Collective actorhood and organizationality: Recalibrating responsibility in business-society relations

Éditeurs invités

• Dennis Schoeneborn, Copenhagen Business School
• Héloïse Berkowitz, CNRS, Aix Marseille University
• Leonhard Dobusch, University of Innsbruck
• Frank de Bakker, IÉSEG School of Management
• Consuelo Vásquez, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Synthèse

Over the past decades, the relations between business and society have fundamentally changed. We are entering an age of digital futures with artificial intelligence taking over more and more human tasks at rapid speed, as well as broken futures with accelerating dynamics of climate change, in which the survival of humankind will depend on our ability to organize in collective ways and imagine alternatives to tackle such complex social problems, amidst growing inequalities and ecological destruction on a planetary scale.

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Thèmes proposés

• How is collective actorhood performed and organized?
• Is a legal status/legal person needed to accomplish collective actorhood?
• Why and how do actors strategically downplay or amplify collective actorhood? How do these strategic efforts affect responsibility attributions?
• What are the implications and limitations of collective actorhood for reenvisioning the business-society relationship and offer alternative solutions in crises of civilization?
• Where and how does actorhood emerge? How do institutional contexts affect actorhood?
• How does actorhood evolve over time or space, and how do organizations transition between different degrees of organizationality?
• Can social collectives be perpetuated and maintained even with a low degree of organizationality – or do they feel pressures either to be dissolved or evolve toward higher degrees of organizationality eventually?
• How to explain asymmetric dynamics between the organized (e.g., established formal organizations; high degree of organizationality) and the (rather) unorganized as their counterparts (e.g., social media firestorm; low degree of organizationality)?
• What can we learn from alternative forms of organizing, including those in marginalized settings?
• How is collective actorhood conceptualized in the various geographies, including the Global South? How does this translate, circulate, and adapt across geographies?
• What are the contributions of other collective notions stemming from indigenous cosmovisions and decolonial approaches?
• How does actorhood affect the interactions between organizations from different domains (for profit and non-profit, scientific organizations, public actors, etc.)?
• When does collective actorhood create relations of domination and exploitation?
• At what point does collective actorhood become constitutive of societal problems and crises (incl. fascism, techno-feudalism, etc.) – rather than a solution for addressing them?
• How does actorhood (or the lack of) affect the relationship between privileged and marginal communities?
• Can living (forests, rivers, soils) and non-living (algorithms, technologies) entities be attributed actorhood and be held accountable? How does it differ from 'human' organizing?
• How can alternative ontologies help inform this analysis?
• How can a gradual understanding of organization help us to understand variations in the degree of organizational actorhood and responsibility attributions in the relations between businesses and society?
• What are the parameters of organizationality required for a responsible collective actorhood?
• How can alternative ontologies, cosmovisions, and organizing experiences inform this critical reflection?
• How to better account for situations in which marginalized actors are forced into fluid and precarious ways of organizing and/or have no choice to lessen the degree of organizationality to cope or survive?

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