The Affective Creation of Dissonance in Alternative Organizations: The case of a shared community garden

The role of dissonance in alternative organizations: from norm-changing to rule-creating individuals

Alternative organizations have been defined by their strong commitments to members’ autonomy, democratic participation and solidarity (Bendl, Fleischmann, & Schmidt, 2022; Cheney et al., 2014; Kokkinidis, 2015; Parker et al., 2014). Alternative organizations literature offers critical formulations of ‘how we might organize in order to create free spaces for becoming, for exploring possibilities [. . .] usually denied in the characteristically conformist and authoritarian organizations in our contemporary world’ (Reedy, 2014, p. 653). Studies have discussed structures and procedures put in place outside of the ‘conventional’ workplace, exploring settings as diverse as cooperatives (Cheney et al., 2014; Jaumier, 2017), social movements (Reinecke, 2018; Swann & Ghelfi, 2019), food chains (Shanahan, 2023), networks (Bendl et al., 2022) and more (see Parker et al., 2007).

Typically, what most if not all alternative organizations have in common is that they allow for relational, bottom-up processes to influence the revision of their explicit rules. Kokkinidis (2015), in his account of workers’ cooperatives in Greece, argues that the central purpose of members in these democratic organizations is to ‘contribute to the development of more inclusive models of participation and the construction of rule-creating rather than rule-following individuals’ (Kokkinidis, 2015, p. 28, our emphasis). However, the processes enabling the emergence of such ‘rule-creating’ subjects depend on more than organizational structures, such as democratic assemblies or shared leadership. Alternativity requires the creation of open-ended change, which requires a ‘parasitical’ relation to dominant norms, something that ‘emerges through tactics of doing things differently while remaining recognizable within the given context’ (Dahlman et al., 2022, p. 21).

Therefore, a key feature of alternative organizations would be their potential for allowing dissonance to become visible and impactful (Ashcraft, 2001). In the ‘performative and reflexive’ dissonance process (Dorion, 2017), norms are established by simultaneously producing their ‘outside’ and creating exclusions. Normality is established by creating abnormalities. Such arbitrations, happening at a micro (intra- and inter-subjective) level, generate deviations from the norm that, if reiterated in recognizable ways, might reconfigure what is ‘normal,’ regarding both the organization and its corresponding subjects (Dorion, 2017). Such micro-deviations create dissonance that can reinvigorate organizational alternativity.

Literature has recognized the political character of the body as a source of mobilization against a specific social structure (Vidolov et al., 2023), but rarely has discussed it as essential to the process of organizing itself, which has been based mostly on the recognition and guidance given by shared values (Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020). We aim to shed light on internal dynamics of deviations and settlements. Following the literature, we argue that paying attention to their role in conforming the embodiment of participants is key to clarifying how these dynamics enable dissonance, which means paying attention to implicit embodied norms and their relations to explicit organizational rules and how the body interprets, creates and transforms the relations that sustain the search for alternativeness (Rahmouni ElIdrissi & Courpasson, 2021). Dissonance may in turn help to maintain and renew the alternative, which might be confirmed through organizational processes and procedures, revising explicit organizational rules, and provisionally resolving itself. The porosity of such processes is an essential feature of alternative organizing to avoid degeneration despite democratic structures and intentions (Diefenbach, 2019; Shanahan, 2023). The literature on embodiment, which we turn to next, offers important insights into the potentially dissonant mutual dynamics between organizations and their members.

Embodiment: from disciplinarian processes to the emergence of dissonance

Current understandings of organizational embodiment analyse it as a set of disciplinary processes that, in the context of ‘conventional’ organizations, conform members into organizationally desirable and productive bodies (e.g. Coupland, 2015; Dahl, 2014). Such processes of embodiment naturalize modes of conduct by their continuous (re)production in everyday organizational life (Leung & Caspersz, 2019). For example, organizations establish norms of conduct that prescribe how to stand, move, speak, or manipulate specific objects (Connellan, 2013; Hassard, Holliday, & Willmott, 2000). Exploring questions such as ‘how do bodies become organized’ (Godfrey, Lilley, & Brewis, 2012, p. 541), current studies thus emphasize bodies as effects of organizational influence (Michel, 2023).

Furthermore, attempts at subverting norms or embodying dissonance tend to be repressed or taken over in corporations. Norms such as multiculturalism (Hoobler, 2005), diversity and inclusion (Tyler, 2019a), and well-being (Butcher, James, & Bloom, 2023), become instruments for the reproduction of (productive) sameness. Embodied conformation processes are thus instrumentally deployed, so the organization is (re)produced. Invited to embrace seemingly progressive norms such as inclusion, ‘diverse’ employees are brought ‘closer to those norms that have historically excluded them, resulting not in genuine freedom but rather in increasing subjection’ (Tyler, 2019b, p. 53) as they learn not to challenge them. When they emerge in conventional organizations, dissonant modes of embodiment are thus coopted as resources or ‘strategic assets’ (Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop, & Nkomo, 2010, p. 12), significantly jeopardizing their chances of becoming viable alternatives that challenge norms.

However, the body is by no means completely passive under these lenses. Studies have explored how bodies resist to cope with change (Courpasson & Monties, 2017), or how they tend to overflow in ways that are difficult to control (Trethewey, 1999). Each time norms are reproduced in daily lives, there is room for a random alteration, or imperfection in its reproduction, ‘leaving them open to subversion and the emergence of unintended consequences’ (Kenny et al., 2011, p. 236). In summary, dissonant processes take place.

Furthermore, while discursive approaches to embodiment explore how people conform to norms and discourses out of their need to experience themselves as coherent ‘whole’ subjects (Tyler, 2019b), even when they are detrimental to them (Kenny, 2010), we argue that paying attention to explicit discourses is insufficient to understand the reproduction of implicit norms or the elaboration of new rules. As authors suggest, ‘while constructed in discourse, the body is not confined to such’ (Rahmouni Elidrissi & Courpasson, 2021, p. 38). The notion that the (re)production of norms is, centrally, an embodied process calls attention to bodily experiences and affective dynamics (Daskalaki, Fotaki, & Sotiropoulou, 2019).

