“It falls upon you to create a better place”: exploring ephemeral online communities under the lens of organisational configurations

This study aims to extend Mintzberg’s theory of organisational configurations to the specific context of ephemeral online communities. As such communities self-organise rapidly and temporarily, without fixed hierarchies, authority relationships or formal structures, they represent a novel and challenging subject of study from an organisational perspective. In this paper, the author argues that configuration theory can nevertheless be a powerful framework to understand how such communities organise collective action.