Organizing otherwise – can alternative organizations provide an alternative?

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Organizing otherwise – can alternative organizations provide an alternative? Daniel King,

Nottingham Trent University Burton Street Nottingham, NG1 4BU

[email protected] +(44)1158482694

Christopher Land,

University of Essex

This is a draft paper, do not quote without permission For correspondence please contact Daniel King

Paper Prepared for the 8th International Critical Management Studies Conference, Stream 26 - boundaries of the voluntary sector and neo-liberalism

University Manchester, July 2013

Abstract

Although foundational texts in Critical Management Studies (CMS) pointed to the empirical

significance of anarchism as an inspiration for alternative ways of organizing (Burrell, 1992),

relatively little work of substance has been undertaken within CMS to explore how anarchists

organize or how anarchist principles of organization might fare in other contexts. In this paper

we examine an empirical case of a voluntary sector, education service provider. From a quite

radical background in the 1980s, over three decades the organization became more hierarchical,

fitting with the other organizations it was working with. In 2010, after a difficult period under a

dominant director, and with a much more competitive funding environment, the organization

sought a more radically democratic way of working. Driven by workers and members of the

management committee, this change was explicitly informed by anarchist theory and practice.

The paper analyses this process of organizational change through the lens of ‘translation’,

examining the process through which ideas and practices are translated and transformed as they

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travel from one context (direct action anarchism) to another (the voluntary sector). The paper

argues that this move was made possible by the translation of ‘anarchism’ into ‘non-

hierarchical’, opening an empty space defined strictly by negation. Rather than having to

embrace anarchism, members were able to find common ground on what they did not want

(hierarchy) and agree on the desirability of its unspecified other. Whilst this enabled a space to

be constituted where members could democratically work through what they did want, the

downside was that the organization became focussed on innovations such as consensus decision

making, with not all members understanding, or interested in, the underlying ideas of direct

democracy that are central to anarchist organizing. In short, the transfer of anarchist organizing

to a new context required a translation. Following work from STS and Scandinavian institutional

theory, this translation is understood as a transformation, as it constructs a new assemblage of

meanings and practices. Those seeking to transfer anarchist organizational practices to other

contexts must recognise and work with this dynamic of translation. Although this local

specificity fits well with principles of direct democratic concern, the obduracy of institutional

forces in the voluntary sector suggest that there may be limits as to how far anarchist principles

might be possible.

Introduction

In one of the founding documents of Critical Management Studies, the eponymous book edited

by Alvesson and Willmott, Gibson Burrell wrote that there were a ‘growing number of alternative

organisational forms now appearing, whether inspired by anarchism, syndicalism, the ecological

movement, the co-operative movement, libertarian communism, self-help groups or, perhaps

most importantly, by feminism’ (1992: 82). These organizations presented both a practical

critique and alternatives to the dominant form of the capitalist business enterprise, which Burrell

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understood as repressing pleasure and human development. Despite this opening, the majority

of critical studies of management since then have focussed on what might be called mainstream

capitalist organizations, and the power relations and processes of subjectivisation that constitute

them (Grey 1994; Fleming & Spicer 2003; Blair 2001; Glucksmann 2004; Knights & McCabe

1998; Poulter and Land, 2008; Alvesson & Willmott 2002; Costas & Fleming 2009). Even where

the focus is on overcoming the dominant, hegemonic forms of power and control, the primary

emphasis is upon resistance to capitalist, managerialist forms of control rather than producing

alternatives (Fleming & Spicer 2010; Ackroyd & Thompson 1999; Parker 2002a).

Whilst such studies have been invaluable in deepening our understanding of power and

domination that structure much of contemporary management, they can lead to a kind of critical

melancholy (Gibson-Graham 2006), in which, by exposing the new, more sophisticated forms of

exploitation and domination within even apparently emancipatory management practices like

teamwork (Barker 1993), participation (Cooke & Kothari 2001) or self-management (Bramming

et al. 2011), ‘critique’ ends up simply reaffirming power and the futility of resistance. Rather than

opening up subjectivity to new possibilities, this form of critique might actually shut them down.

Rather than experimentation and change, which necessarily risks compromise, the left,

including CMS, has cleaved to a politics of purity in which the cleverness of critique in exposing

every recuperation is celebrated and attempts to do something different are evaluated from a

safe distance, which du Gay argues is a form of ‘secular holiness’ (1988). Whilst this leaves the

critical subject in a relatively safe and risk free position it also prevents the active development

of alternative, perhaps better, ways of organizing. As Gibson-Graham (2006: loc 509) puts it,

“Strong theory... affords the pleasures of recognition, of capture, of intellectually subduing that

one last thing. It offers no relief or exit to a place beyond.”

In light of these melancholic critical investments, very little has been done within CMS to

follow Burrell’s suggestion that ‘alternative’ organizational forms found in self-consciously

political, social movements (Reedy and Learmonth, 2009) should be examined as possible

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sources of new ideas for organizing. Indeed relatively few studies deal explicitly with non-

capitalist, or ‘alternative’ forms of organization (see Parker et al, forthcoming; Parker 2011;

Parker 2002b; Williams 2005; Parker et al. 2007 for few examples). Of these, fewer still explicitly

relate to anarchist forms of organization (for exceptions see Land 2007a; Reedy 2002;

Sutherland et al. 2013).

Following Parker’s suggestion that “[a]t some point, being critical of other people,

economic ideas and institutions must turn into a strategy of providing suggestions, resources,

and models”, whilst heeding his caveat that “these themselves must be criticized” (Parker, et al.,

forthcoming), this paper explores what happens when an organization consciously seeks to

adopt a more anarchistic way of organizing. In line with calls for a ‘critical performativity’ (Spicer

et al. 2009; Alvesson & Spicer 2012), it seeks to go beyond a purely negative mode of critical

research. In practical terms, we used a research methodology structured around “engaged

scholarship” (Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006) and participatory action research (Kindon et al.,

2007), which seek to transform organizational practice through the intervention of the research

process.

This paper examines a small voluntary sector education service provider - called World

Education (WE)1 - who wanted to become more directly democratic and, drawing inspiration

from anarchist social movements, experiment with non-hierarchical organizing and consensus

decision making so as to align their practices with their political philosophy.

