Keeping the Iron Cage from Closing: How clashes over shared principles elicit collective authoring

Abstract

When less hierarchical organizations attempt to avoid positional authority and rely more on the authority of shared principles, they are challenged to balance a relative open-endedness and sufficient consensus of those principles. However, situations inevitably arise when assertions about the principles clash, disturbing the sense of collective sharing of principles and so triggering tendencies to make the principles more rigid or default to positional rule. This paper explores how internal collective dialogue unfolds in such situations in the central online channels of three mid-sized Nordic software consultancies aspiring for less hierarchical, principles-based organizing. Our research reveals the emergence of ‘collective authoring’— peripheral participation that reacts to the distress stirred by the clash. The collective responds with tension-mediating remarks and, most markedly, with a polyphony of inquiries and musings that are attentive to what is unfolding but not stubbornly fortified with either side of the clash. We discover how this collective dialogue comes to embed the initial clash with the iteratively maturing and saturating soundscape of deliberations, gradually invoking a tacit sense of the collective understanding of the issue on the channels. The dialogues persist until the most acute sense of distress over the sharing of principles seems to dissolve. We discuss how our findings, by illuminating the role of ‘the collective,’ contribute to the extant conceptions of relational authority and less hierarchical organizing.