Author Description

"This book explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn, and show surprising similarities across these three organizations"-- "This book offers a new theory of collective action for the age of digital media, attesting to the continued relevance of formal organizations in a time when digital media can make it seem that organizations are outdated. The authors examine the dynamics of membership in three distinctive organizations: The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn. They develop the theory of Collective Action Space to demonstrate the important dimensions of membership and use survey and interview data to explore commonalities across the organizations, each of which exhibits four,p︢articipatory styles., ̮The book shows that predictors of participation vary greatly across participatory styles, and rather little across organizations. The book wrestles with a crucial feature of contemporary collective action, wherein technology does not necessarily make people participate more, but people consistently use technology when they participate. The result is a theoretically rich and empirically fresh portrait of collective action, organization, and technology"--