Abstract
With the rise and expansion of the Internet, new forms of organizing have emerged, constituting both distributed and collective modes of action. These organizing forms (such as Wikipedia, Blablacar, or Airbnb) have achieved coordination across scales and maintained agility, while, simultaneously, uniting heterogeneous people to act toward a common strategic purpose. Examining this novel phenomenon, Martin Kornberger’s latest book offers a new vocabulary to investigate these ‘organizational innovations’ (p. 8) which blend openness – blurring organizational boundaries due to the mobilization of internal and external contributors, polycentricity – encompassing decentralized decision-making, and plurality – connecting individuals with different values, norms and interests. As I will discuss in this review, the lexicon introduced in his book can serve as an inspiring starting point for theorizing the functioning and structuring of collective distributed action.
Faithful to his philosophical training, Kornberger engages in an interdisciplinary journey in which he first critically discusses the four prevailing conceptualizations of collective action, namely the markets, hierarchies, institutions and social movements, to highlight the need for an alternative theorizing to address this new phenomenon (Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5). Chapter 2 focuses on the market explanation, emphasizing its limitations in capturing complex information and its tendency to describe collective action as an ‘unintended consequence’ or ‘a by-product of individual actions’ (p. 21), thus neglecting the role of concerted efforts or shared ownership of knowledge. In contrast, the hierarchical explanation presented in Chapter 3 sees top-down managers as drivers of collective action. Yet, the chapter also points out that this approach involves substantial investment to ensure control and enforcement, which can limit adaptability within organizations, and downplays the role of individual agency. For the author, the two other explanations, the institutional (Chapter 4) and social movement (Chapter 5) approaches, better recognize people’s participation in the making of social groups, by considering respectively the role of norms and identity. However, they also remain limited in explaining radical and rapid changes, as they rely on highly embedded collectives which take time to develop.
This initial nuanced analysis revisits the roots and core assumptions of these four main figures of thoughts and reveals their limitations in fully explaining the functioning of distributed collective action. It hence sets the stage for the second part of the book (Chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10), which addresses these shortcomings by introducing several new concepts, all rooted in the lexical fields of in-betweenness, mediation and connection. Chapter 7 starts by presenting the concept of shared concerns as the ‘glue’ (p. 112) which binds heterogeneous groups together, borrowing from Michel Serres’ idea of quasi-objects – objects that have resonance between people and weave them into a collective. These shared concerns crystallize in symbols, and hence provide malleable shared references that allow both stability and possibility of change. Chapter 8 then builds on a 2017 publication and introduces three organizing infrastructures – the interface design, the architecture of participation and the evaluative infrastructure – respectively supporting communication, collaboration and control across heterogeneous networks. The ‘interface design’ works as a mediator and creates connections between different environments, by structuring access to and exchange of information. ‘The architecture of participation’ enables different types of contribution, ensuring resilience and adaptability by breaking down small and manageable tasks, which can be delegated across actors. ‘The evaluative infrastructure’ ‘offers a plurality of “thick valuations,” visualized, traced and tracked on the web’ (p. 146), thereby producing value by creating new rankings and making certain things visible.
A key strength of this theorizing is its ability to integrate insights from the four existing figures of thought and its potential to shed new light on certain organizational dynamics highlighted in these earlier conceptualizations. For instance, some dimensions of hierarchies may still manifest in distributed collective action but in different forms and involving different actors, such as designers and programmers. Companies are indeed likely to continue to rely on standardization, surveillance and monitoring performance at a distance, though these processes may now be mediated by algorithms (see for instance the case of Uber; Möhlmann & Henfridsson, 2019). In such scenarios, the manager’s hand seems to become paradoxically invisible. By stepping outside the existing paradigmatic explanations of collective action, Kornberger’s concepts helps open this ‘black box’ and explore these complexities. As an example, the notion of architecture of participation could help further elaborate on how tasks are standardized in more open organizational settings, while future studies could draw on the concept of evaluative infrastructure to explain emerging surveillance and monitoring practices.
Similarly, Kornberger’s vocabulary could be relevant to the social movement explanation of collective action. Social movement scholars have been particularly intrigued by recent mobilizations without strong collective identities (Lobbedez & Buchter, 2023) or networked forms of activism, involving anonymous individuals, which manage to scale up (Massa & O’Mahony, 2021). His emphasis on ‘organizing infrastructure’ (p. 112) and how ‘the division of labour cuts across organizational boundaries’ (p. 134) also resonates with recent work advocating an ecological perspective on political organizing (Nunes, 2021) or calling for further research on how different challengers from the same movement navigate between and through organizations to promote social change (DeJordy, Scully, Ventresca, & Creed, 2020). His concepts could hence be instrumental in deepening our understanding of these phenomena and explaining the types of social movement infrastructure that support and maintain these networked collectives. These comments on the hierarchical and social movement explanations are just a few examples of how Kornberger’s analysis encourages a rethinking of existing figures of thought and demonstrates the potential of his concepts to speak to various academic conversations.
