Media Review: Strategies for Distributed and Collective Action KornbergerMartinStrategies for Distributed and Collective Action: Connecting the DotsOxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 240 pp.
评论马丁·科恩伯格的著作，该书提出新词汇分析维基百科等混合开放、多中心与多元性的组织创新，并批判市场、层级、制度和社会运动四种传统集体行动理论的局限。
With the rise and expansion of the Internet, new forms of organizing have emerged, constituting both distributed and collective modes of action.These organizing forms (such as Wikipedia, Blablacar, or Airbnb) have achieved coordination across scales and maintained agility, while, simultaneously, uniting heterogeneous people to act toward a common strategic purpose.Examining this novel phenomenon, Martin Kornberger's latest book offers a new vocabulary to investigate these 'organizational innovations' (p.8) which blend openness -blurring organizational boundaries due to the mobilization of internal and external contributors, polycentricityencompassing decentralized decision-making, and plurality -connecting individuals with different values, norms and interests.As I will discuss in this review, the lexicon introduced in his book can serve as an inspiring starting point for theorizing the functioning and structuring of collective distributed action.Faithful to his philosophical training, Kornberger engages in an interdisciplinary journey in which he first critically discusses the four prevailing conceptualizations of collective action, namely the markets, hierarchies, institutions and social movements, to highlight the need for an alternative theorizing to address this new phenomenon (Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5).Chapter 2 focuses on the market explanation, emphasizing its limitations in capturing complex information and its tendency to describe collective action as an 'unintended consequence' or 'a by-product of individual actions' (p.21), thus neglecting the role of concerted efforts or shared ownership of knowledge.In contrast, the hierarchical explanation presented in Chapter 3 sees top-down managers as drivers of collective action.Yet, the chapter also points out that this approach involves substantial investment to ensure control and enforcement, which can limit adaptability within organizations, and downplays the role of individual agency.For the author, the two other explanations, the institutional (Chapter 4) and social movement (Chapter 5) approaches, better recognize people's participation in the making of social groups, by considering respectively the role of norms and identity.However, they also remain limited in explaining radical and rapid changes, as they rely on highly embedded collectives which take time to develop.This initial nuanced analysis revisits the roots and core assumptions of these four main figures of thoughts and reveals their limitations in fully explaining the functioning of distributed collective 1298395O SS0010.