The Phoenix syndrome: Netroots organizations strategies to gain and maintain digital resource abundance

Abstract

The development of social media challenges the established conceptualizations of resources in social movements. While previous theories largely illustrated social movements as constantly searching for new and more resources, the development of social media has allowed some actors to gather and mobilize extensive resources rapidly, calling for an analysis of resource abundance. The aim of this article is to analyse how netroots organizations strategically act upon digital resource abundance and particularly focuses on how resources are mobilized and managed and how netroots organizations create organizational structures on social media. Three Swedish netroots organizations are used as empirical cases. This article shows that digital resource abundance is rewarding but also resource demanding as netroots organizations has to act like a Phoenix, the Greek mythological bird, as they constantly need to ‘reinvent’ themselves by being present and active on social media in order to maintain their digital resource abundance.