Affective dynamics: norm change in and for alternative organizing

Affective dynamics are considered in the articulation between embodied processes and dissonance, both at the level of the organizational member and the organization. Research underlines that encounters between bodies can be apprehended affectively because embodied norm reproduction and subversion processes alter bodies’ capacities to affect and be affected (Fotaki & Pullen, 2019; Thanem & Wallenberg, 2015). Thus, affective approaches become particularly relevant to our purpose of understanding how norms are embodied and resisted, how they relate to explicit rules, and how to support the creation of dissonance and, possibly, of alternatives.

Harding et al. (2021) draw our attention to micro-moments where affects are experienced as an ‘electric charge of energy’ (Harding et al., 2021, p. 9) by which one becomes aware of one’s individuated body, and can act to rearrange its inscribed norms, liberating itself from them. Affective suffering may, for instance, prompt oppressed individuals to encounter each other and reverse hurt and shame through various joyous acts (Pouthier & Sondak, 2019; Pullen, Rhodes, & Thanem, 2017).

Nevertheless, we note that so far only a few studies have explored the role of affective embodiment in and for alternative organizing. Adding to these studies’ focus on resistance, we aim to explore liberation processes in alternative organizing by focusing on the affective creation of dissonance and how it may become viable organizational alternative(s). We build on recent debates that have underlined the potential of focusing on the ‘sensing, knowing, perceptive body’ to understand how organizing solidarity and collaboration happen in social movements (Keevers & Sykes, 2016, p. 4).

Indeed, studies of activist movements, among literature on alternative organizing, have engaged with the potential of affectively embodied practices of resistance to effect political and social change (Rahmouni Elidrissi & Courpasson, 2021). In addition, recognizing shared ‘corporeal vulnerabilities’, and preserving emotional bonds, is shown to be pivotal to fostering social and interpersonal relations and overcoming tensions, competition or degeneration of alternative communities (Farias, 2017; Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020). Yet, little remains known about the role of embodied affectivity in the practices of alternative organizing itself. We still need to better understand how the affective creation of dissonance may interact with the alternative and contribute to its fostering changes in implicit embodied norms as well as explicit organizational rules.

This affect-based approach leads us to focus on Slope Garden, an organization where bodily encounters are central to day-to-day practices, to generate rich data about moments of sensory and affective intensification, and to interpret how these moments resonate with an alternative organizing project. With that in mind, we introduce our case study to address our research question, How does the affective creation of dissonance interact with alternative organizing?

Research setting

This study draws on ethnographic research on a shared community garden, called Slope Garden. ¹ Our choice of studying the case of Slope Garden was motivated by its activities which centre affects and bodily sensations (smell, touch, physical activity), and by its preference for horizontal and minimally centralized principles of organization, aligned with alternative organizing. Furthermore, Slope Garden participants tend to frame their participation as optional and above all voluntary, evoking the centrality of their own bodily autonomy and experience in organizational processes. Finally, the organization itself states its goals in a very open-ended, undefined manner, leaving much leeway to organizational members and, potentially, to their embodiment to make up what the organization is. Therefore, we consider it an ‘extreme’ case, particularly suited to reveal more information about relational dynamics and embodiment processes (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 229).

The garden is in a central neighbourhood of a medium-sized French city, halfway up a mountain (see Figure 1). Slope Garden was founded about a decade ago around the principles of permaculture, which exclude the use of chemical products, and aim at increasing biodiversity by working with positive interactions among plants, insects and other environmental features. It grows vegetables, has about a dozen fruit trees, a site of honey production, aromatic and medicinal plants, a wood-fired oven, sites for composting organic residues, a dry toilet and two ponds. It features a rainwater collector and a well but has no access to piped water, electricity or gas. At the time of the study, Slope Garden was also home to a hen and a rooster.

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Figure 1.

Map of Slope Garden. Retrieved from Slope Garden’s website on January 5th, 2022. Subtitles by the authors.

An association composed of volunteers runs the garden. The garden has a small door entry amid tall stone walls, and only administrative council members and beekeepers have access to its keys. Members more or less regularly open it, up to about three times a week. A sign is usually placed on the entry during openings, inviting the public to walk in and get involved. The land is owned by the city, but public authorities do not charge the association for its use. The association is funded by annual pay-what-you-want membership fees and by the sale of the garden’s honey – the rest of the produce is not commercialized. There are no individual lots; all the work and the produce are collective.

The association’s administrative council is formally composed of a treasurer and co-presidents and includes about a dozen members. Beyond the council members, there are three different, yet overlapping groups, summarized in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Summary of Slope Garden membership.

Slope Garden membership
Participation count	Approximate number of people
Administrative Council	12
Paying annual fees	50
E-mail list	100
WhatsApp group	65
Physically present at the garden	25

Members have rotated and no founding member of Slope Garden remains today. At the time of the study, it was mainly composed of French people, with about half a dozen members from other nationalities. Members are mostly aged between 30 and 50 years old, most with higher education initiated or completed. The distribution is fairly well divided between men and women, though gender-dissident people (transgender, non-binary, and so on) are absent. Members are all able-bodied.

Members organize events and produce material products (such as harvests of fruits, honey, and wood-oven baked pizzas). In these activities, very few constraints are imposed on the kind of activities that should happen – and therefore on the possibilities of bodily encounters. Anyone can walk away or refuse to engage in any given activity without penalty or, analogously, can choose to become more involved and to gain more responsibilities and influence within the organization, with very few restrictions. One must only have the time, the will and the ability to do the tasks involved. To comprehend the phenomenon at hand in depth, the first author conducted an ethnographic study.

Data generation

The data of this ethnography includes participant observations and interviews, both conducted by the first author. Participation happened mostly at the site of the garden itself, for a total duration of about 150 hours of on-site observation. Twelve semi-structured interviews were also conducted with garden members. Archival data such as meeting minutes and the garden’s website were also used as background information. These materials are summarized in Table 2. Following, we describe how this data set was generated and used in the analysis.

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Table 2.

Data summary.

