Social Media, Professional Media and Mobilisation in Contemporary Britain: Explaining the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Citizens’ Movement 38 Degrees
| Author | James Dennis,Andrew Chadwick |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321716631350 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
631350PSX0010.1177/0032321716631350Political StudiesChadwick and Dennis
research-article2016
Article
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(1) 42 –60
Social Media, Professional
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
Media and Mobilisation
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0032321716631350
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
in Contemporary Britain:
Explaining the Strengths and
Weaknesses of the Citizens’
Movement 38 Degrees
Andrew Chadwick and James Dennis
Abstract
Digital media continue to reshape political activism in unexpected ways. Within a period of a few
years, the internet-enabled UK citizens’ movement 38 Degrees has amassed a membership of
3 million and now sits alongside similar entities such as America’s MoveOn, Australia’s GetUp!
and the transnational movement Avaaz. In this article, we contribute to current thinking about
digital media and mobilisation by addressing some of the limitations of existing research on
these movements and on digital activism more generally. We show how 38 Degrees’ digital
network repertoires coexist interdependently with its strategy of gaining professional news
media coverage. We explain how the oscillations between choreographic leadership and member
influence and between digital media horizontalism and elite media-centric work constitute the
space of interdependencies in which 38 Degrees acts. These delicately balanced relations can
quickly dissolve and be replaced by simpler relations of dependence on professional media. Yet
despite its fragility, we theorise about how 38 Degrees may boost individuals’ political efficacy,
irrespective of the outcome of individual campaigns. Our conceptual framework can be used to
guide research on similar movements.
Keywords
mobilisation, activism, engagement, social movements, social media, journalism
Accepted: 6 January 2016
Founded in 2009, the UK citizens’ movement 38 Degrees had, by 2015, attracted a member-
ship of more than 3 million (38 Degrees, 2015). In this article, we explain how 38 Degrees
works by focusing on its 2013 Big Tax Turnoff campaign to compel a leading energy
Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
Corresponding author:
Andrew Chadwick, New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics and International Relations,
Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, UK.
Email: andrew.chadwick@rhul.ac.uk
Chadwick and Dennis
43
company, npower, to pay more tax. Our aim is to contribute to current thinking about digital
media and mobilisation by building upon and extending an enduring concept in this sub-
field: hybridity. We draw upon unique data including participant observation, campaign
emails, social media content, online news articles and interviews with 38 Degrees’ leader-
ship and a sample of members. In line with what we know about organisational hybridity
among similar entities in other countries we find that 38 Degrees’ leadership creates a wide
range of online repertoires that foster individual autonomy and self-expression among its
members. It switches its repertoires depending on the aims and focus of each phase of a
campaign. It uses digital media, particularly email, online polls and online petitions but also
social media discourse and metrics to enable grass-roots members to shape campaign strat-
egy in real time. And it maintains loose networks of individuals, technologies and informa-
tion that persist temporally and across a diverse range of issue campaigns.
We diverge from existing studies and open up new avenues of research by revealing
the extent to which 38 Degrees rests on a hybrid mix of digital and professional media-
centric repertoires. This hybrid campaign approach is designed not only to influence jour-
nalists but also serves to legitimate the movement to its own supporters by providing
visible signs of a campaign’s authenticity and its supporters’ efficacy. This is a source of
power but also a source of vulnerability. Delicately balanced relations of interdependence
between horizontalist digital media activism and professional media work can quickly
dissolve and be replaced by simpler relations of dependence on professional media. We
show that when professional media attention fades, interdependence turns to dependence,
and a 38 Degrees campaign is more likely to falter.
Explaining how and why this happens is one of our goals. To summarise our findings,
it is not because 38 Degrees is adapting to ‘mass media’ logic and becoming just another
elite-focused insider interest group whose primary goal is to get its stories in the press.
