As work and organizational reality become increasingly "post-bureaucratic," the conventional and stable bases of a person's authority-their position, their expertise, or the acquiescence of a subordinate-are eroding. This evolution calls us to revise our understanding of authority, and to consider more deeply how it is achieved in contexts that are both fluid and fragmented. Building on a six-month autoethnography of a consulting assignment, we show that authority is a practical, relational, and situated performance. It exists in a tension between two mirroring processes, activation and passivation, through which relations are either leveraged or downplayed to shape the situation and steer collective action. Our study also reveals that the performance of authority involves not just people, but also a broader range of actants, including artifacts and abstract entities. In line with current research on performativity in organizations, our findings contribute to the relational program on authority and the revelation of its sociomaterial dimension. Thus, we provide an action-based understanding of authority that is better suited for the study of post-bureaucratic organizing.

How does one learn and build credibility simultaneously? Such is the challenge faced by an increasing number of professionals, who must quickly get to grips with new assignments while displaying sufficient knowledge to be regarded as experts. If they do not, they will be unable to exert influence over the situation. To address this puzzle, we draw on data from 21 months of participant observation during consulting assignments, and interviews with 79 management consultants. Building on Goffman's notion of face, we identify 'learning-credibility tension'-a discrepancy between a newcomer position that requires professionals to learn, and a role-based image that requires credibility-as a salient and costly issue during organizational entry. Specifically, we find that consultants experience threats to their face during interactions with clients. They deal with these threats by performing individual tactics that help them reduce the anxiety associated with learning-credibility tension, and support their relationship with clients. Our study builds theory in socialization by revealing tactics that allow professionals to keep face while seeking the information they require to adjust to new settings. We also contribute to substantive debates on management consulting by relating insights from the sociology of professions to contemporary knowledge workers.

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.

The diagrammatic slideshow constitutes a crucial communicational instrument in management consulting. However, its semiotic implications remain poorly understood. How do consultants create slides that they deem significant? How do they recognize a good slide or an effective diagram? What practical criteria do they use? To tackle these questions, we develop a pragmatist approach based on the theory of signs of Charles S. Peirce. Drawing from data collected through ethnographic participant observation, our study analyzes how a team of consultants drafts a single slide intended to represent the problems of a client organization and assesses the evolving strength of the document. We identify three recurrent conditions of robustness—impact, accuracy, and layout—and discuss them in the light of Peirce’s distinction of iconic, indexical, and symbolic capacities in signification.

This chapter presents three perspectives that show what kind of difference bodies, spaces, and other physical aspects make in interaction and how that difference can be analyzed in terms of power and authority. The first perspective, presented by Vincent Denault and Pierrich Plusquellec, consists in considering the human body not only as a subject but also as the object of analysis and reflects on ways in which experimental research on nonverbal communication may complete observation of naturally occurring interaction. The second, presented by Nicolas Bencherki and Alaric Bourgoin, proposes a decentering of analysis towards objects and suggest that it is possible to describe them as communicating without reducing them to tools that are only relevant when they are used by human individuals. Finally, a last perspective, presented by François Cooren and Huey-Rong Chen, bridges the gap between verbal and non-verbal communication and proposes a ventriloquial analysis that embraces the confusion between human and non-human participants rather than seeking to neatly sort them out.

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One of the fastest-growing occupational groups in the US is expert service workers: knowledge workers who sell their expert knowledge and services on the free market. In this paper, we offer a comparative case study of how expert service workers, whom are hired for their professional evaluations, navigate the tensions of the expert service-client relation in a specific but critical way: How do they convince others that their professional recommendations are credible? Specifically, we draw on two disparate cases of expert evaluators, book reviewers and management consultants, and document two communicative patterns that these professional groups use to build the credibility of their professional recommendations: (i) transparency and (ii) distanciation. Similarities in the credibility tactics of these two sets of expert service workers from two very different worlds, the Arts and business, suggest their generalizable value. Hence, we conclude by discussing how our findings offer a general approach we call, the evaluative triangle, for studying the credibility tactics of expert claims across multiple worlds of work.

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