Micro-Sociology of Organizations: What Can It Offer?

Organizations are everywhere, permeating almost every arena of life (Bromely & Meyer, 2025). We’re born in organizations, raised in organizations, schooled in organizations. They cover our subsistence needs: from food and health care to social contact and political influence. Most of us work in organizations or at least interact with or through organizations when working. Our spare time is equally framed by organized sports or platforms like Strava, linking us through expectations and comparisons. All this - doing things in organization with others - is perhaps the most important trait distinguishing human beings from other living beings (Tomasello, 2019; Harari, 2014).

The pervasive organizational presence concerns us fundamentally as individuals. To grasp this reality, we need to know how we engage in organizations on an individual and relational level. It is through situated interactions and practices that are embedded in, presuppose, and produce material objects that organizations ultimately happen. To understand the implications of this both for individuals as well as organizations, we have to study the interface between organizations and individual actors and that is the topic of the micro-sociology of organizations.

In this session, we will bring together a broad variety of studies that can be placed under the micro-sociology of human beings in organizations with others. This includes physical co-presence and deliberate digital relating. These approaches are typically qualitative, descriptive, and interpretative, focusing on the situated dynamics of groups and networks.