Composite relations: Democratic firms balancing the general and the particular

Abstract

This paper focuses on a central coordinative tension in alternative, democratic organizations: They need to maintain formal equality and democratic governance, but they also have to support their members in their autonomy and be sensitive toward their particularities. Based on an empirical study of two democratic-collectivist firms, this paper combines insights from Laurent Thévenot’s sociology of engagement, and Zelizer’s notion of relational work to analyze how firms can establish “composite relations” that enable to balance the general and the particular. The paper offers two main contributions to the literature on alternative organizations: First, it describes possibilities for compositions between particular, personal relations, which are often of high importance in alternative organizations, and general, standardized relations, which are centrally important for all modern organizations. Second, while influential work on alternative organization assumes, that the tension between social values and business is quasi-equal to a tension between informal and formalized coordination in organizations, this paper develops a more nuanced perspective on the interrelation between morality and coordination in alternative organizations.