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Making space for garbage cans : how emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis
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Burke, Gary T., Omidvar, Omid, Spanellis, Agnessa and Pyrko, Igor (2023) Making space for garbage cans : how emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis. Organization Studies, 44 (4). pp. 569-592. doi:10.1177/01708406221103969 ISSN 0170-8406.
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01708406221103969.pdf - Published Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (583Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/01708406221103969
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.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School | ||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Crisis management -- Social aspects, Social media, Spatial behavior, Social networks, Organizational sociology | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Organization Studies | ||||||
| Publisher: | Sage | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0170-8406 | ||||||
| Official Date: | April 2023 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 44 | ||||||
| Number: | 4 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 569-592 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/01708406221103969 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 16 February 2023 | ||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 16 February 2023 |
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