Emancipation as Contested Translation: Toward a Dialectic Understanding of Emancipatory Organizing

Broader Context: The ongoing economic crisis and the perpetual state of exception this has engendered have garnered a renewed interest in the question of whether and how organizations can contribute to emancipation. In partial response to this, Management and Organization Studies (MOS) have come to elaborate different forms of emancipatory organizing such as bottom of the pyramid ventures, inclusive business, social entrepreneurship or corporate social responsibility. What is conspicuous is that evaluations of these endeavors in terms of their emancipatory potential diverge to the point of incommensurability: where some commentators conceive of, for instance, bottom of the pyramid ventures as paradigmatic cases of emancipation, others deny them any liberating currency whatsoever. Problematization: What unites these antagonistic interpretations is that they both reify emancipation by construing the respective organizations as either wholly authentic or wholly corrupted, whereas they are deeply contradictory. Objective: The goal of this project is to re-conceptualize emancipation through a dialectic approach which places apt heed on the role of utopia and translation. Building on an understanding of utopia as a motivating impulse which sets things in motion, while drawing on Callon's (1986) theory of translation, emancipatory organizing gets construed as a process of contested translation whereby central actors create utopian openings for new forms of being and co-existence by problematizing and redefining particular aspects of the status quo. Dialectic analysis helps us to focus not simply on how utopian articulations are used to mobilize broader networks of allies with similar interests, but particularly on how such utopian impulses are constantly contested. Research Question: How are utopian impulses which aim at creating new possibilities of individual and collective action translated into broader networks and movements? What are the contradictions, tensions and underlying conflicts which come to the fore in such processes of emancipatory organizing? Methods: The dialectics of emancipatory organizing is studied empirically through two initiatives which explicitly aspire to "make a difference". The studies rely on an ethnographic methodology to produce an embedded understanding of the multifaceted processes of translation. Contributions: First, creating a circuit between dialectic thought and the theory of translation enables dereifying emancipation by pinpointing its "produced' character. Hence, conceptually elaborating and empirically studying the concrete ways in which problematizations of existing practices and conditions are enacted, embedded in broader networks, and contested from different sides, makes it possible to foreground the contradictory nature of emancipatory organizing. Second, in light of the paucity of empirical research on emancipation in the realm of MOS, this project contributes to the academic debate by providing an embedded understanding of the messiness and many unintended consequences involved in the struggles around emancipatory organizing.