Why do you think Anthony’s supervisor thought the interview went very well?

Anthony is interested in the way Internet and mobile communications technologies are changing the way it is possible for people to organise themselves. He has a personal interest in technology so decided to undertake a research project in this area. To gain ideas as to suitable research questions, he took a trip to the university library to browse through the ‘tables of contents’

of recently published journals.

One particular article in the journal Culture and Organization about ‘flash-mobs’ caught his eye (Kaulingfreks and Warren 2010). The authors had written that the recent craze for ‘flashmobbing’

in public places could be seen as a new organisational form based on Hardt and Negri’s

(2004) idea of the ‘swarm’ –

where people who do not know each other come together to do a particular task and dissipate again straight away. Importantly, these ‘swarms’ used mobile phone and Internet technologies to send messages to one another through viral communication, and had no clear leadership or management. The authors of the flash-mobs article suggested that these forms could be seen in ‘collaborative innovation networks’ (Gloor 2006) and were also politically powerful, given they were so difficult to ‘find’ – and to stop by police or other authorities. Anthony was intrigued.