Collective Autonomy Research Articles

The politics of coproduction during Latin America’s ‘Pink Tide’: Water, housing, and waste in comparative perspective

Coproduction brings together a diverse range of state and non-state actors to create and deliver public services. These processes, which occur across the Global South, have been widely studied. However, insufficient critical attention has been paid to their politics. We address this gap in the literature by analysing the politics of coproduction in Latin America during the ‘pink tide’ of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on original qualitative research, this article explores the coproduction of three distinct public services—water, housing, and waste—in three countries where left-leaning presidents and governments were elected into office—Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay. We argue that coproduction is intrinsically political in these three cases; that is, the ‘political’ is internal to, and inherent in, coproduction. Our comparative analysis centres on two political dimensions—subject-making and collective autonomy—and shows that tensions around these two issues were central to coproduction in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay . The article demonstrates the importance of not treating politics as a mere contextual concern in coproduction analysis and shows that coproduction has the capacity to reshape political relationships and subjectivities. Taking politics into account is essential to understanding the dynamics and potential of coproduction in the Global South. Our comparative analysis also provides new insights into Latin American politics, especially concerning 'pink tide' governments and the provisioning of public services.

Wage setting and wage moderation in Belgium: A never-ending and already-old story in the wake of the ‘new European economic governance’

Wage setting can be defined as the procedures which determine the remuneration which needs to be paid to employees as the counterpart of their work. The ancillary relationship between wage moderation and the new economic governance has never been expressed as clearly as in the Europlus Pact. The new economic governance (NEG) of the European Union has fostered wage moderation. This approach to wage setting and wage moderation is analysed from the perspective of the freedom of collective bargaining as a fundamental right, and on the basis of a national case study (Belgium). In order to carry out this analysis, the national wage moderation policies adopted in Belgium prior to the era of the NEG need to be examined first. The recommendations addressed to Belgium to reform the wage-setting system will then be analysed, as well as the impact they had both in confirming the existing system of wage moderation and the attempts to strengthen the restrictions imposed on collective autonomy. In light of these findings, these restrictions of collective autonomy are assessed on the basis of the freedom of collective bargaining, understood as a fundamental right.

An Uncertain Future for EU-Level Collective Bargaining: The New Rules of the Game After EPSU

Abstract The General Court of the European Union (GCEU) in EPSU and Goudriaan vs. Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the subsequent appeal judgment reached an identical conclusion on a key aspect of the system of EU level collective bargaining. The Courts held that Article 155(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) does not impose any obligation on the European Commission to send a social partner agreement to the Council. This is in line with the Commission’s recent interpretation of Article 155(2) TFEU that subordinates the implementation of the European agreements to a positive assessment of their appropriateness. This article critically assesses the GCEU and CJEU rulings in EPSU and argues that they confirm a major break with the praxis of European collective bargaining that will have negative consequences for the social partners’ autonomy and role in the EU. In order to better understand this break, the article examines how and when the Commission changed its approach to European social dialogue, resulting in the new interpretation of Article 155(2) TFEU, and proposes a hypothesis to understand why. The article concludes by describing the consequences of the new reading of Article 155(2) TFEU for the idea of collective autonomy in EU law as well as for the practice of EU level social dialogue and collective bargaining.

Working through the Past: The Victory of Adwa Revisited

If working through the past is going to heal a nation, it has to come from within. This paper explores two senses of historical responsibility: the responsibility we bear for healing the wounds of the past or working-off-the-past, and the responsibility we may have in fulfilling the promises of the defining moments of the past (redeeming or cashing in on the past). By utilizing these two conceptual tools, the paper carves out a normative space Adwa ought to occupy in a just and ethical revitalisation of our collective memories. It argues that the process of coming to terms with divisive historical legacies must pass ‘the Adwa test’ that it ought to be comprehensively liberating, universalizable, and thus has the ability to translate ‘the past as future.’ The victory in Adwa passes on the responsibility to birth our future in the image of its Volksgeist or spirit of the people (in the Hegelian sense indicating dialectical unfolding of the self, and not in the Fichtean sense where the past is defined in puritan terms) and by cultivating a national character commensurate with it. This paper posits that engagement with the positive experience of freedom from colonialism and the attendant sense of individual and collective autonomy that Adwa provides is one part of the equation for what Adorno calls “reconciliation” of the subject with object (history). The other part is a genuine recognition of the collective memory that past harm brought forth in the present, which we often reject as inherently unlike us. While Adwa offers the ground we stand on, embracing historical contradictions will serve as a condition for genuine reconciliation. The responsibility to come to terms with, atone for, and rectify the legacies of our history must be underpinned by an equal responsibility to fulfil Adwa’s promises.

Exorcism and children: balancing protection and autonomy in the legal framework

AbstractThis paper examines the current legal framework in relation to minors who are the recipients of exorcism. Such individuals are ordinarily doubly marginalised, by virtue of their membership of a minority religious or cultural community and their disempowered position as children. This piece aims to assess whether the current arrangements strike an appropriate balance between respecting personal and collective autonomy, as well as protecting vulnerable young people, paying particular attention to the impact of their intersectional position and multiple marginalising factors at play. It seeks to define exorcism and emphasise the very diverse settings in which it arises within twenty-first-century England and Wales. It examines proposals being made for a blanket prohibition in relation to children, considering both the desirability and viability of a ban. It also highlights that exorcism is not the only context in which religious minors will find themselves in a position of multiple marginalisation, and explores what debates in this area might reveal about the wider operation of Article 9 and the ECHR.

Freedom, autonomy, democracy: Castoriadis and the commons

Cornelius Castoriadis defines freedom as the openness of the social imaginary, stemming from the indeterminacy of ontological creation. As such, freedom is the philosophical precondition of individual and collective autonomy. Castoriadis’s conceptualization of freedom surpasses the modern distinction between negative and positive freedom by introducing the model of direct democracy that integrates the private sphere of the individual into the public sphere of the demos, thereby enhancing both individual and collective autonomy. Direct democracy aims at the correct articulation of the private, the public/private, and the public sphere. Interestingly, the last decades have witnessed the emergence of the Commons, echoing Castoriadis’s project in several respects. This paper offers an introduction to Castoriadis’s philosophy along with a critical gaze at the intercept of his political project with the Commons.

The Psychopolitics of Cognitive Enhancement

This article explores the shadow side of transhumanist aspirations to transform humanity using cognitive enhancement technologies (CET). The central problem concerns how the desired transhuman anthropogenesis alters the ethical capacities of the human person. Focusing on the intersection between autonomy and equity, the article posits that inequity enhances individual autonomy for some at the expense of others, hence degrading collective autonomy. This process is already unfolding under neoliberalism, as analyzed via Byung-Chul Han’s theory of psychopolitics. Han’s psychopolitics reveals how the imagined increases in autonomy brought by CET would not yield an authentic enhancement of autonomy, but rather result in further undesirable permutations of humanity. It would erode autonomy while increasing inequity, thus degrading empathy and solidarity. Franco Berardi’s critique of semiocapitalism nuances Han’s theory in support of collective autonomy and an anthropogenesis guided by contemplative empathy. Conjoined, they amplify the possibilities for alternative therapeutic forms of transformational CET.

Collective autonomy: Why groups fight for power and status

AbstractPeople experience “collective autonomy restriction” when they believe other groups want to restrict their own group from freely expressing its social identity and determining its behavior. We review emerging research on the negative consequences of collective autonomy restriction for well‐being, as well as its implications for group members' motivation to fight for their place within social hierarchies. We propose that group members desire two resources tied to having a favorable position within the social hierarchy—structural power (i.e., the ability to influence and resist influence from other groups) and status (being positively valued and perceived as moral by others)—because they believe that having power and status are necessary to secure their group's collective autonomy. We hypothesize that group members anticipate that other groups might restrict their group if they lack the structural power to resist outside influences, or if they are perceived as negative or immoral and worthy of restriction. We apply this power and status perspective of collective autonomy restriction to predict (1) when disempowered groups are most likely to fight against (vs. tolerate) their disadvantaged position and (2) when powerful groups are most likely to relinquish power and acknowledge their transgressions (vs. defensively maintain their privileged position).

