International Management, Should We Abandon the Myth of Cultural Hybridity? A Re-examination of the Contribution of Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches

The postcolonial and decolonial approaches open the way for a rich analysis of the material and cultural conditions in which international management operates, is spread, interpreted, and implemented. They also offer food for thought on the possibilities, tensions, and resistance associated with reinventing alternative organizations more respectful of the dignity of all, while still providing knowledge that is socially and politically useful for oppressed and marginalized groups. Nevertheless, and despite their undeniable contribution to the theoretical development of critical approaches in international management, these perspectives are faced with challenges and difficulties in both intellectual and empirical terms. In this article, I suggest a series of ways forward, which might allow for the renewal of the critical fruitfulness of this intellectual and political project, crucial to face the contemporary challenges of international management.

Among Friends: The Role of Friendship in Alternative Organizations

Friendship, a mutual and profound relationship, permeates history of human culture and occurs in all social situations, including professional and informal human activities. In organizations, it devel­ops through processes of communication and generates a communication culture of kindness and support. Organizational friendship enhances work engagement and satisfaction, as well as helps to promote individual ends. This article investigates the more vital significance of friendship in alter­native organizations. Such organizations, operating at the margins of the currently dominant profit-oriented business model, offer a plethora of insights of possible structures and practices. Our ethno­graphic qualitative research shows the implications of workplace friendship as organizing principle. It helps to make organizations more humane, and redressed the moral imbalance, so prevalent in contemporary organizing and management. This has important implications for any kind of com­munication, creating social awareness around important themes related to management and organ­izations. Patterns of friendship are meaningful for organizing and organizations and their most vi­tal significance concerns the area of social communication.

The possibility of disalienated work: Being at home in alternative organizations

Work organizations have long employed various management techniques in order to maximize workers’ engagement, which in itself implies that ‘alienation’ at work is common. One of the central descriptions of alienation in classic writings is the idea of not being ‘at home’ while at work. In this article, however, we explore its obverse, which we term ‘disalienation’ – a relationship to work based on assumptions concerning control and agency, aided by collective participatory mechanisms for identity construction and dialogical building of social relationships. We suggest that the concept and experience can be productively explored in the context of organizations which are owned and controlled by workers. Using ethnographic case studies from two Polish co-operatives, we discuss the potential characteristics of a disalienating relation to a work organization and suggest that co-operatives can provide a way for workers to be ‘at home’ while they are at work.

Prefiguring alternatives through the articulation of post- and anti-capitalistic politics: An introduction to three additional papers and a reflection

In this introduction to the second part of the special issue on alternative economies published in Organization in 2017, I first briefly chart key fora where the debate has continued in the last two years, and then present the three additional contributions included here. Moving the conversation forward, I argue that, in order to evaluate the prefigurative potential of alternative organizations, we need to address more thoroughly the relation between alternatives and their outside. A productive place to ground this reflection is in the debate between post-capitalism and anti-capitalism. The main lines of this debate are reconstructed based on the keynote speeches delivered by Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the last Rethinking Marxism conference held in Amherst, Massachusetts, in September 2013. I conclude by claiming that post-capitalist immanence should be articulated with an anti-capitalist communist horizon, and advance the Open Marxist notion of de-mediation of social relations as key to do this. Although capitalist institutions (e.g. the market, the state) mediate all social relations, mediation is never definitive, as it always contains the possibility for its own negation, de-mediation. So conceived, de-mediation redefines our understanding of class struggle beyond the capital-labor relation in the workplace, into society as a whole, broadening the ethical and political scope of the organizational research agenda on alternatives to capitalism.

Worlds, words, and spaces of resistance: Democracy and social media in consumer co-ops

This article explores how members of one of the largest Canadian consumer co-ops, reacting to what they saw as an assault on its democratic principles, use social media to try resisting the attempt from the board of directors to change its governance rules. Building on the Economies of Worth and Critical discourse analysis joint framework that considers power relations in the justification context, we unveil two essential moments. Initially, our analysis points to hegemonic justification struggles marked by the board and resisting consumer-members drawing on and reordering multiple worlds to debate the risk of democratic degeneration in consumer co-ops. Second, the critical insights suggest that the hegemonic control over the official deliberative arena pushed dissenting actors toward social media, an alternative space where they could deconstruct the co-ops-controlled discursive arena and create new conditions of possibility. Our article contributes to the literature on democratic degeneration in alternative organizations. More specifically, in the case of large consumer co-ops in which consumer-members have limited embodied presence, our results highlight how social media can offer a new space for debates, dissensus, and critical deconstruction. Our research also extends the post-structural criticism of the domination tendency of rational debate frameworks by showing that strategic displacement to new alternative spaces is essential to create new possibilities beyond those in central discursive arenas.

Coming Home

By the mid-twentieth century, two things appeared destined for extinction in the United States: the practice of home birth and the profession of midwifery. In 1940, close to half of all U.S. births took place in the hospital, and the trend was increasing. By 1970, the percentage of hospital births reached an all-time high of 99.4%, and the obstetrician, rather than the midwife, assumed nearly complete control over what had become an entirely medicalized procedure. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an explosion of new alternative organizations, publications, and conferences cropped up, documenting a very different demographic trend; by 1977, the percentage of out-of-hospital births had more than doubled. Home birth was making a comeback, but why? A quiet revolution spread across cities and suburbs, towns and farms, as individuals challenged legal, institutional, and medical protocols by choosing unlicensed midwives to catch their babies at home. Drawing on archival materials and interviews with midwives, doctors, and home birth consumers, Coming Home analyzes the ideas, values, and experiences that led to this quiet revolution, and its long-term consequences for our understanding of birth, medicine, and culture.

Making Organizations More Inclusive: The Work of Belonging

As corporate discourses of ‘openness’ and ‘inclusion’ become increasingly ubiquitous, an important task for organization studies today is identifying how actors might make their organizations more inclusive. The paper aims to understand why and how practices that often embody the exclusionary aspects of organizations could develop to foster a sense of belonging. Studying alternative organizations, such as cooperatives and social movements, where the members may often be more willing and able to develop such practices, could offer lessons about the possibilities and pitfalls of organizational belonging and inclusion more generally. The paper focuses on discussions of financial targets and budgets, practices that confront the members with tensions between their social aims and the need to survive in a competitive market, and that may enact capacities to work through these and other related difficulties. A case of a Spanish cooperative, analysed using a Latourian anthropological approach, demonstrates two main contributions. First, it builds positively on critical assessments of the pitfalls of corporate constructions of belonging, which seek employee commitment despite persistently exclusionary practices. The case demonstrates how the practical work of belonging can enable organizations to become more inclusive and ‘liveable’. Second, it shows that organizational practices are neither inherently exclusionary, nor intrinsically inclusive. Their role depends on the context and specific socially orientated abilities among the members, which can develop through their interactions with budgets.