Anonymous – ConJunction

New Article in Organization Theory: “Toward a Theory of Organizationality: A Gradual View on Collective Actorhood”

Figure 1 Organizationality Framework (from: Schoeneborn, Dobusch, and Seidl (2026)) — The organizationality framework offers an explanation how collective social addresses are charged with and discharged of actorhood.

Over ten years ago, Journal of Management Studies published Dennis Schoeneborn and my article on “Fluidity, Identity & Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous.” It turned out to become not only my most cited piece of scholarly work but really started a conversation on how we should conceptualize organization: as an entity (organization), as a process (organizing) or rather as property of social phenomena (organizationality).

Not long after the article had been published, Dennis and I started to work on a theoretical follow-up to spell out what we had only claimed but not fully conceptualized: understanding organisation as a matter of degree. Over seven years since we started this endeavour and after teaming up with David Seidl, I am extremely happy and proud that “Toward a Theory of Organizationality: A Gradual View on Collective Actorhood” has been accepted for publication at Organization Theory and is available open access as a preprint version. The abstract summarizes our main points:

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.

At the same time, this is the perfect occasion to once more point toward the open call for papers in Business & Society on “Collective Actorhood and Organizationality” with the deadline for submissions set at September 30, 2026.

New Book Chapter: »Alternating between Partial and Complete Organization«

Building upon a previous joint article on “Fluidity, Identity, Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous”, my co-author Dennis Schoeneborn and I dig deeper into issues related to the concept of “partial organizations” in a new book chapter entitled “Alternating between Partial and Complete Organization: The Case of Anonymous”. Specifically, the case of the hacker collective Anonymous illustrates that longer periods of ‘partialness’ may alternate with temporary punctuations, during which a social collective accomplishes a ‘completion’ of its organizationality. As a consequence, with our book chapter we seek to contribute to a processual and dynamic theory of partial organization, thereby applying a communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective.

The chapter is part of the volume “Organization outside Organizations
The Abundance of Partial Organization in Social Life” (2019, Cambridge University Press), edited by Göran Ahrne and Nils Brunsson. A pre-print version of the Chapter is openly available as a PDF.

Looking back on the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2016 in Anaheim, California

IMG-20160805-WA0013 — Enjoying California’s most healthy food together with Max Heimstädt (FU Berlin) and Katharina Kreissl (University of Vienna)

After Disneyworld Orlando in 2013, this year’s Academy of Management Annual meeting was again in a Disney resort, only this time in Anaheim, California. A lot happened during five days packed with workshops, meetings, presentations and, of course, receptions at the world’s largest gathering of management and organization scholars. What follows is a short list of my personal highlights at this year’s meeting:

I presented the paper on “Communicating Corporate Afterlife: Post-mortem Statements of Failed Startups”, co-authored with my former FU-Berlin-colleagues Nils Köster and Erik Schäfer. (see Pecha-Kucha-style slides below; in case you’re interested in the draft paper, just send me an email)

I was honored to contribute to the first edition of the Strategizing Activities and Practices (SAP) Interest Group’s “Doctoral & Early Career Program” in a Professional Development Workshop on post-PhD career strategies.
I was honored to receive one of several “Outstanding Reviewer” Awards of the SAP Interest Group.
As one of the co-founders of the recently launched “Open Strategy Network“, I made sure some merchandise was made available to fellow strategy researchers.