원청은 하청노동조합의 단체교섭의 상대방으로서 사용자인가? - 택배노동조합사건에 대한 중앙노동위원회 판정을 중심으로 -

In a case whereby the deliverymen’s labor union (“subcontractor”) demanded collective bargaining against the company (“contractor”), the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC) cited “de facto governing” as a ground for judging the contractor an employer and thus a legitimate party in collective bargaining. This decision had significant repercussions because it raised a controversial issue: whether the legal principles behind the 2010 ruling of the Supreme Court, which expanded the notion of an employer for certain affairs (e.g., governing, intervention) among various forms of unfair labor practices, may be further expanded to judging the status of a contractor as an employer and a legitimate party in collective bargaining.<BR> According to the NLRC, in a case where a labor union consisting of subcontractors who lack either an explicit or an implicit labor contract with the contractor requests collective bargaining against the contractor, the contractor may be deemed an employer who is burdened with an obligation for collective bargaining, citing “de facto governing” as a legal ground.<BR> I argue that the contractor is not an employer or a legitimate party in collective bargaining against the subcontractors’ labor union, and this argument applies to the problems and criticisms surrounding the abovementioned NLRC case.<BR> First, identifying a legitimate party for collective bargaining means identifying a party that can collectively form or revise provisions of a labor contract through collective bargaining within a framework of collective autonomy. In comparison, identifying an “employer” in unfair labor practices―that is, a follower of a rule that bans unfair labor practices―means identifying a party that breached the rule of ensuring three basic labor rights or a fair labor–management relationship. An employer, according to the Trade Union And Labor Relations Adjustment Act, is a legitimate party in collective bargaining in principle, and they should be distinguished from an employer according to regulations on unfair labor practices. The abovementioned NLRC case fails to make this distinction, deeming an employer in collective bargaining and an employer in unfair labor practices the same.<BR> Another problem is that in identifying an employer as a legitimate party in collective bargaining, the NLRC expanded the notion of “de facto governing”―a legal ground for the H Heavy Industries case ruling―which saw the employers as inflictors of unfair labor practices, such as governing/intervention. Flawed logic is found in that the NLRC regarded the contractor as an employer and thus a legitimate party in collective bargaining despite the absence of a contractual relationship with the subcontractor, which is needed to be seen as an employer in collective bargaining.<BR> Furthermore, it is problematic that the NLRC only quoted a court ruling Supreme Court 2010. 3. 25. 2007du8881<BR> that admitted the status of a contractor as an employer regarding unfair labor practices of governing/intervention while overlooking court rulings Supreme Court 2008.9.11. 2006da40935 and others<BR> that denied the status of a contractor as a legitimate party in collective bargaining when it recognized the contractor as a legitimate party in collective bargaining without making a distinction between an employer as a legitimate party in collective bargaining and an employer as an inflictor of an unfair labor practice. To establish grounds for such a decision, it is necessary to introduce Supreme Court rulings that have denied the status of a contractor as a legitimate party in collective bargaining and analyze them critically. Lacking such effort, the NLRC decision is an a priori judgment that exposes a bias stemming from distorted information.<BR> Lastly, the NLRC decision was made on the basis of “de facto governing,” and as such, it suffers from all the legal problems of that theory.

