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Abstract

Cooperatives, post-growth organizations, common good organizations, community-supported agriculture, transition towns or ecovillages are examples of alternative forms of organizing economic exchange. Their social practices embody and reproduce alternative moral values to the ones dominating the economy and society. They are regarded as prefigurative: They prefigure an alternative economy, both by creating imaginaries of an alternative future and by showing their viability in their everyday practices. As such, they are important actors for a social transformation of the economy which is also reflected in an increasing scholarship on alternative organizing and prefiguration in organization studies. However, the meaning of prefiguration and prefigurative organizing in this literature is not always made explicit and differs across research work. Furthermore, how prefigurative organizing relates to alternative organizing remains rather vague, as does its close relationship to anarchism. In its first part, this paper therefore informs about the main use of the concept of prefiguration in social movement studies and organization studies and describes the various meanings attached to it in this literature. It then develops a definition of prefigurative organizing that not only allows to differentiate it from alternative organizing but also to reflect its inherently political nature—its intricate linkage to multiple struggles, tensions, and conflicts. In the second part, the paper presents a systematic overview of various types of struggles around prefigurative organizing and briefly introduces each of them with reference to exemplary research. Finally, the paper argues that studying prefigurative organizing involves an alternative praxis in academia.

Keywords

alternative organizing alternatives to capitalism anarchism prefiguration prefigurative organizing prefigurative politics real utopia social movements social transformation

We live in an era of multiple crises. Climate change, exploitation of natural resources, poverty, rising inequality, an increasing polarization in societies, and a global pandemic are serious issues that affect anybody’s chance to live a dignified, “flourishing life” (Wright, 2019). These pressing problems are often related to the functioning of the economy, considered as an outcome of neoliberal policies and economic activities in capitalist societies (e.g. Dörre et al., 2015; Wright, 2019). The awareness of destructive effects of neoliberal capitalist institutions has intensified the interest in alternative forms of organizing economic exchange (Banerjee et al., 2021; Barin Cruz et al., 2017; Mair and Rathert, 2021; Parker et al., 2014; Zanoni, 2020; Zanoni et al., 2017). Encompassing models for organizing the economy in alternative ways are gaining attention, among them degrowth economy (D’Alisa et al., 2015; Jackson, 2016), community economy (Gibson-Graham, 2006), or economy for the common good (Felber, 2015). Central to these models is the idea of changing the dominant organizing principles in the economy toward principles that have been characterized as alternative (Parker et al., 2014), postcapitalist (Zanoni et al., 2017), and anticapitalist (Wright, 2019). The core organizing principles of an alternative economy include a democratization of decision-making processes, equality and inclusion in the workplace and beyond, the primacy of moral values over economic values governing economic exchanges, and—depending on the concept—a collective ownership of the means of production.¹

Principles of alternative organizing have already become established in numerous organizations and communities on the ground; examples include cooperatives, post-growth organizations, common good organizations, solidarity-based producer-consumer networks, intentional communities or ecovillages. Organizations and communities such as these organize economic exchange in alternative ways—ways that embody the seeds of an envisioned future beyond capitalism, both by creating imaginaries of an alternative future and by showing the viability of them in their social practices. Scholars therefore also talk about “the prefigurative power of alternative praxis” (Zanoni, 2020: 7), and refer to prefiguration and prefigurative organizing in their discussions of alternatives to capitalism (D’Alisa et al., 2015; Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Maeckelbergh, 2011; Monticelli, 2018; Parker et al., 2014; Rätzer et al., 2018; Wright, 2019; Zanoni, 2020; Zanoni et al., 2017). Prefigurative organizations and communities are seen as “anticipat[ing] or enact[ing] some feature of an ‘alternative world’ in the present” (Yates, 2015: 4). Through changes in their everyday practices, these organizations attempt to bring about broader societal change. That is why scholars also relate to prefigurative organizations and communities as prefigurative social movements, defined as “initiatives that are developing within capitalism and are striving to prefigure a post-capitalist society” (Monticelli, 2018: 504). And this is also why these practice-based and embodied forms of organizing are considered as crucial for any fundamental transformation toward an alternative economy (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Holloway, 2010; Monticelli, 2018; Wright, 2010).

Scholarship on alternative organizing thus oftentimes refers to prefiguration and prefigurative organizing. But while we see an increasing reference to the concept in organization studies, its precise meaning is not always made explicit, and its understanding also differs across research work. Furthermore, it is not clear how prefigurative organizing relates to alternative organizing, and it sometimes looks as if both terms are used interchangeably. That makes it difficult to understand whether alternative organizing is always prefigurative or not which, as we will see later in the paper, can be an important aspect with regard to the potential contribution of alternatives to social transformation. There is also a close relationship to anarchism but it remains unclear whether, and if so how, prefiguration differs from anarchist approaches to organizing. Yates (2015) seminal article on prefiguration clarifies some of these issues but it primarily addresses social movement scholars and provides no insights into the role of the concept in organization studies. And while his empirical study reflects a few of the challenges and struggles around prefigurative organizing, literature in organization studies has revealed struggles of alternative organizing that are also likely to arise in prefigurative organizations and communities.

