Addiction and Organization Studies

Addiction is not just an individual or public health issue. It is also embedded in organizational practices. We argue that addiction is engineered through the design of addictive goods and the structuring of habitual patterns of behavior incentivized by organizations. We conceptualize how organizing sustains addictive behaviors by creating and reinventing what we term new objects and subjects of addiction. By conceptualizing addiction as an organizational phenomenon, we foreground its embeddedness in institutional, technological, and economic arrangements. We then set out an agenda for further research on its organizational dimensions and the mechanisms that sustain and mitigate it.