Earlier chapters in the book have examined the political and organizational capacities of different types of connective action. Comparing the protest mobilizations in Chapter 2 showed that organizationally enabled connective action can perform surprisingly well in terms of maintaining political agendas and gaining positive recognition from news media and acknowledgment from public officials, while a more radical brokered mobilization fared poorly in terms of public “worthiness.” Chapter 3 showed how another organizationally enabled connective action network also managed a large and well-received demonstration, while a crowd-enabled sub-network of the Copenhagen climate protests displayed robust organizational capacities in response to short-term events and longer-term adaptive patterns such as a marked resource-seeking capacity when the continuing existence of the network became tenuous. In Chapter 4 we found that organizationally enabled issue networks operating at the national level in the United Kingdom and Germany displayed dense mechanisms for personalized, digitally mediated engagement as part of their efforts to attract popular support for their initiatives at the same time as they exerted pressure on institutional politics and policy.

Such findings suggest that large-scale connective action networks need not always be mere lightweight versions of more traditionally brokered collective action coalitions in which players negotiate alliances and allocate resources such as money, professional staff, memberships, skilled leaders, and other levers of power. Indeed, in some respects and in some contexts, the flexibility of connective action networks may offer some clear advantages over more formally constituted coalitions.