On behalf of my coauthor, Alexandra Segerberg, I thank Sidney Tarrow for his review of our book. We intend The Logic of Connective Action to stir discussion about different ways in which large-scale contention can be organized. Part of that discussion entails clarifying misconceptions of the sort contained in several of Tarrow’s concerns.
First, the claim that we conflate social movement studies with Mancur Olson’s collective action paradigm obscures the crucial point that we use Olson only to construct a theoretical continuum bounded by two ideal-type logics of social association: rational choice assumptions about mobilizing individuals at one end, and self-motivated social networking at the other. These contrasting organizational logics take on many empirical variations, and overlap in the middle of the continuum in the hybrid form of organizationally enabled connective action where loosely networked organizations use social media to personalize their causes. We clearly point out that after the resource mobilization school of the 1970s, most social movement scholars relaxed and even challenged rational choice assumptions, arraying movement studies away from the end point of the continuum. However, many social movement perspectives include characteristic such elements as formal organization, leadership, and collective identity framing. As we move along our continuum toward the other ideal type, connective action, social mobilizations such as Occupy Wall Street or the Spanish indignados lose those characteristic organizing elements.
Not engaging with the different organizational logics that define our theoretical continuum may explain Tarrow’s confusion about the role of personalized communication. He is right that personalization has emerged previously in movement studies in analyses of various group-identity movements such as feminism and gay rights. However, connective action addresses a more granular personalization at the level of diverse individuals who share personal stories both online and off under inclusive-action frames like “We are the 99%.”
This lack of attention to the ways in which concepts are anchored in theory may account for Tarrow’s challenge that our account of personalization is really a throwback to Durkheim’s concept of anomie. Nowhere do we imply that there is an inherently anomic condition associated with social networking—far from it. Durkheim referred to the separation of the individual from traditional society at the dawn of the modern industrial age, which is a far cry from the transition away from formal memberships and institutional loyalties characteristic of individuals in postindustrial democracies that are the main focus of our book.
Perhaps this looking back in time and conceptual space to interpret our analysis also accounts for Tarrow’s puzzlement about what makes digitally networked communication so special, as he refers to the importance of earlier communication technologies such as the printing press. Those earlier technologies depended on organizations of various sorts to deploy and control their content, from the religious sects that made the Protestant revolution to the print shops of the American Revolution. In the middle case of our spectrum (organizationally enabled connective action), when organizations use social technologies they give up important degrees of control over messages to publics who share the technologies and their uses. And, at the crowd-enabled end of our continuum, organizations are not the owners or even the managers of technology. Organizations are outcomes of patterns of communication-technology use.
This inclination to reduce our work to prior categories and historical cases may also explain Tarrow’s trouble with our introduction of new methods that require evaluation from the reader. At some level, any good empirical work requires intellectual judgment from the reader. However, since our methods involve no fancy statistics or ungrounded assumptions, it seems that the real challenge for the reader involves coming to terms with the changes in social and political organization that inspire our theory and methods.
Underlying most of Tarrow’s concerns is a reluctance to consider the implications of social media as organizational rather than purely informational. His comparison of a cryptic text message from the Philippines with an iconic passage from Tom Paine misses our point that communication is not just about content. As one moves away from conventional movement forms—where language matters more to evoke collective identifications and bridge differences between organizations—communication becomes more about organization, and various organizational qualities of complex communication networks explain the scale, speed, endurance, and impact of connective action. Nostalgia for times gone by is understandable, but it may stand in the way of grasping emerging forms of political organization and participation.
