Commensuration by form: Lists and accounting in collective action networks

Abstract

This paper studies the roles of accounting in decentralized and unregulated collective action networks. Although the recent past has witnessed a proliferation of social collectives, little is known about accounting in such loose and fluid forms of organizing. While the existence of putatively primitive accountings becomes discernible in some studies on collective action, literature has largely neglected to discuss these in more detail. Taking a conceptual diversion via the format of the list, this paper ascribes such rudimentary and short-lived accounting instantiations a more critical and integrated role in governing the network at large. We develop the notion of commensuration by form to account for the list's dual capacity to convert the world into boxes of equivalent size that can flexibly be reshuffled into new relationships and its ability to serve as an intruder to the world of accounting. The upshot of this perspective, a significant expansion of accounting's non-calculative structuring powers, is demonstrated by an in-depth study of a collective action network formed during the German refugee crisis in 2015. While repertoires of digital and analog lists formed the backbone of the network's infrastructure, we show how their creation, recombination, and growing dispersion constantly provoked arrays of dispersed micro accountings. Even if such accountings interfered with the lists for only a moment, we nevertheless observed their ability to leave more permanent traces by irrevocably residualizing, prioritizing or canceling out items in such lists. We argue that the interplay between listing and accounting is ever more relevant in times when collective organizing is reliant upon digital media technologies that have accelerated the production and circulation of the list as never before in history.