The aim of this paper is therefore to develop a notion of prefigurative organizing that not only allows to differentiate it from alternative organizing but also to reflect its inherently political nature in that prefiguring an alternative economy is intricately linked to struggles, tensions and conflict. To begin, I briefly consider the role of prefigurative organizations and communities in and for the social transformation of the economy. Next, I describe the main use of the concept of prefiguration in organization studies and social movement studies, thereby also addressing the various meanings attached to it in this literature. I continue to propose a definition of prefigurative organizing where organizing is prefigurative when three characteristics come together: (1) the rejection of dominant forms of organizing that are perceived as harming alternative moral principles, (2) the creation of forms of organizing with which envisioned alternative principles are instantiated in the present, and (3) the strive to instigate and/or contribute to a social transformation of the economy. While the first two characteristics are also indicative of alternative organizing, it is the imagination of, or the ambition to contribute to a social change beyond the confines of a single organization or community that differentiates prefigurative from alternative organizing. Each of these characteristics can be related to particular kinds of struggles that are, according to the primary origin and site of struggle, either internal or external. I therefore continue to present a systematic overview of struggles around prefigurative organizing and refer to exemplary research that has already looked into them. In sum, this article proposes a concept of prefigurative organizing and its struggles that allows us to access both its potential and its challenges. It thereby provides organization scholars with important theoretical means to further understand and analyze the role of organizations and communities in prefiguring an alternative economy.

Social transformation and prefigurative organizations and communities

Writers on the social transformation of the economy underscore the crucial importance of organizations and communities that reproduce alternative forms of organizing economic exchange in their daily practices and thereby prefigure an alternative economy (Schiller-Merkens, 2020).² Examples include ecovillages, degrowth communities organized around alternative economic principles such as solidarity and self-sufficiency (Trainer, 2012), alternative producer-consumer networks such as community-supported agriculture, sustainable community movement organizations (Forno and Graziano, 2014), as well as alternative organizations (Parker et al., 2014) such as post-growth organizations (Banerjee et al., 2021; Rätzer et al., 2018), worker-recovered enterprises (“empresas recuperadas,” Vieta, 2020) and common good organizations (Felber, 2015). What makes these organizations and communities alternative is that their social practices embody and reproduce alternative moral values to the ones dominating in society, the latter relating in particular to principles associated with capitalism such as profit maximization, efficiency or growth. Alternative moral values include, according to Wright (2013, 2019), equality, democracy, community and sustainability. This echoes Parker et al. (2014) who see autonomy, solidarity and responsibility as principles constituting an alternative organization. These alternative moral values are considered as being embodied in organizing practices such as assembly-based and consensus-driven decision-making, direct participation, collective deliberation and horizontal organizing.

As grassroots movements, these organizations and communities develop in the cracks, free spaces and niches of capitalist societies, or as Dinerstein and Pitts (2022: 3) put it, in “the fissures of a system in crisis.” Variously referred to as “real utopias” (Wright, 2010), “concrete utopias” (Dinerstein, 2015) or “praxis-oriented notions of utopia” (Dinerstein and Pitts, 2022), they are “pieces of emancipatory destination beyond capitalism within a society still dominated by capitalism” (Wright, 2019: 63). They reflect in their everyday practices that they are viable and that “another world is possible,” despite all the struggles, tensions and complexities involved in realizing alternatives. According to writers on social transformation, this embodiment of alternative values makes them central collective actors in fundamentally changing the economy and society. Prefigurative initiatives represent models and building blocks that reflect how an alternative economy could look like, thereby challenging the dominant economic system and holding the potential to cumulatively generate a qualitative shift in the dynamics of the economy: “The central theoretical idea is that building alternatives on the ground in whatever spaces are possible serves a critical ideological function by showing that alternative ways of working and living are possible, and potentially erodes constraints on the spaces themselves” (Wright, 2013: 20). While he is rather skeptical of a strategy of social transformation that only builds on prefiguring alternatives in the free spaces of the current system,³ scholars such as Holloway (2010) and Trainer (2012) believe that this incremental strategy is enough to lead to “a systemic collapse (without rupture) after which alternative modes of living and organizing that now are marginal will become prevalent” (D’Alisa and Kallis, 2020: 3).

Alternative and prefigurative organizing

Alternative organizations and communities are usually depicted as prefigurative (e.g. Monticelli, 2018; Parker et al., 2014; Wright, 2010; Zanoni, 2020) and prefiguration—and its related terms of prefigurative organizing, prefigurative praxis, and prefigurative politics—is a central notion in literature on social transformation toward an alternative economy. However, there are various understandings of prefigurative organizing in the literature, and it remains unclear what differentiates prefigurative from alternative organizing. In the following, I therefore start describing how social movement studies and organization studies draw on the concept of prefiguration and which meanings prevail in this literature. I then propose a definition of prefigurative organizing that also allows to relate it to alternative organizing.

Prefiguration as means-ends equivalence

Since the 1960s, prefiguration is an important concept for social movements. It started with the US civil rights and radical women’s movements in the 1960s (Breines, 1989; Polletta, 2002), and also describes the organizing practices of Mexican Zapatistas (Holloway, 2010), the global justice or alterglobalization movement (Graeber, 2002; Maeckelbergh, 2011), the Argentinian movement of “empresas recuperadas” (Sitrin, 2012; Vieta, 2020), the Occupy movement (Graeber, 2013; Reinecke, 2018) as well as anti-austerity mobilizations in Europe (Della Porta, 2015; Maeckelbergh, 2012; Simsa and Totter, 2017). In scholarship on these movements, the most common understanding of prefiguration is associated with what Yates (2015: 4) refers to as means-ends equivalence: it is “a way of doing mobilization where the means reflect the ends.” The political ends or envisioned outcomes of activism are thereby already expressed in or through the practices. The values and relations actors aspire to are not projected into a distant future but created and reproduced in the here and now of everyday practices (Maeckelbergh, 2011; Monticelli, 2018). In terms of Reinecke (2018: 1300), “[a]ctivists model or prefigure the future society at a micro-level that they hope to realize at a societal level, thereby instantiating radical institutional transformation in and through practice.”

