Information Communication & Society · 2014 · 305 citations · 65 references
Social SciencesOrganization StudiesSociologyCollective BehaviorOrganizationsSocial MovementsActivismCollective ActionCrowd BehaviorMovement NetworksProtest ParticipationSocial Network AnalysisConnective ActionCoordinationIssue Framing EffectsNetworked ProtestOnline Collective ActionPeer ProductionProtest CrowdsProtest Organization
Crowd organization emerges without recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional structures, and crowds create organization by packaging elemental peer‑production mechanisms—production, curation, and dynamic integration of information and resources—into coordinated work, unlike more structured communities such as open‑source software or Wikipedia. The authors develop an analytical framework to examine the organizational processes of crowd‑enabled connective action observed in the Arab Spring, the 15‑M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The framework is illustrated through a theory‑driven analysis of 60 million Occupy movement tweets, showing how production packages operate to produce organizational routines. The analysis identifies three elemental peer‑production modes—production, curation, and dynamic integration—that together generate organization, and demonstrates how these mechanisms nested within each other produced complex organizational results in the Occupy crowd.
How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these 'production packages' are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011–2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.
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