Relational Publics: Studying organizational possibilities

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On October 27, 2022, the world's wealthiest person walked into the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter Inc. carrying a kitchen sink.This symbolic act by Elon Musk was perhaps a light-hearted attempt at signaling that, after several bumpy months, he had finally completed the acquisition of the company.What followed was a rapid series of moves, starting with terminating top executives such as the chief executive officer (CEO), chief financial officer, head of policy, and general counsel.With the board subsequently getting dissolved and the company shifting to private ownership, Musk became the CEO and sole board member.Internally, the organization underwent rapid changes.Approximately half of the workforce was fired in the first week of the takeover, although some reports suggested that the company attempted to hire some people back the following week.On the platform itself, a significant number of users raised concerns about problematic statements from Musk and expressed their fears about the rise of hate-speech on the platform.Prominent members of the organization studies (OS) community raised their voices on this issue and suggested migrating to alternative platforms such as Mastodon and Post.This gave rise to valuable conversations around social media practices in academia.
In recent years, I have come to value Twitter for professional academic life.Although there is no doubt that some activity on the platform has been dark and hateful, I have appreciated other activity.Hashtags such as #mgmtwitter encouraged the participation in communication flows and sharing of content.Over time, it became a fascinating place as an academic to learn about publications and projects, and to hear about professional events and activities such as smaller workshops.It was helpful for learning about special issue calls and recently published papers from scholars I admired (in OS and adjacent fields).Longer threads from scholars began to resemble mini-literature reviews, curating fascinating topics and synthesizing research for broader audiences.This opened new possibilities of what it means to be a public intellectual, and connecting management and organizational research with the world at large.
With the turbulent change in ownership at Twitter, this raised several issues relevant for OS.The first was the power of a metaphor, and its impact on organizing.Back in the spring of 2022, Musk posted a tweet saying, "Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy" (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507777261654605828).Writing for Wired Magazine, Watercutter (2022) critiqued this view, saying that his focus on free speech was narrow and his focal metaphor was missing overlapping communities.She suggested that a more apt metaphor for Twitter would be a metropolis, "[p]eople have neighborhoods they stick to; sometimes they go out and talk with friends, sometimes they watch from their windows, sometimes they talk up strangers in a park.Most of these aren't the kind of world-changing conversations Musk seems to want to have, but they're just as vital."This debate around determining an appropriate metaphor could also be an occasion for organizational scholars to do the same in our field.With a reflexive stance, we should examine our core metaphors.For example, we often theorize using meso-level concepts such as fields.This builds from the metaphor of community (or a town square).How might a metropolislike frame affect how we study organizations and organizing?

Within and Across Communities in Organizational Studies
Organization studies has often focused on fields cohered by community logics and collective identities.The concept of community here is paramount, particularly with the connotation of a field.One productive outcome of applying the field lens has been in demonstrating inter-organizational power dynamics.The field serves as an analytical object bounding sociality and social capital; entities (people and organizations) are held together as a community by field forces and mechanisms such as a configuration of institutional logics.This community gaze emphasizes boundedness and a social ontology based around social groups as collectives.However, like any frame, it both reveals and obscures.If we were to adopt a more overtly relational ontology, then we might see configurations of elements that constitute seemingly stable communities and fields.We might examine organizational possibilities based on configurations of constituent elements, not just boundaries of extant social groups.
Consider the concept of social capital-it comes in two forms, bridging and bonding.The bonding form is what we most often think of, where social actors are bonded through trust and obligations, and this is held together through the threat of censure and exchange.The bridging form is about information and possibilities; as actors bridge external networks, they gather non-redundant information from weak ties.Davidsson and Honig (2003, p. 324) demonstrated the importance of bridging social capital in the opportunity discovery process for entrepreneurs, writing that, "[for] nascent entrepreneurs, our findings suggest the importance of actively maintaining, pursing, and developing social relations."I recently co-authored an article (Hannigan, Briggs, Valadao, Seidel, & Jennings, 2022) that built from this insight and showed how an emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem used Twitter to help form a cultural milieu that co-evolved with social networks as material resourcing ties.We argued that entrepreneurs explored organizational possibilities by participating across discourses.These works point to social capital in generating networks, perhaps part of a process of a collective becoming.

