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Online communities have displaced or become complements to organizations such as churches, labor unions and political groups which have traditionally been at the center of collective action. Yet, despite their growing influence and support of faster, cheaper and more flexible organizing, few empirical studies address how online communities are built and become enduring agents of social change. Using Internet-based ethnographic methods, this inductive field study examines how an online community called Anonymous transitioned from being a small gathering of contributors focused on recreation to becoming a community of trolls, activists and hackers incubating myriad projects. Findings reveal that the interplay of digital technology and a culture of transgression supported experimentation that culminated with the adoption of a resilient organizing platform that enabled several community factions to coexist in continuous engagement. This paper infuses community building research with an important emphasis on the role of the techno-cultural, highlighting how online formation and maintenance processes are shaped and shape mutually contingent technologies and cultures.

Collectives attempting to self-organize without relying on managerial control can leverage open, digital networks to foster information exchange and agility. But, as collectives grow, the open boundaries that enable the mobilization of participants and rapid exchange of ideas can give rise to new organizing challenges that make collective action untenable. We examine this tension by exploring how networked activists self-organize through open, digital networks to achieve shared aims without belonging to a common organization that supports their cause. With a seven-year, inductive field and archival study, we capture how activists from the Anonymous collective organized 70 protest actions while struggling to integrate newcomers and coordinate increasingly complex activities. Rather than succumb to chaos or managerial control, Anonymous learned to self-organize, gradually abandoning normative forms of control in favor of forms of architectural control. By creating a participation architecture—a sociotechnical framework that empowered technical experts and unobtrusively channeled newcomers to designated forums—networked activists enhanced their collective ability to coordinate complex, interdependent actions at scale. Our grounded theoretical model reveals how the challenges of self-organizing emerge with rapid growth and how these can be overcome by configuring architectural control.

Institutional theorists focus on practices that spread because they conform with and build on established cultural assumptions and resources. Novel practices, however, not only fail to conform to, but also challenge the dominant institutional order. We seek to understand the process by which novel practices move from entrepreneurial anomaly to consecrated exemplar within a field. We contrast Unity Temple by Frank Lloyd Wright—a building that challenged the accepted practices of ecclesiastical design in the architectural profession—with the most prominent churches during the same period. We find two distinct legitimation processes—institutional evangelism where creators express their identity and generate novel practices versus adaptive emulation where adopters focus on prestigious others and emulate their established practices. We reveal that actors engaged in institutional evangelism and adaptive emulation, employing institutional work and leveraging ideas, materials and identities to effect, transform, and maintain institutions. Our comparative cases show the key role of materiality, particularly collective identity markers, in institutional work and institutional processes.

Most category studies have focused on established categories with discrete boundaries. These studies not only beg the question of how a de novo category arises, but also upon what institutional material actors draw to create a de novo category. We examine the formation and theorization of the de novo category "modern architecture" between 1870 and 1975. Our study shows that the process of new category formation was driven by groups of architects with distinct clientele associated with institutional logics of commerce, state, religion, and family. These architects enacted different artifact codes for a building based on institutional logics associated with their specific mix of clients. "Modern architects" fought over what logics and artifact codes should guide "modern architecture." Modern functional architects espoused a logic of commerce enacted through a restricted artifact code of new materials in a building, whereas modern organic architects advocated transforming the profession's logic enacted through a flexible artifact code of mixing new and traditional materials in buildings. The conflict became a source of creative tension for modern architects that followed, who integrated aspects of both logics and materials in buildings, expanding the category boundary. Plural logics and category expansion resulted in multiple conflicting exemplars within "modern architecture" and enabled its adaptation to changing social forces and architectural interpretations for over 70 years.