Summary 

Alternative organizations that reject profit-driven capitalist logics in favor of autonomy, solidarity, and responsibility—often face tensions because members interpret and prioritize these principles differently in practice. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, we argue that an ethics of care enables alternative organizations to navigate tensions around principles by connecting them to the concrete needs, vulnerabilities, and interdependencies of particular co-workers. We identify three relational activities—inquiring, deliberating, and responding—that form a “relational tension-navigation circuit,” enabling organizations to evoke, evaluate and situatively settle tensions around principles as an ongoing, adaptive process. This approach helps alternative and value-driven organizations embrace imperfection, uncertainty, and plurality as strengths, while sustaining their aspirations for social and ecological transformation.  

Alternative Principles as a Site of Tension 

Alternative organizations are forms of collective enterprises that consciously structure themselves outside dominant extractive, top-down and financially driven ways of operating. They challenge neoliberal capitalism by grounding their organizational ethos and practices in principles of autonomy, solidarity and responsibility rather than focusing on profit.  

Yet, research shows that alternative organizations often struggle and disintegrate, because members have conflicting understandings of how these moral principles should be interpreted and prioritized in the everyday organizing. For example, members may disagree on whether working with certain clients contributes enough to socio-ecological transformation. Or tensions may arise when it comes to granting autonomy at work while also maintaining mutual support in the coordination of tasks and time off.  

Although many alternative organizations use horizontal decision-making processes and democratic practices, these are often not sufficient for handling deep seated tensions that emerge around alternative principles. In our paper—now published in the Journal of Management Studies—we examined how an ethics of care helps alternative organizations to navigate tensions around principles of alternativity. 

Tending to the Particular: The Power of an Ethics of Care 

As a feminist moral theory, an ethics of care emphasizes that moral decisions and actions should be based on a caring attention and responsiveness to the needs, feelings, experiences and concerns of particular others. It implies our fragility as well as ability to thrive in webs of dependence that are asymmetric and shifting over time. In alternative organizations, this for example entails attending to members’ situative needs (e.g., for a break or remote work) and relations to others (e.g., taking care of children or family members) when distributing tasks, or considering members political concerns and feelings of responsibility (e.g., when deciding what clients to work for). 

This perspective challenges the idea that moral conflicts can be transcended through universal values or principles. Instead, an ethics of care argues for the necessity of a context dependent morality that emerges out of people’s situative responsibility for the well-being and flourishing of particular others and takes interdependencies, vulnerability, difference and power relations seriously. This for example, can mean exempting a member from a salary cut due to a recent separation, supporting and celebrating members’ external engagement or investing in a decoloniality training to become more sensitive to marginal voices in the organization.  

We found that an ethics of care allowed the organization to explore and address tensions around alternative principles by linking these tensions to concrete feelings, concerns and needs. Rather than relying on rigid norms, an ethics of care informed an ongoing adaptive process in the organization through evoking, mapping and situatively settling these principles and tensions.  

Three Relational Activities That Navigate Alternative Principles 

Across two years of ethnographic research in a cooperative campaign agency, we identified three interlinked relational activities underpinned by an ethics of care that contributed to this ongoing adaptive process in the organization: 

1. Inquiring, which happens for example in the form of regular check-ins – evokes and makes alternative principles matter in concrete caring relations by creating occasions to sense and reveal needs, concerns, and vulnerabilities. 

2. Deliberating, which takes place in collective discussions online and offline – maps and re-evaluates tensions around alternative principles by discussing and negotiating them in relation to conflicting needs, feelings and concerns, considering plurality. 

3. Responding, which takes place adhoc but also through tinkering with and adapting organizational procedures – temporarily settles tensions around alternative principles by finding context-sensitive ways to accommodate needs, concerns and support others’ flourishing. 

These activities constitute what we call a relational tension-navigation circuit—a dynamic, situated, and ethically informed process that navigates tensions by embracing uncertainty, imperfection and contextuality. This circuit frames struggles around principles as hopeful calls for continuous innovation rather than seeing them as cause for defeat in face of the intractable challenges faced by alternative organizations. At the same time, it shows the strength that alternative, and more participatory modes of organizing develop by tending to particular needs and supporting the flourishing of their members and partners. 

Implications Beyond the Case 

Our insights do not only apply to alternative organizations. Public institutions, nonprofits, value-driven enterprises, as well as traditional firms, all grapple with competing moral commitments if they seek step out of a strong adherence to market logics and serve plural social, ecological, public or humanitarian ends. Often, organizations see their commitment to moral values as abstract, distinct, and opposed to the presence of concrete feelings, needs, and concerns of their members. We, however, show that a caring attention to particularity of their members, their needs, concerns and emotion, can help organizations to connect dynamically with broader moral principles and navigate and reevaluate their meaning by embracing and valuing personal and affective connections to others’ situations. 

At the same time, we also show that an institutionalized ethics of care allows organizations to stay with the trouble of participatory and value-led organizing, by instigating them to engage in an ethically informed revisability rather than codifying principles into rigid norms. The capacity of agile, purpose-led, and socially, ecologically responsible organizations to keep reflecting and reshuffling, i.e., revising their own organizational procedures and efforts as well as finding ad-hoc or case-based solutions, allows them to embrace imperfection and multiplicity as strength rather than as weakness while holding onto their aspirations for a better world. 

This blog post is based on our article, “Tending to the Particular: Navigating Tensions Around Principles of Alternativity Through an Ethics of Care,” published in the Journal of Management Studies.