Call for a Special Issue in Economic and Industrial Democracy.
Utopias at work: theories, methods and practices for more democratic work relations

This is a call for contributions to a Special Issue of Economic and Industrial Democracy on the topic “Utopias at work: theories, methods and practices for more democratic work relations”. By gathering contributions from different disciplines, this Special Issue explores the diverse ways in which a utopian lens can contribute to our current analyses of work, work and employment relations, and organizations of working life, toward the creation of socially sustainable and more democratic workplaces and organizations.

In 1993 Olson, Nilsen, and Nilsen (1993) argued, in their article “Industrial Work, Instrumentalism, Learning Processes: An Old Debate in a Utopian Perspective”, that an exploration of utopian thinking within the field of industrial relations could enhance the working conditions of industrial workers. Through future-oriented workshops, the authors explored workers' utopic visions of work. Needless to say, the workers had plenty of utopian suggestions, encompassing visions of new collective ownership to new forms combining paid and unpaid work. More than 30 years later, the utopias explored there, remain utopian.

Working life is still mostly organized around hierarchical principles; and industrial democracy – a concept (Webbs 1897) relying on workers’ influence on economic relations in society – is far from being practiced beyond the entitlements to workers’ information, consultation and (sometimes) co-determination rights as provided by law. We live in an era when the continuous and aggressive flexibilization of labor markets and employment relations and the ensuing precarity of working life that have hit workers in almost all sectors in the last 30 years, leave very little space to propose and explore radical ideas on alternative organizations of working life and of economic relations at large. When the many achievements that workers’ and trade union movements realized in the past are under attack, what space is left for conceiving of dreaming about alternative forms of organizing working life? Who has time to hope today? As social movement historian Robin Kelley (1994) remarked, the pressures of hard times tend not to be generative on political imagination, on the contrary, what characterizes time of crisis is that it is difficult to see anything but the present.

But what if, in conditions of crisis, we take utopia seriously? What if utopias on economy, work, and organization are possible remedies to the current dystopic times? In this Special Issue, we have the ambition to explore how utopian thinking and utopian methodologies can expand the horizons of work and organizational life research and practice with the aim of achieving a more democratic and egalitarian working life. We see this endeavor as part of the ambition to start a discussion about alternative forms of organization of economic relations to which work and employment relations would contribute to a substantial extent.

In the last decades, several scholars exploring issues of work, have worked within traditions of hope and utopias, understood not as naive optimism or infantile escapism, but as solid, original, and collective labor, that explores both the present and the horizons of the not-yet- become (Bloch 1996). According to Ruth Levitas (2013) thinking of utopias as methods help us constructing a critical perspective on the present, while at the same time functioning as an incitement for ‘creating’ alternative futures. Utopian thinking challenges us to explore the limits of the current while at the same time grasping and exploring existing alternatives and future visions on the organization of working life. Kathi Weeks, argues that we should consider utopianism as “a distinctive mode of thought and practice, and explore what a utopian demand is and what it can do” (2011:175). Like Levitas, Weeks suggests that a utopian perspective has two functions: on the one hand, it creates a critical perspective on the present and its status quo; on the other hand, it functions as an encouragement, toward alternative futures. (Weeks 2011). Utopia, if adopted as a methodological lens or theoretical framework, revises our connection to the present, at the same time as it changes our relationship to the future.

Against this background, with this issue, we want to collectively further investigate the possible contribution of the concept of utopia and utopian thinking in shaping a progressive research agenda for the study of work and employment relations. Following this ambition, we invite empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions from a diverse range of disciplines. Topics may include but are not limited to the following themes:

- Utopia as Method and/or theoretical lens in Work and Organizational Scholarship
- Utopia and workplace democracy
- Utopia, gender and Social Reproduction
- Utopia and transformation of work and technology
- Utopia and the Future of work and work relations
- Utopia and labor law
- Utopia as cruel hope
- Utopia and Labor: beyond borders – beyond nations
- Feminist utopias at work
- Utopia and the Representation of work in Art
- Working for sustainable futures
- Utopia and working time
- Queering utopias at work
- Democratization of work and workplaces
- Workplace Resistance and Utopias
- Work, ableism and utopias.

If you are interested in contributing to the Special Issue, please send an abstract of max 500 words by 1 of February 2024, to paula.mulinari@mau.se and andrea.iossa@hkr.se. The authors of accepted abstracts will be informed by February 15st, 2024. Submission of final manuscripts for peer-review is expected by September 1st, 2024. The Special Issue is planned to be published as the first issue of Economic and Industrial Democracy in 2025.