Explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine three organizations and show surprising similarities across them.
1. Involvement in organizational collective action in an era of technological change; 2. The contemporary media environment and the evolution of boundaries in organization-based collective action; 3. The collective action space; 4. The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn in collective action space; 5. Exploring collective action space; 6. Participatory styles, the individual, and the contemporary organization.
Bruce Bimber is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Communication, and is founder and former director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. His interest in digital media and society arises from his training as an electrical engineer as well as a political scientist and from many years of observing the interconnections between social and technological innovation. He is author of Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections (with Richard Davis) and Information and American Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2003). Bimber is a former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.