Suchergebnisse

One challenge facing research on categories is to explain their content and the extent to which they gain meaning from cultural material that originates from moral arenas. This article suggests that categories are an outcome of strategic framing activities by which market members draw on prevalent master frames as cultural material to infuse an emerging market with meaning. It depicts the construction of a market category that emerges at the boundary between the economic sphere of a market and the moral sphere of social movements. A qualitative study of the use of movement master frames in categorizing the market for ethical fashion in the United Kingdom indicates the important role of movements' cultural legacy for the categorization of a moral market. It shows that the master frame of the environmental movement prevails in market categorization. Furthermore, we see that market members tend to adopt movement frames in categorization to discuss solutions rather than to talk about problems. Two propositions are drawn from these findings. First, when market making happens at the boundary of several social movements, market members adopt the master frame mainly of the movement whose activism has already led to changes in the political agenda, in social beliefs and practices in society. Second, framing tactics change when movement frames leave the moral sphere of activist mobilization and enter the economic sphere. While talking about problems has been shown to be as important as the provision of solutions in the movement arena, providing solutions becomes more important when movement frames are adopted in the economic arena of a market.

Der soziologische Institutionalismus zählt - auch unter der Bezeichnung Neoinstitutionalismus - zu den führenden Theorien der Organisationsforschung. Im Zentrum des derzeitigen Erkenntnisinteresses steht die Frage des institutionellen Wandels. Simone Schiller-Merkens stellt den aktuellen Forschungsstand dar und arbeitet die wesentlichen theoretischen Problemfelder der Auseinandersetzung heraus: Welche Bedeutung haben Akteure in institutionellen Wandelprozessen? Wie lässt sich das sozialtheoretische Mikro-Makro-Problem angehen? Was zeichnet ein prozessorientiertes Verständnis von Institutionen

Cooperatives, post-growth organizations, common good organizations, community-supported agriculture, transition towns or ecovillages are examples of alternative forms of organizing economic exchange. Their social practices embody and reproduce alternative moral values to the ones dominating the economy and society. They are regarded as prefigurative: They prefigure an alternative economy, both by creating imaginaries of an alternative future and by showing their viability in their everyday practices. As such, they are important actors for a social transformation of the economy which is also reflected in an increasing scholarship on alternative organizing and prefiguration in organization studies. However, the meaning of prefiguration and prefigurative organizing in this literature is not always made explicit and differs across research work. Furthermore, how prefigurative organizing relates to alternative organizing remains rather vague, as does its close relationship to anarchism. In its first part, this paper therefore informs about the main use of the concept of prefiguration in social movement studies and organization studies and describes the various meanings attached to it in this literature. It then develops a definition of prefigurative organizing that not only allows to differentiate it from alternative organizing but also to reflect its inherently political nature—its intricate linkage to multiple struggles, tensions, and conflicts. In the second part, the paper presents a systematic overview of various types of struggles around prefigurative organizing and briefly introduces each of them with reference to exemplary research. Finally, the paper argues that studying prefigurative organizing involves an alternative praxis in academia.

Prefiguration unites organizations and collectives as diverse as post-growth organizations, common good organizations, community-supported agriculture, transition towns, or ecovillages in their fundamental critique of contemporary capitalism and the belief in the urgency of a major social transformation toward sustainability. It refers to realizing imaginaries of radically alternative futures in social practices, of bringing about the future by enacting real utopias in the present. Prefiguration is an increasingly fashionable concept in the social sciences, but it is still rarely used in scholarship on infrastructures. This paper shows the potential relevance of this concept for studying infrastructures, in particular to address the social transformation of contemporary infrastructures toward radically alternative, revolutionary infrastructures. It therefore starts with providing insights into the common and yet rather narrow understanding of social change and transformation in literature on prefiguration. Building on scholarly reflections on the politics of social transformation and the crucial role of organizing in transformative social change processes, the paper derives a multi-political approach where prefiguration is considered in its intricate linkage to other forms of politics. Furthermore, the paper outlines the conceptual relationship between prefiguration and infrastructures, proposes conceiving radically alternative infrastructures as being created through prefigurative organizing, and discusses a few exemplary challenges of prefiguring alternative immaterial and material infrastructures. It generally suggests that a fundamental social transformation of our societies and infrastructures requires prefigurative organizing, understood through its multi-political lens.

Research on categorization and category dynamics has been rather silent on the role of powerful third parties in the self-categorization of producers. This study sheds light on this question by analyzing dynamics in the self-categorization of designers in the British ethical fashion movement. Their task of self-categorization is particularly complex in a context in which conflicts between aesthetics, morality and the economy still persist. Most of them enter the field as activists. Over time, however, designers stress their moral ideals less in their self-categorization, but put more emphasis on business-related values. Some even switch their self-identities from that of activists or moralists towards identifying as entrepreneurs. In this article, I argue that the designers' dependency relations to a powerful audience member allow us to better understand these dynamics in self-categorization.

One challenge facing research on categories is to explain their content and the extent to which they gain meaning from cultural material that originates from moral arenas. This article suggests that categories are an outcome of strategic framing activities by which market members draw on prevalent master frames as cultural material to infuse an emerging market with meaning. It depicts the construction of a market category that emerges at the boundary between the economic sphere of a market and the moral sphere of social movements. A qualitative study of the use of movement master frames in categorizing the market for ethical fashion in the United Kingdom indicates the important role of movements' cultural legacy for the categorization of a moral market. It shows that the master frame of the environmental movement prevails in market categorization. Furthermore, we see that market members tend to adopt movement frames in categorization to discuss solutions rather than to talk about problems. Two propositions are drawn from these findings. First, when market making happens at the boundary of several social movements, market members adopt the master frame mainly of the movement whose activism has already led to changes in the political agenda, in social beliefs and practices in society. Second, framing tactics change when movement frames leave the moral sphere of activist mobilization and enter the economic sphere. While talking about problems has been shown to be as important as the provision of solutions in the movement arena, providing solutions becomes more important when movement frames are adopted in the economic arena of a market. ; Kategorien sind zentrale Bestandteile der kulturellen Strukturierung von Märkten. Eine der Herausforderungen der Kategorienforschung ist es, die Inhalte von Kategorien zu erklären und herauszufinden, wie stark sie durch moralisch geprägte kulturelle Elemente beeinflusst werden. Das Papier stellt Kategorien als Ergebnis strategischer Rahmungsprozesse (framing) vor, wobei Marktakteure einem entstehenden Markt anhand verbreiteter kultureller Deutungsmuster (master frames) Bedeutung verleihen. Es beschreibt die Konstruktion einer Marktkategorie, die an der Grenze zwischen der ökonomischen Sphäre eines Marktes und der moralischen Sphäre sozialer Bewegungen entsteht. Die am Beispiel des Marktes für ethische Mode in Großbritannien durchgeführte qualitative Untersuchung stellt heraus, wie wichtig das kulturelle Vermächtnis sozialer Bewegungen für die Kategorisierung eines moralisch geprägten Marktes ist. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zeigen einerseits die herausgehobene Bedeutung der Umweltbewegung für die Kategorisierung des Marktes. Sie zeigen andererseits die Tendenz der Marktakteure zu einer eher lösungs-denn problemorientierten Rahmungsaktivität: Die Deutungsrahmen sozialer Bewegungen werden zur Kategorisierung herangezogen, um Lösungsansätze zu diskutieren, weniger jedoch, um die zugrunde liegenden Probleme zu benennen. Aus diesen Ergebnissen werden schließlich zwei Thesen abgeleitet. Erstens: Entstehen neue Märkte an der Grenze zu mehreren sozialen Bewegungen, so übernehmen Marktakteure eher den Deutungsrahmen jener Bewegung, deren Aktivismus die politische Agenda, gesellschaftliche Überzeugungen und Praktiken bereits nachhaltig verändert hat. Zweitens: Die Rahmungstaktiken ändern sich mit dem Wechsel der Bewegungsrahmen von der moralischen Sphäre aktivistischer Mobilisierung in die ökonomische Sphäre. Während zur Mobilisierung von Aktivisten die Problemdiskussion als gleichbedeutend mit der Entwicklung von Lösungsansätzen gewertet wird, gewinnt die Präsentation von Lösungen an Bedeutung, sobald die Bewegungsrahmen in den ökonomischen Bereich eines Marktes übertragen werden.

Abstract
As one of the major causes of climate change, there is an urgent need for a fundamental transformation of the food system. Calls for greater sustainability underscore the importance of integrating civil society and the local knowledge of citizens in this transformation process. One increasingly relevant organisation that can actively engage a plurality of actors from across civil society is the Food Policy Council (FPC). In this paper, we explore the potential role of FPCs in sustainability politics to create an alternative food system, with a focus on the co-production of knowledge for policy-making. We propose that the co-production of knowledge requires knowledge inclusion, exchange and transmission, and we focus on the challenges that can arise for FPCs. Our paper shows that bottom-up emerging FPCs constitute a new form of alternative food organisation that can integrate and support the critical capacity of civil society in food system transformation, but also face potential struggles in the co-production of knowledge for sustainable food policy-making. The paper further highlights that co-producing knowledge in and for sustainability transformation is fundamentally a political process, with politics broadly conceived. It not only has relevance for the institutions of formal politics, but emerges in and is intrinsically linked to the grassroots collective action of contentious and prefigurative politics in civil society. FPCs (re)politicise food by combining these various kinds of sustainability politics, which constitutes their transformative potential.