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.

Introduction

The adjective “alternative” in organizational scholarship can describe a wide range of organizations and practices of organizing (Parker et al., 2014), from social-movements (Luhtakallio, 2019; Maeckelbergh, 2009), to communes and alternative housing projects (Farias, 2017; Törnqvist, 2021), and consumer- and worker-cooperatives (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014; Cheney et al., 2014; Storey et al., 2014). While the context, size and aims of alternative organzations varies, what they all have in common is the goal to change conventional relations—from broad, societal relations, to market or labor relations—according to their values. These alternative goals are promoted by alternative governance-structures and practices.

This article explores the relation between organizational structures, practices, and moral values in alternative organizations through an empirical study of two collective firms. I use this term analogous to Rothschild and Whitt’s (1989) definition of a collectivist-democratic organization as “any enterprise in which control rests ultimately and overwhelmingly with the member-employees-owners regardless of the particular legal framework through which this is achieved” (p. 2). ¹ Rothschild and Whitt (1989) conceptualize collectivist organizations as an alternative to bureaucratic models of organization. These organizations use decentralized, democratic control, and their decisions are based on a logic of substantive rationality instead of formal rationality (p. 61f).

Early, influential literature on alternative, democratic organizations portrays them as unsustainable, since such organizations either develop too much hierarchy and structure to be truly democratic (Michels, 1911), or else, they develop a “tyranny of structurelessness,” together with informal unaccountable elites and organizational impotence (Freeman, 1972). Among alternative organizations, worker cooperatives and collective firms may seem as the most contradictory, as they have to reconcile the rationality of a business with the rationality of a democratic collective. The “degeneration thesis” (Cornforth, 1995) posits, that over time worker cooperatives will degenerate toward a managerial hierarchy in order to fulfill their role as an economic enterprise producing for a market. Consequently, a major part of the literature on worker coops is interested in tensions between business success and social values (Heras-Saizarbitoria, 2014).

The paradoxe of alternative, democratic organizations thus seem to involve two main questions: On one hand, the adequate degree of formalization—the tension between a “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman, 1972) and a “tyranny of tyranny” (Levine, 1979), on the other hand, the tension between different value orientations, usually “business” and “social.” Related, there is the assumption, that organizations that prioritize economic gains need to lean more toward hierarchy and structure, while prioritizing social values requires to further democracy, decentralization and personal relations.

However, empirical studies show that close, friendship-like relations between members are beneficial for the overall (economic) success of alternative and democratic organizations (Chen, 2016; Kokkinidis, 2015; Puusa et al., 2016; Reedy et al., 2016). Furthermore, while studies of worker cooperatives often use the corresponding dualities of social/business and informal/formal, some suggest that it can be problematic to conceptually, or practically, separate formal and informal relations, as well as the goals that are served through them (Darr, 1999; Jaumier, 2017; Sobering, 2019).

This paper offers a theoretical perspective that allows to reconceptualize the corresponding dualities in the existing literature. It argues, that the dualities of alternative organizations, both on the level of goals and on the level of governance structures, can be understood as variations of the tension between the general and the particular. The paper distinguishes two different modes that organizations use to coordinate work: First, coordination based on generalization, that is, the use of standards, roles and rules. Second, coordination based on familiarity, which rests on intimacy and detailed, often tacit, knowledge and understanding. Both coordination modes have a moral dimension: Generalization is justified by, and justifies common goods, while coordination based on familiarity allows for the consideration of what is just in a particular situation. The paper will show, that the tension between the general and the particular cuts across the economic and social dimension of organizations and is a central problem of coordination.

The paper draws on two conceptual approaches that highlight, that people are able to create and sustain contradictory relations and practices: Thévenot’s (2006, 2019) “sociology of engagements” and Zelizer’s (2000, 2005) “relational work.” Thévenot’s work is characterized by a concern with compromises between multiple, conflicting rationalities. He conceptualized organizations as “compromise devices” (Thévenot, 2001a) that mediate between different modes of coordination. Zelizer’s work is interested in the interweaving of economic practices in intimate relationships. These two approaches are combined to develop the notion of the “composite relation,” which highlights that organizations can transcend contradictions between different modes of coordination through their relational work. This is complemented by characterizing a moral orientation that helps to maintain composite relations, by focusing on upholding a balance between the general and the particular, by “not going too far.”

The two collective firms studied in this paper balance the general and the particular by (1) developing governance structures that allow to complement formal rules with space for personal concerns and considerations, (2) allowing different ways of relating and belonging to the organization while valuing all members, and (3) using situated relational work to consider particularities within a division of labor.

The paper offers two main contributions to the literature on alternative, democratic organizations: First, it offers a new perspective on the interrelation between morality and coordination in alternative organizations. While influential conceptualizations of alternative organizations assume that the tension between business success and social values is quasi-equal to a tension between personal-informal and general-formalized coordination in organizations, this paper offers a more nuanced view. Second, this paper 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.

