Political campaigns, whether advancing a candidate or an issue position, have always had to be flexible and adaptable organizations. How has the process and organization of political campaigning changed with the proliferation of hypermedia technology? Even though the role of technology in the organizational behavior of firms, hospitals, stock traders, and academic networks has been well researched, relatively little has been written about the impact of new information technologies on political organizations (Barley 1986; Orlikowski 1995; Barley 1996; Barrett and Walsham 1999). Networks have become a prominent analytical frame for organizational research (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Podolny and Page 1998; Contractor and Monge 2004). As a consequence, scholars of political communication have begun to study how political information flows among citizens, with limited attention to the role of new media in organizational units of analysis: party and campaign organization. Moreover, archival work has revealed the myriad ways organizations control people and resources through information management tools (Yates 1993), and both New York's Silicon Alley and California's Silicon Valley have become important contemporary field sites for studies of organizational innovation with new media technologies (Saxenian 1994; Pratt 2002; Neff 2005).

Political campaigns are important sites of technological and organizational innovation. Recent studies of campaign organization have posited the growing role of professional pollsters and professional fund-raisers. Even though pollsters supply campaigns with important information about the electorate, and fund-raising professionals generate revenue, information technology experts have become dominant, often managing both the pollsters and fund-raising staff.