Time period	Source	Type of data
April 2021 – August 2022	Participant observation	About 150 hours on-site spread over 16 months. → Activities included: gardening, renewal of water collection structure, administrative council meetings, association’s fair, organizing and attending winter seminar → Jottings of the observations were usually written down on a notepad on the researcher’s cellphone while walking home after the visits, and later on expanded into full observation diaries → Visits lasted between 1 and 7 hours per day. This is as long as the openings go; longer visits such as whole-day or overnight immersions are not possible nor are experienced by any member
November 2021 – January 2022	Interviews	12 interviews (ranging from 30 to 75 minutes) with people engaging with different activities and with different levels of involvement in the organization, as well as newcomers and people who are leaving it, to gather a wide range of (embodied) perspectives → Questions were about how participants got to know and became involved with the garden; about their activities in the garden and how these were decided or organized, and how they felt about it. Additionally, interviewees were encouraged to share personal stories of the garden →All interviews were recorded and transcribed

The first author became a member of the association in February 2021, a few months before initiating the research. Observations began shortly after the researcher disclosed their wish to conduct a research project on the garden to members. A message was sent to the members of the administrative council to inform them of the study. Furthermore, Slope Garden is very open to new members, and the researcher eventually became a part of the administrative council. The fact that the first author was new not only to the garden, but to the country and city as well, allowed them to avoid the position of ‘expert’ (Stavrakakis, 2008), and to inquire at length about how and why tasks were carried out.

Observations occurred as visits to the garden’s openings. Participant observation allowed the researcher to examine the events in depth, and to draw not only from what had been said, and from the overt activities, but also to dwell on how it felt, to get closer to what was unsaid or was too difficult to describe in them. Semi-structured interviews were conducted around key themes seeking to capture different perspectives about the garden as an organization, with members whose degrees of involvement in the garden activities varied.

We take into account the researcher’s presence in the field (Field-Springer, 2020), and understand our study within the ‘affective ethnography’ style, where the fieldworker is ‘with’ and ‘in-between’ data, performing an ‘affective attunement [that] carries with it [. . .] an intentional disposition to affect and to be affected’ (Gherardi, 2019, p. 748). Data is not understood as something already existing ‘out there’ that is collected in the process of research; rather it is created in the very act of conducting research and might change how the researcher comes to perceive the world.

To analyse our material, we attempted to ‘make do’ with the data created and studied, in the sense that our interpretation ‘assumes no authority over reality, but is a representation of a partial understanding, stressing the researcher’s positionality and the critical role the researcher plays in the research itself’ (Tallberg, Jordan, & Boyle, 2014, p. 83). There were no preconceived observation schedules, rather the researcher tried to capture ‘everything’ (cf. Neyland, 2007, p. 18). The aim was to increase the immersion in the life world of the organization while on site, for the researcher to gain familiarity with the field (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011).

Data analysis

We conceptualize our analytical framework in terms of explaining embodiment to be conformed through a three-step process of affective tension, transitional reaction and articulation. Further, we claim that this process is iterated repeatedly. The ensemble of the multi-level iteration of this process, we argue, shapes the affective bonds organizational members embody towards each other and with the garden.

To get to this process, data analysis followed an abductive logic, and our interpretations went through a process of ‘drift’ instead of a formulaic design (Mees-Buss, Welch, & Piekkari, 2022; Van Maanen, 1979). Conducting ethnographic research involves ‘re-covering and re-telling stories of lived relations, experiences, meanings, practices and actions, through immersion in the stories and lived experiences’ (O’Neill et al., 2002, p. 80). Accordingly, we coded our data in an immersive manner, dealing with it as an ensemble, allowing for the formation of ‘provisional settlements’ (Beane & Orlikowski, 2015). We maintained an embodied and reflexive approach to our analysis, as literature around embodiment (e.g. Styhre, 2004) informed our first theorizing attempts. In other words, we considered all the different kinds of data simultaneously (rather than successively), trying to identify recurring themes and to relate them to literature.

The first author read the observational diaries and the interview transcripts multiple times, trying to keep memories of observations, statements and impressions as vivid as possible. Additional documentation was consulted to check timelines and ensure consistency. We followed abductive iterations of coding, seeking to find plausible interpretations for the data, selecting and transforming the ‘settlements’, as ‘coding and classifying may transform data used for one purpose to another in ways that guide and reflect the evolving concepts of the analyst[s]’ (Van Maanen, Sørensen, & Mitchell, 2007, p. 1149).

Discussions between all authors led us to tentatively categorize our provisional settlements, as our understanding collectively progressed (Locke, Feldman, & Golden-Biddle, 2020). At first, our focus was on the relationship between embodiment and organizing, and we experimented with theorizing with several related concepts such as performativity, flesh and presence, which resonated with fieldwork anecdotes relating to integration or horizontal decision-making. We progressively noted that the coding settlements related to democratic decision-making seemed central. For example, the definition of tasks as something debated and often decided on the spot, as well as the terms in which they would be carried out – e.g. with which tools, or yet the conditions in which the decisions happened – led us to turn to alternative organizations literature to support our conceptualization of the case (e.g. Parker et al., 2007).

This process led us to develop an interpretation of embodiment processes in Slope Garden, first, as conformation processes, socializing new members. Second, we shed light on embodied processes of dissent, decision-making and ‘bottom-up’ dynamics as key for the performance of dissonance, and hence for alternative organizing at Slope Garden, which we argue complements existing organizational literature on embodiment-as-discipline. Finally, we understood affects as encompassing circuits that go beyond controlled ones in disciplinarian practices, as sparks from bodily encounters, and therefore we agreed to develop an affect-based analytical framework to explore the interrelations between embodiment and alternative organizing.

