Bencherki, N., & Cooren, F. (2011). Having to be: The possessive constitution of organization. Human Relations, 64(12), 1579–1607. doi:10.1177/0018726711424227.
Key takeaways
From the abstract, not a reading.
- The question is how an organization acts: by itself, or through members who act on its behalf.
- Using Greimas’s narratology “to make apparent in talk some of process philosophy’s tenets”, it argues that organizations act “by being attributed actions”.
- 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”. No essentialist ontology of organization is needed for it to act “itself”.
- The empirical grounding is the study of meetings in a community organization.
Why this is here
Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) use it three ways. It supplies the phrase that defines what they reject: most organizational scholarship on agency focuses on “who or what acts” (p. 1350, citing p. 1581, “emphasis original”). It is the line of research showing that practices of attribution move agency “from the individual to the collective” (p. 1358). And it is named among the approaches for which “zooming in on agents is necessary in order to move from the individual to organizational/collective action”, Cooren and Fairhurst’s “scaling up” (p. 1364).
None of this could be checked against the article. Two things are worth checking when a copy comes. Whether p. 1581 frames “who or what acts” as the question it answers or as the question it moves past. And whether “possessive constitution” is an entitative account: the abstract’s own terms, attribution and appropriation in talk, and Bencherki’s thesis’s grounding in the philosophy of individuation (Simondon), sit closer to the parent paper’s process view than the parent’s p. 1364 grouping suggests. Bencherki is the parent paper’s first author, so the parent is in part revising his own earlier position.