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Op vrijdag 15 oktober nam Koen Matthijs afscheid als hoogleraar in de Sociologie aan de KU Leuven. Bij deze gelegenheid kreeg hij een huldeboek aangeboden met essays van (oud-)collega's: Neurotische Twijfelzucht en Heilige Verwondering. Tine De Moor en Ton Duffhues wijdden in hun bijdrage 'De gemeenschap is niet van gisteren' een gedachte-experiment aan de rol van zelforganisatie door burgercollectieven in de post-coronasamenleving.

We welcome George Varthalamis and Grant Halliday, who joined us as research interns. George is a food scientist and MBA who will look into the life cycle of agricultural cooperatives and the co-creation of sustainable collective businesses. Grant is a historian, focusing on the evolution of fishing cooperatives throughout western Europe. Visit our team page for more information.

On 28 October Damion Bunders will present a paper in the PhD Symposium The future of the platform economy and platform work, titled: 'Member participation in digital cooperatives: Silicon law of oligarchy or democratic disruptor? For more information and registration, visit the organizer's website.

Gezocht: community researcher met kennis van burgercollectieven en coöperaties. Weet je hoe wetenschappelijk onderzoek werkt, ben je communicatief sterk in woord en geschrift en kun je goed in teamverband werken? Dan zijn wij op zoek naar jou, voor het uitbouwen van het CollectieveKracht kennisplatform. Bekijk de hele vacature op de website van Rotterdam School of Management.

New mutuals fill the social insurance gaps that state and market left open. Zooming in on network structures and interconnections within the mutuals, Eva Vriens, Vincent Buskens and Tine De Moor give insight in the role of embeddedness in these organizations to engender trust and commitment. Read the entire article in Social Economic Review.

In a new article an interdisciplinary group of scholars challenge the image that sanctioning is an all-important mechanism to prevent the overuse of common-pool resources. Instead, De Moor and others argue that it depends on many different factors whether sanctioning is a useful tool or not. Read the entire article in the Journal of Rural Studies here.

Bread funds are a modern type of mutual insurance for self-employed persons. Damion Bunders interviewed Eva Vriens, who conducted research on bread funds, on the success factors and challenges of these institutions for collective action and the role of the government. Read the entire interview (in Dutch) here.

On 5-7 October the Global Forum on Democratizing Work organizes its first-ever forum. Damion Bunders will make a presentation in the panel themed 'Democratizing and Decommodifying Work: Lessons From The Struggles Of #WorkerCooperatives For Sustainable Working Futures' on 6 October, from 13:30 onwards. For more information and subscription, see the organizer's website.

'Who owns the city' is the main theme of this year's lectures series of StadsSalonsUrbains. On Friday 1 October, 5:30 PM, Tine De Moor kicks off with the lecture 'Collective urbanism? Challenges and opportunities for commons in cities in past, present and future.' Urban centers offer plenty of opportunities to set up institutionalized forms of collective action, but how to cooperate, and to do so inclusively? Read further on the organizer's website.

On 8-10 December we organize a specialized workshop on methods and data for longitudinal analysis of Institutions for Collective Action. By following institutional developments over long-time horizons, and in combination with an examination of the stimulating and/or threatening factors, we can understand what makes cooperation within these institutions successful and when it fails. Abstracts for papers can be filed until 30 September. For more information, read further here.

This week in Nederlands Juristenblad (Dutch Lawyers' Magazine): de BV-m, zwevend tussen nut of noodzaak. Esmée Driessen and Tine De Moor explain why the scope of the legislation under preparation regarding private limited companies with a social purpose (BV-m) is both too limited and too wide. Read the article, in Dutch, here.

Looking through a thousand years of history, Tine De Moor analyzes the current accelerated development of institutions for collective action in a newly published chapter of Oxford Handbooks Online. These institutions constitute a correction mechanism and can play an important role in society as a third governance model, although the potential of the commons as a governance model for global resources remains disputed.

While housing becomes less affordable in Europe, the population is ageing and increasingly lonely. At the same time, cities try out innovative ways of building and space sharing. On 9 September 18:00-20:00h Project Together and TU Delft's Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment dedicates its BK Talks to these topics. Tine De Moor will be one of the panellists. More information can be found here. The session is broadcasted on the TU Delft Youtube channel.

Research team Institutions for Collective Action is growing fast. We welcome our new postdoctoral researchers Coline Serres and Fijnanda van Klingeren, and our PhD candidate Karoline Heitmann, who joined us on 1 September. For more information on their backgrounds and current projects - and on the other team members as well - visit our team page.

Is it really possible that an interdisciplinary team studying historical commons offers advice about the management and use of shared resources in contemporary and future systems, overexploitation of natural resources and climate change? Read about this topic in the newly published article by Anders Forsman, Tine De Moor, René van Weeren, Mike Farjam, Molood Ale Ebrahim Dehkordi, Amineh Ghorbani and Giangiacomo Bravo in PLoS ONE.

While housing becomes less affordable in Europe, the population is ageing and increasingly lonely. At the same time, cities try out innovative ways of building and space sharing. On 9 September 18:00-20:00h Project Together and TU Delft's Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment dedicates its BK Talks to these topics. Tine De Moor will be one of the panellists. More information can be found here. The session is broadcasted on the TU Delft Youtube channel.

Damion Bunders wrote a chapter for the book 'Platform Economy Puzzles. A multidisciplinary Perspective on Gig Work.' His contribution addresses the puzzle of gig workers' collective action, a phenomenon that is theoretically unlikely to occur, but is observed in practice nonetheless. The chapter can be found here.

René van Weeren and Tine De Moor published 'Counting Couples: The Marriage Banns Registers of the City of Amsterdam, 1580–1810' in Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The article provides an unique insight in long-term marriage patterns. Find the entire article here.

On 4-7 October, the hybrid 8th EMES International Research Conference takes place. Under the title social enterprise, cooperative and voluntary action: Bringing principles and values to renew action researchers discuss themes such as commons, sustainability and solidarity. The Institutions for Collective Action research team has recently joined EMES. See the EMES website for more info.

On 25 June the final of the CoronaPapers sessions of Platform31 took place (in Dutch). Tine De Moor participated in round 4: did people's trust in government change? Is such a change temporary or permanent? How do we prepare for post-corona times and who takes the lead? What does a distance of 1,5 meters do with a community? For more info, click here.

On 8-10 December we organize a specialized workshop on methods and data for longitudinal analysis of Institutions for Collective Action. By following institutional developments over long-time horizons, and in combination with an examination of the stimulating and/or threatening factors, we can understand what makes cooperation within these institutions successful and when it fails. For more information, read further here.

On 7 September Tine de Moor kicks off the Community Building Summer School in Wanneperveen. The summer school is an initiative of Joop Hofman of EMBGG (Eerste Maatschappij tot Bevordering van Gronings Geluk) and participation home Rode Wouw. The summer school will be attended by a variety of people committed to community building and the organization of cooperatives in their own cities, villages and regions. For background information on these initiatives, see the Rode Wouw website (in Dutch).

Our team member Damion Bunders  presented a paper of his PhD project titled: ‘Commitment issues? The (im)possibility of worker cooperatives in the gig economy’ at the annual international conference of the Royal Geographical Society in London. The RGS-IBG conference takes place between 31 August and 3 September. For more information, visit the RGS website.