The Power of Organizing without Organizations in Thai Society: Case Study of the New Social Movement without Leading Organizations

Abstract

The objective of this article is to bring the conceptual idea in “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations,” written by the communication scientist-Clay Shirkey whose scholarly interests are on social change phenomena and he proposes social network’s system after the emergence of WEB 2.0 which impacts on the dynamics of new social movement, and it changes the way social organizations are formed. The framework to understand phenomena in Thai society by three-level process in the formation of social organization is as follows: 1) Sharing, 2) Cooperation, and 3) Collective Action.      In this article, four case    studies in Thailand are investigated. The finding shows this new social tool is not only able to empower and help ordinary people to advocate their individual and communal problems through story-telling but also potentially allows members of the intra-network to connect and exchange information to each other. Furthermore, this tool fairly helps facilitating the social organizations at two prior levels. Nevertheless, there’re still challenges for social organizations to transform their action into “collective action” level, and to sustainably maintain the leverage of groups.