The Agency of Organizing: Perspectives and Case Studies

Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Edited Book Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association

The Agency of Organizing explains why the notion of agency is central to understanding what organizations are, how they come into existence, continue to exist, or fade away, and how they function. Written by leading organizational communication scholars, the chapters in this edited volume present seven different theoretical perspectives on agency in the dynamics of organizing. Authors discuss how they conceptualize agency from their own perspective and how they propose to investigate agency empirically in processes of organizing by using specific methods. Through insightful case studies, they demonstrate the value of these perspectives for organizational research and practice.

Boris H. J. M. Brummans (PhD, Texas A&M University) is a Professor in the Département de Communication at the Université de Montréal in Canada. His research interests include agency, mindful organizing, organizational communication, organizational ethnography, and process philosophy. He has contributed chapters to several edited books and his articles appear in international peer-reviewed journals such as Communication Monographs, Human Relations, Information, Communication & Society, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization Studies, and Qualitative Inquiry. His edited volume, The Agency of Organizing: Perspectives and Case Studies, received the 2018 Outstanding Edited Book Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association and he served as an Associate Editor of Management Communication Quarterly from 2015 to 2019. He also received college and university awards for his teaching excellence and was a Visiting Scholar at Seinan Gakuin University in Japan as well as the University of Bologna in Italy.