We draw on literature which defines bodies as assemblages of different elements (Pullen et al., 2017; Thanem & Wallenberg, 2015) that work towards expanding their capacities by reconfiguring their material and affective bonds with each other. Discussing how such reconfiguring happens, we arrived at our three-step process. We read activities as encounters that can generate friction, create tensions among bodies, and potentially trigger change. Our ethnographic data shows that gardening activities involve going through encounters with one’s own body, with other people’s bodies, and with plants and tools. We found that our data on these encounters was full of moments of discomfort and intense sensations, which became our focus. This allowed us to operationalize affective tensions, i.e. frictions that arise from the encounters of the gardener with the other (human and non-human) bodies involved in gardening activities, and that unsettle pre-existing embodiment. This helped us make sense of the first author’s urban body’s unwillingness to go to the garden on his first visits.

Continued encounters may also intensify affective tensions, up until a point at which a more profound change must take place, or the encounters must be halted. For activities to continue, tensions must be integrated into the web of (affective) bonds that constitute a participant’s body. Or else, the encounters might altogether be stopped as the unease becomes too intense. Either way, a deciding moment, a transitional reaction, is demanded, leading into a different state of being, a different, changing embodiment. Looking at our data, we noted that the ethnographer’s recollection of his first experience of eating wild plums straight from the tree was a really intense one, from both a sensory (taste, smell) and emotional (joy, excitement) point of view, and analysed this as a key transitional reaction. Transitional reactions are responses in certain directions in which the gardener pulls the situation to be repositioned and tuned anew. While being an expression of will, it is instantaneous, a responsive reflex, not thought-through.

In a third stage, members engage in verbalization to make sense of the new affective circumstances emerging from the new situation. Here, we looked for moments in our data where participants attempt to ‘justify’, to make explicit what happened and why. We identified these as moments of articulation where members state anew the operating embodied norms that have been tinkered with. The resulting affective bonds shape the gardener’s embodiment, which may or may not conform to the existing organization. The organization, in turn, can be more or less tolerant of existing dissonance among its composing bodies. For instance, our data on the second anecdote helped us to analyse, through participants’ contrasting emotional reactions, as well as the deliberative process they engaged in, how an organization may support such process of dissonance and then articulation, leading to the revision of organizational rules. Our ethnography uncovers three potential outcomes, depending on the level of conformity of embodiment vis-a-vis the organization, and how much dissonance the organization tolerates. Either members may conform to the organization (i.e. remain or become socialized into it), the organization may change to incorporate the new embodiment, and/or members’ dissonance can lead them to leave the organization.

‘A bond to the soil’: from affective tensions to conformation

As an urbanite, I have been keen to romanticize the notion of a disconnected, earthly life. Urbanites may find it desirable to get away from the frenetic, accelerated rhythm that we are used to, to go back to the land and ‘touch grass’. However, once we do, there is plenty to find unappealing and unpleasant in the many encounters that take place. Many passages of my observation diaries mention me feeling an unwillingness to go into the garden, because of anxiety, fatigue, or a kind of vague, lethargic sensation that made it difficult to want to get there.

On a particular visit, around two o’clock, the task was to cut down a bush that was developing from within mid-way up a stone wall. It was a young chestnut tree that would never develop there, and whose roots could jeopardize the structure of the wall. Martina, a more experienced gardener, asked me if I wanted a glove along with the big pruner to be used to cut down the plant. ‘Yes, just one that. . .’ – I started saying – ‘isn’t too dirty?’ – she guessed. I meant simply one that fits my hand, but we had a little laugh, and she handed me a pair of gloves from the garden’s stock without me explaining it. I moved on to the task.

While using a big pruner to cut off what was possible from the plant, my wrist brushed one of the neighbouring plants and I felt it burn. I knew it would soon turn red, and the sensation would last at least for a few hours. I kept on cutting, to the point where I reached thicker stems that were not easily cut. I felt my mouth dry, my nose was dripping, and now with the extra effort to cut through, my forehead was sweating.

Two hours later, I started to feel hungry and had nothing to eat. I caught myself thinking about things completely unrelated to what I was doing, and some random song was playing in the back of my head. My urban mind had trouble slowing down, my urban body was in tension with the garden, unsettling previously embodied norms. I went a little higher up on the flowerbed to reach the plants at the back and needed to balance my body so as not to fall.

After a while, I decided to trim the plants on the green roof above the wooden oven. Martina alerted me to the fact that the wooden structure was over ten years old and that I needed to watch my step. I climbed through the neighbouring stone wall, and I began trimming the neighbouring plants. I stretched my arms to get to the ones further away, while trying to mind the structure, to put my weight in the right places. I felt a certain rush of adrenaline. I listened to the wind. I noticed a little squeaky sound from the plants I was trimming. . . However, I was still not fully able to appreciate any of this, to feel it pleasant somehow.

I got down from the green rooftop to take the branches to the composting site on the other side of the garden. There, I noticed a tree was full of little red round fruits, many of which had already fallen on the ground, some with insects on them. I took some of them to Martina to ask what they were. ‘Wild plums,’ she answered while accepting one, noting they were really sweet, and that the wild plum tree itself had been ‘planted’ by birds, while another one from the same species, planted by humans, was growing no fruit. I came back to the tree, and ate countless plums, then filled my hands with as many as I could carry.

I felt amazed by that sweetness that surprisingly satiated my hunger. I felt so happy while biting and smearing my mouth and hands with it. It was as if they were made to do exactly that. At that moment, my perception radically changed: little did the dirt on my hands matter, even if the fruits had fallen on the ground, which would not stop me from eating them. My unsettled body reacted by transitioning into a new, changed embodied state, a new situation, or perhaps it was the garden that spurred my body to transition. All the ubiquitous sanitation rituals of our Covid times were thrown to the wind. There, in that moment I did not desire i-mmunity from other beings, rather I wanted to create co-mmunity with them – I was a part of them. Quite literally, I felt tethered, affectively bonded to them.

I wanted to take them to share with my partner back home, I filled my hands still sticky from the fruit’s sugar and blackened from the soil and took them up to my bag. I offered Martina some more, but she only took one, not quite sharing my silly wonderment with the fruits. It was then a quarter before five o’clock, and I could see a bucket of water near the well, which I used to wash my hands. My hands had been touching the earth, the plants, the fruits, and the water. I carried on with trimming activities.