Maeckelbergh (2009), for instance, shows in her work on the alterglobalization movement how diverse groups of activists instantiated envisioned principles of democracy and equality in the movement through organizing practices such as horizontality and deliberative, consensus-driven decision-making.⁴ Comparably, Graeber (2002) talks about the network-based forms of organizing in the alterglobalization movement that embodied principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Principles of democracy and equality were also central to the Occupy movement. In his book on the global Occupy movement, Graeber (2013) describes how occupiers created spaces of freedom in which they were able to live the value of radical democracy. Their organizing was prefigurative in that it sought to embody the kind of society they wished to create. Another example is Reinecke’s (2018: 1299) field study of Occupy London that provides insights into the difficulties and struggles of “enact[ing] the desired future society in the present.” She describes the failure of protesters to prefigure an equal society in the camps: they were unable to integrate occupiers who were homeless, and thus failed to realize the moral value of equality in their everyday practices.

While social movement research draws on the concept of prefiguration to look into the organizing processes of social movements, organization scholars refer to it in studies on organizing in alternative and anarchist organizations and communities. The basic understanding of prefiguration in organization studies is also in the sense of means-ends equivalence. For instance, Reedy et al. (2016), draw on the concept of prefiguration to study identity work in alternative organizations. Prefigurative practices, understood as “a form of politics in which desired outcomes are created in the here and now rather than projected into the future” (Reedy et al., 2016: 1554), thereby allow organization members to realize more autonomous selves. With the aim of instantiating “prefigurative ideals” like autonomy, non-hierarchy, self-organization and self-construction, organization members rely on alternative organizing practices that include horizontal organizing, consensus decision-making and mutual aid. Sutherland et al. (2014: 770) refer to prefigurative politics to describe how anarchist organizations constructed a collective form of leadership through democratic and participative practices and thereby enacted “the kind of social relations they wish to see in wider society.” Some papers in organization studies directly build on Maeckelbergh (2011) and her understanding of prefiguration as means-ends equivalence to study organizing processes in social movement organizations that should prefigure “an inclusive social order of the economy” (Laamanen et al., 2019: 312). Both Laamanen et al.’s (2019) study on timebanks and Simsa and Totter’s (2017) study on organizations in the Spanish Indignados or 15M movement reflect the struggles inherent in prefiguring alternative principles of direct, participatory democracy and equality through horizontal organizing.

Prefiguration as a direct form of politics

Prefiguration is widespread in progressive, left-wing movements in which values of radical democracy, equality, diversity, freedom and community are embodied in particular organizing practices, most notably in consensus-oriented, participatory decision-making in which everyone gets a voice. Prefiguration is always used here in the sense of means-ends equivalence but it is also commonly related to another aspect: the “detachment from institutional politics” (Della Porta, 2015: 163) or “disinterest in seizing state power” (Monticelli, 2018: 21). Social movements are considered as prefigurative not only due to their attempt to create the future in present relationships but also because “social change isn’t deferred to a later date by demanding reforms from the state, or by taking state power and eventually instituting these reforms” (Sitrin, 2006: 4). Instead, prefigurative movements are said to focus upon direct social action—“upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself, instead of claiming something from the state or other power holders” (Bosi and Zamponi, 2015: 367). Thus social movement studies draw on the concept of prefiguration also to differentiate direct forms of collective mobilization from indirect mechanisms of social change whereby activists target the state through contentious politics (Tarrow, 1998).

Still, prefiguration remains a form of politics, although a more constructive one that not only includes negation but also the creation of an alternative. In terms of Monticelli (2018: 511), “prefigurative movements end-up (re)politicizing what is usually non-politicized: everyday life, the spaces of private, economic and social (re)production through conscious processes of organization and not-necessarily through confrontational actions.” Politics includes the refusal and negation of a dominant system (or certain of its organizing principles); for most examples of prefigurative politics it is capitalism. One illustrative example is the study by Kokkinidis (2015) who describes how various workers’ collectives that emerged in Greece in the wake of the Great Recession created autonomous spaces guided by horizontality and direct democracy. They practiced “prefigurative politics” in that “autonomy is not a mere organizational tool but a way of doing politics, of bringing the future into the present, which is simultaneously a collective act of refusal and creation: refusing a set of values and practices embedded in capitalist relations while experimenting with anti-capitalist practices.” Kokkinidis (2015: 848) hereby emphasizes that the critique and rejection of the current economic system are an inherent part of prefiguration, besides the instantiantion of real utopias in the present. This also reflects Dinerstein’s (2015) understanding of prefiguration which includes both the negation of given realities and the creation of new realities—“concrete utopias” as she calls them—that provide vivid examples for an alternative economy and society. Although not always made explicit, both rejection and creation form part of the understanding of prefiguration in organization studies and social movement studies.

Prefiguration as the collective construction of alternative organizations and communities

Prefiguration and its related terms are not only used to describe organizing in temporarily bounded adversarial mobilizing acts such as in occupying camps. Worker-recuperated enterprises, self-managed social centers, solidarity-based exchange networks, local food policy councils, collective purchasing groups, timebanks and ecovillages are also commonly seen as examples of prefiguration (Bosi and Zamponi, 2015; Forno and Graziano, 2014; Laamanen et al., 2019; Machin and Schiller-Merkens, 2022; Parker et al., 2014; Vieta, 2020; Wright, 2019). These grassroots initiatives “organize from below” (Misoczky et al., 2017) in prefigurative ways, they collectively construct alternatives from the bottom up in the niches and free spaces of the current economic system.

