Understanding the Communicative Flows of Collective Action

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Anastasia Kavada, whose focus is on claims that the Net leads to more decentralised forms of organising which help to unite heterogeneous participants in loose collectives. Such claims place communication in a central position, but there appears to be a lack of systematic theoretical frameworks – organisational communication may help here, she suggests.

Communication and organisation are seen as mutually constituting phenomena; each communicative event is made up of a combination of various communicative flows. First of these is membership negotiation, establishing and maintaining the organisation’s relationship with each of its members; second, organisational self-structuring which connects the organisation to itself reflexively, including communication processes with reflexive design and control; third, activity coordination through which members of the organisation coordinate specific activities and tasks; fourth, institutional positioning through communication between the organisation and the entities with which it engages.

Applying this to digital communication, then, membership negotiation is about individual recruitment and affiliation to the collective, at a comparatively loose level; new roles and activities can also emerge here through the frameworks of specific online tools. Organisational self-structuring is about flexible processes of establishing boundaries between the collective and its environment; this may include decentralised processes of constructing common narratives, representations, knowledge, and memory, and facilitate decision-making, but may also be more difficult than in face-to-face modes. Activity coordination follows similar patterns as in organisational self-structuring; boundaries between organisational self-structuring and activity coordination are being blurred here. Institutional positioning becomes more about the positioning of individuals than of a unified organisation; loose networks of allies rather than social movement organisations may be the result, and mass media are still important in facilitating these processes.

This is about the balance between the dynamics of dispersion, decentralisation, and loosening affiliations, and the dynamics of centralisation, then. Communicative activities must be examined against the backdrop of the entire media ecology, rather than just against that of digital media; this needs a multi-level focus to investigate collective action as a series of interconnected communication processes shaping its form and character.