Teamwork and collective autonomy: experience in home care nursing

Teamwork is often identified as being a core value in care work. Studies on this topic often focus on pluri-professional configurations, whereas mono-professional teamwork has not aroused the same interest. In this study, we examine teamwork among a group of nurses providing homecare within a new organization, Soignons Humain (SoHu). SoHu was inspired by Buurtzorg, a Dutch homecare company composed of self-organized nursing teams. Given that the healthcare context for French and Dutch nurses is different, SoHu chose to focus primary on teamwork as a mechanism for improving the quality of care. The article examines how this objective was implemented through the practices and representations of work: to what extent do these self-organized teams lead to deeper collaborations with other homecare actors? How does this type of organizational model differ from other forms of homecare nursing in France? How does SoHu's experience allow us to rethink nurses' autonomy in their work? SoHu's organizational model differs from both private nursing clinics and traditional nursing care centers. The SoHu nurses' salaried status makes it possible for them to focus on delivering holistic care and highlights their autonomous nursing role, which they claim as being central to their profession. SoHu's originality lies in its highly developed instrumentation of teamwork and its work organization that is attentive to the construction of a collective competence. The use of coaches appears to be one ofthe organization's key investments in sustainably supporting teamwork and, paradoxically, their collective autonomy. Following an initial learning phase, and through other types of support work (workshops and facilitation meetings), the association has attempted to create and support a propitious environment for teamwork. Our work calls attention to the necessary conditions for real collaborative practices to take place, wether these are inter or intra-organizational. SoHu's case shows what an organization can do to create an environment favorable to team collaboration. This consists in building reflexivity into care work with a focus on the patient and the family; investments in developing teamwork skills; ensuring a frequency and specific type of exchange between the nursing teams; using both ad hoc arrangements and formalization of these collaborations; and finally by recognizing and objectivizing these invisible coordination practices.

Resisting Usefulness

Arts advocacy in the U.S. tends to cultivate state and philanthropic art support by emphasizing art’s potential to increase productivity and generate revenue in various ways. Even musicologists often take this rhetorical route, arguing for the continued relevance of our work, for example by noting that studying music cultivates the kind of creative thinking skills that make workers attractive to corporations like Google. This way of promoting music and musicology thus reinforces the logic of state and capital by demonstrating music’s usefulness within that logic. I argue that we should instead embrace and pedagogically center music’s uselessness as its most potentially radical quality. Doing so could help us construct a new political imaginary that might more robustly resist the antisocial logics of capital.&#x0D; My argument circles around the question of musical autonomy. While a certain version of autonomy undergirds our discipline’s tools and assumptions, today this value is dismissed by almost everyone, including leftists and liberals, activists and academics. In salvaging the autonomous ideal, I attempt to resituate it firmly within collective practice, an orientation it has traditionally been seen as transcending. My exploration of collective autonomy weaves together work from musicology, political theory, anthropology, feminist theory, and Black studies, as well as from radical activist traditions that develop outside of any institutional framework. I think with and through these diverse perspectives, arguing that celebrating music’s uselessness might aid our collective ability imagine a radically different world.

Promoting the Emergence of Team Flow in Organizations

An important question in the field of team research is how teams can optimize their collaboration to maximize their performance. When team members who are collaborating towards a common purpose experience flow together, the team, as a performing unit, improves its performance and delivers individual happiness to its members. From a practical point of view, it is relevant to know how team flow experiences arise within professional organizations. The aim of this study is therefore to get more insight into the how the elements of team flow emerge. We conducted interviews with team members, business leaders, and team experts, and in addition a survey with team members. The results provide confirmation of the existing research on team dynamics, flow, group and team flow and indicate that a collective ambition, professional autonomy, and open communication must be deliberately and carefully cultivated to set the stage for the other team flow prerequisites and thence for team flow to emerge.

