Over nearly two decades, the field of organizational education has emerged (Göhlich et al 2018) and international debates on organizational learning have been widened and discussed from an educational perspective. Organizational education perspectives are interested in learning in, of, and between organizations (Weber 2020). Within these debates, critical research perspectives have established (Weber & Wieners 2018). Following a poststructuralist Foucauldian perspective, organizations are not neutral or simply functional. Instead, they act according to sets of knowledge, which are related to power. From a discourse-analytic organizational-education perspective, organizations (and their representatives) are seen as epistemic terrains through which discursive bodies of knowledge ‘flow’. Understood as discursive practices, business, social science, and organizational education rationalizations of change are practices “that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1981, p. 74). Organizations in this sense are constantly actualizing discourses in their discursive practice (Marshak & Grant 2008). Institutional knowledge orders are to be understood as orders of collective seeing, sensing, and thinking. Historical and spatially situated epistemic practices imply specific “visibilities and speakabilities” of and within organizing.

The present multiple crisis like Covid, the climate crisis, the Ukraine War and the global inequality crisis lead to question the ‘normal’ ways of organizing. Taking a closer look, present critiques of modern institutions like the school address not only its main goal of individualization (Collet-Sabé & Ball 2022:12). They challenge its´ existing inherent epistemes of education, still belonging to an ‘industrial age’ and claim to move ‘beyond’ such dysfunctional rationalities. Against an individualistic onto-epistemology, against enclosed education in an institutionalized setting and against disciplinary and hierarchical points of depart schools are criticized as non-place education, as decontextualized education which is oriented towards normalization and follows market-bureaucracy logics.

In an alternative episteme for education, Diversity becomes a tenet and commoning education not only a different type of education, but a potential for organizational education, too. The symposium discusses the dimensions of an onto-epistemological shift, which is needed to transform our given institutions (like schools) towards the Common Good. Commoning then connects to self-formation and to the tenet of diversity in alternative patterns of organizing.

The symposium addresses the challenge and the potential of “co-producing and commoning a different episteme” (Collet-Sabé & Ball 2022) not only for education in general, but for organizational education. It discusses the framework of three alternative horizons (Sharpe & Hodgson 2019) and its´ institutional realization within a university and a program on transformation and inclusion (Koenig 2022). It refers to heterotopic organizing in discursive counter-imaginaries against given normative orders. As an alternative imaginary that encompasses societal, democratic, and economic notions, Commoning and Commoning Education can be seen as a “heterotopia” (Foucault 2005), which suspends, neutralizes, and inverts the given onto-epistemology. Through heterotopic imaginaries, strategies, and practices, organizing can contribute to transforming collective images and practices.

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