Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change

Challenging the notion that digital media render traditional, formal organizations irrelevant, this book offers a new theory of collective action and organizing. Based on extensive surveys and interviews with members of three influential and distinctive organizations in the United States - The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn - the authors reconceptualize collective action as a phenomenon in which technology enhances people’s ability to cross boundaries in order to interact with one another and engage with organizations. By developing a theory of Collective Action Space, Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl explore how people's attitudes, behaviors, motivations, goals, and digital media use are related to their organizational involvement. They find that using technology does not necessarily make people more likely to act collectively, but contributes to a diversity of “participatory styles,” which hinge on people’s interaction with one another and the extent to which they shape organizational agendas. In the digital media age, organizations do not simply recruit people into roles, they provide contexts in which people are able to construct their own collective experiences.

Bruce Bimber is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Communication, and is founder and former director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. His interest in digital media and society arises from his training as an electrical engineer as well as a political scientist and from many years of observing the interconnections between social and technological innovation. He is author of Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections (with Richard Davis) and Information and American Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2003). Bimber is a former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Andrew Flanagin is Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. His research focuses on processes of collective organizing, particularly as influenced by the use of contemporary technologies; people's perceptions of the credibility of information gathered and presented online; the use of social media and social metadata for information sharing and assessment; and organizational technologies. He has published extensively across a wide variety of academic fields on various facets of social relations as implicated by technologies and technology use. He is the co-editor of Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility (2008) and the co-author of Kids and Credibility: An Empirical Examination of Youth, Digital Media Use, and Information Credibility (2010).

Cynthia Stohl is Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Her work focuses on organizing and network processes across a wide range of global contexts, including corporate–NGO partnerships, activist organizing, and clandestine organizations. A signature of Stohl's work is global connectivity and her empirical studies span several countries in Europe and Asia as well as New Zealand and the United States. Her interests in communication technologies arose from her studies of boundary permeability and emerging networks in workplace participation programs, organizational collaborations and the contemporary global social justice movement. Stohl has published extensively in communication and organizational studies and is the author of Organizational Communication: Connectedness in Action (1995). She was recently elected a Fellow of the International Communication Association.