‘Un-responsible’ Organization: How More Organization Produces Less Responsibility

Abstract

As the world becomes more and more organized, it seems ever more difficult to find anyone responsible. Why is that? We argue that the extensive external organization of organizations in contemporary society provides the key. Formal organizations are collective orders with great potential for concentrating responsibility on top managers and the organization. But when they are organized by other organizations, this potential is undermined, and responsibility becomes diluted rather than concentrated. We explain this outcome by analysing the communication of decisions as a main producer of responsibility and by defining organization as a decided order. Our analysis draws upon and contributes to research about partial organization, but it also contributes to literatures on global governance and organizational institutionalism.

Explaining Responsibility Dilution

The notion of responsibility is a fundamental social phenomenon. In many situations, people want to establish who should be seen as responsible for what has happened, and those in power may adjust their behaviour in anticipation of future claims about their level of responsibility.

Organization and responsibility are closely connected. Responsibility was, in fact, a topic in the early organization theories of Henri Fayol, Chester Barnard and Herbert Simon, who saw responsibility as connected to the authority of high-level managers to make decisions for others. Thus, they contended, responsibility was concentrated on a specific group of people. Responsibility is also an aspect that contemporary organizations and their critics increasingly highlight and communicate – in the extensive discourse about corporate social responsibility, for instance (Bansal & Song, 2017). Thus organizations – not merely individuals – are often seen as capable of bearing responsibility. Journalists and others often ascribe moral responsibility to organizations in the public debate, and organizations can be held legally responsible in the courts.

Against this background, one would expect that the more organizations that exist, the easier it would be to find out who is responsible. Many observers have argued that the world is becoming increasingly organized (Abbott, Lévi-Faur, & Snidal, 2017; Brès, Mena, & Salles-Djelic, 2019; Bromley & Meyer, 2015; Hwang, Colyvas, & Drori, 2019; Meyer & Bromley, 2013; Perrow, 1991), which suggests that responsibility would be increasingly easy to find. But there are indications that the opposite is true (Black, 2008; Riera & Iborra, 2017). Scholars in political science, global governance, international relations, and management have argued that such societal developments as privatization, marketization, neo-liberalism and globalization have made responsibility ‘fuzzy’, ‘hybrid’ and in ‘deficit’ (Bache, Bartle, Flinders, & Marsden, 2015; Benish & Mattei, 2020; Harlow & Rawlings, 2007; Jensen & Sandström, 2011). But even though such claims may be credible, offering sweeping arguments in support is not enough; the mechanisms whereby responsibility is constructed, concentrated and diluted in the contemporary world remain unexplained. We believe that organization theory has much to offer in explaining how and why responsibility is concentrated or diluted.

In this article, we propose that more organization may result in less responsibility. We explain this proposition by presenting a theoretical argument of responsibility built upon organization theories that emphasize decision as an essential element of organization. By using the framework of partial organization (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011, 2019), we discuss organization as a decided order that can exist both inside and outside formal organizations. Core in our argument is the connection between decisions and responsibility: decisions are key in allocating responsibility (Brunsson, 1990). This approach enables us to analyse responsibility allocation in traditional constructions of formal organizations and the responsibility effects of partial organizing among formal organizations. Our main conclusion is that the external, partial organizing of organizations tends to dilute responsibility and undermine the responsibility concentration otherwise found in formal organizations. By using decisions as a theoretical tool to explain why such external organizing dilutes responsibility, we hope to assist in keeping organization theory relevant by updating its contribution to an understanding of the construction of responsibility in contemporary society and by extending the perspective of partial organization to include aspects of responsibility.

The structure of our paper follows a step-by-step unfolding of our argument. First, we present our definition of responsibility as a combination of free will and causation. This definition stems from classic, philosophical ideas about individuals. Second, we demonstrate how decisions construct responsibility by signalling both free will and causation. Because decisions are central to formal organizations, formal organizations concentrate responsibility. Third, we discuss how responsibility becomes diluted, however, as some organizations, such as standardizers or meta-organizations, increasingly make decisions about the activities of other organizations. Fourth, we discuss this tendency in terms of various forms of partial organizing; how these forms can be directed to formal organizations, and the ways in which they contribute to the dilution of responsibility. We analyse how decisions that are voluntary to comply with have a particularly strong impact on responsibility dilution. Fifth, we demonstrate how responsibility may be even more diluted as organizations organize each other into complex systems of interconnected decisions. In the final two sections of the paper, we summarize our conclusions by relating them to the literature on governance, new institutionalism and partial organization. We also present an agenda for empirical research based on the questions to which our theoretical argument gives rise.

Defining Responsibility

In public discourse as in theoretical analyses, the concept of responsibility has been defined in several ways (Bovens, 2010; Hart, 2008). Highly relevant for organizational studies is the distinction between prospective and retrospective responsibility (Bexell, 2005; Cane, 2002). Prospective responsibility is forward looking, as when someone is given responsibility for a certain task, implying the expectation that this person will handle this task in the future – a meaning close to duty or obligation. Retrospective responsibility is backward looking and defines someone as responsible for an event that has already occurred. In the prospective sense, responsibility is often contrasted to irresponsibility – in the sense of recklessness – irresponsible people being those who have not attended to things to which they were expected to attend. In the retrospective case, one distinguishes between people who are and are not responsible; a criminal court, for example, determines who is and is not guilty. Both meanings are connected to ideas of actorhood (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000) – the idea that the person has a high degree of autonomy, is capable of acting, and is free to choose actions based on some type of reason.

The retrospective and the prospective meanings of responsibility are related, in the sense that the person who has been given responsibility for a task can be expected to become one of the main suspects when others are looking for someone to hold retrospectively responsible for the way the task was handled or for its consequences (Alexius, 2017; Miller, 2001). Thus, the retrospective connotation of responsibility can be seen as making the prospective connotation consequential (Helkama, 1981).

