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Making Space for Garbage Cans: How emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis.
Making Space for Garbage Cans: How emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis.
- Source :
- Organization Studies; Apr2023, Vol. 44 Issue 4, p569-592, 24p
- Publication Year :
- 2023
-
Abstract
- During the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens self-organized at an unprecedented scale to support vulnerable people in neighbourhoods, towns and cities. Drawing on an in-depth study of an online volunteering group that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic and helped thousands of people in a city in the United Kingdom, we unpack how citizens co-construct social media spaces to orchestrate helping activity during a crisis. Conceptualizing a novel synthesis of classical garbage can theory and virtual space, we reveal how emergent groups use 'spatial partitioning' and 'spatial mapping' to create a multi-layered spatial architecture that distributes decision-making and invites impromptu choice occasions: spontaneous matchmaking, proximal chance connects and speculative attraction. Our insights extend the study of emergent organizing and decision-making in crises. Furthermore, we advance a new line of theorizing which exploits garbage can theory, beyond its existing application in classical decision sciences, to posit a spatial view of organizing that paves the way for its novel applications in organization studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- REFUSE containers
SOCIAL space
CITIES & towns
COVID-19 pandemic
SOCIAL media
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 01708406
- Volume :
- 44
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Organization Studies
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 162756605
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221103969