Following a short literature review of anarchism in CMS, we outline the methodology

used in the empirical study in the second part of the paper, combining a non-expert consultancy

role with participatory action research and more conventional, disengaged academic research.

Together these strategies enabled an effective combination of sympathetic, close engagement,

active intervention, and critical distance. Part three introduces the case organization in more

1 Throughout the paper we have used pseudonyms for the case organization as well as its members and related organizations.

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detail, giving an overview of its historical development from a quite radical activist organization

in the 1980s to a professional education service provider, with 5 full time employees and a

turnover in the region of £400k, by the late 2000s. The change of government in 2010, coupled

with internal conflict, a change of leadership in the management committee, and an increasingly

austere funding regime, meant that WE sought to make quite radical changes to the way it

managed and organized its work.

In part four of the paper we analyse these changes, working through the tensions that

the organization found in bringing anarchist, ‘non-hierarchical’ practices into its systems and

structures. Drawing upon insights from the sociology of translation (eg Czarniawska-Joerges &

Sevón (1996)) in our analysis we recognise that transferring organizational practices and

principles from one sector (anarchist activist social movements) to another (the voluntary sector)

involves a translation as new assemblages of meanings and practices are constituted in the

new context, whilst drawing inspiration from the original. In short, ‘to transfer is to transform’

(Gherardi & Nicolini 2000), both the practices of the receiving organization and the original ideas

that they sought to incorporate. The main finding from the research was that ‘anarchism’, whilst

explicitly referred to by some participants, was more commonly translated into ‘non-hierarchical’.

This shift had two key effects. First, it de-emphasised a highly contentious political philosophy

that some members felt would not allow a professional enough organizational performance to

secure funding. Second, it replaced the fullness of a positive political philosophy with an

absence. ‘Non-hierarchical’ does not signify a presence, or content, so much as an absence.

Given widespread disillusionment with hierarchy on the part of the current members of the

organization, this empty2 or ‘non-signifier’ - non-hierarchical - enabled a degree of agreement

within the organization about what they did not want the organization to be. Whilst this

compromised, in some senses, the adoption of a fully thought through and consistently

2 We are not using the concept of the empty signifier here in the sense that Laclau does (Laclau 1996), but in a more general sense to refer to a signifier that designates absence, rather than presence.

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anarchist style of organization, it did create an open space within which the members of the

organization could debate together the kind of organization they wanted, and as such cleaved to

the directly democratic, autonomous ideal of self-determination that lies at the heart of anarchist

thinking (Graeber, 2013).

Anarchism, Critique and Management Studies

The potential to ‘organize otherwise’ is increasingly part of the popular imagination. The banking

crisis and resultant concern about executive pay have brought some of the more troubling

aspects of large-scale hierarchical organizations into focus and pose the question if ‘another

way is possible’. Indeed, popular uprisings such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Movement and

even the quasi libertarian-anarchist discourse of the Big Society have presented the possibility

that non-hierarchical, empowering and emergent structures might, in both theory and practice,

offer practical alternatives to conventional capitalism. Even within management studies

business gurus such as Tom Peters (1992) and Gary Hamel (2011) have argued for more

liberation from the ossification of rigid bureaucracy and freedom from senior management, albeit

from an instrumental rationality which stresses its potential for increased efficiency and

effectiveness. The need for alternatives is thus now a popular cry.

Given its interest in radical change within organizations one would expect critical studies of

management to be at the forefront of this development. Yet despite calls for more affirmative

critique that can lead to practical forms of transformation (Spicer et al 2009: 537), there have

been relatively little attention to the alternatives which already exist (Reedy & Learmonth, 2009;

Parker et al., 2007; Fournier, 2008). Indeed of the self-consciously critical studies of

management that do consider alternatives are often simply catalogues of alternatives (Parker et

al 2007), culture studies (Parker 2011; Land 2007b) or historical accounts of anarchist utopias

(Reedy 2002) but offer little in terms of practical translation into contemporary practice.

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One of the few examples of alternative ways of organizing attention is on workers cooperatives,

such as the world-famous Mondragón (see for instance Cheney 1999, Whyte 1991, Morrison

1991 and for a critique of Mondragón Kasmir 1996), which although offering a form of worker

control are less attentive to the power-relations and explicitly committed to modelling alternative

ways of organizing. Therefore within studies of management there has been limited attention on

the actual practices involved in organizing otherwise.

Anarchist theory and practice, particularly anarcho-syndicalism, however offers a fruitful avenue

to explore these questions. More direct work on the micro-practices of anarchistic based modes

of organizing have been brought to the fore within recent ‘New’ New Social Movements

literature (Crossley 2003) of direct action anarchist groups. These alterglobalisation movements

(see for instance Maeckelbergh 2011; Graeber 2009; 2013; and for historical context Cornell

2011 and Polletta 2002), seek to develop forms of participatory democracy that are self-

conscious of the power-relations that emerge in any form of organizing and but aim to “model

and enact a different vision of how the world might be organized, thereby inspiring hope that

another world is possible” (Smith 2008: 203). In other words the principles of organizing are self-

consciously reflected on, challenged and alternatives experimented with.

They seek to do this through a process orientated decentralised network which aims, whenever

possible to decentralise power. One of the central principles is horizontalism, an approach

which intends to create non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian ways of organizing and acting. To

do this they use organizing mechanisms such as consensus-based decision-making, structures

such as spokescouncils and tools for reflection to overcome forms of exclusion to “limit power

inequalities that inevitably arise” (Maeckelbergh 2011: 164). Whilst certainly problematic, for

instance these practices tend to focus only on the decision making process within meetings and

pay less attention to the wider processes of exclusion which shape who can be present (see

Blee 2012), they do present possibilities for a prefigurative participative democracy (Graeber

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2013). This approach to participatory democracy though is more than simply a set of systems or

techniques, but an attitude or ethos in which by organizing self-consciously becomes present to

itself (Maeckelbergh 2011). In contrast to a potentially infinite deferral of the ‘good organization’

into a utopian future, these organizations enact their political values in their everyday

organizational practices here and now, “learning how to organise the world differently”

(Maeckelbergh 2011: 96).

