scholarly journals Introduction to Social Media, Activism, and Organizations

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511775071 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhiraj Murthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Organizational Communication ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Transnational Social Movements ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Movement Organizations

Social media have become increasingly pervasive. However, the literature on social movements and social media has not fully grasped just how much social media have fundamentally changed the landscape of organizational communication, ranging from stakeholders being able to directly mobilize resources to making grassroots transnational social movements more organizationally feasible. A major gap in the literature is this lack of understanding how social media have shaped social movement organizations (SMOs) and the organization of social movements. This Special Issue brings together a unique collection of articles that map and comment on the field of social media and social movements. The volume contributes to literature in this area by exploring how social media are not only shaping social movements, advocacy, and activism from the point of view of organizational communication but also changing the ways in which activists and SMOs interact with each other. The volume leverages a diverse array of interdisciplinary methods and covers a broad terrain ranging from analyses of knowledge transfer between grassroot activists via social media to large SMOs. The Issue is broadly divided into two parts. Part 1 is focused around trends and interventions in social media, activism, and organizations research. Part 2 revolves around a global collection of case studies. The two are hardly mutually exclusive and the boundaries are roughly drawn. This collection provides a critical starting point for better understanding social media and social movements, an area that is fundamentally important to a variety of disciplines but severely underresearched.

Transnational Social Movements

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth A. Gould ◽  
Tammy L. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Transnational Movements ◽  
Transnational Social Movements ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Movement Organizations

Transnational social movements are defined as movements wherein members in at least two nations cooperatively engage in efforts to promote or resist change beyond the bounds of their nation. Over the last 20 years, research on transnational social movements has proliferated in tandem with rapid globalization. The scholarship draws upon research conducted by sociologists and political scientists on national social movements and extends it to a global level. Similar questions and concepts applied to national or subnational movements are now applied to transnational movements: Why do they emerge? What are their processes? What are their consequences? Concepts such as political opportunity structure, which have been used to analyze the timing and outcomes of national social movement organizations’ actions, are being extended to understand how the international political arena shapes movements. The majority of work has been case specific and focused on a handful of movements: the human and indigenous rights movements, the women’s movement, the labor movement, and the environmental movement. Over time, this theorizing moved beyond borrowing concepts intended to explain local and national movements to generate concepts and propositions unique to the particularities of local-global/transnational movements. One of the limitations of the work to date is the lack of comparative work and theoretical development. The next stage of research should build upon the empirical work that has been generated by assessing propositions comparatively.

scholarly journals Social Media Activism. Water as a Common Good

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Cernison
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Digital Activism ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Geographical Scale ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Online Activism ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Movement Organizations

<div>What happens when hundreds of social movement organizations give life to a diffused online campaign? Focusing on the referendums against water privatization in Italy, this book explores how the activists colonized social media thanks to a very wide set of communication practices that convinced 27 million citizens to vote.</div><div><br></div><div>This book focuses on the referendums against water privatisation in Italy and explores how activists took to social media, ultimately convincing twenty-seven million citizens to vote. Investigating the relationship between social movements and internet-related activism during complex campaigns, this book examines how a technological evolution-the increased relevance of social media platforms-affected in very different ways organisations with divergent characteristics, promoting at the same time decentralised communication practices, and new ways of coordinating dispersed communities of people.</div><div>Matteo Cernison combines and adapts a wide set of methods, from social network analysis to digital ethnography, in order to explore in detail how digital activism and face-to-face initiatives interact and overlap. He argues that the geographical scale of actions, the role played by external media professionals, and the activists' perceptions of digital technologies are key elements that contribute in a significant way to shape the very different communication practices often described as online activism.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>

Coalitions and The Development of The Global Environmental Movement: A Double-Edged Sword

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Transnational Social Movements ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
Environmental Social Movement

Censuses reveal an increasing prominence of coalition organizations within transnational social movements. However, the causes and implications of this change are unclear. Using original data on a population of transnational environmental social movement organizations, this research shows that coalition presence is a double-edged sword. While greater numbers of coalitions suggest movement expansion, empirical evidence suggests that this rise makes foundings of new organizations less likely.

scholarly journals Transnational Social Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Richard Davies
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Single Case ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Transnational Social Movements ◽  
Movement Organizations

Transnational social movements have been a growing focus of attention in academic literature in the context of the globalization of world politics in the period since the end of the Cold War. Like social movements in general, transnational social movements are characterized by mobilization of people in a sustained manner for the promotion of social and political change objectives. However, transnational social movements are distinctive in that either or both their activities and their objectives cross national boundaries. Transnational social movements include the work of a subcategory of international nongovernmental organizations: those concerned with political and social transformation, known as “transnational social movement organizations.” They also include the work of broader coalitions of transnational social movement organizations, as well as more loosely arranged networks of people promoting political and social transformations beyond the confines of individual states. The range of objectives promoted by transnational social movements is diverse, including democracy, environmentalism, feminism, human rights, labor standards, peace, and religious goals, among others. Academic literature on the topic sheds light on the ways in which social movements organize transnationally, disseminate ideas across borders, shape understandings of global issues, and wield influence in intergovernmental and transnational arenas. Each of these aspects is covered in this bibliography, which focuses specifically on the transnational dimension, since domestic social movements are covered in other Oxford Bibliographies articles. While much of the literature on transnational social movements consists of single case analyses, this bibliography pays particular attention to works with wider significance, and to the contrasting perspectives on each of these aspects.

