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Paper short abstract

This study examines how repair practices reshape organizational roles in Repair Cafés, community-based repair organizations, where boundaries between volunteers, participants, and other actors become fluid through collaborative repair.

Paper long abstract

Repair Cafés operate as community-based organizations that coordinate volunteers, participants, tools, and repair activities through recurring events and shared practices. Yet less attention has been paid to how repair practices themselves shape the internal organization of such initiatives and the relations between actors involved in repair. This study examines how repair practices relate to organizational dynamics within Repair Cafés.

The study combines interviews and field observations conducted in 6 Repair Cafés in Bavaria, Germany and adopts a grounded theory approach to examine how repair practices and interactions among actors shape organizational dynamics in practice.

Preliminary findings suggest that Repair Cafés typically organize repair around a distinction between volunteers who repair items and participants who bring broken objects. However, repair interactions frequently unsettle this distinction and redistribute expertise among actors involved in the repair process. In practice, repair often unfolds collaboratively, blurring boundaries between those who repair technologies and those who use them. These interactions shape how participation and roles are organized and contribute to the formation of specific organizational arrangements within Repair Cafés. The study argues that repair practices not only restore broken objects but can also reorganize relationships between actors within sociotechnical settings, highlighting how everyday repair practices can generate subtle forms of organizational change.