Abstract
How do multiple possible action trajectories progressively narrow into one failing line of activity? While escalation of commitment scholars have long puzzled over this question, their tendency to conflate escalation with persistence and treat commitment as primarily cognitive compromises the concept’s theoretical precision and practical relevance. Adopting a communicative-relational ontology, we reconceptualize escalation as a process of communicatively constituted, ventriloquial attachment. We draw on an in-depth study of an interorganizational team to trace how such an attachment to the idea of working with blockchain technology emerged and progressively intensified in members’ interaction, pulling the team toward a single line of activity while alternatives were increasingly sidelined to a point where detaching became seemingly impossible. Our findings introduce the concept of escalating attachment, emphasizing how escalating processes are dynamic, relational accomplishments that both pull action forward along select lines of activity and hold it in place. This, we claim, resonates with practitioners’ lived experiences of how they not only hold onto an idea but also become progressively held by that very same idea. Further, our insights contribute to the communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) literature by lifting scholars’ focus away from situated (inter)action and toward how (inter)actions connect.
Keywords
Escalation: Moving from commitment to attachment
The phenomenon of escalating commitment—commonly described as “the act of ‘carrying on’ with questionable or failing courses of action” (Sleesman et al., 2018: 178)—has long attracted interest across the social sciences. Since Staw and Fox’s (1977) influential work in this journal nearly half a century ago, hundreds of studies have explored escalation across various fields, including organization and management (e.g., Brockner, 1992), economics (e.g., Berg et al., 2009), and social psychology (e.g., Zhang and Baumeister, 2006). Across these literatures, scholars have sought to understand how certain ideas steer professionals toward—and keep them engaged with—paths that initially seem promising but eventually turn into counterproductive dead ends. Yet, despite this extensive body of work, we argue that the dominant way of understanding escalating commitment (cf., Sleesman et al., 2012, 2018) contains a tension that limits its theoretical power and practical utility for explaining social relations in contemporary work settings. As we will explain, reinterpreting escalating commitment goes some way toward addressing recent calls for more theoretically rich and practically useful insights of the concept and how it plays out in organizational life “in vivo and in situ” (Kremser and Sydow, 2022: 10).
Salancik’s (1977) often-cited study defines commitment as a psychological “state of being” (p. 62) that retrospectively binds decision-makers to past actions (Schwenk, 1986), while escalation denotes movement; an intensity that can become increasingly difficult to halt or undo (Friedman and Currall, 2003; Rubin et al., 1994). Much of the escalation literature draws on cognitive dissonance theory and its “basic inference that individuals will continue investing in a losing course of action to avoid admitting a mistake” (Cornelissen and Durand, 2014: 1010; see also Brockner and Rubin, 1985; Drummond, 2014; Staw, 1976), alongside related explanations such as self-justification (e.g., Arkes and Blumer, 1985; Gómez and Sánchez, 2013; Soman, 2001; Staw, 1981) and self-presentation (e.g., Brockner et al., 1981; 1986; Fox and Staw, 1979; Greer and Stephens, 2001). Subsequent work has acknowledged that escalating commitment is also shaped by broader organizational and institutional contexts. Factors such as political pressures, intraorganizational politics, and institutional logics are thus mobilized to explain why decision-makers persist, even long after the consequences of earlier decisions have been felt (e.g., Berente et al., 2022; Guler, 2007; Reinecke and Donaghey, 2025).
We suggest that this dominant cognitive orientation has an unfortunate side effect: escalation comes to appear more like a binary choice or outcome (i.e., whether a decision-maker persists or desists with a course of action) rather than an intensifying, uneven, and partly unpredictable process. In simpler terms, cognitive methods tend to equate escalation with steady persistence (see also Drummond, 2014). What tends to fade from view are the unexpected, fluctuating, and situated patterns and paces through which courses of action plateau, then steepen, slow down, then speed up, as work unfolds over time.
A smaller, more contemporary set of studies moves away from this cognitive either-or framing. Drawing on Latourian theory (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987, 2005), these works offer in situ accounts of how workers become increasingly drawn into particular paths (e.g., Mähring et al., 2004; Ungureanu et al., 2019). They demonstrate how decision-makers enroll artifacts, such as the computerized baggage handling system of an International Airport or the prototypes of a new science park’s prospective buildings, to translate, inscribe, and reinforce their escalating commitment to a course of action. While these studies approach escalation more as a process moving through stages, artifacts are largely theorized as intermediaries of human will, rendering escalation as a relatively predictable outcome of strategic enrollment.
Scholars within the Montreal School of communication as constitutive of organization (CCO; Ashcraft et al., 2009), by contrast, emphasize that translations are always imperfect (Cooren, 2000) and that artifacts often escape their human counterparts’ intentions (Vásquez et al., 2016). More broadly, CCO scholarship shows how organizational phenomena arise, persist, and evolve through situated communicative practices (Basque et al., 2022; Schoeneborn et al., 2019). Recent work has further developed the CCO perspective through what has been termed a communicative relationality ontology (Kuhn et al., 2017). From this view, organizational phenomena are not only products of communication but also fundamentally relational, that is, composed of, held together through, and continuously reshaped by the relations that form in interaction and (re)configure what comes next.
Adopting this ontology, fellow CCO scholars have reinvigorated long-standing organizational concepts—like mediation, authority, and reflexivity (Brummans et al., 2022; Hollis et al., 2026; Meier and Carroll, 2023)—by foregrounding the shifting relations that form in communication between humans and other-than-humans and through which organizational phenomena become what they are. Communicative relationality offers a way of capturing organizational phenomena with greater dynamism, closer to action as it unfolds, and with heightened sensitivity to the heterogeneous actors involved; precisely the kind of in situ appreciation that recent escalation work has called for but not yet fully developed (Kremser and Sydow, 2022).
For us, this ontological perspective holds particular purchase for rethinking escalating commitment not as a binary (personal) choice or outcome that can, somewhat predictably, be restricted or aided by specific objects, contexts, factors, or preferences, but as a continuous relational process that is “closer to life lived forward, where outcomes are necessarily uncertain, and practitioners can always choose to act differently” (Kremser and Sydow, 2022: 1). Studying escalation from this angle shifts attention away from a single decision moment that actors then “stick with,” and toward the ongoing communicative work through which certain possibilities become repeatedly prioritized, reinforced, and made consequential, often in ways that gradually narrow what can reasonably be done next.
The idea of ventriloquial attachment (Cooren, 2010) offers a particularly useful entry point into communicative relationality (cf., Meier and Carroll, 2023) and to begin addressing Kremser and Sydow’s (2022) call. Ventriloquism starts from the simple idea that people never act alone: what they say and do is always animated by ideas, values, or concerns that matter to them and that make themselves present in interaction (Cooren and Sandler, 2014). Action, from this view, does not originate in individuals alone but takes shape through ongoing relations between human interactants and the many voices that find expression through what these humans say and do. When certain voices, ideas, or concerns repeatedly animate interaction, they begin to matter more (Bencherki et al., 2021), orienting what is pursued and what is left aside. It is often precisely such attachments (to voices or concerns that matter more than others) that move people to continue along certain paths.
