Theoretical Framework: Place & Intersectionality

The study builds its critique and vision on two intertwined theoretical pillars: a nuanced understanding of Place and a systemic application of Intersectionality.

1. Place as a Relational and Political Concept

Moving beyond physical location, place is understood as:

• Socially Produced: shaped by historical relations, politics, and economics (Harvey, 1996).
• A Site of Meaning and Resistance: where community identity is constructed and global forces are lived, contested, and reworked.
• Open and Hybrid: a product of interconnecting flows rather than bounded, exclusionary territories (Massey, 1991).
• Central to Alternatives: Indigenous perspectives, for example, view place as a living kin, demanding stewardship and regenerative relationships, not extraction.

2. Intersectionality as a Systemic Lens

Intersectionality is employed to analyze how capitalism:

• Co-produces Inequalities: Benefits and burdens are distributed unevenly across intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality.
• Creates Layered Oppression: For example, working-class Black women face exploitation shaped simultaneously by racism, sexism, and class stratification.
• Reveals Granular Realities: Provides fine-grained insight into how broad “varieties of capitalism” manifest in specific lives and communities.

3. The Combined Critical Lens

Together, place and intersectionality provide a powerful framework for:

• Holistic Analysis: Understanding how global capitalist forces are reproduced and experienced in local contexts through specific identity configurations.
• Identifying Levers for Change: Highlighting the sites (place) and subjects (intersectional identities) of both oppression and potential resistance.
• Envisioning Inclusive Alternatives: Ensuring that reimagined economic models are rooted in local contexts and actively dismantle intersecting inequalities.

This framework shifts the focus from abstract economic models to the embodied, situated, and unequal realities of capitalist production and social reproduction.

Methodology & Scope

Special Issue Composition & Analysis

The editorial analysis synthesizes findings from a curated collection of research papers selected for the special issue “Atlas Unplugged”:

• Scope of Synthesis: The editorial reviews and integrates insights from all contributing papers to build a coherent, overarching argument.
• Paper Selection: Contributions were chosen for their empirical and theoretical challenge to the core assumptions of liberal market capitalism and their exploration of concrete alternatives.

Contributing Studies & Empirical Contexts

The analysis draws on diverse methodological approaches and case studies from the included papers:

• Indigenous Perspectives & Regenerative Finance: Participatory research on a Conservation Impact Bond co-developed with an Indigenous community in Canada (Arjaliès & Banerjee, 2025).
• Ethics of Care in Alternative Organizing: Ethnography of a European worker cooperative navigating tensions through relational practices (Friedrich & Lüthy, 2025).
• Self-Determination & Basic Income: Theoretical and empirical review of Guaranteed Basic Income trials through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (Howard, 2025).
• Marketization & Stakeholder Complicity: Theoretical model explaining why stakeholders support marketization even when it violates their values, illustrated via soccer fandom (Gruban & Feix, 2025).
• Systemic Violence in GVCs: Case study of institutional violence and “infernal places” in the Bangladesh garment industry (Ahmed, 2025).
• Waste as a Technique of Power: Analysis of the socio-ecological crisis of waste in Naples, Italy, linking organized crime, state failure, and public health (Lobbedez et al., 2025).
• Indigenous Resistance & Timeless Organizing: Study of a Zapatista-influenced occupation of a water-bottling plant in Mexico (Maher, 2025).

Analytical Approach

The editorial employs a thematic synthesis to:

• Identify common challenges to Randian capitalism across the papers.
• Articulate the shared theoretical foundations of the proposed alternatives.
• Construct the novel combined framework of Place and Intersectionality.
• Apply this framework to key domains (labour, GVCs, resources) to generate systemic insights.
• Derive cross-cutting implications for guardrails, resistance, and alternative models.

Key Findings & Alternative Visions

1. Foundational Critiques of Randian Capitalism

• Myth of Virtuous Self-Interest: The pursuit of individual wealth is not inherently virtuous but often leads to exploitation, inequality, and ecological destruction.
• False Dichotomy of Individual vs. Collective: Human flourishing depends on meeting needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Self-Determination Theory), which hyper-individualistic capitalism undermines.
• Violence is Systemic, Not Aberrant: Capitalism, especially in global value chains, produces “infernal places” where violence against marginalized workers is normalized (Ahmed, 2025).
• Waste is a Core Feature: The “take, make, waste” model is not a bug but a feature of accumulation, functioning as a technique of power and dispossession (Lobbedez et al., 2025).