This ‘future retrospective’ aspect of prospective responsibility is often explained in terms of accountability, a common concept in the organization and accounting literature that should not be confused with responsibility (Bexell, 2005; Bovens, 2010; Heimstädt & Dobusch, 2020; Messner, 2009; Roberts, 1991; Roberts & Scapens, 1985). Accountability can be defined as an expectation to provide an account of one’s actions after the fact and before some sort of public forum (Bovens, 2010; van Gunsteren, 1976). The accountable person may be, but not necessarily must be, one who has been mandated with a prospective responsibility. The account demanded from an accountable person can be used to determine if the person is retrospectively responsible (Bovens, 2010). But whether the account will actually make the person responsible is far from certain. And responsibility may well be attributed to a person who is not accountable and has not rendered an account. In fact, there may be responsible persons, even if no one is accountable.

In this article, we analyse responsibility in the retrospective meaning of the term. The roots of this concept run deep in Western thought. In his Nichomacean Ethics, Aristotle provided a first analysis. By claiming that an individual has caused an event to occur through free will, he argued, responsibility can be attributed to that individual. This definition is still fundamental to Western philosophical and legal discussions of responsibility (Hart, 2008; Miller, 2001).

Retrospective responsibility is a fundamental idea in and about society. The determining of responsibility is a key task for the legal system; the retrospective responsibility of governments for societal developments is a key issue in democratic, political debates and may determine the outcome of elections. In contemporary public debate, responsibility is a common theme in response to many events and conditions, especially negative ones. It is easy to mobilize a discussion about responsibility for such everyday negative events as traffic accidents, but complex phenomena, such as unemployment or an increase in crime, may also lead to discussions about responsibility. Consumers and citizens attribute responsibility to firms, governments, or public authorities; political parties attribute responsibility to one another; and governments and businesses may attribute responsibility to each other.

Responsibility creates meaning. It constitutes a particular way of explaining phenomena: Responsibility makes it possible to link individuals to events and conditions. Identifying someone as responsible constitutes an explanation that builds upon and reinforces the image that people in general and certain people in particular are powerful and capable of influencing occurrences. It is humans rather than God, Nature, chance, or fate that constitute causes. This explanation promises the possibility to control, the assumption being that we can avoid the occurrence of bad things by controlling other people. Dismissing powerful persons from their positions can be a way of showing one’s concern for negative events.

There is extensive philosophical debate about various, more detailed forms of retrospective responsibility, such as causal, moral, or remedial responsibility, and about who shall be held responsible in various intricate social situations (Bovens, 1998, 2010; Miller, 2001) – the moral responsibility of employees in public administration, for example (Thompson, 1981). There are similar discussions among legal scholars about the intricacies of responsibility and about the circumstances under which responsibility leads to legal liability (Hart, 2008). In both the philosophical and legal literatures, the exact meaning of ‘free will’ and ‘causation’ in complex situations are central issues (Cane, 2002). And the tendency is normative: Who shall one consider responsible in various situations? There is also extensive discussion with strong normative overtones in political science about the ways in which new forms of governance threaten ideal systems of responsibility allocation in a democracy (Bovens, Goodin, & Schillemans, 2014; Harlow & Rawlings, 2007).

We take another direction. Our aim is to provide a theoretical understanding of the social construction of responsibility – when and how people attribute free will and causation to themselves or others – a phenomenon that varies over time and situation (Alexius, 2017). We are not trying to assume the overwhelming task of providing a comprehensive answer to that extremely broad question, however. Rather, we limit ourselves to analysing the potential effects on responsibility by phenomena fundamental to organization theory: the communication of decisions and the social construction of formal organization. That analysis forms the background to our discussion about the unforeseen implications for responsibility that are caused by the external organizing of formal organizations.

Decisions, Formal Organization and Responsibility

The concept of decision is often mentioned in the philosophical literature in connection with discussions of responsibility, but it is typically not the object of deeper analysis or theorization. In contrast, organization studies have provided elaborate conceptualizations and theories of decisions and decision making, and we believe that those theories can offer useful insights for understanding responsibility allocation within and among organizations.

Our core assumption is that decisions as communications represent a salient way of attributing responsibility, because decisions signal both free will and causation. In both common parlance and traditional decision theory, decision is equated with choice, and most decision theorists treat decision and choice as synonymous (Kahneman, 2011; March, 1978; March & Simon, 1958/1993). Someone who is able to choose is exercising free will; the person ‘could have done otherwise’, as often expressed in legal discussions (Hart, 2008, chapter 2). Even Aristotle’s definition of responsibility lies close to this interpretation of decisions. According to him, actions are voluntary if ‘at the time they are performed they are the result of a deliberate choice between alternatives’ (Aristotle, book 3, chapter 1).

Decisions also signal causation. A decision suggests the intention to act or to make others act; it is intended to cause what happens in the future. And it can later be cited as a reason why someone did something or why something happened.

Given these connotations of decision, claiming that someone has made a decision is equivalent to attributing both free will and causation to that person, thus placing responsibility on the decision maker or at least making a strong argument for that person’s responsibility. Contrary to the way decisions are traditionally described in decision theory, the key element is the communication that someone has decided something, rather than the existence of any ‘real’ decision process. It is possible to declare that a decision has been made, even if no such process has occurred (Chia, 1994).

By ‘communication’ we mean that people inform others about their view – in this case whether a decision has been made and, if so, who made it. The communication can be directed at anyone who is seen as relevant, from members of a small group of people to the general public. We see the reference to decisions as performative – as a clear and common way of assigning responsibility in modern societies. People who want to accept responsibility for an action can effectively claim that they have been the decision makers. Those wanting to avoid responsibility can argue that they had not made any decision. And observers may try to allocate responsibility by arguing that other people, whatever their claims, have or have not decided.

The responsibility aspect of decisions implies that even if a person communicates a decision about what other people should do, it is not merely those people who are affected by the decision; the decision maker is affected as well. And the assumption of intentionality that is common in modern decision theory ties responsibility even more closely to the individual decision maker: intentions can be traced back to ‘preferences’ – to characteristics of the decision maker (March, 1978).

Our assumption about the connection between decision and responsibility has implications for understanding responsibility allocation in the context of organization. Decisions are a key aspect of organization, and organization therefore tends to produce responsibility.

Responsibility allocation within formal organizations

As classic research in organization studies tells us, decisions constitute a key component of such formal organizations as firms, associations, or states (Fayol, 1949; March & Simon, 1958/1993). Organizations have even been defined as systems of interconnected decisions (Luhmann, 2005). A formal organization is created through a decision, and much or most of what happens in organizations is interpreted as the result of decisions (Luhmann, 2005). There is a strong expectation that an organization’s managers will make decisions about the organization’s direction, about who shall be a member of the organization, about what the members should do, and about how to monitor and ensure that that is what they do. It is this salience of decisions that renders responsibility a key effect of organization. The right to make these types of decisions is often expressed as ‘authority’ – as Fayol (1918) put it, ‘wheresoever authority is exercised responsibility arises’. In a similar vein, Simon (1945/1965, chapter 7) argued that the authority of people at higher levels is accepted because that authority gives rise to responsibility. The decision makers are responsible, whereas those who merely act according to those decisions have little responsibility (Barnard, 1938/1968, p. 170).Thus, organizations tend to concentrate responsibility on the people we call ‘top managers’: board members of firms and associations or politicians in states or officers with executive positions in all these types of organizations.

The communication of decisions by top managers can be used to clarify the fact that they accept responsibility not merely in general, but in specific situations. Such properly placed responsibility is often a precondition for decisions to be seen as legitimate within and outside the organization and therefore possible to implement. Even when the actual choice of an action has been made by other members of the organization on the basis of their expertise, top managers are often anxious to stage and communicate a ‘formal’ decision by which they accept responsibility for the action.

On the other hand, the responsibility of top management may be weakened or undermined by those managers when they use methods of influence other than decisions or when they delegate decisions to organizational members at lower levels. If top managers are unwilling to accept their role of responsibility, while simultaneously wanting to influence choices, they may avoid decision making by trying to motivate people to behave in a certain way through their charisma or ideological influence (cf. Bache et al., 2015; Bachrach & Baratz, 1970). And if managers or politicians have communicated a decision, they may, in retrospect, try to reduce their responsibility by arguing that the decision was not a ‘true’ decision. They can try to reduce the impression of free will by arguing that they had no choice, given the external circumstances that compelled them to make the decision, or they can try to separate their decision from causation by arguing that their decision did not cause what eventually happened (Thompson, 1981); it would have happened anyway.

Top managers’ attempts at avoiding responsibility in these ways are not necessarily successful, however. Organizations are expected to make decisions, so a manager’s lack of decision may be interpreted as a decision, and the manager is seen as responsible anyway. One reaction to accidents, for example, is to claim that management had earlier failed to make the right decisions that could have prevented the accident – that the managers did not decide on an appropriate policy or did not decide to follow up on its implementation.

Responsibility concentration may also be weakened because the number of decision makers has increased, as when top managers delegate to other organizational members their right and duty to make decisions, and those members come to be seen as the responsible ones. In the organization literature, delegation is often described as a transfer of accountability (Lindquist & Llewellyn, 2003; Roberts, 1991). But the distinction here between accountability and responsibility is often unclear or unmentioned and unproblematized. Again, we suggest that decisions constitute the key difference. Even if members to whom decisions have been delegated are often accountable for virtually everything that has happened within their area of delegation, they are not likely to become responsible for more than can be connected to their decisions. But for them, as well, responsibility is dependent upon the extent to which others interpret their behaviour as the result of decisions. And simply complying to managerial decisions is generally not interpreted as a decision; rather top managers can be seen as the only party with free will who have caused an action or event. Not complying, on the other hand, is seen as a decision with responsibility attached (Luhmann, 2005; Thompson, 1981).

Furthermore, there is always a possibility that top managers will be held responsible, regardless, because it can be argued that they have decided to delegate certain tasks and decided to whom those tasks will be delegated and the limits within which that person was free to make decisions. It can also be argued that the decisions that management has made will serve as key premises for the delegatee’s decisions. Then, because the premise upon which the decision was based was another decision, both decision makers are candidates for responsibility (cf. Hinterleitner & Sager, 2017). If management has decided on a general policy, delegatees can argue that their decision complied with that policy and that the policy decision makers are at least partly responsible. In extreme cases, they can argue that, given the policy, they could not have done otherwise (in our words, they made no decision) and no responsibility can be attributed to them. Such reasoning can be used for developing long chains of responsibility denial, making top management appear responsible in spite of extremely complex decision processes (for examples, see Bovens, 1998, chapter 4).

In summary, we do not argue that responsibility allocation is always easy and unambiguous in formal organizations. (For an analysis of some of the ambiguities involved, problems of making managers legally liable, and problems of sanctioning organizations, see Ciepley, 2019.) Yet, in spite of the complexities, and with the help of decisions, formal organizations are able to overcome, at least partially or in principle, the problem of assigning responsibility to and in collective orders, which makes them different from such other collective orders as those created by institutions and networks. We define an institutional order as an order that is taken for granted (Jepperson, 1991) – the opposite of an order based on decisions. A decision communicates its own contingency (Luhmann, 2005); that there are options – not merely one option that can be taken for granted. And one does not decide on what one takes for granted. This lack of decisions renders it difficult to assign responsibility in an institutionalized order. The same is true for a network that is held together merely through trust and reciprocity and not by common decisions.

