FINDINGS
Even though they operated in different cities, we found a common set of constraints and strategies at work across our four cases. These findings tell a story that simultaneously points to the limits of citizen responses to crisis and to the efficacy of strategies used by ordinary people acting entrepreneurially to navigate those limits and improve response effectiveness. We report these results according to stages of network emergence and network evolution. We depict this as a model of learning about self-organizing for collective action during a crisis (see Figure 2).
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In this section, we explain elements of the model with evidence from the four cases. In the network emergence stage, maker networks formed rapidly in response to the crisis. As they emerged and self-organized, the networks of makers encountered resource and institutional limitations. Network participants learned about their resourcefulness and legitimacy as they began producing and distributing PPE. In the network evolution stage, network members developed new ways to overcome their resource constraints and legitimacy deficits. They learned to implement resourcefulness strategies including improvising, focusing, satisficing, configuring, and brokering. They also learned strategies for legitimation such as legitimacy seeking, pressuring, leveraging, circumventing, and matching. The dotted lines in Figure 2 represent differences in the presence of feedback loops in each case.