[ecrea] CfP: One-day workshop on online commitment to collective action

Call for Papers: ‘I Will if You Will, Too’: Conditional Commitment in
Collective Action

Research Workshop

3 June 2016, City University London

Deadline for Submissions: 25 April 2016

http://www.city.ac.uk/arts-social-sciences/international-politics/research/social-movements-and-civil-society/_nocache 



This one day workshop convenes academics, activists and political
practitioners investigating the potential and consequences of new—social
and technological—participatory designs. The main focus of the meeting
will be on conditional commitment (CC), a theoretical and practical
solution to the perennial collective action problem that the attainment
of a collective good by otherwise autonomous individuals is most likely
to happen when everyone knows that everyone else will also act. As a
collective action is proposed, conditional commitments to act are made.
The action only takes place once a critical mass of commitments are
made. Conditional commitment represents a new “digital”
syndicalism–citizens, organising outside the walls of the state,
challenging political power via digitalised collective aggregation.

What excites a small but growing number of academics and political
practitioners is the new viability of this mechanism afforded by the
collapse of the transaction costs in the three way communication needed
for this process to take place: the naming of the target critical mass;
conditional commitments to that target; informing that the target has
been reached. While in the analogue age the costs of this communication
over a dispersed space were prohibitive, with social media technology
space and time constraints are effectively removed.

Some specific questions to be considered are:

How can conditional commitment, which is now well established in the
economic and cultural sphere (e.g. Groupon and Kickstarter), be
effectively transferred to the political realm?

Is conditional commitment subject to its own cultural collective action
problem – people do not know about it and therefore do not use it – and
how can be this be overcome?

What are the potentialities of hybrid models which combine offline and
online communication of CC to lever collective action? The use of face
to face canvassing to tell people about the target critical mass was
piloted in the recent UCL rent strike in London by one of the workshop
organisers
(http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/25/london-students-refuse-to-pay-rent-and-demand-40-cut). 



What are the various applications of CC in the contemporary political
field, in social and community relations, culture and the creative
industries and how can they be promoted with a view to creating a more
equitable and just society?

We invite 250 word abstracts that outline *academic research, practical
examples or case-studies as well as experience-led assessments* of these
and related questions. Abstracts should be emailed to Roger Hallam at
(roger.hallam /at/ kcl.ac.uk) <mailto:(roger.hallam /at/ kcl.ac.uk)> .

Proposals will be evaluated on a rolling basis. *The deadline for
submission is 25 April*. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out at
the earliest opportunity and no later than 9 May 2016.

*Organisers:*

Roger Hallam (King’s College London, (roger.hallam /at/ kcl.ac.uk)
<mailto:(roger.hallam /at/ kcl.ac.uk)>)

Dan Mercea (City University London, (dan.mercea.1 /at/ city.ac.uk)
<mailto:(dan.mercea.1 /at/ city.ac.uk)>)

Matt Wall (University of Swansea, (M.T.Wall /at/ swansea.ac.uk))

Dan Mercea

Sociology, City University London

St John Street, EC1V 0HB

http://www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/dan-mercea

*iCS Special Issue /Protest Communication Ecologies/*

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rics20/19/3

---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier and ECREA.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chauss�de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------