Thus prefiguration not only includes more confrontational and short-term forms of protest as reflected in acts of occupying but also non-confrontational and long-term activism in the economy through the social construction of alternative organizations and communities. This echoes Yates (2015) who underscores that writers such as Epstein (1991) and Breines (1989) already used the term to describe community building in the movements of the 1960s and the collective construction of counterinstitutions as a complement to mobilization-related, adversarial protest activities. He therefore proposes that these different forms of politics—more short-term, confrontational and mobilization-related protest forms and the long-term social construction of alternative organizations and communities—should be seen as complementary in prefigurative politics. While this differentiation is relevant, the focus of this paper is on gaining a deeper understanding of prefigurative organizing in and by organizations and communities.

Prefiguration and anarchism

The emphasis on direct action and the refusal of state power as a driver for radical social change in most of the literature on prefigurative movements reveal the intricate linkage of prefiguration to anarchism and Open Marxism. Indeed, the understanding of prefiguration as means-ends equivalence goes back to the Open Marxist Boggs (1977: 100) who was the first to define prefigurative politics as “the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.” His definition has to be seen in relation to the rising form of political protest in the 1960s that was based on an anarchist critique of all forms of authoritarianism coupled with a turn toward direct action where people “govern themselves democratically without domination or hierarchy” (Parker et al., 2007: 76). Open Marxist like Boggs, Holloway or Dinerstein reject the state fetishism of other strands of Marxism, and see the state as being deeply enmeshed in and corrupted from capitalism. By referring to Latin American movements such as Mexican Zapatismo and worker-owned cooperatives and reclaimed factories in Argentina, they show how radical change is possible without taking the power of the state. Dinerstein (2015, 2017) refers to them as “hope movements” that move from contentious claim-making toward the state to the construction of alternatives by prefiguring “concrete utopias” in the present. They engage in an “experiential critique (. . .) rooted in everyday life, in the body, in social relations, in communal practices” (Dinerstein, 2017). Central to them is the anarchist principle of autonomy; instead of taking power over the state, they take power over their lives (Böhm et al., 2010; Parker et al., 2007).

Anarchism also pervades the prefigurative organizing of the global justice movement, the Occupy movement and anti-austerity movements in Europe (e.g. Graeber, 2013; Simsa and Totter, 2017). Contemporary anarchist principles such as “mutual aid (cooperation and reciprocity fueled by a shared sense of struggle); anti-authoritarianism (with the state as the highest, though not only, expression of top-down authority); decentralization (so as to diffuse centralization of power); autonomy (and by extension self-governance); and direct action (as a necessary method for achieving liberation)” (Manski et al., 2020: 14–15) are common to all of them, coupled with a deep commitment to thereby realize an egalitarian, participatory and direct democracy. Given the intricate linkage of anarchism and prefiguration, it is not surprising that some authors use these terms interchangeably, such as when talking about anarchist or prefigurative organizations in the Spanish 15M movement (Simsa and Totter, 2017).

Prefiguration, social change and diffusion

Prefiguration is political, also because it is coupled with aiming for a broader social change. It is a form of politics in the making where change happens incrementally through the everyday practices of situated actors. The political aspect of prefiguration shows itself in people’s “preparedness to act in order to change wider society” (Yates, 2015: 15). In prefigurative organizations and communities, people strive to be a role model for other actors, they want to inspire others to follow their alternative practices of organizing economic exchange. Kokkinidis (2015: 862) describes that workers aimed at disseminating and circulating their political ideas beyond the boundaries of their own collectives; they not only wanted to create “a laboratory for social change” for themselves but also to inspire more people to participate in comparable political actions. Similarly, Farias (2017: 7) writes that members of an intentional community saw the invitation of outsiders into their communes “as a necessary condition for social change” with the “primary goal (..) to stand as an engine for similar movements.” And Yates (2015: 19) states for members of autonomous social centers: “When participants said that their actions or experiments were political ‘in themselves’ or that ‘living differently was political’ per se, they nearly always added disclaimers with a pragmatic sense of political impact: they were an ‘example’ to be seen and communicated; people wanted to ‘inspire’ change and diffuse perspectives.” Yates therefore considers the diffusion of alternative ideas, principles and practices to wider networks and the public as a defining element of prefiguration that differentiates prefigurative initiatives from sub- or counter-cultural groups.

Defining prefigurative organizing

Based on this overview of organization and social movement studies’ reference to the concept of prefiguration, it is now possible to come to define what makes organizing prefigurative. As will be seen, the definition builds on the core characteristic of means-ends equivalence with which prefiguration is most commonly associated in the literature. However, it extends this common understanding by proposing two further characteristics in order to reflect the inherently political nature of prefigurative organizing and to disentangle its meaning from alternative organizing.

