Player or Platform? How Metaphors Affect the Attribution of Actorhood to New Forms of Organizing

Alexander Buhmann, Kateryna Maltseva, Dennis Schoeneborn, Patrick Haack

Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapportKonferenceabstrakt i proceedingsForskningpeer review

Abstract

As discussed in the literature on organizational actorhood, organizations either tend to pronounce or downplay their status as collective actors. While prior work has primarily focused on actorhood attributions on the level of public communication, we study the causal interplay between public communication and individual perceptions of organizational actorhood. For this purpose, we conduced four empirical studies to show how anthropomorphic metaphors (e.g., player or participant) and non-anthropomorphic metaphors (such as platform or app) used in organizational portrayals affect cognitive attributions of collective actorhood to organizational entities. We embed our study in the context of new organizational forms (e.g., digital platform organizations) because here the question of organizational actorhood and responsibility is particularly salient. We show that the use of anthropomorphic metaphors in organizational portrayals lead to higher levels of individuals’ attributions of collective actorhood to organizations. Such higher levels of organizational actorhood attribution occur, as we demonstrate, due to anthropomorphic metaphors directing individuals’ attention to the organization as a collective entity rather than to its constitutive parts (e.g., members, products).
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelProceedings of the Eighty-first Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management
RedaktørerSonia Taneja
Antal sider1
UdgivelsesstedBriarcliff Manor, NY
ForlagAcademy of Management
Publikationsdato2021
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2021
BegivenhedThe Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2021: Bringing the Manager Back in Management - Online, Virtual, Online
Varighed: 29 jul. 20214 aug. 2021
Konferencens nummer: 81
https://aom.org/events/annual-meeting

Konference

KonferenceThe Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2021
Nummer81
LokationOnline
ByVirtual, Online
Periode29/07/202104/08/2021
Internetadresse
NavnAcademy of Management Proceedings
ISSN2151-6561

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