I still felt my nose dripping and my body sweating. My legs were itching from grazing the plants as I walked. However, I could also feel a sense of urgency lessen within myself, which I could only perceive as I noticed it fade out. A calming atmosphere, a sensation of all being well, took hold of me. I remembered another gardener’s words from an interview, which allowed me to articulate what I was going through: ‘That appeases me.’ I walked up the garden to bring something to Martina and I was taken by the view of the city. I sat there for a few minutes, quiet. Time slowing down: ‘I am so glad to be here.’

I remembered that I wanted to plant a tomato plant I had brought from home. I picked up the gardening tools needed, along with a little marking stick and a piece of string to strap it to the plant. I decided to leave the gloves behind and touch the soil directly. Once again, I felt my dripping nose and my now bloated belly. I was not energized. On the contrary, there was a sort of laziness taking hold of me. I felt my back hurting after planting the tomato. The level of soil was at the height of my thighs, and instead of folding my knees to crouch down, I had bent my back – something I only realized afterwards.

On a different visit, I asked Martina about the positions she took to do the gardening so that she would limit pain, although ‘I always feel pain,’ she said, ‘it’s inevitable.’ She told me of some stretches one can do later, but that there needs to be some level of pain. As it is with the garden, it is with the body. You go through pain to deal with it, through tensions between you and the activities, and then it is possible to gain familiarity – to build upon what was grasped, incorporated from past experiences, in the process of a transitional reaction, and to become able to fashion it into a harmonious relation and witness the rise of an affective bond that shapes one’s embodiment, conforming into the existing garden’s norms.

While gardening with Martina, on a certain day, she asked me to trim some of the plants. She showed me which ones to leave uncut by grabbing them and saying ‘These are pretty, we leave them be.’ I could hardly tell them apart from the ones she wanted me to cut, while she had a clear sense about it. Other members, like Joseph, have a very deep connection to the activities and the garden, and articulate it in words:

I have always seen my mother gardening. [. . .] It is almost a nostalgic way. And now each time I garden, it is as if I got closer to my mother’s activity [. . .] it is a bond connecting me to my mother, and so to the soil. When I say my mother, it is my homeland. That is how I think. The more I age, the more I love this coming back to the soil. [. . .] The garden is not related to ecology, to nature, it is not that. It is more. . . It is more of a bond that is more profound than that. It is a bond to the soil. (‘Joseph’, January 2022)

Participation allowed me to experience being in the garden as an appeasing, slowing-down experience. I am a city person. I have had some particular experiences with rural landscapes and with planting throughout my life, but by and large, gardening activities were novel to me. It does not go smoothly to figure out what tasks to do, nor how to do one once it is presented to me. This is only possible through a number of encounters with the plants, the tools and the people that compose the garden, and a resulting set of affects ‘sparkling’ from them.

Therefore, while I was performing the tasks, especially at the beginning, my body was dissonant and very poorly bonded to the garden. Affects stemming from these encounters did not resonate, but created tensions that needed to be overcome through activities. The encounters I had with the plants, the tools, the people and everything else in the garden make this a process which is not entirely individual. It is about each person’s embodiment encountering all of that and changing accordingly, becoming different through the gardening activities, which in turn become different as well. It is about going through the tensions until finally something like the wonderment I had with the fruits is ignited, a transitional reaction that changes the situation. Writing up this anecdote is, in fact, part of my following articulation.

Members with more intimacy with gardening develop upon these affective encounters a very profound sense of belonging and of how the garden ought to be, and what it means for the garden to be beautiful. As I went through one version of this process, others have become affectively bonded to it through the intra-subjective process of tensions, transitional reactions and articulation, conforming to the organization. Some members of the association were so intimate with gardening activities that they developed a certain sense of how the garden should be, and of how the environment and the gardening activities were beneficial to them, as expressed in the following interview excerpts:

I think it is one of the very positive aspects of the garden, it’s that you can just disconnect and look at the view and watch the beautiful garden, hear the birds. . . it’s very peaceful. (‘Christine’, November 2021)

So, that appeases me, already, when I physically work, that appeases my mind and when I go to the garden, the atmosphere appeases me [. . .]. And then, the fact of being within nature, without needs, without a reason, we are well. I am well. (‘Joseph’, January 2022)

That kind of bond is the result of an embodiment that has built upon past affective experiences from gardening. They do not require complete homogeneity. The many encounters happening in the gardening activities spark affective tensions that each person experiences differently, and tensions are also building up to dissonance within conformation processes, as familiarity with the garden is built along with one’s affections or ‘sensitivity’. One participant explains:

I think that the longer you stay [at the garden], the more you realize which tasks there are. You realize there are plenty. I think that. . . My way of seeing tasks will not necessarily be yours, or that of someone else. As an example, [Joseph] hates messes and so, when he sees something out of its place, he puts it where it should be, because that is important to him. I am more tolerant, regarding messes, so that won’t appear to me as a task to be done, I don’t have the same threshold of tolerance as. . . As him. [. . .] That is the perception part. And then there is, effectively, the information part. If we take the example of watering [. . .] Actually, it is a lot more important to water frequently on that [sloped] land than on other lands that would be on a plain. [. . .] The everyday experience of the garden during the summer is due to change, as [you see] how fast it gets dry. And that is not obvious for someone that comes less often, actually. (‘Luke,’ December 2021)

Therefore, on top of the ‘information’ part that allows participants to have a better grasp of the needs of plants and soil, among others, defining what is to be done also passes through each participant’s ‘sensitivities’. As we have seen, people nurture bonds to the garden that are affectively constituted. These bonds will frame not only the perception of what is to be done but when, depending on ‘thresholds’ of tolerance regarding specific issues, or even prioritization attributed to each task and what matters within them. In turn, as Luke’s remarks suggest, such sensitivities may introduce dissonance into the conformation process of each member’s socialization into the organization. In other cases, dissonance can also lead to a more sustained change within the organization, as we discuss in the following sub-section.

‘There is an attention’: from dissonance to rule-changing

In a meeting of the administrative council in 2020, Martina, a newcomer with previous gardening experience, pointed out that some trees were growing too close to each other, undermining their development. In particular, she proposed to cut down a walnut tree that was too close to an apricot tree. Those present at that meeting did not oppose the proposition, so it was approved.

