Sharing economies are united in action. Certain initiatives are managed collectively, based on reciprocity, and remain nonprofit. Others – victims of their success – shift to the side of “netarchical capitalism”. No matter where they end up, they appear to share an original impetus – to act, to make, which contributes to the transformation of our worldview.

What does it mean to “make” (Lallement, 2015; Anderson, 2012)? It is more than a political agenda, it is a way of life: to no longer be a passive consumer – to join the ranks of the producers. Production liberates, as Proudhon emphasized (in hackerspaces we approach the Proudhonian notion of mutualism that was opposed to the Marxist vision of communal ownership of the means of production) – production in places where space, tools, experiences and knowledge (fab labs and hackerspaces) are shared, production to affirm one’s identity, in collaboration and for collaboration’s sake. To make is to learn by doing – it is a practice of production/personal liberation that fosters empowerment; it is the union of art and technique (which encourages disciplinary decompartmentalization). One might ask if the sharing economy announces the triumph of pragmatism over ideology, of the maker over the professional.

The maker movement and its DIY approach encourage us to be/make the world, challenging our relationship to knowledge, to work and workplaces. This mini- conference is focused on work and workplace transformations in the context of the collaborative economy.

It explores collaborative spaces and collaborative communities, in particular coworking spaces (external or corporate) and coworking movements, maker spaces and maker movements, fab labs, hacker spaces and hacker movements.
Articles related to this mini-conference cover the social, political, managerial, digital and spatial dimensions of collaborative spaces and collaborative communities.

We are particularly interested in discussing following questions: Coworking communities & movements: what’s new for organizations, entrepreneurs and project leaders? Collaborative communities & movements: new muses for management or counter-cultures? Makers and maker movements: a new industrial and artistic revolution? Collaborative communities, hacktivism and city renewal: towards new civil infrastructures for citizens and consumers?

Possible but not exhaustive topics:

• the relationship between collaborative communities and work transformations,
• the relationship between collaborative communities and new collaborative spaces,
• the social movement nature of collaborative communities,
• the new business models behind collaborative communities,
• public policies and their impact on collaborative communities and collaborative dynamics,
• clusters and social hubs and their relationship with collaborative spaces,
• innovation and new innovative practices grounded into collaborative communities and collaborative spaces,
• social and critical perspectives about collaborative communities, digital transformation and collaboration, etc.

We invite contributions that illuminate how the digital economy has affected economic competition and competition policy. The digital economy and especially the increasing relevance of data collection, processing, and monetization represent momentous forces in contemporary capitalism that change business models, consumption, corporate structures, and production. Examples of its effects that challenge core parts of our conventional wisdom about economic organization are the pronounced role of platform control, network effects, intellectual property, the monetization of user input and activity, rapid scale-up, and white-collar worker skills. So far, the structural effects of digitalization on the organization of firms, industries, markets, and political economies have rarely been explored systematically. By bringing together detailed analyses of the effects of the digital economy on competition and competition policy the mini-conference seeks to provide building blocks for systematic accounts of the evolution of capitalism in the face of digitalization.

Supplementing this general line of questioning, we particularly welcome contributions that explore the following issues:

1. Does competition in “new” digital industries differ from competition in “old” industries for tangible goods and face-to-face services? Many well-established regularities of economic competition – like the “law” of one price or the intuition that strengthened competition among sellers leads to better terms for buyers – have been formulated in the context of classic trades, industries, and markets. Are there specific regularities in markets with non-monetary transactions, non-tangible goods and services, and negligible marginal costs of production, such as “free” online services?
2. Has the digital economy changed the range of benefits and public goods that societies expect from economic competition? Especially in the fields of antitrust and intellectual property, competition and monopoly are today hardly discussed with reference to classical objectives of competition policy, like the disciplining of producers, the disempowerment of businesses, or the preservation of small-scale economic activity. Instead, debates about competition in the digital economy seem to increasingly center around technological progress, innovation, and wealth creation.
3. How do polities react to rapid industrial and technological change in the digital economy? New industries, business models, and products challenge political economies on multiple fronts. States, for example, build up expertise, reinterpret rules and standards, come to grip with a new field-specific politics, and develop industrial policies. Such processes of political economic adaptation to the digital economy take place domestically and transnationally. Are there new “conceptions of control” in Digital Capitalism in which the state, businesses, financiers, and stakeholders align their idea of a stable and well-organized market? Is there such thing as national Varieties of Digital Capitalism?
4. Does digitalization mean commoditization? Many “disruptive” businesses in the so-called “sharing economy” have created new platforms and marketplaces. Services such as AirBnB or Uber have thrived by offering new ways to connect supply and demand. Those services have expanded the scope of marketization and seem to have further commoditized sensitive goods such as housing or labor. How did local and national governments, stakeholders, and interest groups respond to those platforms?

