Call for Papers: Special Issue in Business & Society on »Collective actorhood and organizationality: Recalibrating responsibility in business-society relations«

Ten years after Dennis Schoeneborn and I had introduced the idea of ‘organizationality’ to conceptualize organization as a matter of degree in our joint article “Fluidity, Identity and Organizationality”, we have teamed up with Héloïse Berkowitz, Frank de Bakker and Consuelo Vásquez for a special issue on “Collective actorhood and organizationality: Recalibrating responsibility in business-society relations” to be published in Business & Society. We will be supported in the editorial work by consulting editor Devi Vijay as well as Business & Society editor Colin Higgins. Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2026. Please check out the full call for papers below:

Background and context

Over the past decades, the relations between business and society have fundamentally changed. According to Mulgan (2019), we are entering an age of “digital futures” (e.g., AI taking over more and more human tasks at rapid speed) as well as “broken futures” (e.g., accelerating dynamics of climate change), in which the survival of humankind will depend on our ability to organize in collective ways and imagine alternatives to tackle such complex social problems, amidst growing inequalities and ecological destruction on a planetary scale (see also Ferraro et al., 2015; Mercier-Roy & Mailhot, 2024; Varman & Vijay, 2022; Whyte, 2020). Collective actorhood, defined as the capacity of a social group to act on a supra-individual level and to become considered as an agent in its own right (List & Pettit, 2011; Knight, 2022), in turn, has been argued to be the main criterion that distinguishes organizations from other social phenomena (King et al., 2010). However, the current ‘crisis of civilization’ (Escobar, 2021), i.e. a crisis of climate, energy, poverty, inequality, food, and meaning, can only be addressed if we consider that collective actorhood often requires to reach beyond the boundaries of single organizations and involve a much broader spectrum of organizational phenomena. Examples like cross-sector partnerships (Koschmann et al., 2012), meta-organizations (i.e. organizations that have other organizations as their members; Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008), or open organizing phenomena that resemble social movements (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; Puranam et al., 2014) all tend to have in common that their status as collective actor is far less clear-cut or that collective agency may be accomplished in different ways.

In this Special Issue, we thus call for research that reconsiders the business-society relationship by giving up the clear-cut separation between “the” organization as a distinct entity and society that surrounds it. Instead, we invite scholarship that explores the dynamics of collective actorhood of a much wider spectrum of organizational phenomena, how they shape and are shaped by social and ecological transformations, and whether and how these dynamics address or reinforce complex social problems (Ferraro et al., 2015; Gümüsay et al., 2022; Berkowitz et al., 2024; Mercier-Roy & Mailhot, 2024; Wenzel et al., 2025).

For studying such recalibrations of business-society relations, organization and management scholarship lately has started to draw on gradual understandings of organization. Prominent examples of this view are the notions of partial organization (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011; 2019) or organizationality (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2019). With the concept of partial organization, Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) have widened the spectrum of social phenomena that can be considered organizational, incl. those that abstain from using typical elements of organization (such as hierarchy or membership). Similarly, with the notion of organizationality, Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) have suggested conceiving organization as a matter of degree. As the authors demonstrate based on an analysis of the hacktivist network Anonymous, even loose and fluid social collectives can situationally mobilize features of a quasi-organization. Taken together, gradual theories of organization (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011; Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; Biancani et al., 2014; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2015) hold much promise for rethinking collective actorhood beyond the boundaries of formal organizations. In a similar vein), indigenous, feminist, and decolonial approaches further invite us to question the Global North’s conceptualizations of organizations (Cruz & Sodeke, 2022; Rosiek et al., 2020) and to consider also how organizing happens at the margins (Pal et al., 2023). As Cruz and Sodeke (2022) have pointed out, thus far most of the research on organizationality tends to take the starting point in situations of privilege where actors deliberately choose to organize themselves in loose and fluid ways. Adopting such alternative ontologies (Daher, 2024) invite to better account for situations in which marginalized actors are forced into fluid and precarious ways of organizing.

