摘要：This article contributes to the debates about critical
performativity (CP), a research program aimed at reorienting critical
management studies toward affirmative and transformative research.
While some scholars explain how CP can be engineered to create
alternative organizations, others remain skeptical, exposing its potential for
failure. We examine alternative organizations with a particular focus on the
struggles in which they are entangled, such as competition with other
performative programs and normative agendas. These struggles cause
permanent reconfigurations to agencements and make the future effects of
performative engines uncertain. To understand these reconfigurations, we
look at the transformation of already established alternative organizations.
We conducted a case study on French Community-Supported Agriculture
(CSA), which is illustrative of CP “in the field,” looking at how the CSA
network can engineer local organizations. We show how the struggles
between competing performative programs produce diversity, in time and
space, of organizational settings and goals within the French CSA
movement. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, because of the struggles
in which it is entangled, a performative engine can create diverse and
potentially competing normative content rather than a single stable
agenda. Secondly, deviations from the initial normative content are not
neutral and may undermine the subversive potential of those
agencements. Ultimately, we call for a research agenda which would look
beyond the implementation of subversive practices to question the way
subversive agencements develop, and which would acknowledge that CP
is also about struggles between competing engines.