The mini-conference invites both conceptual and empirical contributions of all methodological varieties.

The mini conference explores the impact of culture on the historical development of capitalist democracies and on cross-national variations in contemporary policy choices. Panel participants will consider how cultural artifacts influence policy choices and how institutions shape new cultural frames and policies. The organizers of the mini-conference invite papers that have a strong empirical grounding as well as theoretical foundations, and we especially seek those that compare cultural artifacts over time and across polities.

Culture is under-represented as a determinant of democratic and capitalist institutions in part because historical uses of cultural arguments are rather thin. These arguments often rely on vague generalizations about national values and can be seen as too amorphous for rigorous empirical investigation. Theories about culture are often linked to national economic and political models; but these neglect significant variations in economic markets, shifts in significant policy issues, and perceptions of groups that vary across time. National culture may influence the broad boundaries of markets and political engagement, yet this sweeping view misses how cultural artifacts shape political struggles and responses to economic change. Moreover, the relationship between institutional innovations and cultural norms is undoubtedly reciprocal.

The panels in this mini-conference will develop and use a more robust view of culture, grounded in empirically testable cultural artifacts. These include art, literature, images, historic buildings and food and drink. If distinctive cultural artifacts matter to how citizens perceive and engage in their political world, then one should expect to see empirically-verifiable variations across countries, communities, social groups and time. For example, panelists might consider how cultural artifacts contribute to the evolution of institutions within diverse capitalist democracies. These may range from economic institutions to social ones.

Panelists might also investigate how cultural artifacts exert an influence on the operation of markets and economic reforms. Cultural goods and services themselves represent major markets — from the arts to certain types of food and tourism, and even parts of the housing market. Culture is often linked with identity and these may be subject to specific rules, ranging from controls on ownership to issues of content. Equally, papers can study the effects of marketization, new suppliers and altered rules governing supply. The panel will also consider how culture affects actors in markets for non-cultural products and government policies- for example, their preferences and identities which can have major implications for markets ranging from labour or entrepreneurship.

This mini-conference is concerned with disruptions to established patterns of the regulation of work and employment, and with how social actors are attempting to respond to these disruptions through various forms of institutional experimentation.  Our aim is to bring together a wide range of contributions, analysing social actors’ adaptation to disruptive change across a number of fault-lines and geographical spaces. This will allow us to build a more generalised picture of the scope of institutional experimentation, and whether and how experimental practices can meet the challenge of responding to disruptive change in ways that support worker wellbeing, social cohesion, and sustainability.

We are interested in contributions which address how social actors have attempted to innovate across one or more of the following ‘fault lines’:

• Technologically-driven disruption, notably the dematerialisation of work through technological intermediation, and technologically-driven disruptions to organisation form which challenge existing patterns of work regulation.

• The unbundling of the organisation, including the various forms of reorganisation of the internal and external boundaries of the firm (or public sector employer), outsourcing, and the increasing separation between lead organisation and the responsibility for working conditions.
• The reconfiguration of global production networks, including the ways in which place competition within global production networks challenges national regulation, and the problems and possibilities of transnational regulation.

• Shifts in identity, solidarity and values, including the challenge in reconstituting, and finding new forms, of collective identity and solidarity across labour markets which are multiply segmented (by gender, ethnicity, age, etc.) and characterised by multiple forms of precariousness.

• How the challenge of climate change, and the demands of sustainable development, can cohere with the promotion of decent jobs and worker security

• Reconfigurations of the role of the state, and attempts to build counter-narratives responding to the subordination of social protection to the neo-liberal project

We seek papers which go beyond elucidating the nature of these fault-lines, and which seek to analyse how social actors (at local, regional, national or transnational levels) attempt to build new institutions, or reconfigure existing ones, in response to these challenges. We are particularly interested in how social actors use existing identities in these processes, and with how social learning develops within and between actors seeking to experiment. We also specifically welcome papers which examine and problematise the international transfer of policy ideas which necessitate institutional experimentation in recipient countries.

The notion of “employment grey zones” is widely used in developing countries and informal economies. It is equally present in developed countries and reflects the incomplete nature of employment relationship boundaries. It highlights the difficulties in identifying the employer’s power in productive systems characterised by subcontracting firms or interdependent networks or, more recently, by “uberised” working conditions.