Centrally, prefigurative organizing involves the collective creation of alternatives to dominant forms of organizing. Alternative moral principles are realized in the present rather than projected into a distant future. It is this instantiation and embodiment of envisioned alternative principles in social practices—means-ends equivalence—that is commonly seen as the core defining characteristic of prefigurative organizing. However, underlying this understanding is another characteristic that is not always made explicit. Creating alternatives is coupled with, or originates in, the negation of dominant forms of organizing (Dinerstein, 2015; Kokkinidis, 2015). Oftentimes, rejection is directed at the whole economic system of capitalism, when it is seen as a major cause of serious global problems and as a barrier to disseminating alternative moral values in society. However, there are also prefigurative initiatives that do not explicitly reject capitalism but other authoritarian and oppressive forms of organizing with regard to both humans and nature. What unites all of them, and is inherent to prefiguration, is the rejection of forms of organizing that are perceived as detrimental to principles such as democracy, equality, solidarity and responsibility.⁵

Finally, prefigurative organizing is political, meaning here that the actors imagine and strive for having an impact on a broader social change of the economy. While prefiguration refers to a “politics of immanence” (Reedy et al., 2016: 5) whereby desired outcomes of political action are created in the here and now of situated practices, reducing it to micro-politics of particular groups would neglect prefigurative actors’ broader political aspiration: their aim to contribute to a social transformation of the economy and society. Empirical studies of prefigurative organizing further suggest that oftentimes, it is not only an ambition to impact social transformation in and through particular organizing practices but already includes mobilization and collective action toward it. Prefigurative organizations and communities are keen to inspire others to adopt their alternative models and practices, with many of them already mobilizing accordingly. Building on Yates (2015), we can thus say that it is particularly this aspect of diffusion—the collective attempt, or at least the ambition, to circulate alternative practices, beliefs and values beyond the boundaries of the own organization or community—, that differentiates prefigurative organizations from alternative ones.⁶

To summarize, it is the actors’ critique of the status quo and their ambition to contribute to social transformation that is peculiar to prefiguration and reflects its inherently political nature. While these additional qualifiers of prefiguration already pervade the literature on prefigurative organizing, they remain less explicit besides the main understanding of creating alternatives that embody envisioned alternative principles in the present. I therefore propose to see organizing as prefigurative when three characteristics come together: (1) the rejection of forms of organizing economic exchange that are considered as harmful for the realization of alternative moral principles (2) the creation of forms of organizing that embody and instantiate alternative moral principles in the present, and (3) the ambition to contribute to a social transformation of the economy. This definition goes beyond the usage of prefiguration simply as means-ends equivalence that is common in organization and social movement studies. I herein follow Yates (2015) who argues that means-ends equivalence cannot be a precise qualifier of prefiguration (see also Parker, 2021). Most importantly, it is not only in prefigurative organizations that means and ends are somehow equivalent but common “in any social group or network with shared goals, whether it be a cultural grouping, business or other organisation [where interaction] is always likely to reflect some overarching ethical and political values to some degree” (Yates, 2015: 18).

At the same time, the definition does not directly associate prefiguration with anarchism in that the absence of seizing state power is not seen as a defining characteristic of prefiguration. This allows to consider different collective identities of prefigurative organizations and communities, some of which might be more anarchist than others. There are also divergent views on how to achieve social transformation among actors in prefigurative organizations and communities, some of them embracing the idea to also targeting the state for support (Wright, 2019). Furthermore, governmental actors, particularly at municipial level, are already actively involved in a variety of organizations that prefigure an alternative economy and society (one example beingin, food policy councils, Machin and Schiller-Merkens, 2022). Concepts such as the “prefigurative state” (Cooper, 2017) reflect this intricate linkage between state actors, civil society and citizens at the local level where they collectively organize through councils to prefigure a society of direct democracy (see also Wright, 2010). Also Dinerstein (2017) argues that state actors and prefigurative organizations should co-construct policy through “prefigurative translation” to adequately translate alternative organizing practices (her example are social and solidarity economy practices) into state policy. Thus state support for prefigurative organizing already goes beyond the mere non-intervention in the free spaces and niches of prefigurative movements as envisioned by anarchism but includes collaboration.

Struggles around prefigurative organizing

Struggles are inherent to prefigurative organizing (Dinerstein, 2015; Monticelli, 2018; Zanoni, 2020). According to Dinerstein and Pitts (2022: 7), prefiguration is not the result of the process of creating a new society in the present, but the result of “a struggle with, against and beyond capitalist social relations.” Some of the tensions, contradictions, setbacks and unintended consequences of prefiguring alternative realities can be discussed in relation to the three constitutive characteristics developed above. First, rejecting the dominant principles in the economy involves ongoing “processes of struggle with, against and beyond the state, the law and capital” (Zanoni, 2020: 12). The second characteristic refers to the attempt to collectively create alternative practices where struggles can arise in relation to experimentation. Failure to live up to one’s ideals and to realize alternative moral principles in everyday practices can cause struggles in the creation of alternatives. And finally, diffusing alternative organizing to contribute to a fundamental transformation of the economy is—as social change processes in general—a contentious political endeavor rife with conflicts, contestation and critique.

All of those struggles, with regard to their core origin and primary site of occurrence, have an internal and an external aspect to them (see Table 1). The internal aspect relates to struggles within and between prefigurative organizations and communities, in part due to the heterogeneity of actors involved. Despite sharing the underlying moral values of alternative organizing, actors can diverge in their opposition against dominant principles in the economy, can disagree on the processes and ways of organizing in alternative ways, and can have diverging views on the strategies of social transformation, or the question of how to allow alternative organizing practices to diffuse more widely in society. Struggles can also primarily originate and enfold externally, due to the embeddedness of prefigurative organizations and communities in the context of a contested economic system that mediates the outcome of prefigurative organizing.

Table 1.

Struggles around prefigurative organizing.

