Toward a Theory of Organizationality: A Gradual View on Collective Actorhood

This paper addresses a central dilemma in organizational theory of how to conceptualize organization in a way sufficiently specific to distinguish it from other social phenomena yet sufficiently flexible to account for new organizational forms. Traditionally, there has been a split between scholars advocating a narrow understanding of organizations as entities and scholars arguing for a broader understanding of organizing as a processual phenomenon. While an overly narrow approach risks rendering organization studies irrelevant by failing to account for new organizational phenomena, an excessively broad view risks blurring the distinction between organization and sociality in general. To resolve this dilemma, we advance a third-way approach based on the concept of organizationality – a gradual notion of organization, understood as a quality that social collectives may possess to a higher or lower degree. In particular, we develop the contours of a theory of organizationality grounded in a gradual understanding of collective actorhood. Higher and lower degrees of organizationality, in turn, depend on practices of attributing actorhood to a collective or to an individual social address. By proposing collective actorhood as the main axis of organizationality that can vary in degree over time, we offer a theoretical framework that preserves the specificity of organization as a concept while accounting for a broader range of new organizational phenomena, as well.