Creative Precarious Decision-Making in the Crises of Our Time: A Visual/Narrative Collaborative Panel

Panel organisers Dr. J. Miguel Imas, Kingston University, UK Professor Patrick Humphreys, LSE, UK

Motivation The current economic crises in Europe and the United States prompt new questions on how communities around Europe and (by extent) the world would come together and explore new alternative possibilities for the design and application of new models for collaborative decision-making.

How can our language engage and construct participative spaces upon which new solutions to problems can emerge?

QUESTION

CHALLENGE

•how we break from the main paradigmatic thinking and language that simply imposes layers of meaning and design of decisional models that do not respond to local demands. •We need a new audiovisual language for showing and telling. Upon which we can construct spaces for collaborative authoring of outcomes.

•A language that reflects the marginal and excluded: the ones whose decision-making processes are not part of the grand decision-making discourse.

SOME THEORETICAL IDEAS

Theoretical Ideas:

Living decision-making stories (Boje, 2001) in-between between narratives and ante-narratives which encompass many modes of expression as well as different trajectories or directions for a decision story to unfold.

Heteroglossia is defined by Bakhtin as simultaneous differences (i.e., several/diverse voices) that are found in dialogue, each associated with a set of distinctive values and presuppositions that governs the operation of meaning (Holquist, 1997) and decision.

Deleuze’s re/de-territorialization through the co-creation of visual narratives

Methodology: Fabric Visual/Storying Creative Decision

Simultaneity of events and actions taking place in different geographical locations, spaces and temporalities.

Fragmentation, it is never a complete very well rehearsed plot.

Trajectory, emergence of coherence in narrative, not as a single tale but as part of a collective ante-narrative

Morphing what takes place as a part of the re-historization process in order to highlight new values, persons or episodes. This what makes the process of living story transformative to a context or indeed what transform the con[text] itself

THE GREEK EXPERIENCE

THE ARGENTINE EXPERIENCE

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If globalisation means that the world is a seamless unity in which everyone equally participates in the economy, obviously globalisation has not taken place. The global, the plan and capability of market and labour penetration by industralised nations, recognising that industrial development is uneven, and many parts of the world merely serve the benefits of industrial capital that is more and more restricted to fewer and fewer people (Masao Miyoshi)

GLOBALISATION= AMBIGUITY & IDENTITY

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Colonialism

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POST-COLONIALITY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPddW3da2aA&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEzXln5kbuw

RESPONSE: ARTICULATING CREATIVE-PRECARIOUS DECISION-MAKING

Fábricas recuperadas as living precarious/creative decision-making stories

Fábricas recuperadas are the self-styled managed businesses that were taken by workers in Argentina at the time of the financial crisis that hit the country in 2001.

Fabricas recuperadas is an example of alternative discourses of organising embedded in living stories that are dialogical and heteroglotic (Bakhtin, 1986) as well as co-authored (Shotter & Cunliffe, 2003) by all participants, de-territorialising the meaning of what is management and organisation and re-territorialising it with polysemous as well as polyphonic new meaning.

These stories reveal the trajectories, simultaneous and fragmented nature of the story processes in the making of new and polysemous workers’ identities in the context of crisis alongside the accounts and experiences of reclaiming their workplaces. The story re-territorialises the crisis experience, bringing authenticity back into the narrative.

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Examples of living precarious/creative decision-making

“This is the story of a changing society, told by people who have taking their lives, communities and destinies in their hands. They speak in their own voices. It is a story of cooperation, vision, creation and discovery….” (Patricia)

“The night they came to evict us, we were printing a book that was going to go out in the next days. We did a mini assembly and decided to continue with our work. A neighbour helped us to trick the police by taking all the printing books through a hole in the wall and then through his house, which was next to the factory. In this way we managed to survive the police harassment and uncertainty of losing our jobs and only income” (Marki employee)

“What came out of it is the total level of participation. People do not accepted that a director, or union directive make decisions on their behalf. It is a right that individuals have to consult each other; it is an acquired value” (Marki employee)

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"This whole thing started, not with words, but with the sound of the banging of pots and pans. It was a music that entered your body and made you move your feet, and so we moved our feet and found ourselves in the Plaza de Mayo." The phrase "Que se vayan todos" ("Get rid of them all," referring to corrupt politicians) nourishes the movement, it pushes it in a utopian direction. ---Pablo

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You want to know why I go on? In the end it’s the same struggle as before… for the right to work, for an organised, transparent society.