2. Emerging Alternative Principles

• Relational Wealth over Individual Accumulation: Indigenous ontologies value shared well-being of land and community, exemplified by Conservation Impact Bonds that fund care and regeneration, not property rights.
• Ethics of Care over Instrumental Rationality: Organizing centered on interdependence, moral responsibility to the vulnerable, and relational processes (inquiring, deliberating, responding) to navigate tensions.
• Timeless Organizing over Efficiency: Zapatista-inspired resistance emphasizes horizontal leadership, inclusive decision-making, and reclaiming time and space from corporate control.
• Regeneration over Extraction: Moving from a logic of depletion to one of repair and renewal, as seen in place-based struggles for ecological and cultural sovereignty.

3. Analysis Through Place & Intersectionality

Applied to Labour Markets: Exploitation is not uniform. An intersectional-place lens reveals how immigrant women of colour, for instance, are concentrated in undervalued, precarious sectors in specific urban zones, bearing the double burden of paid and unpaid care work essential to social reproduction.

Applied to Global Value Chains (GVCs): GVCs perpetuate global hierarchies, funneling value northward while externalizing social and environmental costs onto specific places and bodies (e.g., women in Bangladeshi garment factories, Indigenous lands).

Applied to Resource Access: Power dictates access. Marginalized communities (poor, racialized, Indigenous) are disproportionately exposed to pollution and waste, while being excluded from capital, quality education, and political influence, creating self-reinforcing cycles of disadvantage.

4. The Gap Between Rhetoric and Corporate Reality

Despite political rhetoric promoting reshoring, corporate restructuring favors regional diversification (“China-plus-many”) over returning production to home countries. This highlights a disconnect between policy desires and the corporate logic of risk-spreading within global ecosystems.

Implications & Future Research

Theoretical Contributions

• Advances Critical Management Studies: Provides a robust, synthesised framework (Place + Intersectionality) for systemic analysis of capitalism.
• Re-centers Normative Questions: Brings ethics, justice, and ecological limits to the forefront of management and organizational theory.
• Bridges Micro-Macro Levels: Connects intimate, place-based experiences of oppression with macro-structures of global capital.
• Legitimizes Plural Epistemologies: Elevates Indigenous knowledge, feminist ethics, and Southern perspectives as vital sources of theoretical insight.

Practical Implications for Organizing

For Businesses & Alternative Enterprises:

• Adopt governance models that mandate care for stakeholders and ecology (e.g., Benefit Corps, Cooperatives).
• Implement due diligence through entire supply chains to confront systemic violence and waste.
• Develop “Two-Eyed Seeing” approaches that respectfully integrate different worldviews in partnerships.
• Center relational practices (inquiring, deliberating, responding) to build resilient, ethical organizations.

For Policymakers & Regulators:

• Design regulations with an intersectional lens to prevent unequal burdens (e.g., ensuring green transitions don’t disproportionately harm poor communities).
• Support place-based, community-led economic development and regenerative finance instruments.
• Strengthen transnational regulation (like EU CSRD) to hold global capital accountable for externalities.
• Protect and empower labour unions, particularly those representing intersectionally marginalized workers.

Pathways for Establishing “Guardrails”

• Regulation: Move beyond voluntary ESG to mandatory, intersectionally-aware reporting and accountability for global supply chain impacts.
• Labour Movements: Build inclusive, intersectional unions that fight both class exploitation and identity-based oppression.
• Market Forces: Leverage impact investing, climate-risk pricing by insurers/investors, and growing consumer demand for ethics.
• Social Norms: Business schools and management scholars must stop preaching shareholder primacy and educate for public value and systemic stewardship.
• Alternative Models: Scale and support cooperatives, solidarity economies, and purpose-driven enterprises that institutionalize broader accountability.

Limitations & Future Research

• Scalability of Alternatives: How can regenerative, place-based models be scaled without co-optation or losing their transformative essence?
• Mechanisms of Resistance: More research is needed on how identity-based, place-bound resistance can coalesce into broader systemic change.
• The Role of the State: Further analysis of how states can transition from facilitators of neoliberal capitalism to architects of guardrails and alternative economies.
• Interventions in GVCs: Developing and testing effective multi-level interventions to dismantle “infernal places” and build equitable chains.
• Decolonizing Management Scholarship: Continuing the work to center marginalized voices and epistemologies in theory-building itself.