Xenografting in Political Activism: Co-Existing Logics Powered by Resource Injections
Lisen Selander, Sirkka L. Järvenpää · Academy of Management Discoveries · 2020
The Decoder project launched Amnesty International (Amnesty), a global social movement organization (SMO), into the uncharted territory of crowd work for political activism through a micro-task crowdsourcing (CS) platform. The platform allowed rapid scaling of repetitive, online microtasks to generate large quantities of standardized data by leveraging the work of thousands of previously unaffiliated crowd workers around the world. The logics of crowd work were different from the dominant logics of expert research at Amnesty. We detail how seemingly contrasting logics can coexist as complementary without leading to transformative change. We find that the coexistence required major resource injections because of the foreignness of the underlying practices of crowd work. We discover and appropriate xenografting as an organizational approach for understanding this coexistence. Xenografting adds a new approach to logics pluralism and a temporal dimension to the digital transformation literature.