Structurelessness: an evil or an asset? A case study

Haug, Christoph; Rucht, Dieter

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139236034.009

Cited by 24 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…In social movements, such rules are rarely drawn up specifically for a particular meeting arena but they exist as standards (see Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011, p. 87) in the form of procedural handbooks such as Robert's Rules of Order for "deliberative assemblies," first published in 1876 and widely used in all sectors of society in the United States. Not surprisingly, activists try to establish their own (emancipatory) standards (e.g., Gelderloos 2006;Haverkamp et al 2004Haverkamp et al [1995), but many times, meeting participants shy away from deciding on formal rules and still manage to hold meetings reasonably well (Haug & Rucht, 2013), while in other cases participants cannot overcome fundamental disagreements about the meaning of consensus (see, e.g., Maeckelbergh, (2009, pp. 77-9) for a vivid example).…”

Section: Membershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizing Spaces: Meeting Arenas as a Social Movement Infrastructure between Organization, Network, and Institution

Haug

2013

Organization Studies

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147

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In recent years, social movement scholars have shown increasing interest in the internal lives of social movements, but this turn from "social movements as actors" to "social movements as spaces" has not yet led to a conceptual apparatus that addresses the key role of face-to-face meetings, especially in the interorganizational domain of mesomobilization. Building on the concept of "partial organization", the paper develops the concept of "meeting arena" as a hybrid of three forms of social order: organization, institution, and network. It is argued that the complex figuration of meeting arenas in a social movement or protest mobilization constitutes an infrastructure that synchronizes the dispersed activities of movement actors in time and space. This infrastructure is not an entirely emergent phenomenon but is also the result of conscious decisions by organizers. Heuristic, methodological, and theoretical implications of this novel perspective on social movements are discussed, highlighting especially the potential of the distinction between organizing and mobilizing as two intertwined but essentially different types of social movement activity.

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Section: Membershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizing Spaces: Meeting Arenas as a Social Movement Infrastructure between Organization, Network, and Institution

Haug

2013

Organization Studies

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147

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“…Observers have noted contemporary collectivists’ reliance on formal rules and mechanisms: among them, provisions for modified consensus and an array of hand signals for facilitating discussions. These, they say, have helped to counter participatory democracy’s tendency to generate inequalities (Haug & Rucht, 2013; Smith & Glidden, 2012). But case studies suggest that perhaps more important has been the development of new ways of interacting (Leach, 2016), and indeed, relationship schemas.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But case studies suggest that perhaps more important has been the development of new ways of interacting (Leach, 2016), and indeed, relationship schemas. Activists have crafted new modes of association—“affinity groups,” “working groups,” “ encuentros ,” “non-exclusive friendship,” among them — that aim to foster individual initiative along with common purpose, equality with opportunities for individual growth, and intimacy with openness (Haug & Rucht, 2013; Maeckelbergh, 2012; Polletta, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Best Friends Forever: Relationship Schemas, Organizational Forms, and Institutional Change

Polletta

2022

Organization Theory

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Scholars have drawn on cultural concepts to demonstrate the capacity of organizational actors to transform existing institutional scripts and invent new ones. When it comes to accounting for the limits on such change, however, scholars have tended to fall back on structural dynamics. I argue that paying attention to the symbolic analogies and oppositions in terms of which institutional schemas have meaning can shed light on the role of cultural constraints alongside creativity in institutional change. In this article, I investigate schemas of personal relationships. By transposing the obligations and expectations of a familiar relationship from one kind of interaction to another—by treating employees like members of a sports team or a research collaborative, for example—organizational actors can bring about new habits of interaction and create new organizational forms. But people’s emotional investment in the integrity of a relationship script may make them unwilling to modify the script when it proves impractical. Shared relationship schemas are thus a source of creativity and constraint. I show that understanding this dialectic accounts for several puzzling features of the diffusion of participatory democratic organizational forms among progressive movements in the late 1960s: notably, that even in the absence of a legitimated model of participatory democracy, activists adopted a similar form of organization, and that, for all their creativity, activists were unable to modify that form to cope with the inequalities it produced.

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Meeting Democracy: Organizational Structures and Models of Democracy in the World Social Forum

Fiedlschuster¹

2018

Globalization, EU Democracy Assistance and the World Social Forum

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Structurelessness: an evil or an asset? A case study

Cited by 24 publications

References 16 publications

Organizing Spaces: Meeting Arenas as a Social Movement Infrastructure between Organization, Network, and Institution

Organizing Spaces: Meeting Arenas as a Social Movement Infrastructure between Organization, Network, and Institution

Best Friends Forever: Relationship Schemas, Organizational Forms, and Institutional Change

Meeting Democracy: Organizational Structures and Models of Democracy in the World Social Forum

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