Institutional Logics and Digital Collective Action at Amnesty International – the Decoder Initiative

Abstract

As social movement organizations (SMOs) enter the platform economy to transform their processes and scale their impact, they have to reckon their traditional logic with the emerging logic of the platform organization. In this paper we examine the Decoder initiative at Amnesty International. The Decoder initiative introduced the global SMO into the uncharted territory of online microtasking of political activism. The platform allowed rapid scaling of repetitive unstructured data tasks to generate large quantities of standardized data, leveraging the work of thousands previously unaffiliated digital supporters around the world. While partially contrasting, we trace and examine the coexistence of the SMO and digital platform logics. We conclude with implications for theory and practice.