On the very next day at the garden, Beatrice, absent from the meeting, saw the tree being cut down, which she experienced as a traumatic event. She asked people who were at the meeting about it and nobody said they supported it; nobody seemed to stand by it. She later found out that the group decided by voting the day before, without much discussion, and left no room for arguments coming from absent members. That had never been the way decisions were made, and even people who voted in favour of it did not defend their decision after being confronted.

To me, it was a serious moment because I had been going to the garden for a long time, and I had an affective relation to things. And that walnut tree, I liked it a lot, and I found it absurd to destroy it. [. . .] It was shown that, in that meeting, there was little. . . There was not a real discussion about this walnut tree affair, that nobody, in the end, really assumed the decision, and that what happened was that quickly there was someone who said ‘well, come on, we vote for or against, come on, the majority is for, we have shouted, we write on the record that it is dealt with, we have voted for it’. (‘Beatrice,’ December 2021)

Beatrice wrote a long e-mail about this, expressing her disappointment and anger, before finally deciding to leave the administrative council, and not to come to any more meetings. She made sense of this as a conflict of values:

To me, that really involved the values of the garden, I was really outraged. To me there was a conflict of values. [. . .] To me, [Slope Garden] is a bit of a sanctuary. It is kind of a place where we protect biodiversity, where we welcome all species. At a certain moment, there was someone that said ‘yes, but in any case, this walnut tree, nobody planted it. It was a squirrel that brought a nut one day. And there’s the walnut tree, it got there on its own.’ To me, the fact that it got there alone is not an argument to say we can chop it down. Really to me, it engaged the values and actually, I thought I was together with people along a set of values which imply not destroying a tree, but above all not to do it for reasons like ‘it wasn’t us who planted the tree,’ or that ‘it is too close to an apricot tree,’ you see? [. . .] I have the impression of having created a clash, a little, yes, but I said to myself, actually, I do not have the same values as these people. (‘Beatrice’, December 2021)

Beatrice’s reaction was very intense. We can understand that her socialization in the garden was incompatible with what she had seen. Seeing the tree being cut down triggered intense affective tensions and prompted her to react to the situation. We can see the social character of embodiment, as the change that she needed to undergo to conform to that situation was so foreign to her that she mobilized her different, dissonant embodiment, in confronting people about their decision.

People did not stand by the decision they had made in the face of it becoming a much bigger deal than they had anticipated. About four days after the conflict, members decided to hold an emergency meeting about it, to which Beatrice was invited but did not attend. When people spoke about this, many recognized that there was a problem in decision-making. In the meeting, ‘[Martina] felt really bad. She spoke again about the decision and everything that had happened at that moment. With tears in her eyes, she was really disturbed about this. . .’ (‘Arthur,’ December 2021). Dissonance prompted a revision to sustain the organization. A new agreement was then made that every change that is considered ‘structural’ to the garden must first be debated by the administrative council, then made known, and should only be put in place a month later.

There is an attention, an attention not only towards others, but also an attention towards the animals, you see, to the birds, the insects, the bees. That which we leave during the winter is for the animals. You see the flowers of the thyme that we leave, we do not cut them immediately because there is. . . It has to, to be there while necessary for the animals. There is an attention; we try all that. (‘Martina,’ December 2021)

We can understand Martina’s participation in the emergency meeting, with ‘tears in her eyes’, as the outcome of her encounter with Beatrice’s reaction. The fact that her proposition would disturb someone else generated affective tensions, enough for her to have a transitional reaction – while we cannot pinpoint the exact moment of that reaction (would it be when she read Beatrice’s e-mail? Or perhaps thinking about it some time later. . .?), her tears can be understood as a sign of her changed embodiment. That would lead her to take action, and to engage in the articulation described above, making space for dissonance within the organization.

However, some people resented Beatrice for not having attended the meeting that was happening because of her and confronted her about it. She abandoned the administrative council and her only connection to the garden was a hen and a rooster that she raised as pets there. More than once, I witnessed people being rude to the animals while complaining about her, as the excerpt from the field notes illustrates:

He then told the rooster to get away from him and amused himself by showing his shoe sole, while the rooster bristled and tried to attack it. He laughed and said things like ‘fuck off!’ to the rooster. She then grabbed a garden rake and slowly pushed the rooster away from the wooden board, telling the rooster to get out. [. . .] She said ironically that they are ‘gourmet poultry’, and that Beatrice overthought things, with which he agreed. [. . .] They kept on complaining about how hard it was to deal with Beatrice. (January, 2022)

Beatrice’s bodily encounters ignited affective tensions leading to the unsettling bodily emotions she expressed. This clash caused her to transitionally react in changing her originally deep bond to the garden through an outbreak and by confronting the others. However, she did not find any articulation that would settle the situation, leading to a dissonant demand for revision. There appears, notwithstanding, in Beatrice’s interview, a shift towards articulating it, through the evocation of ‘values’, and constructing a cohesive narrative around them. It is as if the affectivity from the encounter that prompted the decision-making was perceived as something that needs articulation for the organization to be able to ‘make do’ with it. The organization (and its members) seemed to be unable to deal with it in its bare character and needed to come up with an articulation, verbalizing the felt affective reality.

The way the organization dealt with the dissonance, in this case, the aftermath of Beatrice’s outburst, was that people tried to prevent someone from feeling as strongly neglected as she did, by revising the rules around decision-making. As Martina put it, the decision was motivated by an ‘attention’ towards other members as well as animals in the garden – it was the narrative path she found as an articulation to bridge the gap between seemingly operating embodied norms into Slope Garden’s explicit rules. Evoking the animals might come up as a legitimation of the extra-rational – of the affective bonds that were hurt and that Beatrice’s reaction made tangible.

Nevertheless, there were also reactions whereby members appeared to have attempted to articulate the affective dimensions that triggered conflicts, denying the legitimacy or acceptability of different interpretations. Then, the complaints about Beatrice and the animals express other members’ affective dynamics stemming from encounters under the new revised rules, in a way that is reluctant to conform to them. Complaining about the animals is a way of venting about the experience of unsettled embodiment which stems from the affective tensions that dissatisfied members experience. Such latent responses may occur before any transitional reaction, and may (or may not) lead members to conform to the new state of the organization and its explicit rules.

