Collective Action in Organizations

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.

“Theories of collective action traditionally focus on the central role of organizations in overcoming the high cost of individual participation. In turn, new information and communication technologies and their ability to lower the costs of participation have been seen as sounding the death knell for such organizations. Starting instead from the perceptions, attitudes and actions of organizational members themselves, Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl argue that individuals’ ‘participatory styles’ interact with organizational structures and the new information environment to create a complex “collective action space.” The result is not the death of formal organizations but a shift in power and agency from leaders to members. Collective Action in Organizations is a major contribution to both our empirical understanding of and our theorizing about civic and political engagement in the new information age.” —Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

• 1. Involvement in organizational collective action in an era of technological change; 2. The contemporary media environment and the evolution of boundaries in organization-based collective action; 3. The collective action space; 4. The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn in collective action space; 5. Exploring collective action space; 6. Participatory styles, the individual, and the contemporary organization.