Contributorship and Partial Inclusion

Abstract

Organizational communication theory and research tends to assume the practices of organizational “members” are relevant to the study of organizational phenomena, without reflecting on how those members were identified in the first place. This issue is particularly relevant to perspectives that view communication as constitutive of organizations because they may take the very object they seek to explain—the organization—as the starting point when identifying pertinent informants. We provide a communicational perspective of organizational membership by starting from communicative events, instead of individuals. Ethnomethodology’s notions of accounts and sanctions are useful in recognizing the interactionally performed nature of membership. We extend ethnomethodology’s intuition by viewing membership—which we reframe as contributorship—as being achieved through the contribution of actions to the organization.

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