TY - JOUR

T1 - The communicative constitution of atomization

T2 - online prepper communities and the crisis of collective action

AU - Husted, Emil

AU - Just, Sine N.

AU - du Plessis, Erik Mygind

AU - Dahlman, Sara

N1 - Publisher Copyright: ©The Author(s) 2023 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association All rights reserved.

PY - 2023/8/1

Y1 - 2023/8/1

N2 - As environmental and societal crises increase in numbers, severity, and urgency, online forums for so-called “doomsday preppers” have seen a concomitant surge in membership. Beginning from the perspective of communicative constitution of organization, we explore the sociotechnical communities that emerge on such forums. Methodologically, we use netnographic observations to show that online prepper communities are organizational, in the sense of being networks of communicative episodes that use common narratives to build identities around material objects and physical practices. However, the online prepper communities do not move from the enactment of organization to acting as organizations. This observation leads us to conceptualize online prepper communities as atomizations whose communicative constitution does not entail a capacity for collective action, but only manifests the similarity of disparate individuals. The communicative constitution of atomization, we argue, is symptomatic of an underlying social logic, which promotes individualized responses to collective problems.

AB - As environmental and societal crises increase in numbers, severity, and urgency, online forums for so-called “doomsday preppers” have seen a concomitant surge in membership. Beginning from the perspective of communicative constitution of organization, we explore the sociotechnical communities that emerge on such forums. Methodologically, we use netnographic observations to show that online prepper communities are organizational, in the sense of being networks of communicative episodes that use common narratives to build identities around material objects and physical practices. However, the online prepper communities do not move from the enactment of organization to acting as organizations. This observation leads us to conceptualize online prepper communities as atomizations whose communicative constitution does not entail a capacity for collective action, but only manifests the similarity of disparate individuals. The communicative constitution of atomization, we argue, is symptomatic of an underlying social logic, which promotes individualized responses to collective problems.

KW - collective action

KW - communicative constitution of organization

KW - doomsday prepping

KW - organizationality

KW - Management studies

KW - Media and communication studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85192167545&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1093/joc/jqad005

DO - 10.1093/joc/jqad005

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:85192167545

VL - 73

SP - 368

EP - 381

JO - Journal of Communication

JF - Journal of Communication

SN - 0021-9916

IS - 4

ER -