Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Reflecting on the Fascist predicament from a cell in a prison in Italy in the early 1930s, Antonio Gramsci (1971) observed that he old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. Also, today, a time marked by great uncertainty, we witness regressive, reactionary, and destructive forces devouring democracy, care and the planet (Fraser, 2023). Yet, as Gramsci himself observes, it is precisely at the end of an era, in this interregnum marked by morbid symptoms,  that the seeds of the ‘new’ can be planted and germinate. Better socio-economic, ecological, and political alternatives can emerge if we collectively organize to make this happen.
 
In Management and Organization Studies (MOS), the search for alternative forms of organizing has given rise to a vibrant field of studies. Investigating a variety of organizational experiences across the world, such as solidarity communities, social movements, worker-recuperated factories and cooperatives, they advance our understanding of how organizing can be done differently, what this organizing entails for relations and subjectivities, and what possibilities and risks come with it (e.g., Bhatt et al., 2023; Daskalaki et al., 2018; De Coster & Zanoni, 2023; Esper et al., 2017; Reinecke, 2018; Varman & Vijay, 2022). To a large extent, these analyses focus on the organizational values, principles and practices of these alternative organizations, contrasting them to what is commonly found in companies, the hegemonic organizational form characterized by the profit imperative, private ownership, a division between workers and owners of the firm, hierarchy between intellectual and manual jobs, and concentration of decision-making and control. This analytical focus has brought organizational multiplicity to the forefront, revealing a broader repertoire of organizational forms (Parker et al., 2014; Del Fa & Vasquez, 2019).
 
Yet, the focus on the specific characteristics of alternative organizations tends to overlook how they partake in broader hegemonic capitalistic socio-political-economic relations. At best, they are seen as constrained by the risk of degeneration into ‘business as usual’ or co-opted by the mainstream (Dahlman et al., 2022; Shanahan et al., 2024). With few exceptions (Alakavuklar, 2024; Barin Cruz et al., 2017; Meyer & Hudon, 2017; Zanoni et al., 2017; Zanoni, 2020), works on alternatives in MOS do not fully engage with the capitalist relations and contradictions inherent in attempts to transform the capitalistic political economy through alternatives that are situated within it. This engagement is, however, necessary if alternative organizations are not to become contingent escapes from the dominant order (Dahlman et al., 2022; Husted et al., 2025), or merely a shadow of the non-capitalistic economies, and to indeed prefigure a post-capitalistic future (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Schiller-Merkens, 2024; Zanoni, 2020).
 
There is still considerable scope to advance the theorization of alternative organizations’ strategic political role in building a society that transcends capitalist relations and the accumulation imperative through mass exploitation and extractivism. Key to this debate is how to articulate prefigurative alternative organizational practices and forms of political engagement with existing institutions. For instance, Wright (2019) discusses the need to combine different strategies to erode capitalism with forces from above, involving the state and policy, as well as forces from below, such as community activism, grassroots movements, and unions. He argues that interstitial change practices in marginalized spheres are not necessarily contradictory but can rather feed into the reformist policies of institutions for social change.
 
From a more bottom-up perspective, Schiller-Merkens (2024) addresses the struggles of prefiguration through alternative organizing within and beyond capitalist relations. Such a struggle emerges as heterogeneous actors deploy diverse strategies, while the institutional context may hinder their potential for transformation, either by co-opting or resisting them. As Shanahan (2024) cautions us about the risks of degeneration of alternatives, either through collaboration with or distancing from institutions, Monticelli (2021) emphasizes the importance of prefigurative transformative politics and its mutually beneficial relationship with conventional politics for a radical, emancipatory, and decolonial transformation.
 
Scholarship on alternative organizing amidst and beyond capitalism should further emphasize relations between humans and non-humans (de Vaujany et al., 2024) and envision strategies for economic transformation through (non)anthropocentric and (non)capitalist entanglements and tensions (Ergene & Calas, 2023), challenging and changing institutions with a political agenda. It should address organizing emergent alternative practices to meet the needs of precarious communities ‘amidst capitalist ruins’ out of necessity (Vijay & Lacerda, forthcoming), and prefigure a post-capitalist society with different exchange and value relations (Alakavuklar, 2024; Pitts, 2021). From a posthumanist perspective, such relationality opens up possibilities for imagining alternative configurations of power relations (Kokkinidis & Checchi, 2023) and value relations (Beacham, 2018) that distribute agency to humans and non-humans for a post-capitalist transformation in novel ways.
 
