Contesting scalability, organizing non-scalable worlds

Héloïse Berkowitz () and Mathias Guérineau ()
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Héloïse Berkowitz: LEST - Laboratoire d'Economie et de Sociologie du Travail - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, AMU - Aix Marseille Université
Mathias Guérineau: LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique - Nantes Univ - IAE Nantes - Nantes Université - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Nantes - Nantes Université - pôle Sociétés - Nantes Univ - Nantes Université, CRG I3 - Centre de Recherche en Gestion I3 - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: What are the implications of conceiving scalability as a key parameter of social orders and a driver of societal transformation? Alternatively, what does it mean to consider nonscalability? In this paper, we seek to put 'scalability' under arrest, unsettling its self-evidence and mapping its territorialized materialities from below. Scalability implies specific qualities of a scalable world, logics of action and purposes that have unattended implications, shaping a resourcified, simplified, and disposable world. Scalability replaces the plurality of social bonds with homogeneous organizational relationalities predicated on a vertical ontology, such as extraction, domination, and predation. By dissecting the system implied by scalability and attending to its unattended implications, we analyze the violence of scalability and describe how it contributes to the direct or mediated ruination of the world. On this basis, examining what politics of non-scalability in organization studies could mean, we explore some reparative organizational gestures for organizing and inhabiting non-scalable worlds: from celebrating non-innovation, maintenance, and dismantling, to cultivating heterogeneity, regenerating bonds, and embracing counter-performances through friction, sabotage, or even disappearance.

Keywords: non-innovation; maintenance; counterperformances; alternatives; Scalability; innovation; non-scalability; organizing non-scalable worlds scalability; Contesting scalability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-10
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05536428v1
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Published in Ephemera : Theory and Politics in Organization, In press, online first

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05536428

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