Unlearning for Democratic Organizing
Owen Powell & Koen P.R. Bartels
What the paper says
This article advances empirical and conceptual understanding of how unlearning can help to sustain democratic organizing. While learning to confront persistent tensions is widely recognised as a central element of democratic organizing, there is surprisingly little research on its practice. In exploring this gap, unlearning emerged as a distinct yet integral aspect of individual and collective learning in democratic organizing – and to sustaining democratic organizing across time and scale. Our abductive analysis of qualitative research across four established (>20 years) and scaled (>50 members) UK-based worker cooperatives uncovered the centrality of relational processes of unlearning habitual beliefs, values, and patterns of behaviour in interaction with others, the organization, and the environment. Empirically, we discern three relational dynamics that create a need for unlearning and three relational practices for engaging in unlearning. We offer conceptual depth by formulating three analytical propositions for future research and practice.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.