Organizations as responsible actors

Formal organizations tend to concentrate responsibility not only through their internal structures, but also as they are constructed as actors in their own right. The re-invention of the corporation or legal person in medieval times created entities to which rights and obligations could be ascribed. These entities are based on one first fundamental decision establishing them with a name and an address. They can own property and act as a party in courts, and they are understood as being able to act in other ways as well. In modern, contemporary societies, such legal persons are ubiquitous, and many or most entities that organization scholars call ‘formal organizations’ have this status. Modern states are perceived in a similar way. This idea of organizational actorhood has recently been appropriated by other entities – often parts of large organizations – that do not constitute legal persons: state administrations, schools, hospitals and universities, for example (Brunsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2000; Hasse, 2019; Hasse & Krücken, 2013).

When organizations are socially constructed as actors, they are seen as capable of making decisions, choosing and acting in much the same way as individuals (Bovens, 1998; Brunsson, 1990; Meyer, 2010) and thereby capable of assuming responsibility. Arguably, this construction is dependent upon the individual-like construction of the organization’s inner life, as described here – as a coordinated unit under central control. Many of these organizations are now expected to make decisions and accept responsibility in wide areas (Meyer, 2010); to consider their effects on the environment, health and sustainability when they make decisions; and to make decisions aimed primarily at improving these aspects – implying that a lack of such decisions is also interpreted as a decision. ‘Corporate social responsibility’ is a concept describing an extensive prospective responsibility of organizations giving rise to an extended retrospective one.

Responsibility and Partial Organization Outside Organization

When more and more social orders are constructed to appear as formal organizations one could expect that responsibility becomes relatively easy to construct and allocate in contemporary society. The concentration of responsibility to individual organizations is challenged, however, by the fact that organizations are becoming more and more interrelated and interdependent (Bromley & Meyer, 2015). This interdependency challenges the concentration of responsibility to the individual organization.

One type of organization that is actively involved in creating interdependencies is the so-called ‘others’ (Hwang et al., 2019; Meyer, 2011, 2019). These are organizations that try to influence other organizations for the sake of more or less special interests. Rather than producing something concrete, ‘others’ produce more or less specific ideas. They talk rather than act (Meyer, 1996). They influence organizations external to themselves.

One such group of ‘others’ – think-tanks, lobbying organizations and management consultant firms – try to affect the content of decisions made in other organizations by providing the right information or advice, with or without direct contact with decision makers (Medvetz, 2012). Thus, these others may affect choices but leave decisions to someone else, like the experts or charismatic leaders within an organization that we described previously. The responsibility remains with the managers or the organization.

Another group of ‘others’ work in another way, through decisions of their own that are publicly communicated, with the hope of influencing decisions made in another organization – thereby complicating responsibility allocation. States constitute the classical case of this strategy. But states are not alone in this role in the contemporary world. There is a whole armada of organizations making decisions for other organizations, often on a global scale, including standardization or certification organizations, rating institutes, rankers, prize givers, and various meta-organizations with states or other organizations as members.

The decisions of this type of ‘others’ have been described as ways of partially organizing other organizations, such as industrial firms or state agencies (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011). In this terminology, organizing is seen as attempts at creating a decided order, an order formed by decisions (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011). In these terms, there are two groups of organizers: It is not merely management that organizes formal organizations, but also external ‘others’.

According to the partial organization perspective, non-state external organizers typically concentrate on one of five key organizational decisions: decisions about rules, hierarchy, monitoring, sanctions, or membership, the so-called ‘five elements of organization’ (Ahrne & Brusson, 2011).

Rules in the form of standards play an increasingly salient role in global organizing (Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000; Timmermans & Epstein, 2010; Yates & Murphy, 2019). International standardization organizations create rules for other organizations to follow, most often with global coverage. Standards produced by such organizations as ISO, ILO, and many more cover various aspects that constitute key decisions in organizations, from product design, measurements, test methods and terminologies to labour relations, management systems and social responsibility. Similarly, a multitude of social-movement organizations publish standards for how other organizations shall behave, from how firms shall handle the physical environment to how states should treat their citizens.

Hierarchy or constitution signifies decisions about how to make decisions: who can make various types of decisions, when they should make them and by what procedures. Such constitutional decisions can be made by the organizations themselves or through laws, but there are also standards that define how an organization should make decisions. Examples include so-called codes of corporate governance (Seidl, Sanderson, & Roberts, 2013). There are also more specialized standards for decisions on hierarchy constitutions, such as the ISO 17011 standard for how accreditation organizations should handle decision making (Gustafsson, 2020).

Many organizations monitor other organizations: rankers, certifiers, auditors, accreditors and various others such as Human Rights Watch or organizations that concern environmental and sustainability matters. Many monitoring organizations rank other organizations; there are rankings of almost all large organizations from several perspectives (Werron, 2014). Certification organizations monitor how other organizations comply with standards. Rating agencies monitor the economy of firms, states and local governments and decide how creditworthy they are (Kerwer, 2005). The decisions of these monitoring organizations are made public, and the monitored organizations often adjust their structures and work procedures in order to become auditable and approved by external monitoring organizations (Power, 2003).

There are various forms of sanctions relevant for organizations, including an increasing set of prizes and awards (Edlund, Pallas, & Wedlin, 2019). Organizing others by means of prizes means that the prize-giving organization defines what is ‘good’ or ‘preferable’, which may influence the decisions of other organizations for which these prizes are valuable for status or economic reasons. There are also negative sanctions, such as penalty fees or publication of blacklists by watchdog organizations.

Finally, many organizations are organized by membership in other organizations. These organizations are known as meta-organizations, formal organizations with other organizations rather than individuals as their members. Meta-organizations make decisions with which members are expected to comply (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008).

All these decisions about rules, hierarchy, monitoring, sanctions and membership by external organizing ‘others’ are likely to lead to ambiguity in responsibility allocation. There are several decision makers, and the decisions of ‘others’ may become a decided premise for an internal decision in targeted organizations. These aspects and their potential for responsibility dilution can be recognized from our discussion about internal responsibility allocation in organizations, but there are now two conditions that substantially reinforce the risk for responsibility dilution: Most external organizers present their decisions as being voluntary to comply with, and furthermore, the added decision makers and their production of decided premises have not been decided as a delegation decision.

