Marginal Alternativity: Organizing for Sustainable Investing

This thesis explores the emergence and maintenance of alternative organizations at the margins of alternativity. An empirical curiosity springing from an in-depth ethnographic study of SusPens (a pseudonym) led to this study, which advances the field of alternative organization studies by seeing the alternative as an oscillation between imagination and actualization, a continuous process of breaking free of societal norms that takes place at the margins of capitalism.
Founded in January 2017, SusPens offers sustainable investment solutions to private customers and institutional investors, its aim being to mobilize pensions savings towards a more sustainable future. During the period of empirical engagement, SusPens developed a machine learning algorithm that uses name-matching to screen investment portfolios. The screening tool is based on––and enables––a simple investment strategy: Exclude any portfolio containing companies engaged in fossil fuels, weapons, or tobacco. In automating the screening process, SusPens sought to mainstream the practice of sustainable investing by lowering its cost, thus pushing the pensions industry in a more sustainable direction. As such, this organization deviates from the typical alternative organization.
In contemporary studies of alternative organizing, the alternative is often negatively defined as the opposite of any mainstream institutional arrangement––usually capitalism. Generally, such organizations therefore tend to be less hierarchical, less bureaucratic, and more concerned with taking responsibility for social and environmental issues. Defining the alternative as the antithesis of the mainstream can lead to a binary thinking that renders organizations as either conventional (capitalist) or alternative. However, SusPens’s position at the intersection of alternativity and capitalism means it is neither. Operating at the very margin that separates the alternative from capitalism––and simultaneously conjoins the two––SusPens is significantly shaped by inherent tensions, ambiguities, and oppositions. Studying these aspects, this thesis seeks to move beyond the binary to instead focus on the relationship between the alternative and the mainstream. To this end, the following research question guides the investigation: How are alternative organizations established and maintained?
To answer this question, the thesis reports on a nine-month ethnographic study of SusPens, conducted from April 2018 to December 2018 and including observations, interviews, and document analysis. This body of data provides the empirical backdrop for the thesis’s four analytical chapters, each of which highlights a particular aspect involved in establishing and maintaining alternative organizations. To illuminate the role of sociomateriality in establishing an alternative, the first analytical chapter examines the relational process in which SusPens shaped and was shaped by its key algorithmic tool. The second analytical chapter looks at the role affect played in the collaborative practices of the organizational members as they developed SusPens’s algorithm. The chapter shows how affect installs borders and becomes a means for the organizational members to attain power in the organization. The third analytical chapter zooms out from the organization to investigate how alternative discourses relate to societal discourses. Taking a utopian perspective, this chapter focuses on how the organizational practice of sustainable investing is distorted when encountering mainstream financial logics. Taking a more general approach, the fourth analytical chapter explores how alternative organizing can be understood as a constant process of breaking free of societal norms. As such, this chapter moves towards a processual understanding of alternative organizing by emphasizing the unfinished character of the alternative.
The thesis concludes that establishing and maintaining alternatives is an iterative process, a constant movement between imagining and actualizing the alternative. This process of dreaming and doing takes place at the intersection of alternativity and capitalism, and thus at the margin of––and in proximity to––capitalism.