W. Lance Bennett & Alexandra Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics

Abstract

It is hard to miss the striking resemblance between Mancur Olson’s (1965) The Logic of Collective Action and Bennett and Segerberg’s The Logic of Connective Action. Just like the first book that heralded social movement studies into the resource mobilization paradigm, the latter is likely to inaugurate a new paradigm of contentious action research in the digital age. Both books deal with the role of organization in social movements. In contrast to the collective action organizational logic in the first book, Bennett and Segerberg’s book offers a new organizational logic—connective action— to explain how contentious action networks evolve in the digital era. This review follows the structure of the book and discusses its main theoretical contributions, the empirical studies supporting the new theory, and a few gaps that can be filled by further investigations.