We intend to reflect on the meaning of the grey zone in relation to the changes in production systems and the proliferation of new social and professional figures in the margins of wage-earning relation and labour law. Theoretically, the notion of employment grey zone enriches the classical neo-institutionalist approaches (Schreek, Thelen) that underestimate extra-institutional, cultural and political, infra- and supra sources. It stresses power or “micro-political” process (Almond, Ferner), underpinning the institutionalisation of new labour and employment regulations.

Proposals are welcome from all academic and non academic participants, referring to wage-earning societies transformations and to the emergence of collaborative economy workers.

Panel 1

“Emerging Figures of Labour in a Circular and Collaborative Economy”

Session Organizer: Christian Azaïs, LISE/CNAM Paris

“Emerging figures of work” reflect transformations in labour and employment relations. Three interpretations of emerging figures appear: declining figures, intermediary figures –between the declining and ascending ones, marked by individuals wishes or utopia. ”Uber” and collaborative jobs exemplify these three statements. The emerging work figure expresses how individuals and collectives react to labour transformations. We expect examples from Northern and Southern countries. The panel focuses on two main dimensions: individual & collective.

1. Individual issue

We wish to highlight the impact of collaborative economy forms on workers and how they make their own living, conveying their own subjectivity. We expect participants to dialogue around “Uber and collaborative economy” workers all around the world in a comparative dimension. Therefore, we will contribute to understanding the current features of employment wage-earning relationship and social protection in an e-economy, at a time when convergence appears between global North and South.

2. Collective issue

On the other hand, we would like to focus on trade union and state actions, from a comparative perspective. The idea is to underline how they incorporate or not labour market changes and their strategies.

At the same time, contributions that focus public and civil actions and judicial reviews against Uber and collaborative workers are welcome. By legislating and reinterpreting rules, paradoxically the state collaborates in individualisation and recontracting labour relations. The logics of individualisation, uncertainty on labour and life conditions are expressed as collective situations and are experienced by collectives of workers who, starting from an individual work status, can stand up for their interests.

Panel 2

“Grey Zones of Employment, MNC and Labour Law:

What Articulations for What Regulation(s)?”

Session Organizer: Patrick Dieuaide, ICEE/USPC/Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle

The relationship between “employment grey zones”, MNC and labour law is closely linked to globalisation, characterised by the predominance of finance in organisation, capital mobility and the contribution of multinational firms in the production and creation of jobs in national economies. This economic landscape draws a new map of power relations leading to profound changes in the employer-employee relationship. While at the post-war period in Europe (1945-1975), conflicts between employers and employees could lead to mutually beneficial collective agreements under the auspices of national states, globalisation is radically changing the perspective. Enclosed in a network of authorities and economic and financial interdependence of transnational dimensions, the employment relationship now follows a dual power asymmetry: the legal and economic subordination of the employee to his employer in subsidiaries or subcontractors is more or less overlaped by legal and financial constraints of the parent companies. This double asymmetry sketches the outlines of a new pragmatic order regulating, deployed at different levels (from transnational to infranational). Such a new order does not cancel existing institutional legal frameworks but tends to bypass or encourage privatisation labour law and a formal de-salarisation.

This panel will identify and analyze concrete examples of employment grey zones, considering the relationship with company policies and/or discussing the place and role of law (and institutions) in this relationship. A series of questions will be addressed: How to understand the existence and persistence of employment grey zones? Do they reflect institutional delays in job codification at a national level? Should we consider grey zones as a new process of employment relationship recodification? What is then the place of labor law and of institutions?

Much research highlights the importance of various types of legal intermediaries in explaining the meaning and import of judicialization of economic and organizational behavior in France, the US and elsewhere. The concept of legal intermediary helps us analyze the role of actors who contribute to legal endogeneization processes, by which the meaning of law is defined by the economic actors law is designed to regulate.

Bringing neo-institutional approaches to organizational behavior into socio-legal studies, researchers such as Lauren Edelman, Mark Suchman, Robin Stryker, Frank Dobbin, David Levi-Faur and other have analyzed not only how the meaning of legal rules becomes endogenous to organizational behavior but, more generally, how law and organizations interact to build new forms of legality in business relations as in new types of economic relations.

