THE NEW SITE OF ACTIVISM: ON-LINE ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENT ENTREPRENEURS, AND THE CHANGING LOCATION OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT DECISION MAKING.

The article focuses on various kinds of on-line activism being incorporated by social movements. The authors show in their study of the on-line strategic voting movement that emerged during the 2000 Presidential election, on-line activism has important consequences for how movements are organized, including how they make decisions. They show, for instance, that traditional movement organizations had little to do with this initiative, and that individual movement entrepreneurs were instead largely responsible. The strategic voting movement was essentially built around and facilitated by the websites of these movement entrepreneurs. Further, the authors show that this decentralized infrastructure moved decision making away from networks or organizations and their leaders to the on-line movement entrepreneurs who were less constrained by funding concerns, membership recruitment and maintenance, and organization-building. In this way, they argue, leadership decreased in importance even while discretion increased.