Working beyond Neoliberalism: Organizing Alternativity through an Ethics of Care
Journal
40th EGOS Annual Colloquium, Milan, Italy
Type
conference contribution
Date Issued
2024-07-05
Author(s)
Abstract
The urgency to reimagine neoliberal capitalism challenges scholars to explore how we can organize alternatively. In this paper, we argue that a feminist ethics of care, which stresses our fundamental interdependence and responsibility to particular others, provides a novel relational understanding of the organization and maintenance of alternativity. Relying on an ethnography of a campaign and consultancy cooperative, we show how an ethical adherence to flourishing, vulnerability, and solidarity informs an alternative coordination, valuation, and orientation of work. We theorize how the cooperative maintains this alternativity through the organization of a ‘deliberative-responsive space’. Departing from scholarship that focuses on principles and practices in alternative organizing, our study emphasizes the organization of alternativity as an ongoing ethical responsiveness to different needs, capacities, and perspectives. We underline that a relational ethics and the responsive organizing it calls for provides a more situative and dynamic approach to dealing with plurality and conflict that frequently degenerate alternative organizations.