To understand these processes – and notably how they are probably more and more crucial in a context of disruptive and collaborative economy, which raises new questions to public actions and regulations -, the role of legal intermediaries today is important to scrutinize.  Where some types of legal intermediaries are members of the legal profession – as in-house corporate counsel – many other types of legal intermediaries are not legal professionals.  Street-level bureaucrats are one such well-known type, but legal intermediaries also include regulatory intermediaries inscribed in public or private institutions, human resource managers and other kinds of compliance professionals, including safety officers, inspectors and auditors, as well as insurers, union members or some social movement or non-governmental activists.  In short, the category of legal intermediaries includes all actors who in their daily activities work with legal concepts, rules and principles, whether or not they are formal-legal professionals.  To understand the development and economic implications of law over time, we need to deepen our understanding of various types of legal intermediaries, their professional training and legal consciousness, and the constraints on and opportunities for their meaning attribution and behavior.  In so doing, we also can understand whether and how different types of legal intermediaries contribute to the managerialization of law, that is, to law’s adaptation to such business imperatives as productivity and profit.  As well, we can better understand how legal intermediaries contribute to shifts in legal consciousness and mobilization, and ultimately to reproduction and/or change in economic relations, reproducing business as usual and/or contributing to disruptive, collaborative and new economic relations.

Themes and research questions could address the identities and activities of legal intermediaries, their role at the interface between law or legality and economy or business, how they contribute to reproduce business as usual or disrupt economic logics, how they distinguish them from legal professionals and how they interact with them, how they are marginalized or central and what resources, constraints and power they develop in the multiple processes of regulation, implementation and building of the legal-economic frame of organizational activities.

The development of digital and online technologies has deeply impacted the organization of markets, firms, institutions and consumer agencies. In some cases, these changes have disrupted value chains and market equilibria. In many industries digital players have built new sociotechnical arrangements, including those forms of intermediation sometimes referred to as the platform economy. In the Global South, digital money and financial services offered through digital technologies have been hailed as having the potential to create financial inclusion and grow the economy. More generally, digitization affects the way most ordinary economic activities are designed, undertaken and assessed, from marketing through consumption, including for example tracking and targeting devices, the imperative of data collection, and the rise of collaborative consumption.

Empirical studies show that the outcomes of digitization are not technically determined, but depend on local arrangements. On some markets, the internet provides opportunities for challengers, on some others it favors concentration; some digital tools empower consumers, whereas tracking and targeting devices aim at controlling their behavior. Indeed the market form itself is sometimes bypassed in favor of new forms of economic organization.

The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together empirical studies on digital markets and the digitization of economic practices. We particularly – though not exclusively – welcome contributions on:

1) Digital goods & services

In many creative and knowledge-intensive industries, goods and services have been “digitized”. Moreover, new categories of digital items circulate and are traded: digital money, digital artifacts (e.g. in-game objects), digital reputations. How are these digital commodities designed, valuated and traded? How does the machine-based intermediation that underlies digital services compare with human-based intermediaries?

2) Market infrastructure and equipment

Digital infrastructures provide new kinds of intermediaries and business models, now gathered behind the concept of ‘platform economy’ (eBay, Etsy, Amazon, etc.). But they also equip markets with new coordination instruments, such as judgement and evaluation systems based on participation (online consumer reviews), virtual and alternative currencies, bots, algorithms and new forms of calculation. To what extent do these infrastructures lead to new ways of performing markets practices online and offline?

3) Engaging with markets

Online market devices have triggered or extended specific forms of market participation and enhanced new forms of consumerism. Digital technologies gave support for consumer empowerment: evaluation of products (price comparison, online reviews), coordination (forums, communities),amateur commercial activities – and digital labor. Symmetrically, firms invest in conversational forms of connection with consumers. How do these ongoing processes shift market boundaries and change the balance of power in the economy?

4) Beyond the market

Digital technology also provides a platform for non-market forms of economy. On the web vast amounts of information are transmitted at no cost to the consumer, and this is further developed in organizations like Wikipedia. What are the contributions and prospects of non-market forms of digital economy?

In recent years, socio-economists have studied social actors’ ability to shape representations of the future convincing enough to enable present actions when uncertainty prevails. Economic regulation and policy-making also rely on a definition of what a desirable future is and is constantly threatened by unexpected situations. The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together researchers examining the construction of knowledge and ignorance regarding the future in economic activities and regulation. We will particularly welcome contributions that address the following thematic strands (although contributions exploring other related questions will be considered):

The technologies of future-related regulation. Present anticipations of the future involve a set of tools and calculative technologies, most of them relying on expertise and making use of specific data and inputs. These techniques not only differ in the way they process “data” but also in the construction of the economic reality they engage. They also depend on the category of actors (institutions, NGOs, firms, individuals, pressure groups etc.) who produces and/or makes use of them. The development of future-knowing (or -guessing) for regulation emphasizes connections between socio-economics and science and technology studies, and leads to an interrogation on the social conditions according to which expertise is regarded as reliable.

