Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries

Fleischmann, Alexander; Holck, Lotte; Liu, Helena; Muhr, Sara Louise; Murgia, Annalisa

doi:10.1177/13505084221083907

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Any unity of purpose would be established through organisational experimentation rather than automatically, through the setting of common goals and creation of common identities. The construction of ‘solidarity in difference’ ( Fleischmann et al , 2022 ) cannot but imply that such a collaboration is by necessity experimental precisely because of the possibility of failure that haunts its attempts to effect change. In this sense, the value of an attempt such as the one studied lies in having explored an articulated and complex pathway that seeks to bring together the cornerstones of labour and workers’ organisation with, for instance: democracy, through cooperativism and mutualism; collective representation, through trade unions; and collective organisation of labour, through the infrastructures that a politicised model of coworking can offer.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organising the self-employed: combining community unionism, coworking and cooperativism across contexts

Pitts¹,

Borghi²,

Murgia³

2023

Open Res Europe

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The growing insecurity, flexibilisation and fragmentation of labour markets goes hand-in-hand with the decrease of social protection levels and collective representation for workers in non-standard employment relationships, such as the hybrid category of ‘solo self-employed workers’. In response, on the one hand, trade unions attempt to approach and organise this heterogenous category of workers. On the other, new freelancer organisations are emerging to improve worker rights and safety, and overcome their social and professional isolation. Reporting the findings of long-term, slow ethnography, we describe a failed collaboration between three new collective actors in the representation and organisation of self-employed workers. In the second half of the 2010s, two UK organisations, Coworking (all names pseudonyms), a coworking space operator working in a deprived ex-industrial area, and Union, a former industrial union, created Coworking.Union, a cooperative trade union offering services and advocacy for the self-employed. Coworking.Union collaborated with Cooperative, a freelancer cooperative based in Northern Europe, with a view to emulate aspects of its model in the UK. We present a detailed reconstruction of the interactions of the three actors over time, including their context, expectations, and visions, starting from the motivations that generated the first contacts, through to the development of operational agreements, up to the failure of these agreements as relations cooled. The case study, and the failed experiment it captures, constitutes an important opportunity to understand the dynamism, complexity, and contradiction manifest in organising the self-employed. While the strategic ingredients of significant organisational innovation were in evidence between the three actors, it generated instead a failure. The case study thus demonstrates the importance of an in-depth analysis of failed attempts at organising the self-employed and their meaning for broader struggles by old and new actors to alter the terrain of the hybrid areas of employment more generally.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organising the self-employed: combining community unionism, coworking and cooperativism across contexts

Pitts¹,

Borghi²,

Murgia³

2023

Open Res Europe

Self Cite

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“…Yet there remains much work to be done to ensure that the intersectional oppressions of black, ethnic minority, as well as (dis)abled, LGBITQ+ and other marginalised people, have space, are valued, and heard within CR efforts (Collins, 1990), and this hasn't historically been the case (Combahee River Collective, 1978/2014King, 1988). Thus, we call for contemporary, feminist intersectional CR which emphasises the polyphony of voice and experience (Firth and Robinson, 2016) and aims for 'solidarity in difference' (Fleischmann et al, 2022), rather than trying to find a one-size-fits-all approach to our diverse human experience. This contemporary application of CR is suitable to our politically fragmented times.…”

Section: Consciousness-raising So What?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking isolation: Consciousness-raising as a methodology for academic activism

McCarthy

Grosser

2023

Organization

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In this essay we argue that one way to combat the depressing creep of the neoliberal university is to recuperate and re-use consciousness raising (CR) in teaching, administration, research, and engagement. Consciousness-raising can be roughly characterised as first, an apprehending of one’s place in a system, and second, feeling inspired to do something about that system. We propose that CR is an especially helpful way to think about our work in contexts where more structural changes to advance social justice agendas appear to have stalled, or even to have taken a step backwards. There may be potential to co-opt the increasing dominance of individualism in our worlds, by revisiting the role that individual reflection and development plays in social change, as conceptualised within CR. Through examples drawn from our own experiences, we demonstrate how CR happens in our day-to-day interactions, reigniting a sense of meaning in our working lives whilst potentially creating ripples of positive change. We thus call not just for revisiting, but also for reconceptualising and reframing CR rooted in feminist and intersectional praxis as a methodology for academic activism in the contemporary business school.

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“…Organization and management scholars (critical or not) might want to pay attention too. Fleischmann et al’s (2022) focus on “organizing solidarity in difference,” beyond capitalocentric logics, resonates with prefigurative reason. Also, those studying alternative organization (e.g.…”

Section: Imagination Experiments Maybe-logic and Warding-off Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

Book review: Who controls the future now?

Burø¹

2023

Organization

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New social ordersI live close to Christiania, the self-proclaimed Copenhagen freetown that has sustained itself for 51 years and which is featured in The Future is Now as an exemplary empirical case of prefigurative politics in practice. Though I know the history and culture of Christiania, I never considered it to be a community established with a prefigurative intent. After reading the book, I know better.Lara Monticelli has edited a neat 241-page book that assembles cutting-edge contributions from 23 scholars. It is divided into three parts that sets the context for, describes the practices of, and present reflections on researching prefigurative politics. The afterword by Davina Cooper asks, among other things: "what is being prefigured?" (p. 230). In a sense, the foreword by Arturo Escobar is a reply: "throughout this volume's chapters . . . prefigurative politics is amply shown to involve not only a struggle against both capitalism and the state, and the multiple forms of power and material-semiotic arrangement of everyday life they deploy, but a diverse set of political experiments to bring about new social orders" (p. xxiii, my emphasis). Chapters are short, to the point, like a good hardcore punk rock tune and, indeed, the book reminds me of a high-quality anarchist A 'zine like Inside Front or Maximum rock'n'roll (which, to be sure, is a good thing). Critique of prefigurative reasonIf in doubt, then observe. At the back of the book cover, prefigurative politics is aptly summarized as the act of "envisioning alternative futures," and The Future is Now is subtitled an "introduction to prefigurative politics." However, this book can be observed to produce a critique of prefigurative political reason, in the Kantian sense, as it sets and establishes the limits of the validity of prefigurative reason. What kind of reason might that be? While Kant's critiques asked: "what can I know?"; "what must I do?"; and "what can I hope for?", the present salient questions are either "what imagined future social order may I enact?" or "what is the future social order immanent to my present agency?" The questions are substantially different but reflect prefigurative reason all the same. At the heart of the matter lies the problem of living today the life that you wish would be the life tomorrow, speaking in future perfect: when the new order has been established, some of us will have already experienced it. Bergson (2007) analyzed this problem in The Possible and the Real (p. 73ff): whenever something profoundly new happens, its possibility is born too and is projected back in time. Even if we could hitherto

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Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries

Cited by 17 publications

References 56 publications

Organising the self-employed: combining community unionism, coworking and cooperativism across contexts

Organising the self-employed: combining community unionism, coworking and cooperativism across contexts

Breaking isolation: Consciousness-raising as a methodology for academic activism

Book review: Who controls the future now?

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