Operativity And Typicality: Studies Of Meaning And Communication Theory In Organizational Research 3658420103, 9783658420109

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Thomas Drepper

Operativity And Typicality Studies Of Meaning And Communication Theory In Organizational Research

Operativity And Typicality

Thomas Drepper

Operativity And Typicality Studies Of Meaning And Communication Theory In Organizational Research

Thomas Drepper Soziologisches Seminar Universität Luzern Luzern, Switzerland

ISBN 978-3-658-42010-9 ISBN 978-3-658-42011-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42011-6

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This book is a translation of the original German edition „Operativität und Typik“ by Drepper, Thomas, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH in 2017. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. # The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Preface

This text discusses meaning-theoretical foundations of recent organizational research and makes them visible by analyzing the concepts of current discourses in organizational studies (cognition, institution, practice, culture, communication and semantics). In a further step, communication is applied to various organizational phenomena (e.g. managementization, standardization, circulation of ideas, translation and design) as an operative guiding concept for understanding organizational reproduction and networking. This book thus sees itself both as a contribution to theory development in organizational research and as a contribution to the research field of “(world) society and organization”. Overall, the individual studies in this text discuss and explore the relevance of an epistemological, social and societal theoretical foundation of organization theory on the basis of an operative theory of meaning (German: Sinntheorie). This text is for me personally a text of border crossings and transitions, factual as well as symbolic. Many of the ideas presented here emerged in the context and period of my work at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Wil Martens, Jan Achterbergh, Dirk de Vriens and Bas van der Linden for the cooperative and at the same time friendly meetings and discussions. At the University of Lucerne, I was able to let many ideas mature and try them out in seminars, workshops and presentations. I would especially like to thank Raimund Hasse and Eva Passarge, Swaran Sandhu and Hendrik Wortmann for the simultaneously collegial and friendly level and very pleasant working atmosphere there on site and beyond. I am very grateful to Gaetano Romano for having established a professional place in Lucerne for the combination of communication science and sociological topics, which I was able to participate in. Veronika Tacke reminded me of this text in a motivating way through a joint cooperation. For this I thank her very much.

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Furthermore, I am very grateful to Thomas Klatetzki, Günther Ortmann and Arnold Windeler for their support over the past years. Some ideas can also be traced back to my time at the University of Essen and the many years I spent working in Eckart Pankoke’s department. The social figure of the “border crosser” was one of Eckart Pankoke’s preferred topics and “sociological border crossing” (Pankoke 1991, p. 1262), an important means of insight for him to introduce incongruent perspectives as a source of irritation into his own discipline. I have always found this very inspiring and remember with great gratitude Eckart Pankoke’s appreciative encouragement. My wife Claudia and my daughter Laura deserve more thanks than I can express. This book is for me in many respects a text of border crossings and so I hope that the measure between known and daring courses, between known paths and daring branches, is composed in a moody and exciting way and possibly also new directions open up. In the Ruhr region, one wishes at such a waypoint: “Glückauf!” Essen, Germany April 2023

Thomas Drepper

Contents

1 Introduction: Basic Questions of a Meaning-Theoretical Organization Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Historical Approaches to Ideas and Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Conceptual Concretizations: Operativity, Form and Typicality . . ..

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2 Meaning: Operativity and Typicality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Organization and Knowledge: Topic Access and Theoretical Desiderata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 Intermediate Consideration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Communicables: Meaning Movements and Meaning Determinations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Managerialism and Managementization: Topic Access and Theoretical Desiderata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 (Neo)institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Diffusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 (World) Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 (Self-)embodiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1.1

Historical Approaches to Ideas and Concepts

A lot has happened since Burell and Morgan’s (1979) determinations of the epistemic foundations of organization theory. Certainly, today one can still go quite far in following their classification of the epistemological and social-theoretical contexts of reference of the organizational sciences into functionalist, interpretative, humanist-subjectivist and structuralist-objectivist justifications, but one cannot avoid noticing that in the last almost 40 years many ideational differentiations have taken place, which partly confirm these classifications and justifications, but also relativize, correct and expand them. The developments of ideas and conceptual shifts of the many turns in the social and cultural sciences have also reached organization studies and shaped its basic epistemological mood to varying degrees, certainly with differences in reception and acceptance that must be taken into account, since not all ideas reach the mainstream immediately or ever, but are first received at the margins, tried out and rescued into the thinking niche or dropped again because of accusations of idiosyncrasy. As Kieser puts it, to some organization scholars “their discipline therefore appears as a wildly sprawling garden (...), to others as a particularly fertile biotope (...)” (Kieser 2002, p. 20). Pfeffer (1997, p. 4 f.) also points to the interdisciplinarity and permeability of disciplinary boundaries in Organization Studies, which makes the field of Organization Studies on the one hand very productive and attractive, but on the other hand also quite broad and sometimes diffuse. This richness and complexity of the academic field of knowledge on organizations is expressed today both in the multitude of journals, edited volumes and handbooks (cf. Drepper 2008b) as well as in the high frequency of meetings and major conferences of differentiated professional organizations (e.g. EGOS). This is certainly also due to the fact that organizations are one of the # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Drepper, Operativity And Typicality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42011-6_1

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most productive social and cultural science interface topics of all. Almost every area of life in modern society has organizational aspects (cf. Drepper 2003a, 2005b, 2006a, 2018; Hasse 2003; Drepper and Tacke 2010; Tacke and Drepper 2018) and thus raises questions of organization and decision-making (cf. Schimank 2005). It is therefore not surprising that, in addition to the volume of communication, problemsolving and design knowledge arising from organizational decision-making practice itself, many social science disciplines are concerned with the organizational aspects of their research subjects and thus contribute for their part to the multiplication of knowledge and perspectives. In order to be able to express the many different voices of the multidisciplinarity and polyperspectivity mentioned within organization studies, research often talks about “polyphony” (cf. Grant et al. 1998; Eberle et al. 2007; Boje 2008, 2011; Thorpe and Holt 2008). Here, it is possible to ask whether this is a coherent polyphony or rather cacophonous detunings expressing the paradigmatic arbitrariness of organizational research? Can polyphony be understood as the appropriate epistemological mood and fitting requisite variety-form of research in relation to the ubiquity and diversity of organizational forms, functions and consequences in modern society? Or is polyphony perhaps not the appropriate term at all, but rather “incommensurability” (cf. Scherer 2006, p. 40 ff.), which, unlike the consonance and harmony concept of polyphony expresses, addresses epistemological and methodological incommensurabilities and untranslatabilities?1 This addresses fundamental questions about the epistemology and methodology of organizational studies, which focus attention on the epistemic constitution of organizational theory

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If we take up the music-theoretical concept offered here, polyphony is based on consonance and harmony, since polyphony is based on a harmonic frame (uniform key, scales, harmonies). Incommensurability, on the other hand, describes – translated into musictheoretical language – dissonant and disharmonic relations. The recourse to terms and concepts from music, vibration and wave theory (cf. Pretor-Pinney 2011, p. 75 ff. and p. 207 ff.) in relation to human communication and social coordination phenomena has increased in recent years. The focus here is on fundamental questions about pre-linguistic communicative mediality and the coordinative functioning of sounds and musical forms. This perspective has been strongly stimulated in recent years by neuroscientific and anthropological research on the connection between musicality, cognition, emotion and sociality (cf. Levitin 2006, 2008; Sacks 2008; Spitzer 2002) and has also been widely received in popular science (Ball 2011; Drösser 2009). This raises and poses questions that have been and are still being discussed in sociology (Casimir 1991; Drepper 1992; Fuchs 1987, 1992b; Großmann 1991; Rotter 1985) as well as cultural history (Blanning 2008; Richter 1997) and philosophy of music (Adorno 1986, 1989, 1991; Becker and Vogel 2007).

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and the epistemological and social-theoretical lean-to contexts organizational studies refer to (cf. Scherer 2006; Tsoukas and Knudsen 2003; Hassard 1993).2 In this context, it is also significant from the sociology of knowledge that both the (observer’s) understanding of organizations and their self-observations and selfdescriptions are shaped by the respective socially valid concepts of reality and dominant world views. The basic epistemic moods of a particular societal formation have an influence on the external and selfperceptions and descriptions of organizations and are expressed semantically in the communicatively circulating concepts of organization (cf. Türk et al. 2002): organization as organism (nature semantics, organology and biologism), organization as machine and clockwork (machine semantics, technicism and mechanicism), organization as process (time semantics, temporalism and dynamism), organization as system (systems theory, cybernetics and neocybernetics) organization as collective (group/community semantics, social psychologisms and sociologisms), organization as network (connectionism). Keeping this in mind, the knowledge sociological reflection perspective of a history of organizational ideas) arises (cf. Bonazzi 2008), where the historicity of organizational thought refers to the historicity of the ideological and epistemic contextuality. The various terms, concepts and “images of organization” (Morgan 2002) can be understood in this sense as elaborations of the multiple sources of ideas of the lean-to contexts that circulate in the discourse on organizations: “Our knowledge of organization is intertwined with the historical situation of both its creators and users. In other words, there is no knowledge or truth in organizations independent of a historical context” (Thatchenkery 2001, p. 117). In this sense, views on organizations (German: Organisationsanschauungen) are shaped by worldviews (German: Weltanschauungen). Conversely, the development of ideas in society in and since the twentieth century has been strongly influenced by organizational semantics and concepts, as a result of which worldviews is also increasingly related to organizational views. To be mentioned here are, for example, ideas of planning, control and monitoring, in which mechanistic, cybernetic and neo-cybernetic concepts from the world of technology and control regulation (cf. Achterbergh and Riesewijk 1999; Achterbergh and Vriens 2009) are imported into the organizational and professional world and from there related to societal and individual phenomena and problems. On the one hand, it can be observed from

2 In this context, Ortmann (2004, p. 57) has pointed out that reflection theories (cf. Luhmann 1993) are by no means merely neutral observers, describers, understanders and explainers, but influence their subject matter by incorporating their ideas and knowledge into the communication of the subject matter (e.g. organizational self-descriptions) (cf. Ortmann 2004, p. 66).

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these transfers how societal value communication and value expectations can overtax organizational realities, and on the other hand, that socio-technical, purpose- and goal-related ideas of feasibility and design are often not appropriate to the complexity and contingency of societal problem situations.3 However, let us first take a step back from this comprehensive context of the history of ideas and look at some of the main internal scientific currents that have provided impetus for organizational science in recent years. To be thought of here, for instance, are neoinstitutionalism in organization studies, structuration theory, sociological systems theory, sense-making approaches, theories of cognition, practice, discourse, and deconstruction, approaches to narration and translation, and critical management studies. Despite the differences in conceptual and terminological consistency that can be observed in a detailed view, they all find a common denominator in the critique of an instrumentalist-rationalist understanding of organization and the accompanying expectation of rationality, efficiency and effectiveness that can be planned, controlled and monitored.4 The meta-narrative of recent organizational research is the relativization of the concept of rationality and the rational model of organization (cf. Tacke and Drepper 2018, p. 33 ff.) and the “correction of a technical in favor of a social understanding of organization” (Baecker 2003, p. 137). Dobbin attributes the fact that organizations have long been viewed so dominantly from a rationalist-technical perspective and so little from a social and cultural perspective to two main aspects, on the one hand to the dominance of the Western-style rationalist-instrumentalist worldview with its

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Current examples of this can be found in the managerialism debate, which we will discuss later. 4 The relationship between theories and approaches requires explanation in terms of the theory of science and should not be ignored here. In recent years in particular, there has been a strong trend towards approaches and their multiplication in the social and cultural sciences. In terms of their cognitive consistency, approaches seem to be more low-threshold than theories, so that one can be more tentative and modest “on the road” with them than with “big” theories, which are sometimes perceived as “burdensome”. Methodologically, then, it often sounds as if approaches are closer to empirical phenomena than theories, which require more elaborate respecifications. Furthermore, approaches also seem easier combineable and quicker switcheable. This possibly minimizes the risk of being locked into one theory as a research individual. Following approaches is different from holding theories. Pathetically speaking, it almost seems as if the “time of theories” has expired and the different approaches within the framework of the different turns determine the scientific field. But this may be subject to a wave and sometimes fashion logic. We will revisit and discuss the notion of fashion later for the circulation of management ideas.

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sometimes “neo-mythical” quality (cf. Hauser 2005, 2009, 2016), and on the other hand to the position of organization studies as a hybrid discipline that oscillates between theoretical systematization and application pragmatics (cf. Dobbin 1994, p. 117). Starbuck also identifies the epistemological mood in early thinking about organizations as follows: “Even the earliest generalizations about organizations tended to treat organizations as almost mechanistic systems, and rational behavior has long been a component of the mechanistic philosophical tradition” (Starbuck 2003, p. 161). How could such dominance and historical persistence of the rationalist concept within organizational thinking have occurred? The mechanistic thinking of the early twentieth century sees in organizations the machine type of the effective and efficient transformation of inputs into outputs. With organization, the social tool seems to have been found and designated with which the rationality principle can be socially put into the world and realized in the best possible way. At this point of thinking, according to Dobbin, an elective affinity and close coupling of neoclassical economic and business theory and instrumental rationalist organizational theory prevailed for a long time, resulting in an “undersocialized rationalist conception of organizations” (Dobbin 1994, p. 119). In this rationalist lock in, it was easily overlooked that organizational practices and organizational structures are to be understood as culturally and historically contingent social forms (cf. Dobbin 1994, p. 119). Once this perspective is adopted, rationality can no longer be taken for granted as a self-evident and inescapable criterion of organization, but must be identified as knowledge formation, semantics, cultural pattern, epistemic dispositif, or constellation of expectations, and understood as historically-variable. This brings the critique of a self-evident coupling of expectations of organization, rationality, and progress to the point and shifts the interest to the how of the constitution and construction of complexes of meaning and significance, systems of rules, and social institutions: By suggesting that instrumental rationality is just one in a series of constructed meaning systems, alongside mysticism, religion, and secular philosophy, the phenomenological approach to modernity problematizes foundations of rationality that most social scientists thought they did not have to explain. (...) In other words, phenomenologists presume that instrumental rationality emerged for identifiable social and historical reasons that merit examination, rather than because, as a meaning system, it more accurately represents the nature of reality than mysticism, religion, or philosophy. (Dobbin 1994, p. 122 f.)

Following this insight, in recent years organizational studies have increasingly focused on the analysis of the symbolic reality(ies) and the meaningful construction

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of organizations, both in terms of their internal form(s) and their external relations, via the guiding concepts of language, communication, culture and institution. These guiding concepts have raised many important questions in order to pursue both the cultural formation, the constitution of meaning and significance, and the societal embeddedness and differentiation of organizations.5 Let us look at some important impulses in this regard. The detailed discussions follow in the individual chapters. Viewing organization as a linguistic phenomenon emphasizes the communicative, social-constitutive and social-constructive function of language (cf. Donellon 1986; Hancock and Tyler 2001, p. 1; Westwood and Linstead 2001, p. 1 ff.; Chia and King 2001), which can be done, for example, through language figure analysis of rhetorical tropes such as metaphor, analogue, metonym, oxymoron, etc. (cf. Tietze et al. 2003; Gergen 1999). In this way, the mutual constitutional relationship between organization and language is brought into view: Interest has centered on: the significance of language in the structuring of organizations: its place in the very constitution of organization; the use of language and other forms of signification in the very processes and activity of organization; the constitution of identities and subjectivities in the textual space of organization; and the conception of organization theories and theorizing as forms of language; as a method of language. (Westwood and Linstead 2001, p. 4)

Understanding organizations as text builds on the language perspective and emphasizes the textuality of organization (cf. Hatch and Yanow 2003). The organizational world appears as a coded and decodable text that can be narrated, written down and interpreted (cf. Richards 2001, p. 21; Thatchenkery 2001, p. 113). The communicative function of narratives and stories for the constitution of reality in and by organizations is particularly emphasized by the Narrative Paradigm (cf. Czarniawska 1997, 1998, 2004; Boje 2008, 2011), in which the modes of communication orality and literality are observed for their reality-creating aspects. In this approach, the combination of culturalist, linguistic and interpretative perspectives is found in order to be able to identify the cultural contextualization of stories, of small everyday narratives and comprehensive background and metanarratives, making clear how this communicative process produces organizational structural realities. 5

What is remarkable about this in terms of the sociology of knowledge is that culture and institution are identity-creating semantics from the self-descriptive repertoire of modern society, whereby culture gains its social-structural plausibility as a comparative concept and institution as a concept of order and constitution. This will be topic again in the following discussions.

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The so-called CCO approach (“communication constitutes organization”, Putnam et al. 1999; Putnam and Nicotera 2009) also goes back to the interpretative perspective (cf. Putnam 1983), which places the concept of communication even more centrally in order to be able to understand the communicative form constitution of organizations. Defining organizations as communication systems is still a position that requires a lot of justification, because the relation between organization and communication is usually based on a container (organizations contain communication among other elements) and production concept (organizations produce communication) and not on a (self-)constitution perspective (communication constitutes organization – organization constitutes communication). (cf. Putnam et al. 1999, p. 125; cf. Martens 1989).6 The concept of discourse also emphasizes a communication and event perspective, because speaking and writing are different modes of communication that constitute and realize discourse as a temporal unit (cf. Silverman 1994, p. 121). The construction of organizational reality is carried out in and through discursive practices and different modes of discourse as topic-constituting, -disseminating and -selecting modes of speaking and writing, because discourses always have a boundary-determining and selective effect, they include and exclude by thematizing something, but thereby precisely not something else: All writing, all discourse works as an inclusion-exclusion practise. What a writing presents is made meaningful, in part by what is not written. This is part of the paradigmatic properties of language. Every discourse appropriates an area of knowledge and in the move excludes others. (...) Every discourse participates in a power/ knowledge practice in that what is privileged by the discourse at the same time banishes alternatives. (...) Language texts and discourse are sides of productivity and potentiality in which the struggles for meaning and power are played out. (Westwood and Linstead 2001, p. 6 ff.)

Organizations are analyzed as (continuous) conversations, building on the language perspective, whereby ethnomethodological and conversation-analytical borrowings bring in the interaction and situation concept and address the relation of frame, context and situation. The notions of frame, context and situation play a crucial role in dramaturgical concepts of organization in the use of the drama concept to understand social processes. It is about constitution and construction rather than representation in the relation of acting and scripting. Recourse to Goffman’s role 6

A communicative (self-)constitution perspective of organizations is prominently represented by Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann 2000a; cf. in detail Drepper 2018, p. 95 ff.). I will come to this in detail later.

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and frame analysis (Goffman 1980, 1998) highlights the interrelation of acts and scripts and the simultaneity of execution and performance. It is about “scripted and dramaturgical aspects of organizational activity” (Kärreman 2001, p. 90). This perspective is tangible in the concept of performance, which emphasizes both the situational and contextual performance character as well as the normative execution character of scripted actions. Here, the emphasis on interaction, contextuality, situativity and language constructivity fall into one, for language is conceived as a mode of action in the tradition of Burke (1969) and thought of in terms of relations: acts of action (act) and scenes (scenes), agents (agents), mode (agency) and motives (purpose) (cf. Kärreman 2001, p. 97). Where there is construction, deconstruction is not far away (cf. Silverman 1994). Once the reality-constructing function of language is recognized, the deconstruction game can begin. A deconstructive understanding of organization is also oriented towards the guiding paradigm of language (cf. Grant and Oswick 1996; Hassard and Parker 1993; Ortmann 2004; Westwood and Linstead 2001; Tietze et al. 2003; Richards 2001), emphasizing the shift in basic epistemological understanding from an ontological paradigm of organization as structure to a “more fluid conception of organization as process” (Hancock and Tyler 2001, p. 1). This puts the focus on differences, ruptures and discontinuities in organizational reality. The concept of aesthetics (cf. Linstead and Höpfl 2000; Strati 1999) emphasizes limitations, omissions, flipsides, intermediate tones, and in-between colors of customary organizational images and understandings, proposing aesthetics as a synthetic mode of perception, observation, and knowledge for both the conceptual understanding of self-constitution and the external observation and description of organizational realities. This involves the cooling of customary notions of organization, which, as Strati (1999) puts it, have led to a baroque image of formal organizations through both academic descriptions of the outside and fetishizing descriptions of the self. The aesthetics of organization are meant to make visible and audible the, in this opulent painting shortchanged, unusual, and in part unpopular themes and phenomena such as emotion and intuition, subversion and confusion, comedy and tragedy, order and disorder, sensibility and cruelty, the indeterminate and the uncanny, theatres and battlefields, images and illusions, light and shadow, the bearing and the unbearable, exaggerations and understatements, transitions and exaggerations, force and imbalance, decay and disintegration. In doing so, the quietness, the “silence of the organization” (cf. Ortmann 2011, p. 366) can also be recognized as a difference phenomenon. To understand organizations as a difference phenomenon and multimodal date of perception and communication that is both constructed by and perceived and experienced through all human senses, to discover and express the audible and inaudible, the visible and invisible, as well

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as the sensible and intangible, that is the aesthetic program. Whether one should want, guess and endure this all-round view at all is quite another question, but as an epistemological programme it is enlightening in that rather unusual and unconventional categories and distinctions are tried out for organizational observation and description: Aesthetic approaches work more in the spaces between the organization as a regulatory (the Law) and as experience (the Body); between the cognitive and the sensory; and between the stimulus and the response. Consequently, aesthetic approaches have much to contribute to the study of organizations by working outside conventional categories and by challenging the logic of the organizing process. (...) the silences, the unspoken, the inevitable, incompleteness, the implicit, the ambiguous, that quality which cannot be specified. These are the necessary and inescapable complement to the positive aspects of signification which are required for meaning and order to become real in the enacted organization, or which may subvert its purposes. (Strati 1999, p. 2)

Let us summarize. Language and language games, textuality and discourses, narratives and stories, communication, theatre, drama and aesthetics are concepts that have entered organizational studies through the linguistic and cultural turn. The interpretative-symbolic, dramaturgical-performative, institutionalist and praxeological perspectives already mentioned thus encounter a prepared field of thought and concepts. Bachmann-Medick (2007, p. 7) speaks of the interpretative turn, the performative turn, the reflexive turn, the postcolonial turn, the spatial turn, the iconic or pictorial turn, and the translational turn, which in the slipstream of the linguistic turn are themselves already relativizing and rebuilding its language and text orientation: The ‘master narrative’ of the ‘cultural turn’ is virtually undermined by the differentiating impulses of these various cultural turns. Moreover, their striking shifts in perspective also cause the claim to validity of the linguistic turn itself to fade. For they tend to lead away from the language- and text-heavy nature of cultural analysis, away from the predominance of representation, mere self-referentiality and the ‘grammar’ of behaviour. But where do they lead? It is precisely the broad reservoir of refocusing that opens up wide horizons for cultural studies after the linguistic turn: self-interpretation and staging, corporeality and agency, but also the politics of social and intercultural differences with their practices of translation and negotiation come to the fore, as do visual insights, image perception and cultures of the gaze, as well as

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spatiality and spatial references of social action, and finally even the inescapable materiality of experience and history. (Bachmann-Medick 2007, p. 8)7

As important achievements of these thematic movements, the further substantiation of the critique of a purposive concept of organization as well as the definition of organization as a phenomenon of meaning can be noted. Ortmann (2004, p. 67) emphasizes that a consistent theory of meaning within organization theory has so far led a “pansy’s existence”. In addition, this tender little plant is already being pressured again during its growth phase, for example by the rediscovery of materiality in the context of the practice, space and aesthetics turn already mentioned. If the perspective of meaning seems to be developing, then the perspective of organization as a material phenomenon immediately comes up against it! The mainstream is surprised and shouts: “Don’t spin so much, just stand still, because we’ve always known that organizations have something to do with materiality and resources. So what is to be done? If one does not want to lose the impulses one has just gained, then different perspectives must be conceptually reconciled in order to be able to think about the simultaneity of meaningfulness (German: Sinnförmigkeit) and materiality. This requires a multidimensional concept of organization that allows us to define organizations as differential entities. In this task, one can take advantage of the fact that research turns usually also offer a new vocabulary. As Reckwitz indicates, the culturalist perspective “signifies in the social sciences what may be called, in Gaston Bachelard’s terminology, an ‘epistemological rupture’: the introduction and dissemination of a new epistemological vocabulary that opens up

7 Bachmann-Medick speaks of research shifts instead of paradigm shifts. In my opinion, this takes the exaggerations out of what is happening and does not hang the supposed innovations and new developments so high:

A common view of the social and cultural world can therefore not be expected from the competing theoretical positions or even generations of theories in the cultural and social sciences. Corresponding to the turning away from ‘grand narratives’ and ‘master paradigms’, the turns in cultural studies are not ‘Copernican’. Much more cautious and experimental, indeed much more gradual, they help new perspectives and approaches to break through step by step. (...) It is never a matter of complete and comprehensive about-turns of a subject, but rather of the formation and profiling of individual turns and refocusings, with which a subject or a research approach can make itself interdisciplinary compatible. This results in methodological pluralism, border crossings, and eclectic methodological adoptions – but not in the formation of a paradigm that completely replaces another, previous one. (Bachmann-Medick 2007, p. 17 f.)

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novel analytical perspectives” (Reckwitz 2000, p. 644).8 In this process, we can see that notions of difference take the place of notions of coherence that allow us to think and comprehend the simultaneity of the different, circularities, ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes. These are concepts such as discontinuity, rupture, threshold, displacement, boundary and form, which can be found in the conceptual household of difference-logical theories of language, discourse, culture, cognition, practice, communication and systems, and in which difference is discussed as a condition of possibility for the constitution of unity. Such a difference orientation can also be very instructive within organization theory if one reconstructs the history of organization-theoretical thinking and the various versions of the concept of organization in terms of the sociology of knowledge as an interplay of concept and counter-concept (cf. Luhmann 2000a, p. 11 ff.).9 In this sociological reconstruction of knowledge, the analytical movement becomes visible to be able to comprehend both the structural and the constitutional-logical multi-sidedness, multi-formality and multi-dimensionality of organization. Thus, in the course of thinking in terms of organization theory, it became increasingly clear that, in addition to the structural differentiality – organizations form various structural aspects based on the division of labor – something like a meaning-typical differentiality – various social logics of meaning operate in organizations at the same time – must also be taken into account, because it is precisely this simultaneity of the different meaning logics, which is expressed in terms of structural differentiation, that accounts for the degrees of complexity of organized coordination and cooperation (cf. Wehrsig 1986).10

8

Reckwitz (2000) elaborates his convergence thesis to the effect that the two main branches of the field of cultural studies, the structuralist-semiotic and the phenomenological-hermeneutic traditions, merge into theories of practice. I will not pursue this question further here. 9 Or, as Bardmann puts it: “Work organizations cannot be depicted through concepts that symbolize unity. They can no longer be understood as structures of rationality or as contexts of domination without immediately having to consider either the irrationality or the resistance of the ruled or the powerlessness of the rulers” (Bardmann 1994, p. 35). 10 Niklas Luhmann expressed the meaning-logical differentiality of a unit most clearly in the distinction between “means-end rationality and system rationality” (Luhmann 1968, p. 55 ff.), which expresses the simultaneous operation of different types of rationality as meaning logics in a unit. The late Luhmannian concept of paradoxical constitution and the thereby triggered intrinsic mobility of meaning units (cf. Luhmann 1997, 2000a) consistently thinks this idea further (cf. in detail Drepper 2018, p. 67 ff.). Within the framework of more recent approaches to organization theory, Nils Brunsson’s distinction between “rationality and irrationality” is certainly even more widespread (cf. Brunsson 1985). This conception also goes beyond the idea of structural multidimensionality and takes a meaning-logical constitutional difference

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The relevance of a multidimensional concept of organization can be underpinned by a reconstruction of the epistemological terms and concepts of organizational thinking along dimensions of meaning (social, factual, temporal and spatial dimensions). Organizational multidimensionality can be conceptualized on this basis as multi-meaning dimensionality.11 If one adopts the meaning-dimensional perspective, it becomes clear that the organizational theoretical thinking starts with a strong dominance on objectification and factual dimensionality, which is expressed in leading concepts such as formality and rationality and by a strong reference to the materiality and instrumentality of the organization. In the interaction of practical experience and industrial and domination theory, organization is conceived as a purposive-rational-instrumental factual context, which on the one hand is described and reflected in Weberian bureaucracy theory and sociology of domination (cf. Kieser 2006a) and on the other hand is co-designed and standardized in classical organization and management theory (cf. Kieser 2006b).12 In the course of further observing and describing organizations in the twentieth century, more and more discomfort towards the over-formalized and over-rationalized view emerged. One reaction was to emphasize the informal in the organization and thus the “nonrational elements of behavior” (Dobbin 1994, p. 120). Two approaches can be understood in terms of conceptual history, each with its own profile and emphasis, as relativizing positions of the object-dimensional notion of rationality of early organizational theory. These are the human relations movement and behavioral decision theory. As different as both approaches are, of course, in both cases behavior is understood as a counter concept to normative conceptions of organization. While Chester Barnard conceived of organizations as systems of coordination and cooperation within the framework of his communication theory of the organization and used coordination and cooperation to denote already social modes or mechanisms of the

into account, since rationality and irrationality mean different meaning-logics and not only structural aspects. Brunsson’s further conceptualization of talk, decision, and action deepens this direction by naming the operational level or modes of bringing about these logics of meaning. We will take this up again later in the text. 11 The non-justification of the introduction of the three meaning dimensions and the rejection of space as a fourth dimension can be found in Luhmann (2002, p. 238 f.). One can follow this dogmatically committed. Or one can deal with it as experimentally as Luhmann himself. This is the option I choose in this text. 12 Or as Günter (1994, p. 326) puts it for the peak phase of industrialization in Germany: “The modernizations happen in a mixture of experience and calculation. In the modernization push around 1900, a combination of production and science develops. Iron and steel stimulate the expansion of technical universities (...). The universities train qualified engineers and conduct research in association with industry.”

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constitution of unity, Herbert Simon built on this and conceptualized organizations as behavioral contexts with bounded decision-making rationality, drawing particular attention to the discrepancy between normative specifications and factual processes in organizations. The sociality of organizations here refers to the empirically emergent factual sequences of behavior as opposed to normatively inflated expectations of modeltype decision rationality to be manufactured in organizations. The organization comes into view as a social conditional context of factual behavior and no longer as a rational model. In its own way, the human relations school popularized the understanding of the organization as a “natural system” with its special mixture of scientific experimentation and value-based worldview (humanism) (cf. Scott 1986, p. 119 ff.; Preisendörfer 2005, p. 114; Kieser 2006c). The discovery of the importance of social relations and the resulting concept of informality also promoted the perception of the social dimensionality of the organization, because the emphasis on the relevance of social relations in the organization and the discovery of informality draw attention to the organization as a social context, whereby the behavior of individuals and behavioral relations between individuals were understood as organizational variables. From this point on, it could be considered relevant to think about behavior, personality dispositions, personal attitudes, motives, needs, and interpersonal relationships and to consider their influence on organizations. In short, the relationship between the individual and the organization becomes in need of and relevant to explanation. Terms that refer to the social dimensionality of the organization are individual, social relations and informality, but also behaviour as a concept of activity. In further theoretical development, the concept of behaviour is increasingly generalized and no longer assumed to apply only to the level of the individual, but in the concept of organizational behaviour also becomes a basic concept for organization as an independent entity (entity, collective, system).13

13 Pfeffer (1997, p. 2) uses the methodological distinction individuals vs. situations to make clear what difference it makes in terms of organization theory whether one determines organizational elements via units of substance or temporalized units (events). Pfeffer (1997, p. 4) draws attention to the long tradition and dominance of the concept of behavior within organizational theory and attributes the attractiveness of the topos Organizational Behavior to its high connectivity in the field of intersection between sociology and social psychology (cf. Buchanan/Huczynski 2004). At the same time, according to Pfeffer, the theory and research field of Organizational Behavior has become very broad and unmanageable due to the high connectivity and interdisciplinary appeal, but also the simultaneous vagueness, diffuseness and permeability of the collective and bundling term “behavior” (cf. Starbuck 2003, p. 144). Pfeffer (1997, p. 42 ff.) also points out that behavior and action are often not kept apart in terms of basic concepts. Baecker (1999, p. 137) already tries to demonstrate the

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The understanding of the organization as an independent social entity is further emphasized in particular by the concept of the social system, which, via the concept of boundaries and the system/environment distinction, aims at aspects such as the drawing of boundaries and boundary relationships, dependence and independence, as well as inherent logic and inherent dynamics.14 Self-dynamics refers to the time dimension, and so organizations are now also analyzed more as time phenomena. Temporality and temporalization are no longer understood as a means to an end – e.g. in work processes, working time regulations, time measurements, procurement, production and distribution times – but are related to the organization as a whole via process as a guiding concept. Organizations appear as self-dynamic and selfrhythmic entities with their own time and history. They have an initial, build up a history and can move towards an end. They thus operate in the field of tension between stability and change.15 This time perspective is expressed in the operative basic concept. More than the behavioral concept, the activity and action concepts (organizations in action, organizational action) emphasize a process and temporal perspective (cf. Thompson 1967), because both are concepts of movement. And also the concept of information (information as resource, element, particle), which is usually understood as a factual concept, supports this temporal perspective, because it does not only function as a factual content concept, but also draws attention to the fact that if organizations are understood as systems that process information and are in contact with their environments in an informational way, there is a need for a temporal-logical idea of different points in time at which changes in state can be observed and determined, both as an external observer and as a self-observer. After the information, things must look different and go on differently than before, that is the meaning of “to inform oneself” or “to be informed”. Niklas Luhmann (1964) proposed to understand the organization as a factually, socially and temporally typified system of meaning and showed along the concept of “congruent meaning generalization” how the dimensions of meaning are aligned early subcutaneous conversions of basic concepts: “The decision theories of Simon and March and Simon are in a strict sense already communication theories of organization, even if they are still formulated as theories of action or behavior” (Baecker 1999, p. 137). 14 Cf. Tacke and Drepper (2018, p. 42 ff.) on the conceptual-historical relevance and development of the system concept from a “conceptual scheme” to an object concept in the history of organization research. As a precursor concept, the concept of organism must be mentioned in the context of an “organology of organization” (cf. Türk et al. 2002, p. 93 ff.). 15 In evolutionary theory and population ecology of organization, the connection of time and social perspective is also found in the concept of organization. Here, the question of social typification is understood via the population concept and the time perspective via life cycle models (cf. Kieser and Woywode 2006).

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with each other via formalization and (decided) membership (cf. Drepper 2018, p. 59 ff.). In the further course of theory development, Luhmann’s time- and eventtheoretical conversion of the concept of the organization as a formalized system of action to the concept of the event-shaped decision-making and communication system became increasingly concise.16 As a final idea in this context, I would like to highlight that spatial dimensionality has increasingly become an issue in recent years by determining organization as a positional and relational phenomenon through the notion of embedding, field and network. This perspective is about positions, positional relations and positional constellations in fields and networks, which is increasingly brought into the discussion both by neoinstitutionalism in organization studies and by actor-network approaches. A multidimensional concept of organization encompasses and considers all the dimensions of meaning that have been emphasized in the history of organization theory by the individual approaches and theories with different weighting. On this basis, organizations can be understood as multidimensional social forms that operationally deal with social, temporal, factual and spatial relations in a typical way and are able to order, regulate, orientate and relate them to each other, while at the same time being social producers and shapers of these meaning dimensions. It is precisely at this point that communication has increasingly been brought into play as a basic concept in recent years, since the concept of communication in particular seems to allow us to analyze the multidimensional constructions of meaning and movements of meaning in and through organizations. Thus, the sequence Organizational Behavior, Organizational Action and Organizational Communication could also speak for an increase in complexity of the analytical potentials of organizational theory.

