Nicolas Bencherki

Having 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.

How things make things do things with words, or how to pay attention to what things have to say

ABSTRACT While organisational communication research has traditionally limited talk to human beings, a trend within the Montreal School (TMS) of the Communicational Constitution of Organizations (CCO) perspective acknowledges that ‘things do things with words’ as well, and criticises the ‘bifurcation of nature’ into two distinct realms: materiality and discourse. However, due to a preference for studying human discourse, many TMS studies still may give the impression that only human spokespeople can make objects talk. This paper uses data from an ethnographic case study to argue that CCO is well equipped to recognise that other sorts of objects may speak as well, and that they enter the realm of language through yet other objects (i.e. their ‘spokesthings’). In doing so, this paper advances an argument that will counter critiques of TMS scholarship that propose it reduces the role played by objects to their interpretation by humans.

Contributorship and Partial Inclusion A Communicative Perspective

Organizational communication theory and research tends to assume the practices of organizational “members” are relevant to the study of organizational phenomena, without reflecting on how those members were identified in the first place. This issue is particularly relevant to perspectives that view communication as constitutive of organizations because they may take the very object they seek to explain—the organization—as the starting point when identifying pertinent informants. We provide a communicational perspective of organizational membership by starting from communicative events, instead of individuals. Ethnomethodology’s notions of accounts and sanctions are useful in recognizing the interactionally performed nature of membership. We extend ethnomethodology’s intuition by viewing membership—which we reframe as contributorship—as being achieved through the contribution of actions to the organization.

Mediators and the Material Stabilization of Society

When one utters the word ‘‘materiality,’’ the name of Bruno Latour usually follows closely. He is mostly known (or misunderstood) for proposing we should recognize the sharing of our social world with non-humans*an idea often ridiculed by those who think that Latour suggests we should share the world with things. In fact, what he says (especially in We Have Never Been Modern) is that we are indeed sharing the world with non-humans, whether we acknowledge it or not, and that pretending we are not amounts to a work of ‘‘purification’’ by which the cultural/social and the natural/ technical are carefully divided into two hermetic and impossible realms. We already share the world with many material entities*or ‘‘artefacts’’*and their participation is essential for (social) action to be possible at all. This is made particularly clear in ‘‘On Interobjectivity.’’ Latour asks: What differentiates simian society from that of humans? His answer is that the distinction lies not so much in apes having a simple society, while that of humans would be complex. Apes do entertain relationships through countless interactions. The difference is between a complex society and a complicated one. Human society is complicated, but not because there are more interactions. On the contrary, thanks to artefacts that record, carry, and channel interactions through time and space, we can avoid engaging in the same interactions over and over again. While apes continually establish their places in their hierarchies, reaffirm their claims to territories, and so forth, humans can merely wear their employee identification badges around their necks and lock their doors. As Latour explains:

The role of space in the emergence and endurance of organizing: How independent workers and material assemblages constitute organizations

Where do new organizations come from, and how do they persist? Based on an ethnographic study of two creative hubs in Amsterdam, in which creative independent workers rented studio space, we show how space plays a role in constituting new organizations and making them last. Focusing on challenging moments in the development of these two creative hubs, we propose that space, understood as a material assemblage, participates in providing endurance to organizing practices. It does so because space and practice reflexively account for each other. In other words, space may constrain or enable practices, and provide them with meaning, as the literature abundantly illustrates, but practices also define and shape space. Rather than emphasizing either of these two options, we argue that they should be understood as integral to each other. Furthermore, it is precisely their reflexive relation that contributes to the emergence of new organizations. Our study contributes to the literature on the communicative constitution of organizations, and more broadly to the knowledge of organizing in the creative industries.

Property and Organization Studies

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.