Organizational Monsters and the Shaping of Systemic Irresponsibility

Abstract Organizational monsters populate capitalist societies and shape the conditions of systemic irresponsibility. Building on organizational sociology and critical approaches, I argue that organizational monsters are powerful yet ambiguously organized and unevenly recognized social actors that emerge, strategize, and operate among and beyond formal organizations. This organizational perspective on systemic irresponsibility moves beyond accounts centered on the destructive nature of capitalist societies and the asymmetric domination of societies by corporations. I first conceptualize organizational monsters through varying configurations of organizationality and strategizing, showing how they scatter collective actorhood across time, space and organizational layers, and thereby make responsibility impossible. I then trace their destructive force by examining how they ruin social, ecological, and semiotic worlds, thus undermining the conditions of collective life. Against this backdrop, I argue that organizational monsters both emerge from and reproduce a technicist social order, in which technique has become autonomous and self-augmenting. By linking organizationality, strategizing, and technique, I contend that organizational monsters not only make responsibility impossible, but also meaningless. I conclude on what politics of refusal could look like in organizational sociology, management and organization studies.