Bencherki, N., & Iliadis, A. (2021). The constitution of organization as informational individuation. Communication Theory, 31(3), 442–462. doi:10.1093/ct/qtz018. (Online 29 November 2019.)
Read in full, from the authors’ manuscript, in NOTE-1483.
Key takeaways
- Information is “a differential in action potential that emerges from disparity in ordering between domains”. Communication is “the kin to kin propagation of action that seeks to resolve disparity and, in doing so, organizes a domain as it circulates through it” (proposition 1).
- Levels coexist. Organizations are not at a later stage of individuation than their members but at “different informational levels”; “An employee is not prior to the organization, nor is the organization an abstraction of its employees” (proposition 2).
- Meaning is reordering. “what information means … corresponds to the way it reorders a domain” (proposition 3).
- Knowledge is individuation. Knowing an organization “is knowing how I have changed along with it as I have come to know it” (proposition 4).
Why this is here
The owner asked for the works Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024, LIT-1902) lean on. Bencherki is the first author of both. The parent takes from this paper:
- Individuation as “the constitution of new entities or collectives” (parent p. 1355, citing p. 445). The words are verbatim in the manuscript (ms. p. 8).
- Individuation as the “processual emergence of physical, technical, psychological, or collective entities” (parent p. 1355, citing p. 448). Verbatim in the manuscript (ms. p. 13). The two journal page numbers could not be checked.
- Cross-level action and a new conception of communication (parent pp. 1351, 1364). “see also Bencherki & Iliadis, 2021” for treating “cross-level” granularities as a continuum and for communication as “the continuity of action through beings”. Faithful: proposition 2, and the paper’s claim that the scaling-up question is “not a matter of sequential physical steps” (ms. pp. 14–15).
- Information’s dual sense (parent p. 1357): meaning as how an action affects the continuation of a field, and information as the in-forming of the new field. Faithful to proposition 3 and to ms. p. 16: “what an action means corresponds to the ordering that action brings about in a given domain.”
- Unattributed borrowing. The parent’s “an action differential that may reorganize those individuation processes” (p. 1356) is this paper’s “information – as an action differential that may take many guises” (ms. p. 13). Same first author; not a misuse.
The parent (pp. 1354–1355) groups this paper with work that “tend[s] to mobilize [Simondon’s] ideas to theorize the constitution of organizations without theorizing the vital role of agency”. That is accurate for this paper. It equates communication with the propagation of action. It says nothing of agency or affect, and its one empirical excerpt is read for ordering, not for who acts. THEORY-1277 states the levels claim the parent leans on.