In recent decades, people have been highly engaged in collective organizing rather than individual efforts to find solutions to the multiple crises across the globe. In ever-increasing complexity, people find radically new ways to go beyond thought through creativity and imagination (Simpson & den Hond, 2022: 141). Creativity and imagination in organizing enable alternative practices emerging from different approaches, such as commons, social and solidarity economy, and degrowth movements (Weber 2022). Imagining democratic and participatory spaces by and for people creates new pathways for demolishing power hierarchies within organizing (Schröder 2018). Discussing these increasingly new patterns of organizing is worth to analyze, since the current Western-center, colonial academic debate limits our understanding of exploring alternative patterns and organizing strategies in "the colonial, gendered and racial asymmetries of the constituted order" (Bourassa, 2017: 82). Critical, feminist, and decolonial approaches seem more suitable to criticize the power relations and understand this topic rather than the dominant universalist and hierarchical approaches.

Therefore, new theoretical, empirical, and methodological discussion at the acacemic level are crucial for finding out the research on this topic. To discover diverse patterns, widening the gaze on learning, education and training in and between organizations may offer new perspectives. Commons in education (Pechtelidis & Kioupkiolis: 2020), alternative research methodologies for teaching (Dryjanska, Kostalova & Vidović 2022) and learning in and between women’s cooperatives in their networks (Cazgir 2022) are contributions addressed in this symposium in order to analyze innovative and transformative patterns of organizing.

Such alternative forms of organizing indicate an ontological shift (Bourassa, 2017). From a diversity perspective, the contrtıbutıons of the symposium address the micro-heteropolitical attempts to build open participatory democratic space  and may allow us to discuss and evaluate the possibility of alternative patterns of organizing..

These theoretical, methodological and epistemological reflections address the different ways of organizational learning in, by, and between organizations (cf. Göhlich a.o. 2018). The symposium aims to bring together discussion on ontology, methodology, and epistemology in order to explore pathways, practices, and pitfalls of the alternative patterns of organizing.

-       How does „organizing“ benefit from "diversity"?

-       How and to what extent does diversity promote radically inclusive, democratic organizational strategies?

-       How does organizational education challenge the individualistic approach?

-       How does the alternative organizing process create inclusive, democratic, and sustainable possibilities? What are the main obstacles and challenges?

-       How do micro-organizations trigger democratic transformations?

-       Which methods are more suitable for research on organizational learning?

-       How and to what extent does learning between the organizations contribute to the transformative potential of organizations?

Following these questions, the organizing of diversity and in diversity will be discussed through theoretical, empirical, and methodological lenses. The symposium addresses organizing from a micro-scale research perspective including their macro-scale transformative potentials. By this, the symposium explores patterns of alternative and diverse organizing, of researching and learning in their pathways, practices and pitfalls.

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