Texts and the ontology of organizations and institutions

There is a growing consensus that the digital age comes along with the distinguishing organisational form of the platform. Discussions of this organisational form, however, tend to lack a coherent theoretical framing. In this paper, I argue that the distinction between platform organising and platform organisation helps to reduce some of the equivocality in the discussion. So far, the literature has focused on the novelty of the ‘organisational form’ without reflecting the inherent ambiguity of the meaning of this term: whereas some scholars use it to describe a new kind of ‘social ordering’, others associate it with ‘formal organisation’. I show that both understandings are relevant, but that they should be kept separate for analytical reasons. Platform organisations are formal organisations which are dependent on the technological infrastructure of a digital platform. Platform organising, however, is a new kind of social ordering, which combines organising outside and organising inside of formal organisations. Platform organising entails four processes: providing (organising technology), regulating (organising markets), integrating (organising networks), and orchestrating (organising the emerging meta-organisation). In shedding light on these processes in their interplay with platform organisations, this paper proposes a theoretical framework providing a basis for both further conceptual considerations and empirical research.

The term “institutional ethnography” has been used since 1987 to refer to an approach to social inquiry pioneered by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (Campbell & DeVault 2011; Smith 1987). By the 1980s, Smith had become known internationally for studies in the social organization of knowledge with roots in the women's movement, Marx, phenomenology, and ethnomethodology. The central concerns of this approach included beginning with the standpoint of women, treating social actors as active knowers of their worlds, and examining the social relations of knowledge – especially the gender‐based divide between everyday worlds of local experience and the ruling forms of institutional organization in capitalist societies. Institutional ethnography both continues this project and refocuses it, placing emphasis on (1) ethnography as an approach to studying social organization and (2) a conception of institutional processes in which text‐based forms of coordination play a key role. Since the 1980s, a significant body of work in institutional ethnography has been built up, numerous institutional ethnography‐based dissertations have been undertaken, several international conferences on institutional ethnography have been held, journal special issues on institutional ethnography have been published, and institutional ethnography sections of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the International Sociology Association have been established.

The concerns of this paper come from an attempt to develop sociological inquiry from women's standpoint and to create a sociology for people. It is a project that must rely on the possibility of “telling the truth.” The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of representation and reference creates a fundamental problem for this project. It challenges the very possibility of a sociology committed to inquiry into the actualities of the social as people live them.The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of the unitary subject of modernity is central. It is argued that the subject and subject‐object relations are inescapably in and of discourse and language. Both subject and object are discursively constituted and there is no beyond to which reference can be made in establishing the truth of statements. Rather subjects are constituted only in discourse and are fragmented, multiple, diverse. This paper argues that, though the unitary subject is rejected, an individuated subject survives though multiplied and that a central failure of poststructuralism/postmodernism is to come to grips with the social as actual socially organized practices.Using the theories of George Herbert Mead and Mikhail Bakhtin, the paper goes on to offer an alternative understanding of referring and “telling the truth.” Observations of sequences in which people are identifying an object for one another are described to demonstrate the radically and ineluctably social character of the process. The argument is then extrapolated with further examples to offer an alternative account of referring. A description of using a street map in an actual context of “finding our way” exemplifies how a science might be inserted into a local practice. Telling the truth, it is argued, is always and only in just such actual sequences of dialogue among people directly present to one another or indirectly present in the texts they have produced. My own and others' observations are used to reconceptualize “referring” in general as integral to a social act of finding and recognizing an object as a local performance. In conclusion, I suggest that the example of a map offers to sociology a model that does not displace and subordinate people's experience but can be used by them to expand their knowledge beyond it.

This chapter summarizes the main points of this book and then presents some conclusions. Barnard (1938) proposed four major concepts of organization: cooperative system and formal, complex formal, and informal organization. Then, Barnard (1948) added two more basic concepts: lateral organization and status system. Barnard started to argue that a cooperative system was a real organization; then, he went on to identify the essence of an organization and extracted an ideal organization such as a formal, informal, and complex formal organization; and finally, he proposed status system as a real organization. Thus, Barnard constructed a conceptual scheme for the theory of formal organization on the basis of his experience in exploring theoretically what an executive should do and how and why. Overall, Barnard presented organizing principles as well as organization forms. Those principles are based on interactions among people and unit organizations and how to connect them; they produce different organization forms by combining those principles. Organization forms are located in the matrix of formal-informal and horizontal-vertical axes. There are two formal organizations, a scalar organization and a lateral organization, while there are two informal organizations, an informal and an informal executive organization. Complex formal organizations are divided into two types: lateral and scalar organizations. A status system is a scalar organization with the function of a formal and informal organization.KeywordsFormal organizationInformal organizationComplex formal organizationOrganizing principlesVertical and horizontal integrationOrganization forms

The validity of management accounting language games – A pragmatic constructive perspective

