IntroductionRationality, efficiency, collective goals, and objectives -these are the keywords of the organizational narrative. This is true both for the self-descriptions of organizations that try to concern themselves with a reality they can deal with as well as for the traditional sociological perspective on organizations. Rationality stands for the idea of repeatable, controllable, and goal-oriented practices. Efficiency symbolizes a practice which is able to relate several forms and practices to each other, achieving an outcome that is more than the sum of its parts. Organizations bundle their members into different positions, duties, and responsibilities within different levels of a hierarchic structure in order to pursue a single, collective set of goals and objectives.Until recently much of the sociology of organizations was content to repeat this narrative and so is able to supply organizations with key words for selfdescription, change and further development. In addition, the basic notions of organization research yield a special semantics of thinking about organizations with their unique kind of rationality, efficiency, and collectivity, with the aim of detecting dysfunctional or insufficient practices that inhibit rational decisions, efficient problem solving, and collective orientations amongst the members of an organization. Beginning with Max Weber's esteem of efficient and rational bureaucracies and leading to James Coleman's description of organizations as devices for bundling and strengthening individual interests, the sociology of organizations always had an ambivalent feeling about organizations. So in regard to my examples, Weber also bemoaned the depersonalizing practices of organizations, whereas Coleman diagnoses an asymmetric society in which individuals lose their potential for self-determination.Why begin with these examples in a chapter in which I want to introduce Niklas Luhmann's sociology of organizations? The mentioned keywords and examples show that Luhmann begins at a different starting point. For him, rationality, efficiency, collectivity, and the ambivalent appreciation of the relationship of organizations and the individual scope of action are not theoreticalThe notion of systems often gets associated with the adage that a particular phenomenon can only be understood as a part of a whole. In this tradition, the Organizations as decision machines: Niklas Luhmann's theory of organized social systems

SARS-CoV-2=severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Further details are available in the appendix.

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The ''Knowledge and Policy'' 1 project illuminates several forms of non-standardised knowledge influencing political decision making. Various terms have been employed by the project teams, but in this article we designate ''experience based knowledge'' as the common denominator of these knowledge forms. The following article stems from the qualitative synthesis of the country reports of the project. After discussing the problems of defining experience based knowledge we discuss its potentials and limits in policymaking. The analysis emphasises the changing and volatile nature of this knowledge: during translation into policy terms it is transformed almost beyond recognisability. This is not however the end of the process-just the beginning of a new cycle.