The organization's synaptic mode of existence: How a hospital merger is many things at once

In: Organization: the interdisciplinary journal of organization, theory and society, Volume 29, Issue 4, p. 521-543

Abstract

Different perspectives on organizations have alternatively sorted them on the side of the social / human / linguistic or that of the material / non-human / technical, reducing the question of what an organization may be to attempts to (re)connect these two realms. Literature adopting a relational view, however, has offered a way out of this opposition, by embracing the multiplicity of beings that may make up organizations. We extend this approach by engaging with French philosopher Étienne Souriau's discussion of modes of existence to suggest that organizations are "synaptic," which means they exist in the passages between modes, as they articulate the actions of entities existing under different modalities. By analyzing the case of a hospital merger in Denmark, we show that this work of articulation amounts to organizing, and that viewing organizations as synaptic recognizes not only their ontic pluralism, but also their existential pluralism. By doing so, our study contributes to relational understandings of what organizing means and provides a sensitivity to the politics involved in deciding who or what may exist within organizations.