Corresponding dualities and the relevance of the particular in alternative organizations

Empirical studies show that close, friendship-like relations between members are important for many alternative and democratic organizations. Already in Rothschild-Whitt’s (1976) pioneering work on participatory-democratic organizations it is pointed out, that employment based on friends and personality attributes that fit the group, facilitates the success of these organizations. Friendship-like bonds seem to be necessary for continued participation in collective action, for instance Farias (2017) describes how they facilitate the mode of sociality that is necessary for collective action and democratic decision-making in an intentional community of activists, whereas Puusa et al. (2016) describe cases in which a lack of trust and commitment between members in cooperatives lead to a lack in participation in collective governance. Furthermore, such relations facilitate and enhance the trading of knowledge, skills, ideas and labor (Reedy et al., 2016). Friendship-like relations allow to consider individual member’s interests and particularities which makes collective action more sustainable (Chen, 2016; Kokkinidis, 2015), but the heightened sensibility for particularities in alternative organizations also implies the need for a continuous alignment and re-alignment of individual and collective aims (Langmead, 2017). Alternative organizations need to find a balance, since a focus on building intimacy can lead to over-investment and affective exhaustion (Resch and Steyaert, 2020).

From the importance of close relations in alternative organizing follows the question of how this is reconciled with the need for formalization and predictability in organizations. This tension is often discussed in studies of worker-cooperatives, which many scholars characterize by the duality of being a social and economic organization (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014; Langmead, 2017; Meira, 2014; Puusa et al., 2016; Stryjan, 1994). This duality is understood in two main ways. First, it is understood as a duality of different value orientations. For instance, of idealism and pragmatism (Ashforth and Reingen, 2014). Second, it is described as one of informal, personal relations and formal, impersonal structures. For instance, Meira (2014) describes “Omega,” a worker-coop, as an organization that exists in a tension “between structure and anti-structure.”

While these corresponding dualities are often used to structure research on cooperatives, the interrelation between formal and informal can be quite complex, and the reciprocal influence can lead to conflict, as well as counterbalance or reinforcement. Jaumier (2017) discusses how informal practices of workers devalue the authority of formal managers and create reverse dominance hierarchies in a worker cooperative. Darr (1999) describes differences in formal membership status in a taxi cooperative as a main source of tension, as well as how conflict resolutions rely to a major part on informal mechanisms, on gossip networks and peer pressure. Sobering (2019) shows the importance of informal communication for shaping collective decision-making, encouraging participation, and activating accountability mechanisms in a worker-recuperated business in Argentina. Based on this, Sobering argues that scholars of workplace democracy should consider the ways that formal and informal practices are interconnected.

The dialectical tension this paper is interested in is related to, but not sufficiently captured by the distinction between formal and informal: The tension between making things general, and considering things in their particularity. This is related to the formal structures of cooperatives: The formal equality of democratic governance structures demands to treat everyone “the same.” But in many collective organizations, democratic aspirations are not restricted to the formal level of democracy and involve considering and supporting members in their particularity.

Combining insights from Thévenot’s and Zelizer’s work, this paper develops a framework that allows to understand how collective firms use relational work to balance the general and the particular. In the following, the framework will be introduced.

Organizations as compromise devices between different modes of coordination

Laurent Thévenot uses a specific notion of coordination, which has been developed within the French school of the economy of conventions (Diaz-Bone, 2011; Eymard-Duvernay et al., 2005), as well as his work with Luc Boltanski (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). The starting point of analysis is to understand coordination in its situatedness. In order to coordinate their actions with others, people have to come to shared interpretations of their situations and agreements on what is “right.” Thévenot and his co-authors consider the double-connotation of “right” as a qualification of what is “rational,” but also of what is “just.” Coordination is seen as an achievement that is always related to, and supported by, moral values.

In “On Justification” Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) developed a theoretical framework to understand the pragmatic processes in which people critique and justify coordination. They describe how people can come to agreements by referring to different repertoires of justification which are based on different ideas of a common good (such as market competition or technical efficiency). Boltanski and Thévenot are interested in how people deal with the co-existence of several possible legitimate principles of justification. They introduce the idea of the “composite arrangement” (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: 277) to analyze situations in which a clash between conflicting principles of justification is prevented and a co-existence is made possible. According to Thévenot, firms always use a variety of modes of coordination, and while this co-existence creates tensions, these can be resolved by composite arrangements. Organizations can thus be seen as “compromising devices between several modes of coordination which engage different repertoires of evaluation” (Thévenot, 2001a: 405).

The framework of “On Justification” is limited to the analysis of coordination that needs to be justified by a common good. But different situations can have different demands on the level of generality that is needed to come to agreements. This can be illustrated by three ideal-typical examples of coordinating work, going from the lowest to the highest level of generality: (1) While I am working together with my colleagues, how we coordinate work can be sufficiently justified by our shared convenience, which takes into consideration our respective particular competences and needs. (2) Working with colleagues can also be based on acting according to general categories and rules that are established within the organization. (3) Finally, there are the situations that “On Justification” is concerned with, these require a higher level of justification, that transcends personal convenience or the aims of the organization.

Thévenot (2001b, 2006, 2019) developed a “sociology of engagements,” which allows to analyze coordination based on varying degrees of generality, and consider coordination that does not have to be justified by common goods, like situation 1 and 2 in the examples above. Thévenot distinguishes different “regimes of engagement,” different modes of being engaged with one’s material and social environment, each of them is a potential basis for coordinating with others. Three of the regimes of engagement that Thévenot differentiates are relevant for this paper: The regime of public justification (which is the topic of “On Justification”); the regime of planned action, in which people are “just” trying to achieve a plan, without a need for public justifications of this plan (situation 2); the regime of engagement in familiarity, in which people protect personal and local convenience (situation 1). Both the regime of engagement in public justification and the regime of planned engagement support standardized action, where coordination is based on general categories and rules. In contrast to these, engagement in familiarity succeeds without relying on general categories. Here, coordination and evaluation are carried out at the level of local adjustment.