Prefigurative organizingPrimary origin and site of struggle	Opposing dominant principles in the economy	Creating alternatives	Diffusing alternatives/instigating social transformation
Internal(heterogeneity of actors)	• Different stances toward dominant economic system• different degrees of alternativeness	• Contestation around experimentation• Failure to live up to ideals	• Diverging views on appropriate strategy of social transformation
External (embeddedness in contested economic system)	• Negating the dominant economic system in society	• Resources partly drawn from a contested system• Degeneration	• Opposition from incumbent actors• Potential rise of countermovements

Opposing dominant principles in the economy

While prefigurative organizations and communities generally share a set of moral values and are united in their aim to contribute to a social transformation of the economy and society, there is a great variety of ideas, beliefs, collective identities and practices within and between them. For instance, worker cooperatives and community-supported agriculture (CSA) networks both seek to establish alternative production and consumption processes with which moral values such as equality, fairness and solidarity can be realized. But the way how they achieve it can remarkably differ, as can their stance toward the dominant economic system. Whereas a CSA network might radically oppose the industrialized agricultural system in which capitalist values dominate, worker cooperatives are sometimes less radical in their opposition against the current system, despite generally rejecting and working against some of its detrimental consequences. One example is the Mondragon cooperative model (Cheney et al., 2014) that is based on values of participatory democracy and labor solidarity but is rather uncritical toward the growth imperative of capitalism and “still plays by the rules of a growth economy” (Banerjee et al., 2021: 346). Referring to Parker et al. (2014: 364), we can therefore state that “[n]ot all alternatives are ‘against’ everything, or ‘against’ the same things.” Thus prefigurative initiatives can differ in their radicalness; each organization and community is unique in its degree of “alternativeness,” already when it comes to opposing dominant principles in contemporary economy. This “alternativeness” is not fixed or stable but is produced, reproduced and changed in the social processes of each organization, where organization members bring in their individual perspectives, beliefs and ideas and continously negotiate it. Struggles pertain to those processes.

Opposing the dominant economic system and/or any of its principles also comes with major struggles for prefigurative organizations and communities in their relations with outside actors. They are embedded in a contested economic context that shapes the way of life of the majority of people. It not only shapes econonomic exchanges but pervades into all areas of social life and is deeply engrained in politics, culture, rules and institutions. Wright (2010) therefore differentiates various obstacles to prefiguring an alternative economy. Among them are legal rules and state institutions that are designed in a way that raises the costs of collective action challenging the current economic system, and that filters out practices and policies that would threaten it. It also includes individual actors’ beliefs, values, habits and tastes that are influenced by an ideology and culture in favor of the dominant economic system, and whose welfare is (still) tied to its functioning. This institutionalization of contested economic principles in society puts major obstacles to prefigurative initiatives, including challenges of sustaining opposition in the long term. Because prefigurative initatives develop within a contested system, not outside of it, they are always confronted with it in their social relations with external actors. Dinerstein (2015), for instance, describes the struggles in relations with the state when prefigurative ideals and practices become translated—and eventually co-opted and deradicalized—into neoliberal governance and policy agendas. Monticelli (2018) mentions some of the mechanisms that prefigurative organizations face in their relations with market actors, including primitive accumulation, expropriation or commodity fetishism. Emerging and evolving in the context of a contested system thus continuously produces struggles that prefigurative organizations and communities have to navigate in their outside relations. In the light of those challenges, prefigurative initiatives can struggle to sustain opposition against the system as a whole, and might rather focus on opposing only a few of its organizing principles.

Experimental creation of alternatives

Prefigurative communities and organizations are commonly seen as laboratories that experiment with alternative ways of organizing, alternative practices and new forms of social relations in the economy. For instance, ecovillages create “new spaces through experimentation with alternative modes of producing, consuming, and living” (Monticelli, 2018: 510), “they are micro-laboratories running loads of experiments” (Litfin, 2014: 205); workers’ collectives experiment with alternative practices to organize work and life guided by principles of cooperation and equality (Kokkinidis, 2015); and social movement organizations experiment with horizontality (Maeckelbergh, 2011) and partial forms of organizing to prefigure an alternative societal order (Laamanen et al., 2019; Simsa and Totter, 2017). Yates (2015: 14) therefore argues that experimentation is one of the processes that constitute prefiguration.

Experimentation around prefigurative organizing is characterized by processes of trial and error (Monticelli, 2018). It can therefore lead to unintended consequences, setbacks and failure, the most studied of which is the failure to live up to the envisioned alternative principles in social relations and practices. One example is the failure to realize direct, participatory democracy and equality in the light of arising oligarchic tendencies in internal processes (“oligarchization”). Organization scholarship has shown the emergence of authority, domination, informal leadership and power structures in prefigurative organizations despite their attempt at creating free, autonomous and horizontal spaces (e.g. Laamanen et al., 2019; Reedy et al., 2016; Simsa and Totter, 2017). The failure to realize alternative moral principles can go back to ongoing struggles about how to organize the tasks within the organization or community. Diverging views among its members about an appropriate level of decided social order (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011), or the acceptance of a decided social order at all, are sources of “conflict and perpetual contestation” (Kokkinidis, 2015: 852). Thus in the processes of creating alternatives, there are always struggles when organization members experiment with new forms of organizing such as rotating leadership roles (Sutherland et al., 2014), the creation of assemblies (Reedy et al., 2016; Simsa and Totter, 2017) or stigmergy and adhocracy (Laamanen et al., 2019)⁷ in order to realize principles of democracy and equality within their organizations.

Reproducing and maintaining core alternative values is also difficult in the light of the embeddedness in and dependency from a contested system. As already mentioned, prefigurative organizations and communities develop in a contested environment and draw resources from it. To survive in social contexts dominated by contradictory and/or opposing principles affects prefigurative organizing and there is always the threat of degeneration, that is that alternative initiatives “will have to adopt the same organizational forms and priorities as capitalist business in order to survive” (Cheney et al., 2014: 599). Particularly research on worker cooperatives has provided insights on the difficulties, challenges and tensions of pursuing alternative values in globalized markets. For instance, Webb and Cheney (2014) show that market competition with large conventional firms can increase the pressure to grow in order to realize comparable economies of scale, creating in particular struggles as to how to continually assure democracy and equality under the growing size of the organization. These authors also describe challenges of drawing financial resources from for-profit investment firms that do not acknowledge the alternative moral principles of cooperatives, thereby challenging their autonomy. Comparably, Vieta’s research on worker-recovered enterprises in Argentina provides insights into “the tensions of pitting democratized cooperatives against capitalist markets” (Vieta and Ruggeri, 2009: 198). They describe struggles as to how to organize production processes in alternative ways, with practices including horizontality and democratic self-management, and at the same time ensure that the organization remains viable (read: economically sustainable) in capitalist markets (see also Vieta, 2020).

Diffusing alternatives

Prefiguring an alternative economy involves striving for a social transformation of the economy and the aim to diffuse alternative beliefs, values and practices beyond the confines of single organizations and communities. Diffusing alternatives in the economy is a contentious political process (King and Pearce, 2010). It involves conflict, contestation and struggles not only in relations with outside actors but already among the prefigurative actors themselves (Phillips and Jeanes, 2018). There can be divergent ideas about how to diffuse, about how to achieve and organize toward social transformation. Social transformation scholars argue that a fundamental transformation of our economies requires both the concerted collective action of civil society-based actors and the involvement of the state (D’Alisa and Kallis, 2020; Schiller-Merkens, 2020; Wright, 2019).⁸ The numerous prefigurative initiatives on the ground would have to collectively organize to become the “robust collective actors” (Wright, 2019) needed “to form a coherent alternative to a politically, economically, and culturally institutionalized system” (Parker et al., 2014: 363). Young and Schwartz (2012: 234), for instance, write that “successful liberation requires building complex organizations that unite prefigurative liberatory movements into formations capable of engaging dominant institutions, particularly the state.” And D’Alisa and Kallis (2020: 7) point out that “a transition [toward an alternative economy] requires a cultural change of common senses through the creation of new alternative spaces and institutions and the generalization of these changes through intervention at the level of political institutions.”

Prefigurative initiatives thus have to decide upon questions such as these: What is the appropriate strategy of social transformation (Wright, 2019)? How and with whom do we collectively organize and build connective structures that allow diffusing our alternatives? And what role should the state play therein? (Monticelli, 2021) Given the heterogeneity of prefigurative organizations and communities and the plurality of actors involved, these questions can be answered in numerous and even contradictory ways. Actors with an anarchist anti-authoritarian identity who “advocate the idea that autonomy from capital must include autonomy from the state” (Böhm et al., 2010: 21) are rather unwilling to engage with state politics. Monticelli (2018: 513) exemplifies some of respective controversies that can arise in prefigurative organizations: “Isn’t it exactly through the interaction with the capitalist context that prefigurative movements are going to erode it? Isn’t it exactly when a municipality, a state, a supranational institution or even a multinational corporation starts to recognise, for instance, that the social and solidarity economy is a ‘best practice’ and thus starts to encourage its growth through funds and favourable policies, that prefigurative movements can consider themselves as having succeeded in their goals?” These controversial questions suggest that how, and whether at all, the state should be part of prefiguring an alternative economy is likely to be a contested issue in prefigurative organizations and communities.

Furthermore, some actors, again in particular the more anarchist ones, might reject the creation of more formalized connections to other prefigurative initiatives, seeing them as a form of decided social order that threatens their liberative ideals (Young and Schwartz, 2012). However, without building more persistent networks across prefigurative organizations and communities,⁹ where relationships are also enabled by establishing more formalized organizational forms, a more radical resistance against the dominant economic system and the creation of alternatives would not only be difficult to sustain. Any localism and parochial focus on the “micropolitics of self-transformation” (Zanoni, 2020: 8) without building connective structures among each other would also challenge the contribution of prefigurative initiatives to a broader social change and ultimately deny their transformative potential (Schiller-Merkens, 2020).¹⁰ As Reinecke (2018: 1302) puts it, “they [would] risk building isolated, inward-looking communities that escape rather than change wider society.” Thus the tension between liberty and community—of remaining locally rooted and autonomous and at the same time interconnected with other initiatives—is likely to create ongoing negotiations, struggles and disputes within and between prefigurative organizations and communities.

The diffusion of alternatives will not only be “politically charged from beneath (i.e. by those supporting alternatives)” but also “politically contested from above (i.e. by powerful incumbents)” (King and Pearce, 2010: 258; Soule and Roggeband, 2019). The prefigurative initiatives represent embodied forms of critique; they are based on moral principles whose broader realization in society would affect the current distribution of income, wealth and status. In this respect, they can pose an existential threat to the actors currently dominating the economy. The more prefigurative organizations and communities show the viability of their “real utopian” alternatives, and the more support and attention they receive from outside actors, the greater is the likelihood that incumbents react by forming a countermovement against the prefigurative movements (Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996). Incumbent actors in the economy dispose of a substantial potential to forcefully countermobilize for reasons related to the institutionalization of the contemporary system in society, including their institutionalized interconnections between each other (for instance, through industrial associations and regular industry events) as well as their intricate relationships to state actors. But, as Zanoni (2020) reminds us, while dominant institutions—she refers to capitalist ones—mediate the prefigurative potential of alternative organizations and communities, mediation is never definitive. The outcome of mobilization for and countermobilization against a fundamental transformation of the economy is open, in part due to the changing institutionalization of the economic system itself. What remains sure, though, is that prefiguring an alternative economy and therefore diffusing alternative values, beliefs and practices in a society organized against those alternatives, is a contentious political project that will be rife with conflict, contestation and struggles.

