Table Of ContentORGANISATIONAL IDENTITY AND
SELF-TRANSFORMATION
Organisational Identity and
Self-Transformation
An Autopoietic Perspective
DAVID SEIDL
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany
First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © David Seidl 2005
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David Seidl has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Organisational identity and self-tranformation : an
autopoietic perspective
1. Group identity 2. Identity (Psychology) 3. Organisational
sociology 4. Social structure 5. Autopoiesis
I. Title
302.4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005929780
ISBN 9780754644583 (hbk)
Contents
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Foreword by Robert Cooper ix
Preface xiii
Chapter 1: Autopoiesis, Luhmann, Spencer Brown 1
Introduction 1
1. New Systems Theory: The Concept of Self-Referential
Autopoietic Systems 2
2. Luhmann’s Theory of Autopoietic Social Systems 7
3. A Theory of Observation: Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form 24
4. The Laws of Form and the Theory of Social Systems 32
Chapter 2: Organisation as Autopoietic System 35
Introduction 35
1. Organisation and Decision 36
2. Organisation and Society 45
3. Organisation and Interaction 53
4. Organisational Culture 59
5. Summary 64
Chapter 3: Organisational Identity 67
Introduction 67
1. Concepts of Organisational Identity in the Literature 67
2. Organisational Identity in the Context of Autopoiesis 75
3. Forms of Self-Description 91
4. Multiple Self-Descriptions 100
5. Summary 104
vi Organisational Identity and Self-Transformation
Chapter 4: The Logic of Self-Transformation 107
Introduction 107
1. Self-Transformation and the Concept of Change 107
2. The Decision to Change the Self-Description 113
3. Paradox and the Risk of Paralysis 123
4. Loose Coupling, Episode and Interactionally Framed Decision
Processes 128
5. Summary 137
Chapter 5: An Evolutionary Model of Self-Transformation 139
Introduction 139
1. Luhmann’s General Theory of Evolution 139
2. Variation and the Interactionally Framed Decision Process 143
3. Selection and the Differentiation between Organisation and
Interactionally Framed Decision Process 149
4. Re-Stabilisation 154
5. Summary 159
Conclusion: The Distinctions of the Study 161
Bibliography 165
Index 185
List of Figures
1.1 Types of autopoietic systems 8
1.2 The logical structure of the statement ‘This statement is false’ 30
1.3 The tunnel connecting marked and unmarked state 31
2.1 The form of decision in the fact dimension 37
2.2 The form of decision in the time dimension 38
2.3 The relation of meaning, society and communication 49
2.4 The relation of meaning, society, organisation and concrete decision 50
2.5 Organisational culture as part of the societal communication
possibilities 62
3.1 The relationship between substantive, reflective and corporate
identity 74
3.2 The interplay between operative and integrative functions 85
3.3 The relationship between self-description, image and reputation 88
3.4 Self-description as simple distinction 92
3.5 Self-description as double distinction 92
4.1 The possibilities of the system 110
4.2 Change as a shift between available and unavailable possibilities 111
4.3 The form of the decision on a new self-description 112
4.4 The decision to change the self-description as an oscillation
between alternative self-descriptions 116
4.5 The oscillation between alternative self-descriptions as a situation
in which (logically) all possibilities become available 118
4.6 The meaning of a self-descriptive text 120
4.7 Stabilisation of meaning of a self-descriptive text through
secondary texts 120
4.8 Decision situation with alternative meanings of a self-description 122
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everybody who supported me on my journey through the
jungle of distinctions and self-referential loops. I am particularly grateful to Dirk
Baecker, Andrew Brown, Geoff Hodgson, André Kieserling and most of all, John
Hendry, who did not become tired discussing paradoxes with me. I am also
indebted to Suzanne Leão-Grötsinger, Nicola Prinz and Artemis Gause for type-
setting and editing the manuscript.
D.S.
Stanford
Spring, 2005
Foreword
Humanity mirrors and reproduces itself through the work of its systems. We may
normally think of the systems through which we live and work as providers of
structures that direct our thinking and actions or as producers of products that
satisfy our needs and cater to our interests, but they perform another, and perhaps
more radical, human service: they create and recreate the forms and appearances
that constitute the immediate reality of our world. Without the constant work of
reproduction and repetition by our systems, the human world would dissolve and
disappear and so would its human habitants since we can only know and maintain
ourselves as reflections of the objects and structures that serve as props for our
daily living. The supermarket has to refill its empty shelves each night in order to
ensure its continuation the following day, the newspaper must reassemble the news
of the world on a daily basis in order to ensure its repeated publication, and the
television station must animate the television screen with the continuous
presentation of audio-visual images. The empty supermarket, the newspaper that
does not appear, the lifeless television screen simply illustrate the existential shock
that would accompany the disappearance of the constitutive forms and meanings of
the human world.
The constant work of human systems is thus radically focussed on saving the
appearances of the human world. In this interpretation, the objects that support us
in the daily work of living are not just instrumental tools to facilitate the tasks of
existence or to extend our powers. They are also, and perhaps more significantly,
the means for mirroring the human image through projections and extensions of
itself into the environment. In this way, the human system talks back to its users to
assure them that they are living in a human world. In saving the appearances, the
system also saves its human users and reminds them that they are habitants of a
human world. A basic strategy in saving human appearances is the fitting together
of the human body and its environment so that the human organs and senses, like
the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, can conveniently fit the various spaces into which the
body projects itself: the chair is made to accommodate the shape of the body and
its tiredness, the book can be held in the hand and within range of the eyes, the
telephone connects directly with the ear. Such examples underline the significance
of the immediate and continuous presence of the specific contents of the human
world as well as their presentability and hence their ready readability. Body and
environment are thus organically intertwined. When this organic intertwining
breaks down, the meaningful objects and structures of the world dissolve and
disappear. Seen from this perspective, human systems are structured connections or
organisations of bodily organs and senses with the supportive objects of their
environments. Organisations thus can be meaningfully understood as extensions of
human organs and senses. This is an old idea which has been lost in the modern
stress on organisations as instrumental systems. We see it in the medieval idea of