From planning to preparedness: knowledge of the future and governmentality. Anticipating the future is in tight relation with forms of government. For instance, while central planning drew on the assumption that the future was predictable, new forms of regulation are based on the hypothesis of the occurrence of unlikely events (e.g. worst-case scenario). This shift questions the appropriate form of economic regulation and projection, conceivably leading to technological or cognitive disruptions. Yet, the assumption of a close relationship between “central planning” and linear modelling on the one hand, and “neoliberal era” and preparedness one the other hand, may be challenged, in order to shed light on more complex socio-historical configurations.

The temporal orientation of regulation. The regulation of economies requires dealing with the future in the present. Future-guessing widely relies on the knowledge of the present. Yet, the way future economic orientations are designed affects the implementation of regulation in the present. Socio-technical devices cannot be understood without reference to the specific objective of economic regulation, to its temporal order (e.g., shorter- or longer-run). Investigating the relationship between projections about the future and action in the present also requires studying how these projections and calculations are translated into actual and present promises, decisions and guidelines, especially once a crisis occurred.

Queries can be sent to antoine.deraymond@inra.fr, cardon@ehess.fr, or olivier.pilmis@sciencespo.fr.

‘Collaborative economy’ has become the buzzword in academic research and public debate. While much has been said about the ways in which digital technology is transforming entire swathes of the economy and constructing new forms of exchange, the predominant tendency has been the reification and expansion of modern capitalism aimed at maximizing profits and reproducing exploitative mechanisms towards workers, natural resources and the environment.

Within this critical juncture, alternative economic practices and lifestyles are being adopted and advocated by a growing number of social groups. These practices share a steadfast belief in the idea of ‘social sustainability’, and a desire to move towards a society which – in the words of Amartya Sen – promotes not just environmentalism but also values of equality, diversity, social cohesion, quality of life and democratic governance of our workplaces and every-day lives.

This Mini Conference follows on from last years’ successful one held at the University of California, Berkeley and welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions from the global North and South and across the social sciences that touch on the following three themes:

1) Cooperatives and Cooperativism

As a form of economic organization, it has long been acknowledged that cooperatives can help buffer economic insecurity and provide the building blocks for economic democracy. By inculcating solidaristic social relations and the values of democracy, solidarity, equality, and reciprocity, cooperatives also play an ideological role in society.

This stream welcomes contributions that explore the following lines of enquiry:

• How does the cooperative experience shape people’s political subjectivities? And to what extent do these experiences play an ideological role in society by promoting progressive values in the public sphere?
• What types of collaboration/opposition exist between trade unions and cooperatives? How have these relationships changed since the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008?
• What are the opportunities and pitfalls of platform cooperativism as a new strategy for trade unions, cooperatives and progressive political parties?
• What types of economic and communication polices are being promoted to enhance cooperatives and cooperativism? Which barriers exist to their implementation and how can these be overcome?

2) Political Consumerism, Collective Action and Social Innovation

Calls to citizens to take action in their role as consumers have been made by social movements of different types. Along with large-scale boycotting and global fair-trade initiatives, political consumerism has entered the repertoire of actions of a number of local grassroots organizations seeking bottom-up solutions for sustainable development. Some example are: solidarity-based exchanges and networks, such as barter groups, new consumer-producer networks and cooperatives, time banks, and local savings groups.

In this strand, we are interested in papers that investigate:

• When, why and where are grassroots economic initiatives emerging and engaging the public;
• What is the effectiveness of political consumerism actions and campaigns at the local, national and international level;
• What is the relationship between political consumerism, sustainability and new forms of governance;
• Which new forms of coordination are emerging between types of organizational actors and initiatives;
• How does political consumerism promote social innovation and learning among actors.

3) Alternative Lifestyles: Embodying the Critique

This last panel aims to gather and discuss collective and community-based practices that aim at ‘embodying’ the critique to consumerist and capitalist societies. These include co-housing, eco-villages, intentional communities and transition towns which are increasingly widespread and inter-connected examples of how people are trying to concretize, not without effort, ‘real utopias’ (Wright 2010).

