The Contested Display of Formal Organization: Exploring the Multiple Roles of Corporate Charts in Organizational and Regulatory Action

The organization chart is a contested artifact. Some see it as representing key features of organizations, while others regard it as less relevant in today’s increasingly networked, team-based, and digitized environments. Additionally, some consider it a performative device, used primarily to legitimate or impress. The paper addresses this ambiguity by examining the role of corporate charts in organizational and regulatory activities. Using the distinction between manifest, assumed, extant, and requisite organization (Brown, 1965), it explores the charts of Danske Bank’s functional structure in the context of the money-laundering scandal that unfolded at the bank. The paper demonstrates that although the bank’s own charts manifested only a fluctuating and incomplete formal organization, they were accepted by stakeholders for a considerable time. Later, legal investigators of the scandal created new charts to represent the bank’s extant organization – i.e. revealing the actual authority structure during the money-laundering activities – and to clarify what the requisite organization should have been. The paper argues that these multiple roles of organization charts make them valuable objects of analysis and that their inherent ambiguity reflects broader tensions surrounding formal organization.