My research is situated in three fields of study: social movements, globalization, and organization. I approach these broad phenomena through the lens of communication and discourse (both mediated and face-to-face). I am particularly interested in meetings, assemblies, and conferences.I am a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and currently a Marie-Curie Research Fellow at the Gothenburg Research Institute (and previously at the University of Montreal (Canada). My current project on inter-organizational collaborations studies how such collaborations are governed through face-to-face meetings as well as how these meetings themselves are governed.
Supervisors: Donatella Della Porta, Dieter Rucht, Barbara Czarniawska, and François Cooren
Phone: +46 31 786-4798
Address: University of Gothenburg
Dept. of Sociology and Work Science
Box 720
SE 405 30 Göteborg
Sweden
Supervisors: Donatella Della Porta, Dieter Rucht, Barbara Czarniawska, and François Cooren
Phone: +46 31 786-4798
Address: University of Gothenburg
Dept. of Sociology and Work Science
Box 720
SE 405 30 Göteborg
Sweden
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1. In what way do the constraints of the meeting-form influence the discussion and hence the decision-making process?
2. How do meeting participants navigate across the various and potentially controversial junctures in the decision-making process to eventually establish what they call “consensus”?
Four elementary structural constraints in meetings where identified: sequentiality, face, status, and frames. While these constraints are thought to be universal, they can be dealt with in culturally contingent ways, which are described as ‘regimes’ governing the interactions in the meeting.
The turn-taking regime of a meeting determines the way in which sequentiality is handled. It prescribes whether a queueing mechanism (e.g. a list of speakers) is used to determine the order of speakers (formal turn-taking), whether speakers self-select at what conversation analysts call turn-transition points (informal turn-taking), or whether the chair or facilitator arbitrarily switches between these two modes (casual turn-taking management).
The politeness regime (or the etiquette) of a meeting determines the range of conflictual issues that may be addressed without causing loss of face and embarrassment. In the regime of avoidance, few conflictual issues can be discussed without risking serious offense and eventually the decline of the meeting. In the regime of fight, on the other side, conflict and potentially harsh controversial debate about any kind of issue is possible, if not encouraged. In the regime of candour, the range of controversial issues and the harshness of adequate debate is considerably reduced, though allowing participants to express their views candidly as long as they take personal feelings into consideration.
The leadership regime of a meeting determines how status differences are dealt with, namely whether they are accepted and reinforced by granting high status participants special authority, or whether status differences are denied or resisted on the basis of egalitarian values. The regime of authority readily accept and install a central decision-making authority who is usually the chair of the meeting. In the egalitarian regime, on the other side, participants tend to work against rather than reinforce the public production of status and prestige by refusing to award high-status participants superior decision-making authority. In the regime of complex equality, there is also a strong sense of equality, but limited authority is nevertheless temporarily granted to participants with a special status in a relevant field of knowledge. Seven types of leaders can be distinguished, each of which is based on a different source of authority: veterans (experience), brokers (connections), experts (expertise), representatives (a constituency), mobilizers (mobilizing-capacity), organizers (maintenance of a meeting arena), and facilitators (focus on process)).
The preparatory regime of a meeting determines to what degree preparatory efforts are made before the commencement of the meeting are accepted as a fait accompli and hence to what degree (pre)established frames (such as the points on the agenda) are allowed to structure the discussion. In the regime of pre-structuration the results of ‘external’ preparations are highly valued and cannot easily be overturned. In order to be relevant, participants have to respect these prepared frames. In the open space regime, on the other side, relatively few contributions will be dismissed as irrelevant, let alone illegitimate. The regime of evolving structures values a certain degree of structure in the discussion, some of which may also come from ‘outside’, but these elements are not automatically established but always subject to discussion so that the autonomy of the meeting is respected.
The decision-making process was modelled as an incremental construction of the public opinion of the meeting. In this continuous process, six critical junctures were identified: the topic, the problem, the task, the options, positions, and determination. Conflicts are likely to occur around the process of establishing these decision-elements. Depending on the meeting culture, the participants use different practices to deal with (or avoid) controversies around these critical junctures. Some of these practices are described in detail in chapter 6 of the thesis. In total, the empirical findings show that (1.) the role of the facilitator has gained crucial importance in the global justice movements, (2.) decisions often are made implicitly first and made explicit later (post-hoc decisions), (3.) the productive role of interruptions, pauses, and ‘new beginnings’ in the decision-process.
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Strategien Gewerkschaften und soziale Bewegungen den sich wandelnden kapitalistischen Verhältnissen begegnen.
■ Wie beziehen sie sich aufeinander?
■ Welche Suchbewegungen gibt es?
■ Wo ist effektiver Widerstand möglich?
■ Welche Relevanz haben soziale Kämpfe in anderen Ländern, transnationale Vernetzungen und Migration?"
The aim of this paper is to explore this logic of meetings as a social form in its own right. Based on ethnographic material from numerous social movement meetings, it suggests that every meeting comes with six elementary structural constraints (or forces): time, place, cognitive frames of reference, status hierarchies, the needs of face, and sequentiality. These forces, however, do not simply determine the meeting talk but they can be handled in culturally contingent ways. The paper describes a variety of meeting cultures and how they regulate the meeting talk in different ways.
The paper argues that both phenomena are due to a lack of an unambiguous conceptual framework that is capable of grasping the peculiarities of internal social movement structures, and the sets out to provide such a framework in two steps. First, it introduces the concept of meeting arena, as the structure-side of meetings and specifies mesomobilization arenas as the place where movement level coordination takes place. These meeting arenas thus constitute an important infrastructure in mobilizing processes. Second, the paper explores how meeting arenas are a source of order in social movements and finds that their structure is threefold: meetings are consciously organized, institutionalized over time, and interconnected through personal contacts. Meeting arenas hence combine and intertwine elements of organization, institutions, and networks, forming a social movement infrastructure that cannot be adequately understood in terms of either one of these forms of order alone.
In my paper, I argue that meetings, especially inter-organizational meetings, are the place to look in order to understand internal social movement processes. While it is commonly accepted that social movements are not organizations but networks of groups, organizations, and individuals, it is also clear that social movements are nevertheless organized, or rather: engaged in organizing processes. If organizations provide the structural context for organizational processes, I contend that meetings provide the structural context for organizing and mobilizing processes in social movements. In other words, meetings constitute a core infrastructure for these processes. Yet, the importance of meetings is not reflected in the literature on social movements or on organizations.
This paper makes a first step towards a better understanding of the internal infrastructure of social movements by presenting a typology of meeting arenas which helps to map this communicative infrastructure. Based on several years of participant observation in various organizing processes of the global justice movements at the local (Berlin), national (Germany), and transnational (Europe) level, the paper describes some core characteristics of social movement meetings and explores what actually happens inside them, focusing on the culturally defined role of the facilitator and how the practices of consensus decision-making is also culturally contingent.
with EPA-participants from various backgrounds. While a full evaluation of all this material will be part of my PhD-thesis, I am presenting some first findings in order to discuss them with activists involved in the ESF process.
It is the first attempt ever to bring together meeting researchers from all social sciences to create synergies and cross-fertilization between meetings related research that has so far taken place in relative isolation from each other in social anthropology, organizational communication, sociology, workplace studies, sociolinguistics, political science, psychology, management, and even applied IT (Group Support Systems).
In this joint session, we want to explore this tension as it plays itself out both in social movement activism and in academic debates. We are particularly interested in how processes of globalization affect these dynamics; after all, the Weberian/Leninist model of bureaucratic organization that many activists want to change or abandon is a Western invention provoking Western countermodels. What happens where the dominant model is a different one? Or where alternative forms have failed? What happens when prefigurative activists aiming to create horizontal forms of organization among equals are faced with vast global inequalities? What do the organizers of the masses do when they find that their opponents have adopted organizational forms that diffuse power, making it difficult to identify the power holder that needs to be replaced? What is the role of indigenous movements in the innovation of organizational forms? Does the multiplication of organizational cultures and languages facilitate or hamper change in established ways of organizing? How do the global communication infrastructures affect organizing? We welcome papers that address these questions as well as any other papers that speak to the overall topic of the session.
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Christoph Haug, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Neil Fligstein, University of California at Berkeley, USA
The theme of the 11th ESA conference – Crisis, Critique and Change – reminds us that the problem of stability and continuity is not only a pressing practical challenge in times like these, but also a theoretical one.
The problem of mesolevel social order is the central problem of a social science interested in how people engage in collective action, how they construct the opportunity to do so, the skills they bring to the enterprise, how they sometimes succeed, and if they do succeed how they seek to stabilize and maintain the resulting order.
While Fligstein and McAdam’s “A Theory of Fields” (OUP 2012) claim to successfully combine the strengths of a number of existing theoretical traditions and to overcome at least some of their weaknesses, other field theorists might disagree and insist on the superiority of other approaches to the problem of mesolevel social order. In particular, it remains subject to debate, whether the dynamics of strategic action fields can be reduced to the essence of “who gets what” and hence winners and losers, as Fligstein and McAdam maintain, or whether interpersonal ties that bind the actors in a field together (can) take precedence over the competition for whatever is at stake in the field. Others may question whether the theory is actually successful in injecting a greater sense of agency into other versions of field theory and (new) institutionalism. Again others may wonder why language and communication, which the authors grant a key role in human evolution, is otherwise so strikingly absent from the theory.
The theory of strategic action fields obviously raises many more questions, including the one that any new theory will be confronted with: what (new) answers does it actually give and to what kind of knowledge does it contribute. Fligstein and McAdam’s theory, as such remains a skeleton, which may be seen both as a strength and a weakness, and it is the aim of this research stream to provide a forum for debate and exchange around these questions and to assess how the theory relates to various fields of ongoing research.
We invite
• Empirical applications and tests of field theory or specific parts of it
• Theory comparisons, especially with:
o institutional theory
o structuration theory
o the work of Pierre Bourdieu and related theories
o network theory
o social movement theory
• Methodological papers (e.g. correspondence theory, network theory)
• Conceptual discussions (introduction, refinement and critique of field related concepts)
• Meta-theoretical reflections on how “A Theory of Fields” may reconfigure existing research fields and relations between them.
In order to facilitate the discussion across papers, we would like to ask authors to relate to the following concepts wherever possible (if only to dismiss them):
• Strategic action fields
• Incumbents / challengers, and internal governance units
• Social skill
• field environment (esp. the state)
• exogenous shocks, mobilization, and the onset of contention
• episodes of contention
• settlement
These are defined in the first chapter of “A Theory of Fields” as well as, more briefly, in Fligstein & McAdam (in Sociological Theory 29(1), 2011), but in the context of this research stream, they are not meant to prescribe a particular theoretical angle, rather a common point of reference.
Please note that abstracts must be submitted through the conference website at http://www.esa11thconference.eu/call-for-papers/submission/01RS07/
Abstracts received by email cannot be accepted.
Deadline for abstract submission: 1 February 2013