Agribusiness Organizing in the Philippine South: The Intertextual Power Play of Weather and Market Agencies

Abstract

This paper shows how an agribusiness in a remote agrarian village in the Philippines has been organized in traditional ways amid technological advancements and the free market. The paper draws on the Montreal School’s CCO approach, which holds that organizing begins at the level of interaction and that nonhumans make a difference in social formation. Through analyzing the text exchanges between farm actors, the paper surfaces the agencies of the most ventriloquized agricultural actants within their talks. Imagined in Bakhtin’s dialogical world, multiple voices were made to interplay across time and space creating tensions, on one hand, and facilitating the assimilation of similar qualities of ideologically differing voices, on the other. This paper stresses that the ideological difference of interplaying voices can be blurred in the process of assimilation or in the constitution of an organization. The “intertextual play of power” of multiple voices offers a postcolonial perspective in examining power in organization studies.