1. The Concept of arrangement – a preliminary outline
Viadrina B/ORDERS IN MOTION CENTRE Research Group
„Tensions of Europe:
Technological Change and Re-arrangements of Work and Migration”
Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Aristotle Tympas, Klaus Weber, Falk Flade and Norbert Cyrus

2. Background information
The research group has already submitted at 2 February 2017 two proposals responding to HORIZON 2020 calls:
ARETE – The Values of Europe and the Migration Challenge
TROUBLE – Evoking Troubled Pasts in National and European Controversies about Migration and Employment
The decision-making is organized in a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, the European Commission will review all submitted proposals (for each of the calls about 30 proposals were delivered) and select only few for the second stage, i.e. the preparation of a full proposal. The first-stage decision is expected for about Mid-May.
The proposals submitted by the research group “European Challenges” included references to the concepts of arrangement and technology as heuristic tools
The concepts require further elaborations in face of the specific requirements of the calls and the co-operation with consortium partners.

3. Initial Idea: Order as arrangement
Exploring an Technology-Arrangement Nexus
The concept of Technology (Large Technology Systems)
Exploring Technology as cause and effect of societal change
Hard technologies
Soft technologies
The concept of Arrangement
Play with the ambigious meaning of „order“ and „agreement“
Arrangements imply some level of (implicit) acceptance
Societal arrangements constituted by arena-specific arrangements
Normative orders established by societal conventions
Institutional orders laid down in legal forms and formal rules
Situational orders constituted in the course of actions at the level of everyday encounters and interactions
Overarching societal arrangements constituted by arrangements negotiated in specific arenas

4. Initial action-theoretical foundation
Overarching societal arrangements
Effect of interaction among social arrangements negotiated in specific arenas
Stability when actors come to an arrangement with a situation-specific and arena- specific order
A precarious stability of the arrangements achieved by everyday cooperation
Arrangements as compromises, open to immanent critique.
Arrangements characterised nonetheless by tensions and contradictions.
When actors feel that tensions between situational, normative and institutional order become too strong, the effect may be social critique
Actors may demand
Enforcement of normative or institutional order in a situation
Struggle for recognition of situational arrangement as accepted normative or institutional order
Technological change
Provides offers for the formation of new arrangements
Essential driver of societal tensions

5. Arrangement as theoretical concept in social science approaches I
References to arrangement one-dimensional
Ordering
Agreement
‘Material Arrangement’ in Schatzki’s theory of practice approach
Material arrangements are defined as ‘connexions of people, organisms, artefacts and natural things’
Practices: ‘open, space-time distributed amount of acts and speeches, organised by a joint understanding, teleo-affectivity (purposes, objectives, affects) and rules’
‘material arrangements’ and ‘practices’ form bunches which constitute the locus of the social
practices generate, use, change, orient on or be an inseparable element of arrangements
arrangements orientate, prefigure, and enable practices
Agreement - a feature of practices or ‚material arrangements‘?

6. Arrangement as theoretical concept in social science approaches II
Public and private arrangements in Boltanski’s Sociology of Critique
Arrangements base on the assumption of a common good that justifies a compromise
Arrangements (or agreement, dtsch. Übereinkunft) as a social practice that mediates conflicting or antagonistic necessities
Arrangements organise the relation between conflicting necessities and have of a joint orientation that allow conflicting parties to compromise – without solving the controversy
Private arrangement
benefits only the direct advantage of the involved parties
no claim to a common good.
Denouncing an arrangement as ‘private’ challenges the arrangement and enacts the right to ask for justification.
Response to critique is a practice of justification
Showing with reference to a ‘common good’ that a situation is coherent (stimmig), that all related elements are well ordered.
Agreement is related to the coherence of ‚material arrangments‘

7. Implications for border research
Exploring the Arrangement-Technology nexus of borders
Focus on border-related practices and material arrangements
Capturing the complexity of borders
Following the connexions of elements of the ‚material arrangements‘
Borders constituted by multiple co-acting and interacting practices
Surveying and Crossing
Generative Questions:
What are border-related practices?
What are the material arrangements, these practices relate to?
How are these arrangements connected and arranged?