Communication, organisation, and action: theory-building for social movements

This paper addresses the need for new approaches to understand the processes through which communicative interactions create, re-create, and change transnational social movements. It proposes that CCO, the communicative theory of the constitution of organisation, provides useful concepts for analysing the communication practices of social movements in an organisational field dominated by global market integration and supranational governance. The author draws on a case study of La Via Campesina, a transnational network of over 160 rural peoples' organisations in more than 70 countries. Through applying the four-flow model of CCO - focused on communicative processes including membership negotiation, organisational self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning - she explores how the global social movement is communicatively constituted and suggests directions for future research.