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4 - Membership or Contributorship? Managing the Inclusion of Individuals into Organizations

from Part 1 - Rules, Sanctions, Membership

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2019

By
Michael Grothe-Hammer
Edited by
Göran Ahrne  and
Nils Brunsson
Göran Ahrne
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
Nils Brunsson
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

In recent years, researchers have observed the increasing emergence of new forms of organization, in which membership is described as becoming fluid or unclear. Against this backdrop, scholars have proposed to drop membership as a defining criterion for formal organizations and instead to apply the broader concept of ‘contributorship’, which states that there are not only members of an organization, but also contributors who belong partially to the organization, as long as they participate in the organizational processes. I add to this development and combine the concept of contributorship with the decision-based perspective on organizations, which sees decisions as the constitutive elements of organization. Thus, contributorship can be understood as a matter of decision: through their decisions, organizations manage the possibilities for individuals to contribute. I build on two qualitative case studies demonstrating that instead of defining specific members, organizations can decide on spatial, temporal, attributional, resource-related, and/or quantitative-limitational premises for distributing possibilities of contributions.

Keywords

membershipcontributorshippartial organizationNiklas Luhmannorganization theoryorganizational decision makingorganizational boundariesCCO
Type
Chapter
Information
Organization outside Organizations
The Abundance of Partial Organization in Social Life
 , pp. 84 - 112
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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