Voluntary organization and the lack of delegation

States traditionally require mandatory compliance in their decisions directed at other organizations. As is the case within formal organizations, such communications tend to place responsibility with the state and its decision makers rather than with the complying organizations. Only noncompliance is seen as a decision with responsibility consequences. Although communications of mandatory compliance embody two decisions – the decision about the law and the expected decision to comply – the first decision is likely to be seen as key for complying organizations. If the law is highly legitimate, a decision to comply may not even be seen as a ‘true’ decision because it does not seem to include realistic options. Having decided on a mandatory law, the state decision makers are likely to carry the blame or praise for what is seen as the consequences of that law. Democratic states are designed to handle this concentration of responsibility.

It is seldom realistic for organizers that lack the authority and enforcement capabilities of a state to communicate their decisions as mandatory. Instead, their attempts to organize others are communicated as decisions allowing voluntary compliance. Standardization organizations are keen to point out that no one is forced to comply with a standard (www.iso.org). The same holds true for decisions about constitutions, although the organizer may sometimes argue that deviance from its decision should be explained (Rasche & Seidl, 2019). Monitoring organizations cannot force the monitored organization to assist them; nor can they force the monitored to pay attention to the monitoring and its result. No-one can be forced to accept a prize, for example.

Voluntariness makes the situation more ambiguous than one in which the decision is perceived as mandatory. The situation is again one of dual decisions: one by the organization communicating the first decision and one by the organization deciding whether or not to adhere to it. But it is difficult to argue that all responsibility lies with the first decision maker. The explicit reference to the voluntariness of the second decision makes it appear as a ‘true’ decision, wherein the free will of the complying or noncomplying organization is involved.

In cases of noncompliance, the situation may be simple and opposite to the case of state laws; noncompliance with a voluntary rule may not be seen as a decision if no-one expects the individual or organization to comply. There are many attempts at organizing, and not every organization can be expected to attend to each one. And if no organization complies with the organizing decision, it cannot be seen as causing anything, thus making responsibility difficult to claim. But the opposite may also be true – decisions by external organizations may become so well-known or legitimate that even noncompliance may be seen as a decision. The noncomplying organization then has no organizers with which to share its responsibility.

In the case of compliance, the attribution of responsibility to the organizations involved becomes ambiguous and dependent upon which decision is communicated as most salient. It is possible to attribute responsibility to the second, complying organization only. Some people may argue that the first decision, although a premise for the second, does not constitute a cause or encroach on the organization’s freedom to choose. Therefore, the argument goes, the second organization made the definitive decision. And unlike decisions made within organizations, any delegation argument is weak: the second-order decision makers have problems arguing that the first-order ones are responsible because they decided to delegate decisions to them; the first-order decision makers have not made, and in fact do not have the authority to make, that delegation decision.

It is also possible, however, to argue that the first decision maker bears some responsibility as well, having provided a perhaps essential premise for the second decision. It could be argued that the second-order decision maker had no choice. For example, there may be system-related effects: if a majority of all organizations have complied to a decision, it may be almost impossible not to comply. This situation is well known in the case of rule-setting by standardization but may occur as a result of decisions on other elements as well. Yet is also possible to contend that both parties are fully responsible. Or perhaps more commonly, people argue that both parties have some limited responsibility because they share the total responsibility. The overall result is that there are many actors making decisions, but that each decision maker has limited responsibility, and no-one has the overall responsibility for all decisions.

To illustrate, in cases of standardization, both the standardization organization and the complying organization can blame the other or take credit for behaviour that occurs according to the standard. The standardization organization can claim that its responsibility is limited because the definitive decision rests with the standard follower, whereas the standard follower can claim that the standardization organization has a weighty responsibility. Similarly, an outside party can ascribe more or less responsibility to each of the two parties.

The same mechanisms emerge when the adoption of a certain constitution is recommended but not mandatory. And a monitored organization that decides to engage in or attend to external monitoring shares responsibility with the monitoring organization. A university management that makes decisions on the basis of its ranking position can blame the rankers for its decisions, whereas the rankers can argue that no organization is forced to consider their rankings. If a prize is significant, the prize-winning organization can refer to the impact of the prize on the field and assert that it had no choice but to make decisions that align with the prize. The prize givers can argue that they cannot be held responsible for the popularity of their prize.

Responsibility for membership in a meta-organization may be confused by the fact that membership is represented as voluntary. Yet in practice many meta-organizations have a monopoly in their field of activity, often making it difficult for organizations in the area to abstain from membership (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005). Furthermore, membership comes with the expectation that most of the meta-organization’s decisions should be complied with, but because members are involved in the meta-organization’s decision making, responsibility is easily confused. When European states are criticized for decisions made in their domestic context, for example, national governments commonly refer to decisions made in one of their many meta-organizations – often the European Union; the response could be, however, that the national government has participated in the European Union’s decision making. In addition, meta-organizations often have difficulty making binding decisions; instead, they issue policies, guidelines and the like, which their members must later decide whether or not to follow (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005).

In summary, organizing outside organizations that is communicated as voluntary yet complied with tends to produce ambiguity, confusion, or controversy, or it can render the organizers only partially responsible, sharing responsibility with the managers of organizations they organize. Although decisions produce responsibility, the existence of two interconnected decisions dilutes rather than concentrates responsibility. It may become extremely difficult to find a clearly responsible person or organization to blame or praise for a significant event. Neither the organizer nor the organized becomes fully responsible for its actions. Although there is a high degree of organization, responsibility is diluted or confused rather than concentrated. The contrast to the standard construction of formal organizations as autonomous decision makers is clear. More organization in that situation implies responsibility concentration rather than dilution, because the more top managers decide on rules, monitoring, sanctions, membership and hierarchy, the more responsible they become. And as we described earlier, even if managers try to avoid responsibility by avoiding organizing, they are generally not likely to succeed.