If we relate such gradual understandings of organization to matters of collective actorhood, we can observe that actorhood can vary by degree, as well (Knight, 2022). On the one hand, research has shown that corporations increasingly portray themselves as collective actors in their own right (Bromley & Sharkey, 2017; Halgin et al., 2018). They do so, for instance, by positioning themselves as “corporate citizens” (Matten & Crane, 2005), thus strongly emphasizing their responsibility as collective actors vis-à-vis society. However, the question arises whether trends of an over-organization of the business-society relations fosters or rather dilutes the responsibility of the collective actors involved (Berkowitz et al., 2022; Brunsson et al., 2022; Jungmann, 2024; Whyte, 2020). On the other hand, we see trends of less pronounced collective actorhood. For instance, digital platform organizations (such as Meta/Facebook, Twitter/X, etc.) have been shown to strategically downplay their status as collective actors to diminish their collective responsibility for the (malicious) content that is shared on their platforms (Vergne & Wry, 2014), while profiteering from such sharing, at the same time. Furthermore, while attempts are being made to recognize ecocide as an international crime (see Minkova, 2023), multinational corporations strategize to escape actorhood and avoid taking responsibility for the destruction of people and nature (Baldi et al., 2024; Whyte, 2020).

In this Special Issue, we invite scholarship to further explore both these empirical trends and the new theoretical approaches that shed a different light on the changing relations between business and society with regard to more or less pronounced forms of collective actorhood. As part of this, we are interested in strategic as well as emergent processes that allow for different degrees of collective actorhood over time and the respective implications for business-society relations. We also encourage critical reflections on the very notion of collective actorhood, along with alternative conceptualizations that may deepen our understanding of how organizations can be made more responsive and accountable in the face of contemporary societal crises. We invite conceptual and empirical inquiries into the dynamics of collective actorhood from a broad variety of theoretical perspectives, including gradual understandings of organization, as well as a broad set of methodological approaches.

Potential themes

The nature of collective actorhood

• How is collective actorhood performed and organized?
• Is a legal status/legal person needed to accomplish collective actorhood?
• Why and how do actors strategically downplay or amplify collective actorhood? How doe these strategic efforts affect responsibility attributions?
• What are the implications and limitations of collective actorhood for reenvisioning the business-society relationship and offer alternative solutions in crises of civilization?

Dynamics over different contexts, space and time

• Where and how does actorhood emerge? How do institutional contexts affect actorhood? How does actorhood evolve over time or space, and how do organizations transition between different degrees of organizationality?
• Can social collectives be perpetuated and maintained even with a low degree of organizationality – or do they feel pressures either to be dissolved or evolve toward higher degrees of organizationality eventually? How does that affect relations with society?
• How to explain asymmetric dynamics between the organized (e.g., established formal organizations; high degree of organizationality) and the (rather) unorganized as their counterparts (e.g., social media firestorm; low degree of organizationality)?
• What can we learn from alternative forms of organizing, including those in marginalized settings?
• How is collective actorhood conceptualized in the various geographies, including the Global South? How does this translate, circulate, and adapt across geographies?
• What are the contributions of other collective notions stemming from indigenous cosmovisions and decolonial approaches?

Symmetries and asymmetries in relations between different spheres/domains of society

• How does actorhood affect the interactions between organizations from different domains (for profit and non-profit, scientific organizations, public actors, etc.)?
• When does collective actorhood create relations of domination and exploitation? At what point does collective actorhood become constitutive of societal problems and crises (incl. fascism, techno-feudalism, etc.) – rather than a solution for addressing them?
• How does actorhood (or the lack of) affect the relationship between privileged and marginal communities?
• Can living (forests, rivers, soils) and non-living (algorithms, technologies) entities be attributed actorhood and be held accountable? How does it differ from ‘human’ organizing? How can alternative ontologies (e.g., Daher, 2024) help inform this analysis?

Collective actorhood and organizationality

• How can a gradual understanding of organization help us to understand variations in the degree of organizational actorhood and responsibility attributions in the relations between businesses and society?
• What are the parameters of organizationality required for a responsible collective actorhood? How can alternative ontologies, cosmovisions, and organizing experiences inform this critical reflection?
• How to better account for situations in which marginalized actors are forced into fluid and precarious ways of organizing and/or have no choice to lessen the degree of organizationality to cope or survive?

Submission process

Submissions must fit with the aim and scope of Business & Society. To understand the fit with the journal’s scope, vision and expectations related to rigor and contribution, we strongly encourage authors to refer to editorial insights published in Business & Society. All manuscripts must be uploaded via the journal’s online submission system between August 1 and September 30, 2026. Please specify in the cover letter that the manuscript is for the special issue on “Collective actorhood and organizationality”. All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by multiple reviewers. Interested scholars are welcome to contact the corresponding guest editor, Dennis Schoeneborn (ds.msc@cbs.dk).