many political dynamics involve collective action, from voting for city council to adopting a global warming treaty, and because so much political action is achieved through some form of organization, the nexus of organization and collective action is one of the underpinnings of the study of politics. Indeed, over the past 35 years, the
organizational nature of collective action has been a recurrent subject of research (Davis et al., 2005; Oberschall, 1973; Tilly, 1978). Formal organizations provide the mechanisms through which political issues are articulated, participants are recruited, targets, locations, and timing of collective actions are determined, complex tasks and strategies are coordinated,
and methods and tactics are selected. To varying degrees, these elements of collective action appear in research on topics from social movements (Nagel, 1981) to political parties (Aldrich, 1995). Across political systems, organizational affiliations and identification provide underlying motivations for individuals to respond positively to incentives and sanctions that help ameliorate the ubiquitous free-rider problem found in collective action efforts (Olson, 1965). In the decade following the mid 1990s,
research on organization and collective action associated with the internet focused on several topics, for example, demonstrating the efficacy of “online” collective action, documenting the appearance of novel forms of organizing not associated with traditional interest groups (Gurak, 1996, 1997), and describing changes in the strategy or structure of traditional interest groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and social movements (Bennett, 2003; Bimber, 2003). Because the internet and related technologies reduce transaction costs of all kinds, blur boundaries between public and private realms (Bimber et al., 2005), and make information-intensive tasks and communicative processes and products readily accessible, those actors pursuing the organization of collective action have available to them many alternative forms and strategies. These alternatives are less dependent than in the past on constraints associated with material resources, expertise, location, and target of the organizing. A dominant theme to emerge from the
first decade or so of this research might be described as “organizational fecundity.” In their examination of the history of civic association in the U.S., Crowley and Skocpol (2001, 819) describe the Progressive Era as the most “organizationally fecund” period in American history, because of the profusion of various civic groups in response to the structural
changes in society at that time. The recent literature on organizing and collective action employing the internet suggests that the current period, close to a century from the height of that wave, may well surpass it with regard to the proliferation of organizations and groups. The fecundity of contemporary political
organization is addressed in several literatures that have heretofore remained relatively distinct. For example, organizational and management scholars have explored the technological, social, and economic contingencies associated with the development of organic, self-organizing, postbureaucratic, and networked organizations (Ghoshal and Bartlett, 1990; Heckscher and Donnellon, eds., 1994; Monge and Fulk, 1999). Globalization theorists have identified underlying dynamics of time/ space compression, disembeddedness of events, and increased global consciousness that are associated with a plethora of contemporary organizational forms (Castells, 1996; Giddens, 1999; Stohl, 2005). Theories of social capital, particularly the work of Putnam (2000), acknowledge the emergence of new forms of social interaction and association and lament the decline of traditional organizations, which by virtue of providing regularized face-toface interaction among known others have a politically beneficial effect that other classes of organization do not. There are two chief contributors to the
proliferation and productive nature of new organizing forms, as described in the literature on the internet. The first is the growth of uncountable instances of civic association and organization online, through e-mail lists, discussion groups, commoninterest groups at social networking sites such as MySpace, MeetUp, and the like. The focus of many of these groups is political and oriented toward problems of public goods. The second contributor is the expanding portfolio of strategies, linkages, and ways of engaging citizens on
the part of traditional interest groups and political organizations, many of which date to the period described by Crowley and Skocpol (2001). Long-established groups are attracting online “members,” and some of those rooted in historically anonymous forms of membership now facilitate citizens engaging with one another personally in discussion boards, or faceto-face. Clusters of smaller face-to-face groups can now sometimes readily band together to engage in larger scale action, creating new types of alliances across time and space. In these and other ways, the landscape of political organization and collective action shows change: many new types of organizations are doing new things in new ways, old organizations are doing old things in old ways, and old organizations are doing new things in new ways. These developments raise a number of theoretical questions about how organizations are conceptualized and categorized, how variation in structures is explained, and about what underlying processes may be giving rise to these developments. Across theoretical frameworks, organi-
zational fecundity presents a central problem of explaining organizational heterogeneity and efficacy. Researchers lack a vision of organizing that sufficiently accounts for the variety of contemporary membership groups in existence, and that also accommodates the multiple perspectives addressing collective engagement and interaction. In this chapter, we propose a model that reformulates and synthesizes a variety of relevant theoretical perspectives, while also taking into account the diversity of organizational forms used to achieve collective action efforts today. We then situate existing work on various forms of collective action within this integrative model, and draw conclusions about contemporary organizations, organizing, and organizational membership.
