6th Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies
Viña del Mar – Chile, 6-9 April 2016
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Subtheme #6: Networked Movements – Resisting Power without Formal Organization
Convenors:
Armin Beverungen | Leuphana University Lüneburg – Germany | [log in to unmask]
Clemens Apprich | Leuphana University Lüneburg – Germany | [log in to unmask]
Maarit Laihonen | Aalto University – Finland | [log in to unmask]
Mikko Laamanen | Hanken School of Economics – Finland | [log in to unmask]
Rodrigo Nunes | Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro – Brazil | [log in to unmask]
The 21st century has so far been marked by a post-9/11 political nightmare of war and global conflict as much as by a slow but certain resurgence of social movements culminating most recently and notably in the Arab Spring, indignados and Occupy movements. The grounds for most social mobilizations are apparent: the dominance of neoliberal ideology, understood not only as a set of ideas but as institutionally enforced practices that promote individualism, competition, and private ownership, and the consequent erosion of social life and political participation. That this process carries on despite it being an obvious threat to conditions of social reproduction bears witness to the democratic deficit of most ‘mature’ democracies in the world today.
Collective action in recent years has arisen as a response to various forms of immiseration of everyday life and a sense of political disenfranchisement, and is engaged in by a multitude of different actors organized around grievances and contention, in arrangements that are emergent and often loosely structured. As such, these forms and modes of organizing can be described as leaderless and structureless (Freeman, 1972; Sutherland, Land & Böhm, 2014), and participants will often see their demands for democracy and participation at odds with traditional, hierarchical forms of organization. This ‘organization of the organizationless’ (Nunes, 2014), inflected as it is by digital, networked media, possesses informal structures of its own and does not exactly correspond to the much touted narratives of absolute leaderlessness and horizontality.
In this sub-theme, we examine the nature of power in contention, focusing on two aspects in particular. First, the dynamics of leadership and participation in the kinds of movement in opposition to hegemonic forms of power that have emerged in recent years, from the Arab Spring to the recent university occupations in the Netherlands. As a critique toward the fable of structurelessness and leaderlessness, we call for examinations of the alignment of movements on a spectrum of formality in the organizations that work against and within hegemonic centres. Second, the relation between movements and their media: not least since Subcomandate Marcos’ letters in Chiapas since 1994 or Occupy Wall Street’s human microphone have the ‘other media’ (Feigenbaum, 2014) of such movements been key to understanding their organizational power, e.g. as ‘mediated subjective apparatuses’ (Bratich, 2014).
We particularly welcome papers on network movement organisation broadly; emergent institutions and the institutional dimension of contemporary social struggles, how these struggles react to neoliberalism, and the question of mediality of organising on topics dealing with e.g.
· the relationship between the ethos or ethopoetic dimension of neoliberalism and organisation
· indigenous concepts of organization – not necessary aligned with existing network theories
· mapping the democratic potential and media of the common as material good (‘the commons’) and social relation (‘the common’)
· networked commons for sustenance, work, and education, such as the Free University movement and university occupations in Chile, the Netherlands and elsewhere
· the use of Tactical Media in Latin America, ranging from free radio movements to educational resources to autonomous network infrastructures
Deadlines
Abstract submission: November 10, 2015
Notification of acceptance: December 10, 2015
Submission of full paper (6000 words): March 10, 2016
Abstracts of about 1000 words should be submitted through the website form at www.laemos.com. The abstracts should be in English, including the name and email address of the author(s).
References
Bratich, J. (2014) ‘Occupy All the Dispositifs: Memes, Media Ecologies, and Emergent Body Politic’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11(1): 64-73.
Feigenbaum, A. (2014) ‘Resistant Matters: Tents, Tear Gas and the “Other Media” of Occupy’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11(1): 15-24.
Freeman, J. (1972) ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17: 151-164.
Nunes, R. (2014) Organization of the Organizationless: Collective Action after Networks. London/Lüneburg: Mute and Post-Media Lab.
Sutherland, N., C. Land and S. Böhm (2014) ‘Anti-leaders(hip) in Social Movement Organizations: The Case of Autonomous Grassroots Groups’, Organization, 21(6): 759-781.