For the most part, what many refer to as 'social movement
theory' has been the province of sociologists and political
scientists, many of whom are committed to positivist theory building,
using quantitative or qualitative methods, and thus tend to view
social movements as 'objects' to be studied from the outside. These
scholars may support the political goals of the movements they study,
but their theory and methods are directed toward other academics, not
movements themselves. There has always been a significant counter-tradition,
of course, including anthropologists who have used
ethnographic methods to study popular movements around the world and a
few politically engaged scholars who have gone deep inside the heart
of radical movements.."

As I point out in Networking Futures, there is nothing particularly
liberatory or progressive about networks. As Castells and Hardt &
Negri show, decentralized networks are characteristic of post-fordist
modes of capital accumulation generally, while terror, crime,
military, and police outfits increasingly operate as transnational
networks as well (see Luis Fernandez' fantastic new book about police
networks, 'Policing Dissent'). What is unique about radical activist
networking, however, is not only how such practices are used in the
context of mass movements for social, economic, and environmental
justice, but also the way radical activists project their egalitarian
values- flat hierarchies, horizontal relations, and decentralized
coordination, etc.- back onto network technologies and forms
themselves.

Institutions are generally associated with the kind
of centralized, top-down bureaucratic organizations inherited from the
industrial age. However, if we see institutions more broadly as simply
sustainable networks of social relations along with the organizational
and technological infrastructure that makes such relations possible
then there are many ways to institutionalize.