Based on the regimes of engagement, this article contrasts two basic modes of coordination in organizations: Coordination based on generalization and coordination based on familiarity. This allows to capture the dialectical tension the paper is interested in: The tension between what can be made general, and what cannot.

Coordination based on generalization subsumes the characteristics of engagement in a plan and engagement in public justification. It uses formal hierarchy, institutions and rules to create relatively stable relations between people and their socio-material environment. People, objects and situations are not treated in their particularity, but based on common traits. This is based on the type of rationality that is depicted in theories of scientific management and Weber’s theory of bureaucracy. It rests on substantial investments in standards and rules and, carried to its logical conclusion, it makes sure that everyone and everything is shaped and distilled into their most functional and scalable form. While the initial investment to achieve this is quite costly, once rules and forms are established, the predictability and certainty they generate yield decreasing marginal costs of coordination. In coordination based on generalizing relations, the underlying idea of justice is one in which it is just to treat all people/objects/situation the same, if they share certain characteristics. For instance, if an employee arrives late and obviously sleep-deprived to an important meeting and delivers a confusing presentation, from a standpoint of justice, it seems fair and right to subsequently deny him promotion.

Coordination based on familiarity rests on intimacy and detailed, often tacit, knowledge about one’s environment. The rationality here is quite different from generalization. With coordination based on generalization, certainty rests on knowing how to act according to general rules, in a situation which is shaped and prepared functionally. With coordination based on familiarity, certainty rests on an intimate knowledge of the elements of a specific situation, stemming from direct, repeated experience: “engagement [in familiarity] supports the ease guaranteed by surroundings that are grasped by idiosyncratic indices and conveniently accommodated through a former habituation.” (Thévenot, 2019: 7). People are able to treat each other and their environment more “adequately” when they know each other. Coordination based on familiarity is based on particular knowledge, which is gained by investing one’s personal time. It allows to coordinate with more flexibility, taking into considerations particularities. This mode of coordination is related to moral considerations of particular needs and particular goods. To provide an alternative ending to the story of the under-performing employee: If his manager knows that he usually performs very well, but is currently caring for his sick elderly father, she might find it legitimate to treat this employee differently than she would normally do. This idea of morality has been most elaborately articulated in the ethics of care approach (Held, 2006). The ethics of care emphasizes that we can think and act as if we were independent is only possible because we are embedded in a network of social relations that sustain and protect us. The ethics of care “respects rather than removes itself from the claims of particular others with whom we share actual relationships” (Held, 2006: 11). The central focus is thus on the moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of particular others for whom we take responsibility.

Once we acknowledge that organizations might need and use both, coordination based on generalization, as well as coordination based on familiarity, we can think about the possibility of composite arrangements that allow to mediate between common and particular goods. A compromise can be institutionalized through a composite arrangement, such as a composite wage scheme, or decision-making bodies that are composed of members that represent different points of view. But situations can also be formatted in a way that allows people to “switch” between different modes of engagement (Knoll, 2013). For instance, collective lunches at work may allow to ask a colleague for their technical expertise for a new project, but it could be equally appropriate to steer the conversation toward more personal accounts of how you feel about a difficult client.

Coordination in organizations is fundamentally determined by the types of relations they create, therefore, this paper adds insights from Viviana Zelizer’s notion of “relational work.”

Differentiated ties and the interplay between intimacy and economy

Viviana Zelizer’s work highlights how interpersonal relations, and the meaning that people give to them, shape the accomplishment and nature of economic activities. Due to her focus on the intermingling of different rationalities in social relations, Zelizer’s work offers important insights for a sociology of organizations. In “The purchase of intimacy” (Zelizer, 2005) she explores the intersection between intimate relationships and monetary transfers. One of the examples she gives is how women develop distinct systems of payment and obligations corresponding to different types of relationships to men, from absent fathers to live-in boyfriends to customers of sex work (Zelizer, 2000: 818). Zelizer discusses that most scholars regard the relationship between intimacy and economics as either one of “hostile worlds,” where contact between these two will lead to moral contamination and degradation, or else a “nothing but” relationship, which assumes that intimate relations involving money are either nothing but economic exchange, or nothing but coercion. In contrast to this, Zelizer posits her own account as one of “differentiated ties”: In their social relations, people are able to mediate between the intimate and the economic, they routinely differentiate social relations. This is what Zelizer describes as “relational work”: “For each distinct category of social relations, people erect a boundary, mark the boundary by means of names and practices, establish a set of distinctive understandings that operate within that boundary, designate certain sorts of economic transactions as appropriate for the relation, bar other transactions as inappropriate, and adopt certain media for reckoning and facilitating economic transactions within the relation.” (Zelizer, 2012: 145).

In Zelizer’s work, the intimate sphere presents the particular, the idiosyncratic, which cannot be formulated for a general audience. Zelizer suggests that her relational work approach would be suitable to study organizations (Zelizer, 2005: 308), and has herself engaged with the significance of certain intimate relations for organizations (Zelizer, 2009). While Thévenot’s notion of organizations as compromise devices is interested in the intermingling of different rationalities of coordination in organizations, Zelizer is interested in the intermingling between different rationalities in social relationships. Both approaches are inherently interested in how conflicting rationalities and moral ideas can be resolved in social interaction and coordination.