Yet while attachment is central to how ventriloquation works, it is typically implied rather than examined in its own right. We know relatively little about how attachments themselves form, intensify, and stabilize through communicative practice. This gap becomes particularly relevant when studying the escalation of commitment. If attachments progressively shape what comes to count as relevant, sensible, or worth pursuing, then escalation may unfold not because of an actor’s decision to persist, but because detaching from what has gained weight in interaction becomes increasingly difficult. Focus, therefore, rests not on how someone’s persistent commitment causes a failing course of action, but on how escalating intensities of attachment progressively grip and pull action trajectories toward some lines of activity while pushing others out of view, until only a single (failing) one remains.
Moving from escalation of commitment to escalating attachment, therefore, edges us towards a more in situ appreciation of how action courses fail. We therefore ask: how do escalating attachments communicatively constitute failing courses of action? We explore this question through an ethnographic-inspired study of an interorganizational team working on blockchain, 1 drawing on video-recorded meetings, documents, and interviews. At the project’s start, members set out to work with a promising yet complex technology that they gradually find themselves unable to turn away from, even as it becomes increasingly ineffective for their purposes. Fittingly, we trace how members and blockchain become progressively “chained,” while alternative options become increasingly “blocked” from view.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: We first outline our theoretical framework on communicative relationality and ventriloquial attachment. Next, we introduce our case and analytical process. Our findings offer a relational account of how the attachment to a promising idea communicatively forms and, over time, escalates to a point where only a single (and ultimately futile) line of activity remains within the project. We conclude by discussing the main theoretical contribution of our work—the concept of escalating attachment—which captures how potentially innumerable trajectories of practice become pulled toward and keep being gripped to progressively specific and eventually singular lines of activity in and through ongoing communicative work.
Communicative relationality
Extending the social sciences’ so-called “relational turn” (e.g., Barad, 2003, 2007; Cooper, 2005; Emirbayer, 1997), communicative relationality (Kuhn et al., 2017) has emerged as a productive ontology for scholars working at the intersection of organization studies and communication studies. This ontological perspective originates from and has gained increasing prominence within the Montreal and Boulder Schools of CCO (cf., Schoeneborn and Vásquez, 2017). Scholars adopting this ontology explore the ways in which organizations, organizing, and organizational phenomena are always provisionally unfolding through unceasing streams of human and other-than-human relations that continuously flow through and affect communicative practice (Kuhn et al., 2017).
Communicative relationality’s insistence that a plenum of actors are constantly interrelating eschews the notion that any single actor can be designated as causing a course of action to unfold along a particular path. Its flat ontology likewise rejects the idea of structural forces conditioning action from some presumed ether. Rather than separating actors, structures, or forces and preemptively or retrospectively assigning primary or intermediary agency, communicative relationality attends to interrelating actors’ “texture[s] of contact” (Kuhn et al., 2017: 62). Accordingly, while the courses of action that relations occasion may be (somewhat) predictable, they are (always) provisional: relations are arbitrary trajectories of practice, the “realization” of some possibilities out of innumerable others. Although their enactment tends to develop habitual, territorial defenses that perpetuate some patterns down the line, they could always be accomplished otherwise, and they frequently veer off course. Relations teem at once with predictability, volatility, excess, and surprise, and it is only clear in retrospect—and even then, only provisionally—which of those features might win out for a time. (Kuhn et al., 2017: 32–33, emphasis added)
This core tenet of communicative relationality has aided CCO scholars writing in Human Relations and elsewhere to reinvigorate longstanding organizational concepts with greater dynamism. Brummans et al.’s (2022) study of conflict mediation sessions, for instance, highlights how shifting relational webs, including mediators, disputants, and texts, increase or diminish the prospects of conflict resolution. This constellation of actors both constitutes and becomes constituted by relations that often reconnect but can also, to varying degrees, disconnect disputants, offering a more nuanced account than that typically forwarded by conflict management research. Meier and Carroll (2023) problematize individualized accounts of reflexivity that treat someone (the “I”) as reflexive about something (the “it”). Instead, drawing on a leadership development program, they show how communicative relationality supplies the ontological wherewithal to reconceptualize how the “‘I’ and the ‘it’ are in constant formation, as is their mutual relation” (2023: 1092). Finally, Hollis et al. (2026) utilize communicative relationality in their ethnography of an eponymous cosmetics firm. Centering makeup artist-client consultations, they show how situated eponymic authority claims conjoin human and other-than-human actors in ways that often “lend weight” to actors’ claims but can also “weigh [actors] down” (2026: 667). Eponyms’ equivocality (i.e., whether the individual founder, the collective firm, or both are interrelating with the artist) and the intensity of their conjoining means claims’ effects can never be (wholly) foreseen. Across these studies, the central idea is that agency is hybrid and continually emerging through relations. As a result, while practices may appear patterned, the multiple agencies involved—each constituted within these relations—ensure that such patterns are never fully under human control.
With this paper, then, we aim to rejuvenate another concept of long-standing interest in organization studies, one that has arguably become somewhat theoretically dated and practically less impactful: escalation of commitment. What would change in our understanding of this phenomenon if we loosened its firm grounding or origins in cognition, the individual, structural factors, and cause-and-effect explanations, and instead—as called for by Kremser and Sydow (2022)—studied it as a relational, interactional accomplishment, one that forms, configures, shifts, and stabilizes through an ever-unfolding stream of action that it both feeds off and feeds back into itself? Our goal is to tease out precisely these dynamics in our analysis, employing the advanced relational tools CCO has to offer for this purpose: ventriloquism (Cooren, 2010) and, in particular, its concept of attachment.
Ventriloquial attachment
At its core, François Cooren’s (2010) ventriloquial theory problematizes organization and management studies’ typically reductionistic handling of interaction, which often equates communication with “two or more people sending thoughts to one another via symbols” (cf., Hollis et al., 2026: 669). Blending Bakhtin’s (1981 [1975]) notion of ventriloquation—whereby multiple voices are always enfolded into and unfolding through the written and spoken word (Cooren and Sandler, 2014)—with Goldblatt’s (2006) vaudeville imagery of communicative acts always comprising a ventriloquist (vent) and a puppet, Cooren’s thesis is that action is always and invariably an effect of distributed agency.
Many different forms of agency, such as principles, values, emotions, etc., can thus be likened to ventriloquial voices that both move people to (re)act within interactions (rendering these people puppet-like) and are themselves made to “speak” in specific ways through those same actors (in this latter case, people are the vents; see also Cooren, 2010; Nathues et al., 2021). Agency, in this sense, is never (pre-)designated or owned by any single actor but is always emerging relationally. This makes ventriloquism a productive lens for exploring how courses of action may unfold in ways that people may plan or intend but can never fully control (cf. Hollis and Wright, 2024). Importantly, norms, ideologies, conventions, etc., are not lying in wait to unilaterally shape action; rather, they are always unpredictably melding with human agency through talk and text as interaction unfolds (Cooren et al., 2013).
To analytically (not ontologically, as ventriloquial scholars subscribe to communicative relationality’s flat ontology) grasp this distributed agency in motion, ventriloquial scholars distinguish between upstream and downstream ventriloquism (Nathues et al., 2024). Upstream, ventriloquial analysts explore what moves interactants to speak and act as they do by tracing the figures that come to matter through them; downstream, they follow how these same figures subsequently take part in shaping what happens next by forming new relations or entering (and potentially altering) existing ones. This bi-directionality is crucial to our argument, for it foregrounds how what becomes expressed and related in communication feeds back into what unfolds subsequently, in a continually oscillating, never-ending flow. In this way, downstream effects can produce new upstream “conditions,” which might step-by-step (or relation-by-relation, if you prefer) direct action along one path or line of activity more so than any other; “perpetuat[ing] some patterns down the line,” in the words of Kuhn et al. (2017: 32).