CARING FOR OUR PEOPLE: INDIGENOUS RESPONSES TO COVID-19 ERA INFORMATIC COLONIALISM

Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, activist work and HCI approaches, these papers show how organizations formed partnerships to curate information resources, and deploy community Wi-Fi and Internet infrastructure across southwest US Indigenous communities during the most challenging months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. For Native Americans this means ideating while navigating colonial inequality. Through an investigation of sociotechnical interdependencies across a broadband network cooperative, tribes, and university labs, an HCI team reflects on how relational stability sustains fragile Internet ecologies stretched to capacity by the needs of users deeply affected by COVID-19 in New Mexico and Arizona. Through an autoethnography of community-centered digital solutions for Navajo Nation, a member of the Nation considers how the role of K’é informs a system of infrastructural care in a nation struggling with high rates of infection and systemic lack of adequate infrastructure. Through an advocacy-oriented analysis of social media content, a Diné and Lakota social media scholar discerns the relationship between community enforcement of social distancing, the loss of interpersonal interaction, mutual aid, and the impact of public health memes for the Navajo Nation. Through radical librarianship practices, a Tohono O’odham librarian and artist counteracts the values of ‘information neutrality’ shaping whiteness-centering American librarianship by generating a community-curated solution to actionable information about COVID-19 for Indigenous communities. This panel models decolonial liberation rooted in responsiveness across mediated layers of Indigenous belonging. The authors express Indigenous interpretations of collective autonomy vis-a-vis strategic Internet assemblages, and particularly, how an Indigenous ethics of care intersects with the dream of an Internet for social good.&#x0D;

Between Autonomy and Solidarity: An African Woman’s Autoethnography

As an infant, my grandmother chewed my food for me because I was not capable of chewing on my own. As an adult, most African men still want to chew my food for me. So, how do African women consent to research when culturally they must surrender their autonomy? We join in solidarity and create our own collective autonomy. We know the rules of our patriarchal society and outwardly adhere to them. As an ethicist, I (Caroline Kithinji) have developed a sense of responsibility and solidarity with female research subjects; we collaborate in the full understanding of our lack of autonomy.

Contextual coaching: levering and leading school improvement through collaborative professionalism

PurposeThe research examines how contextual coaching (Gorrell and Hoover, 2009; Valentine, 2019) can act as a lever to build collaborative professionalism (Hargreaves and O'Connor, 2018) and lead to school improvement.Design/methodology/approachThe multi-case study (Stake, 2013) draws on two bespoke examples of contextual coaching in education and uses the ten tenets of collaborative professionalism as a conceptual framework for its abductive analysis. Data from both cases were collected through interviews, focus groups and documentation.FindingsThe findings demonstrate that effective contextual coaching leads to conditions underpinning school improvement. Specifically, there are patterns of alignment with the ten tenets of collaborative professionalism. Whereas contextual coaching is found on four of these tenets (mutual dialogue, joint work, collective responsibility and collaborative inquiry), in more mature coaching programmes, three others (collective autonomy, initiative and efficacy) emerge. There is also evidence that opportunities exist for contextual coaching to be further aligned with the remaining three tenets. The study offers insight into how school improvement can be realized by the development of staff capacity for teacher leadership through contextual coaching.Research limitations/implicationsThe impact of coaching in education is enhanced by recognizing the importance of context and the value of iterative design and co-construction.Practical implicationsThe principles of contextual coaching are generalizable, but models must be developed to be bespoke and to align with each setting. Collaborative professionalism offers a useful framework to better design and implement contextual coaching programmes.Originality/valueThe research introduces contextual coaching in education, and how coaching can enhance collaborative professionalism in schools.

Editorial: Identity and Privacy Governance

The design and management of digital identity is a complex challenge. On the one hand, it requires a clear understanding of the parameters that are involved in identity management. On the other hand, it requires the cooperation of many stakeholders. In particular, this involves those public authorities and private organisations that need to be aligned to define technical standards, develop identification infrastructures and maintain them. A shared understanding of fundamental concepts that define identity in the digital age is then a prerequisite. Such a complimentary reflection and evaluation of what the emergence of distributed-ledger technologies means from the perspectives of human rights, human dignity, as well as individual and collective autonomy are essential to ensure their use for good purposes. While technical capabilities are important, they are increasingly insufficient without guiding theoretical frameworks. Sound governance mechanisms which respect, protect and promote human rights such as privacy are equally essential. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further increased the desire to use data to understand and manage our societies (Zwitter and Gstrein, 2020), which also increases the degree to which we are defined through data and our access to digital services.