Despite the rich possibilities that studies of the alterglobalisation movement offer, for

those interested in alternatives to conventional management there are few accounts that have

directly imported them into our understanding of managing and organizing. One of the few

accounts is offered by Sutherland et al (2013) who examine small social movements through

the lens of leaderless modes of organizing. Such an account offers some insight into the

potential for organizing otherwise, but it does not examine how these principles might work

outside of the relatively limited environment of protest groups and other New Social Movements.

If these alternative ways of organizing are going to reach beyond the relatively narrow

remit of protest groups and make a larger impact, then it is important to explore the extent to

which these principles and practices can travel beyond the context of protest movements into

more conventional organizations. What, for instance would be the possibilities and challenges

that might occur if a workers cooperative were explicitly committed to anarchistic principles?

Would it even be possible for a conventional for-profit organization to work within an anarchist

framework? What challenges might there be for organizational members schooled in traditional

hierarchical modes of organizing to change their practice? And what impact might it have on the

way an organization operates if it self-consciously adopts these practices? The question

therefore emerges if these principles and practices can travel beyond the relatively narrow

confines of protest movements to wider, alternative organizational spheres.

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This paper takes on this challenge by examining how anarchist principles have travelled

into a Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organization. The VCS has been chosen

because in many senses it shares some of the same roots of mutual aid and self-help that other

anarchist movements originate from, and also has a history of innovating with alternative

organizational forms (Milbourne 2013). Indeed a number of Voluntary Sector organizations have

explicitly sought to organize themselves along non-hierarchical and emancipatory lines

(Kleinman 1996). Our case study organization itself arose from a social centre, which had

explicit anarchist roots and even supported the work of anarchist protestors, a past which still

informs its current self-image. The VCS, perhaps more than any other context outside of protest

movements provides the potential for the practices and principles from NSM’s such as Occupy!

to be translated into the context of a more formal, legally constituted organization. We therefore

turn to our case study.

Background to the Case and a word on methods

In April 2012 the then Chair of World Education approached Author One because he said they

were interested in transforming their organization. The previous years had seen dramatic

changes which they stated nearly destroyed WE and placed it in crisis. They had become rather

hierarchical, with a top-down management style that went against their ethos and had negative

implications for the autonomy of the staff. The Chair and a key staff member believed that

members were very keen to work non-hierarchically but others, in part due to prior experiences

and their occupational background were more comfortable in traditional command and control

structures. They wanted to arrange a meeting to give all the staff and management committee

the opportunity to air different attitudes to how they should operate and explore if they could

organize themselves non-hierarchically. We were initially called in to facilitate the meeting to

help them through this transition stage.

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Before getting into the detail of our case study we will firstly examine the underlying

research methodology and some of the challenges and also possibilities which arise through

taking the role of participating in and transforming practice within a research setting. This has

two purposes. Firstly to provide an account of our methodology and secondly to explore some of

the challenges and interesting possibilities of a critically inspired engagement when using

anarchist principles, when seeking to transform organizational practice.

Critical (anarchist) consultant: A word on methodol ogy when conducting anarchistic

research

As suggested above, this research has been conducted in the spirit of engaged research, within

the ‘performative turn’ in CMS (Spicer et al., 2009) which seeks to bring about practical

transformation to organizational practice (Adler et al., 2007), but this approach is not without its

problems. Both Critical Management and Anarchist literatures remind us of the power-relations

that are inherent within any relationship, including the relationship between the researcher and

the researched (Alvesson and Skőldberg 2000; Wray-Bliss 2002 and Farrow et al 1995). As has

been discussed in detail elsewhere (see for instance Bourgois 2003: 16-17) any research

project, even though with an espoused critical intent, has the potential for inequalities of power

which can unfairly favour the researcher (for further discussion see Wray-Bliss, 2002; 2004).

Mindful of the challenges that this poses for research, through this project we have been

attentive to and reflexive concerning the power-relations structuring the research encounter.

The ambition is not to rid the research of such power-relations, for such would be impossible, or

even necessarily to equalize these relationships in the manner that co-authoring would seek to.

Rather our intention is simply to work in ways that can be useful to the organization we are

studying. To do so we have adopted three roles – that of Participatory Action Researcher,

Critical Consultant and Critical Researcher – it is to these roles that we now turn.

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Using Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Kindon et al., 2007) we have actively engaged with

World Education in order to work with them to develop their understandings and practice that

align it with more anarchistic, participative, democratic practice. Such an approach has a long

history, particularly with workers cooperative groups in Mondragón (Whyte, 1991) and is

particularly suited to studying and working with anarchistic principles, due to its democratic and

participatory intent (Krimerman, 2001). In this spirit throughout the project we have worked with

organizational members to co-develop the project’s guiding research questions. Author One has

been working with WE for 18 months, including as a member of the ‘working group on non-

hierarchical ways of organizing’, exploring possibilities for developing non-hierarchical practices

in the organization. Working in this capacity he shared meeting notes and observations which

have become used as the minutes for meetings, worked with them to understand and elaborate

on key problems, provided material for members to read and use, such as Seeds for Change

guide to consensus based decision-making (Seeds for Change 2013), and introduced concepts

like prefiguration into the discussion. The participative approach also extended to making visible

aspects of the research process such as circulating the ethical approval forms and procedures

and discussion of the interview process.

Secondly at times we took a role more akin to that of (critical) consultants. Together we

facilitated a workshop to enable members to air views on how they organized themselves,

including attitudes to non-hierarchical ways of organizing, and the strengths and weaknesses of

the organization. We also provided connections with other organizations attempting to do similar

transformations in their own organizations, setting up and participating in Skype conversations.

Through most of the research Author Two took a more advisory role, acting more as a sounding

board for suggestions that organizational members made and offered practical suggestions as

well as theoretical perspectives on some of the dynamics at work within World Education.

Working in tandem, we were able to create the closeness and distance that is beneficial for

engaged scholarship.

