Membership and Partial Inclusion: A Communicative Perspective on Organizational Membership

• In Event: As Good as New: Emerging Paradigms/Directions in Organizational Communication

Abstract

The Communicative Constitution of Organizations perspective tends to focus on the communicative practices of members in order to observe the way they constitute “their” organization. We follow Schoenenborn and Scherer’s (2012) suggestion and attempt to provide a truly communicational perspective of organizational membership by focusing on “communicative events,” rather than using complete in-dividuals as a starting point. We show that ethnomethodology’s notions of accounts and sanctions are useful in recognizing the interactionally-performed nature of membership. However, we extend ethnomethodology’s intuition by viewing membership as being achieved through the contribution of actions to the organization. This view is possible because people are “dividuals,” meaning that their own ownership of their actions is not intrinsic, but rather the outcome of negotiation practices. Two cases allow illustrating this proposal in the case of “organizations of organizations.”

Author

• Nicolas Bencherki, University at Albany - SUNY