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The concept of communication has not been considered as an operative guiding concept within organizational theory for a long time, although communication theories of the organization were available early on with Chester Barnard and later with Lee Thayer. Interestingly, March’s seminal Handbook of Organizations (1965) contains an article on communication (cf. Guetzkow 1965), but not on action. In this article, communication is understood as a mode of activity in organizations, but is not yet discussed as a unit-constituting operation.

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Conceptual Concretizations: Operativity, Form and Typicality

Let us now recapitulate the essential concepts of operativity, form and typicality of meaning around which this text will be organized. Operativity serves as an umbrella term to emphasize the eventfulness of the social constitution of reality. Being “based in events” (Luhmann 2000a, p. 46) means the present-related concrete events as well as the relationship between “presences and contexts” (Nassehi 2009, p. 235). Operational theories are “interested in both the present of practice and the social context of that practice” (Nassehi 2009, p. 236). They are concerned with “describing the form of social order generated by operative practice itself” (Nassehi 2009, p. 244). Operativity as a concept is initially indeterminate in terms of content, similar to the concept of practice, which by itself does not yet indicate what kind of practice it is, such as a practice of thought, behaviour, action or communication, or also like the concept of autopoiesis, which can be applied and specified for living, mental or social systems.17 Operational theories do not start from assumptions of essence, but from circular reasoning. They are concerned with events (elements) and event links (element relations) on which form units are based. The concept of form is a difference-based concept that refers to distinctions and relations between distinctive sides (content/form, background/form, medium/form). The essential question in the context of an “operative theory of form” (cf. Baecker 2011, p. 310 ff.) is then how forms are constituted, the question of the event types that produce forms. And what does this mean for organization as a social entity? That an organization can generate itself as an organization at all depends on the socially connectable possibilities of form (potentiality) that an organization

17

Hannan et al. (2007, p. 12) also point out the breadth and need for specification, but at the same time the relevance of the notion of operation as a “fuzzy category” in the organizational context. Overall, the paper by Hannan et al. is an important contribution to the connection between linguistic operativity and the production of type, here autologically related to the production of different types of organization theory. They propose the development of a general theory of organization through translation from natural to formalized language, through “translation from natural to formal language” (9). Through formal translation, communicative everyday observations and descriptions of organizations can, in their view, be generalized into theoretical propositions. I am not pursuing this here, I just find the connection between language, translation and the production of typicality noteworthy. We will encounter this connection again in the text. All in all, the population ecology of organization in the context of a general evolutionary theory of the social (cf. Wortmann 2010, p. 111 ff.) represents a very important approach to the connection between form and typicality.

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actualizes and realizes (actuality).18 This implies both a diachronic-historical or socio-cultural-evolutionary and a synchronic-structuralist perspective of meaning. This brings me to the third important concept, the concept of typicality. In the history of sociological theory and thought, typicality refers to the phenomenological concept of meaning and the other essential concepts of typification and generalization. The temporal circularity of event and structure is logically manifested in the relation of difference and typicality, for the meaning-operational relation of event and structure is realized in the simultaneity of the difference of the typical and the typicality of difference (cf. Drepper 2018, p. 138): Meaning based units reproduce themselves through the production of ever new and non-repeatable, but at the same time typical elements. Events that are always produced anew constitute typical structures, and these structures typify events. For the time being, I will only briefly quote Niklas Luhmann here in order to underline the relevance of the figure of types: Without any reference to types, meaning, where it appears, would initially be underdetermined, incomprehensible, incommunicable (...). There is certainly this possibility of relatively type-free meaning experience and action, and there is a kind of surprise genesis of meaning. (...) But whenever such unspecified meaning happens, efforts set in to eliminate anomie and to identify ordinary meaning, regularly usable sense, typified meaning. (...) We want to call the totality of the forms of a society that can be used for this function (in contrast to the totality of meaning actualizing events of experience and action) the semantics of a society, its semantic apparatus, its stock of ready-made rules for processing meaning. By semantics we thus understand a higherlevel generalized meaning that is relatively available in a given situation. (Luhmann 1980a, p. 18 f.)

That this is a perspective that is also of great relevance for organization theory is marked by Luhmann’s reference to Karl Weick’s concept of enactment: “The concept of typification has in this respect approximately the place that in Karl E. Weick (...) the concept of ‘enactment’ occupies, namely as a ‘version’ of the variation function that makes possible a processing of ambiguities in the system” (Luhmann 1980a, p. 18, fn. 11). In this meaning-theoretical approach to organization, it is important to draw attention to the distinction between meaning (German: Sinn) and significance (German: Bedeutung), which is sometimes blurred in the context of interpretive theories of organization, as Karl Weick explicitly points out:

With the distinction between “actuality” and “potentiality”, reference is made here to a phenomenological concept of meaning (cf. Luhmann 1971a, 1997, p. 44 ff.). We will return to this in detail in the second Sect. 2.4. 18

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sensemaking is not interpretation, and meaning is not to be equated with significance, if one is guided by a phenomenological concept of meaning. This means that meaning as a medium is the condition of possibility for the genesis of meaning and the attribution of meaning. Interpretations and reinterpretations take place in the medium of meaning, that is, they occur and are operationally constituted as events, e.g. as acts of consciousness or as social acts (actions and/or communication). This argument can be further elaborated by distinguishing between generalized and specified meaning. The relation of these two levels of differently condensed meaning is determined by a circular relation of respecification (of ideas by practice) and generalization and abstraction (of practice by ideas). We will encounter this pattern in some conceptions of organization theory, but there it is usually only background. The translation of this meaning-theoretical figure into the distinction between idea and practice already takes into account the usual discourses and the semantics often used there. Ideas are understood as generalized meaning in the form of concepts, distinctions, and semantics, and practice as respecified and concretized meaning in the form of distinction uses and distinction concatenations (schemata, scripts, programs, rules, routines). The terms operation, form and typicality will orient us conceptually in this text. To this end, I will first make meaning-theoretical argumentations within organizational research visible (Chap. 2), because there are several theories and approaches with differently developed understandings of operativity, forms and meaningtypicality. In addition to various approaches, which I will discuss in the individual chapters in a thematically focused way (Chaps. 2 and 3), I see in the circle of established theories above all the structuration theory of organization, neoinstitutionalism in organizational research and sociological systems theory, against which one can develop and discuss this question. For initial clarification: Structuration theory: In structuration theory, organizations are understood as multidimensional, recursively-dualistically constituted action-structure-forms, whereby recursivity and circularity are understood as modes of cognition and practice as event operation. The concept of rule is developed as a concept of difference, language is justified as a medium of communication, and the theory of time emphasizes the temporality of the social. Neoinstitutionalism: Organizations are conceived as cultural-cognitive forms and meaning elements such as symbols, schemata and scripts are understood as outputs and uses in processes of meaning constitution and meaning attribution (accounts). The forms of approximation referred to as structural effects, isomorphism and homogeneity, emphasize an operative moment, since it is conceptually assumed that they come about through active imitation on the basis of reciprocal observations and the resulting field formations. The concept of imitation is

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rehabilitated in this context in terms of the history of ideas because imitation is seen as a social activity rather than a passive reaction (cf. Ortmann 2003, p. 149). Behavioral adaptation is preceded by observation of the behaviour of others, and the operative mode is comparison. Identity construction comes about through simultaneous perception of sameness and difference on the basis of comparative operations. Sociological systems theory: In sociological systems theory, organizations are understood as a self-referential-operational system form, because for “systems theory itself, with the help of this concept of form, it is made clear that it does not deal with particular objects (or even only: technical artifacts or analytical constructs), but that its subject is a particular kind of form, a particular form of forms, (...) which explicates the general properties of any two-sided form in the case of ‘system and environment’” (Luhmann 1997, p. 63). Sociological systems theory has a broad foundation of analysis to offer in the area of an operational theory of form in organization. It is an operative theory, has a decided concept of form and is based on a theory of meaning. Operativity is determined by the three-part concept of communication, form by the concept of system, and type by the concept of meaning. Communication is understood as a form-constituting core operation, whereby the usual distinction and juxtaposition of communication as the level of meaning or symbolic reality production and reproduction and action as the level of practical or material reality production and reproduction can be dispensed with, as is very common, for example, within organizational studies as the distinction between “talk and action” in the sense of Nils Brunsson. To clarify: The classical working paradigm of organization (cf. Kühl 2004) is based on the notion of manipulation of matter. This can be considered plausible especially for the production and distribution of goods, but not for many other types of organizations in which the core practice of the organization is a communicative-situational event. Such organizations can only be understood if one has an understanding of meaningdimensional processes. One can think here, for example, of service organizations in which people-processing (e.g. education, social work) and knowledge-processing (science, consultancies) are involved, or of administrations in which decisions are made and communicated to the social environment. And also for organizations that are engaged in the production and distribution of material objects, it will be possible to establish that material production is preceded by idea-forming and information-

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processing events, i.e. communications, in which tasks, job relations and decisionmaking paths as well as personnel matters are defined, coordinated and regulated.19 Having arrived at this point, it now sounds as if communication must be the conceptually inescapable option of basic operational terms in organizational research today. However, this is by no means the case, because, although there is a complementarity between the concept of organization and the concept of communication in relation to social-structural developments in modern society in the history of ideas – as I will show in the following – and although even early organization theory received the concept of communication (cf. Barnard 1938; Simon 1947), the concept of communication still does not have a truly established status within organization theory. Rather, there is a gap between application selfevidence and conceptual consistency. But especially with regard to modern communication, networking and knowledge relations, which are summarized in the terms of information, communication, media and knowledge society, it would be of great interest for organizational research to be able to refer to a clear state of communication theory, which allows to clearly handle the distinction and the relation between behavior, action and communication. If one looks at the disciplinary theoretical landscape, this should be expected first from sociological theory, which has been dealing with this relation for a long time. But even in sociology, communication is by no means established as a basic operative concept, and the relation between action and communication remains highly contested. The concept of communication still occupies a “minority position” (Luhmann 2002, p. 289) within sociology. As a concept of facts and objects, communication is used and also assumed in many thematic and research fields of sociology, but as a basic concept it is still little elaborated. Schützeichel therefore points out the need to distinguish a sociology of communication from a sociological theory of communication (cf. Schützeichel 2004, p. 11 ff.).20 Communication remained “uncanny” to 19

The distinction between the information paradigm and the materiality paradigm can be more precisely determined by adding further terms from the respective semantic field. The semantic field of the information paradigm includes terms such as meaning, event, information, knowledge, reception, construction, processing, communication, and selectivity; the semantic field of the materiality paradigm includes terms such as materiality, substance, resources, labor, production, allocation, distribution. The epistemological conception of the first case is an event-like relational construction of reality, that of the second perspective an ontology of particles and objects that can be produced, accumulated, developed and transferred. 20 Disciplinary strategies of dealing with the concept of communication can be observed, cognitive differentiations, so to speak, which react to the concept and reach different degrees of theorization and systematization: Communication as a topic, object and circumstance,

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sociology for a long time, so that the term was almost hardly used until the 1950s (cf. Kiss 1989, p. 147 f.).21 The initial difficulties sociologists had with the concept of communication lie, among other things, in the interdisciplinary impositions it makes and the willingness to engage in interdisciplinary debate it requires. The interdisciplinary moorings become clear by looking at some key texts on the concept of communication in the twentieth century (in alphabetical order): Austin (1975), Barnard (1938), Bühler (1934), Chomsky (1968), Cooley (1909), Deutsch (1963), Lasswell (1927), Lazarsfeld et al. (1944), Mead (1934), Ruesch and Bateson (1951), Sacks (1992), Searle (1971), Shannon and Weaver (1949), Simon (1947), Watzlawick et al. (1967), Wiener (1948). This list shows the interdisciplinary grounding and orientation of the concept of communication, which is equally received and discussed in mathematics, cybernetics, linguistics, speech act theory and philosophy of language, communication studies (mass) communication, media and political studies, pragmatist behavioral research, psychology and social psychology. If we consider in parallel the simultaneous efforts of sociology in the twentieth century to establish itself as an independent discipline, then it can be understood that sociology does not want to have its self-conception as an empirical science of action questioned so easily, since it is precisely the concepts of action and social action and their differentiation from the concept of behaviour that are supposed to ensure an independent sociological perspective. Sociology’s caution not to get involved too quickly with a new, possibly even fashionable term is thus understandable as an identity-logical protection (cf. Baecker 2007, p. 10; Baecker 2005a). Thus the critical conceptual relation of action and communication is programmed, which has remained an irritant topic of basic conceptual dogmatism within sociology to this day. Delayed and hesitant reception, however, does not mean complete rejection. Two aspects of meaning mean that sociology cannot avoid the concept of communication in the long run. The first is the time-dimensionality, the movement aspect and the processual that the concept of communication expresses, and the second is the function of language and speech for understanding the meaningful constitution

occasion for subdisciplining (institutionalization of subdisciplines in professional societies) and theorization (basic concept). 21 The Grimm Dictionary of the German Language gives the following meanings for “uncanny”, among others: uncomfortable, restless, disturbing, unfamiliar, unusual, alarming and dangerous (cf. German Dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 24, sp. 1056–1058). But the uncanny also always has something attractive, appealing and exciting about it. For sociology, such a tension between rejection and attraction sometimes seems to emanate from the concept of communication.

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of social reality and the construction of social order. Process and language are two epistemes that go hand in hand with the concept of communication and also paradigmatically irritate sociology. The concept of process fits semantically into the idea of social change, where it functions as a complementary concept to the concept of order. Thus, within the framework of sociological thought, plausible complementary concepts such as order and change, static and dynamic, and structure and process can be formed. As major linguistic-analytical currents, it is especially sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology that irritate sociology in a lasting way, which is due to the fact that they bring methodologies with them (cf. Stichweh 2000b, p. 43). Thus, meaning-based sociology begins by “addressing the centrality of language as a constitutive element of sociality” (Schäfers 1995, p. 157). The connection between language and meaning becomes indisputable, but the relationship between action and communication is not, because the concept of action as a concept of sociology that establishes identity cannot simply be abandoned. The distinction and connection between behaviour, action and communication is particularly relevant here, as Baecker makes clear: Sociology has been concerned with the question of what is meant by an action ever since it believed it had reason to distinguish itself from the behavioral research of biologists and psychologists. An action can be recognized by the fact that a ‘subjective meaning’ is connected with it, as defined by Max Weber. However, this meaning is understood differently by the agent than by the observer, adds Alfred Schütz, so that sociology has to deal with a concept of difference that forces it to think of social order as a unity of the divergence of differently meant meaning. (...) Moreover, it has proven difficult to distinguish the concept of action from the concept of communication sufficiently sharply. (Baecker 2007, p. 36 f.)

So what happens to action and communication? In my opinion, the two cognitive definition routines subsumption and supplementation can be observed, which attempt to bring the relationship of these two event categories to each other into order. At issue here is the question of categorical subsumption and aspectual supplementation. Which term functions as the main term for the other, and what aspect does the assigned term add to the main term? The overwhelming definitional routine is to subordinate communication to the concept of action and interaction, since action-type differentiation has been a common cognitive strategy for sociological theory since Max Weber. Examples of this are communication as symbolic interaction (Mead, Blumer 1969), communicative action as a particular type of action (Habermas, Ungeheuer), communication “as a general element of interaction (...)” (Giddens 1992, p. 82) and communication as an aspect and function of action

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(Habermas, Giddens). The supplementing moment comes into play by the fact that the “communicative” means an aspect enrichment. Communication solves a problem of action by adding understanding and comprehension as dimensions to action. Understanding and comprehension are conceived as prerequisites of action coordination, whereby social action becomes understandable as communicative action (cf. Schäfers 1995, p. 155). This is also the reason for the transition from the information-theoretical to the action-theoretical concept of communication. The information-theoretical concept of communication means the exchange of information by means of signs and symbols, whereas an action-theoretical concept of communication brings into view “processes in which individuals relate to each other as thinking, speaking, feeling and acting persons” (Schäfers 1995, p. 155). The following definition of communication within the framework of a “compact concept of social action” is probably acceptable to most of the sociological community, as Schützeichel (2004, p. 305) reconstructs Esser’s understanding of communication: “(...) communication is an interactional process consisting of the social actions of the actors.” The other definitional routine, subordinating action to communication and justifying action by communicative attribution and ascription of meaning, on the other hand, is rather rarely found. In this sense, actions are understood as attribution points of attributions “made by communication (...)” (Baecker 2007, p. 37). In Luhmann’s system-theoretical theory of communication – as we will discuss in more detail in the second Sect. 2.5 – communication is not determined as the solution of a problem of action, but action is seen as a component that participates in the solution of the communicative problem of transforming improbability into probability in a meaningful way (cf. Luhmann 1981). In this sense, the concept of communication already starts where the concept of action wants to go, namely to establish mutualistic social constitution: “Communication involves or implies, (...), for its coming into being, a simultaneous presence, a cooperation of at least two systems of consciousness. Sociality is already built into the elementary of the operation and is not an effect that may or may not occur, as would be required for a concept of action” (Luhmann 2002, p. 287).22 The conceptual attractiveness and

However, the concept of “mutualistic constitution” is not clearly handled in Luhmann’s theory. In the chapter “Double Contingency” (Luhmann 1984, p. 157 ff.) Luhmann refers to a definition on the front pages of “Social Systems” (Luhmann 1984, p. 65). On the other hand, the term “multiple constitution” is found in a designated place. Which term now precedes, or whether both are to be put into one, cannot be clarified here. That Luhmann means by mutualistic constitution something like what Schütz calls “mutual knowledge” suggests itself. Although Luhmann attempts in the chapter on double contingency to proceduralize the social 22

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simultaneous challenge of the concept of communication for sociology lies precisely in this fundamental sociality, for communication is a genuinely social entity that cannot be reduced to any of its individual components. Communication, as a multi-component unit, is a complex social act and not a single action. “Act” and “action” are not synonymous in English, so it is misleading to translate the English term of act (“the act”) with the German term of Handlung. Already Mead’s “social act” is not conceived as a single action, but as an inter-act and event-composite of coordinating organisms with several components (cf. Mead 1938). Interaction is not seen as a single act, but as a compositional act consisting of several individual components (cf. Nassehi 2009, p. 355).23 This brings us to the sociological argument of the historical-semantic complementarity of ideas of communication and organization. By this is meant that both communication and organization can be considered key sociocultural concepts of the twentieth century (cf. Williams 1976, p. 17), denoting socially structurally situation of double contingency through the entities involved in it and to no longer assume any antecedent structure, value or symbol systems as a condition of possibility – here against the Parsonian thesis of “shared symbolic systems” – this does not quite succeed, as the following quotation from Luhmann (1984, pp. 154 f.) shows: “Situations with double contingency certainly require, in order to get communication going at all, a minimum of mutual observation and a minimum of expectations based on knowledge” Cf. Ortmann (1995, p. 78) on the connection between mutualistic constitution and double contingency. 23 For Parsons (1968, p. 43 ff.), the question of the multi-component unity of the act of action also stood in the foreground. And the concept that was available to indicate the component nature was the concept of system as a “conceptual scheme” (cf. Tacke and Drepper 2018, pp. 42 ff.). This is also how Parson’s dictum is to be understood: “Action is system”! The analytical decomposition of the “unit act” into its constituent components then revealed purposes, conditions, norms and actors. In this context, Parsons also justifies the subordination of the spatial category for action theory While the phenomena of action are inherently temporal, that is, involve processes in time, they are not in the same sense spatial. That is to say, relations in space are not as such relevant to systems of action analytically considered. For the analytical purposes of this theory, acts are not primarily but only secondarily located in space. Or to put it somewhat differently, spatial relations constitute only conditions, and so far as they are controllable, means of action. (...) For it is safe to say there is no empirical phenomenon, no thing or event, known to human experience, which is not in one aspect physical in the sense of being capable of location in space. There is certainly no empirical ‘self’ known which is not an ‘aspect of’ or ‘associated with’ a living biological organism. (cf. Parsons 1968, p. 45, fn. 1) It is possible that Luhmann was guided by this in determining the three dimensions of meaning and left it at the classification of space in the factual dimension (“means of action”) (cf. fn. 11 in this text).

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dominant social phenomena, practices and structures.24 In my view, they are complementary to ideas in terms of observing, describing and shaping human coordination, cooperation and order formation under modernizing social conditions. Or, to put it another way and to ask: Which social-structurally concise phenomena occupy both everyday and epistemic knowledge enormously in the twentieth century? These are new relations of communication and organization. What is meant by ideational complementarity in terms of human coordination, cooperation, and order formation is that communication as a concept of process and movement addresses the dynamics of modern life, and organization as a concept of structure and design addresses the dimensions of order. In detail. Communication is a “nomen actionis” (Kiss 1989, p. 147), a concept of activity and movement, and etymologically stands in the “field of meaning in the periphery of communication, granting, connection, exchange, intercourse, handling, community” (Saner 1976, p. 894). Communication thus carries with it the dual meaning of transmitting and sharing: “In controversy about communication systems and communication theory it is often useful to recall the unresolved range of the original noun of action, represented at its extremes by transmit, a one-way process, and share (cf. Communion and especially communicant), a common or mutual process. The intermediate senses – make common to many, and impart (...)” (Williams 1976, p. 72 f.). Communication in this fundamental sense means connection, mediation and understanding. In the change in the history of meaning from the concept of activity to the concept of object (cf. Williams 1976, p. 72), communication increasingly refers to the means and media, initially physical-technical facilities, infrastructures and aids such as roads, canals, railways. In the twentieth century, the term communication is then increasingly used to designate the transmission of information and the establishment of contact. Communicative traffic now means both the transport of material goods and people as well as the passing on and transmission of information and ideas. In the course of the twentieth century, communication becomes a “terminus technicus” and thus a plausible concept for observing and describing changes in communication and media technology and, as a result, mediatized information and knowledge processes (cf. Stichweh 2000b, p. 11). The concept of organization as a structuring and shaping concept also became popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, whereby the great importance of the organized nature of modern life’s processes was not only reflected upon and at

“Keywords” are socially structurally significant and referential words that address historically relevant issues and problems (cf. Williams 1976, p. 17).

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the same time advanced scientifically – management, administration and business administration come to mind here – but was also thematized in art formats (literature, films, photo documentaries). Kafka’s novel worlds, Chaplin’s films, and Orwell’s dystopias are only the popular examples of cultural reflections on the organized world. As we have marked before, communication is increasingly used to refer not only to activity and sociality but also to the medialities and materialities through which communication processes take place, and communication is used to designate the establishment of contact and the transmission of information. It is precisely at this point that the complementarity of ideas between communication and organization can be demonstrated. It is this double understanding of social coordination and factual information and message processing that makes the concept of communication a relevant concept for organizational research at an early stage. From the moment that organizations are increasingly understood as social collective entities and contexts of human coordination and cooperation, the concept of communication also becomes an interesting concept. Thus, important findings that are now part of the canon of knowledge in organizational research show the influences of communication theory concepts. This can be seen in some key texts in organization studies, where initially the communication, information theory and cybernetic influences were formative: Barnard (1938), Simon (1947), Ruesch and Bateson (1951), Deutsch (1963), Luhmann (1964), Thayer (1967, 1968). As the next major wave of influence, from the mid-1960s onwards, interactionistinterpretative communication and social research reaches organizational research and with it the concept of the linguistically-interactively generated social situation. It is the convergence of Berger and Luckmann’s social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis that realigns organizational research, which until then had been strongly influenced by normative and structural functionalism, and produces knowledge about factual conditions, everyday working life, and milieu conditions of individual types of organizations through qualitative field studies. These natural data can be contrasted with normative model conceptions of rational organization. These qualitative studies establish and anchor an expanded understanding of communication in organizational research that reaches beyond informational and cybernetic models. This research path is deepened and at the same time extended by the latest developments in organizational research. Thus, while it was initially the interpretative-interactionist communication and social research of the socio-linguistic turn that also had an impact on organizational research, today it is various further developments within the framework of a broader cultural turn that further expand and deepen the perspective of the communicative production and institutional stabilization of social forms. As already mentioned, we find this within neoinstitutionalism, in sense-making approaches,

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structuration and practice theories or communication-based systems theory, which we will reconstruct and discuss in the following chapters. These reconstructions and discussions will first make theoretical points of convergence and translation possibilities visible. This does not mean a comparison of theories, but a basic search for traces of the ability to connect meaning and communication theory in operationally oriented studies. In doing so, I follow Niklas Luhmann’s hint and self-disciplining advice to sociology not to exaggerate differences and divergences between sociological theories and the paradigmatic fronts and trench warfare they breed: “Contrasts between sociological theories are often overdrawn. This may be related to profiling and criticizing needs that are bred and rewarded in the scientific system” (Luhmann 1982, p. 366). However, from the point of view of difference and divergence, I would like to pay attention to the independent concept of communication and the subsumptive and supplementary relationship between communication and action in the theories and approaches discussed. This leads to the observation hint and work assignment for this text to pay attention to an independent concept of communication, the relationship between action and communication and the question of the generative principle of form in the reconstruction of meaning-operational motifs in social constructivist-oriented organization research, how typical form emerges from operativity. Especially with regard to the last point, the question of emergence or aggregation as a formgenerative principle must be kept in mind, which I will point out at given points.

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Meaning: Operativity and Typicality

This chapter focuses on essential questions and concepts of an operational-eventoriented epistemology of organization. Cognition, practice and communication as operative modes of the movement of meaning and their structural correlates knowledge, rules and semantics as typifying determinations of meaning are discussed. The thematic starting points and the theoretical desiderata can be demonstrated by the recent debate in organizational studies on “organization and knowledge”.1 The discussion will make clear that knowledge can be understood as a relational operation correlate. In the sense of an event-structure theory (Allport 1940, 1954), this is also accompanied by an expansion of understanding of the concept of knowledge from the factual dimension to the time dimension, because a “representational basic understanding of knowledge” (Luhmann 1995b, p. 160) often prevails. By this is meant that with the concept of knowledge is usually connected “the notion of a representational function. According to this, knowledge refers to the external world, that is, to something that is not disposable for knowledge. For purposes of knowledge, the external world is assumed to be uniquely given. (...) In knowledge, then, it is assumed that the environment is unambiguous as it is, but it can be described correctly or incorrectly” (Luhmann 1995b, p. 155 f.). Such a representational concept of knowledge is usually associated with an adaptionist understanding of knowledge to the effect that more and apparently better knowledge increases the performance and the environmental situation of the respective knowledge carrier, because the function of knowledge is seen in representation, adaptation and integration:

1

Cf. Drepper (2007) on initial preliminary work on this topic, some of which has been incorporated into this chapter in revised form.

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Drepper, Operativity And Typicality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42011-6_2

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This correlated with a conception of historical progress, for work on gaining knowledge had to be understood, on that presupposition, as an improvement in the environmental relations of the system. More knowledge and the elimination of errors would then have to improve the environmental situation of the social system. The representational and adaptionist understanding of cognition require and support each other. (Luhmann 1995b, p. 159)

From an operative perspective, on the other hand, knowledge can no longer be understood as a material stock, but must be seen as an eventfully produced form, which in turn can function as a structure for further operations (cf. Luhmann 1995b, p. 170). In the following analyses, organizational knowledge is understood as a social fact and thus as a sui generis phenomenon, and the relevant areas of coupling and interpenetration that play a role in the genesis of organizational knowledge are named. It is about the coupling of “individual and organization”, “organization and surrounding context” (society, culture, institution) and of “individual and society”. Two other topoi are also frequently encountered in the discussion. These are the distinction between “explicit and tacit knowledge” and the triad of “data, information and knowledge”. The relationship between explicit and tacit knowledge points to a fundamental issue that has always preoccupied organizational theory. It is about the relationship between the individual and the organization: how are individual and organizational knowledge related? How can the transition from individual to collective, from subjective to intersubjective, or from psychic to social knowledge be conceived? The distinction between “explicit and tacit knowledge” or “codified and tacit knowledge”, which goes back to Polanyi, is a leading distinction in this context (cf. as an overview McKinley 2005, p. 243 ff.). “Codified knowledge” is usually understood as formalized and written knowledge, whereas “tacit” or “implicit knowledge” is understood as informal, individually bound and orally transmitted knowledge (cf. McKinley 2005, p. 243). The distinction between “data, information and knowledge” (cf. e.g. Huseman and Goodman 1999, p. 103 ff.) is essentially about making clear a qualitative increase in the relationship between these units. Data is the “raw material” that is formed into information and ultimately knowledge in further “refinement steps”. A basic epistemological assumption here is the distinction between world facts and entity performances, i.e. between internal (subject or system reference) and external attribution (object or world reference) of the phenomenon reference. Data and mostly also information are understood against the background of this distinction as world facts or objects, whereas knowledge is understood as a synthesizing (process aspect) and synthesized (structure aspect) subject or system status.

2.1 Organization and Knowledge: Topic Access and Theoretical Desiderata

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Organization and Knowledge: Topic Access and Theoretical Desiderata

The concept of knowledge has gained much popularity in the organizational discourse of recent years, both in the context of popular and practically oriented management and organizational teachings as well as in academic reflections, and functions as a compact concept that re-contours the description of different form and function aspects of organizations. In this context, both internal and external activities and relationships are described as knowledge phenomena, and organizations as a whole are now portrayed more strongly as cultural and socially diversified entities.2 The diversity discussion within the organizational discourse is also largely based on the coupling of the concept of knowledge with the concept of culture. It is about “cultural differences in mindset” (Sparrow 1998, p. 4), which, in addition to the functional differences in perspective that arise in organizations through the division of labor, job, task and area specializations, provide for intercultural differences in meaning (cf. Sparrow 1998, p. 4 f.). Since the organizational culture discussion of the 1980s, the communicative construction of internal organizational patterns of meaning has been discussed along the concept of culture. In recent years, this research has shifted strongly in the direction of interculturality as a result of globalization and world society processes, whereby both the diversities and comparabilities of cultural pattern production, which play an increasingly important role inside organizations and in their external relations, and the possibilities and conditions of intercultural translations are analyzed.3

2

In this context, the concept of design plays a major role today, both for structural and selfdescription issues. In the case of design, it is a question of setting up different structures with reference to and consideration of knowledge issues; in the case of self-description along the concept of knowledge, it is a question of whether one’s own organization as a whole is knowledge-affine, knowledge-responsive and knowledge-intensive. Cf. Baecker (2005b) on the concept of design in organizational theory. Pfeffer (1997, p. 10) uses the term “engineering manipulation” to illustrate the connection between machine design and organizational design in the engineering view of organizational design. This refers, for example, to the “engineering principles to the design and management of work” (Pfeffer 1997, p. 10) of early Taylorism. 3 The concept of translation, which has been increasingly discussed in organizational studies in recent years, is related to this. One of the questions here is what role translations play in the creation of congruence of meaning, communicative understanding and coordination of action when heterogeneous and divergent cultural imprints and knowledge stocks are present, e.g. in mixed organizational teams, in mergers and joint ventures or also in network constellations. We will discuss the concept of translation in detail in the third chapter.

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It is an initially uncommon definition within organizational science to view organizations as knowledge systems or as knowledge-based systems and, for example, to conceive of a company as a “distributed knowledge system”. According to Tsoukas, this entails a fundamental reorientation away from the elective affinity between the neoclassical and the behaviorist input-output model of the organization (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 95). The limitations of a primarily purpose-rational understanding of organization are underpinned by the insight that the limits of organizational purpose-rationality are not only rooted in unpredictable, contingent and ambiguous environmental conditions, but also in the inherent logic, momentum and stubbornness of organizations themselves.4 Let us first take a closer look at some of the main arguments from this complex of topics. In addition to explicit references to knowledge in terms such as knowledge organization, knowledge management and knowledge engineering, there are concepts here which do not explicitly bear the concept of knowledge in their title, but which do imply a reference to an organizationally relevant concept of knowledge. Concepts such as the “learning organization”, the “virtual organization”, the “competent organization”, “organizational intelligence”, “intellectual capital” and “intellectual assets” are worth mentioning here, all of which address a change from classic organizational forms of industrial modernity to the “postmodern organizational reality” and propose corresponding terms (cf. Alvesson and Thompson 2005, p. 497). The basic argumentation is that in the digitalized information and knowledge society new significant goods are emerging, the so-called “information age goods”, which as intellectual capital increasingly determine the success or failure of organizations (cf. Stewart 2001, pp. x–xii). Innovative capability, competitive enhancement as well as competitive and market positioning through knowledge and intellectual capital are thereby identified as essential economic and organizational criteria. In this context, the concept of resources shifts in the sense that data, information and knowledge are understood as the relevant strategic organizational resources (cf. McKinley 2005, p. 242). Knowledge is seen as the intellectual capital of modern organizations (cf. Stewart 1997, 2001), as a resource and raw material of

4 Cf. Kette (2012) on the typological dominance of the organizational model of the enterprise. In some economic theories, however, both the intrinsic logic and intrinsic complexity as well as the social embeddedness of organizations is now an issue (cf. Child and Heavens 2001, p. 309 ff. on social embeddedness). The concept of institution, for example, enables the discussion of the sociality and societality of organizations. For parts of organizational and management practice, Baecker (2003, p. 36) notes an increasing reflexivity to think not only about rationality and efficiency, but also increasingly about uncertainty, complexity, ambivalence, ambiguity and paradoxes.