In such articulations, participants attempt to claim one ‘right’ way of approaching the situation (‘nobody had planted the walnut tree’; ‘it was a matter of values’), while they also delegitimize the opposing view (‘you know how difficult Beatrice can be’). These articulations indicate ways of settling embodiment which would restrain the possibilities for dissonance, attempting to halt encounters with the dissonant body in question (here, Beatrice), or diminish its relevance. However, these articulations did not make their influence strong enough to prevent changing the organization’s explicit rules.

We have exposed a situation in which affective tensions sparked a very acute transitional reaction, and where no articulation process could settle the situation. The articulation process becomes paramount here precisely because the situation involves many members and a formal procedure, namely that of collective assembly discussion. A dispute about competing rationales takes place. The strong affective tone of the interactions is perceived as needing settling by those involved, who respond to it by mobilizing several means of articulation.

Martina’s articulation speaks of a need for ‘attention’ to others, including other species, tacitly recognizing the legitimacy of Beatrice’s reaction beyond anything strictly rational. That being inscribed in the administrative council’s rules has opened the way for a more cautious procedure, giving time for others’ input for ‘structural’ change. Beatrice’s articulation mentioned a difference regarding ‘values’ and perceived it to be unbearable. She owns up to having created a ‘clash’, as she realized that something she assumed to be shared in a specific way, an affective relation to the garden including that individual tree, was not shared. She understands that what happened was serious, precisely because it hurt her affective bonds. That realization prompted her to divest herself from the administrative council and the garden as an organization.

Conversely, others have articulated the events by assigning a ‘difficulty’ that would be inherent to Beatrice, therefore condemning, if not obscuring, the affective dynamics preceding articulation. It is as if people recognized the importance of their own resulting affective bonds and assigned legitimacy to them as if they were universal. The fact that they did not see an issue with cutting down that specific tree blinds them to the parallelism of Beatrice’s process with their own. These members’ lack of sensitivity to the ongoing dissonance within their group suggests that the administrative council’s debate could have gone otherwise. If theirs had been the dominant perspective, it may have led to recognizing only one embodiment, one way of settling affective bonds, and to presenting it as the only acceptable one, leaving no room for dissonance.

It is as if Beatrice and the people who resented her were impacted by the episode, but in a way that did not restructure their affective bonds into a new, shared embodiment. Rather, in Beatrice’s case, the outcome of the process was a break in her previously existing bonds to the group. She grew more distant, detached from the organization. On the flip side, we can interpret other members’ resentment as a mirroring reaction. It is as if these others wish they did not have to deal with Beatrice (and her affects) in the first place, that it never made any sense to have strong feelings towards the tree that was cut down – they were conforming to the affective dynamics as they were. Beatrice’s intense transitional reaction didn’t resonate with the group; it did not correspond to their affective bonds. Martina, on the other hand, appears to have bought into the collective articulation of the events by attending the meetings, dealing with the affective intensities by discussing the events with tears in her eyes, and prompting a change that would revise the organization’s explicit rules, to prevent such a clash from happening again, by absorbing inputs from more participants.

Concepts for assessing embodied norms

We contribute to existing understandings of affective dynamics (Vidolov et al., 2023) and their influence in shaping organizational life, as we draw out concepts that help explain and enhance comprehension of embodiment processes in the making. We argue that our study thus answers the call for ‘research practices of pulse detection that trace the somatic and affective aspects of ethical life in our organizations’ (Resch & Steyaert, 2020, p. 728), based on an embodied exploration of dissonance processes.

In the current literature, ‘affective dissonance’ has been fruitfully mobilized at macro, ‘vibrational contexts’ (Vidolov et al., 2023, p. 1433), but organized dissonance (Ashcraft, 2001) has mostly emphasized the rational discourse of plurality of positions in an organization. This perspective has been considered incompatible with smaller, grass-roots organizations (Dorion, 2024), and the appreciation of micro-mechanisms of the embodied dynamics of alternative organizing (Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020) and its democratic practices (Mouffe, 2000). Furthermore, the idea of dissonance – as a driving force of change based on the embodied mismatch with implicit norms – has been absent from studies that focused on the ordering of organizational practices through affective dynamics (Endrissat & Islam, 2021; Katila, Kuismin, & Valtonen, 2020).

In contrast, our research, considering that affective dynamics are relational in their nature, generated by bodily encounters (Thanem & Wallenberg, 2015), looked into organizational practices that had no deliberate pace, widely varying, decentralized levels of instructions, as well as decentralized task definitions, amounting to very lax and varying disciplinarian aspects, which are characteristic of (some) alternative organizations. Indeed, in our case, the definition of everyday tasks and how to pursue them changed depending on who was defining them. Such idiosyncrasies leave more room for random alterations in the repetition of embodied norms, allowing members to change norms by enacting new rules (cf. Kenny et al., 2011) rather than relying on hierarchical direction (Tyler, 2019b).

That led us to developing our concepts. The notion of affective bonds allows us to get deeper into the mechanics of bodily encounters that had been shown to ignite change in organizational members’ embodied norms (Harding et al., 2021; Pullen et al., 2017). If bodies are combinations of smaller bodies that bond together, and these combinations change bodily capacities to affect and be affected (Thanem & Wallenberg, 2015), we ought to learn more about their relations, thus the notion of ‘affective bonds’.

Indeed, existing bonds can be affectively tensioned, unsettling embodiment without breaking or changing them. Transitional reactions help us make sense of changed embodiment, and articulation conceptualizes a need for settling the new embodiment, which may involve changing explicit organizational rules. These concepts have the quality of being applicable to different scales of organizational phenomena, and while it has not been the focus of our study, we could envisage their interaction with different organizational aspects, such as spatial setting (e.g. Hales, Riach, & Tyler, 2019).

