Abstract
Utopia is moving from the margins to the mainstream in organization studies. An unprecedented wave of publications – including the one this Agora forms part of – refers to it. This raises an obvious question: why and, perhaps more intriguingly, why now? One hypothesis is that this historical moment – marked by exponential technological change, frightening geopolitical instability and escalating climate disruption – compels us to ask what kind of future awaits humanity. And when it comes to thinking about the future, few concepts are more epistemologically apt than utopia. With a contested intellectual tradition, the idea of utopia is evocative and inspiring, ambivalent and often divisive. In this short piece, I want to highlight four broad directions to start thinking about utopia in the analysis of organizations that stem mostly from my research and role as co-founder of an international research network on alternative organizations. The four perspectives I outline here are not a typology. All four can be applied to the same organization as equally fruitful lenses. Think of them as an invite to kick-start a timely conversation.
Utopia as blueprint
When in 2018 I visited Auroville, one of the most long-standing intentional communities in the world, it was clear that its inhabitants, who call themselves Aurovillians, have been following a vision, a masterplan since its foundation in 1968: a city for ‘peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities’. The idea for this city is not the result of a spontaneous bout of enthusiasm, but a carefully thought-through plan designed by Mirra Alfassa, a French-Indian spiritual leader whose vision was laid down to the smallest detail. A plastic model at the entrance of the visitors’ centre reveals the masterplan in all its grandiosity: a city able to house 50,000 people, developing into concentric sections, where one finds a giant golden-plated dome, the Matrimandir – a place devoted to multi-faith prayer and meditation. Each section of the city should host the infrastructure necessary to sustain key aspects of human life: housing, food production, commerce and handicraft, culture and education, administration and bureaucracy. Auroville – which now is home to almost 3,000 adults and 630 children from 61 nationalities – continues to be seen as one of the most interesting and controversial ‘social experiments’ in communitarian and intentional living worldwide. While only part of Alfassa’s masterplan has been implemented due to lack of financial resources and clashes over the plan’s feasibility, during my time there I had the feeling that this blueprint was still covering its function: providing organizational purpose and direction.
Indeed, the function of utopia as a blueprint is one of its most traditional and still powerful connotations. I am referring here to utopia as ‘ou-topia’ à la Thomas More, the ‘non-place’, the place not yet existing, rather than a normatively charged ‘good place’. If we think about most organizations today – from corporations, to political parties, to social movement organizations – grand plans for what is ‘not yet’ often function as programmatic vision, translating abstract ideals into tangible organizational strategies and designs. Analysing visions and long-term goals in organizations – in other words, understanding their utopian imaginaries – represents a first, critical step to understand their day-to-day functioning. Looking at past and contemporary history, or at Auroville, however, it is clear that a utopian blueprint comes with opportunities and risks. Opportunities to unify and accelerate strategies to achieve shared goals; risks of side-lining or, worse, suppressing dissenting voices and stifling democratic processes. In short, utopian blueprints are double-edged: they can coordinate collective action even as they risk narrowing democratic space. This tension cannot be resolved at the level of vision alone. It requires examining how utopia is concretized.
Utopia as Experiment
Observing the intellectual history of the idea of utopia throughout the centuries, it is possible to note how the idea of a blueprint utopia – with its risks of authoritarian degeneration – has been increasingly replaced with the more dynamic concept of utopianism, indicating an active process of experimentation, an ontological state of constant becoming (Levitas, 2010). In other words, the focus has shifted from the masterplan to the tactics through which this very masterplan could be achieved. This experimental aspect, this process of trial and error, is far from new for organization scholars. Small ‘u’ utopias, sometimes named everyday utopias, have become an important area of study in the last twenty years. The umbrella terms ‘alternative organizations’ and ‘alternative organizing’, popularized by Martin Parker and colleagues (Parker et al., 2014), are now widely deployed to indicate a vast array of organizations such as cooperatives, intentional communities, solidaristic and mutual aid networks. The very logic that ‘we are the change we want to see in the world’ has been labelled ‘prefigurative organizing’ (Monticelli, 2022; Schiller-Merkens, 2024).
Utopia understood as an active process of organizing, however, has its dark sides too. Through several hours of non-participant observation in meetings and moments of deliberation within intentional communities and other prefigurative initiatives, I often sensed that, despite good intentions, these mechanisms were inevitably flawed. Structural drivers of inequality – differences in wealth, education, class, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation – were still on full display. Similar dynamics have been documented elsewhere, for instance in studies of the Occupy movement. Genevieve Shanahan (2025) refers to this as ‘impure critical performativity’ to emphasize how any pursuit of progressive social transformation will be almost always subject to the risk of being either cooptated or marginalized. Does this mean that almost every attempt to realize utopia in the here and now is bound to be, at best, unsuccessful and, at worst, counterproductive? Yes – and that seems to be part and parcel of the process itself.
