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Crowdfunding involves raising small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet and social networks, to fund a project. Crowdfunding projects are mainly funded by the project creator's relatively small network of family and friends. We argue that mobilizing funders outside this close network positively contributes to the success of a crowdfunding success. To study how project creators seek to attract funding from more distant/potential resources (latent ties) in addition to existing networks (strong and weak ties), we examined usage of social media (Facebook and Twitter) and the crowdfunding platform (website). We analyzed 10 cultural projects hosted on the Dutch crowdfunding platform "Voordekunst." Our results contribute to theorizing on latent tie activation by demonstrating that social media messages and platform updates add economic value to the crowdfunding effort. Our study also explains the moderating effect of these messages on funders of various tie strengths.

AbstractThe principles of international humanitarian law (IHL) have evoked considerable debate in the practice of humanitarian support, particularly in terms of emerging tensions with sovereign (national) law. Drawing on organization studies, we examine the emergent strategies aimed at resolving the ambiguous legal context in which humanitarian support operations in a conflict context are embedded. Our analysis of two missions revealed two types of emergent strategies, namelynetworkandnegotiationstrategies, differentiated by particular contextual dimensions. We extend the humanitarian law debate by showing the strategic interplay between the operational humanitarian context and international humanitarian principles, thereby connecting the fields of international law and organization science.

AbstractA major challenge for disaster scholars and policymakers is to understand the power dimension in response networks, particularly relating to collaboration and coordination. We propose a conceptual framework to study interests and negotiations in and between various civic and professional, response networks drawing on the concepts of "programming" and "switching" proposed by Manuel Castells in his work on the network society. Programming in disaster response refers to the ability to constitute response networks and to program/reprogram them in terms of the goals assigned to the network. Switching is the ability to connect different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources. We employ these concepts to understand how the US Federal Emergency Management Agency organized its response in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Our conceptual framework can be used both by disaster scholars and policymakers to understand how networked power is constructed and utilized.

Citizens have often been found to converge on disaster sites. Such personal convergence is increasingly supported by online informational convergence. The adoption of online platforms represents an opportunity for response organizations to manage these two different manifestations of citizen convergence. We analyse one such platform, "Ready2Help", developed by the Red Cross in The Netherlands. Our research demonstrates that by utilizing platforms, response organizations are able to transcend the boundaries between different types of organized behaviour during disaster. We extend the original conceptualization of organized behaviour, as previously described by the Disaster Research Center, explaining how the development of new platforms channels convergence of citizens and information. As such, platforms provide an interface between established, expanding, extending, and emergent forms of organized behaviour. These developments change the landscape of organized behaviour in times of disaster.

The present study of an infrastructure project shows how anxiety of repeated organizational failure instigates stronger stakeholder control. This control frustrated the project organization's efforts to gain trustworthiness, hampering project completion. The study also shows how the public demonstration of stakeholder control was used to curb reputation loss or to preemptively attribute blame. In this way, control inhibits trust relations between supposedly cooperating project partners. We contribute to the debates on political avoidance of reputation loss and trust–control interrelations by showing how the aftereffects of failure (anxiety and avoidance) limit the effectiveness of control as a means to repair trust.

Abstract
Recently, crisis response organizations are adopting a networked communication structure, as a means to connect different sources of crisis information and enable a more effective crisis response. However, this change has introduced legal complications that so far remain unaddressed, for instance regarding the exchange of privacy-sensitive information aimed at rendering a coherent picture of the crisis. This paper examines how information managers interpret legislation during crises. We analyze our results by drawing on Radbruch's tripartite taxonomy, showing that information managers oscillate between the values of certainty of law and purposiveness in regards to legislation, while the value of justice remains remarkably absent in their interpretation. By introducing a legal perspective on crisis information management we provide an important contribution to the crisis coordination debate.