This sub-theme provides a forum for critical perspectives on alternative organizing, further building on the sub-themes organized at the two preceding EGOS Colloquia (“Alternative Organization at a Crossroads: Which Routes Forward?”, sub-theme 20, Milan, July 2024; and “Creating Another World: Alternative Organizations as Engines of Social Transformation”, sub-theme 78, Athens, July 2025). In particular, we are interested in perspectives that address alternatives in ways that more effectively account for the political economy of capitalism in efforts to transform the economy and society, moving beyond it while also engaging with more-than-human involvement. We welcome context-sensitive approaches that mobilize impure critical performativity (Shanahan, 2024) to navigate and also subvert the constraints and contradictions of capitalist relations. We especially welcome research investigating the commoning of food, water, land, energy, care, and other key resources to envision different ways of organizing social reproduction (Zanoni & Alakavuklar, 2023), in which more-than-capital and more-than-human elements are entangled in various ways to sustain a society independent of anthropocentric capitalist appropriation.
 
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that examine any of the following, or related, questions:

• How do alternative organizations interrogate the dominant socio-economic capitalist relations, and what does it mean to be an "alternative" in specific capitalist contexts?

• What kind of post-capitalist strategies do alternative organizations develop to sustain and transform their relations with institutions, including public, market and civil society actors?

• What roles do grassroots movements, community activism, trade unions and civil society actors play in feeding transformations in the social reproduction of life beyond capital accumulation?

• How are commons and the commoning of essential resources like food, water, land, and energy organized in (non)capitalist spaces, particularly concerning the implications for economic transformation and for more-than-human livelihoods?

• What can we learn from alternative organizing practices of social reproduction by marginalized and oppressed communities, such as undocumented residents, Indigenous populations, and populations under occupation?

• How can alternative organizations ensure that their activities for social reproduction within capitalism contribute to long-term, systemic change?

• How do alternative organizations undo power and inequalities along class, gender, race, and other markers of difference in capitalism?

• What roles do entanglements of humans, nature, and animals within and across organizations play in economic transformation towards post-capitalism?

• What does human/non-human relationality introduce into alternative exchange practices and value?

• How do alternative organizing practices in the Global South decentre hegemonic Global North-centric capitalist discourses and practices, offering insights and strategies for global economic transformation?

• How can locally embedded alternative organizations avoid becoming localist and exclusionary?

• What role does technology play in envisioning alternative organizing towards post-capitalist economies and livelihoods?

• How do anti- and post-capitalist infrastructures for work and social reproduction look like?

