Amid multiple crises on a planetary scale, alternative organizing offers plural possibilities for reconfiguring societal relations and bringing into being a more livable world. Despite growing interest, the literature on alternative organizing remains fragmented, marked by a narrow and selective integration of disciplinary and geographic knowledge communities. This fragmentation leads to ambiguities and contradictions in concepts and theory development. To address these issues, we review 50 years of research on alternative organizing, following three steps. First, we map the genealogy of research on alternative organizing, identify its relations with institutional orders, and distinguish key perspectives. Second, we develop an integrative framework that (a) identifies three constitutive dimensions of alternative organizing—imaginaries, alterity, and subjectivities—and (b) synthesizes the processes, frictions, and outcomes for societal transformation. Drawing on this framework, we suggest avenues to attune to the ways alternative organizing unsettles dominant orders and cultivates the present and future, other-wise.

As a collective, Organization has a strong commitment to exposing and challenging domination and oppression, to amplifying scholarly activism, and to standing in solidarity with the oppressed, the dispossessed, and the Indigenous peoples of the world. Therefore, we cannot remain silent observers of the genocide in Gaza, of the oppression of the Palestinian people, and of the political, academic and organizational systems that are complicit in it. In this editorial, we call on MOS scholars to approach and study the genocide in Gaza and the oppression of the Palestinian people as a form of organized violence rooted in settler colonialism and processes of racialization that render Palestinian life disposable, and sustained by corporate, state, and academic infrastructures. Careful analysis exposes how the systematic targeting of health, education, and knowledge infrastructures is entangled with organizational processes involved in arms production, digital platforms, finance, universities, and humanitarian logistics. Building on the critical tradition of the journal, this editorial calls on Organization’s epistemic community to act in solidarity with the people of Palestine through constructing alternative knowledge infrastructures and instituting an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. We urge scholars, editors, and students to reconfigure professional practices and mobilize their work against genocidal, colonial and oppressive organizing.

Alternative organizations are committed to autonomy, democracy and solidarity in an ongoing search for freedom from prevailing socio-economic orders, with dissonance as a key process for challenging dominant norms and creating alternative rules. In our paper, we explore the essential dissonant role of affective dynamics in the interaction between embodied norms and organizational rules. Through an ethnographic study of a shared community garden, we show how the creation of affective bonds conforms embodiment through gardening activities. Intensive affective experiences create tensions in member interactions, prompting transitional reactions that demand settling responses from the organization. Our paper contributes to research on alternative organizations first by elaborating a set of concepts regarding affective dynamics as a means of recognizing and understanding the reproduction and creation of implicit norms. Second, we propose a specific representation of how the dissonance necessary for the revision of implicit norms is generated via affective dynamics. Finally, we highlight the interrelations between affective embodiment processes and organizational democracy, enriching the literature on alternative organizing by stressing how these shape supposedly rational procedures and dialogue in decision-making.

Research on the ethics of life and death in organizations has overlooked the growing role of social media in shaping the ethical implications of organizational regulations on death. More specifically, while recent research suggests that memes are increasingly used to influence the reputation and perception of organizational actions, research on their roles in legitimating the organization of death is scant. This paper analyzes Internet memes legitimizing police slaughter in Brazilian favelas. Three primary discourses were identified: denying life worthiness, establishing actors deserving death, and upholding the police organization as executioners of death. This paper contributes to research on the ethics of organizational death in three different ways in a context of political polarization and growing authoritarism. First, it discusses how social media creates a legitimate discourse that makes death visible and gloats over its victims. Second, this discourse is enabled by social media memes, which divert the ethical debate on life and death, replacing it with superficial and transient engagement. Third, we discuss how memes can reinforce the role of the state police enforcement apparatus as an expression of racialized inequalities.

Based on an analysis of qualitative research papers published between 2019 and 2021 in four top-tier management journals, we outline three interrelated silences that play a role in the objectification of qualitative research: silencing of noninterview data, silencing the researcher, and silencing context. Our analysis unpacks six silencing moves: creating a hierarchy of data, marginalizing noninterview data, downplaying researcher subjectivity, weakening the value of researcher interpretation, thin description, and backgrounding context. We suggest how researchers might resist the objectification of qualitative research and regain its original promise in developing more impactful and interesting theories: noninterview data can be unsilenced by democratizing data sources and utilizing nonverbal data, the researcher can be unsilenced by leveraging engagement and crafting interpretations, and finally, context can be unsilenced by foregrounding context as an interpretative lens and contextualizing the researcher, the researched, and the research project. Overall, we contribute to current understandings of the objectification of qualitative research by both unpacking particular moves that play a role in it and delineating specific practices that help researchers embrace subjectivity and engage in inspired theorizing.

The aim of this paper is to identify some of the characteristics of innovation and collective work in different fablab organizations. We first define fablabs through a review of literature, situating related questions in the field of ergonomics and focusing our point of view on individual and collective activity. Secondly, we show how the results of our qualitative analyses (performed on data from interviews and observations of fablab managers, users, and projects from 13 fablabs) reveal 3 main types of fablab organization: community-oriented fablabs, academic fablabs and industrial fablabs, in which different activities are carried out. Fablab activity depends on lab users and the type of design projects carried out. The discussion will focus on the fablab organization findings, including the links between design/innovation project work, collective work and evolving rules, and how all of these aspects might direct activity-centered ergonomics research and actions in the future.