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Thirdly we also undertook more conventional research of conducting interviews (which form the

basis of this paper). We conducted eight interviews, of around one hour each, with members of

the organization, primarily the paid members of staff, but also members of the management

committee. These interviews were transcribed and analysed both in terms of what members

explicitly said about non-hierarchical forms of organization and how they framed their

explanation, whether in terms of personal biography and experience of other organizations, or in

the narratives they told about WE. In keeping with the ambitions and ethos of the research

project, the focus of these interviews - the perceptions and attitudes of WE members to non-

hierarchical ways of organizing - was one that arose in conjunction with members of WE. They

perceived that the interview programme would provide a useful insight into how different

members understood the term ‘non-hierarchical, and ‘how far along this road [of non-

hierarchical ways of organizing] we want to travel’. Consequently such an interview programme

was practically relevant as well as academically rigorous, enabling insights that could be of

benefit to the organization and our wider understanding of the translation on organizing

practices from NSM’s into VCO’s.

Given our previous experiences working in similar organizations and working closely with

organizational members we had the advantages of insiders (Brannick and Coghlan, 2007; Bell

and King, 2010) who experienced some of these changes for ourselves, however this came with

the dangers of too much loyalty to the organization (Alvesson, 2009). Therefore our position

oscillated between these various roles as well as one of us being geographically (as well as

emotionally) more aligned to the organization whereas the other more distant provided the

opportunity for closeness and distance that is essential for such engaged work.

Who are World Education?

The following section introduces World Education and gives an historical account of their

development, with particular attention to their changing structures and organizational principles.

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According to their website WE are a regional charity, “helping teachers, youth workers and

community educators develop the thinking skills that we all need to make sense of a complex

and rapidly changing world”. A Voluntary Organization now run almost exclusively on project

funding they now have six part-time staff members and a management committee of

approximately ten people. At its peak their turnover was almost £400,000 a year, but now, since

the austerity measures that have hit so much of the public and voluntary sectors, they have

seen their income fall dramatically.

They have two main lines of work, education and youth work. The Education work is

predominantly conducted in partnership with secondary school and aims to “educate people

about different cultures” (interview with project worker) from around the world. Operating as a

Development Education Centre (DEC) they provide training, educational resources and a school

linking project which supports educational trips to other countries. The youth work arm delivers

global citizenship through participatory workshops, using street cultural forms such as hip-hop

and graffiti. This approach is built around a Freirian pedagogical approach that uses dialogue to

‘[i]ncrease self-awareness through reflexive questioning of values and ideas’ and ‘[p]roduce a

more outward looking mindset through exposure to global contexts and multiple perspectives’

(Organization Website). In common with many community organizations (Ledwith, 2005;

Newman et al., 2004) this is based on ‘democratic learning … [where] everybody’s a teacher

and everybody’s a student in a Freirean sense’ (former Chair; see Freire, 1970) to encourage

autonomous learning in a non-hierarchical and participatory manner. As their annual report

states, they use ‘[i]nformal education with young people that encourages a critical

understanding of the links between the personal, local and the global and seeks their active

participation in actions that bring change toward greater equality and justice.’

These two strands of work combine in an overall purpose to create a more just, equal and fair

society based on individuals and communities that understand their mutual interdependence

and interconnectedness with others throughout the world: a perspective that one education

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worker illustrated with the ‘Global Wombat’ video clip

(http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml). Within this overarching framework there

are variations in approach. The education work in schools is more formalized and structured,

while the youth work wing uses more participative, democratic approaches.

Beginnings: A Social Centre

For the first five years what became World Education was a social centre (for a review of social

centres see Hodkinson and Chatterton, 2006) providing a meeting and organizing space for

local activists and including a social change library, published newsletter, permaculture garden,

a veg box scheme and a range of educational courses. Rooted in DIY, anarchist activism they

were also an “umbrella for radical and alternative groups of all kinds – anarchists, hunt

saboteurs, environmental campaigners and community activists. A community centre for those

who felt increasingly excluded from a rapidly homogenising mainstream culture” (WE Annual

Report 2012). The initial social centre operated a loosely structured, consensus based approach

similar to other ‘alternative’ organizations (Kleinman, 1996: Firth, 2011), with an explicitly non-

hierarchical, horizontal decision making structure where everyone, regardless of position, was

paid the same and had an equal voice in the running of the organization.

Phase two: The emergence of World Education

In order to fulfill their aims the social centre successfully applied funding and were able to

employ part-time staff. During this second phase they focussed more on environmental

sustainability and began to work in schools. With funding they became more professionalized,

winning contracts, moving to a serviced business centre and establishing a separate charity,

World Education, which eventually replaced the social centre. This transition brought with it

increased formalization and hierarchy as they became a legal charity and delineated specific

jobs and roles. During the transition to this second phase some of the initial founders left,

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unhappy with the new direction the organization was taking, choosing to work instead with more

radical campaigning and activist organizations.

Phase three: Formalization and growth

The Third phase saw the environmental approach deprioritized, a consolidation in the education

focus and a shift to International Development education. They began to receive funding more

from government agencies and in particular had to work with local authorities to get contracts to

deliver their work.

As this growth phase occurred, the more anarchist social centre past created some tensions

with the new institutional context that WE were operating in. Concerned that they were

perceived as a ‘tin-pot’ ‘unprofessional’ charity, they wanted to ‘shake off’ their ‘hippy image’

(youth worker) in order to be taken seriously as the kinds of professional organization that the

‘council would be happy to partner with’ (education worker). One of the longest serving

members explained to us that Council officials were confused by the non-hierarchical approach,

asking who was in-charge of WE and could be held accountable. In order to secure funding in

this context, they tried to organize in a more ‘business like way’ so as to ‘look like a safe pair of

hands for the funders’ (current Chair).

In this third phase, WE thus embarked on a strategy of formalization and growth, with a focus on

‘reputation building’ and professionalization. The current members all spoke of this period as

being more structured, formalized and outwardly professional. They rebranded with set colour

scheme, relocated their offices to a more prestigious area of the city, built networks and

alliances, and were recognized on a regional and national stage. In conventional terms WE

were at their most successful, with up to five full-time employees and a turnover between £300-

400k.

