Democratic Organizations and Their Monstrous Digital Self: The Use of Facebook by a Labour Union

Abstract

This paper investigates how existing democratic organizations may be altered by members’ participation on social media. To do so, over a two-year period we studied a labour union that opened a Facebook group to modernize its democratic functioning. Unexpectedly, union leaders came to take seemingly completely undemocratic decisions, such as banning members from the Facebook group. To make sense of this ‘surprising’ decision, we describe how both union leaders and online participants socially construct this online–offline assemblage. We argue that three types of interpretation have played a pivotal role in this process: the perceived harmony between online and offline processes, their perceived controllability, and the legitimacy attributed to the ‘others’. We then theorize the online-offline interaction within the union democratic process as a monstrification process, with both union leaders and online participants eventually interpreting it as a disharmonious and uncontrollable phenomenon led by illegitimate actors. Union leaders then come to believe they have no option other than to ban the ‘trolls’ to keep the digital beast they have created at bay.

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