دانلود رایگان مقاله احیای مجدد سازمان بدون انکار جامعه در پاسخ به Ahrne، Brunsson

abstract

In a recent article in this journal, Ahrne, Brunsson, and Seidl (2016) suggest a definition of organization as a ‘decided social order’ composed of five elements (membership, rules, hierarchies, monitoring, and sanctions) which rest on decisions. ‘Partial organization’ uses only one or a few of these decidable elements while ‘complete organization’ uses them all. Such decided orders may also occur outside formal organizations, as the authors observe. Although we appreciate the idea of improving our understanding of organization(s) in modern society, we believe that Ahrne, Brunsson, and Seidl's suggestion jeopardizes the concept of organization by blurring its specific meaning. As the authors already draw on the work of Niklas Luhmann, we propose taking this exploration a step further and the potential of systems theory more seriously. Organizational analysis would then be able to retain a distinctive notion of formal organization on the one hand while benefiting from an encompassing theory of modern society on the other. With this extended conceptual framework, we would expect to gain a deeper understanding of how organizations implement and shape different societal realms as well as mediate between their particular logics, and, not least, how they are related to non-organizational social forms (e.g. families).

5. Concluding remarks

We agree with Ahrne et al. that organization theory is under strain, which can partially be explained by the inability of organization theory to successfully analyze the relationship between organizations and society. Indeed, neo-institutionalism has put this issue at the heart of its analyses; however, by stressing that organizations primarily reflect external societal orders, a definition of an organization as a specific phenomenon becomes superfluous, which negates the usefulness of the analytical instruments of organization theory. Ahrne et al. attempted to counteract this trend by reminding us that society consists of institutionalized orders as well as decided orders. However, in their attempt to highlight the role of decided orders, Ahrne et al. tended to overstretch the concept of organization. Therefore, the concept of formal organization was reduced to decided orders, while society became weakly defined by the distinction between decided and institutional orders. Therefore, we suggest that the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann, which is already present in Ahrne et al.’s approach, should be more thoroughly considered. Luhmann offers a specific definition of formal organizations as complex decision systems and provides an encompassing description of modern society as functionally differentiated. Combining the Luhmannian concept of formal organization with Ahrne et al.'s approach would clarify the concept of organization. As a result, we suggest distinguishing between formal organizations as systems of interconnected decision-making and decided order as the structural elements decided on.