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“The people” and resistance
against international business
The case of the Bolivian “water war”
Birke Otto
Berlin, Germany, and
Steffen Bo
¨hm
Department of Accounting, Finance and Management,
University of Essex, Colchester, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to analyse the organisation of the Bolivian “water war” in
Cochabamba that saw a social movement resist international business and the privatisation of public
goods. The implications for the study of resistance in management and organisation studies will be
evaluated.
Design/methodology/approach – Laclau’s discourse theory is used to analyse the organisation of
resistance and the establishment of a new discourse of “the people”. A range of primary and secondary
data are drawn upon.
Findings – The study shows how the resistance movement was successfully organised in
Cochabamba, Bolivia. Through various “horizontal” and “vertical” methods of organising, the
Coordinadora, the overarching resistance organisation, was able to unite formerly disparate discourses
into a single demand. This establishment of a united front was a key element in the formation of the
discourse of “the people”, which successfully challenged neo-liberal privatisation and management
discourses put forward by the government, multinational companies and international finance
institutions.
Research limitations/implications – The research was primarily focused on studying the
discursive shift that occurred during the Bolivian “water war” in 1999 and 2000. The paper was not
able to discuss the aftermath of the successful resistance movement, and the various problems the new
municipal water organisation ran into after it regained control of the water resources in Cochabamba.
Practical implications – The primary audience of practitioners are participants in social
movements that are engaged in resistance struggles against multinational companies and
governments. Drawing on the experiences from the Bolivian “water war”, the paper offers a range
of practical insights into how to effectively organise resistance movements. This paper might also be
useful to policy makers and managers in the area of water management.
Originality/value – This is one of the first papers that analyses the Bolivian “water war” to consider
its implications for the study of resistance within management and organisation studies.
Keywords Bolivia, Social action, Government policy, Privatization, Water industry,
International business
Paper type Case study
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1742-2043.htm
The authors would like to thank Philipp Terhorst who has generously provided primary data
from Cochabamba, Bolivia, which has greatly helped this analysis. The authors would also like
to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as the Editors of the journal for their useful
comments. Birke Otto would like to thank Seth Hague for useful discussion of an earlier draft of
this paper.
Bolivian
“water war”
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critical perspectives on international
business
Vol. 2 No. 4, 2006
pp. 299-320
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1742-2043
DOI 10.1108/17422040610706631
Introduction
In the 1980s and 1990s Bolivia underwent a process of structural adjustment through
neo-liberal policies imposed by international finance institutions (IFIs), such as the
World Bank, meaning that most of the public services in the country were privatised.
In 1999 the Bolivian government proceeded with the privatisation of the water system
in Cochabamba, the third largest city in Bolivia. It handed over the service to the
multinational consortium Aguas del Tunari (Aguas), whose major shareholder was the
Californian-based multinational corporation Bechtel. The contract expropriated the
independent water and irrigation systems and autonomous water services of
Cochabamba to Aguas. Moreover, water prices tripled for some of the poorest people.
To resist the company’s and the government’s practices, the people of Cochabamba
formed the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (Coalition for the Defence of
Water and Life), a network of a diverse set of groups and organisations demanding
that Aguas had to leave the city. The Coordinadora mobilised an enormous crowd of
protesters, which was met with much police resistance and violence and left 175
protesters injured and one dead. After four months of continuous struggle, the
government agreed to enter into negotiations with the Coordinadora and eventually
rescinded the contract with Aguas. The previous municipal water company was
re-established and then run by representatives of the Coordinadora, community leaders
and members of the local government. The “water war” is the first significant popular
success and “turning point” in the countries historic struggle against imposition of
neo-liberal policies (Kohl, 2006; Olivera, 2004).
This paper discusses the case of the resistance movement of the people of
Cochabamba against water privatisation and international business interests. Our
specific concern is to analyse the organisation of this resistance movement by
employing the analytical tools of Laclau’s (2005) discourse theory. Our thesis is that
through the resistance of the social movement organisation, Coordinadora, a discursive
change took place during the Bolivian “water war”. Through its practices and specific
forms of organisation and decision making, the Coordinadora constructed a movement
identity centred around “the people”, which helped to establish a new discourse in
terms of regarding the people of Cochabamba as active agents for making decisions
about how public services should be governed and run. This discourse replaced the
hegemony of the neo-liberal market logic, which favoured international companies’
take over of what used to be public, municipal organisations that provided a range of
public services, such as water supply.
At the theoretical level the aim of this paper is to enrich our understanding of the
organisation of resistance in the field of management and organisation studies, which
so far has mainly concentrated on analysing resistance in the workplace. This case
study shows how resistance against international business interests is articulated
through social movements that operate in the wider realms of civil society rather than
solely in workplace situations. Politically, this case provides one of the few examples
where resistance to international business has actually led to a radical change of
consciousness against the hegemonic discourse of the market. The Bolivian “water
war” has a crucial symbolic function as a role model for many anti-corporate
globalisation struggles as it exposes malpractices of multinational companies and
neo-liberal governments. It gives incentives to the imagination of alternative ways of
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organising public services and society at large and we therefore see this paper not only
as a theoretical engagement but of political importance to the study of social
movements resisting international business.
Resistance in management and organisation studies
There has been a long history of scholars studying resistance to managerial and
business initiatives (see, for example, Fritz, 1999; Jermier et al., 1994; Smith, 1992;
Thomas, 2005). These studies range from critical engagements with the politics of
management in today’s global economy (e.g. Bo
¨hm, 2006; Parker, 2002) to more
orthodox or mainstream traditions that often see resistance and political struggle as a
setback and something that disrupts the supposedly smooth functioning of
management and international business (e.g. Rugman, 2000). In contrast to the latter
literature, which is often subjected to an economic market logic that sees resistance as
pathology, the starting point for our paper is the view that resistance is an articulation
of the multiple antagonisms that management and internal business are embedded in.
One of the key literature sets that has guided critical approaches to understanding
resistance to management has been that of labour process theory (LPT) (e.g.
