Digital organizing of a global social movement: From connective to collective action

Abstract

Social media are increasingly credited with the emergence and rapid scaling of social movements. Consequently, many studies have explored the role of social media and other forms of Information and Communication Technology in enabling collective action beyond formal organizations. The focus in these studies has been on connective actions that emerge from the individualized but interdependent uses of social media in the pursuit of a movement's objectives. However, few studies have examined how social movements go beyond connective actions to build organizing capacity that can support effective and sustainable mobilization. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the shift from connective action to a more organized, concerted form of action is particularly important in the light of significant differences in lifespan and outcomes among social media-enabled movements. To advance our conceptualization of these mechanisms, we studied the case of Bersih movement, a transnational coalition and social media-enabled social movement that pushed for clean and fair elections in Malaysia. The case highlights two types of emergence, clustering and structuring emergence, that enabled the movement to evolve across three different phases: dispersed individuals, dispersed groups, and networked group. Our analysis of the case reveals that each of these two types of emergence exhibits different dynamics between the environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms that underlie the evolution of social movements. Our findings also present both the enabling and constraining roles of social media in clustering and structuring emergence.