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the future (Wimmer 2004, p. 197 ff.), as a competitive factor and driver of innovation, as a result of which the classic production factors of “capital” and “labor” are experiencing a revaluation in significance. The concept of work is experiencing a shift from the production paradigm to the knowledge paradigm, from the materiality paradigm to the information paradigm, which applies not only to business organizations but also to other types of social organization (cf. Stewart 2001, p. xii). In this sense, knowledge is discussed as a steering factor for non-profit organizations in the “knowledge revolution” (cf. Badelt 2002, p. 515 f.). The redescription of organizations by the concept of knowledge does not really sound surprising to informed observers, since hardly any social context is exposed to so many trend talks and reform expectations as the organizations of modern society (cf. Vollmer 2002). In line with trends and fashions, “fresh” semantics are repeatedly put into circulation, suggesting design templates that are supposedly better suited to the changed structural situations in society.5 These new descriptions can be observed in a performative sense under aspects of reinterpretation and shifting of meaning, which do not only remain superficial and inconsequential, but produce and transport a form of intended and wanted organizational images.6 In this sense, the argumentations on “knowledge as a management resource” can be seen as reinterpretations and shifts of meaning, because they translate the concept of knowledge from informational and cognitive semantics into economic-materialistic semantics.7 All typical terms and composites from the economic-materialistic 5

See Abrahamson (1991, 1996), Benders and van Veen (2001), and Sturdy (2004) on management fashions. 6 Klaus Türk has repeatedly pointed out the interpretive power of semantics with regard to organizational realities. The perception of social objects is concept- and distinctiondependent, and Distinctions that we encounter in society are neither natural nor trivial, but highly conventionalized or even contested and highly relevant for orientations of action. Whether we distinguish between organizations and families, between nations, races, between men and women, between work and leisure, between mine and yours, between economics and politics, etc., or use entirely different differentiations, is of great importance for the constitution of our world, for the way we orient ourselves, define problems and develop solution strategies (Türk et al. 2002, p. 15). 7

I will discuss the concepts of translation and shifting meaning and their relevance to the sociology of knowledge and organization theory in more detail in Chap. 3. The relevance of the concept of translation can also be shown in sociological theory. In the Weber tradition, this is about the relation of values and ideas to rules guiding action; in the Luhmann tradition, it is about the relation of higher generalized to respecified and concretized meaning. This can be

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conceptual household such as “capital”, “property”, “good”, “production factor”, “competition factor” and “information age goods” aim at an economic plausibility and connectivity of the concept of knowledge. The resulting shift in the meaning of the concept of knowledge from a process and event category, and thus a category of difference, to a category of substance and stock means that it is possible to speak in typical economic terms about the acquisition, accumulation, management and administration of the resource “knowledge”. The elective affinity between the representational and adaptionist concepts of knowledge described at the beginning with Luhmann is found precisely at this point, where knowledge is understood as a means of control in the instrumentally rational sense, through whose skilful management the environmental situation, competitiveness and prospects of success of an organization can be improved (cf. Thommen 2000; cf. North 1999, p. 39 ff.). The semantic modes are based on different phenomena, whereby both consultancy communication with matching communicative formatting (literature, digital formats) and the development of ideas in organizational science are to be seen as central. On the one hand, the new organizational images are driven by the modern consulting market, which is effectively flanked and supported by suitable publications in the mass media (cf. Faust 2002; Furusten 1999). In this context, the semantics of rationality is the grand narrative of organizational discourse, which, along with (personal) authority, is one of the “source mystifications” (Luhmann 1980a, p. 170) in decision-making problems. Other societal narratives with contemporary diagnostic explosiveness are also added, demanding from organizations the courage to innovate and renew. “Globalization”, “competitiveness” and “innovativeness” are such legitimizing concepts and background narratives (cf. Hasse 2003), which provide for an appropriate situation and problem definition as well as a high connectivity plausibility and acceptance probability of new concepts. On the other hand, the knowledge-semantic redescription of organizations is also enriched by discipline-oriented organization studies – the differences between management or organization studies and organization theory briefly demonstrated for both approaches using the example of education and school: “By means of transformations into action-guiding rules or norms, educational ideas then gain validity and a behavioral orientation can develop.” (Stölner 2009, p. 108) Systems theory is about structures that enable a functional orientation of the interaction system of teaching. Luhmann and Schorr (1981, p. 52) speak of “translation structures”, that is, “structures that enable a translation of the function of educating to the level of the interaction system of teaching”. What is meant here is, for example, the asymmetry of teacher and student, the unequal distribution of the number of people, the unequal distribution of the planned communication time, the equality of the students and the orientation of communication to topics.

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disregarded here for the moment.8 The abundance of descriptive templates and “organizational images” increases overall as a result.9 The new description of the organization through the concept of knowledge could now give the impression that the relation between organization and knowledge describes a new phenomenon. However, such a view is truncated in the history of ideas to the extent that the knowledge-based nature of organizational activities has long been expressed and reflected along traditional concepts such as work, occupation, and profession.10 Tsoukas expresses this as follows: Knowledge has always been implicated in the process of economic development, since anything we do, how we transform resources into products and services, crucially depends on the knowledge we have at our disposal for effecting such a transformation. An ancient artisan, a medieval craftsman and his apprentices, and a modern manufacturing system all make use of knowledge: certain skills, techniques, and procedures are employed for getting things done. (Tsoukas 2005, p. 141)

But what distinguishes earlier practical knowledge foundations, which were usually formulated and represented as doctrines, from current forms? In this context, the “degree of formalization”, the “systematicity” and the “expert-based nature” of knowledge are named as new structures of expectation (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 142). Theoretical knowledge is regarded as legitimate knowledge, whereby the dominant trend is the increase in demands for systematic procedures of objectification, documentation and evaluability.11 This development does not seem to have the

8

I assume that the genre-specific basis of the rationality critique has shifted from organization studies vs. organization sociology (cf. Mayntz 1961) towards management studies vs. organization theory. That is, it is no longer only organizational sociologists who are aware of the rationality critique, but also the broader organizational science. 9 Morgan’s “Images of Organization” (Morgan 1997) are designed in different fields of communication, e.g. in self-description communications, reflection theories of different social fields, counseling communication and mass media communication. The mutual interdependencies and selectivity reinforcements, but also autonomies, independence and interdependency interruptions between the fields cannot be clarified here. Cf. e.g. March (1999, p. 325 ff.) on the relation of “Organizational Consultants and Organizational Research” and Kieser (2002) on influence differences between scientific and consulting knowledge in organizations as well as on the relevance of various guiding distinctions such as practicability vs. reflection. 10 Myers (1996) makes this clear in an anthology in which he compiles texts that take a look at the correlation “knowledge and organization” from various perspectives, but do not explicitly use the concept of knowledge (cf. Ackroyd et al. 2005, p. 329 ff. in the chapter “Occupations and Organizations”).

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effect of strengthening the importance of traditional professions. “Differentiation”, “decentralization” and “dislocation” of social knowledge through mass media communication and organizational rationalities are the processes that shake the established knowledge dominance of professions (cf. Stichweh 2005, p. 41). The influence of the mass media is expressed in the fact that, in addition to the strong moralization of issues, the critical questioning of traditional and established social structures is given a strong weight. According to Stichweh, this also and especially concerns the professions and their traditionally secured privileges and this presumably works towards a gradual erosion of the willingness to believe in competence and invest trust. Organization and (mass media) criticism work in the same direction, and this leads to the institutionalization of evaluation and auditing, of quality controls with regard to professional services rendered, and finally to the emergence of litigation risks and claims for damages, especially in those areas of professional action that long seemed isolated from critical observation. (...) Finally, the emergence of that structural change in society should be noted which is much discussed under the title of the knowledge society. In my opinion, these terms can primarily mean that knowledge is less and less reserved at privileged social addresses and in this respect the orthogonality of knowledge to the principle of the functional differentiation of society is becoming more and more apparent. (Stichweh 2005, p. 41 f.)

Stichweh concludes from this that professions could lose, or have already lost, their structure-determining function, and that “knowledge and organization as two resources or mechanisms that have become universal, both of which are orthogonal to functional differentiation” (Stichweh 2005, p 42), are replacing the function of professions. The demands for systematization, specialization and documentation of organizational practices and the need for expert knowledge are increasing. It is a matter of problem-solving and application knowledge, whereby the new professionals are organizational experts or experts within medially networked topic communities who communicate in decentralized networks (cf. Haefliger and von Krogh 2004). In organizations, for example, they are “communities of practice” that interact on the basis of new information and communication technologies in a topic-, problem-, and project-related manner and produce semantic material as

11

This process is usually described as scientification, but in my opinion it is mainly about the methodological aspect and thus about the complexity-reducing part of systematic knowledge and not about contingency-enriching theorizing. The orientation is thus in relation to the methodological norm of science to communicate in the scheme “problem/problem solution” (cf. Luhmann 1990, p. 572).

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“polylinguistic communicators” (cf. Priddat 2004) (cf. Bogenrieder and Nooteboom 2004; Huysman 2004). We will come back to these thematic analyses.

2.2

Cognition

I now turn to the various theoretical systematizations of the relation “organization and knowledge”. I will start with the cognition-theoretical discussions, in which the schema-dependency of perceiving, thinking, acting and communicating is central (cf. Strati and Nicolini 1997, p. 388). This field of research exhibits a high degree of conceptual heterogeneity, as the concept of schema is used in parallel with terms such as frames, scripts, prototypes, stereotypes, cognitive maps, and implicit theories to refer to the typicality and memory aspects of mental and social operations. The cognition perspective also leads us once again to the history of ideas in organization studies, for organization studies had a strong social psychological undertone in the sense of the very influential behavioral decision theory with its connection of individual cognition, motivation, and decision rationality (cf. Cyert and March 1963; March 1990, 1999; March and Simon 1976; Simon 1981, 1982; Stinchcombe 1990).12 However, we will not deal with this extensively here, but rather with the meaning- and-, attribution-theoretical extensions of the social-psychological cognitive perspective in organization research, which are connected in particular with Karl Weick’s “sensemaking” approach, in whose “epistemology of organizing” the extension from an information-theoretical to a sense-theoretical perspective can be found (cf. Weick 1985, 1995). Weick describes his research as a heuristic framework of analysis, for which he envisages in an autological conclusion what he also considers characteristic and typical for his objects of analysis, namely processuality and openness to unexpected possibilities through creative production of meaning.13 In this regard, Weick is particularly interested in the temporality of cognitions in addition to the form of meaning. The

Stinchcombe’s “Informations and Organizations” (1990) does not yet contain an explicit concept of knowledge. For a communication-theoretical extension of the narrower information-theoretical decision concept, see Feldman and March 1990. 13 Weick’s processuality extends to the liquefaction of the language of theory and is expressed in his work through the dissolution of nouns into verb forms. Weick (1985) turns this into the emphatic theoretical imperative: “Stamp out the nouns!” Thus, structure and system are to become event and process, and a system and structure perspective is translated into an activity and process perspective. Then, according to Weick, as a social researcher, one also has linguistically before one’s eyes and ears the everyday pragmatic mode of how individuals 12

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core aspects of Weick’s sensemaking concept look as follows (cf. in total Weick 1995, pp. 17–62): • Identity: The mode and the object of thought refer to identities, which in turn are socially constituted. What and how a speaker says this what says something about his identity. • Retrospectivity: The objects of thinking – noema in the Husserlian sense – only become apparent through temporally subordinate (attentional) considerations, i.e. through a further act of thinking or speaking. • Design (Enactment): The objects in the environment of an operative unit are meaningfully produced by it, e.g. through thinking, speaking and writing, and not simply found in the world. • Sociality: Reciprocity of perspectives and mutuality, symbolic interaction, generalizations and typifications of meaning enable, influence and contextualize individual constructions of meaning. • Processuality and eventfulness: the constitution of meaning is eventful, dynamic, continuous, fleeting and self-replacing. Event sense emerges through selective interruption of sequence and interdependence. • Selectivity/production of intrinsic values: Meaningful constitution of objects is always selective and excerpt-like (“extracted cues”), because many possibilities are not even actualized, but remain presented. The repetitions of a selection can lead to stable intrinsic values. • Plausibility: Constructions of meaning and attributions of meaning must be sufficiently contextually plausible and pragmatically appropriate, and not conform to strict criteria of truth or accuracy. How Weick imagines the synchronous realization of these individual aspects in an operative act of meaning constitution becomes clear in the following quotation: “Once people begin to act (enactment), they generate tangible outcomes (cues) in some context (social), and this helps them to discover (retrospect) what is occurring (ongoing), what needs to be explained (plausibility), and what should be done next (identity enhancement)” (Weick 1995, p. 55). These sensemaking elements are held together by a linguistic and receptionlogical principle that Weick adopts from Graham Wallas and that makes clear the elementary temporality of the constitution of meaning:

meaningfully constitute social order through their actions: Language is to be reconstructed as speech, action as acting, and institution as institutionalization.

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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’ (...) This recipe is about justification (my thoughts justify my earlier words), choice (I choose which words to focus on and which thoughts will explain them), retrospective sensemaking (I look back at what I said earlier from a later point in time when talking has stopped), discrepancies (I feel a need to see what I say when something doesn’t make sense), social construction of justification (I invoke the thoughts I have been socialized to label as acceptable), and action as the occasion for sensemaking (my act of speaking starts the sensemaking process). (Weick 1995, p. 12)

Weick is influenced not only by cognitive and dissonance theoretical social psychology, but also by ethnomethodology. In both traditions he sees convergences regarding the concept of meaning attribution. Both the notion of “accounting” in ethnomethodological usage and the notion of “self-justification” in dissonance theory are based on the notion of meaning attribution of subsequent events or operations to preceding events (thought acts or situations). The recourse to social psychology and ethnomethodological sociology makes it understandable that Weick’s sensemaking concept starts at the coupling point of individual and social and assumes a mutual irreducibility of these levels: “Sensemaking is grounded in both individual and social activity, and wether the two are even separable (...)” (Weick 1995, p. 12). Weick also emphasizes the circularity and recursivity of structure and action. He assumes that not only cognition determines action, but that action also produces cognition. This is expressed by the concept of enactment in Weick’s approach. Here, enactment means the act of meaningfully constituting realities. It is precisely this aspect of the constitution and genesis of meaning that distinguishes sensemaking from interpretation and makes sensemaking a fundamental process: Sensemaking is about authoring as well as interpretation, creation as well as discovery. (...) The key distinction is that sensemaking is about the ways people generate what they interpret. (...) The concept of sensemaking highlights the action, activity, and creating that lays down the traces that are interpreted and then reinterpreted. (...) Sensemaking, however, is less about discovery than it is about invention. To engage in sensemaking is to construct, filter, frame, create factivity (...). Thus, the concept of sensemaking is valuable because it highlights the invention that precedes interpretation. It is also valuable because it implies a higher level of engagement by the actor. (...) To talk about sensemaking is to talk about reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves and their creations. There is a strong reflexive quality to this process. (Weick 1995, p. 8 ff.)

Let us note, then, that with the concepts of retrospectivity, recursivity and reciprocity, Weick attempts to make the operative mode of sensemaking comprehensible,

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emphasizing the time and social dimensions of acts of sense-making. Sensemaking is about the meaningful linking of events and experiences and “retrospective sensemaking” is about the aspect of action orientation and structuring of future events through schemata. This seems paradoxical, since retrospective is actually backward-looking, but now functions as a future-oriented mode. But this is precisely the clou of this conception, that recursivity emerges from retrospectivity. Weick emphasizes that sensemaking is about the operativity of sense-making. Sensemaking takes place above all in ambiguous, uncertain and unexpected situations in which clear routines and typifications are not effective. In these “interruptive situations” (cf. Weick 1995, p. 46) “deliberative cognition” (cf. DiMaggio 1997, p. 271) is triggered, modified and new meanings are created and attributed to the situations (cf. Weick 1995, p. 48). Sensemaking is thus a mechanism of order genesis in situations where clear orders are lacking and uncertainty is to be reduced. Weick also understands organizations as meaning-constituting and meaningconstituted units (cf. Weick 1995, p. 16). However, they are not understood as systems that react to their environment (contingency theory) and internally map information from their environment and seek to process it further; rather, they are knowledge-generating systems of meaning that influence their environment by selectively attributing meaning. What functions as a relevant environment for an organization is not predetermined per se, but depends on the selective relevance of the organization. Weick’s approach is thus overall on the course of recent cognitive social psychology, which is concerned with understanding how knowledge processes are embedded in social situations and constellations of action. Social cognitions imply that cognitive schemata enable the production and reproduction of meaning (cf. Sims et al. 1986; Tenbrunsel et al. 1999, p. 65 ff.; Schützeichel 2007). The cognitive and schematic theoretical approach to organizations adopts this perspective and combines an “Organizational Cognitivism” with an “Organizational Symbolism”. Symbols are signs that span and identify further contexts of meaning, and scripts are structures that link individual events into sequences and provide action-guiding meaning (cf. Gioia 1986, p. 57). Coordination and understanding take place via symbols, and “symbolic knowledge of events, actions and concepts” (Gioia 1986, p. 58) is semantically schematized in action-guiding scripts: “Knowledge is stored semantically, that is, according to meaning. That knowledge could be in the form of episodes (...), visual images (...), or verbal codes describing sequences” (Gioia 1986, p. 59). Schemas are meaningful forms of experience generalization (cf. Gioia 1986, p. 56), and schema application is a creative process. Schema updating is an active act in which the fit between the current situation and the generalized type is made.

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Meaning constitution is not a process in which existing schemas are simply retrieved and recalled, but both perceptions can be adapted to schemas and schemas can be altered (“alteration of existing schemas”).14 The modes are “assimilation” of events to existing patterns and “accommodation” of patterns to future possible events (cf. Gioia 1986, p. 57). One goes one step further if one asks about the connection between “social cognitions” and “cultural patterns”, about the connection between “culture and cognition” (DiMaggio 1997). What connects the cognition-theoretical perspective with the culturalist perspective? I would like to specify it as follows. Both mental schemas and cultural patterns can be understood as generalized types of meaning. Here, then, we come to the concept of typification, which the cognitivist culturalists and culturalist cognitivists borrow from Berger and Luckmann’s social phenomenology and thus from the tradition of Alfred Schütz’s theory of meaning and meaning worlds (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1980; DiMaggio 1997, p. 270) and use on the one hand for the conceptual specification of schemata and on the other hand for the definition of institutions: The parallel with sociological accounts of institutions is striking. Typifications (mental structures) influence perception, interpretation, planning, and action (...). Institutionalized structures and behaviors (i.e. those that are both highly schematic and widely shared) are taken for granted, reproduced in everyday action (Giddens ‘structuration’, 1984) and treated as legitimate. (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio 1997, p. 270)

This brings us to the next point of the theoretical discussion, in which the questions just addressed are sharpened with a view to the connection between knowledge, language and schemata. Here it becomes clear that schemata as patterns of meaning generalization and the reproduction of types can be related to each other. From a pragmatist perspective, Hans Lenk (1995) draws attention to the connection between language, symbol use, schema formation and metaschematization. For Lenk, at the event level symbol use and metasymbol use and at the structural

14

The term alteration is commonly used in classical harmony. Here, alteration refers to the chromatic shift of pitch downward or upward. Alteration can lead to modulation from one key to another, since shifted notes can act as new leading tones. The key thing about alteration is that it is the connection that determines which key signature, scale and cadence you are in and how you can proceed: The connection determines the classification, the performance consolidates the assignment of the frequency and vibratory fits. Without going into detail here, the idea of adaptation through modification and displacement is very instructive for an understanding of schema variation in the context discussed here.

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level schematization and metaschematization are the relevant viewpoints. A basic operative motive is expressed in the pragmatist tradition by the equal valuation of action and cognition. Acting and cognition are not separable, because cognition is also an active event, a doing.15 Since action, from this point of view, must be understood as a production of difference – actions produce states of change in the social world – another basic concept – e.g. operation – is needed to be able to express the productions of difference. According to Lenk, one must assume an irreducible circular relation between operation (event) and schema (structure): Classifications, subsuming, classifying, all these and related (mental) operations are important in this context; they are only possible if one has the corresponding schemata to this classification, to this structuring, which it possesses. (...) Reactivation, rehearsing, tuning in, these are the great masters of learning. This ritualized process of repetition gains a kind of inherent stability and is a necessary precondition for really learning something, for recognizing something again, indeed for recognizing and acting at all – and that always means in a patterned, shaped or patterning and shaping way. (Lenk 1995, p. 28 ff.)

Schema, script, category and prototype formation are generalizations that orient and order subsequent meaning connections and thus make them expectable. The generalization aspect lies in the fact that schemata enable the preservation of cognitive capacities, allow transfers to other situations, have an orienting and ordering effect, and structure information processing (cf. Lord and Foti 1986, p. 38). On the basis of this definition and for a more precise differentiation, types of cognitive schemata such as “self-schemata” (“cognitive generalization of the self”, self-perception, selfdescription), “person-schemata” (characteristics, attributes and behaviors of persons), “person-in-situation-schemata” (typical behaviors of persons in typical situations) as well as “scripts resp. Event schemata” (sequence causalities, linking of conditions and consequences, of causes and effects, of means and ends/goals) are distinguished from each other (cf. Gioia and Sims 1986, p. 12 ff.), in which property, behavioral, factual and temporal typifications are related to social, factual, temporal and spatial objects and causally linked with each other (Lord and Foti 1986, p. 29 ff.).

15

According to Lenk, Kant’s concept of schema already exhibits an activity orientation through the understanding of “sensuous-conceptual design” (Lenk 1995, p. 16): “First of all, one can regard as schemata all possible structurings or structural formations of a representational kind that are supposed to represent something, that are represented, for example, externally by signs, ‘internally’ by ideas and pattern activations, whatever both may mean exactly” (Lenk 1995, p. 27).

2.3 Practice

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Practice

The meaning-theoretical discussions can be further deepened by an analysis of the concept of practice in organizational research. An important author in this field of discourse is Haridimos Tsoukas, whose approach combines linguistic and discourse analytical, sociological, cognitive scientific and social psychological insights and in this way raises important questions and points of contact for an operative theory of meaning in organization. In doing so, Tsoukas draws on key concepts and argumentations of recent practice-theoretical approaches.16 A main argument of the practice turn in social theory consists in the embeddedness of knowledge. The aspects of body-relatedness and the incorporation of knowledge emphasize the extension of a purely cognition-based concept of knowledge. A focus of the practice turn is to “shift the emphasis from conscious sense-making to tacit knowledge and non-conscious and materially embedded sense-making in contexts of social practices” (Bongaerts 2006, p. 1). Implicit knowledge is (not available) to the actors through their also bodily socialization (...) Implicit knowledge is presented as bodily anchored knowledge and is thus fundamentally materialized. Social practice is materialistic in two respects: on the one hand, because it is – bodily anchored and thus bodily activities come into view in their function for the constitution of social events, and on the other hand, because bodily activities also include dealing with things of the physical world, whereby mainly technical objects, or more generally: cultural objects are meant. (Bongaerts 2006, p. 3 f.)17

Tsoukas has in mind an operative concept of knowledge that links knowledge to social practices of action and the use of distinction processed therein. According to Tsoukas, knowledge and action are inseparable: “(...) knowledge begins with action” (Tsoukas 2005, p. 96). The decisive factor here is the judging and evaluating, the selective-evaluative mode that allows knowledge to emerge, which

16

Cf. Schatzki and Knorr-Cetina (2001), Reckwitz (2003), Bongaerts (2006, 2007, 2012) and Nassehi (2009) as basic overviews of the practice turn in social theory. Cf. Kai Helge-Becker (2005) on the practice turn in organization and management theory. 17 We will encounter the aspect of the “material anchoring of sense-making” again in the analyses of organizational self-descriptions, self-symbolization and spatial embodiment (Sect. 3.7). Symbolic and material externalizations are important for the organizational constitution of address and self-description, in sum, for the constitution of identity. The relationship between power as a medium of communication and its architectural materializations is also obvious for organizations. In terms of communication theory, these questions refer to “materialities of communication” (cf. Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1988).

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is the difference to data and information (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 121). Data, information and knowledge as objects and events differ according to degrees of complexity, context-dependency and generalizability (context-independence) as well as the required degree of selectivity and (evaluative) judgment by the individual (cf. Tsoukas and Mylonopoulos 2004, p. 8). The individual’s competence to make distinctions is based on language and the capacity for meaning production and meaning reproduction inherent in language. Language is a social medium and “cultural tool” (Tsoukas 2005, p. 121) of reality production, and human individuals make distinctions and apply categories within language-based contexts of interaction (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 123 f.). Individuals are considered to be of great importance in this approach with regard to the evaluation of information, and at the same time the fundamental sociality of social practices is assumed. Individuals actualize the possibilities of meaning given in the form of knowledge through the language-based use of distinction: Although it is individuals who make such judgements, the latter are made possible by the existence of pools of generalized knowledge (theories), produced and sustained by communities of peers (...) upon which individuals draw in the course of their action. Organizational knowledge, therefore, can be defined as the ability members of an organization have developed to make judgements within a collective domain of action, based on an appreciation of context and/or set of generalizations. (Tsoukas and Mylonopoulos 2004, p. 8)

Accordingly, organizational knowledge is the ability developed by organizational members to make appropriate distinctions in organizational contexts, based on historically developed and collectively lived-in sets of generalizations of meaning, e.g. in the form of organizational rules. According to Tsoukas, organizations are thus three things at once: (1) “concrete constellations” in which individual actions take place, (2) “bundles of abstract rules” in the form of propositional knowledge, and (3) “historical communities of meaning” (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 124). The relevance of a meaning-theoretical perspective on organization can be seen directly from these remarks, which can be applied both to the concept of rules and to the relation between the generalization and actualization of meaning. If, at this point, I anticipate the following discussion of rules as meaning-generalizations (Sect. 2.4), then this coincides with Tsouka’s analysis to the extent that he, too, understands rules as typical meaning-generalizations (“generic rules”). “Generic” is here interpretable both in the sense of generalized and in the sense of typical or generic. The further aspect concerns the relation between potentiality (meaning generalization as structure) and actualization (contextualization, concretion/ respecification as event practice). Meaning generalizations are produced and

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reproduced in the eventual actualization or in the practical execution in each new situation (“in situ”).18 Actualization always includes the possibility of confirmation or change (deviation and rejection). In a further step, Tsoukas differentiates organizational forms of knowledge. He distinguishes between “propositional” and “narrative” knowledge. As Tsoukas puts it, “propositional organizational knowledge is intrinsically related to the institutional dimension of organizational contexts” (Tsoukas 2005, p. 70), while “narrative organizational knowledge is intrinsically related to practices” (Tsoukas 2005, p. 70). Propositional knowledge is knowledge for routinized and institutionalized social situations that is applied in them and recursively leads to their regulation and routinization. It fulfils an “institutional utility” and often has the conditional form of an “if..., then formula”: Propositional formalization are predicated on the assumption that the phenomenon they refer to is patterned, composed of objectively available elements that can be re-presented via an abbreviate formula.(...) Algorithmic compressibility is clearly important in so far as it allows the compression of masses of observational statements into a few clearly stated propositional statements, possessing the same informational content but, more importantly, enabling economy of effort, transferability, and remote control (...). (Tsoukas 2005, p. 71)

“Algorithmic compressibility” functions as a generalized shortcut in ordered, structured and institutionalized social contexts (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 73). Narrative knowledge, on the other hand, fulfils a “practical utility” as narratives (“narratives”) are more fluidly and flexibly composed, allowing for creative adaptation to unpredictable circumstances (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 84).19 Tsoukas emphasizes the complementarity of propositional and narrative knowledge for the overall reality of the organization. In his view, both are indispensable. Thus, one arrives at the, within organization theory very common thesis, of expectational complementarity of

18

Etymologically it is worth mentioning that in situ means both a temporal and a spatial reference. It is about current actions or processes in a concrete place (“on the spot”). Thus, in situ always refers to both the time or process dimension and the spatial dimension of actions and activities. 19 In this context, Tsoukas points to the memory function of narrative knowledge. This argumentation corresponds to the cultural and media theoretical work of Goody (1991) and Ong (1987) on the connection between orality and literality and the forms of collective remembering and forgetting based on them. In his cultural theory of social memory, Jan Assmann (1992) has elaborated that literality and orality function as medial conditions of possibility for social memory functions of varying complexity (cf. Drepper 1996).

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expectational structures such as formality and informality (cf. Tacke and Drepper 2017, p. 48 ff.).20 We come here to a further deepening of meaning theory, for at this point in the argument Tsoukas connects the concept of knowledge with the concept of rules and categories, the concept of routine, and the concepts of generalization and typification. Categories and rules represent generalizations of meaning. They are preselections of meaning orientation to which connections can be made, thus limiting possible contingency and making certain connections more probable and expectable. Categories are meaning generalizations that simultaneously include and exclude (“selective inclusions”, “selective exclusions”): “Through generalizing in one direction and, by default, not in another, discursive contexts make organizational action possible. (...) By being generalizations, categories are necessarily selective: as selective inclusions they are also selective exclusions; they suppress as much as they reveal” (Tsoukas 2005, p. 75). To illustrate this, Tsoukas gives the example of the patient role as a categorization or generalization of references to persons, which in medical organizational contexts functions on the one hand as a reductive scheme of meaning – the individual is reduced to a case with medical relevance – but at the same time thus opens up a multitude of connections typical of organizations (examination, surgery, care, etc.), i.e. processes the simultaneity of constraining and enabling. The schemata can be further used in organizational rules and, for example, linked in decision programs such as conditional or purpose programs (cf. Luhmann 2000a, p. 256 ff.; Drepper 2018, p. 158 ff.): “If the patient rings at night, then (...)”.21 By combining types and condensing types, rules can function as more abstract and complex generalizations of meaning by linking types of behavior with types of actors and types of situations, thus forming longer-chain and more conditional patterns of causality. On the other hand, organizations are not only based on formalized rules, for there are limits to propositional knowledge due to what Tsoukas calls “incomplete rules” and “unstable semantics” (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 74). This means that rules by no means always provide unambiguous

20

Cf. Tacke (2015) in detail on the formality/informality distinction. A further fine-tuning and further selective respecification is represented by personalization: “If this patient rings the bell, then special care is required!” With regard to the time dimension of social events, the application of a decision program implies a respective present connection of past and future perspectives. E.g. the ‘then-part’ of a conditional programming is directed to future effects of the decision, whereas the conditional part, the ‘if’, refers to elements of meaning already grounded in the past, e.g. to previous decisions, to other events lying outside the situation, and/or to, in other places and at other times, generalized meaning that does not have to be found or negotiated specifically for the current situation. 21

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definitions and structuring of social situations, for they contain the possibility of incompleteness, ambiguity and need for interpretation. For Tsoukas, organizations are also “open systems” for this reason. He speaks of “openness” because of the potential shiftability of semantics in meaning. In his view, in open systems there is always the possibility that semantics will change and shift their meanings; they are not stable per se just because they were formally defined at a certain point in time or because a certain meaning has historically become habitual. This means that while propositional knowledge can generalize past situations and experiences, it does not automatically come with instructions on how to apply and shape rules in the future (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 76). Tsoukas ultimately describes here a communicative event of meaning genesis and meaning shifting, whereby the openness of the organization means semantic changeability and meaning shifting. This is quite a different understanding of environmental openness than is familiar from the tradition of organization theory, for openness is conceived in Tsoukas’s approach as a mode of meaning production rather than as a mechanism through which external elements are imported into an organization. With regard to the relation of organization and society, Tsoukas points to the highly mechanized communication through modern information and communication media in modern society, whereby ICT technologies are meant here significantly, which simultaneously lead both to a disembedding of communication situations and the dissolution of central perspectives as well as to a strong differentiation of local rationalities (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 15). In this communication landscape, the experience and interpretation of society as an information society becomes structurally plausible and the significance of data and information as determining units of reality is quickly hypostatized. Information becomes the epistemic guiding concept and the concept of information society the dominant self-description (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 15). With this information dominance – Castells (2001, p. 83 ff.) speaks here, for example, of “informationalism” as an ideology – a strongly widespread “information-based concept of knowledge” (cf. Munro 2001) is also conveyed, which equates information with knowledge. Tsoukas calls this process “information reductionism”, in which phenomena are described as informatizable and indexable. This information-centered view of reality is supported by a tube- and transmission-metaphorical understanding of communication (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 16). It results in the reduction of complex processes of meaning constitution by reducing knowledge to information and information to data (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 18). Tsoukas criticizes this assumption in social phenomenological terms and argues that such information reductionism simplifies the phenomenality of social situations by equating them with their substrates and representations (digitalizations and materializations). This hides

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what is typical of social situations, namely their contingency and horizonality. Social phenomena are characterized in their meaningfulness by the simultaneity of actuality and potentiality, and the representation or manifestation of a phenomenon is not the phenomenon itself. Korzybski’s dictum that the map is not the landscape applies here (cf. Korzybski 1994; Bateson 1985, p. 245 ff.; Weick 1985, p. 355 ff.): The information representing a phenomenon itself are not identical – the map is not the territory (Weick 1985). Any phenomenon is given in a mixture of presence and absence – what is and what might be – and is thus inherently richer than information, which focuses on presence by revealing what is or has been. Notice that if all knowledge is reduced to information, the distinction between presence and absence is lost. (Tsoukas 2005, p. 19)

We can add to this analysis by using the concept of self-description to point out that social self-descriptions typically single out individual aspects of social forms of communication and tend to “consider spectacular individual phenomena as representative” (Luhmann 1997, p. 1089). Ambivalences and the generation of difference are thereby underestimated (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 1088). In this sense, information society can be understood as such a self-descriptive concept, which emphasizes the topicality, novelty and surprise value of communication on the basis of the concept of information and thus orients communication towards constant surprise and the advantageousness of the new. Novelty is the positively valued guiding formula, presumably because as a semantics of progress it emphasizes the “appreciation of the new” (Luhmann 1997, p. 1000). “New” therefore seems to be liked “because one can only expect information and thus impetus for communication from something new” (Luhmann 1997, p. 1002). According to Luhmann, a habituation to this idea of innovation sets in from the eighteenth century onwards. From this point on, the semantic career of the new is consolidated, and progress becomes a normal expectation: “One can assume a habituation to innovation for the eighteenth century at the latest, and finds this also in the spread of the idea that progress is to be expected as the normal trend of modern history” (Luhmann 1997, p. 1004). For organizations, the connection between decision-making and modern time semantics (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 997 ff.) becomes a plausible argumentation and situation interpretation. Information, novelty and innovation are modern concepts of time, and decision is explained in modernity as or the mode of activity of bringing change and thus novelty into the world, against the background of contingent meaning and complex system relations. Modernity and modern world consciousness mean that decisions (on a contingent basis) become possible, but also expectable. The course of the world is no longer predetermined, the future is open. It can and must be

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decided that and how it should continue. At the same time, spaces of possibility open up constraints on decision-making; modernity increasingly experiences itself as “dependent on decisions” (cf. Drepper 2018, p. 71 ff.): The traditional notions of time are deforming under the pressure of the necessity to take into account the mass appearance of the new and the growing need for decisions; more different things have to be accommodated in time. (...) If the present is understood as a difference, i.e. as a non-conformity of the past and the future, it is obvious to mark it as a decision, no matter how and to whom the decision is then attributed. (...) Every decision is then the beginning of a new history and at the same time the prerequisite for making prognoses possible – with the proviso that it remains unknown how decisions will be made in the future on the basis of the consequences of the decision. (Luhmann 1997, p. 997 f.; 1010)

In modern society, new dissemination media and digital data processing generate a permanent availability of information that has to be processed: More and more working time is spent on the production of information and more and more working and leisure time is spent on the consumption of information. A questionable premise is accepted unquestioningly, namely that information is an economic good that can be produced, transferred and consumed. From the concept of information, however, the stability presupposed in this context can hardly be justified”. (Luhmann 1997, p. 1090)

Luhmann derives from this the scepticism that “most information (...) is therefore no information at all or at best potential information”, “and accordingly increases in production through more and more information are not demonstrable in macroeconomic terms” (Luhmann 1997, p. 1090). In addition, the concept of information is thought of as a substance and not as an event and thus as a concept of difference. Volatility and ambivalence are thereby ignored. Information can and must be had, and the more one has, the better. The fact that information is a difference and selection phenomenon and not a transferable particle is faded out. Information is an event quality and thus a decay product, because it is disappears when it is updated (...) Moreover, information can surprise only once. Once it is known, it retains its meaning, but loses its character as information. (...) Information is a profoundly ambivalent state of affairs. In a sense, it contains its own counterconcept. It reproduces, and this from moment to moment always anew, knowledge and non-knowledge. (Luhmann 1997, p. 1090 ff.)

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Before we return to the concepts of communication and semantics and go into them in greater depth, I would like to return to rules, which have already been discussed in practice theory as structures of meaning (meaning typification and meaning generalization). In the following, the aim is to pursue this view in more recent studies in organization studies and to make clear the operation-typing function of rules.

2.4

Rules

The concept of practice has already led us to the concept of rule. We now want to deepen this here and sharpen the meaning-theoretical perspective in the process. The aim here is not a comprehensive analysis à la Ortmann (2003, 2004, 2008, 2012) or Klatetzki (2012a, b), but selective insights and additions that are relevant for a meaning-theoretical-operational perspective. Further developments of the cognition perspective of behavioral decision theory are also related to this. The concept of rule is a highly connectable semantics. This is true for both scientific and non-scientific usage. In everyday communication, the concept of rules is sufficiently general to be used in various social contexts, above all as a concept that refers to order. Those who speak of and about rules, set rules and insist on rule compliance can build on a generally accessible collective knowledge: Rules and rule-based action are central features of all human societies of which we have knowledge. Human actions are organized around rules, and these rules fit together to create and maintain social systems. (...) Contemporary hierarchies, markets, and international relations are governed by institutions built around formal and informal rules. (...) In part, the centrality of rules stems from their position as symbolic artifacts of collective life. They are symbols of order, even where their effects on behaviour are limited. They are trophies of bargaining, recording the outcomes of conflicts. They are testaments to intentions and proclamations of virtue, serving in that way to juxtapose the morality of values with the compromises of situational action. They are the sacred texts of social order. Since the earliest recorded human history, systems of rules have been seen as fundamental to civilization. (March et al. 2000, p. 7 f.)