scholarly journals Social Media Activism. Water as a Common Good

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Cernison
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Digital Activism ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Geographical Scale ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Online Activism ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Movement Organizations

<div>What happens when hundreds of social movement organizations give life to a diffused online campaign? Focusing on the referendums against water privatization in Italy, this book explores how the activists colonized social media thanks to a very wide set of communication practices that convinced 27 million citizens to vote.</div><div><br></div><div>This book focuses on the referendums against water privatisation in Italy and explores how activists took to social media, ultimately convincing twenty-seven million citizens to vote. Investigating the relationship between social movements and internet-related activism during complex campaigns, this book examines how a technological evolution-the increased relevance of social media platforms-affected in very different ways organisations with divergent characteristics, promoting at the same time decentralised communication practices, and new ways of coordinating dispersed communities of people.</div><div>Matteo Cernison combines and adapts a wide set of methods, from social network analysis to digital ethnography, in order to explore in detail how digital activism and face-to-face initiatives interact and overlap. He argues that the geographical scale of actions, the role played by external media professionals, and the activists' perceptions of digital technologies are key elements that contribute in a significant way to shape the very different communication practices often described as online activism.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>

Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Religious Associations ◽  
Movement Organizations

This article proposes a new and better concept of civic culture and shows how it can benefit sociology. It argues that a better concept of civic culture gives us a stronger, comparative, and contextual perspective on voluntary associations—the conventional American empirical referent for “civic”—while also improving our sociologies of religion and social movements. The article first considers the classic perspective on civic culture and its current incarnations in order to show why we need better conceptual groundwork than they have offered. It then introduces the alternative approach, which is rooted in a pragmatist understanding of collective action and both builds on and departs in some ways from newly prominent understandings of culture in sociology. This approach’s virtues are illustrated with ethnographic examples from a variety of volunteer groups, social movement organizations, and religious associations.

scholarly journals THE RISE OF INEQUALITY: HOW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS SHAPE DISCURSIVE FIELDS*

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Gaby ◽  
Neal Caren
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Term Outcome ◽  
Long Term Outcome ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
Movement Organizations

Social movement scholars have considered several political and cultural consequences of social movements, but have paid limited attention to whether and how social movements shape discourse. We develop a theory of discursive eruption, referring to the ability of radical movements to initially ignite media coverage but not control the content once other actors— particularly those that can take advantage of journalistic norms—enter the discourse. We hold that one long-term outcome of radical social movements is the ability to alter discursive fields through mechanisms such as increasing the salience and content of movement-based issues. We examine the way movements shape discourse by focusing on newspaper articles about inequality before, during, and after the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. We analyze changes in the salience and content of coverage as well as shifts in actor standing and influence. Using 7,024 articles from eight newspapers, we find that the OWS movement increased media attention to inequality, shifting the focus of the discourse toward movement-based issue areas (e.g., the middle class and minimum wage). Further, we find that compared to the pre-OWS period, the influence of social movement organizations and think tanks rose in discourse on inequality. In addition, the discourse on inequality became more highly politicized as a result of the Occupy movement. These findings highlight the importance of social movements in shaping discourse and indicate that social movement scholars should further consider discursive changes as a consequence of social movements.

scholarly journals Extremism and Intelligence

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Julian Richards
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Crossing Over ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
Transnational Social Movements ◽  
Intelligence Agencies ◽  
Difficult Challenge ◽  
The Right

Contemporary extremist threats encompass a widening spectrum, whereby long-standing threats are supplemented by the stubborn persistence of historical threats, and by the emergence of new threats and Violent Transnational Social Movements (VTSMs). For security and intelligence agencies, the management challenges posed by the evolving picture are complex and multi-faceted. Probably the most difficult challenge is that of prioritisation and the allocation of resources across the spectrum of investigation. Other challenges include those of recruiting and retaining staff with the right cutting-edge skills, especially in such fields of social media exploitation; and a fundamental definitional question of how to define some of the newly-emerging threats, avoiding questions of surveillance crossing-over into inappropriate suppression of legitimate dissent in a liberal democracy.

Protest, Social Movements, and Spaces for Politically Oriented Consumerist Actions—Nationally, Transnationally, and Locally

2018 ◽  
pp. 68-88
Author(s):  
Francesca Forno
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Predatory Lending ◽  
Grassroots Organizations ◽  
Political Consumerism ◽  
Consumer Organizations ◽  
Ethical Criteria ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship between social movements and political consumerism. Besides traditional consumer organizations that seek to protect customers from corporate abuse (such as unsafe products, predatory lending, or false advertising), political consumer practices have become increasingly employed to achieve diverse political and social goals. Calls to citizens to take action in their role as consumers have been made by social movement organizations of various types, either to build up transnational awareness so as to step up pressure on corporations or to facilitate the purchase of goods/services that meet specific ethical criteria. Along with large-scale boycotting and global fair trade initiatives, market-based actions have entered the repertoire of a number of local grassroots organizations seeking bottom-up solutions for sustainable development, within which the act of shopping moves beyond a form of individuals taking responsibility to become a tool for constructing collective, citizenship-driven alternative styles of provisioning.

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