It’s All in the Network: On the Distribution of Agency in Organizational Communication

• In Event: On the Various Ways of Studying Agency in Organizational Communication: A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

Following Luhmann’s (1995) theory of social systems, human agency refers to the attribution of decision rights to individuals by an organization. It is necessarily a social concept that exists only in communication: Individuals may not act as agents on behalf of the organization without the communication of their agency by this or any other organization to begin with. The de-centralization of individuals carries the advantage of looking at agency as an exclusively organizational phenomenon. Thus, all questions of agency can and, indeed, must be answered by organization theory. For example, power and politics in organizations are no longer matters of individual characteristics but result from the asymmetric distribution of agency. As I will show, empirical studies of agency may employ all available qualitative and quantitative methodologies, yet particularly useful is a longitudinal analysis of networks of communication episodes in combination with a discursive analysis of communication genres.

Author

• Steffen Blaschke, Copenhagen Business School