In the scientific description of formal organizations, rules are often seen as the prototypical means of organizing and achieving goals or purposes. Organizations seem to be adequately described by their structured and stable patterns of collective behavior, expressed in routines (cf. Becker 2008; Kremser 2016) and conventions (cf. Knoll 2014). Organizational theories are almost always also theories about rules, rule-making and rule-following (cf. March et al. 2000, p. 8 f.). The rationality and efficiency expectation towards formal organizations is largely based on the

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assessment, expectation or hope (Brunsson 2006) that organizations are capable of designing behavioral codes and standards that capture experiential and problemsolving knowledge and thus guide behavior in a rational and reasonable manner. This is predominantly made possible through written rules and through the internalization of rules by members (see March et al. 2000, p. 9). In the discussion of rules within organization theory in recent years, in addition to the order-theoretical tradition, there are increasingly cognitive and meaning-theoretical reconstructions that relativize the dominant understanding of order in the concept of rules by pointing to gaps in the formal density of rules.22 This is prominent in both Anthony Giddens and James March, and Tsoukas’s epistemology of organization has also addressed the connection between the concept of knowledge and the concept of rules, arguing with a cognitive-theoretic extension of the concept of rules. In these cases, we encounter ideas about the connection between operativity and typicality, for instance when it comes to the question of the communicative genesis and medial operativity of rules. I will first preface the discussion with a meaning-theoretical heuristic of the concept of rule, in which I follow on from the distinction between the dimensions of sense (factual, temporal, social and spatial) and conceptualize the medial operativity of rules. In doing so, a cognitive understanding can be emphasized that places the orienting functioning of rules alongside the ordering one. Rules can be conceptualized as generalizations of meaning, which can take place in the various dimensions of meaning – factual, temporal, social and spatial – whereby regularity can be understood as the repetition of events and rulefulness as the typology of events (cf. Nassehi 2008, p. 38 f.). If one asks about genesis (origin, definition, setting, constitution) and validity (reasons for validity and founders of validity, references to validity, scope of validity, periods of validity), a heuristic of rules as structures of meaning can be outlined as follows: • temporal: Here we are concerned with the time reference of genesis and validity. When are rules established, when do they apply, and when can/must/should they

22

Ortmann (2003) explains this in detail. Friedberg (1995, p. 145), for example, states: Moreover, the regulation achieved by the formal structure is never complete. It is constantly overrun by practices that do not respect the rules it contains. Through these practices, depending on their perception of the constraints as well as the resources of the situation, the participants gradually try to nibble at the conciseness of the formal framework and to shift or limit its validity, even to turn the theoretical processes completely upside down. Crozier and Friedberg (1993) also argue along these lines.

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be applied? To which period and time horizon does the claim to validity refer? When and for how long should the rule apply? • social: Who makes the rules, and for whom and which groups of people and contexts do they apply? Who defines the situation and the appropriate rule? • factual: What facts, cases, objects, persons and groups of persons (objectification of the social dimension!), tasks, problems are involved in rule-making and rule application? What is the subject matter and how is the subject matter understood and presented? • spatial: Where and in which place are rules set and for which places, which scope and within which boundaries do rules claim their validity (e.g. local, regional, global)? A further guiding distinction for determining the functional aspects of rules is the distinction between cognitive and normative, which can be determined as follows: cognitive = orientation, information, coordination, cooperation, and normative = order, control, regulation, guidance, leadership, sanctioning.23 This distinction does not imply mutual exclusion, insofar as rules are both established and employed to perform both orientation and order functions. Depending on the causallogical orientation of the reasoning context, either the one or the other aspect is emphasized, or derivation relations are formulated: order through orientation (cognitive determinism) or orientation through order (normative determinism). For a long time, organizational theory in particular, following a dominant reading of Weberian bureaucratic theory in terms of structural theory, strongly emphasized the normative aspect of rules via the concept of formality. Although, with Weber, rules can also be reconstructed as typical social “meaning-forms” and orders as “rule and maxim complexes” built up from them (Martens 2006b, p. 290 ff., 2010, p. 175 ff.), thus emphasizing the idea of the meaningful constitution of the social, a normative understanding of the concept of rules had for a long time rather taken over the interpretative sovereignty within the analysis of organizational structures, so that the concept of order of organization as a social entity and the concept of order of rules as normative regulations could semantically complement each other

23

The double aspect of the cognitive and normative functioning of rules can be reconstructed in the historical semantics of the concept of rule. The article “Regel” by Gründer and Gabriel (1992) from the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (ed. by Joachim Ritter, vol. 8, pp. 427–450) suggests this. The sources from the history of ideas show the double understanding of the concept of rule (normative and cognitive) and point to the different aspects and dimensions of the meaning-theoretical determinations (genesis, validity, generalization, respecification and typification) (cf. Drepper 2008c).

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and determine the image of organizations as social entities producing purpose rationality and supported by purpose rationality.24 If, on the basis of this understanding of structure, one asks the question of how organizations realize their order and rationality function, then one finds predominantly a reference to rules and routines. The argument reads as follows: A carefully designed system of abstract rules guides and directs official decisions and actions, where rules are stable, comprehensive, learnable, and written down. The notion of formalization sums this up. How the notion of formality and the notion of rules recursively refer to each other and ground the ideal-typical notion of formal organization is made clear by the classic quote from Robert Merton. No question remains unanswered: A formal, rationally organized social structure contains clearly defined patterns of action in which, ideally, each sequence of action is functionally related to the goals of the organization. Such an organization integrates a series of offices, of hierarchically ordered status, to which are attached a number of obligations and privileges, each well defined by narrowly circumscribed and specific rules. To each of these offices is assigned a specific sphere of authority and responsibility. Authority, the power of disposition derived from a recognized status, is inherent in the office and not in the individual who plays the official role. Official activity normally takes place within the framework of pre-existing rules of the organization (emphasis T. D.). The system of predetermined relations between the various offices implies a considerable degree of formality and clearly defined social distance between the holders of these positions. The formality manifests itself in a more or less complicated social ritual that symbolizes and maintains the pecking order of the various offices. Such formality, integrated with the distribution of authority within the system, serves to reduce friction to a minimum by limiting (official) contacts to those already defined by rules of organization (emphasis T. D.). This creates easy calculability of the behavior of others and a fixed set of mutual expectations. Moreover, formality makes it easier for office holders to interact despite their private (possibly hostile) attitudes toward each other. In this way, the subordinate is protected from arbitrary actions by his superior, since the actions of both are governed by mutually accepted rules. Specific procedural instructions consolidate objectivity and prevent the rapid translation of impulses into action. (Merton 1971, p. 560)

If we now ask about the operativity of rules, then the perspective shifts towards the setting, application and interpretation as well as deviation and change of rules, and not only of those that are formally justified.25 Under the aspect of operativity, it can

24

However, Martens (2010, p. 77) also points out the limitations of Weber’s theory of meaning in his reconstruction of Schütz’s Weberian critique. 25 Reference can be made here to the discussion on informality and informal rules. Work groups, departments and teams also form their own expectation structures that are not laid

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be addressed that rule genesis and rule validity are to be understood as constitutional processes and go back to social practices. In this context, genesis means the construction of rules in social processes and through social practices, which, depending on the social theoretical justification, are understood as behavioral, action or communication practices. The construction of rules is a social process “because it can never be attributed to an individual” (Ortmann 2003, p. 54). Validity as a social process means: the “validity of rules (...) is the resultant of tangible practices of assignment and recognition or at least acceptance by the actors involved (...)” (Ortmann 2003, p. 66). The question of the operativity of rules thus refers to acts of setting, because the setting ‘of something as something’ is based on medially borne attributions of meaning. The role of language and writing and the function of speech acts (Searle 1971, 1982, 1997) for rule setting and rule enforcement are particularly emphasized in the context of the linguistic turn. Language is understood as a medium of meaning making and reality creation, and the distinction performative speech acts/constative speech acts indicates the main modes of meaning making and meaning enforcement. Constative speech acts are understood as speech acts that say something about how things are, while performative speech acts are described as speech acts through which action motivation and action influence are to be established. They say something about how things should be and how they should go (cf. Ortmann 2004, p. 47 ff.).26 The following reconstructions of the concept of rules in two very influential organizational theories, the behavioral decision theory and the structuration theory of organization according to Anthony Giddens, exemplify and deepen these questions. I begin with behavioral decision theory. As a further development of behavioral decision theory, the analysis of rule dynamics has increasingly been found in the work of James March and associated research groups in recent years. Behavioral decision theory stands for a series of basic ideas that have been established since about 1950 as a field of research on decision-making processes in organizations (cf. March 1990). This line of research initially saw itself as a critique of standard normative decision theory, which could

down in the formal decision-making premises, e.g. ideas about appropriate work and performance behavior or also loyalty norms, so that informal norm-breaking can be observed and sanctioned (cf. Preisendörfer 2005, p. 119 f.). 26 From a systems theory perspective, the aspect of motivation to take over what is communicated (performativity) refers to motivational and influential media of communication conditioning (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 190 ff.) such as money, power, law, truth and possibly also popularity, through which the probability of rule compliance is established. We will come back to this later.

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be considered the canon of choice theory until the emergence of behavioral decision theory. March refers to normative choice theory as the “religion” and “established church” of the social sciences (cf. March 1990, p. 2) and the relationship with behavioral decision theory as one of tension and understanding (March 1990, p. 2). March (1990, p. 3) makes the following points. • • • •

Emphasis on the importance of attention to the decision-making process. Conflicts of interest in organizations. Actions follow rules that are based on experience. Emphasis on the ambivalence and ambiguity of preferences, technologies, and stories for the decision-making process.

The third point is particularly relevant to the issue of meaning operativity. Adaptation rules mean that organizational behaviour consists predominantly of following rules and only a part is freely calculating choice behaviour. Decision-making behavior follows a “logic of appropriateness” rather than a logic of the best possible choice of alternatives (cf. March 1990, p. 9). Rules are thereby coded experiences and reflect the lessons of history. History-dependent decision processes are grounded in past experience, whereas history-dependent selection and learning processes do not necessarily lead to optimal decisions (cf. March 1990, p. 10). This is the basic proposition for the following connections to rule dynamics. It emphasizes the aspect of the historicity of organizations that form a cognition mode of memory formation. Rules are the generalizations of meaning obtained for this purpose from experience and held in readiness for the future. March et al. (2000) distinguish different conceptions of rules that are almost always found in theories of rules in organizations. These conceptions are not mutually exclusive, but nevertheless lead to different consequences depending on their weighting. Rules are ... • • • •

rationally and consciously designed means to achieve ends. self-propagating, proliferating structures or mechanisms. Elements of organizational reality construction. Codings of organizational pasts.

(ad 1) Rules as rational and deliberately designed means to achieve ends: This is certainly a dominant idea about the function of rules in organizational contexts, e.g. in relation to the functioning of groups in organizations. Rules make it possible to solve communication and coordination problems and thus increase the efficiency of the group. The ideal-typical positive functional conception

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of rules can be summarized as follows: Rules enable permanence, reliability, and predictability of organizational behavior. They point beyond the individual member of the organization and, through this super-personality, promise stability in changing constellations of people. Rules can also fulfill their function in organizational situations with power and interest divergences and conflicts (cf. March et al. 2000, p. 11). (ad 2) Rules as self-propagating, proliferating structures or mechanisms This idea conceives of rules as self-referential and self-propagating, endemic structures. This has been made particularly clear by bureaucracy research: bureaucracies love bureaucracy growth, and rules spawn more rules (cf. March et al. 2000, p. 13). (ad 3) Rules as elements of organizational reality construction This understanding conceives of rules both as patterns of behaviour and action and as symbolic representations. In written form, rules communicate and represent claims about how things happen or should happen. Through a certain bundle of standard rules, the organization provides information about what kind of organization it is or wants to be. Rule bundles typify the organization or the organization typifies itself by choosing or setting certain rule sets (cf. March et al. 2000, p. 15). (ad 4) Rules as an encoding of the organizational past Here, rules are understood as knowledge-bearing structures that record learning experiences. As summaries of experience, rules form the “memory of the organization” (cf. March et al. 2000, p. 16 f.). This generalization and memory aspect refers to the medial conditions of possibility through which meaning can be structurally held ready as an actualization possibility. Written rules are the signum of modern organizations and the essential source of legitimation towards their relevant social environments (cf. March et al. 2000, p. 18), even if many essential rules in organizations are precisely not written down and yet are known. This point refers to the relationship between language and writing and to the distinctions written/ nonwritten, written/oral, oral/unspoken, because it would be truncated to assume that the most important rules in organizations are always formal and written down. At this point of argumentation, March et al.’s notion of translation is included in the theoretical justification in order to be able to describe an active mode of transformation for the relationship between rules and action. Rule genesis proceeds through

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stages of translation: Actions are translated into history – History is translated into rules – Rules are translated into actions. The relations between rules, action and history are called translation processes, which, however, do not run smoothly per se, but can produce ambiguities and ambiguities (“implementation ambiguities”, “history ambiguities” “adaptation ambiguities” cf. March et al. 2000, p. 23 f.). We will discuss the notion of translation further in detail in the next chapter under the title of “communicables”. I now turn to Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration, in which the concept of rule is also prominently placed and grounded in meaning theory. Anthony Giddens has given the concept of rule an important place in his structuration theory, explicitly using the social-phenomenological concept of type and developing a time-theoretical conceptualization of the eventfulness of the social. All in all, therefore, in Giddens’ work we can discuss the three concepts of operation, form, and type, which are relevant to the theory of meaning. In order to ground this thesis, it is useful to first reconstruct some of the main arguments of Giddens’ theory of structuration. As his own theoretical standpoint, Giddens marks the reformulation and reconceptualization of essential social theoretical dualisms. He wants to reconcile these antagonistic positions in the theorem of the “duality of structure” and conceive of it as a reciprocal constitutional relationship (cf. Giddens 1992, p. 215). Giddens accordingly develops his conception in engagement with sociological and philosophical schools of both the interpretive and structuralistfunctionalist paradigms.27 Giddens borrows the concept of “typification” from the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz (1971). By “typifications” – in Schütz (1982, p. 90 ff.) also “types” and “typicality” – Giddens understands cognitive schemes of meaning interpretation. As a further essential Schützian template, Giddens takes up the distinction between acting and action, whereby acting means the process that is currently taking place and action denotes the structural effect that arises ex post in the reflexive attention to acting. In addition, the methodological theorem of “second-degree construction” is crucial for Giddens. In the Schützian sense, social scientists reconstruct the meaning-constructions and interpretations of the world already made by members of society. Social scientific constructions are always already constructions of constructions and thus to be

27

Giddens (1984, 1992) serves as the main reference publications here, in which the references to the individual paradigms are fundamentally elaborated. Here, primarily Schütz’s social theory, Winch’s draft oriented towards Wittgenstein, Austin’s ordinary language philosophy as well as Apel’s and Habermas’s theories of meaning developed in confrontation with classical hermeneutics are to be mentioned. In addition, Giddens (1992) deals with Foucault’s theory of power and the geography of time.

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considered on the second-order level (cf. Giddens 1984, p. 35 f.). From Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (cf. Garfinkel 1967), the concept of the “everyday world” is then added. Social practices are actions by means of which members of society manage their everyday affairs (cf. Giddens 1984, p. 43). The concept of rules is added by Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its social scientific interpretation according to Winch. According to this, meaningful action is to be understood as rule-guided action. All action is rule-guided action, and the relation between rule and action always implies the aspect of the interpretation of the rule by the acting subject. In the Giddensian interpretation of this concept of rule, actors reproduce these rules by referring to them. Giddens pays particular attention to the recursive relationship between action and structure. This is what we want to concentrate on in the following, because both the concept of event and the concept of typification become relevant here. The guiding distinction is that between acting and action. While acting refers to the respective present stream of acting as an event process (“durée”), action means the ex-post typification or classification of the already completed action as action (cf. Giddens 1992, p. 90). The concept of action is contoured by the concept of practice, in the sense that actions are “human practices as an ongoing series of ‘practical activities’” (Giddens 1992, p. 90). It is through these practices that humans bring forth, produce and reproduce the social world. Giddens distinguishes three main dimensions of “producing interaction” and “making sense of communication”. These are (1) the interactive constitution of meaning and significance (level/sphere of “signification”), (2) the constitution of a moral order (level/sphere of “legitimation”), and (3) the constitution of power (level/sphere of “domination”) (cf. Giddens 1984, p. 126 ff.). (ad 1) In the constitution of meaning, the essential communication takes place via implicit, practical knowledge, “mutual knowledge” in the Schützian sense: Mutual knowledge is applied in the form of interpretive schemes through which communicative contexts are maintained. Such interpretative schemes (‘typifications’) can each be seen as a set of generative rules for understanding the illocutionary powers of linguistic utterances. Mutual knowledge is on the one hand ‘background knowledge’ in the sense that it is taken for granted and remains mostly unspoken, on the other hand it is not part of the ‘background’, since it is continuously unfolded, updated and modified by the members of society during their interaction. (Giddens 1984, p. 130)

(ad 2) The moral order of interaction runs through norms, which represent both enabling condition and constraint. Giddens emphasizes that norms are not only constraints, but also enable action (cf. Giddens 1984, p. 131).

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(ad 3) Power relations in interactions are determined by the immanent connection between action and power: “Power in the sense of transformational capacity of human action is the capacity of the agent to intervene in events in order to change their course” (Giddens 1984, p. 134 f.). The relationship between power and interaction is imagined by Giddens to be that participants in an interaction bring resources into an “interaction and draw on them as elements of their production in order to guide the course of the interaction. It therefore includes the skills through which interaction is constituted as meaningful, but also (...) any other resource that a participant can bring to bear in order to influence and control the behaviour of others who participate in the interaction” (Giddens 1984, p. 136). As a requirement of a social theory oriented towards social theory, Giddens demands that action be regarded as rationally explicable behaviour “which is reflexively organized by the agents; the significance of language as a medium through which this is made possible in the first place must be taken into account” (Giddens 1984, p. 8). This form of reflexivity is significantly self-reflexivity mediated by language (cf. Giddens 1984, p. 8). It is precisely to explain the theorem of duality of structure that Giddens draws on the paradigm of natural language. Giddens understands language as a “medium of practical social activity” that assumes central function for the constitution of the social, because “the production of meaning in communicative acts is (like the production of society that builds upon it) a skill-based performance by the agents – a performance that is taken for granted but is only accomplished because it is never taken fully for granted” (Giddens 1984, p. 22). According to his own statements, it is precisely the turn of ordinary language philosophy towards language theory that points to a connection between speech and action for social scientific analysis and suggests a concept of practice that is expanded in terms of communication theory (cf. Giddens 1992, p. 35 f.). Giddens’ integrative claim is evident in his concept of structure, for here the meaning constitution perspective is combined with a materialist understanding by dividing the concept of structure into two components. By structures Giddens understands “rules” and “resources” that “participate recursively in social reproduction” (Giddens 1992, p. 45). Rules, by which Giddens understands routinized techniques or generalizable procedures of practical consciousness that serve to execute and reproduce social practices,28 he divides into “normative elements” and “codes of What is interesting here is the distinction between “everyday rules” and “formulated rules”, which represent something like codified rules of interpretation and occur in the form of laws, rules of the game, administrative orders. This is of interest for the later transfer to organization theory, since it is precisely formalization that is a definitional criterion – along with “reflexive structuration” – for the organization-theoretical variant of structuration theory. 28

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signification”, while resources are to be separated into “authoritative” (springing from the coordination of human action) and “allocative” (springing from control over the material world) (cf. Giddens 1992, p. 45). Giddens further places a strong focus on grounding social theory in time and space theory. With reference to the institutions of modernity, he is particularly interested in the development of “timespace-distanciation”, the decoupling of time and space in social practices, as well as the thesis of spatial disembedding of social institutions, which he understands as specific developments of modern society (cf. in detail Giddens 1995). In this timetheoretical context, structure is understood as a concept of difference, as the “intersection of the present and the absent” as the “intersection of presence and absence” (Giddens 1992, p. 68). Here, the aim is to explain the transition from social situations of “copresence” (interaction) to institutionalized practices of space-time extension of social systems. Interactions in which co-presence and the presence of actors bind time and space must be related to such social mechanisms that point beyond time and space boundaries (cf. Giddens 1992, p. 235). The transition from fleeting interactions based on physical co-presence to social practices that last, institutions that is, is essentially an effect of the temporality of social action. Giddens therefore distinguishes the time of everyday experience, the “durée”, from the time of institutions, the “longue durée” (cf. Giddens 1992, p. 89). These descriptions of the meaning- and event-theoretical potential of Giddens’ social theory can be specified for organization theory. Here, the question of collective formality of social entities becomes virulent, because organizations are conceptualized as “recursive action-structure-forms” that reproduce themselves through the actions of competent actors, the “knowledgeable agents”. In their interactions, the competent agents refer to structures as well as to further structural features of the field of action that are produced by the structured action (cf. Ortmann et al. 1997, p. 317). The concept of organization, which Ortmann et al. derive here from Giddens’ theorem of structure, does not seek to reduce organizational reality to formal structures, but conceives of organizations as recurrent social practices (cf. Ortmann et al. 1997, p. 317). The theorem of the duality of structure thereby enables a fundamental version of the usual double understanding of organization as a process of “organizing” and as a result or product, as “organizedness” (Ortmann et al. 1997, p. 315). Organization is conceived as reflexive structuring, as the formalization of reflexively established rules and resources in terms of formalized decision rules, decision paths, and job descriptions (cf. Ortmann et al. 1997, p. 322). Organized action also refers to the three dimensions of the social (signification, legitimation, domination) and takes place in them at the same time. Every action in organizations refers to the symbolic cognitive level of signification, the normative order of rule references as well as the order of domination, which manifests itself in

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the organizational structure and the communication channels (Ortmann et al. 1997, p. 324). Let us now return from the concept of rules in behavioral decision theory and structuration theory to more general statements. The preceding descriptions were able to demonstrate operative moments, meaning-theoretical aspects and communication-theoretical desiderata of the concept of rule. This could be shown by extending the conventional understanding of order to a cognition-oriented understanding of rules. The basic operative concept in the approaches discussed is predominantly, as we have seen exemplarily in Tsoukas and also in Giddens, the concept of action, through which the concept of practice is determined, which is in need of specification by itself. Social practices are practices of action. The concept of practice does not stand on its own and does not replace action as a basic sociological or social theoretical concept, but it wishes to add to it a particular temporal and creative logical extension in order to keep it away from functionalist structural determinisms. Communication is also not developed as an independent concept, but is understood in the style of Habermasian understanding of communicative action as a special type of action of symbol-mediated coordination (cf. Habermas 1981). As we pointed out in the opening chapter with the definition routines subsumption and supplementation, communication is subordinated to the concept of behaviour, action and interaction in the approaches and theories discussed so far and is used to enrich the main concept in an aspectual way. Communication always comes into play when the linguistic and written mediality of behavioral or action practices is at stake. Or in other words: How do the mediality and the symbolic get to and into behaviour, action, practice or interaction? Via communication. This is what the rule- and practice-oriented analyses of the media of the movement of meaning (language and writing) and their shaping into typical structures have addressed. How is meaning mobilized by media structurally typified and thus orienting and ordering? This question of transitions and transformations of meaning leads into the discussion of the concept of translation, which has played a major role in organizational studies in recent years and which we have already addressed in James March’s analyses. I would like to note at this point that the relevance of communication and communication processes is thematically captured, but it does not come to the elaboration of an independent concept of communication. We will now pursue this question further and consult sociological systems theory, a theory that develops an independent concept of communication on the basis of a “general theory of recursive operations” (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 1124). This concept of communication will orient us in further discussions, together with the concept of semantics, which denotes meaninggeneralizing and meaning-typing structures of communication.

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Communication

Sociological systems theory defines communication as an operative event of meaning that can lead to the construction of typical system forms through structured repetition (cf. Luhmann 1990, p. 73, 1997, p. 127). Communication is a “threeterm-structure” (Stichweh 2000b, p. 10), a multi-component event which is possible on the basis of a very specific distinction, namely the distinction between information, utterance and understanding. (...) If no distinction is made in this way, no communication takes place; those present merely perceive each other. The emergence of communication in situations in which conscious participants perceive much else delimits a highly specific kind of operation against other, and does so by understanding how information and communication relate to each other. (Luhmann 1990, p. 116)

For the formation of social systems, “only communication is available as a basal operation. And while organisms can only react to irritations of their external surfaces (...), communication systems increase their irritability by replacing spatial boundaries with meaningful distinctions” (Luhmann 1997, p. 124 ff.). Meaning systems are event systems that produce their final elements as events that come into being at a specific point in time and immediately disintegrate again, that cannot have any duration and that occur for the first and last time respectively. These are temporalized systems that can only gain stability as dynamic stability, only by continuously replacing elements that are passing away with new, different elements. Their structures must be adjusted to this. (Luhmann 1997, p. 52)

Communication, as an operation of meaning, is a time-bound event. Temporality and transience also apply to the three components of communication, information, utterance and understanding. Information can only surprise once, utterance as an action is bound to a point in time and understanding cannot be repeated (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 71). In this context, the concept of information is conceived differentially. Information is not a particle to be transmitted and communication is not a transmission of meaning, information or significance. In communication nothing is “given away” (cf. Luhmann 2002, p. 289): If one understands communication as a unity consisting of the three components information, utterance and understanding, which are first generated by communication, this excludes the possibility of ascribing an ontological primacy to one of these components. Neither can one assume that there is initially a factual world that can then be spoken about; nor does the origin of communication lie in the “subjectively”

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meaning-giving act of utterance; nor does there initially exist a society that prescribes, via cultural institutions, how something is to be understood as communication. The unity of communicative events is neither objectively, nor subjectively, nor socially derivable, and it is precisely for this reason that communication creates for itself the medium of meaning, in which it can then continuously dispose of whether further communication seeks its problem in information, in utterance or in understanding. The components of communication presuppose each other reciprocally; they are circularly linked. They can therefore no longer ontologically fix their externalizations as properties of the world, but must seek them in each case in the transition from one communication to another. (...) Communication is thus a particular way of observing the world on the basis of the specific distinction between information and utterance. It is one of the ways of gaining universality on the basis of specification. It is not a ‘transmission’ of meaning (...). (Luhmann 1997, p. 71 ff.)29

Let us now come to the concept of meaning in more detail at this point. The phenomenological definition of the concept of meaning is based on the distinction between actuality and potentiality and understands meaning as a surplus of references: One can describe meaning phenomenologically as a surplus of references that is accessible from currently given sense. According to this, meaning is (...) an endless, i.e. indeterminable context of reference, which can, however, be made accessible and reproduced in a certain way. One can designate the form of meaning as the difference between actuality and possibility and can thus at the same time claim that this and no other distinction constitutes meaning. (Luhmann 1997, p. 50)

Luhmann’s later theory complements this concept of meaning, emphasizing in particular the operative moment of meaning processes. This operative turn of the concept of meaning can be grasped strikingly by the following dictum of social theory: “For without making use of meaning, no social operation can start” (Luhmann 1997, p. 44). This means that without making use of meaning, no communicative operation can start. Meaning is understood here as a medium of communicative operations and the relationship between operation and medium is

29

Maturana, too, argues against the transmission model of communication and assumes a “supercoordination of the coordination of organisms” (Luhmann 2002, p. 289). Already G. H. Mead saw the “social act” as a complex coordination process of several components. According to the Latin meaning of the word “componere”, the component means an assembled constituent: “This means further that this unity, these components of information, utterance and understanding, cannot occur in isolation, but are always aspects of an operationally brought about unity, but not as building blocks, atoms or otherwise existing states that one only assembles” (Luhmann 1992, p. 283).

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thereby circularly recursively justified: without operation no medium and without medium no operation (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 44). The epistemological consequence of this recursivity relation lies in the fact that meaningful identities can only be generated recursively and “that we are no longer talking about objects, but about distinctions and further: that distinctions are not conceived as existing facts (differences), but that they go back to a call to perform them (...)” (Luhmann 1997, p. 60). At this point of argumentation Luhmann makes clear the epistemological reference to the linguistic turn: Thus, the ‘lingustic turn’ in philosophy is also understood as a correlate of a social development that withdraws the plausibility of substance ontology and its transcendental refuge. This implies at the same time a transition from what-questions to how-questions, the problematization of the translatability of languages and in general the necessity, seen since Saussure, to replace identities by differences. (Luhmann 1997, p. 48, fn. 50)

The fact that meaning functions as a medium for a distinction-dependent observation means that formations must be carried out as system operations “- be it as the directing of conscious attention, be it as communication. In the case of linguistic communication, these are words that are coupled into sentences in compliance with grammatical rules and according to requirements of meaning formation” (Luhmann 1997, p. 59). This leads us to the concept of form, which is determined as a concept of difference. Forms are not objects, but distinctions, and thus no longer as (more or less beautiful) figures, but as borderlines, as markers of a difference that forces one to clarify which side one designates, that is: on which side of the form one is located and where one accordingly has to start for further options. (...) Every determination, every designation, all cognition, all action carries out as an operation the establishment of such a form (...). The concept of form thus no longer differs only from the concept of content; but also not only from the concept of context. A form can lie in the difference of something from everything else, as well as in the difference of something from its context (for example, of a building from its urban or landscape surroundings), but also in the difference of a value from its countervalue to the exclusion of third possibilities. (Luhmann 1997, p. 60 ff.)

This brings me to the concept of language within Luhmann’s communication theory, the relationship between language and communication, and the significance of language as a medium of communication that links consciousness and communication in a meaningful way. In Luhmann’s theory, communication is not reduced to language and language use, because communication cannot be “conceived as a kind of consummation of a linguistic structure” (Nassehi 2009, p. 261). Language is

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not understood by Luhmann as a (sign) system, but as a communication medium that cannot function without and independently of the operative units using it, because Language has no mode of operation of its own, it must be carried out either as thinking or as communicating; and consequently language does not form a system of its own. It is and remains dependent on the fact that systems of consciousness on the one hand and the communication system of society on the other hand continue their own autopoiesis with completely closed operations of their own. If this did not happen, all speaking would immediately cease to be linguistic thought, and soon thereafter. (Luhmann 1997, p. 112)

At this point, and on the basis of the concepts introduced so far, a connection can now be made between the concept of language, the cognition-theoretical concept of schema (Sect. 2.2) and the concept of typicality. In addition, there is the concept of semantics at this point. Luhmann assumes that language allows the “construction of highly complex communication structures”, thus, on the one hand, the complexification and regrinding of linguistic rules themselves and, on the other hand, the construction of social semantics for the situational reactivation of important communication possibilities. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to language transferred from the acoustic medium to the optical medium, i.e. to writing. (...) While language as a structure must be relatively fixed in time, there is a second coupling mechanism that is instituted in a labile and, as it were, adaptive manner. Adopting a term from cognitive psychology, we call it ‘schemata’. (...) Examples would be standardized forms of determining something as something (...), attribution schemata that link causes and effects and possibly endow them with calls to action or blame. (In these cases one speaks of scripts). But also temporal schemata, especially past/future or preference codes such as good/bad, true/untrue, property/nonproperty, fulfill the schematization function. When schemata are used, communication presupposes that each consciousness involved understands what is meant, how the systems of consciousness deal with the schema, and a fortiori: what connection communications result from the use of schemata. Schemata can be concretized and adapted to any need. (...) In any case, as extractions from memory, they cannot be applied schematically. As reductions of structural complexity, they serve to build up operational complexity and thus to continuously adapt the structural coupling of mental and social systems to changing specifications. (Luhmann 1997, p. 110 f.)

Another relevant system-theoretical argument is that language is not a medium of communication limited to a specific social system in society, but functions as a basic medium of meaning in human communication that is capable of increasing the probability of communication. Language is not a specific communication medium oriented towards special problems, but sufficiently neutral to be able to function as a

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medium for a wide variety of meaning connections. The use of individual words is not prescribed a priori (cf. Luhmann 1984, p. 224, 1997, p. 49; Stäheli 2000, p. 135): “Language thus primarily establishes a mode of repeatability that can be used by different systems and that saves systems from having to invent a new language each time” (Stäheli 2000, p. 136). Thus, we can speak of a multisystemic use of language, because language is not bound to specific system boundaries. This is precisely the difference to symbolically generalized communication media (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 316 ff.). While symbolically generalized communication media establish the unity of a communication system through the similarity of elements, i.e. through typicality, language is neutral because it can be used everywhere as a medium. The relation of language to symbolically generalized communication media thus lies in the difference from non-specific to specific or from non-typified to typified. In order to function socially as typical communication, language has to be enriched, complemented, and supplemented with specific meaning (cf. Stäheli 2000, p. 154). It is precisely this difference between language, which functions as a neutral, multiply and polyvalently connectable medium, and symbolically generalized communication media as special problem-related and thus specific media that is the essential theoretical argument here. Another important argument from the Luhmann quote concerns the connection between the concept of schema and the sociological theory of meaning types. Schemata and scripts are sociologically understood as expectational types of meaning: We had spoken of schemata or, when actions are involved, scripts. This includes the designation of ‘something as something’ as well as strongly abbreviated causal attributions and a pointed attribution to intentions, which help to describe behaviour as action and, if necessary, to evaluate it politically or morally. Such schemata leave more or less open how one relates to the information, what one remembers or forgets, and whether one considers reactions appropriate or not; and ‘one’ in this case means individuals and social systems of all kinds. (...) It is a matter, one could say, following a sociological tradition reaching from Max Weber to Alfred Schütz, of the reproduction of types (stereotyped patterns of expectation), which are indispensable for the understanding of actions or communications and are not already guaranteed by the correct use of words or grammatical rules alone, i.e. not already by language itself. (Luhmann 1997, p. 1106)

We can now incorporate these theoretical arguments into the analysis of the concept of knowledge, which, together with the concept of semantics, brings us to the system-theoretical understanding of meaning structures. Knowledge is conceived as a structure of meaning, as meaning typified and sedimented by communication, which functions as a structure of communication: “Knowledge is (...) in an

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extremely general (and not culturally specific) meaning condensed observation and in a more specific sense, which presupposes evolved discrimination, an expectation stylized as cognitive experience” (Luhmann 1990, p. 146). In sociological systems theory, the concept of structure leads to both the concept of expectation and the concept of expectation-deception modulation (cf. Luhmann 1984, p. 448). Luhmann distinguishes between a “cognitive” and a “normative” way of dealing with disappointed expectations. The cognitive way of dealing with disappointed expectations makes internal reckonings, i.e. seeks to change the expectation in one’s own system, whereas the normative attitude makes external reckonings and remains with the original expectations. The cognitive and normative handling of disappointed expectations is based on modalizing meta-rules that function as selfregulatory modes. There are then two meta-rules for dealing with irritation: “One is: change the structure so that the irritation can appear to conform to the structure. The other is: hold the structure and externalize your disappointment; attribute it to a system in the environment that should behave differently. In the first case, the expectation is cognitively modalized; in the second, normative” (Luhmann 1990, p. 138 f.). Luhmann draws on this distinction to understand knowledge and norms as structures of social systems. Knowledge is understood as cognitively stylized meaning, while normatively stylized meaning is held as law (cf. Luhmann 1990, p. 138 f.). Another crucial insight of the operational systems approach lies in the shift of the knowledge phenomenon into the time dimension, because knowledge “always concerns a current operation which, as it expires, already disappears again. (...) There is no such thing as time-free knowledge. (...) Knowledge appears objectified in order to be able to appear as permanent; but insofar as it is to be known, it must always be performed anew. (...)” (Luhmann 1990, p. 129). Knowledge has a topicality and temporality aspect due to its dependence on operations, because If one takes this seriously, knowledge is always current knowledge and always only given in the observation of observers. For this very reason, it is always also synchronized knowledge, namely synchronized with the simultaneity of that which is ever the current present. (...) If one follows this radical temporalization of what observing is and does, then not only must all object instances and all records be relativized to this, then knowledge also loses the property of something that one can ‘have’ and ‘keep’, and the question of who actualizes what, when, and under what conditions takes the place of such notions of stock. And thus the question ‘what is?’ is replaced by the question ‘how is it beatified?’ What is observed is, of course, almost entirely forgotten again. Only little is recorded, and essentially that which can be constructed as repeatable. (Luhmann 1990, p. 106 f.)

