Organization Theory and Ontological Claims: Working out tensions in CCO scholarship and organization studies

What distinguishes organizations from other social collectives is a recurring question in organization theory. This article engages with the notion of “organizationality” as a recent proposition stemming from CCO (communicative constitution of organization) scholarship to address this question. We argue that by claiming to synthesize a number of insights worked out in organization studies over the last decades, what we call the “theory of organizationality” commits to a number of unproblematized ontological assumptions, which may be shared well outside its CCO source. Questioning those assumptions may, therefore, be useful to help organizational scholarship as a whole to grow on more solid theoretical grounds, making our ideas clearer not only about what it is we study but also how to relate among our various approaches and with other fields of social inquiry.