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
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-rentand-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 casestudies as well as experience-led assessments of these and related questions. Abstracts
should be emailed to Roger Hallam at roger.hallam@kcl.ac.uk .
Proposals will be evaluated on a rolling basis. The final 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@kcl.ac.uk)
Dan Mercea (City University London, dan.mercea.1@city.ac.uk)
Matt Wall (University of Swansea, M.T.Wall@swansea.ac.uk)