Hi, the second screen side shot that you guys up voted as the one you wanted me to respond to was one asked by a former student Viviana Saruti and she asked, can massive protest be considered organizations? Consider massive protests like the revolts in Egypt or the indignados in Spain, could they be considered momentary organizations? They have a goal, participants working on a goal, they accomplish tasks, and eventually have social structures, like someone speaking for the whole group. So a variety of you chimed in and said, yeah that's a great question. And, like Cynthia Collins said, what about Occupy Wall Street? Here's a movement that's been credited with beginning a conversation about economic inequality in the United States. And the movement was built around consensus, she argues, and had difficulty developing a clear message with defined objectives and goals. Was it just a movement or was it some form of organization? Clain Calluna picks up on this too and says, well maybe they can be momentary organizations, which is kind of what Viviana was suggesting. too. He says, I think so. It seemed that in this case there was a real effort to organize. To sum up my point, the occupiers here are still a part of the movement. They still have the same goal, in quotes, just a different interpretation or understanding of what that goal is and how to achieve that goal. So effectively these individuals are kindly, or insightfully, articulating that movements are temporary organizing efforts. Not only that they have in some cases, like the Occupy Movement, that they actually had unclear goals or at least a fleeting consensus on what that goal was. All the news articles I see articulate that the Occupy Wall Street Movement ended up having a cacophony of different kinds of voices and goals that people wanted to accomplish. Michael Peters Rodbell argues that the resulting group behaviors often resemble organizations. They're heavily influenced by the surrounding environment, they have shared goals, an evolutionary social structure. They all seem to have subcultures. They use some form of technology like social media. And these are used to further their cause. So it is taking input into an output. And so he also articulates that aren't gangs also temporary kind of organizations, too, in this sense? I think, again, it's temporary is the key thing. And the consensus is temporary as well. That these aren't always sustained, per se. And when you think of an organization as a noun, or as an entity, that capacity to sustain itself, and reproduce itself, is pretty important. That's why we have the concept of movement, that's somewhat distinctive. Now of course, it does share resemblances with an organization, right? These social movements. Pablo Andres Musso also says the massive protests are not organized and individuals can join and go out of them, according to their convenience. He says sometimes there's no defined leader and sometimes the pseudo-leaders have different interests. Even the participants have different interests and goals than each other. So what's going on here? In many regards, people are identifying inconsistent preferences and goals, and that can occur in organizations though. It's just that there is a point at consensus, even coalition theory, it sounds like social movements are somewhat articulated as temporary coalitions. That they come to a consensus, act, and then they're done. Coalitions tend to repeat themselves though as a coalition organizational form. That they come back together again and again to act. Phalgun Kumar kind of articulates this a little bit and talks about the participants of massive protests have similar and or complimentary goals. But then he starts to mention crowds. And this is where it's an interesting idea, like the difference between a crowd versus a protest versus an organization. You notice there's a continuum there, like a a thoughtless riot. Is a riot on an organization? Not really, it lacks some of the definitional features that we talked about in the lecture of what an organization is. A protest is coordinated to some extent. It's temporary. If it lacks shared goals and coordination becomes less of an organization. And if it's not repeatable, if it's not sustained, it's less of an organization in the strong sense of the term. Now of course a lot of protests end up being a social movement organization, right? So Greenpeace, a lot of these, the movements, or the organizations that we think of, that are activist organizations began probably from social movements and then got institutionalized into a formal organization that's repeated, that's sustained, and has those qualities. And then Lily Maria has an interesting insight, too. She says, massive protest is an organized event, and not an organization. Organized events are meetings, protests, parties, etc organized by a group of people for a particular purpose. They may be a one-time, occasional, or sporadic, or recurring periodic. This was pulled from Wikipedia, which is fine. And it helps the conversation, so I'm glad we all do that. So this is kind of interesting. And as she goes through the characteristics of them, she shows how there are certain kinds of shortcomings to the definition of an organized event. That doesn't fit an organization, like the event may not be shared or observed by all the participants. Some may be there just to be with their friend, right? Organized events, and in particular protests are comprised of a majority of random participants sometimes. Not all participants contribute the same. The recurring patterns are not always expected and planned, right? And the boundaries aren't consistent, and the roles are not defined, so our participant could change roles, right? But of course, a lot of this we can imagine with temporary organizations as well or even ambiguous organizations that have conflict within them. So, I think what we're getting though is that, the definition of an organization can go from very clear and a strong ideal as an entity that reproduces itself has a social structure, shared goals, they keep kind of finding consensus on and coordination around, to temporary, to even lacking in any of those qualities. I actually don't know if it necessarily matters that we have a perfect definition of organization. What is more interesting to me is the process of organizing, if anything, I'm kind of unhappy with the title of the course as organization analysis, as opposed to organizing analysis. Because a lot of what we want to accomplish is temporary, or it is about processes organizing. And I think that can fit social movements and social movement organizations. And I think if we can master processes of organizing and their reproduction, then we've learn how to do the more ideal form of an organization. One of the things that people bring up in this forum and thread, is that their concepts that will come up in a week on coalitions where you have any consistent preferences and kind of compromises that are made to maintain a coordinated action. In addition, in organized anarchy, where organizations are driven by fleeting moments or events where people come together, make a decision, and then act on it, and then has repercussions for the rest of the organization. They're much more fluid conceptions of an organization, as well. So I think this kind of theme is going to keep coming back. And what's nice about the social movement example is that it It does kind of echo some of the kinds of issues about organizations that we will confront later in the course.
