Authorship is the exercise of agency in pursuit of a purpose, and accountability for one’s contribution to what follows. Where agency is your ability to act intentionally and deliberately, authorship is what you do with it to shape what happens next.
Purpose gives authorship direction. It also raises questions of legitimacy: whether what you’re trying to accomplish, and how, fits an organization’s policies, rules, and culture, and sometimes whether those are legitimate themselves. Accountability concerns the part you play in what happens, including effects you didn’t intend.
In collaboration and conflict, authorship can be exercised alone or jointly, and it can be contested. How you exercise it can enable or constrain others’ agency and authorship, just as their actions can enable or constrain yours.
The questions behind authorship are old, and traditions have answered them differently. Aristotle held that we’re answerable for actions that originate with us and that we take knowingly. Buddhist teaching locates action in intention itself, so what you mean to do already carries weight. The Bhagavad Gita asks you to act fully without clinging to the results. The Haudenosaunee are credited with asking how actions will affect the tribe in seven generations.
Organizations face similar hard questions in deciding what people have the authority to do, what purposes justify their actions, what actions are acceptable, what obligations they have to others, how responsibility extends beyond intentions to consequences.
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