Structuring the "Structureless" and Leading the "Leaderless": Organization, Autonomy and Accountability in the UC Movement.

The movement to defend public education at the University of California, or UC Movement, is largely comprised of informal networks with no formal or centralized organization or leadership. Like many contemporary resistance struggles, the UC Movement has rejected formal and traditional forms of organization and leadership in favor of new forms of decentralized, non-hierarchical organization and collective leadership. In the fall of 2011, the emergence of the Occupy Movement exacerbated the UC Movements' commitment to new forms of organization and leadership. This preference for decentralized, diffuse, horizontal forms of organization and leadership over formally organized structures and collective identities is consistent with the dispersed nature of social and economic relations in the new millennium. Much of the existing research on social movements has focused on developing and refining social movement theories and concepts that have little relevance to contemporary movements and cannot account for the ways in which resistance is increasingly becoming diffuse, decentralized and non-hierarchical. Despite their diffuse, de-centered, and horizontal nature, the UC Movement is not structureless. Rather, it is differently structured through a combination of both formal and informal mechanisms that reinforce one another at times and conflict at others. This paper examines the internal tensions and challenges experienced by participants in the UC occupations during the 2011-2012 academic year as they struggled to create new forms of decentralized horizontal organization and collective, informal leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]