Interconnected Decision Premises and the Dilution of Responsibility

So far, we have discussed the simple case of one element of organization at a time. But organizing organizations from the outside may lead to highly complex organizational structures, involving many elements and many organizers, in which the assignment of responsibility is even more complicated.

In formal organizations, decisions about adopting rules may easily give rise to additional decisions about monitoring the compliance of these rules, which in turn may lead to yet other decisions about sanctions connected to the outcome of the monitoring. The same dynamics may apply when organizations are organized by external parties (Rasche & Seidl, 2019). A decision made by one organizer can become the premise for decisions made by a second organizer whose decisions, in turn, constitute premises for decisions by a third organizer. A complex system of interconnected decisions may evolve over time.

To illustrate this development, we exemplify decisions connected to the world’s most-purchased standard, ISO 9001. This standard specifies how organizations should construct and document a system for decision making about quality-assurance procedures. The purpose is to create trust that organizations can deliver high-quality products and services. The ISO 9001 standard serves as a good example because compliance is voluntary and, as a decided rule, it also signals causation. If this rule is applied, something is to occur: better quality or clarified means-end rationality, for example. Over time, the ISO 9001 standard has produced a large system of many interconnected decisions, in which decisions serve as premises for each other.

It has initiated a large global market for monitoring services provided by certification firms that annually assess organizations claiming to comply, rewarding them with an ISO 9001 certificate or informing them that they have not passed the certification process. Certification firms also decide to follow an international standard – the ISO 17021 – in order to communicate that they comply with internationally recognized requirements for the quality assurance of certifiers. And in order to convince others that they actually do comply, certification firms hire an external auditor – an accreditation organization – that issues accreditation certificates. These accreditation organizations in turn also decide to follow an international standard – the ISO 17011 – which prescribes a hierarchy: a decision about how accreditation organizations should make their decisions, how they should be structured internally, and how they should conduct their monitoring. And yet again, compliance to this standard is monitored, but in a different way: Accreditation organizations may decide to become members of the international meta-organization of accreditors – the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) – through which members monitor each other with reference to ISO 17011, through peer reviews. Monitoring is in fact required for membership and serves as a signal that the accreditation services are valid internationally.

This system could be described as a network in which the organizations are the nodes, and the connections among them consist only of decisions rather than the trust and reciprocity that is said to characterize many other networks (Borgatti & Foster, 2003). It is a system close to Luhmann’s definition of an organization: a system of interconnected decisions, wherein decisions become premises for new decisions (Luhmann, 2005, chapter 7). The system has even more characteristics typical of formal organizations. It uses all the five elements of organization mentioned above. And participants work for a common purpose – in this case creating trust in markets. Like most large, formal organizations, it is characterized by internal specialization and an extensive division of labour, wherein different parts have different interconnected tasks, performed recurrently. Like functional departments in formal organizations, many of the parts cannot function independent of other parts. There would be no accreditation without certification, no certification without standards, and no standards without organizations willing to follow them. These similarities to a formal organization once motivated us to create the concept of macro-organization for this type of system (Brunsson, Gustafsson, & Hallström, 2018). Macro-organizations may comprise organizations that are geographically restricted (e.g. Grothe-Hammer, 2019) or dispersed around the globe, such as the one we have briefly described, or others formed around sustainability standards (Arnold, 2020).

Yet a macro-organization differs from the traditional construction of the autonomous formal organization in that it dilutes responsibility rather than concentrating it. The key decision premises are decided by other organizations. An organization cannot issue standards for itself, just as it cannot accredit or certify itself. Because the decision premises are all presented as voluntary, responsibility attribution among the organizations is complicated. The interconnected decision premises form a chain of decisions and a responsibility that is diluted with every decision. In fact, the macro-organization makes the actorhood of participating organizations seem less realistic. They are all dependent on the decisions of other organizations for their existence and are therefore less capable of bearing responsibility.

Furthermore, it is difficult to attribute responsibility to the macro-organization, because it is not an actor. Like a network, it has no address (Bommes & Tacke, 2005); no name; no decided constitution; and no top management or principal to which responsibility can be attributed for deciding to establish the organization, for decisions to recruit certain members, or to delegate some of its decisions to other participants. Although the macro-organization organizes organizations, it is not a meta-organization. So unlike formal organizations, including meta-organizations, the macro-organization cannot be held responsible, nor even accountable for the decisions made within its structure. Rather, this form of organization is constructed such that anyone can decide what another should do, but no one can make a decision directly affecting everyone. Paraphrasing Bovens’s (2007) terminology, one could say that the ‘responsibility for each’ is highly diluted and that there is no responsibility that could be labelled ‘one for all’, ‘all for all’, or ‘all for one’.

Macro-organizations are extreme and therefore useful to illustrate the core of our argument: that more organizing by external actors results in less responsibility. Macro-organizations show a high degree of organization, and because of that, the responsibility of participating organizations is highly diluted, and it is impossible to find anyone responsible for the organization as a whole. The dilution of responsibility in macro-organizations again highlights the difference between extensive organizing by autonomous managers of formal organizations and extensive organizing initiated by external decision makers. If organizing within the macro-organization had instead taken place within one single formal organization, responsibility would likely have been highly concentrated rather than diluted.

Why a Decision-Based Analysis of Responsibility Matters

We have argued that decisions signal choice, a combination of free will and causation, thus rendering the communication of decisions a forceful way of allocating responsibility. By understanding responsibility and decisions in this way, we can explain how and why responsibility becomes diluted when organizations make decisions about each other. Our analysis has significant implications for the literature in global and multi-level governance, new institutionalism and partial organization.

