‘No decision is permanent!’: Achieving democratic revisability in alternative organizations through the affordances of new information and communication technologies

Abstract

It seems natural to understand organizational democracy as granting members of the organization the right to choose the rules that govern their actions. But what meaning does a rule have if one can choose to change rather than follow it? By investigating the understudied dimension of democracy I call revisability, this paper suggests that an organization’s rules can be meaningful – they can effectively coordinate action – while remaining continually open to democratic modification. To support this claim, I present an activist ethnography of the Open Food Network, an alternative organization that builds open-source software for the decentralized coordination of short food chains, working in a democratic, non-hierarchical manner. Using the communicative constitution of organizations literature to conceptualize the requirements of democratic revisability and coordinating rules, I argue that this case demonstrates the possibility of achieving both ends simultaneously through the affordances of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This paper thus contributes an account of the concept of democratic revisability, and a generalized model of one means by which democratically revisable and effective coordinating rules can be established and maintained with the support of ICT affordances.

Why Reinvent the Wheel? Materializing multiplicity to resist reification in alternative organizations

“…The centrality of reification to the case was not apparent to us, however, upon entering the field originally. Indeed, we did not begin with a particular research question but rather simply a hunch that something interesting might arise given the tendency for alternative organizations' scaling efforts to exacerbate underlying value tensions (Schiller-Merkens, 2024;Shanahan, 2023;Siedlok et al, 2024). Our data collection thus began with participant observation, through which we encountered the empirical anomaly that drove our abductive inquiry (Burawoy, 1998;Locke, Golden-Biddle, & Feldman, 2008).…”

“…Yet this implies a cyclical waxing and waning of agency corresponding to periods of dereification and reification. To instead maintain agency in an ongoing manner, we suggest that alternative organizations might resist the emergence of agency-limiting reification by pursuing what Shanahan (2023) calls revisability : holding organizational mechanisms continually open to re-examination and modification. This paper thus explores whether such revisability might facilitate a more systematic and ongoing resistance to the reification of, simultaneously, both the existing social order and the social order pursued by the alternative organization.…”

“No dig, No Ride”: The Communicative Constitution and Consequences of Imperfect Authoritative Texts in Fluid Collective Organizing

“…Hierarchical leaders may use the discursive device of "bookending," wherein the context or topic of a meeting is either setup or closed down, which ultimately influences meeting outcomes. Shanahan (2022) explores organizational democracy in a network of nonprofit organizations seeking to decommodify food supply chains and finds that the ability to transparently revise an authoritative text, particularly through shared ICT use, is a key dimension of organizational democracy.…”

“…Shanahan (2022) explores organizational democracy in a network of non-profit organizations seeking to decommodify food supply chains and finds that the ability to transparently revise an authoritative text, particularly through shared ICT use, is a key dimension of organizational democracy.…”

Field, place or space? A carnal ethnography of a therapeutic space-construct

“…This was also because my values – of empathy, support to the vulnerable, power of the community, my opposition to age discrimination and the exclusion of the older adult from social life – largely overlapped with those of the Foundation (cf. Shanahan, 2022). I became part of the story that I was telling (Bolton and Laaser, 2021).…”