Can you imagine a human organization without a name? This simple thought experiment reveals how language and organization are intrinsically connected. Organizing implies the development and maintenance of regular patterns of interaction, and the conceptual and material activities involved in planning, acquiring resources, negotiating with internal and external stakeholders, coordinating action, etc. that constitute any contemporary organization, would not be possible in the absence of a

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... cated communication system. Any activity performed in a contemporary organization, be it a government agency, a corporate body, or a not for profit organization, demands the agency of language. In the absence of place names, signs, written policies, rules, procedures and a myriad of oral performances any organization would become effectively mute. It is only through linguistic construction that we can, individually and socially, make sense of the phenomena that we label 'organized activities'. While simple communicative interactions (expressing threats or friendliness, conveying elementary meaning, etc.) do not require a codified language to be performed, organized behaviour is founded on the use of a sophisticated sign system, allowing the transfer of articulated meanings. The relationship between communication and language is not one of one-directional causation: as organizations are a product of language, so in the modern world language embeds organizations. A precondition for conceiving and understanding ideas that we consider commonplace, such as 'rule', 'money', 'market', 'sport', 'authority', is the tacit acknowledgement of a multiplicity of organizations. Taken-for-granted actions such as boarding a train, sitting in a lecture or attending an event imply the active participation of the subject in a complex network of organized actions involving a multitude of human and non-human agents (Latour 2005). Consequently the specific ways of organizing transactions of a given human society define the way in which we talk about and understand things. Even an apparently simple idea such as 'buying lunch' for a friend, could never be conceived by a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe,