(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
How do online groups come to organize themselves without any formal leaders or mechanisms of authority? Is there a way to apply our understanding of their self-organizing to other, more formal groups outside of the digital arena?
A new paper by Felipe G. Massa, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at Loyola University New Orleans College of Business, and Siobhan O’Mahony, professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Boston University Questrom School of Business, delves into this issue by examining Anonymous, the internet collective of hacktivists, and how the structures that the group created for participants affect its governance.
“By creating a participation architecture—a sociotechnical framework that empowered technical experts and unobtrusively channeled newcomers to designated forums—networked activists enhanced their collective ability to coordinate complex, interdependent actions at scale,” the researchers write.
The paper has a long history, Massa says. Originally part of his dissertation, which he completed in 2012, “it was one of those papers that the time hadn’t come for it yet.” Back then, the Arab Spring—the uprisings organized largely via digital platforms that roiled Arab countries from Tunisia to Syria—was fairly new. The Black Lives Matter movement would soon take off. The alt-right social-networking app Parler had not yet launched.
Massa started off researching alternative forms of organizing at corporations, such as the online publishing platform Medium and online clothier Zappos, which are well-known for having essentially no managers. But all businesses must have some form of hierarchy, even if they’re relatively flat structures. “I wanted a purer version of self-organizing and self-managing,” he says. Massa was also looking for scale, a group larger than intentional communities like Israel’s kibbutzim or the modern-day utopian communes that dot the United States.
“Those work well when people know each other, when there is trust and norms that everybody shares,” he says. “But as they grow, it breaks down; schisms between subgroups, they end up falling apart, or they tend to adopt traditional hierarchies and management and give up on the experiment of managing without managers.”
Anonymous, an online vigilante collective that carried out spectacular hacking attacks on major targets such as the US Federal Reserve and the Church of Scientology, offered a way to research a distributed group of anarchists who never interacted in person.
“It’s interesting because it’s self-organization at scale, and tech plays a big role in why it’s possible,” Massa says.
The researchers lurked on 4chan, the online imageboard where participants interacted, and took advantage of Anonymous’ high-profile string of attacks to glean information about how the group made decisions. “With a seven-year, inductive field and archival study, we capture how activists from the Anonymous collective organized 70 protest actions while struggling to integrate newcomers and coordinate increasingly complex activities,” they write.
Although Anonymous is amorphous, it does have a structure, Massa and O’Mahony discovered. The group has different online channels with moderators, each of whom guides a particular chat room. Instead of normative control—which the pair characterize as “everybody shares the same ideas about where they’re going, what’s okay and what’s not okay”—Anonymous operated with architectural control, where “the rules and norms are built into the software that controls the people.” A group structured this way needs a leader or a leadership team that predetermines the rules and sets up the software. Once the chat rooms are in place, new group members can self-select into these rooms “so they feel they still have some control,” Massa says.
The researchers’ conclusions can be generalized to study other similar groups. Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution and the Black Lives Matter movement also use some features of this architecture, where participants are funneled to specific interests and tasks. This allows Umbrella adherents some deniability. “It provides you with a layer of protection against liability for the actions of the people within your maze,” Massa says.
“In addition to providing a thick descriptive account of the particular inner workings of Anonymous, the paper also provides broader theoretical insight into how self-organized collectives are able to coordinate their activities even as the organization scales without formal hierarchical authority,” says Michael Y. Lee, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at France’s INSEAD.
The paper’s importance, Lee says, lies in its explanation of how Anonymous was able to get its adherents to work for the group’s interest by moving from normative controls to architectural controls as the movement got larger.
“Far from being structureless and anarchic, self-organizing collectives that scale successfully are able to utilize structure in the right places to stay in sync,” Lee says.
Felipe G. Massa and Siobhan O’Mahony, “Order from Chaos: How Networked Activists Self-Organize by Creating a Participation Architecture,” Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.