Fluidity, Identity, and Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous

This paper examines how fluid social collectives, where membership is latent, contested, or unclear, achieve ‘organizationality’, that is, how they achieve organizational identity and actorhood. Drawing on the “communicative constitution of organizations” perspective, we argue that the organizationa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of management studies Vol. 52; no. 8; pp. 1005 - 1035
Main Authors: Dobusch, Leonhard, Schoeneborn, Dennis
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.12.2015
Subjects:
Anonymity
anonymous
Collectives
Collectivism
communicative constitution of organizations
fluidity
Hackers
Identity
identity claim analysis
Internet
Organization theory
Organizational culture
Organizational effectiveness
organizational identity
organizationality
Social identity
Speech acts
Studies
ISSN:0022-2380, 1467-6486
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper examines how fluid social collectives, where membership is latent, contested, or unclear, achieve ‘organizationality’, that is, how they achieve organizational identity and actorhood. Drawing on the “communicative constitution of organizations” perspective, we argue that the organizationality of a social collective is accomplished through ‘identity claims’ – i.e., speech acts that concern what the social collective is or does – and negotiations on whether or not these claims have been made on the collective's behalf. We empirically examine the case of the hacker collective Anonymous and analyse relevant identity claims to investigate two critical episodes in which the organizationality of Anonymous was contested. Our study contributes to organization studies by showing that fluid social collectives are able to temporarily reinstate organizational actorhood through the performance of carefully prepared and staged identity claims.
Bibliography:ark:/67375/WNG-67Q8GMF8-M
'Governing Responsible Business' (GRB) Research Environment at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark).
ArticleID:JOMS12139
istex:9A2D3E060E683C3CB87A4BB0AE76707BB3596DEC
Funding
L. Dobusch and D. Schoeneborn contributed equally to this paper.
We gratefully acknowledge the support by the ‘Governing Responsible Business’ (GRB) Research Environment at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark).
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ISSN:0022-2380
1467-6486
DOI:10.1111/joms.12139