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Dirk Baecker specifies this Luhmannian concept of knowledge explicitly for organizations. He also understands knowledge as a communicative structure of meaning, whereby he particularly points out the implications of the concept in terms of difference and distinction theory. Organizational knowledge is not knowledge in the heads of individuals, but knowledge that resides in social relations, and the “most important quality feature of this knowledge is that it must be communicated in order to become effective, and that the way it becomes effective depends on how it is evaluated in communication” (Baecker 1999, p. 78). Knowledge cannot be understood in a retentive metaphorical way as a stock that can be stored in a memory and retrieved when needed, but as a differential operation correlate and condensate. Knowledge is a structure that orients the information processing of a system of meaning and enables irritations to be transformed and translated into information. Here we are dealing with a circular event-structure logic, because knowledge as a structure of meaning enables the reshaping of an irritation into information (cf. Baecker 2003, p. 168). The structural value of organizational knowledge lies in the fact that it generates the connectivity of decisions and reduces rejection probabilities. This is not about the truthfulness of knowledge, but about connectivity with the function of reducing uncertainty: The knowledge on which every decision is based is itself a signal that increases the probability of acceptance of the decision. It has the same function as the footnote in a scientific text: You don’t know what’s behind it, but you’re impressed and accepting. The knowledge on which every decision is based does not serve to instruct the followup decision or even previous decisions. Rather, it serves to secure the usefulness of each decision. (Baecker 1999, p. 94)

From such an operative-temporalized concept of knowledge it follows that materializations of communication, such as texts, do not themselves already represent knowledge, but are artifacts that hold ready the principal condition of possibility of the actualization of meaning and of meaningful connection (cf. Luhmann 1990, p. 154). The iteration of sensible operations, be they communications or acts of consciousness, leads to the “construction of object permanences” and thus to meaning identities. For this reason, repetition and repeatability are also indispensable components for understanding an operative concept of knowledge. The crucial thing about repetition is that it occurs at different times and in different situations. According to Luhmann, this produces the double effect of “condensation” and “confirmation”. “Condensation” means reduction to the identical, means confirmation of meaning,

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which only becomes necessary when one extracts something specific for repeated designation from the abundance of what is simultaneously actual. The conditions of repeatability must be specified as conditions of selfhood, as conditions of recognizability and reusability of the same thing. This already happens at very simple levels of life and of course even more so at the level of conscious perception. In the case of communication systems, it requires words, i.e. language. (Luhmann 1990, p. 108)

“Confirmation” furthermore denotes the aspect of meaning enrichment. Generalizing confirmation is the operational effect through which new meaning references are taken up in the process of repetition. The identical also proves itself in other situations, and because “it is reduced to selfhood, it can gain fullness of meaning” (Luhmann 1990, p. 108). It is about meaning confirmation and meaning enrichment in and through repeatable and repeated communications. Semantics are “cultural goods relevant for orientation” (Luhmann 1997, p. 894): Repeatable is not the object that explains the repeatability, as it were. Only the operation itself is repeatable, and this only thanks to a recursive networking with other operations. (...) Nothing else is meant when we occasionally speak of semantics. We abandon all semiological connotations with this term (admittedly: contrary to the meaning of the word) and focus only on the distinction that observations experience when they are fixed as descriptions, i.e. when they are recognized as worthy of preservation and kept ready for repetition”. (Luhmann 1990, p. 108)

This brings us to the concept of semantics.

2.6

Semantics

The concept of semantics connects the knowledge perspective of the organization with the concept of meaning and communication and enables the question of the relationship between social and organizational communication. This is a field of research that has not been particularly widely explored to date, as it “lacks the inclusion of organizations with regard to the correlation thesis of societal structure and semantic tradition” (Göbel 2001, p. 358). On the underexposure of this relation, Wil Martens (2001, p. 358) also notes “the lack of an attempt to systematically bring together semantic patterns on the one hand and the social structures of modern

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organizations on the other”.30 Suggestions and connection possibilities for a sociology of knowledge of organization can be found especially in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society and organization (Luhmann 2000a), which includes not only the theory of meaning and communication but also the theory of observation and differentiation, which we presented in the last subchapter. An organization-critical perspective does not necessarily have to be abandoned with this – a common reproach towards systems-theoretical social and organization theory – but rather this is grounded in observation and distinction theory. Critical then, “coming closer to the original sense of the word, can mean that sociology must be able to distinguish and to reflect on the use of distinctions” (Luhmann 1997, p. 22). And critical, in times of polycontextual social relations in which an exclusive and context-independent point of view of observation and description can no longer be taken, can no longer mean exposing, uncovering and knowing better. Luhmann formulates the task of the sociology of knowledge accordingly: “Sociology knows (...) that there is no arbitrariness in reality. And the task of a sociology of knowledge could then be to explore the conditions under which certain distinctions are more plausible than others” (Luhmann 1995b, p. 176). It is precisely this aspect of “plausibility” that can be called the social-structural plausibility of semantics. The concept of semantics describes the repetition of generalized patterns of meaning, the typified (forms of) meaning in a society that are available for the communicative repetition function (cf. Luhmann 1980a, p. 19). These semantics are a stock of “ready-made sense-processing rules” (ibid.), a “higher-level generalized sense that is available relatively independently of the situation” (ibid.), which orients and orders communications. Semantics provide communications with typical meaning. Berger and Luckmann (1980, p. 42 ff.) also speak of “semantic fields” in relation to typifications of meaning, because semantics are not simply understood as words, but as concepts with a greater capacity to carry meaning, a household of meaning. Semantically wide-ranging and connectable terms assume an essential realityconstituting function, for they unite “a multiplicity of meanings (condensation),

30

Exceptions in the German-speaking context are the works of Hiller (2005) and of Deutschmann (cf. Deutschmann 1997, 2002; Deutschmann et al. 1995). Türk (1995, 1997, 1999) has also repeatedly researched the relationship between the social structure and semantics of organizations in modern society. Cf. Starbuck (2003) on the incremental relationship between societal organizational ubiquity, reflective multiplication, and knowledge proliferation. In the broader organization and management studies debate, it is Martin Parker, for example, who sharpens the critical eye for the relevance of ideas, discourse, communication and semantics to the topic of management. We will explore this theme in the next chapter.

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thereby generating indeterminacy and ambiguity” (Stäheli 2000, p. 188). The structuring aspect of semantics lies in the fact that each symbolically highly valued term enables communicative repeatability and connectivity, “generalizing singular experiences” (Stäheli 2000, p. 192). For organizational research, the sociological question of semantic fields, meaning households and the social-structural plausibility and meaningful fit of semantics is relevant, because it allows the structuring effects of established and cultivated semantics of organizational communication to be analyzed, by which we mean established and ingrained descriptive and self-descriptive terms as patterns of reuse in organizational communication. This includes terms such as purpose, goal, hierarchy, work, job, career, management, performance, success, resource and now also project, process, performance and network. In the case of organizations, the socialstructural plausibility of semantics is measured by their relatability to the organizational phenotype. Semantics have to prove themselves on the problems and issues of “decision and uncertainty” or of “decision and contingency”. All those social semantics that make the relation of “decision and contingency” particularly meaningful, in which it is a matter of questions of time, fact, social and space in decisionmaking situations under conditions of contingency, are therefore organizationally particularly connectable and socially structurally plausible (“”), always when it is a matter of decision semantic ciphers for contingency such as uncertainty, insecurity and risk. In the case of socio-structural plausibility, one could also speak of a semantic ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March). This point is about organizationtypical structural features that establish specific “starting points for semantic needs” (Luhmann 1980a, p. 29). Organizations form and reproduce themselves in a society that “has always already produced and perpetuates a construction of reality. (...) Within this general social construction of the world (...), however, organizations generate particular operational correlates, particular semantics, particular distinctions with the help of which they observe the world” (Luhmann 2000a, p. 216). Wil Martens sums up this distinction-based organizational constitution of form strikingly in the following quotation: For Luhmann, organization means in the first place processing a specific complex of distinctions (...) In fact, he focuses on the distinctions used in the production of the manifold ‘structures’ of organizations. Thus the most important organizational phenomena he describes have a semantic nature, or in my words are cultural forms. In Organization and Decision, Luhmann is looking for the logic of the distinctions that are processed in the basic operations of organizations and in the descriptions they make of themselves. The use of these distinctions is constitutive of the existence of modern organizations. The distinctions are the means of dealing with the typically modern problem of an abundance of alternatives through the choice of temporary self-

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descriptions. With the help of which distinctions does an organization produce decision premises (decision programs, communicative relations, personnel) in such a way that the resulting restrictions are clearly temporal in character? (Martens 2006a, p. 90)

This quotation from Martens now makes very concrete and descriptive what we can formulate here not only with reference to Luhmann, but also following the previous presentations on an operative concept of organization and the function of formforming distinctions addressed within organization-theoretical epistemology: Organizations can be understood as a typical meaning complex of form-forming distinctions. Which distinctions are used to typify organization as a specific social form and to design and shape organizational structures according to this typology? Martens reconstructs the distinctive structure of decision premises accordingly: (...) Decision programs (are, TD) generally based, among other things, on the distinctions task/execution, wrong/correct (...). Conditional programs are based on the distinctions: Condition/Consequence, Rule/Exception; Application/NonApplication; and the Purpose Programs on the Distinctions: Purpose/Means; Cause/ Effect; Primary Purpose/Subordinate Purpose; Cost/Risks. Fundamental to staffing are the distinctions of individual/person, job/person, character/motivation, competent/ non-competent, member/non-member; recruit/transfer; job/career. In designing communication channels, the relevant distinctions are: Address/no address; responsible/ nonresponsible; large/small; diverse/non-diverse, professional competence/hierarchical competence, horizontal linkage/vertical linkage. (Martens 2001, p. 357)

If we dive into Martens’ compact quotation, we find the distinction “rule/exception”. This indicates the theoretical point at which the concept of rule is discussed in Luhmann’s organization theory, namely within the framework of the concept of program. Decision rules are formulated and generalized in decision programs. This includes all “rules (including rules about changing rules, about interpreting rules, about competences and instructions to be given on a case-by-case basis) according to which members are to behave. These rules are also contingent. They are established by decisions. They apply positively. Their changeability is therefore co-implied and often co-regulated” (Luhmann 1975b, p. 40). Programs bundle rules for conforming and deviating behavior. They are thereby distinctions constructed in the system, whereby conditional programs, as past-related “if-then” routines, distinguish conditions and consequences of decisions, while purpose programs distinguish between purposes to be fulfilled or goals to be achieved and means appropriate for them. Both types of structure hold distinctions for further use, once with past reference and once with future reference (cf. Luhmann 2000a, p. 262; Drepper 2018, p. 158 ff.).

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Self-descriptions are another way of analyzing the relationship between social semantics and organizational communication, because self-description formulas are linked to specific social structures of expectation. It is a matter of asking and determining where the guiding ideas, conceptions and models come from through which organizations identify themselves. This is by no means trivial, because the social embedding in differentiation arrangements of modern society means for organizations a multitude of different system references and constellations of expectations based on them.31 In this sense, self-descriptions can be understood as self-location and positioning communication. This can be exemplified by the terms “field” and “performance”. From the self-location aspect, self-descriptions raise questions such as: Who are we? Where are we? Where do we stand? What do we do? What should we do? How should we do it? The corporate design and mission statements of organizations make the relevance of (positioning) communications clear: How is the organization positioned in the market and in the field of market competition? Is it a “global player” and does it play or perform in the “premier league” or is it only a regional or local player? Using these spatial and field semantic distinctions (global/regional, global/local, regional/local), organizations can observe themselves and also observe how they are observed, e.g. by other market participants and customers. In this context, these distinctions are generalized compact terms that bundle and abbreviate a multitude of other distinctions in comparative communication. Whoever describes himself as a global player and wants to be described as such, also knows which strategies, performance indicators and benchmarks are to be offered, i.e. which follow-up expectations are to be taken into account and adhered to. All this takes place within the framework of field semantics, which as a semantics of space and location enables the question of positions, positioning and constellations of places and set-ups in the field and is linked to performance semantics, because the field is also a stage on which the setup and production is observed as a performance in front of competitors, rivals and audiences.32 The performance term is double-meaning and refers to two aspects of

This is described by the term “multireference” (Wehrsig and Tacke 1992). The emphasis on fellow performers is important here because it emphasizes the inward effect aspect of the performance. In the sense of G. H. Mead (1938, 1969, 1988) one hears oneself talking when speaking and can thus manipulate, convince and condition oneself (selfconditioning as conditioning of the self!). In everyday organizational and management life, this can be found today under motivational and commitment aspects. The appearance of the inspired and inspiring (or uninspired and uninspiring?) CEO on the stage of the multifunctional arena, the address of the medium-sized company at the Christmas dinner or the specially composed company or department song, which is supposed to create, convey and 31 32

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meaning of activities, operations: first, performances and activities as the production and execution of tasks, orders, services, processes, and products; and second, the presentation and performance aspect of these performances and activities observed by external observers and audiences.33 The concept of field refers historically and semantically to military and sporting contexts, events and situations, to combat and competition, to battlefields and playing fields. It is about acting in turbulent fields under conditions of contingency, uncertainty and insecurity, in which practical coping strategies are required: “It is again about conquering, mastering an unconquerable, uncontrollable field in which chance plays its game” (Fuchs 2005, p. 197). Here we can add that battlefields and playing fields already function as stages and are connoted as such. It is not only about victories and defeats and wins and losses, but always also about the attitude, the how of the battle and the competition, which is observed, evaluated and retold. The concept of performance is one that takes into account the various stakeholders in the environment of organizations. Performance is always also performative (German: Performanz), because the normative of the simultaneity of execution and performance is that it is about meeting performance expectations to enable and perform performance comparisons. In this double sense, performance means the execution of expectations and the performance of the execution of expectations. Moreover, the concept of performance is a concept of value, for performance is a social semantics of value (as a distinction-based form of meaning) in which the preference of the binary schema of performing/nonperforming is clearly on the performance side of the distinction. Performing, of course, is better than non-performing, and performing is more desirable than failing. And if all is well for the moment, then it is: “Well set up and good performance – Good set up, good performance”!34

support a desired image and a specific identity and which everyone sings along together in chorus, point in the direction of a communicative, visual and auditory self-manipulation and self-suggestion of the organization through “Organizational Sounds”. 33 Themes such as staging and theatricalization of management and organization in the sense of Erving Goffman become apparent at this point, because organizational and managerial life sometimes appears as performance on “show stages” (Günter 1994, p. 212ff.) of the front and back stages, for which one must be attuned and prepared, either through habitus, education and/or job-related training, coaching and mentoring. 34 It’s not just about beating yourself, but also about how you beat yourself, for example as a worthy winner or a good loser. On these fields, heroes are crowned or challengers stumble. And this is where hero stories become myths of masculinity. From a gender perspective, it is evident how field semantics, military rhetoric, management and leadership doctrines, and sport semantics are interdiscursively interwoven through masculine identity and performance values. Cf. Neuberger (2001, pp. 109ff.) on “masculine archetypes” in leadership theory and

2.7 Intermediate Consideration

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Intermediate Consideration

In this chapter, the starting points and questions of operational and theoretical organizational research were reviewed. The logic of the presentation led from the thematic hook “organization and knowledge” to the different theoretical perspectives. The thematic discussion could serve to identify and address relevant questions, concepts and theoretical desiderata of a meaning-theoretical organizational analysis, which are concerned with operative modes of meaning movement and typifying structures of meaning determination. As conceptual proposals to determine the event-structure relation, we have pointed out the relation between cognition and schema, social cognitions and culture, action practice and rule, and communication and semantics. I summarize here again some of the main yields of the discussion, which will occupy us further in what follows. In the field of discourse “organization and knowledge”, knowledge is defined as a social phenomenon that is dependent on individual or psychological conditions of possibility – the theories and approaches outlined here conceptualize this differently in some cases – but cannot be reduced to these. Knowledge is defined as an operational phenomenon that stands in relation to and in dependence on an operative act. Be it cognition, action practice or communication, it is always a matter of considering knowledge not as a storage phenomenon, but of linking it to a respective current event of meaning. This emphasizes the temporality and eventfulness of the knowledge phenomenon. Along the phenomenological definition of meaning, knowledge is understood as a structure of meaning that enables event connections (cognitive aspect) and at the same time keeps them within certain prescribed limits (normative aspect). With orality (language), literality (writing) and medial artifacts based on them (e.g. texts), two medial conditions of possibility of the genesis of social knowledge have been analyzed in the discussion. With the latest information and communication technologies, digital information processing must be added here. The social reference of the knowledge phenomenon led to the question of the Mronga (2013) on constructions of masculinity in management. Cf. Luhmann (2000a, p. 344) on the “methodology of performance improvement” as a “common language” of sport and business. The fact that a common language is (should be!) spoken and that one can therefore learn particularly well from the other is shown by the engagements and appearances of predominantly male sports coaches at leadership and management congresses and seminars, which have now become a matter of course. At the same time, new team-based management, motivation and coaching fashions are increasingly appearing in sport, originating in the field of corporate human resource management and sending teams cooking, climbing, sailing, singing and meditative silence. Cf. Sprenger (2008) for an example from the genre of management consulting literature on the relation of sport and management.

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social embedding and contextualization of organizations. This has been made clear by the concepts of cultural-cognitive, practical embedding and social differentiation. Furthermore, in the discourse of knowledge of organization, essential topoi of organization theory are reformulated and re-contoured along an operative perspective. This concerns the central organization-theoretical themes of organizational structures and environmental relations, as well as the question of the formality or constructiveness of organizations as genuine social entities. In detail: Organizational structural components – since Simon and March discussed in organizational theory as “standard operating procedures” and “decision premises” – are conceptualized in knowledge discourse as specific forms of knowledge. The procedural form of conditional programming – “if ..., then ...” routines – is, for example, referred to as propositional routine knowledge (cf. Tsoukas 2005, p. 70 ff.) and the organizational knowledge household is divided into recipe knowledge (routine operating procedures, standardized procedures) and social typifications (shared patterns of perception, meanings and beliefs) acquired through socialization and interaction within the organization (cf. Sparrow 1998, p. 46). Accordingly, the operational-knowledge semantic reconstruction of decision-making premises and their interdependencies is: Know how?! How can and should conditions be linked to effects? How can and should means make ends and goals attainable? How can and should communication channels be structured? How can and should staff be involved in programmes and communication channels? How can and should programmes and communication channels be adapted to staff? Another example of the knowledge-semantic reformulation of organizationtheoretical topoi is the question of system-environment references of organizations and correlating organizational internal differentiations. Various societal environmental references of organizations, to which organizations relate through internal differentiations in the form of expectation structures or subsystem formation (cf. Drepper 2018, p. 111 ff.), are understood as knowledge references and knowledge sources. Organizational internal differentiation – departments as segmentary subsystems or roles as task- and topic-related structures –, is conceptualized as knowledge differentiation. The multireference of organizations (cf. Wehrsig and Tacke 1992) in legal, economic, political, scientific, educational, artistic, medical, technological and religious terms is conceived as knowledge field differentiation. A further operative realignment of organization-theoretical topoi within the framework of knowledge semantics is found with regard to the determination of the roles that organizations play in overarching social processes, making them communicative addresses and addressees. Organizations are understood as consumers of knowledge, as producers of knowledge, as distributors and selectors

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of knowledge, whereby they function as addresses (dissemination and selection) and addressees (stabilization of expectations through address formation) of communication (cf. Fuchs 1997; Tacke 2000; Drepper 2018, p. 305 ff.) with regard to topics condensed into knowledge. This can be fanned out again as follows: Knowledge Consumption/Communication Addressee Describing organizations as consumers of knowledge describes the dependence of organizations on social households of meaning and knowledge. The differentiation or formation of organizations presupposes diachronically (differentiation of organizational systems in the context of socio-cultural evolution) as well as synchronously societal structural conditions to which organizations with their decision-making structures and their decision-making production are connected (cf. Drepper 2018, p. 19ff.). Organizational genesis is always system formation within society, whether it is oriented towards clearly contoured, generalized and typified communication contexts (economy, politics, law, science, education, etc.) or towards structurally less condensed communications (e.g. interactions, networks, social movements). All in all, the addressee role expresses the integration of organizations into social structures and the participation of organizations in social communication contexts. Knowledge Production/Communication Address The knowledge production function describes the active role of organizations in social communication. The idea is that organizations, as addresses of communication, participate in both the dissemination and selectivity of communication topics. Certain topics are set and occupied by organizations and disseminated under their names. In this way, organizations communicate a specific selectivity which is intended to condition or predispose the interpretation, understanding and thus a specific connectivity of a topic (agenda setting). Business organizations can, for example, become communicatively active at the level of technological and production knowledge or at the level of service knowledge and act as knowledge producers. Many companies, and especially consulting firms, are nowadays engaged in producing and communicating knowledge in such a way that it can be exclusively attributed to the company as special brand knowledge, thus enhancing the organization’s reputation as a specific address in the market (cf. Sandhu 2009). Dissemination takes place through publications, conferences, seminars, trainings and nowadays also through participation in digital contact networks. The reinforcement of selection proposals to increase the probability of acceptance runs through

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the reference to efficient operating results and balance sheets (success), (scientific) expertise and its reputation and mass media presence and popularity. We will further elaborate on these connections in the following chapter along the concept of “communicables” (German: Kommunikabilien).

3

Communicables: Meaning Movements and Meaning Determinations

The following chapter deals with research and studies at the intersection of organizational, societal, communication and knowledge theory, which can be used to demonstrate and discuss the relationship between operative movements of meaning and typifying determinations of meaning. In doing so, we take up relevant theoretical concepts and arguments from the first two chapters and apply them thematically. The discourse on management as a semantic and structural phenomenon serves as a thematic entry point, whereby managerialism is determined as a “discursive event” (cf. Link 1997, p. 15) or “semantic field” (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1980, pp. 42 f.), in which not individual words, but discourse-bearing categories and classifications and “entire semantic complexes including their practical references” (Link 1997, p. 15) develop cognitive and normative effects, which are realized and concretized through managementization as a level of practical implementation and structural enforcement. In terms of the sociology of knowledge, the distinction between managerialism and managementization can be heuristically underpinned by the distinction between semantics and structure, in order to distinguish between a discourse level of idea circulation and a structural level of idea implementation. In a next step, however, it must be considered that both levels must be related to each other, because one thing remains sociologically unquestionably presupposed: meaning is the social universal medium into which all social structures are operationally imprinted as forms. This means that both semantics and structures of expectation usually referred to as social structures are typified structures of meaning that differ according to various degrees of meaning generalization and communicative connection potentiality or bindingness (cf. Drepper 2018a, p. 116; Stichweh 2000c). In a further step, the sociological considerations on managerialism and managementization are followed by analyses of organizational and management # The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 T. Drepper, Operativity And Typicality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42011-6_3

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standards based on meaning, communication and media theory. Well-known concepts in organizational studies for the circulation of ideas are diffusion and for adoption and stabilization standardization and standards. In this discussion, a diversity of terms can be observed with regard to the designation of the meaning elements. Ideas, practices, innovations, standards, knowledge and cultural material are the concepts commonly used here. The concept of “communicables” (Fuchs 1993, p. 149 ff.) as an exploratory term should make it possible to identify the questions and argumentations relevant to the theory of meaning and communication and to pursue the (what) question of the meaning elements that are moved operationally. In addition, there is the question of the who, of the social-structural sponsorship and stabilization of the meaning material or the forms of meaning. Is this a question of specific groups of people, individual organizations, types of organizations, actors and collective actors, social fields and spheres, communication systems, roles, rules and routines, norms or values? The question of how takes a look at the event mode of processing and variation of forms of meaning. Is behaviour, action or communication taken as the basic concept here? And what other terms and concepts are assumed for circulation, dissemination, acceptance and connection phenomena? Is it a matter of translation, travel, diffusion, transfer, adaptation, adoption and reinterpretation, exchange, import, imprint, displacement, transformation, bricolage, hybrization or specification? The why-question then casts a glance at backgrounds and justifications for selectivities that refer to concepts such as system, institutional or field logics, actor interests and actor constellations, path dependencies, historical recursivities and intrinsic values. These issues and theoretical discussions will be the focus of the following. I begin with the distinction between managerialism and managerialization.

3.1

Managerialism and Managementization: Topic Access and Theoretical Desiderata

The management perspective has spread to almost all areas and aspects of life in modern society.1 Today, it seems that (self-)control through management methods can no longer be dispensed with. The expansion ambitions of “managerialism” (Schelsky 1965) are no longer limited to business organizations, for

Cf. Drepper (2005a, 2006b) for initial preliminary work on this topic. When “managers” are referred to in the following, this is meant in a gender-neutral way, as I use the generic masculine to make the text easier to read. I then refer to gender aspects of the topic separately. 1

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“managementization” (Meyer 2002) increasingly confronts non-business organizations with management trends and reorganization expectations. As Nigsch already put it in the 1990s, management has “increasingly become the common denominator of inevitable reorganization processes” (Nigsch 1997, p. 417). The concept of management functions here as a micro-, meso- and macro-labeling semantics of control and self-control. Today, the rationally acting “actor” (individually and collectively) makes use of modern management techniques and describes himself accordingly. In the discourse on the organizational and societal relevance of management, a rough distinction can be made between two polar positions, an operational-instrumental perspective and an ideology- and organization-critical perspective. For the management-affine position, the standard proposition is that nowadays even schools, hospitals, kindergartens, universities, dioceses, old people’s homes and Caritas wards, political parties, parishes and administrations can no longer function and compete if they set up and compete without professional management. Organizations, of whatever stripe, are almost unthinkable without comprehensive management programs and appropriately trained management professionals (e.g. MBA graduates). Let’s listen to Peter F. Drucker, one of the most popular protagonists among management authors, who speaks here for a society-wide management claim: “The center of a modern society, economy, and community is not technology. It is not information. It is not productivity. It is the managed institution as the organ of society to produce results. And management is the specific tool, the specific function, the specific instrument to make institutions capable of producing results” (Drucker 1999, p. 39). In the understanding of the second and more management-critical perspective, the penetration of many areas of social life with management ideas and practices appears as the consistent implementation of the neoliberal project of economizing the social. In terms of a modern governmentality, management practices appear as socio-technological governance forms of governing social structures and the modern subject (cf. Bröckling et al. 2000). The “Enterprising Self” experiences the radical individualization of opportunities and risks (cf. Bröckling 2000). Success or failure, victory or defeat are up to the individual himself and his competencies, willingness to perform and commitment. In this culture of self-valorization, the individual should and must economize, rationalize and discipline himself like a company, because entrepreneurial individualism places “hope in the entrepreneurial entrepreneur” (Bude 1997). The new type of person, “who embodies the spirit of capitalism like no other, (is) that of the entrepreneur” (Verwoert 2003, p. 7). He is creative and autonomous, takes things into his own hands and thus differs fundamentally in his mentality from the bureaucrat and employee (cf. Kracauer 1971). This manageriable type of person (Hondrich 2001) bristles with “initiative, vigor,

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drive, imagination, and perseverance” (Gutenberg 1958, p. 42). In the case of failure, or failure that is too slow or infrequent, victim blaming becomes a common attribution routine, for it is, after all, up to the individual if he or she fails to make progress.2 Semantically, communicative permeability is facilitated by the fact that management is no longer an exclusive term, but has become a popular one. The ubiquitous use of the concept of management proves its high communicative connectivity, because management is a highly connotative concept that is deeply embedded in the rationality and modernization self-image and the self-description household of Western-influenced society. When management is mentioned, rationality, effectiveness, efficiency, profitability, innovativeness, competition, rivalry and profitableness always resonate. In the sense of Raymond Williams (1976), management has become a highly connectable keyword, whereby high communicative connectability is often based on semantic diffuseness and ambiguity of meaning.3 The concept of management can sometimes be described as “indeterminately overdetermined” (cf. Baecker 2002). It is overdetermined in the sense that far-reaching expectations are attached to management, and at the same time it is For the new management trend of “design thinking” (cf. Brown 2016), it is not failure that is the problem, but rather non-failure. Fast and frequent failure as a thinking style and problemsolving habitus is understood as the appropriate mode of learning and innovation in the digital world: Binary volatility is met with individual and collective tempo failure: Fall a lot and fast – get up a lot and fast – and on and on! One certainly does not directly become an ideology critic if one assumes that this does not sound so much like a new pedagogical culture of error-friendliness, but rather like a self-repairing employability algorithm as the next incremental stage of the self-managing individual as a potential maximizer within the framework of the concept of the plastic organizational man in the ability culture (cf. Drepper 2008a, p. 3200 ff.). 3 Ortmann points out the difference between vagueness and ambiguity, which is often ignored in organizational studies. Vagueness means diffuseness, ambiguity and blurriness of meaning offers, while ambiguity means double and ambiguities of meaning offers. This then makes significant differences as a signal for possible communicative connections, whether one is interpretively searching for potentially meant meaning in the case of vagueness, or can connect to one offer among several in the case of ambiguity. These are thus two different forms of meaning with different trigger selectivity for connection communications. Vagueness motivates interpretive communication in search of meaning(s) (What is meant here? How is this to be understood at all?) and ambiguity motivates the decision for one meaning offer among several possible ones (Which meaning possibility do I decide for and connect to?). In English, however, the distinction is somewhat more ambiguous, since there “ambiguity” can also be used as a synonym for vagueness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Cf. Ortmann (2012, p. 77 ff.) on vagueness in organizations and Keefe and Smith (1999) on vagueness in general. I would like to thank Günther Ortmann for the reference. 2

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so sufficiently indeterminate that it can be applied to almost any circumstance. It is precisely such terms that develop a great symbolic power, which are diffuse and connotative enough to establish multiple connectivity. The definiteness gap ensures communicative connectivity. Ambiguity is a generator of variation in meaning for this very reason, since ambiguity opens up communicative spaces of possibility and thus “offers opportunity for attaching variation” (Luhmann 2000a, p. 349). Reflected sociologically of knowledge, the societal generalization of the management claim seems to be accompanied by a business-supported overestimation of the management function.4 In this context, it is Dirk Baecker’s thesis that historically-variable leading sciences can be determined, which, however, are often overtaxed by societal expectations of management: But just as at that time (1960s and 1970s – T. D.) sociology and society suffered from the overestimation of sociology – just remember that at that time one derived the consequence from the insight that complex phenomena are not controllable, then one had to control in a more informed and indirect way, i.e. anyway – so today business administration and society suffer from the overestimation of business administration. Those who believe that ‘management’ is an art of leadership and design that can be prescribed indiscriminately to all organizations, i.e. not only companies but also public authorities, churches, associations, schools, universities, social and cultural institutions as well as armies, no longer know that this management is a product of the application of an economic calculus to an object that is alien to this calculus, the organization. (Baecker 2003, p. 15)

It is precisely this hypostasizing of the management function that the critical reflection perspective takes up, which I would now like to reconstruct using selected analyses as examples. Here, the focus is on “managerialism” as a critical concept of reflection (cf. Parker 2002; Pollitt 1993; Reed 1989). This concept opens up, among other things, the analysis of the relationship between organizational practices and social discourses. Managerialism as a critical concept thus aims not only at the level of organizations, but also at the level of society as a whole and asks about the socialstructural significance of knowledge formations. In the context of Critical Management Studies (CMS), Martin Parker refers to managerialism as a displacing ideology, because despite the socially and historically observable diversity of

4

It should be noted that disciplinary-oriented management science now sees itself in strong competition with management consulting doctrines and management guidebooks. Cf. Kieser (2002) on the dispute over definitional and consulting monopolies between disciplineoriented management sciences and management teachings oriented towards the consulting market. Cf. also Faust (2002) on the boom in management consulting.

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organizational types, a “generalized application of managerialism as the one best way” (Parker 2002, p. 184) has come to the fore in recent years. The legitimizing background narrative of managerial-focused organizations is globalization and market orientation. The dominant proposition is that globalization creates and intensifies market and competitive conditions, and market and competitive structures demand and promote efficient and effective organizational management (see Parker 2002, p. 185). This programmatic approach then subsumes any organizational issues under the management control dictate. According to Parker, however, the focus on market and management cannot be plausibilized either synchronously-socially-structurally or historically-diachronically. The labeling of management becomes questionable at the latest when organizational practice and descriptive rhetoric no longer correspond and structure and semantics diverge too clearly (cf. Parker 2002, p. 185): “Recognizing the historical and social specificity of managerialism is very important in this respect. For most of human history, and in most cultures, organizing has been done without managers and markets as we now understand those terms” (Parker 2002, p. 202). In his analysis, Parker asks about the social-structural supporting elements of semantics.5 According to Parker, the managerial understanding of organization is based on three aspects that contribute to the meaning of management as a generalized technology of control. Parker (2002, p. 184) cites the growth of an international professional group or perhaps even managerial class, the widespread application of management semantics, and the spread of management knowledge through business schools. By the first point, Parker means that the “new corporate internationalism” is leading to a global and globalized managerial class, with organizational memberships increasingly displacing the influence of nationalsocietal identities and identifications (see Parker 2002, p. 55). The second point refers to the high connectivity of the concept of management in societal communication. The third point refers to a relevant voice that makes the language and tone of management heard socially, management science, which according to Parker not only produces and provides educational and reflective knowledge, but also functions as a PR machinery. According to Parker, it keeps too little distance from its subject matter, behaves too affirmatively, and adopts too many selfdescriptions from business. The vast majority of texts from the literary space of 5

Cf. Pfeffer (1997, p. 9) on the sociological question of the historical development and differentiations of the supporting groups (engineers, business economists, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, managers) and organizational contexts (refa institutes, business schools, sociology departments, etc.) of the production and reflection of thinking, talking and writing about organizations.

