Federal employees or rogue rangers: Sharing and resisting organizational authority through Twitter communication practices

Abstract

On 24 January 2017, the Trump administration tried to censor various science-related federal agencies, most notably the National Park Service. This case study presents the emergence of “alternative” National Park Service Twitter accounts that subverted the ban and explores how “rogue rangers” share in and resist organizational authority through communication practices we interpret as dis/attributing communicative action to various figures to do so. Through qualitative analysis of textual and non-textual data pertaining to the accounts, we demonstrate that organizational members create ambiguity through communicative dis/attribution to do and say more things than authorized, while maintaining a link to their organization, for it is as members that their actions and words are authoritative. The study concludes by theorizing three contributions to the literature on authority and resistance, in particular in the context of social media: (1) it shows that authority and resistance are at play even outside of conventional organizations, which conversely means that social media activity can display a level of organizationality; (2) it demonstrates that the communicative performance of authority and resistance rests on membership ambiguity; and (3) it extends current conversations on the communicative performance of authority by showing that the same practices can also perform resistance.