Communities and collectives organize their economic and social interactions and co-create their own worldviews. When collective efforts are sustained in time, they may grow in terms of the number of members in the community, the diversity of goals, the partnerships with external organisations and the modalities of action in the public arena. At the same time, they stabilize the ways in which members interact with each other, the roles of different members in the division of labour, the rules that make their actions acceptable or unacceptable, and how different plans of action are organized and pursued. This is a process of building institutions from below that entails the contestation and adaption of the institutions “out there” to the aspirations and ideals of the groups that organize a social and solidarity economy group. Building institutions from below addresses the internal organization of rules for and by communities and collectives, and the bridges to the rest of society. It is a highly contradictory process of continuous tension between a flexible and creative structure and the gradual achievement of a higher degree of formalization and recognition.
Lawson (2003: 182) defines institutions as ‘structured processes of interaction among individuals, relatively enduring and recognised as such’. In absence of legal formalisation, the stage at which an action becomes stable, recognised and acceptable follows a period of contestation and negotiation among various actors and courses of action, during a “window of opportunity” (Tarrow and Tollefson, 1994) in which change is perceived as possible and timely.
This paper aimed at better understanding the process of institutionalisation and was guided by three research questions. What are the consequences of scaling–up and stabilizing an organizational form? In what ways are rules made in the process of institutionalization from below within the social and solidarity economy? The research explores the practices of “flexible institutionalization” (Pruijt 2003; 2007) to address the reconciliation of claims from part of a collective that aims to establish rules and redefine its integration in society, with another more radical part that prefers to continue producing disruption and contestation of the social structure. The study conceptualizes the process of flexible institutionalization and distinguishes it from an ideal final stage of ‘terminal institutionalisation’ when convention replaces disruption and rules of governance are stable.
The study looks at a Local Exchange Trading Scheme (LETS) called ‘Puma’ in the neighbourhood of Pumarejo, in the Spanish city of Seville. In March 2012 a local group organized a local currency as part of a project to establish what it described as “a more human and sustainable economy” and was closely related to the Indignados movement (Taibo, 2013). Eighteen months later Puma’s membership climbed to 800 participants from other areas of the city and at that scale the organization was facing problems to sustain its practices of contestation while managing the informality of close social relations that characterized it. The group declared a ‘hibernation period’ in which new rules were discussed and introduced. The study is based on secondary data collection of journalistic sources and social media, followed by primary data collected via interviews and participatory observation between May and November 2013. We found that while some rules were fixed, the group built stable mechanisms to maintain their negotiation and review sets of rules sequentially. The instances of discussion were seen as guarantors of flexibility and informality, which ranked highly among the members. At the same time, the organisers decided not to establish rules to regulate many of the social activities of PUMA. The process of flexible institutionalization is hence characterized by permanent negotiations to balance out different efforts, such as between personalized relations and impersonal rules, stable division of labour and contingent needs, long terms aspirations in the public sphere and the daily decisions to sustain the survival of the group.
References
Lawson, T. 2003. Institutionalism: On the need to firm up Notions of social structure and the human subject. Journal of Economic Issues, 37, 175-207.
Pruijt, H. (2003) 'Is the Institutionalization of Urban Movements Inevitable? A Comparison of the Opportunities for Sustained Squatting in New York City and Amsterdam', International journal of urban and regional research 27(1): 133-157.
Pruijt, H. 2007. Urban Movements. In: RITZER, G. (ed.) Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Blackwell.
Tarrow, S. and Tollefson (1994) Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics. Cambridge Univ Press.
Taibo, C. (2013) 'The Spanish Indignados: A Movement with Two Souls', European Urban and Regional Studies 20(1): 155-158.
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