Chapters 9 and 10 then investigate strategizing and leadership in collective distributed action. Here, strategy does not necessarily follow a clear roadmap or provide a ‘formula’ (p. 151) to achieve success based on a single prescribed direction for the collective. Using examples of city development, among which is the Sydney 2030 programme, Kornberger instead advocates for a strategy which focuses on ‘building collective capacity to make decisions’ (p. 163). This approach to strategy avoids closing doors and keeps every ‘option open as long as possible’ (p. 165); it works indirectly through multiple micro-actions to create power of action and legitimacy. Under these circumstances, the leader is a diplomat, who translates the ideas of different stakeholders, and who uses ‘highly institutionalized practices to explore and exploit room for maneuver’ (p. 177) and ‘gain capacity to act’ (p. 176). Rather than commanding and controlling, he thus operates with tact, trying to read and to understand uncertain situations while making decisions and acting.
This approach is particularly insightful to strategize for distributed collective action as it embraces unpredictability, integrates wider audiences in decision-making and relies on feedback loops to adjust to changing contexts and expectations. I also found the arguments and examples discussed in these chapters useful for offering alternative perspectives on managerial roles and their practical implementation, which could be beneficial for teaching strategy. Yet, the challenges and dilemmas that leaders may encounter when adopting this posture is an important dimension that could be further examined. For instance, research in open strategy and open innovation has shown that involving broad and heterogenous groups can slow down or even impede decision-making and reduce flexibility (Hautz, Seidl, & Whittington, 2017). In addition, building legitimacy as a leader may take time. This hence raises questions about whether different temporalities or mechanisms are needed to facilitate this type of decision-making and maintain fluidity, possibly requiring not just an infrastructure of participation but also shared rules of engagement. Furthermore, it would also be helpful to better comprehend how leaders can contribute to sustain people’s commitment toward a common strategic purpose, especially when actors feel their contributions are not fully acknowledged and valued.
Chapter 11 concludes with general ethical considerations for distributed collective action. Rather than building on core abstract moral principles, the author takes a situated approach in which ethics is an ongoing practice that is learned and acquired. Through these lenses, people don’t always know what the ideal moral option is, but they try to evaluate the better choice among different alternatives, for a given situation. According to Kornberger, evaluative infrastructures play a crucial role in this ethical process and constitute ‘moral experiments’ (p. 197) as they help people collectively discriminate between different choices and guide moral reasoning.
These last ethical considerations are particularly timely given the emergence and expansion of collective and distributed modes of acting and could be an important baseline to address contemporary challenges of collective decision-making. For instance, recent events of the past two decades, such as the election of Donald Trump as United States President or the Ukraine war, have underscored that these infrastructures can be infiltrated by bots, which then steer evaluations and collective decision-making. This may lead to misinformation and may constrain agency, especially in the context of echo chambers, which tend to isolate people from opposing views and reinforce their preexisting beliefs. If evaluative infrastructures are meant to facilitate the making of moral judgements, it would be valuable to explore how such dynamics can influence distributed collective action and whether or how they should be addressed. Further research could also expand on how these infrastructures shape participation in collective action. For instance, how might certain technological affordances enable or restrict collective decision-making? And what role do major platform companies play in shaping specific forms of distributed collective action? In other words, a closer examination of the interactions, uses and ownership of the various infrastructures introduced in Chapter 8 would provide an important pathway to deepen our understanding of their governance.
Ultimately, I see considerable potential in this book, as a resource for researching distributed and collective action as well as a pedagogical tool to enhance our teaching in management and strategy. Kornberger’s rigorous analysis of the roots of the four main intellectual traditions is having clear value in providing a broad overview of the foundations of the literature on collective action, and his alternative theorizing opens up many avenues for future research. Besides, the author’s agility in revealing tensions within his writing, his skilful navigation between theory and rich examples – from ant colonies to a South Pole expedition or the military – as well as his refreshing style and self-derision makes his book a compelling read. I also believe his pragmatist approach can speak to practitioners, as Strategies for Distributed and Collective Action consistently aims at speaking to both researchers and strategists, making sure to connect the empirical and the theoretical and to reflect on potential practical implications. Without a doubt, the aforementioned elements contribute to the book’s overarching argumentation and makes it accessible to a broad audience.