Nor is it because professional media trivialise and marginalise 38 Degrees by personalis-
ing its campaigns or framing it as a deviant ‘protest’ group. These are well-established
explanations for movement ‘failure’ in earlier social movement research (see, for exam-
ple, Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993; Gitlin, 1980; Rucht, 2004), but we find little evidence
for these factors in the case of 38 Degrees’ campaigns.
38 Degrees’ leadership certainly tries to gain professional media coverage to convey
campaign momentum to its dispersed membership base, but how this works is complex
and differs from how it worked in earlier social movements (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993;
Gitlin, 1980; Rucht, 2004). Professional media coverage is a mirror used by the 38 Degrees
core team to show its members that a campaign is still emergent and moving towards a
successful outcome. It is seen as a credible means of reflecting the iterative successes of
members’ actions, thereby potentially expanding the scope and scale of future action. But
as we show, 38 Degrees’ leaders and members capitalise on the nature of today’s media.
Collectively, members produce large-scale, publicly visible informational traces of their
own actions online: responses to issue-priority email polls, online petition signatures,
social media comments, ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and retweets. These are mobilised in the leader-
ship’s interactions with professional media. The professional media coverage that follows
is then used by the leadership to reinforce momentum and build individual members’ effi-
cacy, further increasing the likelihood that members will go on to participate in yet further
online actions. Subsequent professional media coverage will again further increase the
likelihood of member action, and so it goes on, in a virtuous circle. However, when this
circle is broken, it becomes difficult to sustain a campaign’s momentum. Despite this fra-
gility and interdependence, we conclude our analysis with a note of cautious, if somewhat
44
Political Studies 65 (1)
speculative optimism regarding how 38 Degrees may, over time, boost individuals’ politi-
cal efficacy, irrespective of the outcome of individual campaigns.
Organisational Hybridity and Hybrid Mobilisation
Movements: Augmenting the Framework
Digital media continue to reshape political activism, and there is now a significant body
of research that includes several substantial and influential book-length studies.1 An
important strand in this literature is hybridity. We conceptualise this in two distinct
although interrelated senses: organisational and media-systemic.
Organisational Hybridity
The idea of organisational hybridity begins from the perspective that interactions between
the affordances of digital media and long-term shifts towards personalisation, political
consumerism and postmaterialist ‘lifestyle politics’ (Bennett, 1998) have created, among
many other things, a new political form: the hybrid mobilisation movement (HMM;
Chadwick, 2007). In the mid-2000s, only one example of this new form existed: MoveOn.2
Founded in the United States in 1998, by 2015 it had 8 million members. But over the last
decade, other HMMs have emerged (Kavada, 2012; Vromen, 2008, 2015; Vromen and
Coleman, 2013). Australia’s GetUp! was founded in 2005. Within a decade it had a self-
reported 1 million members. SumOfUs, which facilitates multiple campaigns against cor-
porate power, was founded in 2011 and now has more than 5 million members worldwide.
Avaaz, an international movement founded in 2007 boasted an extraordinary 42 million
members by 2015. And then there is the movement we examine here, Britain’s 38 Degrees,
founded in 2009 and now with 3 million members.3
What do we know about how these movements work? First, they cannot function with-
out the complex spatial and temporal reconfiguring of political life that has been enabled by
the widespread adoption and organisational embedding of digital communication. Second,
mixing and switching between older campaign repertoires typically associated with parties,
interest groups and social movements, HMMs use digital media affordances to help them
quickly adapt spatially, temporally and institutionally – between online and offline action,
from one campaign to another and between elite-centric pressure strategies and member
activism strategies. Third, given that digital media networks constitute almost (but not
quite) the entirety of their organisational infrastructure, HMMs undergo an extraordinary
amount of shape-shifting (Chadwick, 2007: 285–286; Eaton, 2010: 187–188). They lack the
bureaucratic structures that make rapid structural change difficult for pre-digital organisa-
tions (Bimber, 2003; Bimber et al., 2005, 2012). Instead, they mobilise their membership
across loose affiliations of digitally connected individuals. These affiliations periodically
cohere and act before temporarily...
To continue reading
Request your trial