Braverman, 1974; Cohen, 1987), which sees the capitalist labour process in the
workplace as the prime articulation of the class antagonisms between capital and
labour. For labour process theorists, the class relationship between labour and capital,
and hence their antagonism, is articulated by the fact that capital appropriates the
surplus value that is produced by labour. For this reason Thompson’s (1990)
framework for a “core labour process theory” maintains that the study of the labour
process produces privileged insights for an understanding of possibilities of resistance
against management and capitalist relations. Hence, labour process scholars tend to
concentrate on studying collective resistances in the workplace, such as unionism and
strikes (Edwards, 1979; Friedman, 1977), as well as other, more informal, forms of
resistance or “misbehaviour” (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). However, what these
studies mainly focus on are the structural class relations between capital and labour in
the workplace.
The influence of Foucauldian thinking in management and organisation studies
over the past two decades has led to a profound critique of such structural analyses of
resistance. Authors have increasingly highlighted discursive dynamics and the
importance of micro-practices when studying resistance in the workplace. In this
manner, “subjectivity is understood as a product of disciplinary mechanisms,
techniques of surveillance and power/knowledge strategies” (Knights and Willmott,
1989, p. 554). This is to say that, the worker/manager or powerful/oppressed
dichotomies are replaced by an explanation as to how subjectivities of workers and
managers are inextricably entwined with complex processes of discourses and
relations of power and knowledge. This new paradigm has opened the field to
recognition of more subtle acts of resistance, such as irony (Fleming and Spicer, 2002),
humour (Collinson, 1992), scepticism (Fleming and Sewell, 2002), and cynicism
(Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Willmott, 1993). It is argued that such micro-practices show
that resistance cannot only be articulated through class antagonisms; instead,
dominant organisational discourses can be resisted through re-signification of
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language and construction of new meanings. Thus, these studies open new ways of
thinking about resistance in managerial and organisational settings.
However, many Foucauldian studies remain focused on resistances occurring
within organisations (Bo
¨hm, 2006). That is, the workplace is often regarded as the
primary location for the study of resistances to management and international
business initiatives. What is not emphasised enough is that resistance to business and
management also occurs outside the specific realms of the workplace. Following a
Gramsci (1971) perspective, we can say that the hegemonic regime of management is
not only produced through economic class relations in the workplace. What are equally
important are the political consent mechanisms in the wider realm of civil society,
which culturally and socially legitimise as well as undermine that regime. This insight
is derived from an understanding that sees civil society as that sphere that orders
relations between humans through political reason, whereas the workplace is mainly
ordered by economic reason. Arguably, management and organisation studies, as a
field of enquiry, sits at the border between economic and political reason, because
organisation is not a closed entity but an open process, as it interacts with, and is
penetrated by, a wide range of social forces. Therefore, in order to understand the
relations of power and resistance that face management and international business, it
is important to look at the resistance struggles going on in civil society.
Social movement research is one of the fields that has addressed the shortcomings
of traditional organisational research, which is mainly focused on the economics and
politics of the workplace. The works of Davis et al. (2005) and Levy and Nevell (2005)
are examples of how management and organisation studies can be expanded to include
the organisational politics of civil society. This move towards social movement
research is of vital importance because it might provide insight not only into how
social movements influence organisations, but also, how they develop new forms of
organising. Thus, the shift away from the economic sphere, in which organisations are
located, towards the study of social movements as forces of organisational resistance
may open new discursive possibilities as to how to perceive organisation.
Organisation of resistance and social movements
There have been a growing number of researchers interested in the relationship
between resistance, organisation and social movements. Collections of essays, such as
Social Movements and Organisational Theory (Davis et al., 2005), are testimony to this
(see also McAdam et al., 1996, and Zald and McCarthy, 1989). The argument put
forward by organisational scholars interested in social movements is that the division
between organisations and social movements is not clear cut anymore. Organisations
– broadly defined as institutions with the intention to maintain order – increasingly
become associated with elements of change and instability, whereas social movements
challenging that order must take on board forms of formal organisation to be
successful (McAdam and Scott, 2005).
The underlying assumption of many contributors in this field is that social
movements which are able to endure for any length of time have formal strategies for
coordinating action, and can, therefore, be analysed through frameworks of
institutional analysis (e.g. leadership, administrative structure, incentives for
participation and means for acquiring resources). This approach originates from
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resource mobilisation theory developed by Zald and others in the 1960s and 1970s (see
Zald and McCarthy, 1989). It is argued that social movements must mobilise resources
through instrumental activities and coordination of effort. Along these lines, the
analysis privileges concepts such as efficiency, strategy, organisation, rationality, and
interests as resources in order to determine a movement’s success.
More recent approaches related to resource mobilisation include questions of
identity, often seen as an important aspect of the formation of resistance movements.
For instance, Campbell (2005, p. 43) identifies three mechanisms that determine a
resistance movement’s success: firstly, environmental mechanisms, such as political
opportunities that encourage and discourage change or trigger mobilisation; secondly,
cognitive mechanisms – how actors perceive their identities, interests and
possibilities for change; and lastly, relational mechanisms, such as formal and
informal networks, which affect actors in a way that enable them to cause change.
The inclusion of cognitive mechanisms has been influenced by a trend in social
movement theory that emphasises the social construction of collective identity (Scully
and Creed, 2005, p. 311).
The social movement theorist Melucci (1995, p. 43) assumes that actors produce
collective action, not only because they have certain resources available, but also,
because they are able to define themselves and their relationship with the environment
through a contested process of identity construction. Campbell and others employ this
idea of the construction of a collective identity through the concept of framing, which
means that actors define their field of action, interests, ends and means. In order to be
successful, they must frame these issues in ways that resonate with the ideologies,
identities, and cultural understandings of supporters. In short, frames are metaphors,
symbols, etc. that are created strategically in order to manipulate shared
understandings and interpretations of the world (Campbell, 2005, pp. 49, 66). In this
approach, the construction of identities is understood in terms of agents crafting social
identities, discourses and meaning making for resource and outcome (Scully and Creed,
2005, p. 311). In other words, identity is perceived as a resource that can be
intentionally used in strategic actions. This is a strategy often employed in
organisations as, for example, in the introduction of a “corporate culture” (Ogbor,
2001). However, one must question if this concept can be transferred so easily to the
organisation of social movements.
In response to this literature on the study of the organisation of resistance
movements, we have three points of critique. First, the assumption that identity can be
constructed voluntarily assumes that interests are stable and agents act in a rational
process, consciously knowing their own desires. It neglects how resistance movements’
identities are an outcome of discourses that struggle with other discourses and,
therefore, constantly change subject positions. Thus, it ignores the contextual and
antagonistic processes that influence the construction of identity. Second, identity is
perceived as a resource, which is subordinated to material resources: “symbolic
resources are different from the resources that pose the sharpest distributive dilemmas
– resources that are nonpartitive and scarce” (Scully and Creed, 2005, p. 326). This
economic determinism maintains a separation between the symbolic and the material
by ignoring that every symbolic construction has material effects.
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Third, and expanding on our second point of critique, this literature moves within a
discourse of economic rationality, as it focuses on institutionalised organisations that
are only successful if everything is perceived as a resource, even the construction of
identity. In this manner, resources must be accumulated and mobilised, some form of
administrative order must be established, and a stable leadership or some form of
hierarchy has to come into place (McAdam and Scott, 2005, p. 38). These attributes
emerge from a managerial and economic discourse to explain social movement
behaviour (e.g. “social movement industry”, “target goals”) in relation to capitalist
organisations (Jung and Strang, 2005).
In short, the resource mobilisation literature, which has mainly been developed
within an American context by Zald and his colleagues, might be usefully expanding
the traditional realm of management and organisation studies to include civil society
organisations – such as social movements – yet their discourse remains within an
economic, institutional and even managerial frame of analysis. That is, Zald et al.’s
frameworks offer possibilities to assess social movements in terms of their
institutionalisation and success, yet they offer little to examine non-institutionalised
movements that critique and resist capitalist relations, as social movements are mainly
assessed in terms of economic and institutional rationality. To address these problems,
we must hence turn to more radical management and organisation literatures.
Fournier (2002), for example, argues that the field of organisation and management
studies often seems to sustain a certain inevitability of capitalist rationality. She
provocatively states that if “one looks at the field of organisation studies specifically,
one may be forgiven for thinking that there aren’t many alternatives to capitalist
corporations”, as it does not sufficiently pursue the imagination of alternative forms of
organisation (Fournier, 2002, p. 189). Yet, she finds inspiration in, for example, Blaug
(1998), who offers views on social movement organisation that challenge Zald et al.’s
bias towards economic and institutional forms of movement resistance. In relation to
grassroots organisations, Blaug perceives social movements as “rhizomatic” struggles
that operate outside any established forms of organising. He contrasts grassroots
activities to “hierarchism”, which, as he states, is the hegemonic form of organisation
deeply entwined with capitalist rationality and the “dream of western order” (Blaug,
1998, p. 36). Hierarchism is characterised by a “hierarchy of command, centralized
control and the institutionalisation of roles of expertise and leadership” and emerges
from “the long history of sovereign/subject structures of power” (Blaug, 1998, p. 35).
According to Blaug, grassroots organisations can challenge this order, because they
organise through informal, spontaneous and ad-hoc action, in flat networks of
communication, and without centralised guidance, “yet somehow with the capacity to
co-ordinate effectively collective action” (Blaug, 1998, p. 47). The idea is that these
forms of organisation do not aim at seizing power (Holloway, 2002), but that they
challenge existing power relations by shifting them towards new discourses of
organisation.
Blaug’s argument of anti-hierarchical resistance to dominant regimes is embedded
in a much wider discourse of so-called “horizontal” anti-capitalist movement
organising, which has gained popularity in recent years (e.g. Bircham and Charlton,
2001; Kingsnorth, 2003; Notes from Nowhere, 2003; Osterweil, 2004). This literature
argues that, while “vertical” organisations (e.g. unions, political parties, and some
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NGOs) operate with more traditional; that is, bureaucratic and hierarchical; structures,
“horizontals” are social movements that are arguably more participatory and open in
the way they organise resistance against capitalist relations. In contrast to the resource
mobilisation view discussed above, this literature is firmly embedded in a radical
critique of, not only managerial and business initiatives, but also, hierarchical and
institutional forms of resistance and their articulations in all corners of society. Part of
the argument put forward is that “horizontal” struggles create the possibility for
radically shifting the way society is organised. This not only involves a challenge to
the inevitability of neo-liberal market relations, but reaches much further into an
all-encompassing critique of established hierarchies that currently organise “the
social”.
There are, however, some shortcomings with this more radical literature. What are
sometimes constructed here are binaries between formal and informal, or vertical and
horizontal forms of organisation (see also Juris, 2005, p. 254). While the former is seen
as being inherently managerial and capitalist, the latter is supposed to be the preferred
mode of resistance organising. By relying on this binary, authors in this canon ignore
that capitalist relations often entail forms of “rhizomatic action”; mobility, diversity
and spontaneity (Bo
¨hm, 2006, p. 159; Fournier, 2002, p. 190; Hardt and Negri, 2000,
p. 150). Additionally, there are many examples of how vertical and horizontal
resistance practices combine in specific situation and events (Spicer and Bo
¨hm, 2006).
Therefore, there are two problems with those accounts that privilege horizontal,
grassroots forms of resistance organising. First, it is evident that today’s market
liberalism embraces the discourse of movement and horizontality; it incorporates
forms of activity that are characterised by spontaneity, flexibility and informality. In
this way, a resistance movement that simply repeats this mantra of horizontality might
be easily incorporated into the hegemony of management and business. Second, as our
case will show, horizontal and vertical resistance practices rarely exist independent of
each other; that is, there are often multiple relations between grassroots organising and
more traditional institutional forms of organising resistance.
Resistance movements and discourse theory
The above trends in theorising resistance in management and organisation studies
have offered important insights in terms of: opening the field towards discursive
constructions of resistance forces (Foucauldian labour process theory); drawing
attention to the importance of studying the organisation of social movements (resource
mobilisation theory); and the appreciation of new forms of organising that grassroots
movements develop (Fournier (2002) and Blaug (1998)). However, we have been critical
of all three of these literatures for: concentrating their analyses on the workplace and
ignoring resistance processes in the wider realms of civil society; relying on
institutional and economic rationalities; and working with binary understandings of
“horizontal” and “vertical” forms of resistance practices. We now put forward a
discourse theory, which, in our view, addresses these shortcomings of the existing
literature.
As we mentioned earlier, Foucauldian management and organisation studies have
been important for a critique of established conceptions of resistance by emphasising
discursive processes of identity construction. What Foucauldian writers highlight is
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that “in discourse analysis, attention shifts decidedly towards an appreciation of the
power of language in constituting the world, in the sense that language/discourse is
taken as the means by which human actors engage, make sense of, and construct the
world” (Delbridge and Ezzamel, 2005, pp. 606-607). Therefore, discursive approaches
have often emphasised the micro-political processes of resistance at work in
managerial and organisational settings. As a point of critique, however, Reed, for
example, suggests that these studies sometimes “retreat into a form of
micro-contextual reductionism in which institutional power and control are always
derived from below, rather than from the social structural mechanisms and locations
that generate such practices and through which such structures are elaborated and/or
transformed” (Reed, 1997, p. 28). Such critiques point to the “need to relate our
microstudies to the big picture, to take on board social and political issues” (Hardy,
2002, p. 17) that affects societies as a whole, and not only workers, managers or other
actors within organisations.
To combat such criticism, we think it is important for discourse theory to go beyond
its micro-political, organisational horizon and take into account the struggles of social
movements that resist hegemonic discourses of management and business in the wider
realms of civil society. What, for example, the so-called anti-capitalist movement
resists is not only managerial and business micro-practices. Instead, their struggle is
aiming at a profound change in the organisational and social imaginary of a discursive
field that affects the very way we think and talk about society. This movement is not
only critiquing one particular company or organisation; its aim is to struggle against
discourses of management and capitalism as they are articulated in all spheres of
society.
In the following, we introduce Laclau’s (2005) discourse theory to explore how it
might help us to understand the organisation of popular resistance movements, such as
the anti-capitalist movement, and the discursive shift away from hegemonic regimes of
management and organisation. In so doing, the emphasis lies on the discursive and
symbolic dynamics of the social, the analysis of the conditions of emergence of a
resistance movement and its “success” in terms of the construction of a new discourse.
With our discussion, we contribute to a growing field of scholars in management and
organisation studies interested in the work of Laclau (Contu, 2002; Contu and Willmott,
2003; Jones and Spicer, 2005; Willmott, 2003, 2005). What these contributions have in
common is a commitment to not reducing discourse and resistance to a micro-political
struggle that occurs within the boundaries of organisations. Instead, following
Laclau’s language, organisation is seen as “hegemonic impossibility” that cannot be
reduced to the contemporary discourse of neo-liberal management and international
business. Here “impossibility” means that the discourse of organisation is multiple, as
there are many possibilities of how society can be organised. Seeing organisation as
hegemonic impossibility therefore opens up new possibilities for understanding
resistance to managerial and business initiatives in civil society, and imagining new
and alternative forms of social organisation.
Laclau’s (2005; see also Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) discourse theory is first and
foremost one that emphasises social organisation as a relational process. For example,
according to Melucci (1996), a social movement can be considered as neither a purely
empirical phenomenon, nor as possessing a coherent identity. That is, social
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movements cannot be studied as something given, but rather as socially constructed.
Thus, the identity of a movement is not, as for instance in Zald et al.’s resource
mobilisation view, a dependent variable subordinate to more objective variables.
Rather, a social movement is a relational process.
In his recent book, On Populist Reason, Laclau (2005) interrogates the process of
constructing a political formation’s identity as “the people”. According to him, this is
not caused solely by structural conditions – as some theories of class antagonism
might have it – but by symbolic processes of identity construction. For him, it is the
process of constructing a collective identity in the name of “the people” which is the
significant factor for the establishment of resistance unity (Laclau, 2005, p. 95). In
claiming the universality of “the people”, the movement creates the conditions of
possibility for a radical change and the construction of a new hegemonic discourse,
which can replace another hegemonic discourse, such as neo-liberal management and
business. The construction of this identity of “the people” requires three processes:
(1) an equivalential articulation of demands making possible the emergence of “the
people”;
(2) the formation of an antagonistic frontier; and
(3) the unification of these demands into a stable system of signification or
hegemonic discourse (Laclau, 2005, p. 74).
These three elements provide us with a basis for studying a movement and its success
in terms of organising itself to achieve a discursive change. As mentioned above, the
unification of a movement is not created because of structural conditions, which create
a homogenous group with fixed interests, as some labour process theorists or Zald et al.
might argue. Unity is also not created by simply relying on a binary of “vertical” or
“horizontal” practices of resistance, as Blaug and Fournier seem to suggest. Instead,
according to Laclau (2005), a movement must be analysed from its smallest unit – its
demand. The demand creates the identity of a movement, which in turn is necessary
for the unification of “the people”. Hence, the strategic and organisational aim of a
movement is to establish a demand (involving a range of different organisation
principles), which can function as common signifier in order to unify a plurality of
different subjects.
For example, the symbols of the Solidarnosc workers movement in Poland in the
1980s did not remain as particular demands of a group of workers, but came to signify
a much wider popular camp against an oppressive regime (Laclau, 2005, p. 81). In other
words, in order to reach a broad coalition, the movement’s demand must be open to a
variety of interpretations so as to accommodate many different actors in a common
project. In Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, this means that a unity is reached through what
they call an “equivalential chain” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 130). That is, actors
cancel out their differences in order to identify with a particular demand. Yet, the
establishment of this chain can never be a purely intentional and rational act, as the
process is disrupted through an antagonistic relationship with other discourses, which
at the same time is necessary for the unity of the movement.
Laclau’s next proposition is that the equivalential chain derives part of its power
and unity through the creation of a political frontier. This resembles Derrida’s idea of
the “constitutive outside” (Staten, 1984). The concept indicates that, in order to identify
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oneself, one must demarcate oneself from an “Other”, which we are not, and to which
we are superior. Thus, the Other is excluded from one’s identity. Conferred upon a
movement, this means that the movement’s demand is addressed to someone who is
excluded from the movement’s identity (Laclau, 2005, p. 83ff). More concretely, one can
say that the constitution of an “enemy” is necessary to construct the movement’s
identity as the precondition for its own existence. This paradoxical relationship of
antagonisms is a defining moment of social life. It is paradoxical because every identity
requires an enemy, which enables the existence of the movement at the same time as it
threatens it (Bastow, 2002, p. 85), because it prohibits the representation of a
universality. Thus, every antagonism exposes the limits of the movement’s discourse
through the presence of other possibilities (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 125). This
tension leads to the attempt to conceal the fact of the failure of objectivity through the
creation of a hegemonic discourse, which suggests the existence of a universality, such
as “the people”.
The idea of hegemony is a central concept in the construction of a movement’s
identity and can be achieved through the unification of many discourses, subjects and
demands in a stable system of signification (Laclau, 2005, p. 74). A hegemonic
discourse can create a new social objectivity; in other words, a new common sense,
which determines the organisation of social reality and provides a subject position with
which “the people” can identify. The hegemonic discourse can only exist in a “concrete
social formation” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 7). This is to say, the discourse only
becomes credible and, therefore, hegemonic if it is embodied in institutions, practices
and modalities of its organisation (Laclau, 1990, p. 66). Laclau and Mouffe adopt the
concept of hegemony from Gramsci’s (1971) conception of a “hegemonic bloc” in order
to describe social order. This describes a coalition of many groups and institutions
from different social sectors; such as the state, economy and civil society; that reach a
consensus through intellectual and moral leadership and, thereby, legitimise a
particular ideology (Levy and Nevell, 2005, p. 50f). Thus, a discourse can never be
established through a small group of elite, but must convince a great variety of social
actors. Yet, the existence of resistance and antagonisms always threaten the hegemonic
discourse.
This short overview of Laclau’s discursive theory draws attention to the
significance of identity construction of a resistance movement through the interplay of
different elements and antagonistic discourses, as well as its aim to establish a
hegemonic discourse through a “chain of equivalences”. The focus on discursive and
symbolic processes and struggles for hegemony exposes the contingency of social
reality. That is, every hegemonic discourse is only a partial fixation of a particular
order that can be challenged through resisting forces. This is why discourse theory is a
useful approach for the study of resistance in organisation studies: it not only offers a
systematic explanation of the emergence and organisation of movements, but in its aim
of exposing hegemonic discourses as something contingent it is suitable for a critique
of the inevitability of established regimes of management and international business.
Methodology
What follows is a case study of a resistance movement of “the people” against
international business and the privatisation of water in Bolivia. Through the
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application of Laclau’s discourse theory we aim to make sense of the social struggles
that took place in Cochabamba in 2000, and better understand the organisation of the
resistance movement that led to the successful eviction of a multinational company
from Bolivia. We think this case provides an important contribution to the study and
conceptualisation of resistance in management and organisation studies, as it widens
our horizon to understand the variety of struggles articulated through the global
anti-capitalist movement which, so far, has been underexposed in our field (see also
Bo
¨hm, 2006).
With the intention of demonstrating the discursive change that has taken place in
Cochabamba during the “water war” through the impact of the social movement
organisation Coordinadora, we closely engage with a reading of “popular actions”
(Escobar, 1992, p. 82), by way of a textual analysis of carefully selected statements of
official documents, movement documents and secondary sources. We treat these data
as elements of the discourse under investigation. In other words, slogans as well as
academic documents work as representations of the social logic of the underlying
discourses and the relation and interaction between them. In addition, these slogans
articulate how social discourses function to create and mobilise subjects (Howarth,
2004, p. 342).
To explain the processes of privatisation in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the
organisation of the resistance movement, we have used existing primary data[1]. We
have also consulted a range of secondary literature, mainly in order to reconstruct the
historical context, with special reference to the neo-liberal policies introduced in Bolivia
and their effect on resistance practices.
Background to the Bolivian “water war”
In telling the story of the Bolivian “water war”, let us first turn to a brief
contextualisation of the events in Cochabamba in 2000. According to Kohl (2006,
p. 304), there have been three phases of imposition of and resistance to neo-liberal
policies in Bolivia: After a first set of structural adjustment programmes, imposed by
the World Bank and other IFIs in 1985, President Sa
´nchez de Lozada launched a second
major neo-liberal restructuring program, called Plan de Todos (The Total Plan) in 1994.
The new policies turned Bolivia into a market-democracy. One element of the Plan was
the Law of Capitalisation, introduced under pressure from the IFIs. As a result of the
law, 50 per cent of the state industries (hydrocarbons, telecommunications,
transportation, and electricity) that had provided 60 per cent of all government
revenues were sold to multinational corporations, such as Enron, Shell, STET or VASP
(Farthing and Kohl, 2005, p. 77ff; Kohl, 2006, p. 314, see also Perrault, 2006). These
processes had a crucial effect on an increased social fragmentation in Bolivia. The
decline of the industries caused high levels of unemployment and reduced the
capacities of the national labour union Confederacio
´n Obrera Boliviana (COB; Bolivian
Workers Federation). The COB had been the main opposition force to the government
since the 1950s, and was known for its ability to unify workers, middle class and urban
dwellers, as well as rural and indigenous people into organised resistance movements
(Farthing and Kohl, 2005, p. 52). Thus, one can argue that neo-liberal restructuring
programmes in Bolivia had a profound impact on the nature of popular resistance in
Bolivian
“water war”
309
Bolivia, which had been rather strong because of unionised, class-based struggles
organised by the COB.
As part of the ongoing capitalisation in Boliva in 1999 the government decided –
under pressure from IFIs – to lease SEMAPA, the public water supplier of
Cochabamba. It was taken over by the consortium Aguas del Tunari (Aguas), a
composition of companies dominated by International Waters, whose major
shareholder was the Californian-based corporation Bechtel. In 2000, Bechtel had
yearly revenues that exceeded $14 billion, while Bolivia’s national budget was $2.7
billion. The other companies involved in Aguas were Bolivian and their executives
were part of the political elite of the country.
The way in which the water contract was negotiated with Aguas raised suspicions
over the influence of foreign capital and private interests on public policy. The Bolivian
newspaper La Razon wrote, in January 2000, that the deal poorly protected the interests
of “Cochabambinos” because of the rise in water tariffs (in Farthing and Kohl, 2005,
p. 123). However, Bechtel justified this position by explaining the increase as common
practice in the international arena, as applying tariff rises protects scarce raw water
sources from increased consumption and, therefore, Aguas “instituted internationally
accepted best practices in managing the system” (Bechtel, 2005, p. 2ff).
This reflects the “new water paradigm”, a discourse which had been gaining
momentum since the 1970s, highly encouraged by the IFIs and multinational
corporations (Sjo
¨lander Holland, 2005). It sees water as an economic, rather than
common, good and proposes market mechanisms for water management (Finger, 2005,
p. 280). The Bolivian government derived its line of argumentation from the same
discourse of economic rationality, which perceives privatisation, i.e. the introduction of
foreign capital and entrepreneurial management techniques, as the most efficient and
effective way to organise water supply.
In Cochabamba, the chronic lack of sufficient water supply had often been the cause
of conflicts among the population. Conflicts mainly took place between the city
dwellers and rural irrigation farmers; the substance of them being that increased
consumption in the city was taking water away from the rural areas (Peredo Beltra
´n,
2003, p. 6). The farmers were organised in an independent organisation with an
established trade-union structure, called Federacion Departamental Cochabambina de
Organizaciones de Regantes (FEDECOR, Departmental Federation Cochabambina of
Organisations of Irrigation Farmers). Since the mid-nineties, the group had organised
many protests against inequitable distribution of resources and hence acquired
knowledge about the legal water situation in Bolivia (Assies, 2003, p. 20f). When Aguas
took over the municipal water supply in September 1999, FEDECOR became aware of
a new mandate, Law 2029, which had been introduced simultaneously with the
concession contract, and which prohibited all alternative water systems whilst
transferring the ownership of the springs and wells to Aguas. This would remove the
irrigation farmers from their customary use of water, which they had been using, free
of charge, and would, therefore, challenge their most fundamental base of living
(Crespo Flores et al., 2004, p. 8). At about the same time, some urban activists from
professional schools and environmental organisations were alerted to the tariff rise.
The group feared that water prices were to rise much more than the proposed 35 per
cent. They formed the Committee of the Defence of Water and the Popular Economy
CPOIB
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310
(CODAEP, Comite
´de Defensa del Agua y la Economı
´a Familiar, Committee of the
Defence of Water and the Popular Economy) and demanded the reduction of water
tariffs (Assies, 2003, p. 23).
Meanwhile, the irrigation farmers had made contact with the Fabriles, an
established project concerned with labour conditions in Bolivia and in response to the
decline of the trade unions. The Fabriles investigated and informed the population on
the new forms of labour, and were clearly opposed to neo-liberal polices, which they
saw as the cause of these conditions. Yet, they had little to do with the water issue.
Very soon, this organisation came to be a crucial factor in the formation of the
movement, as they had already established a consciousness among the people about
the effects of neo-liberalism, as well as a mechanism to voice their opinions.
These organisations, which were to become part of the Coordinadora’s network, all
had considerable experience in organising protests in different ways. However, the
groups came from different social sectors and had different economic preconditions,
thus the emergence of the movement cannot be explained through structural factors,
such as class boundaries, which are at the heart of traditional labour process theory.
Instead, we argue that, prior to the “water war”, these groups had relatively few direct
links, as there was no common discourse available that could be extended over many
social sectors. In the following analysis, we demonstrate how the newly formed
organisation, Coordinadora, created precisely such a discourse through the symbolic
construction of “the people”, which established the conditions for a new form of unity
similar to the national labour union COB. This unity came to replace the hegemony of
market forces as the dominant logic for water management in Cochabamba.
The Coordinadora: analysing its organisational strategies of resistance
On 11 November 1999, the irrigation farmers called for a public meeting at the Fabriles
office, where various organisations came together and created the Coordinadora
(Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida, Coordinator in Defense of Water and
Life). The Coordinadora was a coalition of the above-mentioned groups. This
configuration introduced a new rural-urban dimension, as well as a fusion between the
workers (Fabriles) and the professionals groups (CODAEP) – a new situation in the
political landscape of resistance in Cochabamba. The Coordinadora had two singular
and very well-defined demands: the cancellation of the concession contract and the
modification of Law 2029 – demands that had already been expressed by FEDECOR
and CODAEP. The intention was to “call upon the whole population to join the
struggle”, based on the belief that “no individual sector alone could marshal sufficient
strength to block the privatisation of water” (Olivera, 2004, p. 28). This was expressed
in the Coordinadora bulletin, which appealed to the population of Cochabamba to rise
and express their demands in “a single voice” (COD et al., 2000). The question raised
here is how everyone could be incorporated into the struggle and create that “singular”
voice, even those not directly invested in cancelling the concession contract and
modifying Law 2029.
The previous context of resistance in Cochabamba was marked by a complex
situation of diverse interests and demands among different groups of the population.
The achievement of the Coordinadora was to construct a political alliance between
differently positioned actors and contexts, in order for them to link their differential set
Bolivian
“water war”
311
of demands into a common “universal” project: “The idea was to launch a campaign
around a common problem that had divided us in the past” (Olivera, 2004, p. 30). The
articulation of a variety of different demands was channelled into a common demand:
water. What had been an individual demand of two particular groups, and an issue of
conflict among various groups, came to represent a source of identification for
everyone. This is to say that the water issue had “for a set of circumstantial reasons,
acquired a certain centrality” (Laclau, 2005, p. 95). When the Coordinadora organised
its first public protest on 1 December 1999, ten thousand people from many different
social spheres joined the march through the city. Olivera states that these were people
who usually did not respond to calls from a particular resistance group, but did
identify with the water issue (Olivera, 2004, p. 30).
In this manner, the term “water” became an “empty signifier” (Laclau, 1996);
“empty” because it was so open and general that it could comprise a plurality of
demands and accommodate many different interpretations. Thus, the signifier “water”
had a double function – i.e. it was internally split – as it presented the two particular
demands, on the one hand, while at the same time it became a universality, which
represented more than the two particular demands. The people of Cochabamba were
interpellated by the water discourse, and on the streets graffiti read:
THEY WON’T STEAL OUR WATER, or, SEMAPA BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE,
DAMMIT!! (Graffitti in Cochabamba).
These statements and slogans represent the meaning of the universalised demand,
which came to be the notion of self-determination. Perrault (2006), p. 151) argues
that the protest over water “became a venue for the expression of manifold
frustration on the part of the people with its long history of colonial and
neo-colonial exploitation, marginalization and poverty”. In this manner, the
signifier “water” was internally split, i.e. it entailed a productive ambiguity,
because it could be read in a number of different ways by diverse groups. A
particular demand became the signifier of a wider universality expressed in a
popular identity that was embodied by the Coordinadora.
As the Coordinadora was a configuration of various organisations and individuals,
it can be referred to as a network-based organisation (Juris, 2005, p. 253). Terhorst
describes the Coordinadora as an “informal, grassroots coalition of a multitude of
groups” (Terhorst, 2003, p. 62) that employed a great variety of ways of organising.
Resistance practices included traditional forms of protest as adopted from the unions
and other traditional organisations. These were associated with rather formal and
vertical structures of organising, based on centralised power and obligatory
participation. This confirms Zald et al.’s suggestion that social movements take on
forms of formal organisation (Davis et al., 2005), or hierarchism in Blaug’s (1998) terms.
For example, some subgroups of the Coordinadora shut off the city from its connection
to the capital La Paz through roadblocks and strikes, which caused a complete
paralysis of the city for several days. These were traditional forms of protest in Bolivia,
as they resembled the activities of the national labour union COB and demanded a high
degree of coordination, organisation and command (Garcı
´aet al., 2002; Farthing and
Kohl, 2005).
In addition to roadblocks and strikes, a great variety of protest activities was
employed by the Coordinadora, such as demonstrations and open town meetings,
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weekly information panels on the main plaza, collection of signatures and direct
contact with the press, public communications, graffiti, the symbolic takeover of the
city (La Toma de Cochabamba), carnivalesque festivities, public burning of water bills,
barricading of the buildings of Aguas and the government, public referendums and a
legal claim to the Tribunal Court to prove that the law is against the constitution
(Garcı
´a, 2002, p. 123; Crespo Flores, n.d.).
In the course of the struggle, the Coordinadora developed new forms of social
management and protest, in terms of organising in extremely informal, horizontal and
anti-institutional ways. These new and participatory forms of organisation contributed
to the identification of the people with the Coordinadora and signified the departure
from domination and oppression to a new era of participation, self-determination and
grassroots organising (see Blaug, 1998; Fournier, 2002; Juris, 2005). However, in
contrast to Blaug and Fournier, who seem to state a sole preference for such grassroots
and “horizontal” resistance practice, what the Bolivian “water war” shows is that a
range of “vertical” and “horizontal” forms of organising were combined in order to
construct a powerful counter-hegemonic discourse.
A key element for appealing to the new consciousness and unity of the people, as an
active agent, was the public assemblies and open town meetings, called cabildos
abiertos, which were the decision-making organs of the movement. On the first level,
people met with their own organisation; such as neighbourhood committees, irrigation
farmers or water committees at the “popular meetings”; to discuss ideas, complaints
and proposals. The various interest groups sent representatives of their members to
the second-level assemblies, which were the meetings at the Coordinadora, at which
communique
´s were written and decisions made. Here, decision-making was bound to a
deep sense of involvement, participation and self-organisation.
This form of social organisation obtained a powerful dimension at the third-level
meetings (cabildos abiertos), the space where final decisions were made (Olivera, 2004,
p. 37f; Garcı
´aet al., 2002). The cabildos were large town-meetings on the main square,
which sometimes gathered up to 100,000 participants (Terhorst, 2003, p. 61). Here,
Oscar Olivera, the spokesperson of the Coordinadora, presented several proposals, that
had been discussed at the assemblies, to the people. He remembers how the unity of the
people came to be a powerful decision making force:
So we presented the agreement to the people to consider and they expressed a good amount of
disagreement. They began to shout, “We don’t have to pay,” and, in effect, the assembly
concluded that no one should pay (Olivera, 2004, p. 30).
The cabildos presented “the people” as a sovereign actor, not subjected to decisions
made in rooms closed off from the public by politicians and business people who seem
to represent only their own interests. It was a powerful instrument for interpellation of
“the people” in order to identify themselves as part of the movement and to force the
politicians and representatives from Aguas to react.
The freedom of making decisions and the choice of how and when to participate
took place in a space where roles were not formal or pre-fixed, but permeable and free
to chose, which demonstrates the emphasis on collective coordination, instead of
hierarchical decision making (Caruso, 2005, p. 184; see also Blaug, 1998). This is why
the Coordinadora is often characterised by its horizontal and democratic organisational
structure (Peredo Beltra
´n, 2003, p. 30). Horizontality, here, refers to a kind of
Bolivian
“water war”
313
organisation that is open and participatory and does not exclude anyone. Many
anti-corporate globalisation groups aim at this form of organisation, as it is perceived
to be in opposition to capitalist forms or organisation, which act in a rather vertical
“top-down” structure (Juris, 2005, p. 254; Blaug, 1998; Bo
¨hm, 2006). The loose
ascription of roles and voluntary participation in forms of anti-hierarchy and
anti-institutionalism transformed the people into an actor, which acts in an
autonomous, collective manner.
However, not only “horizontal” resistance practices were used in the “water war”.
As we outlined above, a range of more established forms of resistance, such as mass
strikes, also played an effective role. In fact, while the Coordinadora was able to unify
the discourses of a variety of different resistant organisations, there was no need to
also bring them in line organisationally. That is, the organisations that formed the
Coordinadora network could continue with their established resistance practices –
whether these were of “horizontal” or “vertical” type. In fact, it seems as if the
combination of these different resistance practices contributed to the “success” of the
movement.
Although the organisation of the Coordinadora network followed largely
participatory and horizontal principles – as we outlined above – it also became
clear that there were clear limits to this horizontality. This is because every open,
participatory space is always a “highly uneven, contradictory, and contested terrain”
(Juris, 2005, p. 255). What could be observed in the Coordinadora was that, despite its
general horizontal principles, certain vertical forms of organisation, such as
hierarchies, rules and procedures, were introduced to respond to the complexities of
the organisation of the resistance movement. This created inclusions and exclusion
which, following a Laclauian understanding, can be understood as a necessary part of
any movement that creates a hegemonic frontier of an “us” versus “them”. Several
observers draw attention to the fact that the Coordinadora also had some divisive and
exclusionary elements (Crespo Flores et al., 2004; Terhorst, 2003). Perrault (2006,
p. 166ff) emphasises the “uneven geographies of protest” in Cochabamba, as the
movement obscured the needs of the urban migrant population, which has only
precarious access to water, whereas it privileged the demands of the irrigation farmers.
