Black Lives Matter! Organizational Resilience in the Face of Social Movements

Abstract

The summer of 2020 witnessed a rapid development of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the unique context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Due to social distancing measures and strict restrictions against physical protests, social media platforms emerged as a de novo and de facto setting for social movements, which complicates organizational response to collective claims. We build theory on social movement and organizational resilience using a novel inductive method that combines exploratory data analysis, algorithm-supported induction, and a multi-case qualitative study. Our holistic model reveals the mechanisms under which social movements emerge, spread and interact with organizations in social media. Specifically, we showed how collective claims specific to an event translate into broader societal claims to eventually target prominent organizations and found that message sentiment was the most important predictor for the type of organizational response. We developed a novel theoretical model that describes how some organizations dynamically build organizational resilience in recalibrating their response to meet the activists’ reformulated contentious claims against them.