When an upstream voice repeatedly or forcefully moves an actor along a particular downstream line of activity, this implies some form of attachment between the two (Cooren, 2010). Unlike most escalation studies, which equate commitment with cold, rational, logic-based decision-making, attachments can broadly be understood as affectionate relations that form and intensify among various human and other-than-human beings and things (e.g., Hennion, 2017; Hennion and Gomart, 1999; Landri, 2007). For example, attachments (at stems from the Latin ad, meaning to or toward) may form between ourselves and friends, families, and significant others, but also with our pets, favorite books, habits, principles and values, careers, ideas, and even the plans and images we hold of our future. These attachments shape our actions, often in ways that make it hard for us to de-tach (de stems from dis, meaning apart).
Attachments’ strength or intensity could be said to vary along a continuum from weaker and fleeting to stronger and more binding (Hennion, 2017; Hennion and Gomart, 1999; Latour, 1999). What may initially appear as a tempting idea can, for instance, gain importance, priority, and emotional significance as it becomes repeatedly picked up, refined, and reaffirmed in interaction. Over time, the attachment to this idea may indeed grow so strong that detaching from it becomes difficult, if not impossible, which, in the flow of interaction, can set in motion a path where action increasingly seems to have only one remaining action course.
This dynamic is visible, for example, in Brummans et al.’s (2013, 2020) work, which shows how the voice of the spiritual leader was repeatedly invoked in a renowned Taiwanese Buddhist humanitarian organization, orienting members’ actions along a particular line of action rather than others. Similarly, Nathues et al. (2021) describe how nurses and hospital staff continually invoked values of care when discussing patient treatment, which, in turn, led them to invest time and energy well beyond what they were formally required to do. A comparable intensification of attachment is documented by Poroli and Cooren (2024), who show how recurrent invocations of organizational concerns such as unity, visibility, and performance progressively stabilized particular interpretations of social responsibility while muting alternative ones. As these concerns were repeatedly mobilized to close discussions and move action forward, attachments to specific courses of action deepened, gradually narrowing what could still be questioned or pursued. In all three cases, recurrent invocations reveal strong(er) attachments that seem to move the protagonists to act in specific ways, almost dictating their utterances, understandings, and subsequent action steps.
We can thus say that what we are ventriloquially attached to can, quite literally, act back upon us (thus the notion of bi-directionality). Indeed, attachments can enable and constrain us, drive and exhaust us, or orient and confuse us (sometimes all at once). This is exactly what makes ventriloquial attachment such a useful conceptual tool for reenvisaging escalation of commitment, especially when aiming for a more relational exploration. Whereas the term commitment often carries strong cognitive connotations of human decision-making, attending to escalating attachments foregrounds the complex, dynamic, and messy ways in which actors interrelate and the action courses that these interrelations produce (or set aside).
In what follows, we introduce our empirical setting and outline the analytical steps through which we traced attachments in communication, following how their escalating intensity pulls courses of action forward along ever-narrowing lines of activity.
Empirical case and analytical process
Empirical case
This study draws on data from a four-member interorganizational project team. The team was formed as part of a regional Dutch interorganizational collaboration initiative and was tasked by the initiative’s steering group with developing a digital document system to track products through production cycles using automated logging procedures. However, already in the first meeting, two members (Max and Tom) suggested shifting focus to blockchain technology. Intriguingly, they remained committed to this new direction throughout the project, even when immense hurdles and complications arose. Meanwhile, the other two members either became increasingly convinced (Ben) or remained only mildly persuaded (Anna) about blockchain’s viability. In that sense, stronger and weaker attachments formed between members and the idea of working on the technology. With our analyses, we seek to better understand how the attachments between project members and blockchain emerged and, at least for some members, escalated in their situated communicative practices, and to tease out the precise ways in which these relations progressively narrowed the many action trajectories possible at the start of the project to a single line of failing activity.
Project members met 11 times over 13 months (between January 2019 and February 2020; given the team composition, all meetings were held in English). Adopting an ethnographic-inspired approach, one of the first authors attended and video-recorded nine of these meetings (meetings 1–8 and 11), while a trained assistant replaced her in the two sessions she could not attend (9 and 10). In total, 770 minutes of video material were collected. Additionally, two interviews were conducted with each member (after meetings 3 and 8), and 28 team documents were collected, including presentation slides, minutes, and reports. In our analysis, we primarily focused on the video-recorded meetings, aligning with our interest in the situated formation and escalating effects of the attachment between project members and the idea of working on blockchain. The interview data and collected documents were used to supplement our analyses and cross-check interpretations.
Analytical process
Our analysis unfolded in two stages. First, we developed a processual understanding of how the work on blockchain evolved from an initial suggestion to a concrete plan to an actual prototype. Only then did we delve deeper into the relations established between the project members and the idea of working on blockchain and how these shaped the work trajectory.
Mapping blockchain’s development
In the first stage, we approached our empirical material with the analytical question of how blockchain became present at different moments, allowing us to trace the project’s development over time. We drew inspiration from Martine and Cooren’s (2016) exploration of how a creative idea progressively materialized; first through simple words, then sketches, and eventually tangible prototypes. Thus, working through our data, we identified the various attributes, meanings, artifacts, functionalities, etc., through which blockchain became present in the team’s meetings.
Initially, blockchain was described in abstract and aspirational terms, linked to attributes such as “innovative,” “out-of-the-box,” and “new,” or characterized as a “mystery,” “fun idea,” or “buzzword” (meeting 1). As the team worked more concretely with the technology, their blockchain idea materialized as a detailed and ambitious written plan, complete with milestones and specifications (meeting 2). However, over time, this plan was progressively scaled back, with the envisioned blockchain solution becoming increasingly thin (meetings 3–5) and eventually pointless (“there is no point for blockchain then,” meeting 6). Key blockchain features, such as payment processes, legal aspects, and specification fields, were stripped away from the plan and prototype, and rather than engaging real suppliers, the team decided to simulate supplier roles themselves.
Nonetheless, members kept working on blockchain. The technology continued to draw them in; so much so that some became unable to detach from it, even as it led them down an increasingly unviable path. The excitement of experimenting with something innovative seemed to outweigh the practical benefits of pursuing a more functional solution. At this point, we decided to investigate in greater depth the attachment between blockchain and members and its role in shaping the project’s unfolding.
Examining the attachment between members and blockchain
To analyze (a) how the attachment between project members and the idea of working on blockchain emerged and intensified in situated communicative practices and (b) how this escalating attachment directed the project’s trajectory, we drew on Nathues et al.’s (2021) four-phase ventriloquial framework. The most developed of communicative relationality’s suite of analytical tools (Meier and Carroll, 2023), ventriloquism has aided scores of constitutive scholars to analyze situated action (e.g., Meier and Carroll, 2020; Poroli and Cooren, 2024; Slager et al., 2024). It is to the framework’s potential to explore ventriloquial attachments’ possible “stabilization across time and space” (Nathues et al., 2021: 1473) that we found particular promise and now turn.