Digital Platforms, Democracy, and Organizing
To Musk's conjecture, it is worth reflecting on how democracy is not just a form of government where candidates engage in combat to capture votes against the backdrop of free speech principles.It is also a set of values and a way that we organize and connect with each other.The Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey stressed that democracy is a form of moral and spiritual association, where, as individuals we can engage in institutions and practices of our society.He wrote about public discussion as a method and the process of democracy being critical for dealing with conflicts of interest and avoiding authoritarianism.Dewey's contributions to political theory stressed democracy as providing the basis for individuals and communities to engage in an ongoing process of inquiry.
The potential for democracy as a virtuous force in society is best seen as an ongoing method for tuning a balance of the interests of individuals and social institutions.But this requires a forum for interaction and debate, as well as procedures and structures to ensure their correct working.In this sense, Twitter was (is) a platform technology like the ancient Greek amphitheaters that enabled affordances, such as acoustics that opened the amphitheater to more people (Meyer & Quattrone, 2022).For all its messiness, Twitter also gave voice to many people on a larger scale.
Organizing metaphors matter and this is particularly relevant as we attempt to make sense of the turmoil with Twitter.Musk framed Twitter using the imagery of a public town square, and he also aspired for the platform to facilitate a type of collective intelligence where fact-checking occurs in a bottom-up manner.His populist-based view is explicitly opposed to the power of journalism as the fourth estate, and is laden with cybernetic imagery.The new media scholar Erica Robles-Anderson recently remarked that "Framing Twitter as a 'collective, cybernetic super-intelligence' because 'billions of bidirectional interactions per day' happen here could be reframed more simply as 'publics.' . . .If vast multidirectional conversations that persist and recombine are superb, that's the realm of such things as publics, collectivities, and multitudes.That's not cybernetic super-intelligence, it's the social."(https://twitter.com/fstflofscholars/status/1589273618995109892) The observation about Twitter and what constitutes the social here is apt and seems to be what Musk is missing.The cybernetic perspective that Musk adopts is an abstraction that sees agents interacting using local rules, which scales up to aggregate behavior in a complex system.This could be describing emergence of a system made up of ants, algorithms, or people.But clearly, the concern with collective intelligence largely misses the point about human sociality.This debate also reveals something important overlooked by OS.Most of us would likely agree that this is not about collective intelligence, but it is also not just about collective identity.People here are doing things together-but organizing and interacting in interesting ways not simply according to community dynamics.

Publics in Social Theory
In her commentary, Robles-Anderson referred to the concept of "publics."This concept has long been present in social theory, but less so in OS.The most prominent meaning of "public" has been as a catch-all for society's members (the body politic), but other meanings of this are around tenuous associations.Gabriel Tarde, one of the progenitors of the sociological conception of publics developed it as distinct social phenomenon contrasting with the irrationality of crowds.He famously publicly debated Émile Durkheim in 1903 at the École des Hautes Études Sociales.Durkheim most notably argued for "social facts" as stable elements enabling the study of sociology.In contrast, Tarde focused on social processes and the social coming into being.Tarde passed away the year after this famous debate and the field of sociology was largely built out on Durkheim's view.
Despite the prominence of Durkheim in social theory, various threads of work did continue around the processes of private people coming together to form publics that cut across social categories such as collective identity.Dewey stressed the importance of shared civic concerns guiding public formation.Habermas developed the public sphere to capture the interactions and debates in social locations such as coffeehouses and salons.In envisioning actor-network theory, Bruno Latour reflected on this history and imagined a counterfactual of what sociology would look like if Tarde won the famous debate, and his perspective was foundational instead.These works led to a plural connotation of publics as a form of organizing where people develop a common sense of association, with social ties not enduring enough to constitute a community, social movement, or social category.

Towards the Study of Organizational Possibilities
Publics represent a promising approach for examining organizational possibilities.Recently Starr (2021, p. 69) developed the concept of "relational publics" that "cut across more 'bounded' and 'stable' social formations; this is the bridging function that gives publics emergent possibilities in the creation of new social movements and imagined communities."This is an ephemeral yet measurable concept of organization in the process of becoming.Pozner and Hannigan (2023) have recently used this to theorize the emergence of scandal audiences.This concept captures the constitutive aspects of relations forming through communication-in particular, the shared consumption and transmission of stories and other cultural elements.
Some prior organizational studies projects have engaged with concepts such as the public sphere and civil society, but much of our literature builds on the organizing metaphor of community.This frame has certainly been productive and generative.By anchoring sociality in organizational fields, it helped to establish OS as distinct from contemporary work in mainstream sociology.But the frame also obscures.It masks a concern for constituent elements and organizational possibilities.Using terms from the debate around Twitter, we need to build work around the metaphor of the metropolis, not just the town square(s).Such work should explicitly focus on organizational possibilities, as well as the communicative and social processes that constrain and enable them.