In this panel, we welcome papers addressing the following issues:

• The extent to which these practices succeed (or fail) in introducing new societal values and norms and creating ‘new imaginaries’ for progressive social change;
• The way through which these practices manage to provide not just material goods but experiences and services outside a ‘market’ logic;
• The extent to which these practices constitute (or not) ‘coping mechanisms’ for socio-economic exclusion in times of austerity and crisis;
• The way in which these experiences affect conceptions and experiences of labour in late capitalistic societies.

Information technologies enhancing communication among numerous and dispersed actors enable new forms of creating value and organizing work. Exemplary for this shift is the rise of so-called crowdsourcing and sharing economy platforms, intermediaries that organize buyer-seller relations in digitally-enabled markets — trading a wide range of services including basic (micro-)tasks (e.g. Mechanical Turk, Clickworker); standard creative solutions (e.g. 99designs, Upwork); highly creative, knowledge-intensive solutions (e.g. Innocentive, Jovoto); and services monetizing private assets (e.g. Uber, Airbnb).

These digital intermediaries uniquely excel in large-numbers management: specifically, mobilizing service providers globally through broadcast calls and taming the resulting crowds by means of flat, techno-structure-based organizing. This new potential of what is sometimes called “platform capitalism” raises severe regulatory challenges regarding, e.g., labor and consumer rights. Crowdsourcing markets, for instance, evade traditional, nationally-based labor market institutions such as social and health insurance, minimum wages, or collective interest representation. Like sharing economy platforms, they play an ambiguous role in improving wealth for some while sharpening inequalities for others.

Digital platforms typically benefit from favourable regulation or from sidestepping existing regulation. At the same time, a platform’s success also depends on its ability to regulate its respective market. To date, digital intermediaries decide and enforce platform rules that shape the way services and the required work are commissioned, performed, paid, and evaluated. This development not only creates new lines of competition and contestation between traditional regulatory actors and digital intermediaries, but also among digital intermediaries competing for market share.

The sessions in this mini-conference seek to unpack the new regulatory role of digital intermediaries and their interactions and contestations with traditional regulatory actors. Panels will be organized around the following themes:

1. Regulating digital markets: traditional instruments vs. regulatory innovation

• How can digital intermediaries be regulated? What regulation is necessary, for what kind of intermediaries?
• What are existing regulatory bodies’ strategies regarding digital markets? And how do intermediaries respond to regulation?
• How are traditional regulatory instruments adapted for different kinds of digital markets, e.g. for-profit vs. non-profit, local vs. global markets?

2. Digital intermediaries as new regulatory actors: drivers for inclusion vs. drivers for inequality

• How do intermediaries promote inclusion in terms of non-discriminatory market access or new opportunities? Conversely, how do intermediaries’ digital markets foster (new) inequalities?
• Who evaluates work on digital platforms, and how?
• Which new forms of collective interest representation are emerging through digital technologies and in digital markets?

3. Establishing new digital market orders: contested dynamics

• Taking different perspectives – local, national, and global: who benefits from what, when, and where in new digital market orders?
• What are the dynamics of contestation and competition between traditional incumbents and digital new entrants (e.g. Uber and taxi services)?
• What are the competitive dynamics among new digital intermediaries with overlapping jurisdictions (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk vs. Clickworker)?

We encourage submissions that address these and related themes and showcase convincing arguments grounded in conceptual or empirical (qualitative and quantitative) studies.

Forty years ago, as the most recent wave of economic collectives and cooperatives emerged, they advocated a model of egalitarian organization so contrary to bureaucracy that they were widely called “alternative institutions” (Rothschild 1979). Today, the practices of cooperative organizations appear in many movement organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even “sharing” firms. Cooperative practices are more relevant than ever, especially as recent political changes in the US and Europe threaten to crush rather than cultivate economic opportunities.

Cooperative groups engage in more “just” economic relations, defined as relations that are more equal, communalistic, or mutually supportive.  The oldest collectives – utopian communes, worker co-operatives, free schools, and feminist groups – sought authentic relations otherwise suppressed in a hierarchical, capitalist system.  Similar practices shape newer forms: co-housing, communities and companies promoting the “sharing economy,” giving circles, self-help groups, and artistic and social movement groups including Burning Man and OCCUPY. While some cooperatives enact transformative values such as ethically responsible consumerism and collective ownership, other groups’ practices reproduce an increasingly stratified society marked by precarity. Submitted papers might analyze the reasons for such differences, or they might examine conditions that encourage the development of more egalitarian forms of organization.

