Ambiguous Actorhood: Twenty-First Century Firms and the Evasion of Responsibility

Sociologists have long argued that the cultural construction of organizations as social actors underpins public expectations of corporate accountability. In recent decades, however, the unified bureaucratic structures that once sustained this construction have given way to increasingly fragmented and opaque organizational forms. This study considers to what extent the diffuse, often illegible nature of twenty-first century corporations undermines the ability of public audiences to demand corporate accountability. We argue that complex, fragmented organizational configurations allow firms to partially evade the negative reputational consequences of misconduct by confounding audiences and obfuscating the “actor” behind the bad organizational action. Drawing on a vignette- based survey experiment, we test whether fragmentation reduces attributions of blame following corporate wrongdoing. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that while respondents generally attribute high levels of blame for wrongdoing, greater fragmentation decreases the blame directed at core firms and heightens audiences’ uncertainty about responsibility. Moreover, in fragmented structures, blame is not simply redistributed to auxiliary entities but is diminished overall. These findings suggest that as corporate structures grow more complex and less legible, the underlying actors behind organizational action become harder to identify and construct, and thereby harder to hold to account.

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