Membership Matters: Organizing Archetypes, Participatory Styles, and Connective Action

The contemporary communication landscape enables individuals to connect and engage with collective action efforts in multifaceted and ambiguous ways. This complexity makes membership in collective action groups particularly intriguing and important because of its pivotal role as a mechanism that connects individual behavior to group, organizational, and societal dynamics. This study seeks to examine the spread of membership types in the digital environment and explores how different kinds of prompts for collective action are associated with particular types of membership groups. Through a survey of participants on a popular global digital platform for collective decision-making, we found evidence of a broad range of membership types in the digital space, associated with particular prompts calling for action. The results suggest that there is a strong relationship between membership type and participatory styles of individuals. Implications of the results are discussed.