Contribution and outlook

Alternative organizations and communities are crucial for and in the fundamental transformation toward a more just, fair and environmentally sustainable economy. Particularly those that prefigure an alternative economy by also aiming for a broader social change are central actors in processes of social transformation. While their practices embody alternative moral principles and thereby reflect imaginaries of an alternative economy (and in that sense can be seen as utopias), they also show that they are real, that is, that they are viable despite the contradictions, complexities and unintended consequences involved in prefigurative organizing (Wright, 2010, 2019). As real utopias, prefigurative organizations and communities are important research objects for critical organization scholars who envision a performative role of academia in processes of social transformation (e.g. Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022; Zanoni et al., 2017).

Conceptually, studying prefigurative organizing presupposes an understanding of what prefiguration is, how it relates to alternative and anarchist organizing and what major struggles it entails. This paper contributes to these open questions by providing insights into the use of the prefiguration concept in literature on organizations, communities and social movements. Its particular contribution lies in developing a definition that allows to disentangle the meaning of alternative and prefigurative organizing, to understand prefigurative organizing’s relationship to anarchism, and to capture its inherently political nature. Prefigurative organizing is always collective political action, and the overview of struggles further reflects that struggles arise not only within organizations—which has been the focus of critical organization scholarship on alternative organizations—but also in social relations with outside actors. These involve in particular struggles with, against and beyond capitalist social relations (Dinerstein, 2015; Zanoni, 2020), which asks for more theoretical approaches that acknowledge the embeddedness of organizations in their societal context. In sum, this article provides organization scholars who are interested in social transformation and the role of prefigurative and alternative organizing a conceptual basis to approach and analyze these phenomena in their research.

As an outlook, let me end with some reflections on how to use theoretical concepts such as prefigurative organizing in our research work. The quest for social theory and conceptual clarity should not be misunderstood as suggesting a top-down approach to the empirical field that prevails in academia. Instead, I follow Zanoni et al. (2017) who are convinced that performativity starts with an alternative praxis in academia. Building on Gibson-Graham (2006), they propose a paradigm of “weak theory”—“theory that remains close to the phenomenon under study, to do as little violence as possible to its richness and complexity and, most importantly, not to foreclose (the imagination of) any future (. . .) weak theory should be seen as a strategy to become more appreciative of potentialities” (Zanoni et al., 2017: 583). From this perspective, theoretical pieces such as an analytical categorization of struggles around prefigurative organizing are to be considered as helpful tools for sorting and understanding realities in the first place, without foreclosing their scrutiny and further development while being in the field. It also means that imaginaries of an alternative future—as relevant as they are for performativity (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022)—have to originate in the empirical field and become co-constructed collectively with prefigurative actors who probe, test and experiment with alternatives in their everyday practices. We should co-create imaginaries of an alternative future economy together with those who already create and reproduce real utopias in the present.

To realize this alternative paradigm in academia we need, I again agree with Zanoni et al. (2017), a radically different praxis as academics, one that delves into praxis and values the plurality, multiplicity and heterogeneity of practical knowledge. As practical knowledge is deeply rooted in unique social contexts, it also requires currently underrepresented ways of knowledge generation in academia where knowledge emerges in democratic and participatory collaboration with the prefigurative organizations and communities. At the same time, we should refrain from any uncritical glorification of the practical knowledge embedded in local organizations and communities. Their contribution to a fundamental social transformation of the economy can be limited, not only due to the multiple struggles and perpetual conflicts in their everyday practices and the ever looming risk of failure but also in the light of the capacity of the dominant economic system to constantly reproduce itself. The crucial role of academics therefore also lies in elevating and combining the knowledge generated in studying numerous prefigurative organizations and communities on the ground. In this way, we can also gain a deeper understanding of the conditions for a more sustained prefigurative organizing. By studying what fosters and what impedes the diffusion of alternative practices through prefigurative organizations and communities, we might also find answers to the question of how to scale up their alternative forms of organizing to allow a more fundamental transformation of the economy (Schiller-Merkens, 2020).

Thus to conclude, our role as engaged organization scholars is to co-produce knowledge that allows prefigurative organizations to sustain their real utopias and prefigurative praxis despite all the struggles involved, and to elevate and recombine this knowledge to contribute to the social transformation of the economy that we all envision. While our concepts and theories seem to be only weak theoretical tools in this performative endeavor, they are nevertheless important sensitizing and ordering devices, both in the knowledge generation in collaboration with prefigurative organizations and communities and in the greater transmission of our knowledge about prefiguration in society.

Footnotes

I am grateful to the editor Iain Munro and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and guidance throughout the review process. Earlier drafts of this paper benefited from insightful discussions at the SASE Annual Meeting and the EGOS Colloquium. I also thank Amanda Machin for helpful comments on the latest version of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Simone Schiller-Merkens

Author biography

Simone Schiller-Merkens is a Senior Researcher at the Reinhard Mohn Institute of Management,Witten/Herdecke University. She holds a PhD from the University of Cologne. Her research at the intersection of organization studies,social movement studies and economic sociology currently focuses on the collective action of organizing for social transformation – through alternative organizing,prefiguration,social movement activism and moral market entrepreneurship. She has published in journals such as Research in the Sociology of Organizations,Scandinavian Journal of Management and Historical Social Research,and has co-edited The Contested Moralities of Markets (Emerald,2019). She is one of the co-organizers of the EGOS Standing Working Group Social Movements and Organizations .

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