Drawing on Zelizer’s and Thévenot’s work, this study analyses how collective firms use relational work to create compromises between coordination based on generalization and coordination based on familiarity, and related, an ethics of justice and an ethics of care.

Case studies and methods

The data for this research were gathered through a qualitative study of two firms with collective governance structures. “Call a Bike” (CAB) is a bike courier collective based in Germany. At the time of the research it had been existing for 9 years, with 26 people working for the firm. The “Good Tech Collective” (GTC) is a worker cooperative based in the UK, that builds digital applications and websites. At the time of the research, GTC had existed for 6 years. Over this 6 years, GTC transitioned from a two-person company to a co-op with eight members, six regular and several occasional freelancers.

The fieldwork was part of a larger research project on the relationship between coordination and evaluation in collective firms. I got access to both of these collectives because I had met at least one of their members in person before, in a setting not directly related to my research. In both cases, I combined observation with interviews. Another important data source were the internal online wikis that both collectives maintain. These contain information about the firm and its structures, as well as descriptions of work processes. Both wikis also store minutes of meetings. Upon my first visits, I got access to the wikis and summarized and analyzed their contents.

Fieldwork started with CAB. Since CAB was located in a different city from where I lived, I visited every other month. This lasted over a time-frame of 20 months. I observed their regular working days in the office (6), as well as general assemblies (4), and one annual plenary lasting a day. During and after my observations I wrote memos. From the analysis of my observations, as well as my reading of the documents and minutes of meetings, I developed themes and questions that I wanted to follow. I conducted seven formal, semi-structured interviews (between 1 and 2 hours) as well as numerous informal interviews to answer emerging questions.

Among the themes that I found intriguing was an ongoing discussion on role of the general assembly. While some people wanted to make the assembly shorter, more efficient, and less of a “social space” others argued, that understanding each other and allowing for “social” elements was vital for being a collective. Looking at my memos, I realized, that it was not correct to characterize the double-character of the assembly as “functional” on one hand and “social” on the other. I already knew, that friendship-like affection and knowing other members on a personal level was an important factor for the success of CAB.

My fieldwork at GTC started after I had already started fieldwork at CAB, so I could use insights and questions that had been developed there. I conducted an ethnographic study of the GTC over a period of 3 months, which included observation of internal meetings, meetings with clients and social activities. In addition, I conducted 13 semi-structured interviews (between 1 and 2 hours).

When comparing these firms, I found that they both had developed names to mark the different types of relations between people who work for them. At CAB, people differentiate between “kollektivista” that is, full members of the collective, and non-kollektivista. At GTC, full members of the cooperative are referred to as “members,” while people who are on track to become full members have a name that is a pun using the firm’s own name. ² For the purpose of a more detailed understanding of the meanings and implications of member-relations, I looked at situations in which there was a conflict that targeted these relations. Subsequently, I tried to understand the structures, practices and agreements that allowed for the absence of conflict the rest of the time.

All interviews were transcribed, and together with relevant online texts and meeting minutes, imported into MaxQDA and coded. The coding scheme for this paper developed abductively. Codes were initially following my overall conceptual framework, new codes and connections between them emerged through an interplay between field data and my reading of new literature. While the conceptual framework for the overall study was primarily based on French convention theory, Zelizer’s work was added during the research process to better grasp the importance of relational work.

In the following I will describe how these collective firms mediate between the general and the particular through establishing specific ideas of what the member-firm relation constitutes. Their attempts of composing such relations can be found on three different levels: Their governance structures; how “partial members” are integrated in the organization; and how they ensure that their division of labor allows to consider particular needs of members.

Collective governance balancing particular and common goods

Both CAB and GTC have been founded with the explicit goal to provide a working environment based on equality and solidarity. Intimate relationships between members had been important from the start, but the complexity of their organization requires both collectives to use coordination forms that allow to generalize and standardize. Both collectives use a collective governance structure which is based on semi-autonomous working groups and a group assembly which has ultimate authority.

CAB’s governance model and practices are drawn from the experience of collective governance in a radical left scene in Germany—the first meetings of CAB took place in a legalized squat. CAB have five different working groups which meet regularly and are responsible for certain issues like finances or sales. Additionally, they hold a plenary assembly once a month. In the plenary assembly, working groups, but also individuals can bring in proposals for decisions. Decisions are taken according to consensus.

GTC’s governance model and practices are based on sociocracy, a governance model that is popular among alternative organizations and spread through dedicated associations, books and training. GTC hired a consultant who specializes in organizations with “flat” organizational structures, to help them to implement sociocratic principles in their organization. Their work is organized and governed by six semi-autonomous working groups, so-called “circles,” which meet regularly and are responsible for certain key issues, like design or business development. These working groups practice consent-based decision making.

Within these governance structures, both collectives have established rituals and practices that allow the co-existence of coordination based on generalization and coordination based on familiarity. This can be seen, on one hand by the way meetings are structured. Both collectives start with a “check-in” (GTC) or “Emo-Runde” (CAB, roughly translates as emotional discussion round), in which participants are encouraged to talk about their current emotional state in regard to work or colleagues, but also, to tell their co-workers if something is happening in their “private” life that affects their overall well-being. In both collectives this first round is not minuted. A “check-in” round allows to better understand where the other participants in a meeting are and how they feel. It helps to establish the kind of understanding, trust and well-meaning toward others that enables coordination based on familiarity and treat others with care. Starting with the more personal check-in round and then continuing with business matters can be seen as ritualized “switching” (Knoll, 2013) between modes of engagement.

