Showing 1 - 10 of 21 Items
The Future of Social Movement Organizations: The Waning Dominance of SMOs Online
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: Jennifer Earl
Access: Open access
- For scholars interested in the role of information communication technologies (ICTs) in protest and social movements, the importance of organizations doesn’t appear to be as axiomatic. Work over the past decade researching “Internet activism” has raised fundamental questions about SMOs and their continuing importance to protest: Do organizations play the same role in online protest as they have played in offline protest? Are SMOs as necessary for online movements and protest organizing? What role or functions do SMOs play in online protest? In this article, I address these questions by first surveying social movement research on pre-Internet protest to establish how traditional social movement scholarship understands the role and impact of SMOs. I then compare these expectations to existing work on online protest. In the end, I argue that there are a variety of factors that contribute to the declining necessity of SMOs. Nonetheless, I point to some advantages that SMOs still seem to offer over other forms of organizing. Finally, I discuss the differences between a movement ecology devoid of SMOs versus one that has some level of SMO presence as well as reasons why SMOs might persist, separate and apart from the advantages the organizational form imparts.
An Investigation on Data Gaps in Scope 3 Emissions Accounting and Disclosure using 2010-2021 Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Questionnaire Responses This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-17
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Samara Nassor
Access: Embargoed
Pragmatics and Accessibility in Referential Communication This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Thomas Mazzuchi
Access: Embargoed
Social Media as Technologies of Accountability: Explaining Resistance to Implementation Within Organizations
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: Jeffrey Treem
Access: Open access
Microblogging Practices of Virtual Organizations: Commonalities and Contrasts
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: Jing Wang
Access: Open access
- Microblogging is becoming increasingly pervasive in computer-supported collaboration, attracting various types of users. Organizations, as one type, are willing to leverage this social media service for their operation, but lack guidance of how to effectively manage their organizational microblogs. However, research on microblogging practices at organizational level, especially in virtual organizations, is very limited. To enhance the understanding of how virtual organizations use microblogs in similar and different ways, we investigate microblogging practices of two virtual organizations by examining the content characteristics of their Twitter posts. We identify eleven categories of microblog themes of three dimensions, consisting of both common and different categories between the two organizations. We further enumerate their potential impacts on organizational context, discuss differences between the two organizations, and compare these organizational practices with personal ones.
Modeling the Development & Expression of Political Opinion: A Zallerian Approach
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Avery C Ellis
Access: Open access
- Research focused on John Zaller's famous RAS model of political opinion formation and change from "The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion" (1992). Analyzed the mathematical and psychological underpinnings of the model, the first paper to do so in over fifteen years and the first to do so through an analysis of motivated reasoning and Bayesian reasoning. Synthesized existing critiques of Zaller's model and other literature to suggest ways to build on Zaller, utilizing fundamental reunderstandings of opinions and messages from political and mathematical perspectives. Found verification for Zaller's model, confirming its value, but also found support for the proposed RAIS model, which suggests foundational changes in the way citizens interact with information in the current political environment. Confirmed the utility of a Zallerian framework for analyzing shifts in mass opinion over time and suggested ways to improve the creation of surveys and polls for understanding elections and reported opinions on issues.
Virtual Communities Don’t Exist: Avoiding Digital Dualism in Studying Collaboration
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: PJ Rey, Nathan Jurgenson
Access: Open access
- Effective collaboration in communities requires information sharing. Though digital media may have certain affordances that encourage us to communicate differently than in the past, the communities these media facilitate are no less real than communities bound together by voice or text. In this paper, we argue that idea of “virtual communities” is misleading. Communities and collaboration occur not in some virtual world or a new, cyber, space, but instead they are part of one reality influenced simultaneously by materiality and the various flows of information—digital included. In light of this argument, we implore researchers to take serious the influence of digitality, and, specific to this conference, those looking primarily at digitality to take seriously the materiality, bodies, history, and politics not separate from but deeply interpenetrating the digital. The changes in community organization brought about by digital media should not be thought of or called “virtual” (e.g., “virtual teams” as opposed to real ones), but instead part of one augmented community. Presented at the Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference at Bowdoin College on April 12, 2013.
Measuring Creative Performance of Teams Through Dynamic Semantic Social Network Analysis
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: Peter Gloor
Access: Open access
- In this project we compare communication structure and content exchanged by members of creative, interdisciplinary teams of medical researchers, physicians, patients and caretakers with their creative output. We find that longitudinal social networking patterns and word usage predict creative performance. We collected the e-mail archives of 60 members of a community of researchers working on 12 projects improving various aspects of the daily lives of patients of Crohn’s disease. Our results indicate that more creative projects show a decrease in group density, while more actors are involved, and more emails are exchanged, suggesting that a more successful project attracts more attention from many different people. We also found that members of more creative projects use more emotional language, which gets more focused over time.
The “New” Prosumer: Collaboration on the Digital and Material “New Means of Prosumption”
Date: 2013-04-13
Creator: George Ritzer
Access: Open access
- Many of “cyber-utopians” have lauded the Internet, especially social networking sites, for a variety of reasons, including making possible a dramatic and revolutionary increase in social collaboration (Benkler, 2007; Tapscott and Williams, 2006). The goal of this essay is to examine- and, at least in part, debunk- this claim from a new and unique sociological perspective- the relationship between collaboration and the “new means of prosumption”. Such an examination is suggested by the fact that collaboration is, by definition, a form of prosumption. That is, it involves one or more parties “producing” and other(s) “consuming” something of mutual interest and importance. However, the collaborative process, like prosumption more generally, is not as separable as all that. In fact, collaboration is a dialectical process in which those involved are continually changing their positions on the prosumption continuum (see below), sometimes they are more