Submitted papers could also cover, but are not limited, to exploring:

• What is the nature of “relational work” (cf. Zelizer 2012) conducted in these groups, and how it differs – or is similar to – from relational work undertaken in conventional capitalist systems?
• How do collectivities that engage in alternative economic relations confront challenges that threaten – or buttress – their existence? These challenges include recruiting and retaining members, making decisions, and managing relations with the state and other organizations. Moreover, how do these groups construct distinct identities and practices, beyond defining what they are not?
• How are various firms attempting to incorporate alternative values without fully applying them? For instance, how are companies that claim to advance the sharing economy – Uber, airbnb, and the like – borrowing the ideology and practices of alternative economic relations for profit rather than authentic empowerment? What are the implications of this co-optation for people, organizations, and society at large?
• How do new organizations, especially high tech firms, address or elide inequality issues? How do organizing practices and values affect recognition and action on such issues?
• What can we learn from 19^th century historical examples of communes and cooperatives that can shed insight on their keys to successful operation today? Similarly, how might new cooperatives emerge as egalitarian and collective responses to on-going immigration issues or economic crisis generated by policies favoring the already wealthy?
• Are collectives, cooperatives and/or firms that require creativity, such as artists’ cooperatives or high tech firms, most effective when they are organized along more egalitarian principles? How do aspects of these new modes of economic organization make them more supportive of individual and group creativity?

Selected Bibliography

Graeber, David.   2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography.   Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Rothschild, Joyce. 1979. “The Collectivist Organization: An Alternative to Rational-Bureaucratic Models.” American Sociological Review 44(4): 509-527.

Rothschild, Joyce and J. Allen Whitt. 1986. The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Zelizer, Vivianna A. 2012. “How I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean?” Politics & Society 40(2): 145-174.

As part of the Islamic economics movement, since 1970s, Islamic banking and finance (IBF) as an emergent pattern has demonstrated an unprecedented performance in terms of transforming the transactional or financial base of the Muslim societies and beyond with various forms of financial institutions and practices.

Theoretically IBF practices are shaped by the normative world of Islamic moral economy, which esssentialises a morally guided everyday practice of economy and finance in a submerged sense beyond the observed practices of IBF. The essential principles of ‘sharing economy of Islam’ within this normative world are: ‘risk-sharing’ and ‘profit-and-loss sharing’ along with the prohibition of interest, curbing of speculation and uncertainty, sustainable development, discouraging debt and debt-based system in favour of real economy and asset based economy, de-commodification and non-fictitious products along with developing a human-centred development process.

Islamic moral economy and finance, as a counter hegemonic movement, hence, essentialises sharing and distributive as well as disruptive and collaborative economy beyond contributing to financialisation as the current practice demonstrates. However, the evaluation of the performance of IBF sector shows that it has been converging towards conventional financial practices and institutions through the shari’ah compliant practices beyond its authentic forms.

The recent trends in economic and financial world, however, identify disruptive and collaborative economic and business practices as well as sharing and participating economic practices in the sense of counter-hegemony. Therefore, one may argue that Islamic moral economy and finance can contribute significantly to growing new phenomena of global sharing economy. However, we also acknowledge that despite its positive contributions, one can also argue that sharing economy depletes certain cultural and moral values for the sake of money.

This mini-conference, hence, invites conceptual and empirical papers to:

• Explore the emerging Islamic moral economy and finance practices in relation to the theoretical base in the form of sharing and disruptive and collaborative economy.
• Assess how sharing economy (risk-sharing and profit-loss-sharing), de-commodification and non-fictitious commodity nature, asset based, and sustainable economic, finance and banking practices can be developed and modelled within Islamic moral economy and finance.
• Examine how sharing economy and financing practices may contribute to growing commodification of values in the world

Hence, we propose to bring scholars together to discuss both sides of sharing and distributive/collaborative economy practices in the light of ideals and realities of Islamic moral economy and finance within the following themes:

• Conceptualizing and theorising the Islamic Moral Economy within disruptive and collaborative economy
• Collaborative/distributive business from Islamic moral economy perspective: End of market or morality?
• Commodification, consumer culture, and collaborative business: Theory and practice from Islamic moral economy perspective.
• New institutional forms towards sharing economy in IBF
• Political economy and regulation for the development of Islamic sharing economy
• Political and moral economy responses for the development of sharing economy within Islamic moral economy.

A provisional list of panel topics and indicative research questions can be accessed at Durham University’s Durham Centre for Islamic Economics and Finance.

