Achieving Organizationality Through Authorship Affordances — A Communicative Episode of Telegram Polling from 2019 Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

In 2019, Hong Kong activists mobilized against the proposed Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) and relied on a mobile chat-app’s polling feature to make collective decisions. To understand the chat-app’s role in the movement’s ‘backstage’ dynamics — i.e., building coalitions, making decisions, and coordinating action away from public view — I analyzed a series of Telegram polls during the Anti-ELAB movement's airport sit-in/takeover. To generate insights into social movement studies, I combined aspects of a vibrant stream of research known as Communication as Constitutive of Organizing (CCO) with a nuanced use of the affordances concept. To identify the backstage dynamics of the movement, I applied criteria from the organizationality concept to assess the extent to which the movement communicatively exhibited organizational characteristics. Therefore, I addressed how chat-app polling facilitated collective decision-making and cultivated the movement’s social address and collective identity. Recognizing chat-app polling as pivotal in transforming voiced concerns to legitimized authority, I identified three authorship affordances that fostered authority practices: anonymity, hyper-temporality, and affectivity. This study makes three contributions: (1) it extends the understanding of backstage organizational dynamics of social movements by adding two additional criteria of collective decision-making and collective actorhood to the extant criteria of collective identity, (2) it refines the affordances concept to explore how chat-apps influence data-related practices in contentious politics, and (3) it provides a novel method of analysis to isolate and investigate the processual dynamics of authority practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-ELAB
• affordances
• authority practices
• CCO
• contentious politics of data
• organizationality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this special issue as an organization studies scholar. I would like to thank Yao-Tai Li, Trix van Mierlo, Nicolas Bencherki, Boukje Cnossen, Leonhard Dobusch, Richard Weiskopf, the anonymous reviewers, and especially special issue editors Stefania Milan and Davide Beraldo for their insightful feedback at various stages of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Marilyn Poon

Marilyn Poon is an organization studies scholar whose research focuses on the digital condition and its influence on organizing phenomena, including leadership and entrepreneurship. She applied a communication as constitutive or organizing (CCO) approach in her dissertation, which focused on the 2019 Hong Kong Protests to explore the role of platform technologies. Currently, she is applying practice-based theorizing to unpack the generative dynamics of data-driven and value-based practices.