Prefiguring an alternative economy: Understanding prefigurative organizing and its struggles

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.