Like in many other collectives, in the working groups and plenaries of both CAB and GTC decisions are based on consensus or consent. ³ Consensus is not just a quantitative increase from a majority vote, but rather, requires a different process of coming to decisions together. Decisions are taken in group meetings and their start is always a proposal to do something. People then discuss the proposal and if there are concerns, they try to alter the proposal in a way, that no one has a concern. If this process is successful, the proposal is agreed on. Otherwise, if there are still concerns, each member of the group has the right to block a proposal with a veto. The process of consensus-decision making thus is based on collective, horizontal discussion in which different opinions and ideas can be voiced.

A veto is an emergency mechanism, it gives people the possibility to stop a proposal that would “go too far” and ensures that what a majority considers a general interest cannot completely oppress particular interests or goods. While vetoes are rare in the practice of both collectives, the existence of their possibility changes how people relate to each other while discussing decisions, since it demands to consider everyone’s concerns.

Not a member, but not “just” a freelancer either: Status differentiation

When it comes to the relationship between a cooperative and people who work for it, conventionally, there is an either/or choice: People can be co-owners and members of the cooperative, which means there is a relationship that is long term, in which interpersonal trust can be established. Or people can be freelancers, a market relation, which does not need any kind of trust or intimate knowledge, a relationship between independent individuals. While people working for CAB and GTC can formally be distinguished between members and “non-members,” both collectives have established more nuanced, differentiated relations for “non-members” which entail considerations of particularity and are marked through specific language and evaluative practices.

Status differentiation at CAB

CAB is legally a company with limited liability owned by a registered association. Internally, however, CAB is organized like a cooperative. People can become members of the collective—“kollektivista”—after 3 months of regularly working for CAB. Kollektivista are engaged in at least one of the working groups and have veto-rights at the assembly. However, not every courier working for CAB is interested in taking part in the governance structures. ⁴ Therefore, there can be stark differences in terms of commitment for the collective. But apart from the veto-right at the assembly, non-kollektivista enjoy the same rights as kollektivista: They get equal pay and are paid to take part in the assembly. This is interesting, since CAB needs a lot of personal investment by its members to make the company sustainable. But the people who are involved in the collective still share the advantages that they have worked for with people that are not taking on the same amount of responsibilities. There was, however, a critical moment in the history of CAB, when this composition of different ways of relating to the collective was seriously challenged.

Four years after CAB had been founded, four members of the collective surprised the others at an annual extended plenary with the demand to radically restructure the collective. ⁵ While the majority of the other members were either still studying or had additional sources of income and worked only part-time, the four people who attempted this coup worked full- or almost full-time for CAB, which was their main source of income. They were also doing the major bulk of the strategic and administrative work. While there was effectively an elite of four people in the collective, who were responsible for critical tasks and usually worked more than they were paid, these very same people had neither entitlement to higher salaries nor exclusive decision-power. Their proposal at the plenary assembly was to drastically reduce the number of people working for CAB. Only the best and fastest couriers should be allowed in the collective, and only if they were working full-time. Their proposition was thus not to formalize and henceforth remunerate the existing hierarchy. Instead, they were striving for a solution that would eliminate differences between members, by demanding that everyone should work approximately the same amount of hours and by reducing the collective of its less worthy members. They were striving for a collective of equally capable and motivated people. This shows that even within “the elite,” there was an unease with allowing evaluative differences between members of CAB. As a reaction to this proposal, everyone in the meeting was asked to describe their personal ideas and wishes for the future of CAB. One member stated that she was very proud to be a part of the collective and hoped, that in the future, it would still be possible to contribute to the collective in smaller ways. Another member supported this, by saying that it would be important for him that they would continue to value the contribution of everyone, regardless of how much time people can spend. A third member stated, that to him the social collective was so important, that he was willing to keep accepting relatively low pay for his work. In these statements we can see the importance of belonging to a collective where everyone is valued in their particularity. In contrast to this, for the people who proposed the restructuring, the best version of a collective was one where people belong to the same general category. Two of these people explicitly stated, that they wanted to work in a collective, where other people are working as much as they were, and shared the same sense of commitment and quality standards. Another one of the elite four stated that she liked her job even when she was doing the demanding work of coordinating deliveries among the couriers “as long as the couriers on the street are doing a good job.”

After a second emergency assembly, the proposal for restructuring was rejected. This established the idea, that CAB is only a real collective, if it can value the contributions of different people with different skills and time-resources. A member told me that:

I believe, one decision that has been taken after this was that CAB decided, that we can’t use rigid patterns for how we see ourselves. We accepted, that CAB will always be a matter of interpretation and we will always have to be flexible with rules or ignore them, while at the same time stay consequent if it is important. First and foremost, we all have to realize, that we will always have to find compromises. And we will always find compromises, and strict and rigid criteria for being part of the collective, like the ones they wanted to introduce, just don’t make sense for our collective.

Remaining CAB members appreciate that subjective, particular circumstances can be legitimate reasons why people are either not able to participate in the governance structures or are not as skilled as other couriers. Still, veto-rights are granted only to the sub-group of members who take part in the collective governance. Giving people, who are “just” couriers and not involved in the governance structures the same authority as kollektivista would be going too far. But refusing non-kollektivista equal pay would just as well be going too far.