References

• Alakavuklar, O.N. (2023): “Untangling alternative organising within and beyond capitalist relations: The case of a free food store.” Human Relations, 77 (11), 1596–1619.
• Alakavuklar, O.N., & Zanoni, P. (2024): “Organising Postcapitalism: Mapping the Terrain for Actionable Knowledge.” In: Academy of Management Proceedings, 2024 (1), https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMPROC.2024.18474abstract.
• Barin Cruz, L., Alves, M.A., & Delbridge, R. (2017): “Next Steps in Organizing Alternatives to Capitalism: Toward a Relational Research Agenda.” M@n@gement, 20 (4), 322–335.
• Beacham, J. (2018): “Organising food differently: Towards a more-than-human ethics of care for the Anthropocene.” Organization, 25 (4), 533–549.
• Bhatt, B., Qureshi, I., Shukla, D.M., & Hota, P.K. (2023): “Prefiguring Alternative Organizing: Confronting marginalization through projective cultural adjustment and tempered autonomy. Organization Studies, 45 (1), 59–84.
• Dahlman, S., Mygind du Plessis, E., Husted, E., & Just, S.N. (2022): “Alternativity as freedom: Exploring tactics of emergence in alternative forms of organizing.” Human Relations, 75 (10), 1961–1985.
• Daskalaki, M., Fotaki, M., & Sotiropoulou, I. (2018): “Performing Values Practices and Grassroots Organizing: The Case of Solidarity Economy Initiatives in Greece.” Organization Studies, 40 (11), 1741–1765.
• De Coster, M., & Zanoni, P. (2023): “More Than Prefigurative Politics? Redefining institutional frames to reduce precarity under neoliberal capitalism.” Organization Studies, 44 (6), 939–960.
• de Vaujany, F.X., Gherardi, S., & Silva, P. (eds.) (2024): Organization Studies and Posthumanism: Towards a More-Than-Human World. London: Taylor & Francis.
• Del Fa, S., & Vásquez, C. (2020): “Existing through differantiation: a Derridean approach to alternative organizations.” M@n@gement, 22 (4), 559–583.
• Ergene, S., & Calás, M.B. (2023): “Becoming Naturecultural: Rethinking sustainability for a more-than-human world.” Organization Studies, 44 (12), 1961–1986.
• Esper, S.C., Cabantous, L., Barin-Cruz, L., & Gond, J.-P. (2017): “Supporting alternative organizations? Exploring scholars’ involvement in the performativity of worker-recuperated enterprises.” Organization, 24 (5), 671–699.
• Fraser, N. (2023): Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It. London: Verso Books.
• Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996): The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Gramsci, A. (1971): Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
• Husted, E., du Plessis, E.M., & Dahlman, S. (2025): “A processual perspective on alternative organization: Reorienting critical research through a study of two political parties.” Human Relations, first published online on March 4, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267251322053.
• Kokkinidis, G., & Checchi, M. (2021): “Power matters: Posthuman entanglements in a social solidarity clinic.” Organization, 30 (2), 288–306.
• Meyer, C., & Hudon, M. (2017): “Alternative organizations in finance: Commoning in complementary currencies.” Organization, 24 (5), 629–647.
• Monticelli, L. (2021): “On the Necessity of Prefigurative Politics.” Thesis Eleven, 167 (1), 99–118.
• Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V., & Land, C. (eds.) (2014): The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization. London: Routledge.
• Pitts, H. (2021): Value. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
• Reinecke, J. (2018): “Social Movements and Prefigurative Organizing: Confronting entrenched inequalities in Occupy London.” Organization Studies, 39 (9), 1299–1321.
• Schiller-Merkens, S. (2022): “Prefiguring an alternative economy: Understanding prefigurative organizing and its struggles.” Organization, 31 (3), 458–476.
• Shanahan, G. (2024): “Two routes to degeneration, two routes to utopia: The impure critical performativity of alternative organizing.” Organization, 32 (4), 489–507.
• Shanahan, G., Jaumier, S., Daudigeos, T., & Ouahab, A. (2024): „Why Reinvent the Wheel? Materializing multiplicity to resist reification in alternative organizations.” Organization Studies, 45 (6), 855–879.
• Varman, R., & Vijay, D. (eds.) (2022): Organizing Resistance and Imagining Alternatives in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Vijay, D., & Lacerda, D. (forthcoming): “Business on Steroids Amidst Capitalist Ruins in the Global South.” In: F. de Bakker, F. den Hond, M. Morsing, H. Bapuji, & S. E. Ibrahim (eds.): The SAGE Handbook of Business in Society. London: Sage.
• Wright, E.O. (2019): How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso Books.
• Zanoni, P. (2020): “Prefiguring alternatives through the articulation of post- and anti-capitalistic politics: An introduction to three additional papers and a reflection.” Organization, 27 (1), 3–16.
• Zanoni, P., & Alakavuklar, O.N. (2023): “Beyond workplace democracy: Prefiguring non-capitalist social reproduction within Marx’s communist horizon.” Studi Organizzativi, 2, 162–193.
• Zanoni, P., Contu, A., Healy, S., & Mir, R. (2017): “Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies.” Organization, 24 (5), 575–588.