Personalized Engagement in the Current ‘New' Wave of Anti-Mafia Grassroots Mobilization

This paper discusses the social mechanisms set in motion by a new anti-Mafia organization called Addiopizzo (Goodbye, Pizzo ) which has been able to successfully encourage a growing number of entrepreneurs and shopkeepers to refuse to pay racket fees to local mobs in the city of Palermo, Italy. By using communication technologies that enable personalized public engagement as part of a new interpretative frame which has brought political consumerism into the repertoire of the anti-Mafia movement, Addiopizzo activists – a group of post-grad students formed in 2004 – have succeeded in creating a range of collective and selective incentives that have made it possible for local businesspeople to overcome the problems of collective action and build new social bonds of solidarity. Referring to social movements and diffusion theories, the paper discusses how a relatively small and locally based SMO succeeded in bringing about important changes by organizing itself locally as well as globally, and via Internet. Data for the analysis came from several sources of information, such as interviews with the activists themselves, participant observation, media analysis and a unique dataset reporting the answers given to a structured questionnaire with more than 70 closed questions, distributed in 2011 to 277 entrepreneurs who had joined the mobilization campaign entitled “Change your shopping habits to fight the pizzo” at various points in time.