Status differentiation at GTC

GTC is legally a cooperative, they differentiate between members and non-members, and have an additional transitional state. In the year I conducted research on the GTC, approx. 17 people were regularly working for the GTC. These people are distinguished into three different categories: Members (9), Collaborators (4) and Freelancers (4). When asked to draw a conceptual map of their cooperative, members of the GTC usually drew three concentric circles, with members located in the most inner circle and freelancers in the most outer circle.

Members are the formal members of the cooperative, they collectively own it and are legally responsible for it. Collaborators are people who are not members yet, but they feel committed to GTC and work almost entirely for GTC. GTC’s coordination logics, which involve self-governance and coordination based on familiar relations make it impossible to treat everyone who is not (yet) a member as “just” a freelancer. At the same time, GTC has made bad experiences with giving people shared responsibility for the whole enterprise without getting to know them first. The status of a collaborator is thus an intermediate relationship that combines characteristics of members and freelancers.

Being a collaborator is a transition phase between being a freelancer and being a member. There is a formal process of becoming a collaborator: Before people can apply to become collaborators they have to define objectives and measurable key results that they want to achieve for GTC, as well as a personal development plan. Collaborators are involved in the self-governance structures, they are automatically part of the collaborators working group and should additionally be part of at least one other working group. Usually, people are part of the working group that is closest to their function at GTC, so developers are in the tech-working group and people responsible for sales and marketing in the sales and marketing working group. Independent of their specific function at GTC, all collaborators have to take up some PR and communication work. Collaborators are also expected to take part in the “social life” of GTC, and attend group lunches, visits to the pub or weekend trips. In return, GTC offers collaborators paid time to attend the circle meetings, and, after members, collaborators are given priority to work opportunities. There is also a clear dismissal procedure from the side of GTC, collaborators are given two formal warnings and an in-depth review before dismissal. People who want to transition from freelancer to collaborator are supported and accompanied by dedicated mentors. A mentor is a formalized role, which involves engaging with a mentee on both a professional and personal level: “The overall purpose of the role is to provide emotional and practical support to the “mentee”, and to help them understand the GTC way of working.” (GTC wiki). The idea of composing relationships which are both, professional and personal, can also be seen by the “formal requirement” to “Take mentee and one or two others for lunch at least once (paid by GTC) to check progress, answer questions, make friends!” (GTC wiki).

Colleagues and friends: Balancing particular and general in the division of labor

Due to the differences in the type of work they perform, CAB and GTC have to accomplish very different coordination processes on a regular basis. While in both firms the governance structures allow democratic participation of everyone, in their day-to-day activities, there is a division of labor and a related, though functionally and temporally constrained, hierarchy. However, people in authority always have to make sure to consider their colleagues not just as workers, but as particular people as well.

Division of labor at CAB

In conventional bike courier companies, bike couriers are effectively forced in the position of being competitors vis-a-vis their colleagues. In order to change this relation of competition to one of solidarity, CAB had to fundamentally innovate and change the way bike courier work is coordinated. In Germany, couriers are usually independent contractors and pay a commission to the courier company, which acts as a broker between customers and couriers. While courier companies try to have as many people on the street as possible, they don’t feel responsible if not all people on the street get enough orders. This means that especially less experienced couriers are available constantly, while not getting enough orders to earn the money they need. Mainstream courier companies profit from the appeal of being a bike courier, which is highly precarious, but still attractive to a lot of young people. Since they do not have to pay the costs, courier companies can be quite inefficient in their coordination of couriers and deliveries, they can have more couriers on the street than necessary, as they always have “surplus couriers.” This is the type of exploitation that the founding members of CAB wanted to stop. CAB was founded by couriers who loved their work, but hated their working conditions. At CAB every courier on the street is paid equally per hour, not per delivery. In order to afford this, CAB has a highly efficient system for coordinating couriers and deliveries. Every shift, there are two people at the office dedicated only to coordination, or dispatching. One person is mainly responsible for taking on orders via telephone, e-Mail and their website. The second person, the main dispatcher, is responsible for calculating routes as well as committals between the couriers on the street. In order to optimize the matching between orders with different deadlines and available couriers in different distances to the delivery points, dispatchers have to have an overview of all current orders and couriers on the street. This job is only done by experienced couriers who know the city and possible routes quite well and who furthermore know how to handle their different colleagues on the street. Dispatchers have to be aware that the couriers on the street have different experience, fitness and psychological states. They stay in constant contact with the couriers during the shift. The communication between the office and the couriers is via radio. Every courier has a number which is used instead of names over radio-communication, to prevent mishearing. To deal with minor disruptions, unexpected incidents and negotiating best routes with couriers, dispatchers employ humor, insider language and their intimate knowledge of the trade. The nuance in language that they use is impossible to translate in English, as they make heavy use of jargon and puns.

Dispatcher to a courier on the radio: 54! Alright then, please jump over to X-street, colleague 50 will be there and he has a delivery for you which will bring you to Y-street.

Dispatcher to a courier on the radio: Take care 47! And by the way it is great how you are totally rocking this just right now. Oh and can you tell me, do you have an estimate for when you will be at X-street?

