The Logic of Connective Action
Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics

The Logic of Connective Action shows how political action is coordinated and power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.

W. Lance Bennett (Author), Alexandra Segerberg (Author)

9781107025745, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 August 2013

256 pages, 16 b/w illus. 5 tables
23.6 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Scholars interested in social movements or activism, political organizing, political communication, civic engagement, new information and communications technologies, and media studies would find the book particularly useful. This path-breaking work, along with others (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, 2012, and Castells, 2012), will change how we think about organization and contentious action for years to come.' Hao Cao, International Journal of Communication

The Logic of Connective Action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated. In many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. In some cases, connective action emerges from crowds that shun leaders, as when Occupy protesters created media networks to channel resources and create loose ties among dispersed physical groups. In other cases, conventional political organizations deploy personalized communication logics to enable large-scale engagement with a variety of political causes. The Logic of Connective Action shows how power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.

Introduction
1. The logic of connective action
2. Personalized communication in protest networks
3. Digital media and the organization of connective action
4. How organizationally enabled networks engage publics
5. Networks, power, and political outcomes
6. Conclusion: when logics collide.

Subject Areas: Media, information & communication industries [KNT], Comparative politics [JPB]