While former debates on alternative organizations had attempted to describe, through cognitive reasoning and morality, structural forms that would characterize alternativeness (Parker et al., 2014), and what practices might achieve it (Reinecke, 2018), our conceptualization focuses on the exploration of alternativity as freedom (Dahlman et al., 2022) by tracing dissonance (Dorion, 2017) in embodied dynamics. We can relate practices and integration of new members to conflicts impacting Slope Garden through our theorizing of affective dynamics conforming members’ embodiment, as the anecdotes around the first author’s gardening experience have shown us. Similarly, through our conceptualization, we can better grasp investment and disinvestment of members in the organization’s activities, connected to outbursts of anger, not only as problems related to structures or individual issues, but also as resulting from underlying affective dynamics.

The affective life of alternative organizing: a conceptual representation

Although we recognize that ‘affect is difficult to pin down’ (Keevers & Sykes, 2016, p. 21), we draw on our ethnographic study of the case of Slope Garden to sketch out an embodied affective process. It is repeatedly iterated, featuring two paths and three steps with specific influences on embodiment, allowing for a better understanding of affective dynamics in organizations.

Our conceptual representation allows us to see the relations between the organizational and the corporeal, highlighting the heuristic potential of the notion of embodied norms. The iteration of the affective dynamics we describe underlines how the repetition of embodied norms may allow for random changing of the norm itself (Kenny et al., 2011) and sheds light on the pathways in which dissonance can help revise alternativity by enacting new rules or, on the contrary, socialize into existing norms. It also presents ‘articulation’ not as a means to erase affectivity, but as an ever-provisory embodied way of making-do with affectivity in a way that settles it into existing organizational norms or new rules, as illustrated in the second anecdote in which organizational rules were re-written not because of any purely logical argument, but acknowledging affective dynamics.

Our conceptual representation helps elucidate ‘how we might organize in order to create free spaces for becoming, for exploring possibilities of selfhood usually denied in the characteristically conformist and authoritarian organizations in our contemporary world’ (Reedy, 2014, p. 653). It does so by offering a heuristic tool for making affective dynamics intelligible, allowing for them to be read as manifesting potentially promising changes for the organization. Through the representation, ‘normal’ functioning within organizations can be read as perpetually provisory states of affairs, legitimizing deviance from them as a means for renewing ‘normality’ into better adjusting forms, instead of simply ‘mistaken’, or ‘wrong’ behaviour, or yet idiosyncratic ways of a particular person or group. We see it exemplified by discussions around posture and back pain in gardening activities, and the level of importance accorded to a specific tree, for instance.

Understanding these dynamics allows people to understand their capacities as well as their preferences in a processual as well as a relational way. Their embodiment comes from encounters and activities with other bodies, and changes along with them (Thanem & Wallenberg, 2015). Our representation helps address the enabling constraints that existing embodied norms may provide. Indeed, our theorizing shows evidence of a plurality of understandings of what is held dear within the garden for different members, and how the recognition of such embodiment, which goes beyond strictly rational explanations, can prompt people to give up their original stances in the name of securing collective cohesion, at best, or disengage completely from the organization, at worst.

Democratic decision-making could benefit from acknowledging affective dynamics

Alternative organizations literature considers democratic decision-making as a central element (e.g. Diefenbach, 2019; Pek, 2021). Moreover, critical literature has acknowledged that alternative organizing depends upon social and emotional dimensions (Farias, 2017). However, the relational and affective dimensions of alternativeness remain underexplored (Resch & Steyaert, 2020), with the dominant emphasis on explanations of alternative organizing relying upon personal interest, reason and morality (Ashcraft, 2001; Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020).

Our contribution evidences the importance of the embodied affective processes, essential to understanding the role of the alternative subject in engaging with and potentially changing alternative organizing (Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020) and its democratic practices (Mouffe, 2000), which are very easily made invisible when deliberation does not pay attention to the corporeal side that sustains it. As Rahmouni Elidrissi and Courpasson (2021, p. 55) have put it, ‘politics emerge at the interface between the docile enactment of the norm [. . .] and the revelation of its concrete physical impossibility and implicit violence’.

We propose ‘articulation’ as a mere attempt at describing the underlying affective processes preceding and constituting it. Our theorization of articulation as one step within affective dynamics, and as such one that is always tentative and provisional, can shed light onto explicit rule-making that usually happens through formal organizational procedures. While we do not claim to have fully elucidated the relations between embodied norms and explicit rules, our case study sheds light on their mutual influence, particularly through the second anecdote, which illustrates how explicit rules have to be close to implicit norms to remain legitimate through the performative and reflexive processes of dissonance (Dorion, 2017).

The procedural creation of explicit rules, when done democratically, takes rules to be an expression of the will of organizational members. Our process links this overt part of rule-making to the depths of affective life of organizations, understanding the making of the embodied will of the organizational members as emergent from affective dynamics, and ultimately as bound to implicit embodied norms. That allows us to reassess explicit enunciations as ‘articulations’ of affective dynamics, displacing our understanding of rational rule-making.

To support this, deliberative processes in alternative organizations may try to recognize the existence of these affective processes, leaving room for their flourishing. We argue that this possibility is necessary to keep formal procedures closer to the overflowing, living affective dynamics that they intend to regulate. As articulation processes give way to the affective, they accommodate organizational members, making room for their (embodied) constitution and avoiding disengagement. Such recognition of the affective dimensions of decision-making would further legitimize the organization’s democratic claims (Mouffe, 2000), and enrich arguments regarding the revisability of democratic decision-making (Shanahan, 2023).

Although the cutting down of the tree respected procedural norms, Beatrice’s reactions were recognized enough to provoke subsequent meetings that culminated in the enacting of a new rule. In this specific case, the new rule introduced changes seeking to allow for such divergences to be voiced. That was not because of any technical argument, but out of understanding that another member’s affective bonds to the garden had been hurt. This change in procedure honours the legitimacy of affective dynamics by bringing them closer to formal organizational rules, strengthening organizational democracy. We read the meetings happening after the chopping down of the tree in our second narrative as an example of attempted formal recognition of affective dynamics by the organization, however imperfect.