Utopia as Island
The wave of interest and scholarship on utopian organizations – or so-called alternative organizations – has attracted an equally compelling wave of detractors. Their central argument runs more or less as follows: ‘Concrete utopias are largely performative exercises. These organizations often reproduce the very inequalities and power imbalances they claim to resist. They are small islands of hope creating little to no change in an ocean of business-as-usual and cynicism.’ Undeniably, utopias have often been portrayed as islands. Thomas More’s Utopia was an island, H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia features an island, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is set on an island floating in outer space. The parallel between utopias and islands is a long-standing one and it is not difficult to see why. Islands are enclosed spaces, fragile ecosystems – places where different, often unspoken customs and habits develop in contrast to those of the mainland. Islands are often connected to imaginaries of escape, experimentation and confinement – whether voluntary or not. And when their status quo is questioned or challenged, as in the iconic movie The Beach, islands can quickly turn from idyllic to nightmarish, from eu-topian to dys-topian. I will condense here a few key reflections.
The first relates to the idea of scalability. If we think about an island, the very notion of scaling up its population, its intake of tourists or its infrastructure would threaten its ecosystem. Similarly, for some organizations the idea of scaling up is unthinkable, or even undesirable, given the immense resources already required to sustain them over time. Some scholars insist that, rather than relying on the capacity to scale up to evaluate an organization’s transformative potential, we should instead attend to its ability to scale out and scale deep. That is, to build networks while also cultivating enduring practices and values. The second observation is that, while the island-like character of some organizations allows them to be laboratory-esque, it can entail a certain degree of isolation. Writing on ‘Freetown Christiania’ in Copenhagen, Jilly Traganou argues that the intentional community founded in 1971 – attracting millions of visitors annually – has become a victim of its own ‘distinct socio-spatial autonomy’ (2022). Despite early aspirations to build a self-governing society premised on autonomy, freedom, recycling and sustainability, the community has grown increasingly detached from the city’s political landscape. Preoccupied with internal challenges – most notably biker gangs and the trafficking of hard drugs – and reliant on agreements with the state and municipality to retain control of the land, Christiania exemplifies the paradoxes of concretizing utopia.
Recalling again Shanahan (2025), making utopia real is taxing, and the risks of isolation, or worse, degeneration are substantial. Yet this should not be used to dismiss the potential of utopian islands. What if we thought about archipelagos rather than single islands, then? Islands can be fragile, but they are less so if part of an archipelago. Archipelagic organizations are necessarily interdependent, highly connected and quickly adaptable. They are literally ‘ec-centric’ (from the Greek ekkentros): operating outside of the centre, they build and consolidate their practices metaphorically, and often spatially, away from the mainstream (Hanna, 2024).
Utopia as Battleground
Utopian discourses and narratives today are more prominent than ever, and not only organizational scholars, but also activists, political leaders, tech billionaires and venture-backed firms routinely mobilize utopian imaginaries as instruments of legitimation and agenda-setting. My final point then concerns utopia as a contested terrain: utopia is never normatively – hence politically – neutral. On the contrary, it is always political. Approaching organizational imaginaries therefore requires placing front and centre the tension between mainstream and alternative projects, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic utopias. It also requires assessing varieties of alternative projects. In doing so, however, the simple ‘utopia versus dystopia’ dichotomy is too blunt and potentially misleading. What is often unsaid is whose utopia organizations are choosing to embody, and at what cost they are doing so. It is the duty of critical organization scholars to make explicit what is often kept implicit and to problematize what seems straightforward. To put it in social theory terms: uncovering the background conditions of possibility that make certain utopias achievable or unachievable, desirable or undesirable, and for whom.
Looking at where the debate on utopias and dystopias is heading, and contextualizing it within the present, it seems like the thematic focus is circling from small ‘u’ utopias back to big ‘U’ Utopias: the utopia as blueprint described earlier. I am finishing this piece on the very day of the historic mayoral win of democratic socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Mamdani’s masterplan for the city, and ultimately for the United States, could not be more different from that of president Donald Trump and the billionaires forming the entourage. During the entire campaign up until the day of election, the discursive battleground between two completely opposing visions of the ‘not-yet’ and how to achieve it have been in plain sight. These struggles are not simply ideological; they are organizational battlegrounds behind which different strategies, tactics, coalitions and financial resources are mobilized.
To conclude, there is no unilateral way in which we can think about utopia in organizations. Organization scholars will always find engaging perspectives to work with. Despite these extensive possibilities, I suggest that its value to the field of organization studies is measured less by popularity and more by its analytical possibilities: the clarity and empirical grip with which utopia – in all the possible configurations existing between eu-topia and dys-topia – can be applied to the analysis of organizations. As the movement of scholars interested in utopia and organizations grows to maturity, developing a shared interpretive framework without forgetting the intellectual and political genealogy of the concept becomes indispensable.