Organization and Decision

Abstract

The concept of organization took on clearer contours only in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages there had been no need for a special concept for what we now call organizations. It would have lacked substance: the stratification of family households and corporations provided for social order, which for the rest was subject to a multiplicity of legal arrangements. 1 Only in the nineteenth century did it become usual to conceptualize the organization as a social formation distinct from other social orders (e.g., communities or social classes). Then the term "organization" found its way into normal, everyday and scientific usage to describe a special type of object. Already frequent in the eighteenth century, it originally referred to the order of organic life as opposed to artifacts and mechanisms. 2 Jean Paul had still regarded the term organization with reference to non-organic matters as a metaphor, 3 but himself wrote about the organization of texts in the sense of actively ordering production. 4 Perhaps the transition to an active, activity-related usage of the term generalized the concept. At any rate, the concept of organization, originally, offered the possibility of referring to both an activity and its effect without addressing this difference.Because the eighteenth century tended to replace hierarchical distinctions by the distinction between "inside" and "outside," in the semantic field of organization we already find the distinction between internal and external relations. This enabled the disorganization concept to be introducedseparately from any hierarchical architecture of the world and with reference to the internal defects of an organism. At about the same time, biology and demography adopted a new concept relating to the individual: "population," which deprived the old genus/species schema of much of its significance and prepared the way for the evolution theory of the nineteenth century. In explaining internal organization, however, the whole/parts schema persisted, and thus the assumption of a harmony tuned to this schema, almost in the old sense of ordinata concordia. The distinction 1

Membership and contributorship in organizations: An update of modern systems theory

“…This is true also for modern systems theory as developed by Luhmann (2012, 2013) (see, e.g., Andersen & Born, 2008; Kette & Tacke, 2015; Kühl, 2015; Nassehi, 2005; Schirmer & Michailakis, 2015). Although defining organizations as processual entities consisting of decision communications, Luhmann insisted that organizations need to preselect certain persons as members in an appointment procedure thereby distributing rights to participate in the organizational communication processes (Luhmann, 2018, p. 45).…”

“…On the one hand, most scholars—including Luhmann—see membership as a structural element or a fixed premise implying that certain individuals become members at one point and then remain members until their memberships are terminated. In this rather static view, membership is tightly coupled to certain identifiable persons who are the members (see, e.g., Ahrne, 1994; Aldrich, 2008; Andersen & Pors, 2014; Drori, Meyer, & Hwang, 2006; King et al, 2010; Luhmann, 2018). Some literature, on the other hand, has suggested that membership should be seen as a precarious process in which the degree of belonging to an organization is constantly renegotiated.…”

Organization and membership: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…She examines more closely in what forms volunteers are addressed as members within three different partnership projects in the very same municipality. In her work, a crucial aspect of membership is under pressure: namely, the assertion that members become members through their obligations to accept the decisions of the organization (Luhmann, 1964, 2018). When it comes to volunteers, these do not have contractual obligations to the organization.…”

“…Organizations, hence, are now understood as a specific kind of social system, that is, a system mainly concerned with making decisions. Accordingly, Luhmann (2018) defines the structures of an organization no longer in terms of formal/informal but as premises for decision‐making: for example, in the form of personnel recruitment, communication channels, hierarchies, rules and culture.…”

“…Nevertheless, although membership retained its relevance in these newer works, Luhmann's (2003, 2005, 2018) interests shifted significantly towards other aspects important to organizations such as autopoiesis, decisions, paradoxes, societal macro‐differentiation and second‐order observation. These new concepts have created new analytical possibilities for investigating organizations and their relations to other social phenomena.…”