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This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of academia through academic activism are gaining momentum. The authors’ take on academic activism builds on feminist thought and practice, a tradition that remains overlooked in contributions on resisting neoliberalisation in academia. Feminism has been long committed to highlighting the epistemic inequalities endured by women and marginalised people in academia. This study aims to draw on radical feminist perspectives and on the notion of prefigurative organising to rethink the topic of academic activism. How can feminist academic activism resist the neoliberal academia?

This study explores this question through a multi-vocal autoethnographic account of the event-organising process.

The production of feminist space within academia was shaped through material and epistemic tensions. The study critically reflects on the extent to which the event can be read as prefigurative feminist self-organising and as neoliberal academic career-focused self-organising. The study concludes that by creating a space for sisterhood and learning, the empowering potential of feminist organising is experienced.

The study shows both the difficulties and potentials for feminist organising within the university. The concept of “prefiguration” provides a theoretical framework enabling us to grasp the ongoing efforts on which feminist organising relies. It escapes a dichotomy between success and failure that fosters radical pessimism or optimism potentially hindering political action.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of workplace democracy in contemporary organisations. While organisational democracy is a popular theme in contemporary management literature, it is often asserted that participatory democracy is impractical and thus representative forms of governance constitute a more appealing and “realistic” option. Such views not only fail to picture workplace democracy beyond procedural principles (e.g. periodical elections), but they also block one of its promising features: its openness to change. In this context, direct democracy that is guided by horizontality and prefiguration may offer more promising grounds in the search for workplace democracy.

The paper exposes the contradictions and limits of representative democracy and traces the debates around hierarchism and horizontality, size and democracy with the aim to focus on its core theme – workplace democracy.

This paper argues that although representative democracy is considered a “realistic” alternative to hierarchical forms of governance it, in fact, reproduces and legitimizes hierarchism. Therefore, organisations can effectively coordinate collective action, without representatives and strict hierarchical structures, by giving emphasis to decentralized networks guided by horizontality and prefiguration.

The paper shows that the current demands for workplace democracy through representation constrains one's imagination of organisational democracy and therefore, one's perception of workplace democracy has to be broadened and radicalized by giving emphasis not only to who rules but also to the process of governance, that is, how to rule.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how activists of the Spanish protest movement 15M conceptualize organizational practices in relation to the movement’s goals.

In order to theoretically understand social movement organizations (SMO), the concept of partial organization is placed within the context of the politics of prefiguration. Empirically, the paper is based on field research conducted in Spain in three consecutive years (2014-2016) that included 82 qualitative interviews and participant observation.

Activists consider the organizational practices as crucial means to achieve social change. They conceptualize SMO in a meaningful and systematic way as partial organizations, specifically, by aiming at open membership and non-hierarchical structures. As they do this to enact the movement’s goals prefiguratively in their daily organizational practices, the limits and restrictions of the practices of self-organization are widely accepted.

The research focused on studying the relatively young and often very successful organizations of the Spanish movement. It remains open to what extent the prefigurative practices will survive organizational life cycles.

By contributing to a deeper understanding of the underlying philosophy of SMO, this paper is useful for social movement activists and scholars.

This is one of the first papers, which analyzes the organizations of the Spanish protest movement with respect to both empirical and theoretical aspects.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of healthcare professionals’ practice, where learning is taking place when a digital artefact is implemented for identification of patients’ cognitive impairment. The use of digital artefacts is increasing in various workplaces, to include professionals in healthcare. This paper aims to explore the following research question: How is the professional learning unfolding in patient-based work when a digital artefact transforms the practice?

Various data collection methods are used for this study, consisting of dialogue meetings, interviews and a reference-group meeting. Thematic analysis is used to inductively bring forth the themes of the collected data.

Professionals’ knowledge and experience are of vital importance in learning and changing work practices. Together with their ability to reflect on changes, their knowledge and experience constitute the prefiguration when the introduction of a digital application brings about indeterminacy in the work practice.

This paper makes a contribution to practice-based research as it consolidates previous research and identifies professionals knowledge and learning in a healthcare context. This can be used to further explore and advance the field, as well as to establish the evidence-based importance of transforming practices based on implementation of digital artefacts.

