Organizing an “organizationless” protest campaign in the WeChatsphere

Abstract

The introduction of digital technologies in collective actions seems to have transformed the dynamics of movement organizing and enabled divergent forms of protest organizing. While some studies emphasize “organizationless” organizing in which traditional organizational forms—social movements organizations and formal-bureaucratic structures—have been pushed into the margins, other studies showcase how traditional forms have assumed alternative features, for example, connective leadership and organizations with fluid boundaries. While existing research correctly points out the evolving organizing dynamics and forms in digital activism, few studies have accounted for why digitally enabled protests take certain organizing forms over others among multiple modes of interaction between protesters and digital technologies. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study illustrates why immigrant activists struggled to keep the campaign “organizationless” on WeChat, a China-based digital platform that afforded other forms of organizing over such an organizing mode. Building on the mechanism-based approach in social movement studies, the findings show that immigrant activists’ emotional–cognitive responses to the changing digital environments became the driving force behind the relational choices to maintain the protest “organizationless.” The study, therefore, may not only inform future studies to explore why certain structures of protest networks emerge and develop but also contribute to the mechanism-based approach by foregrounding emotional–cognitive mechanisms, which mediate environmental and relational mechanisms.