Welfare occupazionale e tendenze evolutive

The essay analyzes the occupational welfare which, thanks to its virtuous capacities, has been supported by the state in recent times through redistributive fiscal policies. Through an analysis of the positive effects and the evolutionary tensions of occupational welfare, the essay intends to demonstrate how such a public policy entails the occurrence of a twofold effect: a) Indirectly attributing a delegation of social protection function to collective agreements, inducing trade unions and companies to include in the object of collective agreements the protection of general and public interests, that are expression of fundamental rights such as education, health, pension plans; b) Further developing the process of institutionalization of collective autonomy which, as early as the 1980s, was delegated the normative tasks of regulating the labour market and employment. The essay argues that collective autonomy, on its own, without a legal framework, is unsuitable to protect general and public interests such as those that since 2016 constitute the new object of collective bargaining and therefore needs to be regulated, also in function of a possible extension of the subjective scope of employment welfare.

Proportionality as procedure: Strengthening the legitimate authority of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

AbstractThe Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has a new mechanism to receive individual complaints and issue views, which makes the question of how the Committee should interpret the broad articles of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights more pressing than ever. Most commentators on the legitimacy of the CESCR’s interpretation have argued that interpreters should make better use of Articles 31–33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) in order to improve the legitimacy of their findings. In this article, we argue conversely that the individual communication mechanism should be evaluated and reformed in terms of legitimate authority. In the context of the Committee’s process of interpretation, we contend that proportionality is better suited than the various interpretive options of the VCLT to offer a consistent procedure that is able to generate legitimacy by attenuating the tension between personal and collective autonomy.

A Programming Approach to Collective Autonomy

Research and technology developments on autonomous agents and autonomic computing promote a vision of artificial systems that are able to resiliently manage themselves and autonomously deal with issues at runtime in dynamic environments. Indeed, autonomy can be leveraged to unburden humans from mundane tasks (cf. driving and autonomous vehicles), from the risk of operating in unknown or perilous environments (cf. rescue scenarios), or to support timely decision-making in complex settings (cf. data-centre operations). Beyond the results that individual autonomous agents can carry out, a further opportunity lies in the collaboration of multiple agents or robots. Emerging macro-paradigms provide an approach to programming whole collectives towards global goals. Aggregate computing is one such paradigm, formally grounded in a calculus of computational fields enabling functional composition of collective behaviours that could be proved, under certain technical conditions, to be self-stabilising. In this work, we address the concept of collective autonomy, i.e., the form of autonomy that applies at the level of a group of individuals. As a contribution, we define an agent control architecture for aggregate multi-agent systems, discuss how the aggregate computing framework relates to both individual and collective autonomy, and show how it can be used to program collective autonomous behaviour. We exemplify the concepts through a simulated case study, and outline a research roadmap towards reliable aggregate autonomy.

From planetary to societal boundaries: an argument for collectively defined self-limitation

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. We bring a critical social science perspective to this framework through the notion of societal boundaries and aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social nature of thresholds. We start by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. We then focus on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process ‒ based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles ‒ it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation. Collective autonomy and the politics of self-limitation are key elements of societal boundaries and are linked to important proposals and pluriverse experiences to integrate well-being and boundaries. The role of the state and propositions for radical alternative approaches to well-being have particular importance. We conclude with reflections on social freedom, defined as the right not to live at others’ expense. Toward the aim of defining boundaries through transdisciplinary and democratic processes, we seek to open a dialogue on these issues.