Multi-level and global governance

Political organizations, such as parliaments, councils and governments, are highly decision-oriented organizations, and democratic systems are structures established to legitimize decision making and handle responsibility. Implicitly or explicitly, decisions are central phenomena in political science and governance studies, yet they are rarely based on an explicit theory of decisions. We believe that by taking decisions seriously and by theorizing them, new insights can be gained, not least in terms of responsibility.

As mentioned in the introduction, scholars in political science and governance studies refer to responsibility in a neo-liberal world as ‘fuzzy’ and ‘hybrid’ (Bache et al., 2015; Benish & Mattei, 2020) or as being ‘in deficit’ (Harlow & Rawlings, 2007). Others have noted that responsibility attributions change because many organizations are interconnected, creating the responsibility associated with the ‘problem of many hands’ (e.g. Black, 2008; Thompson, 1981). Furthermore, more and different organizations are involved with things that used to be the task of the state; public, private and civil society organizations now create a new global landscape that cuts across national boundaries and political levels, giving birth to expressions of global and multi-level governance.

We agree with studies that highlight new public management, privatization, or marketization as reasons why responsibility is harder to locate in the contemporary world. But references to these developments do not constitute sufficient explanation. How and why responsibility becomes diluted is rather to be found through an analysis of variation in the communication of decisions. That is why we use the concept of macro-organization rather than referring to orders as ‘governance’: macro-organizations enable us to analyse these orders in terms of decisions, decision premises and voluntariness, which, in turn, enables us to understand responsibility dilution more precisely.

For example, scholars have described how responsibility becomes fuzzy in private–public partnerships: Private actors are engaging in (public) issues for which they cannot be held accountable or responsible (Mörth, 2007; Papadopoulos, 2010) – a fuzziness that can be explained by the framework we have presented here. Fuzziness could emanate from the discrepancy between choice and decisions that we previously described for the case of a single organization but that can exist among several organizations as well. If people observe that some organizations seem to make choices and others communicate decisions, responsibility easily becomes fuzzy. Private organizations may participate in actual choices influencing policies, for instance, while public organizations are busy communicating decisions. Or private organizations may be involved in communicating decisions when they have no legitimate mandate to do so, thereby accepting responsibility for matters that people believe should be handled by the state.

Our argument also has implications for scholars dealing with global or transnational governance and their studies of new, global ways in which organizations relate to each other. With reference to the escalating organizing surrounding the ISO 9001 standard, it would be easy to point to globalization and ‘multi-stakeholder’ arrangements as causing an increase in organizational complexity and responsibility diffusion (Hahn & Weidtmann, 2016). But in our view, the explanation for responsibility dilution lies not in globalization or multi-stakeholder arrangements per se, but in the voluntariness of decision premises and how decisions, responsibility and organization are combined. Globalization enables proliferation of voluntary decision premises because there is no equivalent to a world state or world government.

Other scholars using a less state-centric perspective have raised concerns that stakeholder theory cannot present a solid analysis of where the responsibility of international business firms begins and ends (Jensen & Sandström, 2011). Again, we believe that a focus on decisions is key, for it allows moral questions about who should be responsible to be complemented by empirical analyses of how responsibility among global business firms is actually constructed today. In sum, taking decisions seriously could lead to sharper and more explanatory analyses of the relationship between globalization and responsibility.

New institutionalism, ‘others’ and social actors

The argument that we put forward also has implications for new institutionalism and, more specifically, ideas about the role of ‘others’ and about organizations as ‘social actors’.

Given our understanding of decisions and responsibility, the discussion about ‘others’ could be extended and nuanced (Meyer, 2011, 2019). Rather than treating ‘others’ as one group, we have argued from a responsibility perspective that it is salient to distinguish between those ‘others’ that communicate decisions for other organizations and those that use other means of influence. Communicating decisions about someone else affects responsibility differently than does silently giving advice. For instance, standardization organizations are likely to be attributed more responsibility than management consultants are.

Contemporary organizations present themselves as social actors, as sovereign entities determining their own fate and with unique characteristics requiring unique strategies; their depicting themselves as responsible is one core ingredient in modern-day actorhood (Bromley & Meyer, 2015). Yet we have demonstrated how responsibility is diluted when formal organizations are organized from the outside and have concluded that the more organizations are organized by others, the less responsibility they will assume. And complying with the decisions of others is in itself a clear threat to a strong image of actorhood.

Organizations are also known to be influenced by what is often called their ‘institutional environments’; they display structures and practices originating from their environment which are taken for granted and similar to those of other organizations. One would expect that the adoption of similar practices and structures among organizations and the internal fragmentation that often follows (Bromley & Meyer, 2015) would be another factor in reducing the credibility of an organization’s claims of actorhood.

There are also factors that work in the other direction, however, possibly making it easier to attribute responsibility and actorhood to organizations and managers involved in reflecting their institutional environment. Even if both external and internal parties take structures and practices for granted, most implementation requires organizational decisions. Organizations turn institutions into decisions. Those decisions may seem easy to make if everyone takes their content as a given, but there are factors indicating the opposite: Many institutionalized ideas are vague and ambiguous and must be translated into more precise decisions (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996), and implementation may require the mobilization of organizational members in extensive reform projects (Brunsson, 2009).The transformation of general institutions into local, organizational decisions places responsibility on the local decision makers, but because institutions emerge over time through broad social processes rather than in and through specific decisions, managers have no one with whom to share responsibility. It seems, therefore, that the image of organizational actorhood can be upheld to some extent. When considering the effects of decisions as communications, it seems possible to combine the construction of actorhood with an influential institutional environment (Bromley & Meyer, 2015; Meyer, 2010). By turning decisions from general institution into local organizational decisions, organizations end up with more responsibility and a more intact depiction of actorhood than would be expected from a view of institutional elements as simply ‘diffusing’ into organizations.