With the expansion of web platforms such as Airbnb.com, Craigslist.org, Etsy.com or Vizeat.com, people are encouraged to commodify their personal possessions as well as their domestic or leisure practices. More generally, this Mini-Conference scrutinizes the marketization of practices previously considered as recreational or domestic, such as cooking, doing handicrafts, blogging, taking care, raising pets, carrying a child, etc. The commodification of the attributes of the self – human body, personal data… – is also in the scope of this issue. The social dimensions of marketization will be of special interest: what social changes favor the commodification of previously non commodified activities? How do market and domestic orders of worth combine? Are markets used to achieve non economic ends? What about the distinction between legal activities and grey economy in such emerging markets? The main goal of the Mini-Conference is to improve our understanding of the causes and effects – at individual and collective levels – of the extension of the market.

The following topics could be addressed:

1.      Becoming an entrepreneur

By commodifying their domestic or leisure practices, amateurs or ordinary people turn themselves into entrepreneurs. They become concerned by financial investments, by the need to promote their products or services, and they have to learn how to engage in economic transactions as sellers. Such investments are expected to alter work-life articulation and to transform the meaning of their activity. Actually, different kinds of commitment in marketization, different profiles and finally different career paths can be identified in each domain.

2.      Online platforms as new marketplaces

The marketization of everyday life is strongly supported by the development of technological devices that enable ordinary people to reach a large audience of potential “consumers”. Those platforms also allow people who share similar interests to locate each other and build communities of interest. They bring values that can be either close to the traditional market values (profit seeking, efficiency, optimal matching, etc.) or seemingly of a new kind (community building, resource sharing, friendliness, etc.). Online platforms are thus interesting places to study in order to understand the transformations of contemporary capitalism.

3.      The social status of newly commodified practices

Market rules are often considered as opposed to social and moral values. However, marketization could also be perceived as a means to improve social recognition, at individual and collective levels, since transactions are also providers of social relationships. Simultaneously, the marketization of specific practices could favor their social upgrading. These questions could be particularly scrutinized in a gender perspective, as they especially concern traditionally depreciated feminine practices.

4.      Market regulation

The marketization of domestic and leisure activities blurs the boundaries between amateurs and professionals. Leisure and work are less and less differentiated. For example, bloggers tend to compete with journalists, private drivers with taxi drivers and so on. The public reactions of well-established professions towards the rise of new “competitors” express the disrupting effect of the commodification of domestic or leisure practices. This phenomenon also questions the existing regulation of professions.

In the present changing global economy, modes of business, work and working conditions are being increasingly shaped by advances in communication, data, and knowledge sharing through information technology. Global firms are restructuring their production with the help of sophisticated software which for example makes it easier to track the management of vast global value chains. Also, workers in factories have created communication platforms to share information over working conditions and mobilize collectively. We are interested in understanding how these changes influence modes of regulation and governance, as well as methods of resistance and activism within industries in global production systems.

Indeed, digitalization and data sharing can affect global production, transnational governance, and work in multiple and ambiguous ways. For example, demands (through regulation and campaigns) to increase transparency in global supply chains are leading to the creation of on-line tracking tools of materials and suppliers in global value chains. Multinational companies are introducing Industry 4.0 and smart factory programs to digitalize the production and management of their global supply chains. Branded firms are also increasingly tracking working hours in real-time of outsourced factories in distant locations. Trade unions and other civil society organizations are also using new communication technologies and social media in creative and strategic ways in their fight for better working conditions and higher environmental standards. Yet innovation in communication and information sharing also pose new threats as it opens avenues for new techniques of policing and controlling of workers, trade unions, and activists by the state and business alike. Such prospects and challenges remain underexplored and are not yet fully considered in our current theoretical frameworks and ideas of transnational governance, global value chains, labour and environmental governance, institutional theories of regulation, and transnational business governance interactions.

We are interested in papers that examine empirically and theoretically changes in the modes of regulation and governance, and resistance and activism, and the opportunities and challenges they create for positive change:

• How do new ways of communicating and information-sharing affect modes of governance that involve business collaboration along supply chains, the role of the state, and activist networks?
• How do new forms of collaboration and techniques of information sharing help integrate different issues such as labour, environment, and business conduct in campaigns and modes of governance?
• How are new forms of transparency requirements in global supply chains enacted, resisted, and create opportunities for change by business, the state, and other actors? How do workers, trade unions, and civil society organisations harness these requirements for increased transparency in new forms of advocacy?
• In how far does Industry 4.0 and smart factories help to improve the outcomes of transnational governance (e.g. by better linking economic with social upgrading)?
• How far do advances in digitalization and information technology create new possibilities for policing and control by the state and/or the private sector?