First, we dissected all moments in which the idea of working on blockchain was discussed from the video-recorded meetings. We then “identified” and “grouped” (phases 1 and 2; Nathues et al., 2021: 1462) the various ventriloquial voices or figures that participated in these exchanges through what team members were saying and doing. The framework’s three analytical questions (i.e., What is a person invoking with what she is saying and doing?, What voice can be recognized in what a person is saying or doing?, and What appears to lead a person to say what she is saying or do what she is doing?) helped us to look up and down the stream of communication (Nathues et al., 2024) and scrutinize both explicit and implicit ventriloquations, that is, both those ventriloquial voices that were openly present in members’ utterances and actions but also those that were partaking in more covert ways (e.g., when we heard ideals of exploration and innovation speak through the words members used). It is important to note at this point that a ventriloquial analysis is never devoid of humans; rather, its analytical questions problematize putting humans at the center of action and agency by helping us tease out the many additional voices that talk and act alongside and through them, up and down the stream of communication. When ventriloquial analysts scrutinize the sayings and doings of human interactants, it is hence always with the intention of decentering these humans and developing more relational, multi-vocal accounts of the phenomenon under study.
Working through phase 3 of the framework (“assigning activities,” Nathues et al., 2021: 1462), we then carefully deciphered what the ventriloquial figures were doing or performing in the unfolding interaction, which relational constellations they entered and altered, and how that altogether shaped the project’s ongoing trajectory. For instance, we identified the voices trend, mystery, and buzzword, grouped them into the cluster blockchain as a trend, and traced how they recurrently animated the conversations of project members by cultivating an atmosphere of innovation and excitement that gave rise to an emerging and later on intensifying attachment to the technology and carried the project forward along the path of working on blockchain. Similarly, we identified the voices of the initiative’s project leader and steering group, grouped them into the cluster initiative voices, and specified how they continuously legitimized the team’s idea of working on blockchain, which in turn strengthened the relational ties between project members and their work on this technology.
Working toward a broader overview, we abstracted four overarching dynamics from the activities we assigned in phase 3, to explain (a) how the attachment between blockchain and members formed and strengthened in and through what members said and did, and (b) how this affected their project’s trajectory. Each of these dynamics, hence, specifies the attachment’s escalating intensity and lays out how this escalation progressively configured different possible lines of activity for the project to continue unfolding along (or not). Teasing out how attachments give rise to such configurations is helpful, we find, not just to reveal how attachments’ degrees of intensity have differing effects on ongoing action, but also for the movement the image of lines implies. Table 1 provides an overview of these relational dynamics, but we also explain them in greater depth next as we move into the findings.
Attachment’s escalating intensities and how they shape the project’s unfolding.
Findings
As we will show, voices supporting the shift to blockchain take hold of the project’s interactional flow from the outset, finding their initial anchoring points in Max and Tom through whom they resonate strongly. This sets in motion an emerging attachment that increasingly pulls the team’s efforts toward the technology, giving rise to a new potential line of activity for the project, alongside its original one (working on a digital document system). Blockchain’s appeal is further strengthened as the project progresses: more and more voices in favor of the technology cluster around members’ ongoing discussions, gather force, and solicit further affirmation. This, in turn, strengthens the attachment between members and their idea of working on blockchain and intensifies the pull toward the technology, with working on blockchain becoming the increasingly dominant line of activity.
Members begin sidestepping hurdles that threaten the blockchain idea, such as by moving them out of the scope, replacing them with their own voices, or calling them forth in dismissive ways, with the attachment progressively blinding them to alternative action courses and centering working on blockchain as the most dominant line of activity. In combination, these dynamics escalate the pulls toward the idea of working on blockchain in magnitude and intensity, progressively making members unable to let go as they become caught up in the escalating attachment. While the now-binding attachment to their idea enthuses and drives members (albeit at varying rates), it simultaneously imposes itself upon the project, dragging possible action trajectories down a line of activity that the team cannot control.
Next, we illustrate and investigate these dynamics in greater depth, zooming in on four moments (as vignettes; see also Table 1). The vignettes focus on the project’s first and middle parts, as these appeared most significant given the emerging, strengthening, blinding, and binding attachment between project members and the idea of working on blockchain.
Emerging attachment: Blockchain as a promising idea
When the project starts, its trajectory quickly shifts: rather than the initially planned digital document system, voices favoring blockchain begin to surface in discussions. Vignette 1 illustrates how these voices gather around and resonate primarily through two team members, Max and Tom. An attachment between these two members and the idea of working on blockchain emerges, but the technology’s perceived potential is also pulling Ben into its orbit.
Blockchain as a promising idea.
As we see, the new idea of working on blockchain finds expression through Max, who wonders whether blockchain is “something that [project members] can do” (line 2), a possibility that Ben appears ready to consider (line 3). Max then mentions that he has already discussed this new idea with the initiative leader, whose response he explicitly ventriloquizes: “Well, that’s not a problem because that’s why we have these kinds of experiments” (lines 5 and 6). The initiative leader is not only staged as supporting this new idea; he is also made to present the overall initiative as existing precisely for such exploratory moves. Changing course to blockchain is thereby constructed as the initiative’s ideal focus, triggering the formation of a new, but already very promising, relation between the project and this emerging idea.
Ben’s verbal and nonverbal acknowledgments signal his approval (line 7), which further strengthens this relation and the project’s potential shift toward another line of activity. Additional voices that stress blockchain’s novelty, innovativeness, and project fit enter through Tom, who characterizes the idea as “out of the box” (line 8), a point that Max endorses (line 9). Tom then takes this reasoning further, explicitly voicing his desire to use the project to investigate “something that doesn’t even exist (.) perhaps cannot even exist technically” (line 11). Staged in this way, the technology’s indeterminacy becomes a source of attraction; one that members have the opportunity to explore in the setting of the initiative and project (line 12), which Ben again acknowledges (line 13).
Tom also names a possible counterargument when he adds, “Of course, to actually use it as a company, well, there is
Across the above turns, one can argue that blockchain is made present in a way that fosters an atmosphere of excitement and innovation around the technology. It appears that precisely this lure begins to work on the group, giving rise to an emerging attachment among project members to the idea of working on blockchain. This emerging attachment is drawing the project away from its linear course of action (the original plan of working on a digital document system) and closer toward this novel line of activity (as a more daring and promising possibility). In other words, in situ pulls toward blockchain are set in motion, hooking at least two (if not three) team members to the idea and charting a new, promising line of activity within the project’s ongoing flow.
Strengthening attachment: Blockchain as the only plan
By the second meeting, moving along with the new line of activity of working on blockchain that became available in meeting 1, Max and Ben have authored a new project plan (Figure 1). In Vignette 2, the team collectively reviews this plan. Interestingly, although the plan formally includes a milestone for selecting a suitable technology, blockchain is the only technology listed for the subsequent steps and the only one taken up for further discussion in the meeting. This maps out blockchain as the project’s path even before the team can know whether it will indeed prove to be the “suitable technology” they claim it to be.
The new plan (naam = name, beschrijving = description).
Blockchain as the only plan.
The new project plan appears on screen, and members discuss its milestones and activities (Figure 1). Although “milestone 2” formally calls for a broad scan and subsequent selection of technologies, the last three steps are already specified as blockchain-focused. The plan, hence, presents blockchain not as a possible new line of activity and eventual outcome of future efforts, but as the one path that the project will be or is already moving along.
Anna’s intervention momentarily disrupts this. By pointing to milestone “three, eh, or four” (line 1; milestone 4 in Figure 1) and asking her colleagues whether this “should be stated more generally” (lines 1 and 2), she turns herself into a passage point through which possible additional paths can make themselves present in the discussion and unsettle this early (and arguably premature) narrowing of the project’s trajectory. Ben turns to the plan and appears about to respond (line 5) when Tom begins responding instead, stating that, for him, the project should be about blockchain “anyway” (line 7). The adverb anyway does important work here, as it frames shifting course to blockchain as already settled. Up the stream of communication, one may wonder what makes Tom adopt this firm stance. As illustrated, an attachment between Tom and the idea of working on blockchain emerged in meeting 1, and it might plausibly be this strengthening attachment that animates Tom’s unyielding specification at this point. Tom appears to be attached to the idea to already such an extent that, for him, there is no other option anymore. Consequently, he becomes an intermediary through which the new line of activity, centered on blockchain, continues to unfold.
Tom then briefly introduces a conditional caveat—“Unless it’s really not feasible” (line 10)—which appears to delineate the outer limits from which working on blockchain could still be discarded. However, as with the uncertainty surrounding blockchain in meeting 1, which did not make this line of activity less attractive but rather reinforced its appeal, this caveat does little to reopen the field of possibilities along which the project could proceed. Although Tom acknowledges that “far better solutions” (line 10) might exist for the problems the team is trying to solve, these alternatives are immediately dismissed as “not just that interesting” (line 13). Moreover, like in Vignette 1, voices that frame the initiative and project as constituting the right setting to work on “solutions that are out of the box” (line 15) find expression through Tom. In other words, alternatives are invoked only to be set aside again, rendered insufficiently exciting or innovative to warrant serious attention.
In this way, the project’s new line of activity can keep unfolding through what Tom says, or, more precisely, through what he is made to say by the progressively strengthening attachment between himself and the blockchain idea. Max appears to be animated by the same attachment when he repeatedly marks his agreement with Tom (lines 8, 12, 16) and even reiterates Tom’s argument that continuing to work on blockchain is preferable to simpler or better alternatives (lines 19–23). Note also how Max switches from speaking for himself (“I:::” (line 21)) to speaking with a collective “we” (line 23) and uses the past tense when articulating the project’s new goal (line 23), thereby positioning blockchain no longer as an optional choice but, indeed, as the only path the project can continue to proceed along.
At this point, Anna appears to relent (line 25). Ben, however, perhaps seeking to introduce some flexibility into the plan, raises the possibility of a “no-go situation” (line 26) as if to ensure that members could still detach from the interactional flow that is spun around working on blockchain, should the technology prove entirely unfeasible. Ben is interrupted by Max, who, curiously, seems to agree (line 27). At the same time, Max also again states that the team will continue with blockchain even if “it is eh- less feasible than all the others” (line 29). The project’s exploratory character also finds expression through Max once more, who labels their work as “an experiment” (line 34), just as he did in the first meeting. In doing so, he effectively mutes the hypothetical “no-go situation,” ensuring that blockchain remains the project’s unquestioned focus, consistent with prior conditioning and the strong relations that have emerged between the project, the idea of working on blockchain, and at least Max and Tom.
Overall, we can observe how the strengthening attachment to blockchain provides the project with a clear next-action trajectory; yet the attachment also appears to be excessively and prematurely locking the team into a single line of activity. Lingering doubts or critical voices concerning this early commitment become dismissed, so that any possible emerging relation between them and the project is quickly dissolved. In stark contrast, voices that strengthen and legitimize continuing along the new blockchain line of activity are amplified by the ongoing flow of interaction, which, in turn, makes the attachment to this idea even firmer and more consequential. In many ways, the project is no longer merely moving along with the idea; rather, it is beginning to be swept away by it.
Blinding attachment: Blockchain as an oversimplified plan
The team then starts trying to materialize the idea of blockchain into a physical form. However, members soon encounter significant obstacles and realize that the technology’s complexity exceeds their collective expertise. Nevertheless, their previously authored plan and, more importantly, the firm attachment to blockchain that has built up by now holds members to continue along this progressively narrowing line of activity. Many of the difficulties faced, such as security requirements, payment processes, and legal details, are moved out of the project’s scope. Apart from Anna, members also agree not to involve real suppliers but to act out the supplier role themselves, even though this renders the technology functionally meaningless (Vignette 3, meeting 4).
Blockchain as an oversimplified plan.
That all critical or complicating voices are continuously pushed aside or cut away from the project’s interactional flow further intensifies the attachment between the team and blockchain, as it can continue to gain force without many hurdles in its way. Indeed, one could argue that the attachment becomes so strong that members appear to be blind, at least in part, to the adverse consequences of their many simplifications. The project, by now, appears to be embroiled in a powerfully recursive self-reinforcing dynamic (Kremser and Sydow, 2022), whereby, up the stream of communication, members’ actions and utterances are largely driven by their blinding attachment, and, down the stream, these very actions and utterances only further intensify this relation. It is because of this dynamic, unfolding in and through members’ situated communicative practices, that the interactional flow eventually seems to overtake members and lead them down the one main line of activity it has charted, regardless of whether this will lead the team to something functionally worthwhile or not.
The team discusses whether to involve real suppliers, and Max explains how they should simply “invent a name and a number” (lines 1 and 2) for their blockchain prototype. Ben seems to translate this precision into the assumption that the team will not “get suppliers on board” (line 4), which Max confirms (line 5), now explaining that what they are doing “is all difficult enough” (line 7). That it is unrealistic to involve suppliers is further illustrated by Tom, who mockingly invokes an imaginary conversation between the team and a potential supplier (lines 8 and 9). Note how Tom acknowledges that members are still unsure about what they are doing (“we don’t know” (line 9)), which is accompanied by everyone’s laughter.
On the one hand, as in the two preceding vignettes, Tom’s acknowledgment reemphasizes the daring character of the team’s work: they continue working on a technology that, at this late point, they still know little about, thereby foregrounding to one another their bold spirit rather than their technical naivety. On the other hand, this acknowledgment also indicates that at least Max and Tom are not greatly concerned about omitting suppliers. What was a promising idea at the start should have become a more-or-less functional prototype by now, but it appears that it is still the promising idea (and the blinding attachment that has formed to it) that drives the interactional flow of their efforts and keeps them working on blockchain, even if that means ending up with something technically functionless.
After a few seconds of silence, Anna is about to speak (line 12), but she is interrupted by Max, through whom additional reasons not to include suppliers make themselves heard (lines 13–16). Specifically, despite this being the sixth meeting, Max describes the team’s work as involving “an idea” that is “still in the feasibility phase” (line 13), which is why they first need to “play the game” (line 16). It is noteworthy that members continue to refer to their work as an idea, as this indicates that the project’s interactional flow indeed continues to unfold around blockchain’s promising possibilities rather than its technical complications. Framing blockchain as an idea even becomes a source of justification or legitimization down the stream of communication, for if the project is all about an idea, this, by implication, means that members themselves must take on the roles of customers, suppliers, and mediators (lines 18 and 19)—it is what the experimental, explorative nature of their work prescribes.
Interestingly, Ben does not appear convinced by this simplification, noting that the team must consider suppliers’ perspectives to assess blockchain’s feasibility (lines 21 and 22). He strengthens this by pointing out how the prototype will be “useless” (line 24) if, ultimately, suppliers “are not willing to join” (line 24). Max, however, seems to be willing to sacrifice suppliers (lines 25–28) as doing so means the team does not have to admit that they lack the technical wherewithal to incorporate all the necessary components that distinguish blockchain from other technologies (such as the digital document system they originally switched from). In essence, we see here a conflict between continuing along the blockchain line of activity but in a simplified and possibly pointless way, or switching to a more realistic option. As expressed through Ben, without the suppliers’ buy-in, the team’s blockchain may become redundant, yet that does not seem to stop Max and Tom from wanting to continue down this path. Ben eventually relents when he agrees to “leave the supplier [. . .] out of the scope” (line 29) and suggests that they can “just create a node, as a supplier” (line 31).
The strong attachment between two members (Max and Tom) and blockchain appears to simultaneously enthuse and constrain the whole team. The fierce pull toward blockchain seems to have largely swept the team away, energizing members and instilling a sense of purpose while also clouding their judgment and blinding them to potential red flags and alternative lines of activity. In our interview with him, Ben also attested to positive and fulfilling feelings from the team’s exploratory practices around blockchain: “I like it a lot. It’s a new topic for me; I enjoy the exploring [. . .] It gives you a good feeling, that we are doing a cool thing.” Anna seems to be the only member who remains skeptical, as she also expressed in our interview: “[The other members] are more like, ‘Okay, we have to implement blockchain, it doesn’t matter if it is useful or not. It’s simply what we have to do.’ I find it quite hard that blockchain isn’t really valuable [. . .] It’s pretty strange for me.”
However, Anna is continuously overruled by the others (an overruling that could, of course, also be interpreted in gender terms). By herself, she cannot lean against the project’s interactional flow that is already extending along the blockchain line of activity; so instead, she appears to be simply carried along. What we see unfolding here appears to remain driven by the possibility that emerged in the team’s first meeting, and that has, ever since, conditioned efforts toward blockchain, only now more strongly. Consequently, the blockchain that members design becomes increasingly simplistic, shallow, and functionally worthless. The attachment to, or pull toward, the idea of working on the technology has enchained the team and escalated their work beyond a point of no return.
Binding attachment: Blockchain as a pointless plan
Meeting 6 is characterized by further simplifications, including the agreement to use blockchain exclusively with suppliers that member organizations already work with. This choice essentially culminates in a pointless prototype, which even Max and Tom acknowledge. In other words, at least for the moment, it appears that all members understand that the interactional flow of where their project is headed will not lead them anywhere useful. Nevertheless, they keep moving along with the blockchain line of activity, or perhaps more precisely, are made to move along with it, with voices emphasizing blockchain’s great appeal and general usefulness continuing to express themselves in the discussion. The attachment to the blockchain idea that formed and has continuously gained force through members’ sayings and doings is spinning with such intensity that members can no longer break away from the line of activity it has charted for them—it has become binding.
Ben questions whether blockchain technology is de facto needed for trusted suppliers (line 1). Curiously, all members seem to confirm (lines 2 and 3, 5) Ben’s assumptions that “there is no point [. . .] for blockchain” (line 4) when suppliers are known. The team originally intended to use blockchain to procure components from unknown suppliers, as Ben and Max remind the group (lines 6–8). However, just moments before Vignette 4, members chose to work only with known suppliers to keep moving along the blockchain line of activity, even if, as it now appears to be dawning on them, this simplification renders blockchain redundant. Importantly, unlike in Vignette 3, members no longer seem to be able to turn a blind eye to the adverse consequences of their many simplifications.
Blockchain as a pointless plan.
One could say that, at least in parts, the critical or complicating voices pushed aside in previous interactions have found a way back into the project’s interactional flow, clashing with and pulling at the edges of this very flow and making members pause, hesitate, and question their efforts for a moment rather than just moving along with the intensity of what unfolds before them. However, the team also appears unable to revert or reorganize. While the critical voices that make themselves heard here are not being muted right away and thus begin to irritate the line of activity along which the project proceeds, they remain too faint to steer the project towards a different course. Conditioned by everything that happened before and the by-now binding attachment between the project, its members, and the idea of working on blockchain, the blockchain line of activity continues to hold members in its grip, pinning them down to this one path.
That also explains why Tom seems unwilling to fully accept Ben’s dismissive argument, even though he initially agrees with him (line 2). Offering a more precise answer, Tom acknowledges that blockchain is “most useful” (line 10) when suppliers are unknown, but an argument for why the technology is valuable even for the simplified plan expresses itself through Tom, too: blockchain “always” makes communication “more convenient” (line 11). These attempts at restoring blockchain’s appeal find immediate and enthusiastic support in Max’s sayings and doings (“Yes, yes. Also with listed suppliers, it can help to communicate!” (line 13); “this can be a very nice thing on top, to have fast communication!” (line 17)). This is not surprising, given that Max and Tom have long been captivated by the technology.
It appears they are now trying to maintain this image as a counter-reaction to Ben’s questions (lines 1, 15) and to the doubtful voices questioning whether the technology is needed for the now heavily scaled-back ambitions that join the discussion through Ben. As described before, these doubtful voices have the potential to momentarily freeze or rupture the fierce pulls toward blockchain that the team is caught up in; in fact, they might even do so when there is fleeting agreement (lines 1–9). However, any potentially more consequential relation of these voices to the project is stifled before it can even begin to properly form, allowing the pulls to keep pulling everything toward blockchain without dismissive arguments getting in the way.
In many respects, one finds the project in a paradoxical situation. The team’s lack of knowledge about blockchain is becoming apparent, yet blockchain’s allure still holds members firmly in its grip. Max, Tom, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Ben remain “chained” to the technology (or the idea of it), underlining the intensity of their attachment. Figuratively speaking, members are sucked into this attachment so deeply that they cannot detach, as if the project is no longer in their hands. Instead, everything happens as if it is indeed the attachment, rather than the members, that is defining and dictating the project’s path.
The interviews with Max and Tom attest to this interpretation. For instance, Max explained that the project had reached a point where it was “no longer possible to change course.” Seemingly beyond a point of no return, the team hence continued to work on their simplified blockchain: a blockchain exclusively for known suppliers (who were not even involved but played), operating only on local networks, and without payment processes, legal specifications, or fields to specify requirements. Consequently, at the end of the project, the team designs a functionally limited prototype that, although labeled as a blockchain, lacks most of the technology’s distinguishing features.
Nevertheless, Max and Tom still frame their project as a success insofar as the technology they designed delivered faster communication. Arriving at this outcome, however, was not the main driver behind the continued work on this technology. As we have illustrated before and will discuss in further detail in the next section, our claim is that it was members’ escalating attachment to blockchain that gripped them and pulled the project along a single line of activity, excluding consideration of other (more achievable) technologies and ways of working.
Discussion
The attentive reader might wonder at this point: if, put in the most straightforward terms, attachment made the team we studied set off and persist with the blockchain line of activity, what is it that made us, as authors, embark on and continue with this project across months and years of empirical work, analysis, revisions, rethinking, and so forth? Two things, in particular. First, a deceptively simple empirical question kept troubling us: Why did project members keep working on blockchain? Second, and more theoretically, we were motivated by Kremser and Sydow’s (2022) call (and by our broader ambitions as CCO scholars) to study organizational phenomena in more relational, more in situ, and more decentered ways.
Building on the empirical insights we gained by approaching escalation of commitment through communicative relationality and ventriloquial attachment, this discussion section elaborates further on the concept of escalating attachment. Additionally, we call for more longitudinal communicative relationality research. We conclude by outlining key practical considerations.
Escalating attachment
By moving from escalation of commitment to escalating attachment, we address recent calls to advance more in vivo appreciations of how self-reinforcing dynamics unfold within and affect the day-to-day lived experiences of organizational practitioners (Kremser and Sydow, 2022). Adopting a communicative-relational ontology, and thinking with and through the idea of ventriloquial attachment, allowed us to understand escalation as a continuous relational process and to analytically examine how an initial lure both draws professionals into and along progressively more specific and increasingly questionable lines of (ultimately failing) activity. In this sense, the concept of escalating attachment foregrounds the complex, dynamic, and messy ways in which actors (human and otherwise) interrelate and the action courses that these interrelations produce (or set aside). It thus introduces greater nuance and a stronger appreciation of situated practices into long-standing handlings of escalating commitment, where the relevance of retrospective rationalizations and cause-and-effect-focused explanations has increasingly been called into question (Kremser and Sydow, 2022).
In simple terms, we hope that thinking in terms of escalating attachment rather than escalation of commitment sensitizes scholars to how escalating dynamics are forever evolving along a pull-grip-pull (and so on) continuum whereby what starts as an emerging attachment begins strengthening its grip on activity in ways that then begin blinding actors to alternative action paths before ultimately binding them to a single (failing) line of activity. Importantly, these verbs are not intended as discrete stages or phases through which attachment passes. Rather, we hope they help to articulate the ongoing tension that undergirds escalating dynamics and draw attention to their inherently relational and situated character, where whether escalation is occurring or not is best understood as a matter of relations woven between various things and beings, across situations and interactions.
Even when attentive to process, much of the classical escalation literature, whether grounded in cognitive dissonance (Cornelissen and Durand, 2014) or self-justification (Gómez and Sánchez, 2013), treats persistence as an outcome to be explained retrospectively, once decision-makers are already hooked, so to speak. By contrast, our analysis shows how attachment works both ongoingly and prospectively, configuring in one moment what can reasonably be done in another, long before actors experience themselves as persisting in a course of action at all. In this sense, with the notion of escalating attachment, we can start to see how escalation does not begin when actors decide to stick with a failing path; on the contrary, it begins when an attachment starts progressively narrowing the field of possible action in such a way that persistence becomes the only way forward.
Kremser and Sydow (2022) break important ground in this regard by conceptually illustrating the potential of practice-based linkages as a contribution to the self-reinforcing dynamics literature. Linkages among practices, they argue, set in motion chain reactions, where one practice creates the conditions for another, and so on. These linked dynamics “self-reinforce” what is unfolding, each feeding back into the other, in a complex nexus that ultimately “envelop[s] practitioners” (Kremser and Sydow, 2022: 17). However, while Kremser and Sydow’s concept helpfully disrupts escalating commitment’s orthodoxical (and overly deterministic) view of human agency, the authors arguably risk centering the other extreme by portraying people as akin to “cultural dopes” (whereby practices unquestionably make them perform, rather than exhibiting some own degree of agency in how they perform these practices). Indeed, Kremser and Sydow’s downplaying of human agency has begun influencing framings of self-reinforcing processes that are claimed to be unfolding “behind the backs” of practitioners (Braun et al., 2025: 538) or are so ubiquitous that they simply become “invisible” (Geisemann et al., 2025: 11; see also Bruder, 2025).
Through our communicative-relational grounding, and by thinking in terms of ventriloquial attachment, we put forward a more measured yet still strongly decentered view of practitioners’ role in escalating dynamics. Somewhat ironically, we argue that ventriloquism’s form of decentering human agency affords greater primacy to practitioners as, like all actors (human and otherwise), they form the constituent “parts” of relations through which attachments emerge, unfold, and escalate. As the four verbs that constitute escalating attachment (i.e., emerging, strengthening, blinding, and binding) hopefully convey, our point in decentering agency is not to entirely bracket out humans and focus on everything but them, nor to relegate them to the margins of analysis. Rather, by considering people as part of a relational whole, we can appreciate how actors of various hues are always conjoining to varying degrees and intensities, from initially holding onto something (in our case, blockchain’s appeal) to progressively becoming held by that very same thing.
This point also distinguishes our findings from prior actor-artifact accounts of escalation that draw on Latourian notions of enrollment and translation (e.g., Mähring et al., 2004; Ungureanu et al., 2019). In these studies, artifacts are often shown to stabilize or reinforce a course of action once they have been enrolled. In contrast, blockchain, in our case, was not merely enrolled as a means to advance an already chosen trajectory. Rather, through the escalating attachment, it actively reconfigured the field of possible next actions, progressively rendering alternative paths less visible, less discussable, and ultimately less actionable. Escalation, from this perspective, is not simply a matter of intermediaries locking actors in, but of attachments reshaping what can still count as a viable way forward or not.
Noteworthily, the line(s) of activity that an escalating attachment may foreground or present as the only viable option can withstand critique that (re)enters interaction. In our case, we saw how Ben and Anna’s questions periodically reopened the issue of whether blockchain made any sense, and for a moment, the team even recognized the pointlessness of their many simplifications. Still, this recognition did not translate into reorientation and reconfiguration of the project’s trajectory. The reason, we suggest, is not simply that critical voices are muted (even if they sometimes are), but that critique arrives late, once an attachment has already become binding, and the blockchain line of activity has become the only way forward. In other words, late critique appears to fail because it does not hold against the accumulated force of attachment that has already defined what can count as a viable next step.
Expressions such as “drowning in ideas” or “being carried away” by them are common in everyday talk and organizational settings. Yet, we argue that we have so far lacked the conceptual vocabulary and analytical sensitivity to fully grasp the ambivalent dynamics they imply. When professionals become carried away, they may experience excitement and immersion, but also constraint and entrapment. Do they hold onto their ideas? Or do their ideas, once they have taken a grip, hold onto them? The notion of escalating attachment, through its ventriloquial undertone, does not force an answer in one direction or the other. Instead, it allows us to trace how both operate simultaneously—and how, over time, one may come to dominate the other.
Communicative relationality and ventriloquial attachment: Action and agency as always already carrying forward
A core claim of this paper—that escalating attachments progressively narrow lines of activity until only a failing course of action remains—calls into question a key hallmark of communicative relationality research, whereby scholars foreground the eventful, provisional, and situated nature of (inter)action, granularly unpacking relational dynamics as they unfold in the moment. Garfinkel’s (1967) famous ethnomethodological dictum “for another first time” (p. 9) has steered much communicative relationality research insofar as although (inter)actions may undoubtedly both bear a strong resemblance to previous ones and make what is currently unfolding recognizable as one type of (inter)action more so than another (e.g., a line of people waiting to be served becomes intelligible as a queue), an interaction can never precisely replicate those that preceded it. This thinking has been crucial for problematizing how what are often taken to be pre-given structures, factors, or entities within organization studies are necessarily (re)emerging in the moment, owing to the multiplicity of human and other-than-human relations that are forever bringing them into being (e.g., Brummans et al., 2022; Hollis et al., 2026; Meier and Carroll, 2023).
While acknowledging the momentary, the contingent, and the idea that it “could always be accomplished otherwise” (Kuhn et al., 2017: 32), our key finding that escalating attachments progressively narrow lines of activity, in turn, strongly suggests there to be relational residues spilling over from one interaction to the next. Our study is, to the best of our knowledge, one of the first to elucidate how the “excess” of relations (Kuhn et al., 2017: 33) within interactions can carry forward and configure (to some degree) future (inter)action possibilities.
From such a viewpoint, agency is neither confined to the “parameters” of a single interactional episode nor to be found exclusively in hybrid, momentary configurations of human and other-than-human actants as we suggested earlier (see also Bencherki et al., 2024). Rather, it is forever flowing within, through, and between interactions, accumulating and settling—even if unevenly and provisionally so—into patterns that make some fields or lines of possibilities increasingly likely while others quietly fall away. As a case in point, if we were to engage in counterfactual thinking, it would be hard to imagine team members suddenly switching to a “safer” technology by the later stages of the project, precisely because previously constituted attachments have become progressively reconstituted to such a degree that they take on an immutable quality that stretches beyond any single interaction.
Looking across communicative relationality research, however, much existing work remains oriented toward what might best be described as action flow “cuttings.” Meier and Carroll (2023), for instance, study “reflexive moments” (p. 1081, emphasis added) rather than reflexive flows, while Brummans et al. (2022) acknowledge a similar limitation when reflecting on how they “did not obtain data that showed whether this new letter ended up doing what the disputants, lawyer, and mediator hoped it would do in the follow-up session” (p. 784, again emphasis added). In slight contrast, Hollis et al.’s (2026) relational authority study illustrates how eponymic claims can both lend authoritative weight within and carry an organizational weight of expectation between cosmetic consultations, but their work does not explicitly trace how claims’ effects may sociomaterially traverse space and time (e.g., through artifacts and social media posts).
By foregrounding how escalating attachments connect what have typically been treated as discrete interactions, our study develops this emerging interest among communicative relationality scholars. Specifically, we propose that our handling of attachment can be conceptualized as part of what makes interactions interact, which brings to bear a different perspective on the terra firma (Cooren, 2006) or terra fluida (Mallette et al., 2025) of interaction than is often adopted by communicative relationality researchers and the broader constitutive project.
Our study also gives back to this project a more nuanced rendering of ventriloquial attachment. While attachment has long been present in CCO—often implicitly, when actors appear “moved” by something (Cooren, 2010: 11)—it has rarely been treated as an object of inquiry in its own right. In contrast, our study suggests that taking attachments seriously as communicative-relational accomplishments is crucial for better understanding their consequences for work and organizing. Attachments, as with any relational configuration, develop processually: they ebb and flow, intensify and loosen, and, as they do so, they shape what happens next to varying degrees and gradations. This is what our findings sought to capture through emerging, strengthening, blinding, and binding attachments, with attachments’ escalation distinctly shaping how lines of activity gained weight and momentum, and which alternatives became increasingly difficult to (re)connect with. In other words, attachment appears not simply as a state of being, but as a dynamic, relational pull that both draws actors in and carries action forward, including across interactions.
Practical considerations
The complex dynamics and continuous relations we encountered in this study more closely approximate practitioners’ experiences of escalation as “life lived forward” (Kremser and Sydow, 2022: 1) than cognitive or ex-post factors permit. The attachment that developed between project members and the idea of working on blockchain over time became increasingly strong, to the point that it blinded them to complications and warning signs, and eventually kept them completely tied to this line of work.
The verbs we use to describe the varying intensities of attachment (i.e., emerging, strengthening, blinding, and binding) may resonate with projects or teams that find their capacity to consider alternatives slipping from their grasp. Our conceptual proposition, then, is not only of theoretical and analytical value but also practically useful as a barometer to help practitioners become more aware of when they risk being carried away in the maelstrom of their own and others’ sayings and doings and recognize when initial enthusiasm begins evolving into something more constraining.
While the setting of our study—a project framed as an experiment—allowed for greater latitude in risk-taking that might not be typical in other settings, escalating attachment may be an even more crucial concept for practitioners operating in higher-stakes environments. For instance, in corporate settings, public-sector initiatives, or large-scale transformation projects, the danger of being swept along a failing path can carry significant financial, reputational, strategic, and other consequences. Recognizing some of the dynamics of escalating attachment or when an idea starts to “hold” them and pin down their work can help practitioners avoid being drawn into self-reinforcing loops that limit their ability to explore viable alternatives.
This is not to suggest that passion or conviction should be dismissed; on the contrary, attachments are helpful in many ways: they drive our engagement, sustain our efforts, inspire our inquiries. Yet, as this work has shown, we cannot and should not ignore that they carry a risk of becoming blinding or even binding. What begins as an enabling, inspiring attachment may, if left unchecked, narrow our sensitivity to alternative ideas and approaches, suppress doubts, and lead to detachment from broader considerations. In other words, some balance must be maintained: attachments can propel work forward in many great ways, but we must also take care not to foreclose the possibility of thinking otherwise.
These dynamics can also be applied to the professional group to which we identify: academic practitioners. Indeed, in an earlier version of the article, a reviewer perceptively turned our analytical lens back on ourselves, querying whether our attachment to communicative constitutive theorizing was—somewhat ironically—progressively sidelining the phenomenon we set out for it to enrich; escalation of commitment. While this final version hopefully satisfies their concern, we are, of course, part of a scholarly process that allows us and fellow academics to intensely generate ideas for months (or even years) at a time and then step away from them for similar periods while experts read, review, and return them with the sort of astute critique that we received above. Obviously, non-academic practitioners are rarely afforded such benefits. For them, then, the challenge is to find ways to sustain the momentum of new ideas while keeping in check the intensifying pulls that may lead them astray. This might involve structuring regular reflection points within projects, encouraging constructive dissent and dialectical inquiry, and fostering environments where alternative perspectives are not only heard but actively engaged with.
Both for us as academic practitioners and practitioners more generally, recognizing the attachments we have and keep on nurturing through both the big and small things we say and do as we interact day in, day out as both enabling and constraining might help us navigate the fine line between commitment and entrapment or enthusiasm and escalation. Ultimately, the goal is not to eliminate a specific attachment we feel to an idea but to stay attuned to when and how it starts turning into such a traction that we become pinned down and can no longer let go, and to ensure that what initially pulls us in does not, over time, prevent us from stepping back and finding a better way forward.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the LOST (Leuphana Organization & Social Transformation) group for invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to the participants of the EGOS SWG06: CPO 2022 sub-theme “Performing Creativity, Innovation, and Change” and the Organizational Communication division of the 2023 International Communication Association conference, where previous versions of this manuscript have been presented. Special thanks go to Professors Ann Cunliffe and Alex Wright for their great insight and advice. The authors also wish to thank their editor, Professor Karan Sonpar, and the four anonymous reviewers for their helpful guidance, as well as the team that they followed for allowing them this rich insight into their work.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was partially funded by the European Funds for Regional Development (EFRO) under project number PROJ-00729.
AI usage declaration
The authors acknowledge that they have followed Human Relations’ AI policy. No AI was used for preparing the manuscript.
