Contesting scalability, organizing non-scalable worlds

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.