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management studies are, according to Parker, written in a management and control affirmative manner. In addition to practical advice on organizational and management design, they carry and reproduce the self-descriptions of management practitioners (see Parker 2002, p. 9).6 Parker therefore refers to them as one of the greatest legitimation and public relations campaigns in the history of ideas in modern society (cf. Parker 2002, p. 9). A circular idea-reproducing structure can be observed in the relationship between theory and practice, as management scholars train managers, who demand advice from management consultants, who in turn receive their legitimacy from management scholars (cf. Parker 2002, p. 2). In terms of content, modern managerialism as a world and organizational view propagates the application of management as a generalizable technology of control to a wide variety of areas of modern life. Control, governance and design are sister concepts to the concept of management. This managerial imperialism is predominantly at home in large companies, which according to Parker are the breeding grounds for managerialism, but now also extends into organizations in non-economic areas of society. For this reason, Parker speaks of a process of “corporate colonization”. He doubts, however, that the uncritical implementation and reproduction of management methods always represents the automatically appropriate form of organization. Rather, management dominance marginalizes alternative possibilities, many “non-managerial ways” of organizing. This rejection of alternative ways of organizing is also expressed at the semantic level. Alternative terms such as coordination, participation, community, and democracy are marginalized or co-opted by the concept of management (see Parker 2002, p. 11). The semantic inflation of the concept of management is not only superficial and based on trendy but ultimately harmless language games, but functions as a communicative practice with socio-structural effects that exerts a strong influence on organizational and social structures. Management is applied as a structural, process and practice concept (decision-making and action category) to various social processes of ordering and controlling things, people, times and spaces. Managing societal and organizational problems are considered valuable, opportune and worthy of preference, while the other side, non-management appears as the side of the distinction to be avoided. The preference for management and managing is clear. Management functions as a value in communication and managerial/nonmanagerial is the guiding distinction here, further second-coded by the good/bad or

6 We will return to the essential role of popular management literature as a text genre later in this chapter.

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preferable/non-preferable distinction.7 Let us note. Martin Parker’s ideologycritical analyses of managerialism and the managerialization of social spheres analyze both the correlation of social structure and semantics, which is relevant to the sociology of knowledge, and the connection between social practices and knowledge. Parker identifies the managerial class, management sciences, and business schools as the supporting structures for the genesis, circulation, and consolidation of ideas. In my opinion, however, a conceptual difficulty is that in Parker’s analyses the levels are not clearly separated and then related to each other again. Managerialism as the speaking, writing, justifying, legitimizing, ideologizing in management terms and managementization as the expectation-structural establishment of organizational decision premises are difficult to distinguish and are not systematically related to each other. Boltanski and Chiapello’s study on the “Spirit of Capitalism” (2003) is another important reference in this complex of topics. It combines analyses from the sociology of knowledge, organizational theory and social theory. Boltanski and Chiapello examine project and network capitalism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as well as main motifs of neoliberalist thought. This study is situated in the context of recent convention theory (Diaz-Bone 2009, 2011), although it is not a critical theory of capitalism in the conventional sense, but a sociology of the critique of capitalism within the framework of a sociological theory of knowledge of the transformation of societally differentiated and simultaneously embedded economic structures. In it, Boltanski and Chiapello aim to decipher and clarify the normative conceptions of order in the organization of work in companies, family life together, individual lifestyles and collective mentalities, as well as their change. The basic thesis is that capitalism needs external patterns of legitimation, moral charges and ethical safeguards, in order to be able to establish individual permanent motivation to participate in economic processes beyond pure profit maximization and efficiency orientation. Individuals need morally plausible reasons to join capitalism (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 45). In order to be able to produce a common good orientation, to legitimize itself and to embed itself in society, capitalism accesses reservoirs of the socio-cultural context that are alien to it. In this context, the “spirit of capitalism” is the totality of beliefs “that are associated with capitalism and contribute to the justification of this order, to its legitimation, and consequently to the promotion of the modes of action and

7

Cf. Luhmann (1997, p. 1121 ff.) on value communication. This allusive presupposition of the validity of values can be described as “allusive communication” (cf. Drepper 1998, p. 80; 2008a, p. 3206).

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dispositions associated with it” (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 46). The spirit “that favors the process of accumulation at a given moment is thus permeated by contemporaneous cultural products, most of which were developed for purposes quite different from the justification of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 59). The major economic and corporate structural transformation lines, which Boltanski and Chiapello reconstruct historically and critically, run from “family capitalism” to “corporate capitalism” to the currently dominant “network capitalism”. All structural phases have their own justification logics, the so-called “poleis”, which function as “general welfare-oriented conventions” as symbolic-normative models and rhetorical-semantic knowledge and discourse formations of a respective social and economic structure (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 61). Boltanski and Chiapello distinguish the “religious-spiritual polis”, the “domestic-family polis”, the “polis of honor” (polis of reputation), the “bourgeois-political polis”, the “market polis” and the “industrial polis”. The various combinations of these poleis then respectively yield the normative models of justification and persuasion of each phase of capitalism. Family capitalism is based on a combination of family and market polis, while corporate capitalism refers to justification through a combination of industrial and civic polis. For the latest capitalist structural developments, however, these poleis are no longer sufficient. The new spirit of capitalism requires an expanded framework of convention, the project-based poleis (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 147 ff.). In this, social structural developments such as globalization, the liberalization of economic programming, the increasing (compulsive) participation of employees in corporate transactions and risks, performance pay, projects and networks are reflected and programmed. Social-structurally, the project-based polis is based on individual mobility, availability and accessibility, and the multiplication with simultaneous disembedding and delocalization of social contacts. As worldview the notion of modern life as a sequence of projects and a concept of subjective self-optimization dominate. The new spirit of capitalism relies on teams, visions, innovations, networks, competencies, knowledge and leadership, whereby traditional distinctions such as work/non-work or wage work/non-wage work, entrepreneur/employee are becoming increasingly fragile (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 108 ff.). Let us move from here to further theoretical propositions of the present study. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, modern capitalism is an operative-dynamic observer that adapts to changing environmental conditions by observing social change and, in the process, constantly reinvents itself. Capitalism is understood by Boltanski and Chiapello as an observing and learning system whose adaptive capacity stems from constructively turning external criticism around and identifying it as its own characteristic. The incorporation and assimilation of critique is part of

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the capitalist success story. External critique is taken over into its own logic of meaning and normalized there in terms of the structure of expectations. The basic social dynamic that Boltanski and Chiapello see at work is the dialectical interrelation between capitalism and critique of capitalism: external critique becomes the central element of change by being used for capitalist self-correction and readjustment. External critique is thus insidiously trivialized and neutralized through incorporation (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, pp. 68 ff., 211 ff.). Boltanski and Chiapello distinguish two main forms of critique of capitalism, which they call “sources of outrage”. The first is “social critique”, whose bearers are parties and organizations of the labour movement, and the second is “artist critique”, which is carried by intellectuals and artists (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 215 ff.). The artist critique formulates its critique of alienated and alienating work, the suppression of creativity, freedom and autonomy of the social individual, as well as the disenchantment, reification and standardization of modern society. Social critique composes its critique of inequality and poverty, growing opportunism, and threats to social solidarity. Social critique identifies capitalism as the source of poverty and inequality as well as selfishness and exploitation, while artist critique critiques standardization, calculation, restrictions on freedom, creativity, and authenticity on the part of capitalism. The new “spirit of capitalism” has now long since incorporated this critique and converted it into its own configuration of expectations. In it, it is programmed and propagated that standardization and creativity, rationality and emotionality (apparently) no longer contradict each other in today’s economic life. Individuality, authenticity and freedom are explicitly desired and demanded in post-taylorist network capitalism. The artistic semantics and self-description of autonomy has long been appropriated and generalized by capitalism. The neoliberal habitus has appropriated elements of a traditionally artistic habitus such as creativity, autonomy and spontaneity and turned them into main rhetorical building blocks of the management dogma of the flexibilized connectionist economy. Methodologically, Boltanski and Chiapello demonstrate these expectation-structure modulations in two extensive textual corpora, management texts from the 1960s and the 1990s. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, modern management discourse is the semantic context in which the genesis of the argumentation, interpretation and legitimation schemes of neoliberal capitalism can be studied most impressively. It is here that the authoritative programmatics and pragmatics are formulated. Boltanski and Chiapello distinguish different text genres from one another, such as popular management literature from business studies literature that is tied back to a specific discipline, whereby it is precisely the popularly oriented texts (audience literature) and the general management theory represented in them that are the seemingly more effective medium for disseminating

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normative models (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 93). The management texts of the 1960s address the meritocratic detachment of managers from dominant family structures and entrepreneurial rule in firms, and propose as solutions the emancipation of middle managers, the introduction of objective performance evaluation, and the streamlining of bureaucracy. The management theory of the 1990s distinguishes itself above all by criticizing large organizations, the bureaucracy and hierarchy associated with them. This critique corresponds to the popularity of the network concept in theory and practice, which promises loose coupling and dynamics as a counter-world to encrusted, immobile and static structures. The slogan is: project and network instead of bureaucracy and hierarchy (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 188 ff.). Boltanski and Chiapello examine these issues in the relation of discursive formation (semantics), social practice and social structure. The discursive formations are understood on the basis of various text genres (popular literature, disciplinary publications) as programmatic and reflexive contexts of borrowing and dissemination of normative organizational models, so that questions can be asked about the influence of popular management guidebooks, disciplinary business literature, or even political-philosophical texts.8 Another important approach of this study is to examine reciprocal relations of influence between different social spheres, which suggests connections to other sociological theories that, also sensitized to the sociology of knowledge, take a look at reciprocal constellations of observation of different social spheres. Here, the theory of second-order observation from the context of sociological systems theory lends itself particularly well. At the same time, the concept of critique can be reflected in this context.9 The main thesis is that societal spheres observe other societal spheres, observe themselves and observe how they are observed by others. These constellations of observation 8

We will revisit this aspect later in this chapter using a differentiated text genre analysis of management literature (Furusten 1999). 9 Cf. Luhmann (1997, p. 1117 ff.) for an observation-theoretical reconstruction of the concept of critique: In this situation, it seems obvious, as a further development of critical sociology, as it were, to replace the distinction denoted by ‘critique’ with the distinction of observers. This in turn presupposes the insight that all observing and describing (including that of the second and third order) is a matter of context-dependent real operations. Even a second-order observer is always a first-order observer insofar as he must pick out another observer as his object in order to see the world through him (however critically). This forces him to the autological conclusion, that is: to the application of the concept of observation to himself. (...) For every observation of the world takes place in the world, every observation of society, if it is carried out as communication, in society.

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provide information that can be processed internally and contribute to the modulation of structures of expectation. In principle, all social spheres are capable of this style of observation, not only the economy. This eliminates the demonic trait of the economic system, which is an observing, observed and self-observing system among others within society. Boltanski and Chiapello also refer to this in a comparable sense, ascribing to critique and its supporting groups the ability to reinvent, revitalize and reinvigorate themselves (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 379 ff.). The changes in a normative order through critique then appear as changes in the structure of expectations through reciprocal relations of observation. For all the theoretical comparabilities, however, it must be borne in mind here that the argumentative centre of the theory of change in Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s approach remains the dialectical movement. Despite all theoretical openings and expansions of the ideology-critical core program, the basic critical stance prevails. The “power of critique” (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 517 ff.) can be revitalized, because not only capitalism is an observing and adaptive entity, but also the social forms of critique, which, once they have seen through the neoliberal disguise and creeping takeover, can regain strength. Even if the societal-theoretical points of convergence between the critical analyses of Boltanski and Chiapello and sociological systems theory seem to be limited, I would like to take up the differentiation theoretical impulses and relate them to managerialism and managementization at the end of this subchapter. What questions and insights does one arrive at when describing and reconstructing the structure of modern society along specific logics of meaning and system boundaries? And how does the perspective of a dominant “idée directrice” (Hauriou 1965), a grand guiding and background narrative of the managerialization and economization of various social domains and types of organizations, relate to this? On the basis of a differentiation-theoretical analysis, can the concept of management possibly be understood as a modern guiding idea and guiding semantics, through which further economically typical semantics of management and economically oriented organizing are also placed in non-economic organizations

A further theoretical side observation is that Boltanski and Chiapello also work with the concept of operation, but specifically and not in general theoretical terms. They speak, in relation to certain economic transformations, translations or transformations “of non-capital into capital” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003, p. 479), of “a series of operations that can be called operations of production” and which are concerned with the “transformation of the authentic into a market product” (ibid.). Ultimately, this refers to communicative economizing operations of transformation, translation and transformation of the non-economic into the economic sphere.

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and become communicatively connectable there? Is management a modern idée directrice with such a high power of meaning that it can have a meaning-orientating and expectation-structuring effect in non-economic areas of society and its organizations? Does management fulfil the function of a, metaphorically speaking, semantic “Trojan horse”, through which ideas about rationality, efficiency, effectiveness, profitability, market and control (governance) can take hold? What are the structural conditions of possibility, societal and organizational, for management to function as such a plausible semantics, not just of business communication? Possibly it is the generalization of “scarcity” as the dominant societal contingency formula (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 470)? Possibly the model of the enterprise functions as a dominant template for other organizations and types of organizations (cf. Kette 2012)? Possibly it is the problem reference of complexity in society as a whole, because functional differentiation increases the degree of factual, social, temporal and spatial complexity, and organizations are related to the respecification of these complexities in the form of the purposeful processing of societal problems (cf. Drepper 2018, p. 209 ff.)? Possibly it is organization as a social formation of form itself that opens up access to the concept of management and further management semantics in various societal spheres, for organizations exist in almost every sphere of modern society, whereby the organizational dependence of modern societal communications and the money dependence of formal organizations can function as door openers and structural plausibilizers for economic semantics in various societal spheres and their organizations? In terms of differentiation theory, it is the last point that seems to be of particular importance. It is the system level of the organization through which management semantics is also carried into non-economic areas of society. At the system level of the organization, management semantics and management practices can be thematized in non-economic communication areas of society and enter into decision-making premises. However, managerialist semantics can thereby convey an overestimation of managerial logic and the profit calculus. With questions of scarcity and resources, the profit calculation focuses primarily on the material and temporal levels of social meaning, but tends to underexpose the social dimension: The assertiveness of the business calculation lies in the fact that it represents a functional system reference within the organisation, which cannot be disputed within the organisation as long as it operates, i.e. under aspects of scarcity (scarce customers, scarce employees, scarce capital resources, scarce inputs, etc.). The fact that a private enterprise has to prove itself in the markets of an economy that not only offers a choice of products, but also has competing access to the human, material and capital resources required and, not least, positions a large number of stakeholders and shareholders who compete with each other for the economic results of the entrepreneurial creation of

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value, is taken for granted in this enterprise to such an extent that the fundamental inconsistency of these functional system accesses with the different logic of the organisation itself is often not taken into account. (Baecker 2003, p. 268)

This line of argument draws attention to the fact that inconsistencies and structural tensions can already arise between economic organizations and economic expectations, e.g. between longer-term product, structural and personnel issues and shorter-term capital perspectives. Orientation to the profit criterion by no means disposes of organizational questions, which is due to the fact that the profit criterion does not fix, but provides one problem viewpoint among several possible ones, which in principle makes different functionally equivalent solutions possible and comparable. The abstract identity principle of the profit calculus does not contain any concrete guidelines as to what an organizational design should look like. How the organization is to be organized is not directly provided by the profit criterion. As a generalized orientation, it is formulated too abstractly for this and must be respecified at the organizational level in each case.

3.2

(Neo)institutions

Another essential reference address in the debate on managerialism, managerialization, world cultural diffusion and adoption of organizational and management semantics and practices les is neoinstitutionalism in organizational research. Defining concepts in this context are diffusion, imitation, standardization, and standards. Before we come to a detailed discussion of these concepts, we will first reconstruct some core arguments of neoinstitutionalism in organizational research, which make its connection points in meaning and communication theory visible. These theoretical reconstructions could well have been in the last chapter, especially when we come to the connection of “Culture and Cognition” (DiMaggio 1997) in neoinstitutionalist research, which is connectable in terms of both culture and cognition theory. However, due to their preparatory relevance for the concept of diffusion, they are left in the text at this point. In recent years, neoinstitutionalism has made a name for itself in organizational research as a prominent address for not limiting the analysis of organizational structures and processes to the organizational level alone, but also for referring to their embedding in framing institutional, i.e. societal, contexts (cf. Hasse and Krücken 1999, 2005, 2008). The other side of this breadth of meaning and high connectivity, however, is that the term is in danger of being inflated and thus possibly losing theoretical content, since it can easily be applied to almost any

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circumstance involving social structures and the supra-individual permanence of social orders (cf. Drepper 2010).10 The fact that neoinstitutionalism has been able to develop into such a leading voice within social science organization studies at all is due to different aspects that interact in a very favorable way. At the substantive level, the concept of institution emphasizes both the societal embeddedness of organizations and the issue of the meaningful constitution and cultural form of organization. Institutional embeddedness means the first aspect and institutionalcultural formation means the second. Neoinstitutionalism is sensitive to the connection between cultural patterns and structures of expectation, in other words, in the sociological sense of knowledge, to the relationship between “social structure and culture” (Haferkamp 1990) or “social structure and semantics” (Luhmann 1980a). This can be seen, for example, in the concepts of the “collective actor” and the “individual as cultural script”, as well as the correlation thesis based on them concerning the connection of the collective actor status of organizations with the worldwide standardization of cultural patterns, whereby standardization comprises the process of designing, disseminating, adopting and accepting structures of expectation. The standard proposition in neoinstitutionalism on this is that cultural patterns construct agency. This means that the ontological status and identity of individuals and organizations are based on a historical semantic ascription of liberalist doctrines of action that assume the autonomous and rational actor. The borrowing contexts underlying these cultural patterns as a household of meaning are psychological theories for the individual, organizational theories for the corporate and organizational levels, and development theories for nation-states. In addition, more general values such as progress, justice, equality and responsibility are also attributed to units of action. These arguments can be linked to the sociology of knowledge and theory of meaning discussions from the previous chapter, as they address the relationship of symbol levels (guiding ideas, cultural scripts and schemas) to the practice and structural levels of operational units. In neoinstitutionalism, for example, symbol levels are understood as institutionalized meanings (environmental patterning) in the environment of organizations. As we

10 This may be related to the semantic heritage of the term, for “institutio” as a “time-honored” semantics is always invoked when it is a matter of the significant, the worthy of preservation, the supra-temporal, the super-personal and the supra-spatial with particular symbolic weight and symbolic power. This applies to socially valued persons, roles, offices and collective entities as well as to materialities and artifacts (e.g. sacred and canonical texts, constitutions, sacred buildings, statues etc.). Thus, the concept of institution in this double sense denotes both enduring structures of expectation and as salient symbolic addresses (persons, roles, offices, texts, collective entities).

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will see in the following, the field concept used refers to a relational and constructivist thinking (cf. Thrift 1996), because field positions, field constellations and field formations are constituted by attributions (accounts). The cognitive and cultural theoretical orientation leads neoinstitutionalism to analyze forms and types. Culture functions as an umbrella term, and institutions and organizations are understood as “cultural forms made up from cultural forms” (cf. Forssell and Jansson 1996, p. 96). Thus, the formal structure of organizations appears as a structural form. Typicality comes into play in that organizations produce (enactment) and are attributed (accounting) their typical profile through institutional environmental embedding. Institutionalized organizational forms are, in the neoinstitutionalist sense, generalized typifications in the “social stock of organizational knowledge” (Forssell and Jansson 1996, p. 96) that can be employed to constitute and distinguish different types of organizations. Attribution is thus another essential concept in this theoretical environment. Work influenced by neoinstitutionalism often draws on the phenomenologicalsocial constructivist idea of the meaningful construction of social reality and on the notion of the cognitive construction of patterns of meaning that guide action (cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1991a, p. 15). Institutions as objective reality are produced through action-practical sense-making processes. Neoinstitutionalism is also guided by the ethnomethodological and social phenomenological insight that institutions as “social facts” (cf. Douglas 1991) are produced, applied and transmitted in discursive acts and social practices. The objectivity of institutions is an effect of social constructions, and institutions are deposits – “sedimentations” in the Berger and Luckmann sense – of cognitive schemata that symbolically represent individuals’ understanding and interpretation of the world as well as guide their actions. These cognitive schemata are linguistically constructed ascriptions of meaning with collective validity. The concept of institutions simultaneously emphasizes two references: on the one hand, the symbolic level, on which institutions represent supra-individual patterns of interpretation and schemes of interpretation, and on the other hand, the level of social practice, on which actions intervene in the world in a formative way. Institutions provide both the symbol and idea household and generalized forms of practical action through which individuals bring forth the social world. In the sense of the interpretative turn in the social and cultural sciences, which we have already discussed with Anthony Giddens (cf. Giddens 1984), the concept of institution is intended to unite these two levels in a concept of the constitution of social reality. It is about the relationship between meaningful abstraction and generalization on the level of symbols and their concretization and realization through social actions and social relations. In this sense, institutions emerge and exist in the duality of meaning and symbol reference and

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social practice (action and relationship). Social construction as a whole means this recursivity of social practice of action and reference to meaning: social action is oriented towards social meaning, and social meaning is reproduced through action.11 The following example by Friedland and Alford (1991, p. 249) on democracy as a Western institution will illustrate this argument. For Friedland and Alford, the bureaucratic rule of law and parliamentary democracy are simultaneously symbol systems and practices of action. Democracy as an institution means, on the one hand, the symbolic level of political value ideas (e.g. free suffrage, separation of powers, limited terms of office and government, etc.) and, on the other hand, decision-making and procedural practices and structures based on them (state structures, party structures, administrative structures) that realize and concretize these ideas. Democracy as an institution denotes at the same time both the realm of political ideas and the concrete political practices and structures. Social differentiation is understood in neoinstitutionalism as follows. Modern society consists of a plurality of different spheres, each with typical institutionalized patterns or logics of meaning (cf. Bonazzi 2008, p. 370). The proximity to Weber’s understanding of modernity of occidental rationality and the idea of “value sphere separation” (cf. Weber 1920, 1922) is obvious. Krücken (2005, p. 301), however, points out that neoinstitutionalism, on the one hand, is very much based on Weber’s understanding of modernity, but, on the other hand, goes beyond it in two respects, because, on the one hand, “the basic cultural convictions diffused by rationalization are conceived more broadly than in Weber. Thus the universalism of values as well as the value of individuality play a fundamental role. On the other hand, the rationalization thesis leads to a globalization thesis”. Modern society increasingly differentiates institutional environments such as law, politics, economics, science and education, each of which develops its own specific standards of rationality (cf. Meyer and Rowan 1991, p. 46). Meyer and Rowan (1977, 1991) assume that organizations set up their structures and processes with these rationality expectations in mind by adopting rationalized elements. They refer to rationalized elements as rules that, among other things, define the situations and purposes typically encountered in organizations, modify existing definitions of situations, and specify means for acting rationally in particular situations. Rationality claims in the form of institutional rules constitute major factors influencing the emergence and further development of formal organizations (cf. Meyer and Rowan 1991, p. 45). The formal structure of modern organizations is to be understood as a

11 Overall, this recursivity principle is very comparable to Giddens’ duality theorem, which we have already introduced.

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reaction to claims and expectations on the part of the institutionalized environment. If we return here to the discussion of rules from the last chapter (Sect. 2.4), we see the concept of rules in this argumentation at a central basic conceptual position. It is defined as an essential element of organizational structure through which adaptive services to environmental expectations are provided. The importance of the institutional environment as a source of meaning for internal rule genesis is particularly emphasized in neoinstitutionalism and represents a cognition- and culture-oriented extension of a more classical norm-oriented concept of rule. This is also reflected in the “isomorphism” concept, which distinguishes between different organizational forms of adaptation to environmental expectations. Organizations operate in social sectors and organizational fields. “Isomorphism” refers to a process of form assimilation “that causes a unit in a population to assimilate to other units facing the same environmental conditions (...)” (Walgenbach 2006, p. 369). The neoinstitutionalist understanding of isomorphism addresses the “subtle and diffuse pressures to conform to accepted standards” as well as the growing standardization “of social activities as well as around the resulting positive and negative consequences” (Bonazzi 2008, p. 371). The homogenization of organizational structures can also be based on the position and positioning in an organizational field, because the “institutionalized elements in an organized field namely limit the direction and content of changes and at the same time condition that in this field a further push towards homogenization sets in (...), which is all the stronger the more the organizational field is already structured” (Walgenbach 2006, p. 369). Institutional isomorphism is analytically distinguished once again into three different forms: (1) isomorphism due to political-state-legal coercion: “coercive isomorphism that stems from political influence and the problem of legitimacy” (DiMaggio and Powell 1991b, p. 67); (2) isomorphism due to mimetic processes, by which is meant the imitation of customary and standard structures, strategies and processes: “mimetic isomorphism resulting from standard responses to uncertainty” (DiMaggio and Powell 1991b, p. 67); (3) isomorphism due to normative binding refers to profession-related bodies of knowledge and ideas of norms through professional and interest associations etc.: “normative isomorphism, associated with professionalization” (DiMaggio and Powell 1991b, p. 67). “Rationality myths” are another key neoinstitutionalist concept that puts up for discussion the fictional and counterfactual content of modern rationality claims and expectations, because myths are narratives that would not stand up to close scrutiny of reality.12 In Meyer and Rowan’s view, rationality myths have two essential characteristics. On the one hand, they are supra-individual patterns that pass off certain social goals as desirable. On the other hand, these myths are consensually established and collectively binding. They follow a “logic of belief” rather than a

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“logic of doubt” and verification. In this sense, rationality is understood as a historically contingent guiding idea that has become a self-evident intrinsic value in modern society and is addressed to organizations as a normal expectation. If organizations orient themselves to the expectations of their environment and adopt certain standards, then they also adopt these myths of rationality. Even if an external observer now points out that some of these ideas do not even enable the promised rationality advantages, it may well be functional and legitimate for organizations to follow them nevertheless. This is described in neoinstitutionalism as “ceremonial conformity”, since this form of conformity takes place without weighing possible alternatives, ignoring doubts and refraining from scrutiny. “Ceremonial activity” (‘ceremonial activity’) is related to the categorial rules of the respective relevant institutional environments in which organizations operate (e.g., science, business, law, education, medicine, etc.) and is thus based on a (meaning) “logic of appropriateness” (cf. Meyer and Rowan 1991, p. 55). We will bring these neoinstitutionalist core statements into the following discussion of the concept of diffusion and elaborate on them.

3.3

Diffusion

In neoinstitutionalist research on the circulation, adoption and stabilization of organizational and management concepts, two processes are described, one is the expansion and diffusion of management knowledge and techniques into different sectors of society, the other is the structural standardization and homogenization of organizations as isomorphic collective actors. The argument is as follows: The standardized and homogenized organizational forms spread within and between different (national) societies, with rationalization being the ideé directrice of this development and organizations being its implementing agents. The so-called “world polity”, which transports Western ideals worldwide, functions as the dominant cultural pattern of nationwide harmonization (cf. Meyer 2005). Organizations function as both agents and addressees in pattern reproduction. The explanation is that organizations submit to the script of the world polity and act and operate as autonomous and rational collective actors (cf. Hasse 2003, p. 38). The cultural

12

Hauser (2005, p. 57 ff.) makes clear how multi-faceted and complex the discussion of a general concept of myth is in the history of ideas. The distinction between “myth and logos” (ibid., p. 66 ff.) can only give a first direction to describe and denote a difference “between an argumentative proof and a narrative” (ibid., p. 67 f.).

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patterns define both the identity of the actors and the schemata of appropriate economic, political and cultural action. These processes of construction and attribution take place at the level of global social networking. Globalization – that is the relevant process concept in this context – produces a world full of organizations capable of acting and capable of being managed, which (have to) act as rational and independent actors. And as such, organizations can also function as collective actors. In what follows, we will reconstruct and discuss this argument in two steps. First, we will deal with the concept of diffusion, then with standards. In neoinstitutionalism, the diffusion, transmission, adoption and acceptance of typical cultural patterns is analyzed using the concept of diffusion (cf. Hasse 2003, p. 44), which is linked to the question of the cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity of organizations. In terms of the sociology of knowledge, this addresses the relationship between cultural patterns and the structures or carriers that support and reproduce these patterns. The argument here is that when cultural homogeneity is observed and established, rationality acts as a Western guiding idea that drives and legitimizes the processes of standardization and homogenization.13 Individualism semantics (cf. Dumont 1991) is attributed to various action units in modern society as another key justifying context, thus acting as a driving force for cultural alignment processes. Organizations are justified in these cultural assimilation processes as diffusion agents and diffusion addresses, and in turn promote cultural diffusion processes by orienting themselves to type-like models. From the dense network of formal organizations, which compete for scarce resources and are involved in processes of one-way or two-way information exchange, when viewed together, profound diffusion effects can be expected. The intensification of competition and the increase in the exchange of information between organizations favors the diffusion of technical or even social innovations. (Hasse 2003, p. 47)

Hasse concludes that organizations are a central social form of institutional change that are central to the diffusion of innovations (cf. Hasse 2003, p. 50). Organizations function as structuring instances because they help determine the ways through which social processes are structured. This thesis is supported by Karl Weick’s concept of “enactment”, which has already been discussed (cf. Sect. 2.2), according to which organizations actively influence their environments and do not merely

13

With that, I would like to take into account that the homogenization argument has meanwhile been extended by a diversity and differentiation debate (keyword e.g.: “varieties of capitalism”).

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react passively to them. In this way, the question of the social embedding of organizations can be linked to the question of internal organizational processes and structures: “Organizations are thus information- and meaning-producing systems. Insofar as relationships to the social environment are addressed, this concept refers to the fact that organizational decisions and actions intervene in this social environment” (Hasse 2003, p. 53). The collective actor status of organizations generated by semantic attribution and self-attribution (self-description) along the actor semantics and the managerialization of organizations of different social domains are related from a neoinstitutionalist perspective. This thesis brings us back more closely to the concept of diffusion. Meyer describes two sub-phenomena of the “expanded diffusion of management ideas around the world” (Meyer 2002, p. 34). Here he is concerned with explaining the diffusion of “cultural material” – “diffusion of cultural material on organizations and management” (Meyer 2002, p. 42) –, via organizations and management in the context of global world cultural or world social relations. By “cultural material” is meant here hierarchy and control concepts (strategy), templates of organizational structure design (structure), and training methods in the field of human resource management (personnel). Meyer’s thesis is that management ideas can spread more quickly because organizations in different countries and different sectors of society are becoming more structurally similar. The issue is, for example, how efficient and economical structuring and management can also be applied in public administrations, hospitals, universities and schools. According to Meyer, the social change consists in the fact that management orientation takes the place of social structures such as bureaucracy, ownership and typical professionalities (teacher, medical doctor, lawyer, engineer), which were previously orienting and ordering. According to Meyer, this change in structural orientation and ordering is noticeable in that the concept of organization seems to be becoming more popular than, for example, the concepts of administration, bureaucracy, and association.14 It is the labelling of work processes as managerial activities that makes these semantic shifts and reinterpretations tangible. This argument is very much in line with Martin Parker’s and Boltanski and Chiapello’s analyses of neoliberal semantic shifts and reinterpretation processes that we discussed at the beginning of the chapter. At this point of argumentation, Meyer connects the question of the diffusion of management knowledge and the dominance of organizational semantics with the

14

See Toqueville (1985), Etzioni (1975, 1998), and Bellah et al. (1987) on the notion of association in the American common good tradition.

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concept of the actor and the concept of agentic actorhood. The key to understanding the organization as the dominant operational unit in modern society and management as its identity and (self-)identification core lies in the analysis of the attribution practices (accounts) of actorhood and agency to organized units (cf. Meyer 2002, p. 34). Meyer further argues that globalization as a social process produces and increasingly demands a world full of actionable, powerful, and managerial organizations as a set of expectations. The processes of globalization and “hyperorganization” (Bromley and Meyer 2015) are mutually enhancing. Meyer sees one analytical way to get a little closer to the mode of this process in distinguishing dimensions of the globalization phenomenon. For example, Meyer identifies expanded markets as a globalization dimension that create new zones of uncertainty for organizations, which in turn must respond with more effective decision-making structures and processes. Uncertainties can then be dealt with through increased actorhood (“improved efficacious actorhood”) (cf. Meyer 2002, p. 36). Let us first note here: the semantics of “agentic actorhood”, which expects organizations to understand and behave as rationally acting actors, is understood in neoinstitutionalist analyses as an essential factor for increasing the acceptance probability of organizational and management ideas. Meyer identifies the detachment of organizations from nation-states and national communities as a key social structural prerequisite for the notion of organizations as autonomous and selfdisciplining actors to become plausible. Through political decentralization and deregulation, organizations are increasingly forced to conceive of themselves as autonomous decision makers and actors. Disembedding from traditional institutional contexts of integrated nation-states increasingly requires organizations to re-position themselves as autonomous actors. Organizations are increasingly forced to behave like independent, autonomous and self-responsible decision makers (“mobilized decision maker”, cf. Meyer 2002, p. 37). Meyer’s analysis can be extended both in terms of observation and communication theory. The observation concept makes circular structures of the genesis of expectations visible, and the communication concept points to the mode of constitution of organizational environments of meaning. Both views are implicit in Meyer’s work, but are not systematized. The communicative diffusion of management concepts creates a strong tendency for organizations to observe other organizations for possible relevant organizational concepts and also to observe how other organizations observe their own organization. The observing entity observes whether other field participants observe it for the establishment of and adherence to certain standards. Thus, expectations of expectations emerge as circular structures with socially integrative and normative-inclusive effects. Field integration thus develops on the basis of reciprocal constraints on degrees of freedom.15

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This argument can be plausibilized by an example from the educational system that Meyer gives. The usual institutional embedding in a classical logic of distribution (e.g. pupils and students in schools and universities) does not yet demand increased organizational self-profiling (external and self-observation). This, however, is demanded by new situations in which resource scarcity is communicatively produced, in which, for example, pupils and students are declared to be scarce resources.16 Let’s listen to Meyer himself on this. In this quote, Meyer uses a concept of communication in one of the few places within his analyses, but it is not further defined. The meaning environment (German: Sinnumwelt) of organizations is conceived as a comprehensive communication system: If, on the one hand, an organization sees itself as an entity unique to a particular country, community, business setting, and so on, it is unlikely to look for (or to be exposed to) management models drawn from around the world. If, on the other hand, it is seen as a modern organized actor, models are everywhere and the possibilities for diffusion are endless. The entire communication system around such an organization changes: its own elites look elsewhere, as do its ordinary participants. But so do customers and suppliers giving advice, and even members of the general public. If everyone within and without an organization examines it from the point of view of universal rationalities rather than local community, there is a great deal of exposure to expand ideologies of organization and management. Globalization has a variety of meanings and dimensions, many of these operate to create more standardized pictures of organizations across the boundaries of nations or social sectors. And they operate to create stronger pictures of organizations as empowered and managed actors. (Meyer 2002, p. 41 ff.)

With another neoinstitutionalist-informed study by Mikl-Horke (2005) we can further clarify the analytical starting point of the diffusion concept. This also brings us closer to its relevance and references in communication theory, which were only hinted at by Meyer. Diffusion is a concept that is historically and semantically closely related to the concept of culture, because culture and diffusion are concepts of difference. The concept of culture is a “comparative concept” (cf. Luhmann 1995c) that marks differences. And also the question of diffusion only makes sense on the basis of the perception of differences or system or state differences of and

15

Cf. on the concept of integration Luhmann (1997, p. 314 and 601 ff.). In a systems-theoretical sense, competition and contestation as structures and scarcity as a generalized situation definition and contingency formula (cf. Luhmann 1997, pp. 347 f., 470) are the framework conditions for the fact that more and more organizations describe and behave as autonomous actors. The appreciation of market-mediated coordination and the interpretive power of scarcity arguments are also rubbing off on other areas of society.