The idea of pure openness or horizontal participation is therefore a myth. The
movement must be understood as a temporary unification of discourses. Because it
represents a large chain of demands, some particularistic contents are weakened or
dispossessed (Laclau, 2005, p. 96). This endangers the unity of falling apart again. This
idea of antagonisms being at the heart of unity also highlights that established
resource mobilisation theories of social movements, which emphasise rational and
stable interests of resistant actors, do not provide an adequate account for
understanding our case. What Laclau’s discourse theory shows, instead, is that
resistance organisations are a construction of contingent processes formed around
discourses of demands that provide a temporary unity of resisting actors.
Conclusions
On 9 April 2000, it was officially announced that Aguas would withdraw from all its
duties and, one day later, a new agreement was signed between government
representatives and the Coordinadora. It established that the municipal water company
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SEMAPA assumed responsibility for water supply in the city again, under a
temporary board made up of two representatives of the municipality, two from the
labour union and two from the Coordinadora. Moreover, the Bolivian parliament
approved modifications of Law 2029 (Assies, 2003, p. 30).
The movement was now officially recognised by a variety of political forces, and
this is why one can speak of a new hegemony, in which the dominant political actors
were no longer to be a multinational corporation and international finance institutions,
but rather, civil society agents. The movement had initiated a crisis and presented
itself as the only solution, which had changed the social configuration of Cochabamba.
By inscribing the government into its discourse of “the people”, it reshaped the
antagonistic terrain, which lead to the emergence of new subjectivities and a
redefinition of what is acceptable.
In our review of the management and organisation literature we critiqued the notion
that resistance is often studied within the boundaries of the organisation and
workplace. This, we argued, ignores broader forces in civil society that challenge
discourses of management and neo-liberal policies. The case of the Bolivian “water
war” shows that resistance against managerial and business initiatives is embedded in
wider social discourses that cannot be reduced to the specific economic realms of the
workplace.
Using Laclau’s (2005) discourse theory, we have analysed the organisation of
resistance to the hegemony of international business, and to the neo-liberal market
discourse that came to oppress the lives of the people of Cochabamba and their access
to what used to be a common good: water. The presence of a multinational company in
Cochabamba, and its close collaboration with the government, became the antagonistic
frontier that the resistance organisation, Coordinadora, used in order to make different
groups and their discourses equivalent, through their common opposition to these
political forces (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 127). The discourse of “the people” pursued
by the Coordinadora, on the one hand, and the market discourse pursued by the
government, the water company Aguas and the IFIs, on the other, each tried to exclude
the other. Through the popular support of the protests, the Coordinadora exposed the
government and the company as political, and consequently contingent actors, which
was the condition for the possibility of incorporating the government’s position into the
discourse of “the people”. The coherence of the market discourse subsequently fell
apart and the resistance movement presented its own discourse as the only solution
able to deal with this new social situation. This only became possible because the
Coordinadora was able to unite what used to be disparate discourses into one single
demand.
What our analysis of the organisation of resistance in Cochabamba has shown is
that, in order to create a formidable challenge to the hegemony of the market and
management discourse put forward by the government, multinational business and
IFIs, a counter-hegemonic discourse of “the people” had to be established. That is, an at
least momentarily stable system of signification had to be built that enabled the
resistance movement to organise itself around a set of very simple but unifying
demands. In this process of the universalisation of a demand, a new resistance identity
is constructed that exposes the contingency of the established neo-liberal hegemony,
by offering itself as the new hegemonic discourse. However, the construction of a
Bolivian
“water war”
315
movement identity cannot be described as an intentional, rational process, based on
predictable institutional contingencies, as Zald and his colleagues seem to imply.
Rather, it was much more the outcome of many particular and unanticipated forces and
struggles, that came together at a specific moment in which all of them identified with
the “empty signifier”, water. This had not been planned or formally organised before.
What Laclau (2005) highlights is that when different discourses are combined to
establish a unified frontier, an “us” versus “them”, these discourses and identities are
being transformed in that very process of unification, resulting in new differences and
antagonisms. Hence, we have to understand the discursive formation of resistance,
organised by the Coordinadora, as a temporary, contingent unity that was successfully
able to press a particular demand: the reinstatement of water as a public good.
The regional struggle of the Bolivian “water war” grew to national importance and
had a strong impetus for the following “gas wars”. According to Perrault (2006, p. 151),
these protests lead to a broader set of claims involving livelihood rights, political
participation, regional autonomy and other questions of governance in Bolivia.
Moreover, the “water war” has become a worldwide symbol for successful resistance
against neo-liberal oppression. It signifies that alternative forms of organising are
possible, and many different demands can be united under the universalised and
worldwide demand for “the right to water”. In this manner, the Coordinadora was able
to use the logic of the “empty signifier”, water, and contribute to the ongoing,
worldwide protests against the excesses of anti-corporate globalisation.
Note
1. We relied on primary data provided to us by Philipp Terhorst, who has investigated the
situation in Cochabamba for six weeks in August 2003. We refer the reader to some of his
publications (Balanya
´et al., 2005; Go
´mez and Terhorst, 2005; Hoedeman et al., 2005), which
have analysed the “water war” in Bolivia in various ways. Oscar Olivera (2004), who was one
of the spokespersons of the movement, has recently published an account of his experiences
during the water war, which was one of our most valuable sources for the organisation of the
Coordinadora.
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About the authors
Birke Otto is a PhD candidate at the University of Essex. Her interests include the organisation of
subcultures and social movements, discourse theory and governmentality studies. She holds a
degree in Cultural Studies from the European University Viadrina, Germany, and a Masters in
Management Studies from Essex.
Steffen Bo
¨hm is Lecturer in Management at the Department of Accounting, Finance and
Management, University of Essex. He is a member of the editorial collective of the journal
ephemera: theory & politics in organization (www.ephemeraweb.org) and founding co-editor of
the new publishing press mayflybooks (www.mayflybooks.org). He has written one research
monograph, Repositioning Organization Theory: Impossibilities and Strategies (Palgrave), and
co-edited the volume Against Automobility (Blackwell). Steffen Bo
¨hm is the corresponding
authoe and can be contacted at: steffen@essex.ac.uk
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