Partial organization and responsibility

Finally, our argument adds new insights to studies of partial organization. Over the last decade, more and more scholars have used the partial organization perspective to help them understand a growing set of empirical phenomena (see Ahrne & Brunsson, 2019 for an overview). Partial organization runs the risk of becoming a mere descriptive framework, however, although it has the potential to be turned into an explanatory theory. One way forward would be to take decisions more seriously, a development that we began by theorizing decisions in relation to responsibility. One can move from the observation that extensive organizing outside organizations may dilute responsibility (Arnold, 2020; Grothe-Hammer, 2019) to an explanation of why this is the case. Furthermore, one can consider the possibility that the relationship between decisions and responsibility may be double-directed: not only that decisions produce responsibility but that the responsibility implications of decisions may influence people’s willingness to communicate decisions.

Research Agenda

Our theoretical argument gives rise to several issues and questions for future empirical research. In what follows, we present three areas in which scholars can conduct empirical studies that would contribute to a more detailed understanding of organization, decisions and responsibility, based on the core assumptions discussed in this paper. Each area is anchored in the three literatures presented above.

Do decisions always result in responsibility?

The first set of issues for empirical research implies an empirical trial of our theoretical idea, with responsibility as the dependent variable. Does decision making always result in responsibility? This overarching question has relevance for all three bodies of literature noted in this article.

Some organizations stage highly visible decisions, with freely available minutes, a list of participants, a list of options to be decided upon, and perhaps even official statements of involved persons who disagreed with the decision. Their purpose may be to ensure that responsibility is properly attributed to the decision makers. But does it work? Scholars who inquire about the allocation of responsibility in political science and in global and multi-stakeholder governance (e.g. Benish & Mattei, 2020; Mörth, 2007; Mörth & Pierre, 2021; Jensen & Sandström, 2003) could investigate when communicated decisions are in fact not interpreted as ‘true’ decisions, as choices. They could also ask under what circumstances would responsibility be placed on those having made the choice, or on those having contributed with salient decision premises? And when is a non-decision considered a decision – under what circumstances is it impossible to avoid responsibility merely by not deciding? Empirically studying and analysing the relationship between the communication of decisions on the one hand and choice on the other could bring clarity to what is now perceived as a ‘fuzzy’ situation.

For scholars using an institutional perspective, a further set of questions are relevant. Many decisions become institutionalized over time, their content taken for granted and no longer interpreted as the result of decisions, thus weakening responsibility construction. What circumstances speed up or slow down these processes, and what role does the quest for, or the avoidance of, responsibility play for them? In relation to the concept of ‘others’, what ‘others’ tend to be attributed little responsibility? And conversely, what types of others seem unable to avoid responsibility? Arguably, lobbyists may belong to the first group and governments to the second, but what about other organizations? And is there a general trend that makes industrial firms, rather than some ‘others’, victims of increasing responsibility attribution? And, if so, what types of conceptions, ideologies and processes support that development? The scholarly distinction between different types of ‘others’ is still in its infancy (Hasse, 2019) and would benefit from answers to these questions.

Finally, scholars in the field of partial organization may investigate whether there is a pattern between deciding on certain elements and responsibility attribution. Do decisions about rules attribute responsibility differently than, say, decisions about membership or monitoring? And if so, why?

Does responsibility affect decisions?

People tend to be aware that responsibility and decisions are connected. The extent to which this awareness affects a willingness to communicate decisions is an empirical question. To explore this question of responsibility as an independent variable, we encourage scholars to study if, when, how and why responsibility affects people’s decisions. Under what circumstances are decisions communicated with the main purpose of actualizing responsibility and attributing it in a desired way? When do people start making decisions in networks or about institutionalized issues, for instance, in order to construct and attribute responsibility? When and to what extent do predictions of responsibility attribution determine the willingness of organizations to subject themselves to the decisions of other organizations? For example, do organizations adhere to external corporate social responsibility standards rather than deciding on their own rules in order to share the responsibility with the organizations that decide those standards? To what extent do the wishes of ‘others’ to accept or avoid responsibility determine their strategy to work by communicating decisions? What strategies other than decisions and non-decisions do ‘others’ use to influence their degree of responsibility? And when are they thereby able to overcome the effect of decisions on responsibility?

Is responsibility dilution a problem or a purpose of macro-organizations?

The concept of macro-organization was introduced as an extension of partial organization, a way to understand and theorize complex decided orders outside formal organizations.

Scholars of partial organization and macro-organization can make contributions by inquiring more deeply into questions of responsibility. Macro-organizations affect responsibility and, as we have shown, they may seriously hinder any credible attribution of responsibility. But macro-organizations differ from each other, and the extent to which responsibility is a cause or an effect of macro-organizations is not clear (Brunsson et al., 2018; Grothe-Hammer, 2019). We encourage scholars to investigate whether the dilution of responsibility is the reason for the growth and expansion of macro-organizations. In the context of macro-organizations, do organizations connect to other organizations because macro-organizations provide a smooth way of escaping responsibility? Or is responsibility dilution an unintended effect of the extensive decisions made among organizations? Opening for the possibility that responsibility allocation or avoidance may be causes of partial and global organizing would advance the literature on partial organization and macro-organization and the literature on global governance.

Given the responsibility dilution effect of macro-organizations, consumers, governments, civil society groups, or citizens in general could dispute the lack of clear responsibility and demand clarification. What are their chances of success? If organizations wanted to claim responsibility for some reason, what strategies could be identified to stop the escalation of decisions-on-decisions? Is the issue of responsibility one reason why organizations sometimes try to reduce and control organizing by creating a formal organization in the form of an encompassing meta-organization rather than participating in an evolving macro-organization?

The latter set of questions actualizes normative discussions about responsibility attribution in a global world and signals the importance of responsibility as the means of constructing meaning. Zygmunt Bauman (1998) argued that resistance to globalization occurs because globalization is perceived to be an anonymous force that is difficult to identify. Perhaps the dilution of responsibility is a key factor behind such confusion and scepticism, particularly because responsibility tends to evaporate in spite of high degrees of organization.