TY - JOUR
AU - Burke, Gary
AU - Omidvar-Tehrani, Omid
AU - Spanellis, Agnessa
AU - Pyrko, Igor
PY - 2022
DA - April
TI - Making space for garbage cans: How emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis
JO - Organization Studies
AB - 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 UK city, 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.
PB - SAGE Publications
UR - https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/publications/72336dd4-8015-412b-b7e7-6f1d2c044838
KW - Coronavirus (COVID-19)
KW - Voluntary sector
ER