Local? Global? No, Dislocal!

How can we describe and analyze the details of interactions while showing that they literally contribute to the constitution of an organization? While this issue is hardly new, it is our hope that our answer will prove to be original. We undertake this analysis using a concrete situation to illustrate how “scaling up” occurs through actions that first appear to be locally performed. To do so, we will introduce concepts that have been developed by Bruno Latour (1986; 1994; 1996; 1999) to depict and analyze how non-human entities tend to not only dislocate interactions, but also stabilize them. This bottom-up perspective will then enable us to show that interactions are never completely local. Instead, they are what we call, using a neologism, “dis-local,” that is, their local achievement always mobilizes a variety of entities—documents, rules, protocols, architectural elements, machines, technological devices—that dislocate, i.e., “put out of place” (Webster’s Dictionary) what initially appeared to be “in place,” i.e., local. Our analyses will show that the “here and now” is always contaminated by the “there and then” (whether in the past or future). However, and this is the main point of our argument, this “there and then” was or will be another “here and now.” We never leave the level of events and actions even as these events become linked to one another through space and time. Paraphrasing Latour (1993) while giving it a Derridian flavor, we could say that the immanent (micro) is always already transcendent (macro).

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