Digital Curation as a Catalyst for Open Organizing: Brokering Meaning, Relationships, and Emotion

Abstract

While a rich body of scholarship illuminates the inherent conflict and paradoxes of open organizing and open strategy processes, how low-power actors might advance open organizing to exert control over their organization’s strategic decisions remains a black box. In this paper, I present findings from an inductive study of 40,000 social media posts and comments from the Save Market Basket Facebook page to develop a theory of digital curation—how actors leverage their brokerage role to select and interpret digital material (e.g., digital videos, online news reports, others’ social media contribution, emails, etc.) to shape meaning, relationships, and emotion among disconnected parties. My paper 1) contributes to scholarship on open organizing and brokering by illuminating how digital curation of meaning, relationships, and emotion enables low-power individuals to advance open organizing and exert control over strategic decisions affecting their organizations; 2) illuminates how contests over meaning and control in open organizing are navigated through digital curation; and 3) provides insight to the role of emotion in both the brokerage and open organizing literatures.