Convenors:

Volunteer, community-based, cooperative and other socially-oriented organizations are generally deemed as seeking to pursue the good life, through pursuing economic and social inclusion and favouring broad participation in their decision-making (Osborne, 2013). They are established to fulfil a social purpose and, as such, they are said to be mission driven (de Bakker et al., 2013) and focused on creating better social outcomes.
 
While the organizational practices of many socially-orientated organizations often do not match their mission and purpose (e.g., Barros & Michaud, 2020; King & Land, 2018; Pek, 2021), the possibilities remain that such organizations can explore organizational forms that can place participation, democracy, and well-being at their centre, and that support the development of the good life (King & Griffin, 2019). Indeed, socially-orientated organizations have a long (and often forgotten) legacy of alternative ways of organizing that have placed the good life as their central motif and purpose (Milbourne & Murray, 2017). Participatory democracy, radical organizational structures and feminist forms of organizing have all been pioneered, experimented with, refined and critiqued within such social-orientated organizations (Daskalaki, 2018). Such organizations have been called schools of democracy (Dodge & Ospina, 2016), spaces which could develop the capacities to develop democratic citizens. Such movements have sought to actively and consciously organize in a way that can reflect the good life, but also question the outcomes of such endeavours, as Freeman’s famous critique of horizontal forms of organizing exemplifies (Freeman, 1972). Thus, socially-oriented organizations have the legacy of a long-standing history of alternative forms of organizing that can produce an imaginary for new prefigurative ways of organizing that support the good life.
 
We welcome historical, conceptual and empirical accounts and are particularly open to early career researchers. We are open to interdisciplinary contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including public and non-profit management, organizational behaviour, and organization theory. We are especially interested in approaches that focus on organizational practices that support democratization of socially-oriented organizations and contributions that examine how equality, diversity and inclusion are practiced within social-purpose organizations, such as through the decision-making practices or creative ways in which minority voices are listened to and allowed to make a difference in organizing and collective action. Alternatively, we hope to better understand exclusionary mechanisms, such as epistemic injustice (i.e., the denial of some people’s knowledge and relevance on some issue; Fricker, 2007) and other methods through which unbalanced participation is maintained in organizational contexts (e.g., Diefenbach, 2020). While management scholars more broadly have increased our understanding of inclusion and exclusion in organizations and pointed to the potential of a range of relevant practices (e.g., Shore et al., 2011), we are interested in exploring how these practices embrace alternative dynamics when adapted to socially-oriented organizations.
 
We are therefore interested in, but not limited to, the following questions: