Post-capitalistic Politics in the Making: the Imaginary and Praxis of Alternative Economies.

Zanoni, Patricia
Contu, Alissa
Healy, Stephen
Mir, Raza

The record number of submissions we received in February 2016, apart from posing a major editorial challenge, confirmed our original intuition that a forum on the organization of alternative economies is timely. With this special issue, we would like to contribute to the current conversation on alternative economies, which is taking place in this journal (e.g. Bretos and Errasti, 2017; Cheney et al., 2014; Gibson-Graham, 1996b; Safri, 2015) and the broader organization studies community (e.g. Barin Cruz et al., 2015; Garmann Johnsen et al., 2017; Parker et al., 2014), with particular attention to what it would mean for us to redress our own privileging of critique and what that might entail for our own subjectivity and practice as critical scholars (Esper et al., this volume; Gibson-Graham, 1996b, 2008). This introduction is organized as follows. First, we situate the crisis of hegemony of neoliberal capitalism as a backdrop and rationale for the political significance and urgency of post-capitalist politics that re-socialize the economy (Gibson-Graham, 2006). We then situate the debate on diverse/alternative economies by delineating key concepts that have informed it, such as social imagination, autonomy, prefiguration and hope, and subjectivity and desire. We thus advance Derrida’s (1995) notion of the archive as a useful way to think the politics of performativity of alternative economies.  

Suggested citation

Zanoni, P., Contu, A., Healy, S., & Mir, R. (2017). Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies.