The Last Account: Answerability as a condition of collective actorhood

Preprint of the article "The Last Account: Answerability as a condition of collective actorhood", submitted to Organization Theory (SAGE, on behalf of EGOS). The article asks what a collective retains when it has delegated the coordination, the analysis and the production of its work to systems that are not people. It argues that what remains is the capacity to answer for what is produced, and that this capacity is not a residue but a condition of the properties by which organizations are usually recognised. The argument proceeds from a regress: verifying an output produces an output which somebody must in turn stand behind, and the regress terminates where answerability terminates and not where the verifier becomes reliable enough. Three candidate stopping points are examined, the technical one, the collective one and the personal one, and the third is retained. The result is read against the question of organizationality. Of the three criteria proposed by Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015), the article argues that the second one, collective actorhood, is not self-standing: it rests on a distribution of answerability that terminates outside the collective's own communication, in the persons who occupy what the article calls terminal positions. This gives an answer to the closing question of Dion, Cooren and Dupuis (2025) about the organizationality of what. The consequences developed include a reading of the boundary of the firm that is not a boundary of cost, an account of what flattening does to the terminal position when the volume to be answered for is rising, four observable indicators of overload, four design constraints, and a treatment of collectives in which nobody answers. The article is conceptual. It contains no data, no tables and no figures, and it offers no numbered propositions: it is written in what Cornelissen, Hollerer and Seidl (2021) call a perspectival form of theorizing. For that reason there is no replication package: there is nothing to replicate. Companion article: a formal and empirical treatment of the same verification constraint is developed separately by the same authors and is under review elsewhere. The two articles make different contributions. The companion explains a mechanism with a model and data; this one reframes an object. Length: approximately 12,050 words of prose, 25 references. Declaration on the use of generative artificial intelligence: the authors used a generative artificial intelligence assistant to draft prose under their specification and to assist with the location of public sources. All claims and source attributions were verified by the authors against the primary texts, the argument was specified by the authors, and the authors take full responsibility for the content of the article.