(Fieldnotes, paraphrase, translated by the author)

Although they are in a position of ultimate authority, dispatchers use a lot of conversational “repair work” when giving “orders” to couriers, always adjusting their communication as well as their demands in order to not “go too far.” Observing a skilled dispatcher is akin to watching a masterful performance in composition. Couriers are treated as bike couriers that have to fulfill a certain role, but the dispatcher always makes sure to treat them as particular people as well. And at times, the person can be more important than the courier.

Courier passing by in the office: If you don’t have anything for me at the moment, I’ll get something to eat now.

Dispatcher: (laughs) I have a lot for you, but go on, eat something first. (points at screen) See, we already have 57 deliveries. Today we are really rocking it!

(Fieldnotes, paraphrase, translated by the author)

The sophisticated process of disposition CAB uses can be seen as a strategy of equalizing members instead of remunerating differences: Instead of individual couriers being responsible for their own success, via the specific work of coordination and dispatching, the accomplishment of delivering all orders in time becomes a collective success. On good days, they are all rocking it together. Their dispatching, which is based on compromises between the particular and the general, fosters solidarity in the collective.

Division of labor at GTC

The daily work at GTC is structured by client projects. They can therefore use a coordination approach that is more conventional in their sector; agile project management techniques. Project managers, not unlike dispatchers at CAB, have to achieve a balance between treating team members according to their role in the project, as well as particular people. The balance between acting as a functional leader in a project and recognizing the overall equality at GTC led to a conflict with a colleague while I was doing fieldwork. When this colleague, Marcus, started working for GTC, he had been very close to the company, but due to private reasons, he had had to move cities and started working mostly remote. GTC had been trying to accommodate this new situation and had even financed additional working equipment that Marcus new remote work necessitated. Marcus, however started to become quite unreliable, ignoring deadlines set by the project manager, and not being available per e-Mail or phone.

The project manager told me about this conflict:

He’s caused some serious like, some real real problems to me and projects because he just disappears. I can’t get hold of him. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know what country he’s in. I’ve had clients calling me saying where is our website. He was supposed to go through the new developments for a website with our clients once and he went missing. And he didn’t respond so he can really really leave you hanging. And when I said to him like Marcus you can’t do that. He was like “Listen you’re not my boss.” And I was like I’m not talking to you as your boss I’m talking to you as the project manager who is getting an angry phone call from the client.

The conflict quickly got a personal note, when Marcus accused the project manager of “being after power.” The conflict was subsequently discussed in the member’s assembly. One member said that “We have to explain him the expectations we have from our colleagues are not top-down, everyone has to be available in certain times.” While Marcus’ need to work remotely had been accepted, his new unreliability threatened to undermine the general expectation GTC needs to have of all their members equally: That they “will be available in certain times.” Still the member’s decided that one of them would go out for a drink with Marcus, to discuss the situation in a more intimate context. Eventually though, the relationship could not be repaired.

The complex relationship between members and the question of accountability is often a topic of discussions at the GTC. Zelizer (2005) notes that “When relations resemble others that have significantly different consequences for the parties, people put extra effort into distinguishing the relations, marking their boundaries, and negotiating agreements on their definition” (p. 34). The importance, as well as difficulty to demarcate composite relations and their meaning is illustrated in this quote of an interview I conducted with Alex, one of the members:

So for example, on the weekend, I saw a few friends and I was telling them about GTC, my friend John, and stuff like this. And they said: Who is John? And I said, he is my colleague, but he is also my friend. And I was like, we don’t have any bosses. And they were like, but who hired you. And I was like, well, John was the one who brought me in. And they were like, does he earn more than you? And I said, yeah. And then they said: So he is your boss. You know, immediately, when you say stuff like this, people will say that he must be, or she must be, your boss.

We can see here, that Alex’ friends are looking for markers and symbols that enable them to characterize the relationship between John and Alex as an employer-employee relationship, since to them a higher-status, higher-earning colleague is a boss. They apply both the “nothing but” and the “hostile worlds” fallacy described by Zelizer. For Alex, it is not immediately possible to describe his relationship to John to people unfamiliar to the GTC, who have never experienced the intermingling of different modes of coordination in the firm. ⁶ Nevertheless, Alex insists, that their relationship to John is understood in the correct, suitable way, a composition, since he is “a colleague, but also a friend,” and not a boss.

Discussion and conclusion

Scholarship on alternative organizations has frequently discussed the importance of close relationships, trust and commitment for the success of alternative organizations. In this context, Farias (2017) advocates for a broad understanding of friendship to analyze the role of friendship-like relations for the success of alternative democratic organizing. The collective firms I have studied are not the affinity groups of social movements, and not necessarily all their members are friends, but they spend the biggest part of their weekdays and sometimes the evenings, too, together in a collaborative environment with participative democratic structures. They develop familiarity, which in turn fosters and strengthens sympathy and understanding. Still, these are businesses, and while they have to consider the individual well-being and autonomy of their members, they simultaneously have to aim for economic success. To balance these needs, they develop “composite relations” that entail both the meaning of being an employee, and member of a community. I use the notion “composite relation” instead of “differentiated ties” to highlight, that these relations are compositions between different ways of relating to and coordinating with other people.

The main idea behind the composite relation is that organizations employ different modes of coordination and use relational work to balance tensions that can ensue from this co-existence. The specific instantiation of a composite relation at CAB and GTC can be found on three levels:

• (1) Their governance structures, while built on generalizable relations, formalized rules and procedures, leave space for particularity. This can be seen by their approach toward decision-making, as well as their sensibility toward sustaining trusting personal relationships between all members.

