Genevieve Shanahan

Cardiff Business School

'No decision is permanent!': Achieving democratic revisability in alternative organizations through the affordances of new information and communication technologies It seems natural to understand organizational democracy as granting members of the organization the right to choose the rules that govern their actions. But what meaning does a rule...

Platform work can be understood as a particularly acute instance of the individualization of economic risk. Responding to the broader trends of labour commodification and decline of the standard employment relationship, psychological contract theory emerged as a way to conceptualize fairness in individualized work arrangements. In this paper, we dr...

Supposedly emblematic of digital capitalism, the rise of the gig economy is frequently taken as a cypher for the developing deindustrialisation of western societies. It is tempting to interpret the shift of manufacturing jobs to the global south and their replacement with service sector jobs as a one-way street, leading to the demise of decent work...

Societal grand challenges are “seemingly intractable, resisting easy fixes” (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015, p. 365) and demand a high degree of “coordinated and collaborative effort” (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016, p. 1880). At the extreme, grand challenges can enter the realm of super wicked problems, where the necessary coord...

In this paper, I argue that prefigurative organizing, as a subset of prefigurative praxis, entails a tension between a radical democratic commitment to direct action and a need for some enabling structure to organize that action. I examine this tension through ethnographic engagement with the Open Food Network (OFN), a prefigurative organization th...

This article contributes to on-going research on social business models by establishing a link with arguably one of the most salient global challenges we are confronted with today: economic exclusion. We conceive of economic exclusion broadly as a lack of access to salaried employment, finance, or essential goods and services. Addressing how and t...

In this chapter, we unpack the embodied and economic precarity that envelops spiritual body work, such as yoga teaching, in neoliberal economies. Using a life history approach, we illustrate how Maria – a part-time yoga teacher and single mum of two – navigates acute experiences of embodiment (ill health, childbearing and childrearing) and the econ...

A basic income policy, whereby individuals receive unconditional, regular payments regardless of their income, wealth or economic activity, has been a long-held goal for many. Increasing discussions among a variety of stakeholders and evidence of concrete actions in many European states suggest its time may have come. Yet there is also resistance,...

The “platform economy” uses technology to match workers to discreet tasks and has created what may be considered a new paradigm of what work means, and what it provides. As with any relationship between organisation and worker, a series of obligations and expectations emerge – both codified and non-codified. However there is not necessarily agreeme...

Cooperatives justify their existence by reference to a set of values that distinguish them from traditional firms, including democratic control by members and cooperative autonomy. Yet the degeneration thesis suggests that there is often a trade-off between such values and economic success. Our research asks which practices instigate, and which res...