In Search of a “Style:” Capturing the Collective Identity of Social Movements Based on Digital Trace Data
Authors: Henn-Latus, Theresa; Tell, Sarah; Polenz, Julian; Kern, Thomas; Posegga, Oliver
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2025)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00951
<jats:p>The emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is widely acknowledged to have fundamentally changed digital activism. Scholars remain divided, however, on the role of collective identity for social movements online, particularly in terms of the debate between connective and collective action. This paper contributes to this debate by demonstrating that collective identity formation online is possible and can create distinguishable social actors that can be sustained over time. When evaluating collective identity formation online, previous research has focused either on cultural references shared by platform users or on the interaction patterns among them. Foundational theories on collective identity, however, argue that both cultural and social dynamics must be examined together. This paper fills this research gap by drawing on the notion of “style” as introduced by network sociologist Harrison White, which inherently captures collective identity’s duality of culture and structure. We operationalized style based on socio-semantic network analysis, enabling the empirical assessment of collective identity formation online. We applied our style conceptual…