Social Media, Institutional Innovation and Affordances: The Case of Free Lunch for Children in China

This paper presents an interpretivist case study of an NGO innovation in China based on the Chinese twitter-like microblogging platform Weibo. We investigate the performativity of social media in generating innovative sociomaterial practices of an NGO campaign, embedded in a context where civil society is under-developed and politically restricted. We propose a situated perspective of technological affordances, and through the collective action model, explicitly take into account the enactment of, and potential changes to, institutional arrangements. Such an approach moves beyond the individual level of analysis both in ICT affordance studies and the institutional entrepreneurship, and considers technological affordances as relational to human agency, as well as institutional constraints and opportunities. The paper generates theoretical and practical implications in understanding the role of social media in social transformation.