Contributorship and Partial Inclusion

Abstract

Organizational communication tends to assume that 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, since 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" (Schoeneborn & Scherer, 2012), 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.

Property and Organization Studies

“…Property is an empirical matter; whether an organization has these or those members, buildings, brands, partners, missions, markets, and so forth, is an observable achievement, rather than an assured starting point for inquiry (see e.g. Bencherki & Snack, 2016). Property concerns both what someone or something has and what he / she / it is, and we must resist defining people, organizations, or other things before we study the possessive relations that constitute them.…”

“…Second, when considered as happening in people's minds, it is not clear whose attributions count towards the constitution of the organization, and whose are dismissed. Concretely, this means that interpretive researchers should not assume, for instance, that interviews with only formal members provides a complete picture of the organization, since membership itself is the outcome of polyphonic and ambiguous attributions (Bencherki & Snack, 2016). Again, this entails decentering the study of signs, symbols and meaning from an exclusive focus on individual people, to allow a more comprehensive observation of the ways in which they contribute to establishing possessive relations.…”

Rebuilding Babel: A Constitutive Approach to Tongues-in-use

“…The ability of the organization to exist and do things, therefore, is not a given, but rather the result of situated practices through which it is attributed action (Bencherki & Cooren, 2011), made present through talk and artifacts (Cooren et al, 2008;Cooren & Matte, 2010), populated with members (Bencherki & Snack, 2016) and vested with authority (Taylor & Van Every, 2014).…”

Organization and membership: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…For example, scholars highlight that it is important for an organization to distinguish between members and non‐members (Aldrich, 2008), to control who its members are (King, Felin, & Whetten, 2010) and to recruit members and convince them to stay (Mayntz, 1965). Accordingly, the notion of membership as such and the idea that organizations depend on it have been mostly taken for granted for decades (Bencherki & Snack, 2016; Grothe‐Hammer, 2019a). Scholars usually seem to write about ‘members' as if they were some kind of ‘natural' category, for which everyone has a fairly clear idea of both what it is and that it is of eminent importance.…”

“…McPhee and colleagues (McPhee & Iverson, 2009; McPhee & Zaug, 2000) argue that membership should not be seen as one fixed decision that comes first but as an ongoing stream of negotiation. Bencherki and Snack (2016) have revived the notion of contributorship (see Barnard, 1938) for arguing that individuals can be partially included into organizational processes without being or becoming members. Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) point our attention to fluid collectives that decide on membership asymmetrically—meaning that there is no decision on inclusion, but on exclusion if necessary.…”