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Social Movements and Icts: Addressing Complexity and Contingency

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Social Movements and Icts: Addressing Complexity and Contingency Centre for Human Rights Education Social Movements and ICTs: Addressing Complexity and Contingency Gerard Gill This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University June 2017 Declaration To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgment has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. Human Ethics (For projects involving human participants/tissue, etc) The research presented and reported in this thesis was conducted in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007) – updated March 2014. The proposed research study received human research ethics approval from the Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee (EC00262), Approval Number #HR 132/2012 Signature: Date: …13/07/2016……………………... Abstract It is hard to deny that how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are used by social movements is an issue of great importance. However, it is equally difficult to ascribe meaning to such use - it remains a contested topic within academia and in popular media. In this thesis I develop, demonstrate, and test a unique approach to studying ICT use in social movements. The approach is informed by complexity theory and Bent Flyvbjerg’s phronetic social science. Phronetic social science sees the uncertainty contained in issues such as the use of ICTs by social movements as an inherent part of the social, while complexity theorists go on to argue that this means social scientists should concentrate their efforts on producing heuristics – imperfect working principles. In the thesis I advocate using the communicative ecologies conceptual model developed by Jo Tacchi and Don Slater, in concert with the emphasis on processes and mechanisms found in the influential sociological text Dynamics of contention, to produce such heuristics. An emphasis on processes and mechanisms provides specificity as to what ICTs can help social movements with, while the communicative ecologies model provides a holistic framework to understand ICTs as part of a complex system – an ecology – rather than in isolation. Applying this approach to case studies on South African movement Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Australian Socialist Alliance, three heuristics are produced which are then related to other cases of ICT-aided activism. I argue that my approach makes an important contribution to the field of social movement studies by providing am analytical framework that properly accounts for complexity and contingency, producing heuristic statements that are explicitly reliant on certain communicative-ecological conditions. Due to this specificity, when tested the heuristics hold up as expected, supporting my argument. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Socialist Alliance who participated in this research, without you it would not have been possible. I would like to thank my supervisors past and present – Michele Willson, Sky Croeser, Lisa Hartley, and Karen Soldatic. I would also like to thank the rest of the staff of Curtin University’s Centre for Human Rights Education, especially Caroline Fleay and Lynda Blanchard. Richard Pithouse, Kalinca Copello, and Jenny Pickerill all gave me valuable advice at various points through my research process, and for that I am immensely grateful. Finally, I would like to thank my family, my friends, and my wife Amy Gill. ii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... ii List of Acronyms ........................................................................................................ v Chapter One: Introduction ....................................................................................... 1 The thesis ............................................................................................................................. 2 The case studies .................................................................................................................. 4 Theories and concepts ........................................................................................................ 6 Structure of the thesis ........................................................................................................ 9 Chapter Two: Complexity and contingency, mechanisms and communicative ecologies ..................................................................................................................... 16 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 16 ICTs and a history of contention ..................................................................................... 19 Utopia and doubt .............................................................................................................. 21 Contingency in social science – The example of ‘power’ .............................................. 25 Knowledge and social science .......................................................................................... 27 Complexity ........................................................................................................................ 31 Mechanisms of contention ............................................................................................... 34 Technology and communicative ecologies ...................................................................... 37 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 39 Chapter Three: Methodology.................................................................................. 41 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 41 Choosing case studies ....................................................................................................... 42 Data collection and management .................................................................................... 46 Ethical issues ..................................................................................................................... 52 Secondary sources ............................................................................................................ 56 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 58 Chapter Four: Abahlali baseMjondolo .................................................................. 60 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 60 Movement background .................................................................................................... 62 Technical layer .................................................................................................................. 69 Discursive layer ................................................................................................................ 74 Social layer ........................................................................................................................ 80 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 87 Chapter Five: Socialist Alliance (Australia) .......................................................... 89 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 89 Movement background .................................................................................................... 90 Technical layer .................................................................................................................. 94 Discursive layer ................................................................................................................ 97 Social layer ...................................................................................................................... 102 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 111 Chapter Six: From communicative ecologies to processes and mechanisms.... 114 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 114 iii Process – Mobilisation .................................................................................................... 117 Mechanism – Social appropriation ................................................................................. 117 Mechanism - Diffusion .................................................................................................... 121 Process – Scale shift ........................................................................................................ 128 Diffusion in scale shift ..................................................................................................... 129 Mechanism - Brokerage .................................................................................................
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