Why should I not have hope? They haven’t won! They haven’t killed us all! The oligarchy, the multinationals, the need a pueblo muerto to dominate. As long as we are alive and thinking beings and still fighting, they cannot win!

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People are trying to carve out a space free from global corporatism and a site for further reflection and criticism (Masao Miyoshi)

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“I am totally grateful to the sons of bitches who provoked this whole thing. Because now the citizens will never be the compliant lot that they were before. I tell you, I'm seventy four years old, and I've seen a lot of wars., and from each one I've come out better and stronger. Without crisis, you just wallow along in the happiness of a fool. We need to use crises to give a new birth to ourselves.”

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I am afraid. Lili, in the second assembly, said that she was bringing her fears with her and Pancho also spoke about it during the interneighborhood assembly.Now I want to say it: I am afraid. And also: they are afraid, we are afraid.Yes they have taken our life savings and we can do nothing, yes the supreme court has sentenced us to injustice, yes we watch our children begging in the streets, our brothers going through garbage, yes our old people are dying in front of our eyes for lack of care, and the ones who are violating us are having a party, promoting the war of poor against poor, yes I don't know if I'm going to eat tomorrow, nor why I bother to study, work or educate my children..,yes all of this in front of our faces and us with our hands tied. I am afraid.

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Security used to be in the bank, and insecurity was in the streets. Now insecurity is in the bank. The robber who used to be outside the bank is now in it. And security is in the streets, with our neighbors. ----Pablo

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Power is not taken, it is constructed. ----Rosana

For the first time, the "Don't get involved" that formed my generation is being put aside.

-----Marta

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They want to patent our cultural values and emotions, take away our strength and leave us doubting who we are. They want to appropriate the things that make us know who we are, what we stand for and what we want

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I am a father and a mother, so I have to protect my work no matter what. This is what gives me strength. If I allow them to take my work away, I will be letting them to take away the education of my daughter, my daughter’s health and my own. And the well-being that I have with so much sacrifice achieved. Above all, I have to protect my dignity and my identity as a worker and a woman

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This “open decision-making factory” has its roots in the emergent conditions of the recovered enterprise, whose workers had to appeal to social solidarity in order to save their jobs under the rubric of the occupation of the firm. In order to develop recovered plants as productive unities that have survived bankruptcy, abandonment, or its emptying, with all of the well-known difficulties this process includes, ERTs [empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores] have had to travel down a sinuous path that, in most cases, does not follow the economic logic that demarcates capitalist rationality.

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The examples of the factories we discuss here are characterised by civic engagement-driven community activism, including provision of heath care, education and cultural engagement. Literally, the premises of the factories and businesses open up their doors to the community and actively participate in cultural and social activities in the neighbourhoods, strengthening the bonds, a sense of belonging, through more collective responses to socio-economic struggle, and from such basis, attempt to formulate more political responses to their precarious condition

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Our dominant classes have always controlled that workers don’t have history, don’t have a doctrine, don’t have heroes and martyrs. Each struggle has to begin again and again as if separated from previous events. The collective experience is lost, lessons are forgotten. History then comes out as a private property whose owners own everything.Rodolfo Walsh

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Why should I not have hope? They haven’t won! They haven’t killed us all! The oligarchy, the multinationals, the need a pueblo muerto to dominate. As long as we are alive and thinking beings and still fighting, they cannot win!

QUESTIONS & DISCUSSION