• (2) Both CAB and GTC allow “non-members” to relate to the organization in a way that cannot be reduced to “just” a market relationship. They have general categories as well as specific names for “partial members,” which are allowed quite substantial participation in the governance, as well as the same rights as “full-members” in regards to pay and other perks. These relations are on one hand attempts to differentiate “partial members” from “non-members” and furthermore, explicitly entail the aim to value the particularities of these members.

• (3) While both collectives have a division of labor and related formal hierarchies in their day-to-day work, they make sure to balance particular needs of members with the functional needs of the work process. In the literature on worker cooperatives, formalization, specialization and division of labor is often seen as incompatible with sustaining democracy and equality (Diefenbach, 2019). Consequently, job rotation is seen as an antidote to degeneration (Kokkinidis, 2015; Rothschild-Whitt, 1976; Sobering, 2019). In the collective firms I’ve studied, specialized knowledge and skills of members are both necessary and not viewed as a danger to collective governance per se. Relational work in is used to switch between familiar and generalized coordination, this allows to consider particularities, even within a division of labor.

For collectives, it is important, that the relationship between members is one that can pursue both the well-being of their members, and that of the organization itself. It would be a problem if it was only ever one of these “winning.” People engaged in these relations can not limit their moral stance to either an ethics of care or of justice. They have to make sure to not totally sacrifice the particular for the general and vice versa. This moral sense that aims to uphold a balance is what I call “not going too far.”

Some of the most influential views of alternative-democratic organizations presume, that democratic organizations are impossible in the long run. The “iron law of oligarchy,” the “degeneration thesis” (Cornforth, 1995; Michels, 1911), and, to a lesser degree, the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman, 1972), ⁷ can be characterized as what Zelizer calls the “hostile worlds” view: They posit, that it is not possible to be “both,” a democratic, caring collective and an efficient organization. However, there are empirical studies, as well as conceptual work, that show, that while oligarchies can develop in democratic organizations, this is neither necessary, nor unavoidable (Cornforth, 1995; Diefenbach, 2019; Jaumier, 2017; Langmead, 2017; Storey et al., 2014).

This paper offers a “differentiated” view of alternative, democratic organizations that is grounded in theorizing the relationship between coordination and morality. The theoretical framework developed in this paper offers two main contributions to the literature on alternative, democratic organizations:

First, it reconceptualizes the corresponding dualities that are often discussed in the literature on alternative organizations, and specifically, cooperatives. It relates these dualities to the dialectical tension between the general and the particular. This duality is, on a different level of explanation and can thus capture and explain important aspects of both formal/informal and business/social. The distinction between economic and social is usually discussed as the difference between being a company and a collective, and with this, a more or less explicit assumption is that “economic” demands formalization and hierarchies, whereas “social” demands democracy and personal relations. But economic and social can both be related to coordination based on familiarity or coordination based on generalization. For instance, democratic governance can be supported both by generalized and formal, as well as, friendship-like relations. By distinguishing between coordination based on generalization and familiarity, and related, an ethics of justice and an ethics of care, we are able to see the huge potential for conflicts within the “social” side of cooperatives, when the general and the particular clash. Similarly, “economic” in the sense of trying to be a successful business, can be based on familiarity, as considering people in their particular needs not only strengthens social relations, but also enhances motivation and productivity. A conceptual approach that differentiates between coordination based on generalization and familiarity allows to view the tension between particular and collective goods not (just) as one between the interests of utility-maximizing agents and a collective, but as the need to compose a balance between familiar attachments and more generalized modes of coordination. This allows to conceptually transcend the individual-collective opposition, and pay close attention to how members of collectives themselves make sense of their organizations. In organization studies, formal and informal are used to distinguish between the official organization and the co-existing informal aspects that are based on social relations and dynamics. However, in alternative organizations, the informal can be both an important aspect of the “official” organization, as well as inextricable intertwined with the formal. Distinguishing between coordination on different levels of generalization instead of thinking in dualities like “social” and “economic” or “formal” and “informal” helps to gain a better understanding of what is at stake in valuation and coordination conflicts in alternative organizations.

Second, this framework allows to describe how organizations can create sustainable compositions between coordination based on generalization and coordination based on familiarity. Consistent with a “differentiated ties” view, these compositions don’t have to adhere to an ideal of pure logic, since they form compromises between conflicting rationalities. Composite relations, like Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) composite arrangements, can be sustained as long as people are willing to agree to them. They are sustained by familiarity, trust and good-will to others. Simultaneously, these compositions develop in an organizational environment that provides structures and routines which are hospitable toward familiarity.

This paper focuses on relational work and proposes, that a key dimension to understand the difference between alternative and conventional organizations is the configuration of the member-relationship. This proposition echoes Kallinikos (2004) argument, that the defining characteristics of bureaucracy are not the extent of centralization and standardization in an organization (p. 31), but the non-inclusiveness of integrating people qua roles in the organization. Analogous to Kallinikos’ argument, this paper argues that in collective firms, members are more fully included as “persons” and their particularity is valued. The importance of understanding composite relations, is, however, not limited, to alternative organizations. An analysis of the way relations are configured to allow the accommodation of both familiarity and generalization can shed light on how organizations coordinate in a context, in which involvement qua roles is neither morally nor economically ideal.