How do social media matter in social movements? Exploring the performativity of social media activism—the Case of #TCOT and the Tea Party

An interest in social movements is increasingly gaining traction among organizational scholars (Davis, McAdam, Scott, & Zald, 2005; Djelic, 2013; Fligstein & McAdam, 2011; Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008). A social movement lens allows organizational scholars to provide accounts of emergence, persistence, and change of organizational phenomena while attending to matters of contestation, politics, and distributed agency (Fligstein & McAdam, 2011; Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008). Moreover, social movements are one of the most conspicuous forms of solidarity and collective action that increasingly affect organizations in contemporary societies (Bartley, 2007; King & Pearce, 2010; Snow, Soule, & Kriesi, 2008).
Today a considerable amount of social movements’ efforts materialize online—increasingly on social media. Ideas are disseminated on YouTube, knowledge is stockpiled on Wikipedia, ‘cultural wars’ are fought on Twitter, and camps are held on Facebook, so to speak. Social media provide activists with fora for meaning-making and collective action. They can mediate discursive processes such as community formation (Nip, 2004) and collective identity construction (Ayers, 2003; Fayard & DeSanctis, 2010) and can lend themselves to mobilization of collective action. The question, then, becomes how to capture any role that social media might play in the processes of collective identity and collective action that they mediate.
...