To have or not to be: the possessive constitution of organization

How does an organization act? Can it be considered an actor on its own or does it need organizational members who act on its behalf? We would like to suggest our own take on the issue by suggesting a genuinely communicative approach to the issue of organizational action. Using the narratology of AJ Greimas to make apparent in talk some of process philosophy's tenets, we show how organizations act by being attributed actions. The detailed study of meetings from a community organization serves as our empirical grounding. We suggest that through the imbrication of mandates and programs of action in a logic of appropriation/attribution, the organization can effectively act while always relying on others to do so. Far from 'just talk,' we contend that in doing so, participants reconfigure their organization and make it do things. There is no need to resort to an essentialist ontology of organization to state that it acts 'itself.' We therefore reconcile the two most common views of organizational action - that of an organization acting by itself and that of agents acting on its behalf

A Relational Approach to Materiality and Organizing: The Case of a Creative Idea

International audienceIn this paper, we propose to go beyond the notion of entanglement that has been proposed in recent years to fill the so-called gap between " the social " and " the material " , especially in organizational studies. While this notion rightly invites us to reconsider the way we traditionally approach the question of mate‐ riality and organizing, we believe that its formulation tends to implicitly repro‐ duce the gap it claims to fill. In contrast, we propose a view according to which sociality and materiality should, in fact, be considered aspects of everything that comes to be and exist. Throughout the analysis of an episode taken from fieldwork devoted to creative teams, we show that things as abstract as ideas, for instance, in order to emerge, exist, and continue to exist, have to materialize themselves in various identifiable beings. While the sociality of an idea is identified through the various relations that make it what it is, we show that its materiality comes from what precisely materializes these relations

“And who are you?”: A performative perspective on authority in organizations

As work and organizational reality become increasingly “post-bureaucratic,” the conventional and stable bases of a person’s authority—their position, their expertise, or the acquiescence of a subordinate—are eroding. This evolution calls us to revise our understanding of authority, and to consider more deeply how it is achieved in contexts that are both fluid and fragmented. Building on a six-month autoethnography of a consulting assignment, we show that authority is a practical, relational, and situated performance. It exists in a tension between two mirroring processes, activation and passivation, through which relations are either leveraged or downplayed to shape the situation and steer collective action. Our study also reveals that the performance of authority involves not just people, but also a broader range of actants, including artifacts and abstract entities. In line with current research on performativity in organizations, our findings contribute to the relational program on authority and the revelation of its sociomaterial dimension. Thus, we provide an action-based understanding of authority that is better suited for the study of post-bureaucratic organizing