ABSTRACT
Over the past decades, Science and Technology Studies—especially through Latour’s (1987, 1994, 1996, 2005) work—have largely contributed in highlighting the need to revisit the notion of agency. By taking into account the role of nonhumans—artifacts, architectural elements, machines, texts—in the construction of socio-technical phenomena, this theoretical framework has shifted from an internal view of action, as being reserved to human condition, to an external one (Robichaud, 2006), which includes the participation of entities with variables ontologies (human, nonhuman, discursive, material). In organizational studies, this hybrid perspective on action has had a major influence in defining organization as a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, what Law (1994) defines as an “heterogeneous ontology” and Cooren (2006) calls, in reference to Garfinkel (1988), “a plenum of agencies.” As Cooren argues,
[A]n organization’s identity can … be understood through all these entities that can act and speak in its name. The organization, in this specific sense, is a kind of monster, a Leviathan, to the extent that its mode of being can be extended to whomever or whatever ends up representing it. (p. 83)