The history of Bolivia has been marked by racism and the exclusion of the vast majority of its own inhabitants. From colonial times, through the creation of the republic, and until the 20th century, the Indigenous population in Bolivia (which historically constitutes around 60% of the total of its inhabitants) was excluded by the state of their social and political rights, remaining absent from the decision-making mechanisms of the state, thus being excluded and silenced for centuries. Indigenous movement in Bolivia has been aHistorical stakeholder for the incursion of its peoples in Republican politics. After the Revolution of 1952 and the first recognition of universal voting rights and the attempts of agrarian and educational reforms, the first forms of political organization of these Indigenous communities were made as peasants’ unions. Precisely, the denaturation and loss of their own deep identities, leading to the forced “peasantization” of the Indigenous population, was the main claim, during the 1970s, of the Indianist-based revolutionary movements, which built their thinking around the claim of their own forms of economic, cultural, and political organization. The origins of the first experiences of community and Indigenous communication arose from the movements’ own questions, claiming for their own forms of organization, structure, and narratives, which show as a whole the identity and political and cultural complexities and specificities. Beyond the colonial elements of understanding, emerge as a dialogical sense of understanding their own cosmologies, but also vindictive, in the need to build their own communication and action mechanisms. Thus, the different cultural and cosmopolitical resistances have assumed a central role as a mobilizing element of sociopolitical awareness in the face of the powers established by the institutional management of public space, beyond the formal organization of their structures, in the construction of intersections that take advantage of interstitial spaces to develop identity stories with a clear emancipatory vocation. However, this reflection not only belongs to an exclusive past, but in a scenario as identifiable as the current onein 2024, in which one of the great issues present in social and political construction in Latin America has to do with the great problem of representation as a form of political-identity construction in the complex societies of a Global South. Focused on the definition and political-cultural configuration of the Indigenous movement, the different Bolivian subalternities, far from having forged their own discourse around the multiplicity of daily resistances, still suffer from a systematic lack of voice in the deepening of abysmal differences that necessarily refer to rerecommending the question beyond the discursive exercise, from a perspective closer to the political economy of knowledge.

The previous chapter emphasized the significance of framing processes for the translation of a complex reality into a labelling scheme. This chapter turns the focus to another process in this translation, namely the organizing that takes place behind labelling schemes. For our purposes, it is relevant to employ and combine two perspectives on organizing: first, one broad perspective that focuses on coalitions, social movements, and interaction among actors within the organizational landscape; second, one narrow perspective that focuses on formal organization. A brief discussion of these two perspectives is followed by an analysis of different organizational forms for labelling activities. We analyse three different organized forms in which business and social movement actors, particularly EMOs, interact in labelling arrangements; and we ask whether and how such variation matters. Indeed, organizational form itself is subject to intense debate among stakeholders, because the stakeholders generally believe that organizational form matters both for the efficiency of interaction across actors and for the environmental as well as social outcomes, and not least for the legitimacy of the labelling scheme. Finally, this chapter takes a closer look at some of the major actors involved in labelling, including their motives (or lack of motives), arguments, and power resources.KeywordsSocial MovementMutual FundGreen ConsumerismForest CertificationForest CompanyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper examines local sustainability concepts in Connemara, a predominantly rural region in the West of Ireland (in this paper, the term “Ireland” refers to the Republic of Ireland), to show how they are (re-)constituted through people's interactions with social and biophysical environments. We argue that these interactions produce diverse forms of lay environmental knowledge and expertise that encompass cognitive and emotional aspects, a fact that is frequently ignored in environmental policy-making which prioritises rational arguments over reactions rooted in people's sense of place and community. Local people's responses to this dominance of “official” rational-technical sustainability concepts are central to recent cases of environmental controversy and lack of compliance to environmental policies that have characterised the study area but that show many parallels to conflicts and disputes elsewhere. Drawing on rich qualitative evidence from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper demonstrates how communities' responses to environmental policies depend on how well (or poorly) sustainability concepts underpinning these policies match local people's social-ecological practices and related place-specific views of what should be sustained.

This paper considers the contrasting ways in which disabled people seek to overturn socio-attitudinal, political and physical barriers to their mobility and access requirements in the built environment. In particular, the paper documents how disabled people are attempting to influence the form and content of local authority access practices and policies in the UK, through the context and contours of access groups. I begin by briefly outlining some of the key factors inhibiting and facilitating disabled people organising as effective political groupings, relating the material to access issues in the built environment. Then, using case studies of two contrasting access groups, the paper explores some of the practical barriers, problems and opportunities connected to disabled people's activities in seeking to influence local authority access policies and practices. I conclude by discussing how some of the wider structural and agency-level constraints on disabled people's political and policy interventions in access issues might be removed.

The National Health Service in Britain has recently undergone a major re organization. It has moved away from being a planned system of health care delivery to a demand driven system organized on the principles of (quasi-) market competition and quality assurance. These changes are intended by gov ernment to 'empower' the consumer (patient) with real choice and to incorpor ate the health professionals within a more effective and efficient system of hospital management. It is in this context that the paper examines the use fulness of 'postmodernity' as an explanation for the emergence of new 'flex ible' organizational forms within the hospital service. The paper will concen trate on the ideological and organizational contradictions between state policy and local practice, especially in relation to issues of managerial vs professional autonomy and control.

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

Social informatics: Overview, principles and opportunities

The social sciences are systematically developed forms of knowledge that are in and of the ruling relations and conform to its objectifying order. This paper proposes the creation of a sociology that puts into question, at the outset, the objectifications that universalize and generalize discourse and ruling across local settings and localized consciousness of actual people at the margins and translates the subtexts of gender, race and class into 'knowledge' as a model of inquiry from the standpoint of women.

The social sciences are systematically developed forms of knowledge that are in and of the ruling relations and conform to its objectifying order. This paper proposes the creation of a sociology that puts into question, at the outset, the objectifications that universalize and generalize discourse and ruling across local settings and localized consciousness of actual people at the margins and translates the subtexts of gender, race and class into ’knowledge’ as a model of inquiry from the standpoint of women.

Gender and sand extraction in the Usumacinta River basin