Christina Lüthy

Alternative organizations must continuously address conflicts that emerge regarding diverging prioritizations and interpretations of autonomy, solidarity, and responsibility. We explore how tensions around alternative moral principles can be navigated through relational processes that attune to others' needs, emotions, and concerns. Building on an organizational ethnography of a cooperative campaign agency, we mobilize ethics of care as a research lens to trace and analyse how relational activities that are infused by an ethical attention to particular others assist the organization in dealing with these tensions. Our findings show that three relational activities – inquiring, deliberating, and responding – constitute a “relational tension-navigation circuit” that enables the alternative organization to evoke, map, and situatively settle tensions around alternative principles by embracing the vulnerability, plurality, and flourishing of others. We contribute to relational, ethical, and processual research in alternative organizing by showing how the particular and the general can be productively enfolded in alternative organizations. Furthermore, we conceptualize a broad, ethically and relationally grounded understanding of revisability that supports alternative organizations in finding targeted adaptations and provisional solutions to address conflicts and tensions.