Convenors:

 

Ana C. Dinerstein

A.C.Dinerstein@bath.ac.uk

 

Luciana Ghiotto

luciana.ghiotto@gmail.com

 

F. Harry Pitts

fh.pitts@bristol.ac.uk

 

Patrizia Zanoni

patrizia.zanoni@uhasselt.be

 

 

Call for papers

 

This stream welcomes submissions that recode the concept of resilience away from survival within the present organisation of work and economic life, towards the development of alternatives ‘in, against and beyond’ capitalism. In critical management studies, resilience is associated with resistance within organizations and how working place resistance relates to other spheres in civil society (Spicer and Böhm 2007). Social movement organizations’ role is regarded as the ‘sites’ for the creation of novel organizational subjectivities and ethical practices’ (Munro, 2014: 1127). This approach demands to ‘reposition organization theory’ towards an anti-hegemonic approach (Böhm 2006: 104) that links critical organization studies with developments in anti-capitalist movements towards the renewal of organization studies (Reedy, 2014: 652) in the direction of utopia (on this see Parker –ed. 2002).

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The Sub-Theme will first deal with processes of organising resilience that are grounded in the material production of capitalist social relations and explore a central contradiction of resilience: that in securing our survival in and for situations not of our choosing, we secure the strength to struggle for alternatives in the future, and, vice versa, in struggling for alternatives, we simultaneously seek our survival in the here and now.

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Second, the panel will establish a connection between resilience, social reproduction and concrete forms of utopia. Social reproduction is a broad concept developed by Marxist-feminist scholarship (Vogel, 2014; Federici, 2012; Ferguson, 2016), that designates a range of activities and processes through which the ongoing conditions of life are secured.

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The neo-liberal restructuring and the global crisis have precipitated a crisis of social reproduction (Zechner and Hansen, n/d). The concept and reality of resilience predominantly relates to survival within the present organisation of our social reproduction within the capital-labour relation, based around the wage relation. But there exist in the wake of the global financial crisis many practices of commoning, caring, growing and living that propose a radical break with the present and the possibility of the development of new forms of socially reproducing the capacity to live and work for different futures. These include, but are not delimited to, social movements, informal work, alternative economies, the social and solidarity economy, community agriculture projects, cooperatives, worker occupations and unemployed workers’ movements. In their development, the contribution these organisational innovations make to society’s resilience in times of crisis invites institutionalisation by the state and other authorities as a component of governmental strategies for greater stability of individuals and communities with the current economic system. The capacity of actors and groups to organise within this contradictory relationship, ‘in, against, despite and beyond’ capital and the state, is the crucial issue we hope to address in this stream.

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The panel aims to bring together interdisciplinary contributions that

• Offer theoretically-informed empirical scholarship on resilience as a contradictory concept.

• Reflect on how social processes and movements are organising resilience beyond survival, in, against, beyond and despite, capital.

 

We welcome papers that investigate and analyse, empirically and/or theoretically, topics including yet not limited to:

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• social movement organizations as ‘sites’ for the creation of novel organizational subjectivities and ethical practices’ (Munro, 2014: 1127)

• how alternative organizations cater to needs that are left unattended to due to the economic crisis and the dismantling of the welfare state 

• the role of alternative organizations in addressing the crisis of social reproduction

• the relationship between marginalized identities and alternative organizing

• the role of (counter-)ideologies in alternative organizations

• how alternative organizations foster subjectivities and practices which resist capitalism as a system

• how they foster hope and real utopia

• how alternative forms of organizing foster solidarities cutting across capitalistic relations and/or new exclusions

• how alternatives forms of organizing are co-opted into the reproduction of capitalism

• how alternative forms of organization constitute sites of resistance

• novel alliances of alternative organizations challenging existing institutions

• institutional factors fostering the emergence of alternatives

• the role of academics in alternative organizations.