This paper aims to study how activists involved in consumer-initiated cooperatives, in a specific context, challenge the practices of the neoliberal system and develop counter-practices that are ingrained with their values. It aims to access the transformative capacity and inclusiveness of consumer-initiated cooperatives and the role played by prefigurative practices in changing the status quo. Three practices – defetishization of agricultural commodities, surplus generation and distribution, prefiguration – that enable the inclusion of those groups who are marginalized in the food production and consumption nexus by neoliberal policies are identified.

The findings of this paper were developed from 23 unstructured interviews, participant observation and analysis of the social media accounts of five consumer-initiated cooperatives located in different districts of Istanbul and which are involved in a collective response to the neoliberal policies.

The study discusses that, in a specific context, political events and economic policies can be a catalyst for the initiation of alternative consumer-initiated cooperatives. The findings indicate that these organizations can develop and articulate prefigurative practices that are influential in transforming the prevailing capitalist food provisioning system to be more inclusive.

The findings offer an alternative view to the dominant capitalist logic and advance the concept of how the economic sphere can be re-politicized and how the persevering notion of financial performance is resolved by invoking values of inclusion, solidarity, responsibility and sharing. The findings are based on the study of five cases in a specific context during a specific period.

This paper focuses on cooperatives owned and governed by activist consumers and presents results concerning their underlying practices for creating a food provisioning system that is inclusive and aiming for social justice and equality. Similarly, it provides evidence of how local political and economic conditions influence the appropriation and development of these practices – commodity defetishization, surplus distribution and prefiguration.

Focuses on a sixteenth‐century religious movement that bears a striking resemblance to nineteenth‐twentieth century communism. Before securing power the movement presented itself as a peaceful, humanistic denomination that advocated egalitarianism, congregationalism, and self‐help. It rejected the institutionalization of both church and state. Securing power the Anabaptists established a totalitarian regime that exceeded its adversaries in regimentation and coercion. They totally restructured the economic system with “communism” and the traditional family system with polygamy. Demonstrates simi‐larity between Anabaptism and contemporary communism in the original recruitment pattern, the leadership configuration, the basic ideological development, the employment of coercion, the control of history, the reform measures, and the ultimate ramifications. The implication is that the communist principle may be endemic to the human condition and may reappear in a different form in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to first consider how veterans use talk to shape interpretations of personal and social identify. Second, this paper seeks to gain an understanding of how veterans see themselves in a civilian world, their ability to re-conceptualise and realign their perspective on life to support their transition in to a civilian world.

Underpinned by Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, the work provides a qualitative analysis data from coaching interviews with five veterans.

The findings revealed the on-going legacy of military life and how its distinctiveness and belief centred on kinship shapes personal identity and the way they see their civilian world. The work sheds light on to the benefits of this Ricoeur’s self-reflexive approach and how it can be used to provide a deeper insight in to the nature of personal transitions and how narrative can be used to expose complexities of the narratives of personal history and meaning as the narrator becomes both the seeker and what is sought.

The work reinforces the value of Ricoeur’s self-reflexive approach identifying narrative mediating between two “poles” of identity and the act of mimesis; prefiguration, configuration and refiguration as veterans project stories of their world and their place within it.

The paper provides new insights in to the importance of narrative identify broadening its potential application with engagement across diverse communities, thereby providing depth and rigour of its conceptual understanding of personal identify. The work further provides insights in to the challenges facing veterans to integrate within a civilian society.

When confronted with issues dealing with first and second order cybernetics, it seems that the manner of defining the former has been somewhat caricatured. The second appears to sometimes give rise to conclusions which are almost opposite to those of Wiener by questioning the possibility of a control for a system. We find in Wiener’s research a prefiguration of the autonomy concept, which, in our opinion, could bring an explanation – and a solution – in cases where control elicits some perverse effect; an acceptance of positive feedback if it serves a desired purpose; the central importance held for him by ergodic theory that we use in an addendum on imbalanced strange attractors control; the idea of a knowledge which may be the fruit of the control; an interest for logical paradoxes he put in relation to communication in nervous system; and already the notion of dialogue in the core of the relation man/man or man/machine. Of course, Wiener did not accord an equal development to all his insights, but we have not yet finished scrutinizing his writings. First and second order cybernetics perhaps form an agonistic/antagonistic couple of which neither element could overshadow the other.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.