Multispecies Organizing. How Humans and Plants Organize Embroidering Hills and Growing Bridges

Abstract

This article aims to extend the notion of organizing (Weick, 1969) from a human perspective to a multispecies one. To do so, it critically addresses the literature streams of sociomateriality and sensemaking, highlighting how organizing has always been studied only through an anthropocentric perspective. Then, it presents the developments in the elaboration of non-humans’ agency in social sciences. Afterward, it develops a theoretical framework illustrating multispecies organizing. It adopts notions stemming from biology and ecological psychology to explain how the organizing between humans and non-humans unfolds. To discuss the implications the model entails, it presents an example of organizing between humans and plants using two illustrative vignettes, guiding the reader to mentally ‘visualize’ the plants’ ‘point of view’ when organizing with humans. The vignettes present two real-case scenarios, one coming from a Western context, the other from an indigenous one. They are the winegrowing landscape of the prosecco hills in Italy and the native infrastructures of living root bridges in Meghalaya, India. These examples illustrate how multispecies organizing de facto always occurred between humans and other species. Management science might then engage with this framework to critically account for the relationship between humans, and non-humans, by framing them as multispecies organizing.