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

• Published date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12139
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Dennis Schoeneborn,Leonhard Dobusch

Fluidity, Identity, and Organizationality: The

Communicative Constitution of Anonymous

Leonhard Dobusch and Dennis Schoeneborn

Freie Universit€at Berlin; Copenhagen Business School

ABSTRACT 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.

Keywords: anonymous, communicative constitution of organizations, fluidity, identity claim

analysis, organizationality, organizational identity

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, scholars have observed the emergence of diverse forms of organizing that

deviate from formal organizations in that they resemble looser social collectives. Such

collectives include online communities (Garud et al., 2008; O’Mahony and Ferraro,

2007; Puranam et al., 2014), hacker collectives (Coleman, 2014; Scott, 2013), and terro-

rist networks (Comas et al., 2015; Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012; Stohl and Stohl,

2011). These forms of organizing have in common that they tend to be ‘fluid’ in the sense

L. Dobusch and D. Schoeneborn contributed equally to this paper.

Funding: We gratefully acknowledge the support by the ‘Governing Responsible Business’ (GRB) Research

Environment at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark).

Address for reprints: Leonhard Dobusch, Freie Universit€at Berlin, School of Business & Economics, Man-

agement Department, Boltzmannstr. 20, 14195 Berlin, Germany (leonhard.dobusch@fu-berlin.de).

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C2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 52:8 December 2015

doi: 10.1111/joms.12139

that membership is contested or unclear and their boundaries are open or permeable

(see also Schrey€ogg and Sydow, 2010). However, the fluidity of these forms of organizing

challenge classic assumptions of what an organization is. For instance, traditionally (e.g.,

March and Simon, 1958), organizations ‘are simply not conceivable without reference to

workable identities and boundaries’ (Schrey€ogg and Sydow, 2010, p. 1253). These works,

however, tend to overlook that even highly fluid forms of organizing can nevertheless

gain the status of organizational entities and actors (see King et al., 2010). Other scholars,

in view of such developments, have suggested that the notion of organization should be

broadened to include also looser, networked, and ‘boundaryless’ social arrangements

(e.g., Ashkenas et al., 2002) and that organizations should be conceived not as static enti-

ties but as ongoing processes of ‘becoming’ (e.g., Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). In turn, those

works can be criticized for failing to distinguish organizations from other social collec-

tives, such as communities, networks, or movements (see also Sillince, 2010).

In this paper, we argue that the notion of organization remains useful nevertheless to

comprehend fluid social collectives of various kinds (see also Kociatkiewicz and Kostera,

2014). We propose to use the term ‘organizationality’ that allows us to switch from the

binary classification of social collectives as either organizations or non-organizations to a

more gradual differentiation. Organizationality depends on the degree to which social

collectives fulfill the minimum criteria of what constitutes an organization (see also Ahrne

and Brunsson, 2011). Our notion of organizationality draws on the idea that social col-

lectives are ‘organizational’ on the basis of three criteria: first, they are characterized by

interconnected instances of decision-making (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011); second, these

instances of decision-making are attributed to a collective entity or actor (King et al.,

2010); third, collective identity is accomplished through speech acts that aim to delineate

what the entity or actor is or does (‘identity claims’; see Bartel and Dutton, 2001).

This conceptualization emphasizes that the formation of collective identity (see Gioia

et al., 2013; Hardy et al., 2005; Schultz and Hernes, 2013) is a key component of orga-

nizationality, especially (but not only) in fluid social arrangements. From a processual

perspective, organizational identity has been defined as ‘articulated claims emerging

from interaction among leaders, employees, and other stakeholders [...] regarding who

they are, or who they are becoming, as an organization’ (Schultz and Hernes, 2013, p. 2).

We extend works that rest on processual (e.g., Gioia et al., 2013; Schultz and Hernes,

2013) or language-centered (e.g., Coupland and Brown, 2004; Hardy et al., 2005) notions

of organizational identity by emphasizing the fundamental and formative role of identity

claims in the communicative constitution of social collectives as organizational entities or

actors (see also Bencherki and Cooren, 2011; Koschmann, 2013). In this regard, our

study speaks to a larger stream of research that emphasizes the communicative constitu-

tion of organizations (CCO) (for recent overviews, see Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren et al.,

2011; Brummans et al., 2014;).

Based on these considerations, we aim to shed light on how identity claims contribute

to the communicative constitution of fluid social collectives as organizational actors.

Investigating the contingent and precarious accomplishment of organizational actor-

hood is important for understanding how loose social collectives persist despite their

inherent fluidity (see also Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012). To empirically explore the

research question of how fluid social collectives accomplish organizationality, we

1006 L. Dobusch and D. Schoeneborn

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C2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies