Alternative Economic Organizing as ‘Change from Within’: Evolution or Inertia?

What are the alternatives to currently dominant forms of economic organizing? And how can researchers help promote alternatives that offer hope for a more sustainable future? The present chapter begins by examining how these questions are currently addressed in the fields of critical management studies, diverse economies, and alternative organization, respectively. On this basis, the chapter develops alternative economic organizing as the inherently interdisciplinary study of the conditions of possibility for progressive change from within the existing economic order. Alternative economic organizing finds its conceptual grounding in the performativity of economics, which posits that economies are processes, not substances. Hence, economic orders emerge from, are maintained in, and reformed through continuous and contentious struggles over the in- and exclusion of diverse elements in social and material arrangements. While existing studies of the performativity of economics tend to limit their purview to the explanation of how the economy is currently organized, studies of alternative economic organizing are unapologetically normative. Hence, the chapter concludes, by shifting attention from currently dominant forms of economic organizing towards ‘actually existing alternatives’ researchers may leverage their own performativity and help bring about change from within.