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This shift to formalization also brought with it substantial increase in hierarchy and bureaucracy,

culminating in the formal appointment of a Director. As one of the current staff members

explained:

“Mary went on some sort of training course where it was like ‘we should really have a

Director’. So Mary was appointed as Director”

Indeed Mary, according to many of our interviewees, appointed herself Director, working with

the then chair of the Management Committee, who was a close friend and long-term ally. The

first that the employees knew was when a new organizational chart was emailed around,

showing the changes in pay and communication structure. One of the youth work team was

promoted from co-ordinator to manager and the administrator was offered a new title of ‘centre

manager’. This move was presented in terms of professionalisation and efficiency but the

experience of some members was not so positive.

Phase four: And back again?

The Fourth phase can be seen as one of crisis. Like many VCOs, in the wake of the austerity

measures introduced by the 2010 Con/Dem coalition government, WE’s core funding was cut.

With it jobs were lost and working hours were reduced, eventually leading to the departure of

the Director and several members of the Management Committee. These changes also offered

an opportunity, however. Many members of World Education had been unhappy with the way

things had been organized, and the impact of the changes on the way they worked. The

remaining members expressed a genuine sense of grievance and injustice at how the

organization had been managed, reporting conflict with the new Director and her second in

command, a complete separation from the management committee, with all communication

channelled through the Director, and conflict over resources, for example the Director used the

organization’s administrator more like her Personal Assistant.

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With the loss of core funding, positions like that of the Director could no longer be

supported and she left, along with the Youth Team Manager. Those closest to her in the

Management Committee, including the Chair that had approved her appointment as Director,

left around the same time, creating a sense of both crisis and opportunity. Without a formally

appointed manager in a position of leadership, the organization went back to its more ad hoc

methods of coordinating activity. With a relatively small group of workers, and mostly working in

close proximity, this was not a huge challenge, but was more of a drift than an intentional

change strategy. It was with the appointment of a new Chair, who had a background as an

activist and had taken a post-graduate degree in Activism Studies, that the group began a more

intensive period of reflexive evaluation of their organizing practices. As the Chair of the

Management Committee put it at the time:

“World Education is an organization which is aspiring to create a more just, equal,

democratic, fairer world and it seems ironic, paradoxical, hypocritical, contradictory, that

the way that it organizes itself replicates a lot of the problems within a world that is trying

to move away from”.

Drawing upon the language of prefiguration (Maeckelbergh, 2011; Graeber, 2013), several

members felt that how they organized themselves should match more closely with the values

they aspired to deliver in their work. Especially in their youth work, WE took an approach

drawing heavily upon Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, insisting upon a relationship

of mutual learning, rather than expert/student. Their key focus in this work was to empower

young people to take control of their own lives, encouraging a more active attitude, rather than a

stance of passive dependency. Members did not see this approach mirrored in the hierarchical

structures that WE had adopted. For some, the Chair included, hierarchical organizing was both

a result and cause of wider problems with the environment and society, and so could not also

be a part of the solution to those problems.

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Consequently the way WE organized itself, and their central purpose, once again

became a matter of debate. They conducted visioning workshops, involving volunteers as well

as workers, and began discussing how a less hierarchical way of working fitted with the origins

of the organization. As their annual report put it “do we return to our social activist/outsider

roots, or try to find a new niche and stay within the education mainstream?” In a sense, then,

the crisis was turned into an opportunity to reevaluate and change the way WE worked and was

organized, opening up a space in which to bring contemporary anarchist organizational

practices of horizontality, consensus, participatory democracy and prefiguration into a critical,

self-reflexive process of organizing (see Steyaert and Van Looy, 2010). This process, and its

results, are explained in the following sections, first looking at how the need for a change and

the desirability of a more anarchistic way of organizing were legitimated, then examining some

of the effects of this process on the implementation of these changes.

Shades of anarchist discourse

The introduction of, or return to, a ‘non-hierarchical’ structure within World Education has a

prefigurative character which resonates with anarchistic theory and practice. According to the

current Chair the central aim of WE is about “creating a better world” and in doing so they

“should model the type of world we want to create, not just perpetuate the organization”. This is

reiterated by the previous Chair who states the way WE organize themselves should be in “the

spirit of the organization’s values, trying to make it as democratic as possible as participatory as

possible, having an appreciation of the power of collective learning and gaining critical insights

from other people … pooling our collective insights so we can be as strong as possible”.

At the heart of these statements is the belief that the means by which WE organizes itself,

should match the ends to which it aspires, creating a more just, equal and empowering society

and realising these ideals in their own practices. This conflation of means and ends lies at the

centre of the anarchist belief in prefiguration (see Maeckelbergh 2009: 88). As the

19

anthropologist David Graeber has said when discussing the influence of anarchism on anti-

capitalist activism from the ‘battle of Seattle‘ protests against the G8 to Occupy Wall Street,

‘Pretty much everyone in the activist community had come around to the idea of prefiguration:

the idea that the organizational form that an activist group takes should embody the kind of

society we wish to create’ (Graeber, 2013: 23).

This approach, for the former chair, draws self-consciously on anarchist principles and was

translated into demands for direct democracy, both in ‘life‘ and in ‘work‘,3 as illustrated by a

picture in the 2011 Annual Report of him holding a hand painted sign saying: “I want the right to

self-management & to participate in making decisions that affect my life.” The “a” of self-

management replaced with the anarchist sign of the circled A, quite clearly referencing the

political tradition within which he wants to locate this claim. This new chair had also studied

anarchism and activism in his post-graduate degree, so was very well informed about both the

intellectual traditions of anarchist thought, and contemporary examples amongst the more

radical ends of ecological and political activism. When asked about his ideas in an interview, he

cited a catalogue of contemporary anarchist influenced movements that had inspired him,

including “things like Climate Camp, Earth First! gatherings and certain mobilisations leading up

to the G8 summit in 2005 and indirect second hand experience like reading a huge amount

about, not just theoretical, about people experiencing engaging in these processes … Bolivia

anti-water privatization, Occupy... David Graeber”.

For an organization that had, in recent years at least, been primarily focussed on state

funded education, working in schools and with young people in the local area, the idea of

drawing inspiration from Occupy and the Zapatista movement was quite radical and not all of

the members agreed with these political positions. The strategy that evolved to legitimate these

3 See Kathi Weeks’ (2011) book The Problem with Work for a discussion of the political issues surrounding this distinction. We use the distinction here simply to flag up that the extension of democratic self-determination and autonomy to all spheres of life, including work, has been a theme throughout much of anarchist thought (Marshall, 2009; Rothschild and Whitt, 1989), and was quite explicitly brought into the discussions at WE in this sense.

20

ideas centred around several reframings. Whilst anarchist thought was explicitly discussed, and

referenced symbolically, for example in the circled A appearing in official publications, some

members worried that this would not be a good image for an organization that sought to work

with schools and local education authorities. Rather than presenting this as something new, or

a change of direction, these values were also referred to in terms of returning to the

organization’s roots, for example by referencing the early days as a social centre and

involvement in the direct action hunt saboteur and environmental justice movements. By

drawing upon the past in this way, members were able to construct a narrative in which such

ideas appeared almost natural. In doing so they placed the previously dominant

professionalization narrative as one in which WE had lost sight of its core values.

A second strategy of legitimation was to work with us as business school academics. For

many, the idea of ‘non-hierarchical’ forms of organizing (we discuss the significance of this

particular term below) was quite contentious. The narrative of a need for professional

organization had been strong, particularly amongst those on the Management Committee who

came from education, unions or local government and were thus used to the forms of

accountability and governance found in public bureaucracies and private firms. These modes of

organizing had a strong degree of institutional legitimacy and challenging them with models

drawn from anarchism was problematic. Reflecting a kind of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio

& Powell 1983), the perceptions of funding bodies and clients were evoked as requiring at least

the semblance of a conventional organizational structure. Bringing business school academics

in to run visioning workshops, SWOT analyses and provide an overview of ‘alternative’

organizational practices lent a degree of institutionalized legitimacy to what would otherwise

have been, to some members, too left field.

Finally, evoking the idea of consistency between means and ends, anarchistic methods

of organization were legitimated by association with the kind of work done by WE. By

connecting anarchistic self-management with the ideals of equality, respect and collective

21

learning that underpinned their approach to youth work, the idea of prefiguration would be

translated into ‘walking the talk’ or ‘practicing what you preach’, and associated with a well

established and institutionally recognised set of youth work practices.

One way to view these re-framings is through the lens of ‘translation’. As sociological

studies of science and technology have used the term, ‘translation’ here refers to a process by

which particular practices, artefacts or ideas are transferred from one context to another. This

transfer never leaves the objects unchanged, however, as they have to be translated to fit into

the new context. By entering into a new set of relations, meanings, practices and even material

objects are changed and reconfigured, becoming something else in the process (see Callon,

1986; Czarniawska 2012; Czarniawska-Joerges & Sevón 1996; Czarniawska 2010; Gherardi &

Nicolini 2000; Brown 2002). In this sense it goes beyond the strictly linguistic meaning of

translation. As Czarniawksa puts it, citing Latour:

‘It is important to emphasize, once again, that the meaning of “translation” in this context far surpasses the linguistic interpretation: it means “displacement, drift, invention, mediation, creation of a new link that did not exist before and modifies in part the two agents” (Latour, 1993, p. 6), that is, those who translated and that which is translated.’ (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996: 24)

This idea that a ‘new link’ is created is important from this theoretical perspective as the

sociology of translation adopts a broadly anti-essentialist perspective (see Land (2007b) and

Grint & Woolgar (1997) for discussions and reviews of this debate). In this perspective, the local

relationships between humans, non-humans, meaning, artefacts, narratives and a range of

other actants actively constitute a particular object, practice, or organizational innovation, as an

assemblage. The connections made to translate a practice to a new context, assemble a new

practice. In the case of WE, practices and organizational forms developed in the context of

anarchist social movements and direct action organizations had to be translated into something

that made sense, and could gain traction, in the very different context of the voluntary sector,

education and youth work. Given that the label ‘anarchist’ is a highly mutable and contested

22

term, as well as subject to significant moral approbation amongst certain social groups, one of

the first steps in this process was to linguistically translate ‘anarchist organizing’ into something

else. This is the first step in constituting the idea as a concrete practice, innovation, or quasi-

object, that can gain a degree of objectivity within the new context. As Czarniawska puts it:

‘Ideas that have been selected and entered the chain of translations acquire almost physical, objective attributes; in other words, they become quasi-objects, and then objects. The simplest way of objectifying ideas it turning them into linguistic artifacts by repetitive use in an unchanged form, as in the case of labels, metaphors, platitudes...’ (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996: 32). This is an attempt at a reproduction, a mechanical translation, intended to minimize displacement effects. Local labeling, for instance, is especially important in cases where ideas must be fitted into already existing action patterns, as it reflects the broader, societal categorizing.’ (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996: 32)

Further developing this through an example of organizational decentralization, Czarniawska goes on:

...decentralization can be almost any change in organizational structure, but by labeling actions in such ways, desired associations are created to master-ideas... such as modernity and community help [or] democracy and autonomy... Words are turned into labels by frequent repetition in an unquestioning mode in similar contexts, so that a possible “decentralization, why?” will give way to “decentralization, of course!” (Czarnaiwaska and Joerges, 1996: 32)

For this to happen effectively at WE, the ideas of ‘anarchist organization’ or even ‘alternative

organization’, which were locally seen as redolent of an undesirable, or now unrealistic, hippy

past, had to be linguistically translated before a new quasi object and organizational innovation

could be assembled. The crucial moment in this process was the translation of the ideas we

have discussed in this section into the simple label of ‘non-hierarchical organizing’. This label

enabled two key developments. First, an opposition to hierarchy was a widely shared sentiment

within the organization. Every one of the current members we spoke to told us about the period

under Mary’s Directorship in very negative terms. This opposition to hierarchy, allowed the

group to coalesce around a recognition of the need for change as a way to avoid going back to

hierarchy. It is to a discussion of the details of this process, and the implications it had for how

the organization understood these changes, that we now turn.