16

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between entities. In addition, the concept of diffusion is not only a comparative concept, but also a time-semantic concept of development, movement and process. It derives from the vocabulary of semantics of movement, diffusion and exchange to describe the socio-cultural development of communicative accessibility, networking and mutual interpenetration of meaning (cf. Pankoke and Marx 1989). Accordingly, diffusion research directed at the social is linked to certain phases and questions of communication theory. First of all, the diffusion understanding of communication, which understands “communication as transmission” (Merten 1977, p. 42 ff.) and thus as a unidirectional process, is in the foreground. In this sense, Mikl-Horke draws attention to the use of the term diffusion in the context of early mass communication and media effects research, especially in the United States. The diffusion term “was eventually introduced in the meaning of the spread of news. The concept of diffusion and communication theory thus combined to form a specific research interest in the spread of information and news in a population” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 17). A very influential milestone of diffusion research is Roger’s “Diffusion of Innovation” (2003). In it, diffusion is understood as a process “in which an innovation is communicated through specific channels over time among the members of a social system” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 19). Rogers sees diffusion as a communication process consisting of four elements: (1) “innovation”: an idea, practice or object is perceived as new by an individual; (2) “communication channels”: communication channels are the means of passing on messages; (3) “adoption rate”: This refers to the rate “required for the innovation to be adopted by an increasing number of individuals” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 19); (4) “Social system”: the social system is ultimately the set of interacting elements “that work together to solve problems and pursue goals” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 19). Rogers thus makes a two-stage distinction between diffusion and adoption. Adoption is preceded by an act of selection: “The latter involves a mental process from initial perception through the emergence of interest, assessment of consequences, tentative application, and finally adoption. This decision-making process is influenced by preconditions such as existing practices, the existence and urgency of needs or problems, culturally determined attitudes towards innovations, and the norms of the social system” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 19 f.) Against this background, Mikl-Horke asks about the diffusion of management innovations. She understands management innovations in a broad sense as methods, practices, techniques as well as principles, guidelines, corporate concepts (shareholder value, corporate governance), whereby above all the question of the assumption conditions and assumption probabilities of innovations, no matter first of all how one determines the diffusion elements or communicables, proves to be difficult. Mikl-Horke discusses some possible structures of acceptance probability:

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1. Rationality and imitation: The expectation of rational decision-making and the self-description as a rational decision-maker are essential characteristics. Both the expectation of rationality and the idea that dynamism is imperative are fundamental legitimation principles. Change is permanent, so that innovations per se are viewed positively (cf. Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 23). 2. Geographical proximity, industry affiliation and cooperation networks: The motivation to adopt new ideas, practices and models may lie in geographical proximity, industry affiliation and existing cooperation networks (cf. MiklHorke 2005, p. 23). 3. Reputation: Reputation and image are also discussed as selectors and acceptance probabilities (cf. Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 24). 4. Uncertainty absorption, novelty preference and imitation: Mikl-Horke concludes that imitation is a decision-making practice under conditions of uncertainty, a strategy that managers often use under conditions of uncertainty. It may well be based on rational considerations regarding the cost of the innovation or the possible loss of competition if the innovation is not adopted. Imitation does not preclude rational consideration, but it by no means guarantees success because an innovation may prove efficient in one case but inefficient in another. (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 24)

According to Mikl-Horke, the predominant diffusion research exhibits an actorcentered and quantitative narrowing that encounters explanatory problems with ambiguous social objects. The usual concept of diffusion in diffusion research is a very broad one, because it refers equally to the spread and transmission of ideas, practices, information, products and technologies. The objects of diffusion “may be tangible or intangible, they may be more or less precisely delimitable and definable, simple or complex in structure. The most commonly studied objects of diffusion are news, consumer goods and techniques (...)” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 29). Management and organizational innovations, meanwhile, are complex social objects, ambiguous and open to different interpretations. They can be “principles and guidelines for behavior, practices and procedures, organizational models, leadership theories, corporate philosophies” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 29). For this reason, Mikl-Horke argues for an extension of diffusion research in terms of organizational and social theory, because the (...) Diffusion research is primarily concerned with the influencing factors and courses of adoption behaviour of individuals, not of organizations. (...) With regard to management innovations, however, it is less a question of these psychological steps, but rather of the micropolitical processes in the organization, the external influences on the

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decision and the efficiency question, which is always of particular importance in this area. (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 31)

This means in particular that power, authority, interest and legitimacy aspects are to be weighted much more strongly than the usual diffusion research does (cf. MiklHorke 2005, p. 30). According to Mikl-Horke, the Rogersian diffusion concept is too consensus-oriented and harmonious, because it does not include power differentials, conflicts of interest and goal ambiguities that are typical for organizations. This means for the communication and organizational adoption of management theories and techniques that variations and alienations of meaning can occur, “as a result of application in the sense of trial and error and related to concrete functional expectations. Hence, adoption can mean anything from exact copying to factual reconstruction (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 31).” There are thus ambiguities and interpretative ranges to consider here, and multiple diffusion trajectories can be identified based on different communicative channels, as well as different selection structures such as power, authority and interest (cf. Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 30). Assumptions can also be differentiated, because in the case of management innovation, what adoption means can refer to very different degrees of internalization and integration into the company. Adoption can mean the use of certain principles as terms or buzzwords in the way problems are talked about. Thus, it may be reflected in particular rhetoric or explicit endorsement of a basic principle, such as in terms of stimulus diffusion (...). If, on the other hand, it concerns techniques or management tools, adoption usually implies implementation in the organization or production system. What is meant by the ‘adoption of innovation’ can therefore cover a very wide range from the adoption of slogans to the implementation and routinization of practices. (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 31)

Another aspect of Mikl-Horke’s study takes us from the concept of diffusion to the question of the standardization and homogenization of organizational practices and structures. We have already addressed this connection with John Meyer and will continue it in the next sub-chapter with Nils Brunsson’s analyses of world standards (“A World of Standards”). In her study, Mikl-Horke takes on the task of “examining the diffusion of management and corporate concepts with a view to the question of a global homogenization of the practices and principles according to which companies are managed and work is organized” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 7). Her opening thesis on this is: The expansion of international trade and competition, leading to the creation of a new supranational level of economic organization, coordination and control across national borders; the impact of multinational companies on existing economic systems and the

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creation of global markets: The globalization of capital markets combined with the strengthening of the power of capital owners over management, changing the rules of competition and the character of companies; the spread of telecommunications and electronic networks on a global scale, which also enabled the precondition for the dominance of the global financial sphere, but moreover is often seen as the basis for the emergence of a global culture through the worldwide diffusion of Western, especially American, lifestyles, fashions, ways of thinking and rhetoric. (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 7)

If we now systematize the individual aspects of this compact description, different social and organizational structural levels are addressed here, which, according to Mikl-Horke, are all involved in the general dynamics of globalization in their own specific way. The expansion of international trade and competition involves practices that demand and entail a new need for regulation and order. The effect of multinational enterprises refers to the effect of organizations on non-organizational processes and structures. The globalization of capital markets refers to an abstract and highly generalized form of financial market economic communication, which in turn influences ownership and power structures in organizations. The spread of telecommunications and electronic networks denotes the structural condition of possibility for the dominance of the global financial sphere and the condition of possibility for the “emergence of a global culture through the worldwide diffusion of Western, especially American, lifestyles, fashions, ways of thinking, and rhetorics” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 8). In this context of argumentation, Mikl-Horke addresses the important question of whether the globalization of economic cultures leads to a diversity or homogeneity of organizational practices and structures. According to Fligstein (2001), there is no area-wide homogeneity of organizational structures and conceptions of control, but rather a “varieties of capitalism” (Hall and Soskice 2001). Fligstein’s comparative studies point to the divergence of globalization rhetoric and structural reality, but nevertheless a “tendency towards universalization based on the ideology of neoliberal globalization, which also suggests a homogenization of principles and structures” (Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 12) can be noted. The “shareholder-value” principle takes on the character of an ideology that is widespread worldwide. According to Fligstein, a diffusion of generalized American experiences in the form of concepts, models and theories can be noticed here. Fligstein thus marks the problem of legitimacy of corporate concepts and their diffusion through political and cultural channels. Power aspects play a major role in this generalization process in relation to entrepreneurial control concepts (cf. Mikl-Horke 2005, p. 12). Thus, from the Fligstein perspective, an ambivalent assessment of the change in structure and ideas between homogeneity and diversity arises.

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Determining and grasping the simultaneity of homogeneity and heterogeneity, of typicality and difference, is also the focus of the following two Scandinavian analyses extending the neoinstitutionalist concept of isomorphism, which are based on Nils Brunsson’s distinction of “talk and action” (Brunsson 1989), thus distinguishing a level of discourse from a level of practices and structures. Erlingsdöttir and Lindberg (2005, p. 66) distinguish different types of isomorphism, which empirically can occur in varying degrees and mixed forms: ‘isonymism’ (name, label, designation, attribution), ‘isomorphism’ (form), ‘isopraxism’ (practice, practices). In this way they differentiate the usual notion of isomorphism. What is interesting about this is that homogeneity and divergence can be observed simultaneously. “Isonymism” is supposed to be possible with simultaneous “polymorphism” and “polypraxism”. This means that quite different structures and practices can differentiate under one and the same label (cf. Erlingsdöttir and Lindberg 2005, p. 70).17 Hwang and Suarez (2005), in a study of various organizations and their implementations of strategic plans and Internet presences, also conclude that homogeneity and heterogeneity, convergence and divergence are possible simultaneously. There is such a thing as surface convergence and depth divergence. The authors play this out on the two cases of “strategic plans” and “Internet presence”, which belong to the semantic complex of the organization as a collective actor (“agentic actorhood”). Strategic plans and internet presences are communicative artifacts that are expected by default from autonomous, purposeful and goal-oriented modern actors. Strategic plans are communicative manifestations that articulate a particular set of goals and interests and means and instruments leading to them. Internet presences are a typical form of positioning communication through which self-descriptions are communicated and external representations are presented. In this way, positions in the specific field or (market) segment are marked. With regard to the question of how ideas and practices are adapted by organizations, Hwang and Suarez argue that it is about the appropriateness and plausibility of ideas and practices and that differences and differentiations emerge through the active evaluation of appropriateness (cf. Hwang and Suarez 2005, p. 71). They further argue that even when organizations pro forma adapt a uniform model, variations, divergences and differentiations are possible and very common. They support this thesis with the inherent logic of internal organizational decisionmaking processes, which has entered organizational theory from the context of behavioral decision theory: “Decision-making within organizations is often

17

See the table in Erlingsdöttir and Lindberg (2005, p. 69) for the various possible combinations.

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‘anarchic’ due to problematic preferences, unclear technologies, and fluid participation and these internal processes often create divergent responses to the same adopted models” (Hwang and Suarez 2005, p. 72). Let us note here: the neoinstitutionalist argumentations make clear the differentiation-theoretical relevance of distinguishing a level on which organizations operate from a level of discourse on which ideas and concepts circulate communicatively and expectations that are applied to organizations are formulated, recorded and standardized. This level distinction can be underpinned and supplemented by systems theory. Organizations constitute a “mesodiversity” (Lieckweg and Wehrsig 2001, p. 42), because how they ultimately implement a typical expectation addressed to them can be shaped (“enactment”) and leads to variations and differentiations of typical discursive expectations from the organizational meaning environment. We will now pursue this question further with the discussion of standards and standardization.

3.4

(World) Standards

In the analyses of the working group around Nils Brunsson on the connection between globalization, organization and standardization (cf. e.g. Brunsson/ Jacobsson 2000a; Ahrne et al. 2000), which have been very research-intensive and influential in social and organizational science in recent years, globalization is discussed as a phenomenon of world-wide communication and at the same time as a source of cognitive assimilation and structural homogenization. Globalization is understood as a level of circulation of normative concepts, patterns of identity and self-description, as well as situational typologies that generate assimilation and similarities on a world-societal level (cf. Stichweh 2000a). In the following, I would like to reconstruct exactly how this is to be understood in terms of basic concepts, incorporating the pieces of theory from the sociology of knowledge, the theory of meaning and the theory of communication from the last chapters. First, I will focus on the form, function and consequences of standards. Brunsson and Jacobsson (2000b, c) provide a broad notion of standardization, which should heuristically enable us to capture as many aspects of the phenomenon as possible and to be able to grasp its world-society-wide relevance (cf. Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000, p. 4). Standardization is understood in this broad sense as a form of regulation and order that enables and regulates coordination and cooperation on a global level.18 Standards are understood as generalized knowledge and generalized rules of correct or appropriate behavior that enable coordination and control by

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functioning both cognitively (orientation and coordination) and normatively (order and control). This argumentation leads us back to the discussion of knowledge and rules from the last Sects. 2.1 and 2.4, because standards, as structures of expectation, are fundamentally determined by the concept of knowledge and the concept of rules, emphasizing both cognitive and normative functioning. Brunsson and Jacobsson then distinguish once again between three types of standard: (1) “Identity standards” standardize the question of who, of “being something”. They provide patterns of typification and self-description. (2) “Standards of action” establish routines of action and provide instructions of “doing something”. (3) “Ownership standards” regulate property and resource relations of “having something” (cf. Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000a, p. 4). Brunsson cites the dwindling influence of nation states as a key socio-structural argument for the increase in the importance of standardization in global society, which creates new zones of uncertainty for organizations. Free standardizations now close this gap. The standardization of organizations is primarily supported and driven by two processes, by “individualization” and “globalization” (cf. Brunsson 2000a, p. 38). For Brunsson, globalization means not only worldwide accessibility and networking, but also mental or cognitive globalization, which leads to the external and internal standardization of collective actors. This process change expects autonomous actors (“strong actors”) as the dominant identity format. “Strong actors” are expected to have autonomously generated capacity for action and decision-making, because organizations released into “freedom” can or must no longer perceive and describe themselves primarily as “dependent” or “controlled”, but as autonomous units (cf. Brunsson 2000a, p. 32).19 Brunsson assumes that the more organizations (have to) orient themselves to this format of expectations, the more standards and standardizations can be expected in the future. In this sense, there would be a self-reinforcing circular structure: Standards generate, promote and Brunsson distinguishes between “formal organization”, “market” and “standardization” as forms of coordination and control within modern society. Formal organization is based on hierarchy and decision, market on the voluntary mutual commitment of participants (sellers/ buyers) through prices. I’m not entirely clear on the basic conceptual status of this distinction. In my opinion, the basic conceptual situation is not made any sharper by the suggestion that the three forms could also be described as institutions. This would introduce the conceptual vagueness of the concept of institution that we have previously discussed (Sect. 3.2). 19 This may not be true for schools, for example, to the extent that they feel pressured and forced to be free. The externalization addresses to which displeasure about reforms can be directed remain the school authorities and education policy. The actual autonomy of the school as an “independent actor” seems rather to be a pseudo-autonomy (cf. Drepper and Tacke 2012). 18

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enforce autonomous organizations, and autonomous organizations promote standards. Organizations are thus on the one hand addresses of standardization, i.e. objects of standardization, but on the other hand also involved in its production, i.e. subjects of standardization (cf. Brunsson 2000b, p. 149). This situation has an impact on the form of interorganizational communication, because according to Brunsson the dominant type of communication changes from instruction and control to consultation. How exactly is this to be understood? Standards follow a free or voluntary logic, comparable to market coordination and in contrast to the obligatory structure of formal organizations.20 This means that advice, rather than directive, is the appropriate type of communication (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000a, p. 2), drawing its authority and legitimacy from expertise. Standards are not hierarchical or written in command form, but as “pieces of general advice” (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000a, p. 2). Advice is programmatically linked to the basic ideas and values of individuality, and decision semantics such as individuality, autonomy and self-responsibility, and as a contingency-sensitive form of communication it fits the polycontextural form of modern society (cf. Fuchs 2004, p. 243).21 In counseling communications, the selection burden of the communication offer is shifted to the side of the counselee, who has to decide whether the communicated information is acceptable, connectable and motivating for him. Selections, risks and dangers can no longer be externalized, but must be borne by the person being advised. If standardization in this sense is understood as “governance without government” (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000a, p. 7) and consultation as the appropriate type of communication, then the question arises theoretically – as just discussed – of the motivation to accept the selection of the communicated proposals as a problem of communicative persuasion. From the perspective of communication and media theory, we come back here to symbolically generalized communication media (cf. Sect. 2.5), which make the acceptance of and compliance with proposed meaning selections and thus communicative connectivity more likely. And in the case of standards, these can be truth, money, power, law and

20

In my opinion, Brunsson underestimates the coercive character of standards and overestimates their voluntary nature. This is due to the fact that Brunsson operates with the distinction between standard/directive and standard/law, respectively, and that the concept of voluntariness is determined by the difference to political standardization and regulation. 21 The work of Fuchs (1992a, p. 43 ff., 1994a, b, 2002, 2004, 2005); Fuchs and Mahler (2000) is fundamental and trend-setting both for the connection between polycontextuality (as a meaning modality type corresponding to the functional differentiation type) and counseling (as an operative form of communication) and for the understanding of the connection between operation, typicality and form.

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possibly also popularity, which make them structures of expectation worth following, depending on which medium of communication is used.22 Sometimes it can be about scientific truth and reputation, sometimes about economy and efficiency, sometimes about the binding force of laws and the avoidance of sanctions of legal requirements, sometimes about personal charisma and another time about popular and fashionable.23 Standards not only contribute to orientation, legitimization and uncertainty absorption, but can also trigger problems by counteracting internal organizational norms, disrupting market structures and irritating normative communities (e.g. professions).24 Another risk of standardization can be seen in the problem of attribution of responsibility due to strong abstraction. The burden of selection is placed on the standard adopter. The user of a standard bears the risk, because standardizers can hardly be held liable. They offer a body of knowledge, but do not force anyone to accept and follow it. Acceptance or rejection is at one’s own risk (cf. Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000a, p. 24 f.). Standardization is therefore a process in which accountability can be fragmented, thinned out and individualized (cf. Jacobsson 2000, p. 47), so that a major risk of standardization is the low feedback and correction mechanisms. While scientific knowledge and professional knowledge are exposed to scrutiny by professional representatives, standardization knowledge in expert networks is predominantly “dislocated knowledge” (cf. Stichweh 2005, p. 41). The exit option, i.e. rejecting the standard knowledge and turning to a different standard, is much more likely than the voice option (Hirschman 1974) with the intention of eliminating the possible errors and suggesting improvements by means of complaint and criticism: This is a special feature of expert knowledge embodied in standards, which distinguishes it from other forms of expert knowledge. In the sciences there are well-developed systems for expressing criticism; in professions there are often quite specific procedures for filing complaints and for determining whether there has been unprofessional conduct. In the case of standards, however, not only is there often little

22

In a system-theoretical reconstruction, the concept of standardization is to be discussed in the context of the concept of program, which is used in sociological systems theory to explain the formation of expectations of different types of systems, both for functional systems and for organizational systems (cf. Drepper 2018, pp. 50 ff. and 83 ff.). 23 Popularity and fashion as meaning selectors will be discussed in more detail in the following subchapter. 24 Brunsson illustrates this with the example of value conflicts in the reform of the public health system in Sweden, where new organizational and management standards clash with professional values and norms (cf. Brunsson 2000a, p. 31).

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incentive to complain; there may not be any established procedure for doing so, either. These two factors are of course related. (Jacobsson 2000, p. 46)

These considerations on standards and expert-based knowledge lead us back to the connection between the knowledge society, professions and new organizational professionalism (Sect. 2.1). Jacobsson (2000) lists professions, organizations and knowledge workers as carrier types and storage forms of expert knowledge in modern society. Professions are a classic form of expert knowledge storage and organizations are another, now very prominent, site of expert knowledge storage. With Reed (1996), Jacobsson distinguishes the classical discipline-based professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers, judges) from experts in organizationbased professions such as managers, administrators, and technicians. These two types differ in their knowledge base, power strategies and form of coordination. Classical professions are identified by abstract, codified and cosmopolitan knowledge based on academic discipline and sedimented and handed down through educational socialization. These professions follow a strategy of monopolization with the aim of claiming sole representation and solution of a social problem, their principle of organization and reproduction being based on collegial closure. Inclusion and exclusion relations must be able to be regulated (cf. Jacobsson 2000, p. 43). The knowledge of the so-called organizational professions, on the other hand, finds its reference in the problems of organizations. The knowledge is technical, explicit, local and political. The professions strategy is not focused on monopolization but on mutual credentialing and support rituals of the importance of academic degrees, positional authority and career mobility. Jacobsson follows up with the diagnosis that management and organizational professions are increasingly becoming the dominant standardizers in modern society (cf. Jacobsson 2000, p. 43). Knowledge workers are the third relevant group of experts. Jacobsson understands this to include, again following Reed’s typology, financial and business consultants as well as IT experts, but their knowledge base is not clearly contoured. It is a mixture of theoretical knowledge, analytical diagnostic tools and partly undisciplined elements (Jacobsson 2000, p. 43). Empirically, according to Jacobsson, the different forms of storage and types of carriers of expert knowledge are often mixed and interconnected. For example, standardizations are sometimes based on academic knowledge, linked to professions and related to organizations. At the end of this sub-chapter, I would like to use the example of the identity format of the “Ideal Organization” to bring together the analyses on managerialism and managementization from the beginning of the chapter with the discussions on standardization. Management models and reorganization concepts often offer a complete picture of the “ideal organization”. In this sense, they engage in ideal

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type construction. As an example, the quality management system of ISO 9000 standardization can be discussed here (cf. Mendel 2006). Furusten makes clear the assumptions about the ideal organization that are inherent in this concept: “These (assumptions – by me, T. D.) are embodied in six principles for achieving quality: customer orientation, clearly defined processes, a view of organizations as manageable units, the use of measurable objectives, management that exercises control, and ongoing documentation of each process” (Furusten 2000, p. 75). The organization oriented in this sense can set clearly defined, manageable goals and purposes and control and monitor the processes to achieve them. The function of management can also be clearly defined. It designs the system (“designing”), supervises the processes (“monitoring”, “controlling”) and drafts goals and programs (“policy making”) (cf. Furusten 2000, p. 77). Furthermore, documentation is elementary for newer quality management processes (cf. Cole and Scott 2000). Goals, plans, responsibilities and authorities have to be documented precisely in order to establish verifiability and attribution of responsibility in case of deviations (cf. Furusten 2000, p. 78). The analyses of Michael Power (2002) on the connection between standardization and management control systems deepen this argumentation. Power describes a shift in the governance conception of organizations, from an “imperialist” to a “neoliberal” governance model. The new forms of governance are framed in terms of ideas by neoliberal conceptions of order such as personal responsibility, personal initiative, self-organization, self-motivation and self-direction. These concepts, ideas and notions prepare the ideational basis for the reflexivity of control that is typical of neoliberal forms of governance (cf. Power 2002, p. 191). In this process of transformation from imperialist to neoliberal governance, according to Michael Power, the centres of standardization shift from the state to non-state organizations, organizational fields and networks. The neoliberal form of regulation envisages that the ideal organization no longer simply follows prescribed expectations, but empowers and commits itself to permanent self-observation and makes this self-observation and self-commitment transparent and observable to the relevant environmental audience. Optimally, the internalization of these “codes of conduct” (cf. Teubner 2012, p. 93) functions in a self-disciplining way. Disciplining takes place through the normalizing gaze, the normalizing (self-)observation configuration. Standardization in this sense is normalization, because standards define norm points, norm areas and norm fields (cf. Link 1997): In short, the discipline of the imperialist ‘cage’ is replaced by that of normalizing ‘gaze’. To summarize: the neoliberal, responsive model of standards as tools of regulation is intended to compensate for the failings of the imperial, command and control model. New institutional sources for standards and standard setting can be

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found beyond the state in the form of hybrid self-regulatory bodies, such as business associations and individual organizations, although the state in many cases functions as regulator of last resort or guardian of general principles. As the neoliberal model has taken hold, the boundaries between projects of organization and of regulation are no longer distinct. (Power 2002, p. 195)

In the “sea of globality” (Teubner 2012, p. 86), various structural effects can be observed, such as increasing competition for the central position in the standardsetting process and a change in the form of standards from a content orientation to a process orientation (cf. Power 2002, p. 195). Power illustrates these structural effects in three areas of recent management control systems, using the examples of “corporate accounting”, “quality management” and “risk management”. A centre-periphery structure can be specified for the field of corporate accounting. It competes for the centre position in the structure of international standard setters. The establishment of international auditing and accounting standards is a contested terrain, with the support of large multinational corporations and the recognition or support of the capital markets being important pillars for the standard-setting organizations (cf. Power 2002, p. 197). The communicative production of accounting standards by various organizations, associations and federations provides visibility and legitimacy to the accounting knowledge base, which provides standardization of knowledge through interpretations and commentary practices.25 For the second example of more recent management control systems, “quality management”, Power also highlights visibility and transparency of organizational operations to third parties as symbols of acceptance. For example, the standardization concept ISO 9000 functions as a normative blueprint of organizational external and self-observation, which as a structure of expectations is intended to enable both organizational environmental communication and organizational internal commitment. ISO 9000 is thus a program for regulating internal control structures as well as a design format that is intended to signal predictability, reliability and trustworthiness to the outside world and thus serves to absorb uncertainty. ISO 9000 certified companies can be perceived as stable and reputable addresses that the organization’s external audience can count on. 25

Cf. on this topic also the analyses by Hendrik Vollmer (2003, 2004), which deal with “accounting concretely” in the sense of functions and consequences of organized calculation. The fact that accounting can take on such a relevant function in modern organizations is related to the high structural plausibility and authority of numbers and arithmetic operations based on them. In this context, numbers assume an essential symbolic function. The power of numbers lies in measuring, calculating and scaling. It is about formalization. And what better way to formalize than through numbers and number relations?

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Power uses the global/local distinction to draw attention to the fact that, empirically, it is never simply a matter of organizations transposing and implementing formal standards. Global and generalized standards, which are communicated as normative imperatives, are not simply implemented one-to-one by organizations, but are interpreted or respecified locally and adapted to practice (cf. Power 2002, p. 199 f.). Above all, the process orientation of the ISO concept, i.e. the predominant refraining from substantial and thus concrete aspects, enables the far-reaching connectivity to the concept. As we have already shown in the first chapter, the concept of process alone is highly connectable, since it is, in terms of time semantics, a concept of movement that supports modernity as a concept of selfdescription and is closely connected to the idea of progress (cf. Koselleck 1977; Luhmann 1980b; Pankoke 1977). Whoever says process usually also assumes development, progress and growth at the same time: Everything is directed forward and set on ahead! In English, the etymological proximity and kinship relation of the terms becomes even clearer via the preserved Latin root. Thus it becomes apparent that the terms belong to a semantic complex and form a synonymous field of meaning: process, progress, proliferation.

3.5

Texts

In the discussions so far, the question of the dissemination of communicables and the possible function of popularity has already been raised repeatedly. In the following, I would like to show this using the example of influential texts that can be analyzed both as dissemination media and as acceptance probabilities. This can be discussed exemplarily using the genre of popular management literature, which plays a major role in increasing the accessibility and acceptance of the respective current and fashionable management concepts. Here, the bestsellers as sales peaks of the text genre are particularly relevant in the dissemination and popularization of relevant semantics. I will demonstrate this by reconstructing Furusten’s (1999) analysis.26 The starting thesis for this is that management discourse can be understood as a social, inter- and intra-organizational communicative phenomenon,

26

The analysis of Furusten is meanwhile somewhat older, but shows very precisely the connection points for communication, knowledge and differentiation theory considerations in organizational research. In the meantime, one will have to extend and specify the media analysis to the observation of digital formats (blogs, forums, topic-specific social networks and portals). I am concerned here with the systematic arguments.

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forming a communicative environment of organizations to whose genesis, shaping and reproduction organizations themselves contribute as operative communicators with communicative ‘enactment’. Thus, in the sociological sense of knowledge, management discourse is a relevant carrier of knowledge or household of meaning for organization-related topics, which is differentiated into various textual genres and refers to and accesses various social communication contexts. In detail: Furusten’s analysis combines neoinstitutionalist arguments with a discourse analytic approach to ask about the correlation of organizational structures and social discourses, semantics and ideas in their environment. This study is thus a good example of the combination of sociological of knowledge, communication and meaning theoretical perspectives in organizational analysis. Furusten describes the difference between oral and written dissemination of management ideas. In interaction contexts such as seminars and training courses, management concepts are primarily disseminated via orality (with media support). Personal authority and rhetorical skills are very important here. In these performances, some structural aspects of oral communication among those present apply, such as limited complexity processing potential, primacy of the narrative, and dramaturgical and comedic communication. In the extreme popularity segment, these are the arenas of management gurus who are attributed as charismatic personalities by their inclined audience. The high attention success of management gurus seems to lie in the combination of different communication media and systems, e.g. in the combination of orality in interaction systems (“speeches and lectures”) and literality (“articles and books”) (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 3). The overall range of popular management conceptions, however, stands on differentiated feet. Furusten on this: Although the gurus may advocate different perspectives and suggest different models for solving organizational and managerial problems, it is still true that what a few gurus articulate is disseminated to a vast number of people in the world through the various distribution channels of modern society. To conclude, it should be noted that the supply of managerial manifestations both in the past and today seems to be dominated by services offered by a few consulting firms, a few management books, a few management gurus, a few management magazines, and a few management development programmes. (Furusten 1999, p. 3)

Furusten describes popular management literature as “written manifestations” and relevant meaning elements in the environment of organizations. The text genre of popular management literature is thereby a sub-segment of a comprehensive managerial discourse (“general managerial discourse”, cf. Furusten 1999, p. 5). Furusten identifies an important socio-structural argument in his study in that, despite the decentralized processuality and complexity of the production, dissemination and

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consumption of management ideas, there are something like centres with dominant voices within the discourse that enjoy high authority and great influence. There are central places of conceptual development and knowledge production from which newer management concepts emanate and whose likelihood of adoption is thereby enhanced for reputational reasons. Harvard in Boston would be such a renowned centre address for the USA in the field of academically linked management knowledge with a high probability of acceptance of communicated management concepts (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 11). Another example of the center thesis in this thematic context can be found in Vollmer (2004, p. 456), who analyzes the American military academy West Point as a central address in accounting discourse, from which the hidden organizational potential of the medieval duplication technology of doubleentry bookkeeping was carried into the large-scale economic organizations of industrialization. Accounting experts were trained at West Point and from there a new style of management was introduced into business organizations. Brunsson also argues the selective effect of the center/periphery structure. When something diffuses, new ideas or techniques for example, the diffusing element spreads from the centre to the periphery (cf. Brunsson 2000b, p. 139). If we follow Furusten’s, Vollmer’s, and Brunsson’s thesis this far, then the center/periphery differentiation within the disciplinary differentiation of the sciences is an important assumption amplifier for circulating ideas. Presumably, however, academic reputation as a reinforcement medium is not sufficient to permanently and sustainably stabilize the proposed selections also outside the sciences. Relevant selection amplifiers in the respective system contexts must be added, which “translate” the reputation into the respectively valid medium (cf. Renn 2006). For example, consulting firms attributed as successful or successful companies in business can act as such reputation enhancers, transferring academic reputation into the logic of meaning and programmatic of business communication. If renowned companies attributed as successful apply the respective knowledge and consider it useful for themselves, then the adoption plausibility and probability also increases for other organizations in the context, field and market segment. The approach of understanding popular literary management ideas and management concepts as parts of a broader management discourse determines this discourse as a differentiated communication phenomenon. The general management discourse is conceived by Furusten as an element in the multiple relations of meaning between organizations and their environments. It forms a semantic environment of organizations, which is often not sufficiently considered in organizational studies (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 17). For Furusten, the general management discourse consists of the production, dissemination and consumption of managerial manifestations (“managerial manifestations”). The “general management

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discourse” refers to the phenomenon of the diversity of manifestations and textualized concepts about management and organizational forms communicated worldwide. An interesting aspect of this communication phenomenon is that it takes place to a very large extent outside organizations, in lectures, seminars, teaching, articles and books, i.e. in the environment of organizations. Whether it is rhetorically stylized manifestations of interaction in seminars, workshops, or lectures, or written documents as media substrates (articles, books, handouts), Furusten’s argument is that it revolves around design propositions proposed to the organization from outside as design schema and problem-solving knowledge. For this reason, Furusten refers to the “general management discourse” as the aggregate of written and oral textualizations of organizational and managerial life. Or, to put it differently, the general management discourse appears as a kind of macro-conversation or an institutionalized form of conversation, which is further subdivided in itself into various sub-conversations or discourses of independent social networks. Each singular textualization thereby provides a contribution to the comprehensive (discourse) topic.27 Furusten lists various actors, groups of actors and role bearers who contribute to the general management discourse: teachers and researchers at business schools and universities; management gurus and those who hold seminars and workshops and who write articles and books; management consultants who offer organizations definition and problem-solving services; organizational practitioners in their fields and networks, economic and tax policy makers with regulatory programmes and decisions; professional, interest and trade associations, with formative influence on member companies (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 20). These different groups of actors communicate in different communication flows, each with its own typical rhetoric. Furusten understands these communication flows as sub-discourses within the comprehensive management discourse. He distinguishes four sub-discourses: the “popular”, the “academic”, the “practical” and the “political-managerial” discourse. The different sub-discourses thereby reproduce different operational logics (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 20). If we hold here a first intermediate result from the sociology of knowledge, Furusten names various operative units and medial carrier structures of the management discourse, such as individuals (trainers, coaches and authors), consultancies, management books, magazines as well as training programmes and institutions, which form the institutional framework of the discourse. In terms of

27

Cf. Luhmann (1984, p. 213 ff.) on the communication-theoretical distinction between contribution and topic.

