Why reinvent the wheel? Materialising multiplicity to resist reification in alternative organisations

Seminar summary

Alternative organizations aim to dereify the existing social order by demonstrating the real possibility of organizing otherwise. This characterization implies a key challenge: how can alternative organizations maintain dereification in an ongoing manner, resisting the reification of their proposed alternative order? We address this question by examining the case of the Réseau Alimentaire Local (RAL), a French network of participatory cooperative grocery stores, unified in their pursuit of alternatives to the dominant grocery store model and its deleterious environmental and social impacts. We focus particularly on the risk of reification of these organizations’ alternative technologies, prompted by various RAL projects’ imputations of attempts to ‘reinvent the wheel’ as a means of delegitimizing other projects’ efforts to develop new technologies, or sociotechnical configurations. This empirical exploration grounds two contributions. First, conceptualizing reification in terms of materialization, we demonstrate how any given instance of materialization contributes to the materialization of multiple ideas simultaneously. We identify two forms of such multiplicity – vertical and horizontal – and argue that failure to recognize this multiplicity accounts for a great deal of the reifying capacity of materiality. Correspondingly, we suggest that awareness of multiplicity facilitates new ways of thinking about dereification methods. Our second contribution is therefore a strategy for resisting sociotechnical reification: materializing multiplicity.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We welcome you to join us online on Wednesday 17 May at 12pm.

Speaker bio

Genevieve Shanahan

Genevieve Shanahan is Lecturer in Management, Employment and Organisation at Cardiff University. Her research deals with the ways in which technology can enable or impede radical democracy in alternative organisations, especially those that address the climate crisis. More broadly, she’s interested in critical perspectives on technology and post-capitalist futures.