Chapter 8 -- Images of Organization
Unfolding Logics of Change: Organization as Flux and Transformation
The universe is in a constant state of flux with characteristics of permanence and change.
David Bohm argued that the state of the universe at any given point reflects a more basic reality.
This reality is the implicate (or enfolded) order and is distinguished from the explicate (or unfolded) order manifested in the world around us.
This theory suggests that in order to understand the secrets of the universe we have to understand the generative processes that link implicate and explicate orders (logics of change).
Autopoiesis: rethinking relations with the environment
Traditional approaches have been dominated by the idea that change originates in the environment.
Major problems facing modern organizations stem from changes in the external environment.
Maturanna and Varela argued that all living systems are organizationally closed.
This argument is based on the idea that living systems are characterized by three principal features: autonomy, circularity, and self-reference.
Autopoiesis- this capacity for self-production through a closed system of relations.
Their own organization and identity is their most important product.
Living systems strive to maintain an identity by subordinating all changes to the maintenance of their own organization as a given set of relations by engaging in circular patterns of interaction where change in one element of the system is coupled with changes elsewhere. They are self-referential because a system cannot enter into interactions that are not specified in the pattern of relations that define its organization.
A system interacts with its environment in a way that facilitates its own self-production (its environment is really a part of itself).
The closure and autonomy they refer are organizational systems that close in on themselves to maintain stable patterns of relations.
There is no beginning and no end to the system because it is a closed loop of interaction.
Autopoietic nature of systems requires that we understand how each element simultaneously combines the maintenance of itself with the maintenance of the others.
Changes do not arise as a result of external influences but are produced by variations within the overall system that modify the basic mode of organization.
Maturanna and Varela argue that the brain is closed, autonomous, circular, and self-referential and they suggest that the brain creates images of reality as expressions or descriptions of its own organization and interacts with these images, modifying them in the light of actual experience.
The theory of autopoiesis accepts that systems can be recognized as having "environments" but insists that relations with any environment are internally determined.
The system's pattern has to be understood as a whole and as possessing a logic of its own.
Enactment as a form of Narcissism: Organizations Interact With Projections of Themselves
Organizations are always attempting to achieve a form of self-referential closure in relation to their environments, enacting their environments as extensions of their own identity.
Many of the problems that organizations encounter in dealing with their environments are intimately connected with the kind of identity that they try to maintain.
Explanations of the evolution, change, and development of organizations must give primary attention to the factors that shape the patterns embracing both organization and environment in the broadest sense.
Egocentric organizations have a fixed notion of who they are or what they can be and are determined to impose or sustain that identity at all costs. They overemphasize the importance of themselves while underplaying the significance of the wider system of relations in which they exist.
Egocentric organizations draw boundaries around narrow definitions of themselves and attempt to advance the self-interest of this narrow domain.
In the long run, survival can only be survival with, never against, the environment or context in which one is operating.
Three logics of change:
Shifting "attractors": the logic of chaos and complexity
Although it is common to draw a clear distinction between the tow, it seems systemically wiser to view organization and environment as elements of the same interconnected pattern.
Coherent order always emerges out of the randomness and surface chaos.
Five key ideas for guiding the management of change:
Loops not lines: the logic of mutually causality
A and B may be co-defined as a consequence of belonging to the same system of circular relations rather than A causing B.
Exponential change is change that increases at a constant rate.
Contradiction and crisis: the logic of dialectical change
Opposing forces drive change through contradictions.
| The factory system created workers to produce products. | THEN | The workers unionized to form an organization to "go against" the system that created them. |
Morgan, G. (1997). Images of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.