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

Carly R. Knight, Adam Goldstein Sociological Science January 27, 2026 10.15195/v13.a4 Abstract 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