Full Paper

Research on collective action (CA) dates back to at least the 1960s. However, the plethora of Internet-driven CAs warrants the need to revisit the theory of CA. By analyzing blog and Twitter postings for the two movements, “Women to Drive ” and “Sexual Harassment”, we- (1) develop novel methodologies to model online CAs by utilizing existing CA theories and computational approaches for social network analysis, sentiment analysis, text mining, and content analysis, (2) establish a rigorous and fundamental analytical framework to understand the emergence, evolution, development and trajectory of CAs in complex online environments, and (3) study coalition formation, interorganizational communication, and transnational support of the two online CAs. The study also identifies cross-cultural aspects of the campaign network, where Arabic hashtags relate to the local factors and English hashtags connect with transnational and interorganizational support from various organizations such as human rights and women’s rights