A legacy without a will. Feminist organising as a transformative practice

Grounded on a practice-based, processual, performative and material understanding of organising (Corradi et al. 2008; Feldman 2002; Czarniawska 2014; Lindberg and Walters 2013), the dissertation explores an example of feminist organising (Acker 1995, Brown 1992). The study investigates upon the concrete interweaving of theories and practices in the everyday organising and shows how a specific way of organising outside traditional institutions can be in itself a crucial way to shield, enact and therefore transmit a particular heritage. The research looked at the relation between theories and practices as key perspective to understand the work underlying both the creation and maintenance of an organisation. The study, that focuses on the first feminist bookstore in Italy, the Milan Women’s Bookstore, founded in the second half of the Seventies, was carried out combining fieldwork with archival research covering more than thirty years of organisational life; in fact, this research reconstructs the history, context of reference and theories produced by the Bookstore while also observing and participating in the unfolding of its day-to-day activities. The dissertation thus mixes practice-based (Nicolini 2012; Sandberg and Tsoukas 2016) and historical perspectives (Wadhwani et al. 2018; Clark and Rowlinson 2004; Üsdiken and Kieser 2004) in studying organising. Overall, the text that takes shape consists in a contextualised narration of the becoming of an organisation in an environment characterised by intense philosophical and political debates and suggests three key elements in feminist organising, space, relations and language, as sites where ideas inscribe in the organising sphere (Joerges and Czarniawska 1998 Czarniawska 2014a) and where processes of symbolic institutional maintenance take place (Zilber 2006). The way in which theories and practices interact one another is qualified as material reflexivity. The expression indicates the collective reflexive process through which participants appraise spatial, relational and discursive practices in creating the organisation and functions also as a device able to institutionalise feminist meanings.