(Re)Moving Blinders: Communication-as-Constitutive Theorizing as Provocation to Practice-Based Organization Scholarship

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/articles/8w32r7058

Abstract

Practice-Based Organization Scholarship (PBOS) is significant, but its vision is narrow. It aims to show organizational scholars that what are taken to be entities are better understood as the accomplishments of ongoing practices; in doing so, it seems to re-imagine the organization studies field. Yet PBOS suffers from some encumbering blind spots, particularly with respect to its conceptions of agency and its ability to theorize “the” organization. I offer Communication as Constitutive of Organization theorizing—itself a variant of practice thinking—as providing some helpful remedies to those problems. Both approaches, however, have trouble seeing domination in organizing, so a further provocation builds on their shared interest in new materialist theorizing to articulate a novel approach to exposing the conditions and conduct of organizing.

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