The Proliferation, Profusion, and Taken-for-Grantedness of Actors in Organization Theory

• In Event: 495 - Regular Session. Organizations: Actors and Decision-Making

Abstract

The term actor has become a central construct in organization theory, and yet remains unexamined and taken-for-granted. The proliferation and profusion of its uses and meanings encompass a broad range of social entities at individual to global levels in society and also from empirical observations of unique entities to general, theoretical typologies. We interrogate the construct as a form of abstraction and demonstrate that the construct has been stretched far too thin across both levels of society and levels of abstraction: the construct has acquired surplus meanings and uses at the expense of clarity and theoretical precision. We take the example of application in institutional theory and discuss how the ambiguity of actor as a construct can undermine theoretical development by obscuring incompatible ontologies within the same theoretical domain. While we problematize the construct’s rampant uses, our intention is not to purge it, but to advocate for more appropriate and productive uses that would clarify its theoretical and empirical role. In this spirit, we develop a framework and chart some fruitful areas for future research, building on the works that problematized the actorhood of social entities and analyzed the emergence, construction, and transformation of actors.

Author

• Hokyu Hwang, UNSW Australia Business School