23

Ambiguity and ‘non’ signification

For all members of the organization there was a degree of agreement about what they did not

want from the organization and its management: hierarchy as represented by the previous

regime. As one member put it, the Director’s departure was “why this all this sort of

nonhierarchical business started to creep in really ... [the hierarchical approach resulted in] a lot

of staff [being] quite disgruntled about how things were going with the management committee,

a lot of the management committee resigned … so we end up with a brand-new structure in

place the management committee” (Worker). The imposition of hierarchical management

brought with it formalization, micro-management, surveillance and reporting. Unnecessary,

bureaucratic reporting and paper trails were created, such as completing a request slip to use

the administrator’s services. Workers also reported having to submit reports two weeks in

advance of meetings and accounting for their daily activities to the Director. As one employee

told us: “for the past three months I had to write down every meeting that I’d attended, every

project I had worked on.” This account then provided the basis for target setting for the next

three months. In most accounts, these practices were reported as a largely procedural waste of

time. For example, whilst there was an insistence on accounting and reporting, the resultant

paper was just “put in a folder” making it feel like a “sort of pointless exercise”.

The establishment of hierarchy also brought an increase in pay differentials, which the

existing employees perceived as regressive and iniquitous. The Director in particular received a

significant pay increase with her change of title, which one employee believes was (ironically)

paid for out of the reserves that arose from the sale of the original social centre building, as she

was not directly generating revenues through hands-on project work.

If we attend to the flow of the interviews, some members also contrasted non-

hierarchical working with their previous experiences of work and management. For example,

one of the youth workers had previously been employed by a well known high street, ethical

24

cosmetics retailer. In recounting her experiences, she clearly distanced both WE, and her

expectations of work, from this experience:

It was good... [pause]. It was hard work... for not a great deal of money, erm, and despite

the happy clappy ‘we’re fun, light-hearted’ front that it gives, its actually massively hard-sell.

You have a lot of targets. They have a counter on the door which counts every single person

that walks through. So when we would go in, we would duck and people would always think

we were insane that we would walk through the door by going low and coming up again, but

it was because we didn’t want to be counted into ‘coming in’. And at the end of the day they

would calculate how many products had been sold compared to how many people had

come in and the ratio of how many products per person basically, and each person was

meant to buy on average three products. You were meant to acknowledge someone within

30 seconds of coming through the door; approach them within two minutes; and speak to

them about three different products; and tell them different essential oils and ingredients

within each of those products. And you would get mystery shoppers that would come in and

do it, but we had a Nazi of a manager as well. (Youth Worker)

It was clear, then, what the remaining members of WE did not want. They did not want

hierarchy or anything to do with the way that things had been organized under the Directorship.

Previous experience working for private, for profit business organizations, and the experience of

working under the Director during phase 3, left a shared sense of what they did not want but

there was less consistency over what should fill this gap. Members articulated a wide range of

desires and expectations of non-hierarchical organizing and what people meant by non-

hierarchical varied greatly. For some, like the current Chair of the Management Committee, non-

hierarchical organizing was about autonomy, decentralisation and collaborative working:

“People taking an active role in being involved in the decisions that affect them, and

taking responsibility for decision that are made as part of the organization; being

25

proactive in getting support and supporting each other, in more of a network model than

a line-management model... erm... [long pause]... so the consequences of that are you

don’t have people making decisions about others further down the organization without

their say, or their... that the organization is more of a collection of people that have a

shared purpose and are working together collaboratively to make sure that they’re...

using their talents effectively and able to deliver good work in a creative way together”.

Others, such as a relatively new member of the management committee, echoed this

perspective, speaking about autonomy and personal responsibility:

“a flat level of management, a lot of autonomy, a lot of expectation on individual staff, to

be autonomous to be proactive, to support each other, no obvious boss but people that

are skilled in, using people strengths of not of people's weaknesses”

Sharing the emphasis on collective responsibility, one of the education workers focussed more

on open communication and respect:

“I think it means more open and honest communication which is what we all want [...] but

also the idea of shared responsibility. [...] So finding we together, but we can all

contribute and respect each other’s points of view, and come to a way of moving forward

as an organisation and also as individuals I suppose. That’s how I hope it’s going to

work.”

Whilst the first two perspectives resonate very clearly with anarchistic ideals of direct democracy

and autonomy, by bringing respect and honest communication to the fore, this perspective

shifted away from a central concern with power - the touchstone of an anarchist analysis -

toward a more liberal concern with diversity. Moving even further away from anarchist ideals of

democratic participation, the funder raiser and financial co-ordinator, one of the longest serving

members of the organization, framed non-hierarchical organizing in terms of a hand-off ‘laissez-

faire’ management style. Whilst this was also concerned with giving individuals as much

autonomy as possible and trusting them to do a good job, there was no underlying analysis of

26

power and conflict and the basic idea was one of a unitarist goal for the organization, which all

would strive towards without conflict, if they were allowed to.

Whilst most of our respondents had a fairly clear idea of what ‘non-hierarchical’ meant, others

appeared less certain:

“Erm... hmmm... I don’t know really, to be honest. I don’t feel I could give you a fully

confident answer... I don’t have a clear idea of it. Erm... I mean, I guess there is... on

previous experiences it would be something... it would be something where each and

every, like, member of the team, and that includes volunteers, feels valued and

respected, and... and has an equal voice in decision making really. But there’s

transparency, unless it can be very, you know... like... genuinely like explained as to why

there can’t be transparency and that kind of thing. I don’t think that it should be... I think it

should be something that can be explaining in kind of lay terms but like for me it’s kind of

common sense really” (Youth Worker).

In this account, the kernel of participative decision making and equality remains, but is

combined with discourses of respect and transparency that draw upon other political traditions

than anarchism.

As these examples show, WE members presented ‘non-hierarchical’ organizing in a

variety of forms including respect, participation, openness, honesty, pro-activism, collaboration,

creativity, co-working, community, networks, laissez-faire management, autonomy/freedom.

The hierarchical structure which WE became in ‘phase three’ of its history is recounted by the

remaining members as one of alienation, control and ‘significant unhappiness’, with members

feeling disrespected and disempowered. By translating anarchist organizational principles into

‘non-hierarchical organizing’, a widespread commitment to change could be mobilised, but

rather than a positive organizational form, this was understood as an absence. Whilst

‘anarchism’ would be a full, but contentious signifier around which to mobilise organizational

27

change, ‘non-hierarchical organizing’ was an empty, non-signifier, which was uncontentious but

also lacking positive content. The result of this was that members could fill it with whatever they

saw as desirable, from fairly anarchistic ideals of pre-figuration, direct democracy and free

association, to more liberal ideas of diversity, respect and transparency.

This non-signification did, however, enable a degree of consensus about the desirability

of change and an agreement to work toward a non-hierarchical model of organization, whatever

that would look like. By bringing the organization’s members together to work through this in an

open, dialogical space, the process of moving toward non-hierarchical organizing embodied

some of the direct democratic ideals of self-determination that characterise contemporary

anarchist social movements. Arguing that ‘democracy’ and ‘anarchy’ have historically been used

interchangeably, David Graeber suggests that:

In its essence [democracy] is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought

to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in and egalitarian fashion, using whatever

means appear most conducive...

[It] is not necessarily defined by majority voting: it is, rather, the process of collective

deliberation on the principle of full and equal participation (Graeber, 2013: 183-186)

The absence at the heart of ‘non-hierarchical’ constituted a space within which the members of

WE would engage in precisely this kind of ‘process of collective deliberation’ about what equality

and participation might mean, and how they wanted to embody these principles in their

organizational structures and management practices. As one of the employees told us, the

process was about finding “a new way about how WE can work”. On the other hand, this

absence of non-signification led to an over emphasis on concrete practices which, stripped from

the contexts within which they had been developed and disconnected from active dialogues

about what democratic organizing might actually mean, were understood through more

established notions such as majority rule. To give a very clear example, we had run some

sessions on Consensus Decision Making (CDM) with WE, and provided them with some of

28

Seeds of Change’s guidance notes on the process (Seeds for Change 2013). The idea had

been to bring in one of the most characteristic organizational practices of the contemporary

anarchist social movements (Graeber, 2013; Maeckelbergh, 2009) into WE’s repertoire of

organizational practices. Unfortunately, this emphasis on tools and techniques, whilst relatively

accessible and easy to implement, was understood in light of members’ extant conceptions of

democratic organization. Without a clear, structuring framework of anarchism and direct

democracy, this left the practice open to misinterpretation. For example, one respondent

described the new practice in management meetings of 'voting with Jazz hands'. In discussing

this, it became clear that whilst she had understood the hand signals associated with CDM in

anarchist social movements, the underlying ideas of consensus and participation had not

travelled. Rather, this was understood as an unnecessarily complicated, and perhaps

unprofessional, way to ‘vote’ for a majority rule. Although this was certainly an improvement on

the managerial diktat of the Director, the lack of a substantive political ideology at the heart of

‘non-hierarchical’ organizing, left it open to interpretations in line with dominant hegemonic

conceptions of democracy and participation as one-person-one-vote and majority rule.

Conclusions

It might be seen that our case study represents one of failure, in that the concepts from

anarchism have been reappropriated and normalized as they have left their social movement

home. We however would like to argue for a more positive reading of this situation. Rather than

stating that there is an essential ‘essence’ of anarchism which can get lost through moving to a

new domain, alongside Gherardi and Nicolini we argue that ‘to transfer is to transform’ (2000). It

is through the process of taking an innovation that has emerged in one context to a new one the

concepts are transformed in the process of translation (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005). By

translating ‘anarchism’ and pre-figuration into conceptions of participative education and self-

determination already present in the organization through its Youth Work philosophy, anarchist

29

ideals could be discussed without the baggage of the term itself. By developing a narrative of

‘going back to the roots’ of the organization in direct action, anarchist ideas could be brought

into a context that, by then, was more characterised by the values of the Voluntary Sector,

Public Education and Local Government.

Whilst internally legitimating the development of anarchist forms of organizing, this left

members uncertain about the acceptability of these ideas and practices to other organizations

that WE depended upon. To enable a degree of institutional legitimation, Business School

academics were brought in to run quasi consultancy projects and workshops, and to advise on

organizational change and practices and to be stated in funding application forms to legitimise

the ‘unusual’ structure. Additionally, the discourse of ‘anarchist’ or even ‘democratic’

organization was replaced with ‘non-hierarchical organizing’. In relation to members’ previous,

negative experiences of hierarchical organization and managerialism, both at WE and in

previous employment, this enabled a consensus on the desirability of change and the direction

of change: away from hierarchy. As an empty signifier, however, ‘non-hierarchical’ lacked a

consistent and coherent political theory of organization. Although this opened a space for

‘collective deliberation on the principle of full and equal participation’ (Graeber, 2013: 186), it

also meant that members could retain their political investments and ideas, interpreting a

shared, but empty, language as consensus without engaging in serious discussion about what

others understood by these terms. This was exemplified by the interpretation of the practices of

CDM in terms of majority ‘voting with jazz hands’.

In summary, the translation of anarchist forms of organization to non-native contexts like

the Voluntary Sector has real potential but if this becomes focussed on attempting to transplant

organizational innovations and practices like Consensus Decision Making, it is likely that the

process of translation will constitute an assemblage that bears only slight resemblance to the

ideas and ideals of anarchist organization. This is particularly the case if a desire for positive

alternatives and a ‘critical performativity’ dominate the necessary first step of a careful critique of

30

power and domination: a critique that is at the very heart of any kind of anarchism. On the other

hand, the literal translation of ‘anarchism’ into a more empty concept like ‘non-hierarchical’,

whilst risking recuperation and a loss of substance, could open up the possibility of an open,

collective discussion over what self-determination, equality and full-participation might mean in a

range of organizational contexts. If such ideals could even be openly discussed and debated,

never mind acted upon, this would be a significant step forward both for practitioners and

organizational theorists, when compared to the melancholic analysis of hierarchical, capitalist

organization that almost completely dominates Critical Management Studies.

31

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