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differentiation theory, this can be compared as follows: popular = mass media, academic = scientific, practical = organization (operational and structural) plus domain type (business, education, politics, mass media, etc.), political-managerial = organizational strategy and micropolitics. Let’s solve the equations in detail. The “popular sub-discourse” gathers journalistic and consulting writing oriented to practice, as well as management development programs. It is popular because the mass media system makes it possible to reach a wide audience. In addition to its prevalence, the aspect of its orientation towards topics relevant to the present and associated rhetorics that establish a general and the attention of organizational practitioners lends this sub-discourse the label popular. The main actors in this sub-discourse are management gurus and consultants who teach management and leadership development concepts and provide direct consultancy in organizations. Other relevant professional roles in this context include business journalists who conduct interviews and write articles. But academics and practitioners can also contribute to this communication context. It is not uncommon, however, for academics who have a reputation as researchers and teachers to change roles and become consulting personalities or popular best-sellers. In the Simmelian sense (1992, p. 456 ff.), these “border crossers” (Pankoke 1997, 2000) cross social circles. “Academic management discourse” includes practices such as research, publishing and teaching. Furusten therefore refers to it as a distinct sub-discourse because academic rhetoric has its own language game logic. Academic jargon and its semantics identify and typify scholarly communication. Reference orientation (texts, empiricism, methodology) and systematicity of argumentation are further symbols of identification. The “political-managerial discourse” feeds on legislation, drafting political programs, political speeches, and writing mass-media published articles on management issues. The main people and roles reproducing this communication are politicians and policy experts (policy advisors). Their main role is to produce and decide laws and regulations about economic action. The code of conversation or communication is on the one hand political and thus linked to everyday discourses, but on the other hand also legal when it comes to concrete collectively binding regulations. The final sub-discourse Furusten distinguishes is the ‘practical management discourse’, which receives its contributions from internal management development contexts of organizational practitioners, interactions and networks of organizational practitioners, and trade, interest and professional associations. The focus is on practitioners and their pragmatically grounded and oriented experiential communication, consisting not only of oral but also written contributions. Furusten further argues that through management manifestations, which can be drawn from the four sub-discourses of general management discourse, content

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circulates between organization and society. This includes ideas and models about organizational identities, structures and processes that are addressed in the discourses. The boundaries between the sub-discourses of the overall discourse are permeable and fluid and also connected to other discourses in society. Furusten sees one reason for these discourse permeabilities and multiple topic connections in actors communicating in different roles, once as academics, then as consultants and seminar organizers, and perhaps as authors of a popular management book, or as consultants and practitioners acting as writers and perhaps as teachers in business schools and universities. From this role-theoretic argument, Furusten concludes that, as a result of role-switching boundary spanners, there is a constant and complex interaction between sub-discourses: the boundary spanners keep the issues moving and the issues keep the boundary spanners moving. In this context, popular management books at a higher level of meaning generalization take over the function of the written communication medium providing ideas and beliefs (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 23). In terms of differentiation theory, Furusten is guided by the neoinstitutionalist research program on the relationship between institutional environments and organizations that we outlined at the beginning of the chapter. Meaningful environmental elements are produced and maintained by professions and organizations in systems such as education, research, and counseling. Activities in these fields in turn contribute to structuring the organizational environment, which in turn can develop influence on organizational processes (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 24). The production of ideas and knowledge emanates from rationalization agents (professions, organizations, associations) that provide organizations with ideas for structure and process design. According to Furusten, however, it is hardly possible to identify the clear places of origin or “specific actors” of ideas, since ideas can be communicated at different levels at the same time, in organizational networks, in organizational fields and in society as a whole. To specify a genuine locus of idea genesis, and thus to make a genetic causal assumption, thus seems extremely difficult. With John Meyer, Furusten argues that “new and elaborated models of management, accounting, consulting or personnel administration pop up almost everywhere, in trends or waves of a general character” (Furusten 1999, p. 27). Despite this difficulty in locating clear contexts of idea genesis, Furusten maintains the relevance of being able to specify concrete actors for the dissemination of ideas and knowledge elements. For him, such actors are the aforementioned management gurus and consultants who confront organizations with ideas and concepts. These individual actors, be they individual or collective, are embedded in system contexts in which the ideas circulate (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 27). Furusten understands the comprehensive management discourse as a carrier layer of the organizational environment in which events, experiences, problem,

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situation and solution definitions and condensed (condensed), conserved (memory function of writing) and thus kept available for further updating of meaning in different situations and application contexts. We have described these aspects in the knowledge chapter in terms of systems theory as the “condensation” and “confirmation” of meaning. For Furusten, management discourse provides a micro-macro connection in this way, as locally relevant stories (narratives) are generalized in it and made available as a selection proposition for various other contexts (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 28). The general management discourse forms a semantic household and a thematic memory to which management writers can selectively connect. In doing so, these texts not only present and represent dominant content with organizational and managerial relevance, but also function as intermediaries or coupling media between organizations, organizational fields and society. Against this background, the question of the function and influence of popular management literature as a textual part of a comprehensive discourse for organization – and perhaps society – is relevant. This literature contains ideas and normative design cues for the reproduction of typical forms of social order. In this sense, Furusten refers to them – following Scott’s extension of the neoinstitutionalist three-step of isomorphic mechanisms (coercive, mimetic, cognitive, normative) – as elements of a “cognitive isomorphism”, since they contribute to the production and maintenance of socially valid categories and typifications: “If homogenous accounts of organizational and managerial life are distributed in books to a worldwide public, they may trigger a general institutionalization of these accounts” (Furusten 1999, p. 33). The function of popular texts can thus be seen in the dissemination, generalization and preservation of organizational and management issues. In doing so, some influential texts can assume something like the status of canonical texts if they are attributed and accepted as dominant and central voices on a particular topic by the audience.28 Texts enable the movement of meaning from ideas in time and space, from organization to organization, from organizations into society, and from society into organizations. Understood in terms of meaning, communication and media theory, texts as written communication media hold meaning potentialities and present the possibility of meaning connection and meaning updating. Topics and topic selectivities are available for possible further subsequent access and

28 Cf. Jan Assmann (1992, p. 93 ff.) on the function of “canonization” and “canonical texts” in relation to communication, identity formation and collective memory. In the organizational culture debate of the 1980s, for example, this was Peters and Waterman’s “In Search of Excellence”, while the organizational learning debate was “inspired” by the Argyris and Schön works and the knowledge management discussion by Nonaka and Takeuchi (cf. Nonaka et al. 1996).

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contributions. Whether and how they are connected is, of course, an open question. With reference to the four sub-discourses of the comprehensive management discourse, Furusten assumes that the popular sub-discourse in particular has the greatest influence on organizational events. This is in line with Alfred Kieser’s thesis (2002) on the problematic influence of management science as the dominant reflective discipline of economic organizations, which we have already addressed. As Luhmann (2000a, p. 334) puts it, the reception advantage of management doctrines lies in the fact that they are something like “easily communicable quasitheories” which, if one additionally draws on Simon’s analysis on “Proverbs of Administration” (1946), are based on analogizing communication and refer in “short cut” form especially to the comparability and relatedness of topics, ideas, cases and problems and do not refer and address so much to the possibility of contradictions or even the simultaneity of difference and commonality. Analogization provides a promise of contingency management and complexity reduction, even at the risk of doing so with the production of illusory logics, as Eco (1992, p. 267) points out, “Connections always exist, you just have to want to find them.”29 So what are the structural properties of popular management texts that make them such interesting offers for action and reflection for managers and organizational practitioners? To answer this question, I will pick out some relevant aspects from Furusten’s deconstructive text analysis of popular management literature. In addition to the action and design orientation, the pragmatic bias, the narrative structure and the single case orientation are key genre structural characteristics of popular management literature. Stories of successful and pioneering individuals and organizations are told, and their stories are generalized and extrapolated into a universal principle of action that other decision-makers and organizations can and should follow. The individuals and organizations thus portrayed are used as metaphors in further argumentation, as shortcut symbols that need not be discussed 29

Analogizing communication is about showing and creating connections and convergences, while digitalizing communication creates and is based on separations and differences. For this reason, analogization also corresponds to interdependencies and digitalization to interruption of interdependencies. Increasing complexity is usually based on the simultaneity of interdependence production and interdependence interruption, possibly thus also on the simultaneity of analogue and digital meaning production and information processing. And here, once again, a music-theoretical connection suggests itself when one considers the relationship between note/pause and sound/silence, for melodic lines are not based on the stringing together (interdependence) of tones, but on the simultaneity of tones strung together (interdependence) and pauses (interdependence interruption). The magic of melody thus lies in specific relations of difference.

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in detail. Such texts attempt to increase credibility and persuasiveness by referring to the author’s wealth of experience and expertise. The author foregrounds the fact that he himself can usually draw on experience and expertise in the matters discussed, i.e. that he is part of both the problem definition and the problem solution. Such popular management texts achieve their normative character through a stringing together of self-evident everyday truths. Furusten calls this rhetorical characteristic “platitude orientation”. Another rhetorical stylistic device are “labels”. This means that design proposals (e.g. strong corporate culture, team spirit and leadership) are introduced and propagated in a recipe-like manner and without closer definition, stringency and consistency checks. They are used and assumed as “self-explicative labels” (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 81 ff.). They are ascribed unconditional value, so that their necessity is no longer questioned. As already mentioned, Furusten is interested in looking not only at the form but also at the function of popular management texts as meaning environments of organizations. The question is whether such texts represent ideologies or whether they convey knowledge. Are they written in an “ideological rhetoric” or a “cognitive rhetoric”? Furusten concludes the following: Following from the discussion above, it seems that the label ‘knowledge’, i.e. that the argumentation should be stable, mobile, and combinable (...) does not apply to these texts. Thus the arguments are definitely not so loosely coupled that we should speak of free associations. (...) In other words, they can be regarded as particular packages of normative explanations of how management and organizations work. In this regard they can be seen as attempts to make sense of the ambiguous world ‘out there’ (...). This means that they constitute collections of concepts, and sets of values and beliefs concerning what reality would be if it were ideal (...). In this respect ‘ideological’ seems to be an appropriate label for the arguments in these books. (Furusten 1999, p. 101)

The slightly cautious formulation (“seems”) is explained by the fact that it is not entirely clear to speak here exclusively of ideological content and ideological rhetoric. Rather, we are dealing with a mixed form of scientifically back-bound and normatively shaped statements. Something like a semi-academic or semiideological format emerges. This is due to the social-structural context of text production. The authors are often people who move from academic management research to consulting, i.e. from making research to doing business. The problemorientation ductus of academic practice is usually not completely abandoned, but then meets a stronger pragmatic ambition. The result is a hybrid text consisting of both scientifically oriented and pragmatically and consultingly oriented statements. The production of such hybrid texts between management theory and management

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theory is strongly dominated by the standardization of methods and working routines. Furusten argues that there are alliances between the production, distribution and consumption of popular management concepts. There is a circular structure here: We have argued that these groups of allies consume what other voices in the popular discourse have already produced. What they consume, however, is not just anything. In fact, they tend to consume manifestations that have gained informal acceptance as representing a general knowledge. Manifestations that have achieved high circulation in the form of books, or that are written by famous managers or well known management gurus, are most likely to achieve such a status. (...) Allies with a commercial interest in defending dominant ideological standards appear in all three processes of production, distribution and consumption. In this way they contribute to the maintenance and guarding of these standards. (Furusten 1999, p. 139)

Furusten concludes overall from his analyses that the popular part of the general management discourse is an important distribution route for standardized management topics. The popular part of the discourse takes the dominant voice in the overall discourse. Furthermore – and here Furusten extends the perspective beyond the level of organizations towards society – popular management discourse acts as an important source of politicization (“policy maker”), involved in the production and perpetuation of cultural expectations, norms and standards of “good and bad management” (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 140 f.). On the consumption side, popular management literature is nowadays an important component in the everyday communication of many organizations, even if it is not widely received. Even if standardized ideas do not yet automatically mean homogeneous operations and standards are not literally implemented but locally interpreted and respecified, popular management discourse functions as a topic repository or semantic reservoir that presorts possible contributions to a specific topic (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 145). On the one hand, popular management discourse functions as a semantic household that both grants and restricts communicative possibilities by thematically pre-selecting interactions. On the other hand, the local organizational processes follow their own logic and transfer and translate the contents into the respective situational adequacy. Thus, a transitive logic of derivation does not prevail here, but rather various selection steps occur, sometimes simultaneously. “Idea migration” (“travel of ideas”, cf. Czarniawska 1997) is a multi-selective communication process and not a top-down mechanism. Information is not simply passed on, but is meaningfully constructed and respecified in situ, that is, in the moment and in context. The comprehensive management discourse serves as a framework of

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meaning and an embedding context that is used by organizations in a constructive and meaning-making way (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 149). Let us now turn to the mode of idea circulation. Furusten makes the distinction between the meaning of management knowledge and managerial manifestations. The first aspect refers to the meaning of texts, while the second aspect refers to the materiality of the text. Furusten assumes that meaning cannot simply be transferred, but must be understood as the result of interpretation (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 37). Whether a proposed meaning is perceived and accepted as connectable in a social context depends on the extent to which it corresponds with and can be adapted to the already institutionalized schemes of meaning and codes of communication. Furusten pursues the idea of a multi-level and multi-selective process: a text production is preceded by processes of observation, interpretation and selectivity. Social events are continuously observed and interpreted by individuals and collectives, so that different texts are always simultaneously produced, read and interpreted. In this way, a constant discussion about management is underway in social space, in organizations, organizational fields, social sectors, nation-states, and the level of world-society communication processes. These collective discourses and discussions lead to various texts that are continuously produced, read, interpreted and also ignored. Written texts articulate and construct views of reality and, to this end, are packaged and disseminated by their authors in appropriate formats. In this way, texts function as media through which ideas are disseminated both at the macro level of society – in neoinstitutionalist terminology, organizational fields and social sectors – and at the meso level of small groups and organizations. For Furusten, management knowledge is developed in three steps: (1) “observation” of a phenomenon, (2) “analysis” of that phenomenon, and finally (3) “textualization” of the results in various textual formats. “Packaged”, i.e. meaning-generalized in text form, this knowledge can then circulate in space and time and spread (Furusten 1999, p. 46 f.). The transmission of management ideas across time and space is thus a multiselective process. The term very commonly used in theoretical analysis to describe this process is the diffusion term. We have already reconstructed this. However, the application of this notion to the transmission and adoption of meaning objects is much more problematic than for physical objects, since unambiguous transmission is much more presuppositional in the case of event-like meaning elements, due to contingent possibilities of connection and ambiguous possibilities of interpretation. Texts do not convey unambiguous meaning, but function as a medium, since an active construction of meaning takes place in every reception and interpretation. Against this background, it is problematic to speak of diffusion, since the diffusion concept implies a linear and transitively functioning centre-periphery structure or

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presupposes an asymmetrical relationship (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 48). The transfer of management ideas, topics and knowledge, on the other hand, is a complex communication process that runs through various dissemination, selection and reception stations. It cannot be comprehended through an input-output model of meaning transfer. This notion overestimates the homogeneity and stability aspect of information and ignores the active process of construction, selectivity and respecification of meaning. An information is not an object or substance stable in and with itself, but a selectively constructed difference (from an operative entity) that produces a difference (in an operative entity), in Gregory Bateson’s sense “a difference that makes a difference” (Bateson 1985, p. 407). It follows that the physical transport of textual management ideas cannot be equated with a transport of meaning. This also means that the spread of certain dominant management concepts cannot yet be thought of as synonymous with the homogenization of organizations (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 51). This brings us to the point of analyzing the simultaneity of homogenizing ideas and divergent organizational practices or behavior, what Furusten calls the “paradox of homogenous ideas and divergent behavior in organizations” (Furusten 1999, p. 52). This is a valuable contribution to the question of the simultaneity of form homogeneity and form heterogeneity or diversity discussed in current organizational theories. Furusten approaches this discussion in terms of differentiation and communication theory through the aforementioned distinction between production, dissemination, and consumption as distinct selective processes involving multiple operational units. On the production side as well as on the consumption side, a separate process logic can be analyzed. Production and consumption each have their own contingencies and selectivities. There is a difference between production and consumption, even if there are typical patterns of production and reception on both sides. At the latest, consumption by the individual organization, - at the “local level” as Furusten calls it30 –, with its own decision-making premises and its own history, ensures individual reception. Furusten argues that therefore neither the neoinstitutionalist concept of isomorphism nor Selznick’s classical concept of immunity do justice to the process of local translation of management ideas by organizations. Furusten echoes Røvik’s (1996, p. 141 ff.) critique here. On the one hand, adaptation is formulated too quickly (neoinstitutionalism), on the other hand, rejection too exclusively (old institutionalism).31 Rejection and decoupling are two

30

Furusten works with the very common distinction between elements in global organizational environments and local processes in organizations, that is, with the analytical distinction of global/local, or general discourse/local organization.

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ways of dealing with new organizational and management concepts. Decoupling through the differentiation of “talk” and “action” (Brunsson 1989) or the separation of front and back stage (Goffman 1980, 1998), an idealized front for the audience and an inside of deviating activities (Luhmann 1964), is sufficiently described by organizational research. Adaptation is also possible, of course, only not as a blackbox implementation or copying process, but in “translation processes” (cf. Czarniawska and Sevón 1996). The meaning of ideas is not simply transferred, but constructed in the new contexts according to the rules and relevancies that apply there. This is a matter of grasping an operative practice of interpretation and reinterpretation as the construction and reconstruction of meaning. The translation process can take different forms: “from borrowing models and words when talking of management and leadership, to using models to structure and organize activities and events” (Furusten 1999, p. 54). And it can take place at different places or levels, in organizational fields, in translation chains and within organizations. At the field level, authoritative centers dominate the translation and adaptation of management prescriptions. These centers assume the function of a “generalized other” (Mead 1988, p. 194 ff.) and thus act as selection filters. Another level are the translation chains (“translation in chains”), in which filtering and interpretation processes take place continuously, at every point in the chain. Furusten imagines a transformation and translation chain concretely as follows: A management recipe reaches a field and is translated there by the center. Once the recipe has been adapted to specific fields, it is interpreted by further actors and sometimes translated into organization-specific structures in “local organizations”. Once this version reaches the organization, it may be developed in different organizational units (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 55). To further specify the concept of translation, Furusten adopts Røvik’s typologization proposal. Here, translations are differentiated into different manifestations such as “concretizing” (“concretizing”), “partly imitating” (“partly imitation”), “combining” (“combination”) and “remelting” (“remelting”). “Concretization” means that an organization does not simply implement a recipe as a whole, but tries to make it fit its own structures, processes, activities and routines. “Partial imitation” means that some elements of a concept, but not the whole concept, are adopted and introduced. “Combining” means that different concepts are combined. The most radical form of translation is “remelting”, where different concepts are mixed and merged into a new concept (cf. Furusten 1999, p. 57).

See Scott (1994, 1995) and Scott and Christensen (1995) on the relationship between “old” and “new” institutionalism.

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From a communication-theoretical point of view, the discourse context analyzed by Furusten presents itself as a communication process in which various entities are involved. The following picture emerges. Management literature communicates selection proposals that can be connected to in different contexts (business, education, science, law, etc.). How it is connected, however, depends on the specific structures that are relevant to meaning and condition communication in each of these contexts. This differentiation analysis points to the separation of functionsystem specific communication or semantics and the level of organizational systems. On the level of function-systemic communication, as e.g. in economic semantics – organizations are understood here as controllable enterprises – the homogenization concepts circulate, whereas on the level of organizations independent and self-logical decisions and decision premises are made, which are very much oriented towards the function-systemic expectations, but do not simply implement them one-to-one, but respecify them in an organizational way, i.e. interpret, adapt and possibly also enrich them. This respecification step is what Furusten, like Nils Brunsson and other neoinstitutionalists, calls local. The spatial metaphorical distinction local/global describes the level difference between the superordinate, global discourse and the organizational level. In organizational research, this process of transformation has been analyzed for some time using the language- and meaning-theoretical concept of translation (cf. Czarniawska and Sevón 1996). We have already addressed this and will now go into it in more depth.

3.6

Translation

There has been a lively discourse on the concept of translation in recent years in relation to questions of the interrelationship of organization, circulation of ideas and knowledge. The theoretical figure of translation is used whenever it is a matter of explaining how connections and shifts of meaning occur through and in operative units. In doing so, this discussion addresses and critiques the notion of diffusion as an explanatory concept for the spread, adoption, and stabilization of ideas. As we have already shown with Mikl-Horke’s analyses, the diffusion concept is a familiar and common concept used in organizational and management sciences to explain the circulation of ideas, objects and practices. The main criticism of the diffusion concept is that diffusion carries with it so many physical and chemical connotations that its transfer to social and cultural phenomena seems questionable (see Czarniawska and Sevón 2005, p. 7). The limitations of the diffusion concept are also pointed out by Powell et al. (2005). Their argument is that the diffusion concept

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pays too little attention to the active process of reception as well as differences in reception. Instead, they argue, it is more appropriate to speak of “circulation” and “translation” in order to describe the active character of movements of meaning (cf. Powell et al. 2005, p. 233). Powell, Gammal and Simard further assume that circulation and connection to ideas is a multi-selective process based both on properties of the organizations involved and on aspects of the interaction situation itself.32 Erlingsdöttir and Lindberg (2005) also argue for the translation notion. Their argument is similar. In order for an idea to ‘migrate’ within an organizational field, it must be detached from its original context and transformed into an object, e.g. in the form of a text or a picture. Such an object can then move through the relevant organizational field in time and space and be adapted in a different context. Finally, the object can be translated locally into a new practice (cf. Erlingsdöttir and Lindberg 2005, p. 48). It is seen as an analytical advantage of the concept of translation that, in contrast to the concept of diffusion, the open possibilities of connection, ambiguities and differences in reception in the meaning process can be considered more appropriately (cf. Sahlin-Andersson and Sevón 2005, p. 254). Here, Michel Serres’ (1987) epistemological understanding of translation is epistemologically guiding. Translation in Serres’ sense is a differential operation that presupposes an operator and can take different forms, producing displacement, substitution and transformation of elements. Identity only ever exists operatively in situ, through “difference and repetition” (Deleuze 1992): Translation is both a practice and a theory; (...) states change phase, systems change state through transitions from one phase to another or from one state to another. But if one considers the system itself, it is never stable. Its equilibrium is ideal and abstract, but it is never reached. State lies outside of time. State is the opposite of history, the former seeks to block or freeze the latter. (...) The system as such is a transformational space. This is generally true. There is only change. What we think is equilibrium is nothing but the slowing down of the processes of change. (...) I thought that the distributors were mediators, that interference took place at the margins, that the translator interposed himself between the instances; I thought that the bridge connected two banks and that the path went from the source to the destination. But there are no instances. Or better, the instances, systems, banks, etc. are in turn analyzable as distributors, paths, translations. (Serres 1987, p. 111 ff.)

The element or object of translation has an unstable identity and is subject to change, transformation, in the translation process. Elements that move around are

32

In their study, Powell et al. (2005) analyzed the reception behavior of various nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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not stable in identity or meaning. Translation thus appears as a process of difference, heterogeneity and ambiguity, in contrast to an understanding of translation that relies on a meaning-convergent transfer of meaning between source and target.33 Czarniawska’s analyses of the circulation of management and organizational ideas and their translation into concrete management and organizational practices are also linked to this differentialist concept of translation. How are organizational and managerial ideas translated into objects (models, books, slides, etc.), sent to different places, transformed into other objects, and then translated into actions that, when regularly performed, become stabilized into institutions (cf. Czarniawska and Sevón 2005, p. 8)? The notion of translation lends itself to describing the emergence and construction of different global connection types because it is polysemantic in nature. It means transformation and transference of elements, but not only linguistic ones. For the context of organization studies, this concept is instructive precisely because it refers not only to linguistic or symbolic elements, but also to material objects and thus makes it possible to address the connection between the symbolic and material levels. Czarniawska’s and Sevón’s thesis is that only through the intermediate step of materialization can a “wandering” of ideas in time and space function at all. Practices and institutions, for their part, can only be passed on via the detour of ideational deconstruction and dissolution. In terms of the theory of meaning, we are dealing here with a relationship of dissolution and recombination of meaning, so that it is conceptually even more precise to speak not only of materialization, but of meaning-generalization, for it is a matter of the relationship between meaning-generalization and meaning-respecification. Of course, vertexting is a materialization, but the fact that a text as a product and artifact represents a materiality of communication is secondary in relation to the medial function of meaning-generalization for further communicative connections. Deconstruction is thereby a meaning-dissolving operation that makes the meaning available for subsequent respecification, recombination, concretization, transposition, application, and adaptation. This meaning-theoretical reformulation and specification of Czarniawska and Sevón’s thesis also has an influence on the following considerations on the question of the acceptance probability of ideas. Which ideas are now accepted and for what

33

Translation can be understood as a transformation of form, which is not an exceptional but a regular operation. Similarly as in neurophysiological cognition research it is assumed today that perceptual data in the brain “are once again transformed (by me, T. D.) into another form. This is a transformation into the language of emotions, because each data element additionally receives a certain quality through translation, is intensively experienced and felt” (Trappmann-Korr 2010, p. 287).

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reasons? Czarniawska and Sevón cite “superiority” as a motivational and selection criterion. But how do individuals know what is superior and how do they learn to imitate things? Czarniawska and Sevón provide the answer with the notion of “fashion”. In this context, it is important to note that the aim is not to explain fashions, but to introduce fashions precisely as an explanatory variable for idea circulation. Once again, an addition based on the theory of meaning and communication can be argumentation-precipitating at this point. Modes are social or collective selection spaces or selection horizons. They reduce potentialities to actualities. Fashions are communicated selections and in this sense a communication structure, because they reduce complexity for temporally indexed style decisions and thus specify typifications. Fashions generate and focus attention and popularity and simultaneously produce identity and difference, homogeneity and heterogeneity, typicality and deviation. Fashions differ from everything that is not attributed as fashion, which is communicatively expressed in the use of the main distinction fashionable/unfashionable and meaningfully associable subsequent distinctions such as new/old fashionable, trendy/not trendy, attractive/unattractive, interesting/ boring, trendsetting/mainstreaming or also desirable/unnecessary. For organizations and organizational decision-makers, the fashion mode is so appealing as an orientation structure because fashions prescribe preferences, which is a significant facilitator for decision-making that has to weigh up between alternatives, because fashions present themselves as typical alternatives at a given point in time and thus as a limited possibility space. Through popularity, fashions become decision aids. In organizational language, the relevance of fashions lies in the fact that they are perceived as decision alternatives. Fashions limit and offer the appropriate choice at a given time. People subscribe to a prevailing opinion, follow a particular flavor, and apply proven solutions. Fashions can thus serve to form decision premises by preferring decision alternatives and thus contributing to uncertainty absorption. Various selection amplifiers can be added, such as successful companies as trendsetters, specific occupational groups and professions, consultancies and management gurus. The “fashion behaviour” (Czarniawska 2004, p. 129) is thus by no means irrational. Moreover, there seems to be a circular process at work here whereby fashions become attention attractors. Oriented to fashions, individuals imitate ideas, beliefs, and passions that are considered attractive at a certain time in a certain place. This moves them to translate ideas, objects, and practices for their own use. This translation, meanwhile, changes what is being translated and also those who are translating. For organizations, it is precisely this emphasis on the typical at a given point in time that is the crucial point, because fashions and trends, through their selection aspect, provide a limited range of the typical that can take on an uncertainty-absorbing function for organizations: “Ultimately, then, it seems to

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be a matter of supplying what is only possible with form” (Luhmann 1995d, p. 79). But, according to Czarniawska, the one-sided complexity-reducing nature of fashions is only supposed and deceptive, for fashions are paradoxically constituted. Their stability is permanent change, their legitimation the preference for the new: “Clearly, however, the purpose of fashion is to legitimize, even to octrophy, the new, on the stupendous (not to say admirably) grounds that it is ephemeral” (Luhmann 1995d, p. 81). Czarniawska further assumes that fashions can be simultaneously homogenizing and heterogenizing. Fashions mean that many people do the same thing at the same time in different places, but fashions also mean that these people will do different things in a relatively short time. Fashions are a restless social mechanism that continuously produces change (see Czarniawska 2004, p. 144). Drawing on Lyotard’s distinction between “innovation and invention”, Czarniawska assumes the following paradoxical form of fashions: Its constitutive paradoxes are invention and imitation, variation and uniformity, distance and interest, novelty and conservation, unity and segregation, conformity and deviation, change and status quo, revolution and evolution. And it is indeed translation, side to side with negotiation that is used to resolve these paradoxes in each practical action. (...) Translation comes first. Fashion would not be able to proceed without constant translation, which permits it to appear in many different guises in different times and places. (Czarniawska 2004, p. 136 f.)

Fashions are thus on the one hand an expression of conformity and at the same time an expression of anticonformity. Decision-makers may well follow for both reasons, on the one hand the conformity aspect and on the other the deviation aspect (cf. Czarniawska 2004, p. 144). We can further enrich the translation analysis by adding the concept of mutual observation constellations to the neoinstitutionalist concept of organizational fields in terms of observation theory, as was done earlier in Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis (Sect. 3.1). Hedmo et al. (2005) attach great importance to organizational fields for imitation and translation processes. Organizational fields can be understood as relational constellations and configurations that initiate and structure the mutual observation of units. Following Bourdieu, they understand fields as relational systems in which dominant actors occupy central positions and peripheral actors constantly strive to increase influence and achieve a central position by measuring themselves against the central actors and following the field’s common logics of meaning and structures of expectation. Imitation is thereby not a passive process, but an active activity of an operative unit, in which both reciprocal observation relations with other units (comparative references) and self-observation and self-description operations (identity references) play an essential role. The

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following quotation therefore points to a recursive relationship between imitation and identity. Perceived identities stimulate imitations, while imitations form identities: As certain models, actors, or practices become widely known, these shape the wishes, ideals, and desires of others, thus providing the impetus for further imitation. Thus, perceived identity shapes imitation: one imitates those one relates to and these with whom one identifies. The process of imitation involves both self-identification and recognition of what one would like to become. The opposite is also true, however, in that imitation shapes identity. Imitation constructs new relationships, references, and identifications and opens new avenues for comparison and for creating new identities. In this way fashions and trends largely form through processes of imitation (...). Furthermore, because imitation is shaped by and shapes identity, the motives, dynamics, and consequences of imitation may differ between places and over time. (Hedmo et al. 2005, p. 194)

At first glance, imitation seems to be about creating uniformity. At second glance, however, it is also about “being the same and being different” and about “wanting to be better than the other”. It is about the simultaneity of identity and difference: Who and how am I? And: how can I be different? Imitation is triggered by the identity or self-description question, aims at the question of appropriateness in relation to typical identities, and thus follows an appropriateness logic: “Thus in order to be appropriate, one must make a comparison with appropriate others (‘Who am I?’ ‘What situation is this?’), in order to conduct the consecutive action based on the perceived action and achievements of other actors – thus, an imitation” (SahlinAndersson and Sevón 2005, p. 255). The logic of appropriateness then provides for: (1) “matching of own and others’ identifications and situations”; (2) “construction of desire to transform”; (3) “institutionalized, appropriate action” (cf. SahlinAndersson and Sevón 2005, p. 256; Czarniawska and Sevón 1996). Imitation processes are constituted by comparative operations and structured by comparative constellations. In a further step, Hedmo, Sahlin-Andersson and Wedlin refer to imitation as a translation process and add the term “editing” for clarification. They assume that ideas and practices usually circulate in the form of written objects (e.g. texts) or oral communications and are adapted differently in different contexts, i.e. “edited”. In the respective social contexts, the communicated information is respecified or edited into context-specific relevant information (cf. Hedmo et al. 2005, p. 195).34 The

The term “editing” is both exciting and fraught with tension, especially since it is at least ambiguous in the English language. On the one hand, it can certainly be understood in the

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direction of editing can be guided by various selection structures as well as selection amplifiers. Hedmo, Sahlin-Andersson and Wedlin distinguish different ideal-typical imitation modes such as the “broadcasting mode”, the “chain mode of imitation” and the “mediation mode”. These three modes are meant to make tangible both the dissemination aspect and the specific selection stages of knowledge and idea circulation, so that the local respecification of disseminated topics, ideas and practices can be explained by different selectors. “Broadcasting” means dissemination starting from a central location and proceeding from an “activating entity”. “Chain mode” means the further spread of dissemination through chain repetition of the idea or practice. An idea or practice is imitated, and the imitation is then imitated in turn. In the third step, mediators are added, which once again serve as selection enhancers (cf. Hedmo et al. 2005, p. 196). These mediators and selection enhancers are referred to as “editors” because they actively intervene in the interpretation and meaning process (cf. Hedmo et al. 2005, p. 197). The example of the international spread of management education programs (MBA) will illustrate this argument. The MBA label is seen as an example of the worldwide spread and enforcement of a symbol for success and its simultaneous differential or diversifying design through variations. The differentiation follows along the centre/periphery schema, to the extent that one address (place, region, organization) is portrayed as influential and reputable. This results in one centre address and many peripheral addresses (cf. Hedmo et al. 2005, p. 198). The selection or mediation function in these processes is assumed by so-called “monitoring organizations”, which take on the role of standardizers, because mediating modes of imitation have become increasingly important in these times of globalization, and that this development is related to the expansion of monitoring organizations in contemporary society. Our analysis thus emphasizes the crucial importance of monitoring organizations, such as accreditation bodies and media, and other transnational regulatory and monitoring organizations in forming organization fields. (Hedmo et al. 2005, p. 205)

Researchers, experts, consultants, publicists and international organizations can also act as mediators of ideas and knowledge. Accreditation procedures and organizations as well as the media have a great influence as selection factors. Media rankings create visibility, ensure publicity, comparability, competition and sense of a more classical understanding as a text and text composition practice (editorship: editor), in which case it refers to the editing of textual meaning. Or, if one follows modern data and information semantics (cf. Munro 2001), then it refers to the producing, editing, and changing of data. In both cases, it is about the manipulation of meaning.

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rivalry. Rankings structure the positioning of entities (e.g. states, organizations, individuals) in the field. Rankings and accreditation function as a means of establishing comparability and distinction. While accreditation ensures admission or inclusion in a field, rankings establish hierarchical differentiations and a fieldinternal hierarchy of inclusion. Accreditation regulates participation: who belongs to it in the first place? And rankings provide the answers: Who belongs at the top, who in the midfield and who in the bottom third? International rankings and accreditation procedures are thus seen as important sources of reputation and status. For this reason, more and more emphasis is being placed on PR, external presentation and impression management. Strong audience orientation seems to be indispensable, and the reach of the potential audience has increased enormously under world-society observation conditions, but attention is extremely scarce at the same time. For this reason, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to attract scarce attention (cf. Hedmo et al. 2005, p. 207). By reflecting on the concept of translation along the system-theoretical concept of communication and media, we can bundle and focus the previous argumentations.35 Translation can be conceptualized as a communicative operation of meaning, which is about differently conditioned and conditionable connections of meaning, depending on the respective medium of communication. We first return to the concept of communication in sociological systems theory, which we introduced in chapter two. Language is understood here as one communication medium among others, albeit a fundamental one for the evolution and operativity of human communication (cf. Luhmann 1984, p. 224, 1990, pp. 49, 52, 187; Stäheli 2000, p. 129 ff.). The argument relevant to this context is that language is not a medium limited to a specific social system in society, but functions as a basic communication medium that can increase the probability of acceptance of communication (cf. Luhmann 1981, 1997, p. 205 ff.). In this context, language is not a specific communication medium oriented towards special problems, but is sufficiently neutral to be able to function as a medium for different and diverse connections of meaning. The use of individual words is not prescribed a priori (cf. Luhmann 1984, p. 224, 1997, p. 49). Thus, a multi- and inter-systemic use of language can be assumed, because language is not bound to certain system boundaries:

35 See Tyulenev (2012) for a comprehensive discussion of the notion of translation in the context of sociological systems theory.

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The normality of words is located (...) not only on an extra-textual level, but also before the use of language in individual systems. It is only through recursions of meaning in social communication that the uniformity of the language medium is produced. If one accepts this premise that meaning cannot be transported from one system to another, then the multiple use of language as a social medium seems in need of explanation. (Stäheli 2000, p. 153)

If we look back from here to the organizational semantic analyses, e.g. of the concept of management, this can be linked in linguistic theory to the question of the strong or weak stability and identity of words. One could now argue that a word used in different contexts would remain identical in its meaning. The word as an element of communication would thus be denotatively self-sufficient (cf. Luhmann 1995a, p. 167). To stay in context. Management in an economic context is equivalent to management in an educational context. Those who say management, here or there, know what is meant by it and what it means. And almost more importantly, the others know it too! This is countered by the thesis that the meanings of words can of course vary, shift, be reduced or even enriched, both in one and the same context of meaning and by being used in a different context of meaning (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 200 f.). Stäheli provides us with a good example that fits perfectly in our thematic context: Through a variety of uses, a word acquires additional meaning: the economic meaning of shareholder, for example, is supplemented by its political articulation in New Labour discourse. Some meanings from the spectrum of a word’s meaning are used more frequently than others, which in turn increases the chance of that meaning being updated in the future. The ‘original’ meaning of the word competes with the variable meanings of the word, which thus increase its meaning spectrum. Through syntactic articulation in communications, the vocabulary of a language is regenerated and, in some circumstances, bivalent, whereby its communicative use ‘regenerates’ language, condenses and confirms word meaning, thus enriching it, but also leaving words never used again to oblivion. The metaphor enrichment refers to the fact that a previously constituted meaning becomes more complex by adding new uses. (Stäheli 2000, p. 149)

If we go one step further, this theoretical context is about the relationship between language and typical system communications. In typical functional systems communications, the rhetoricity of language is largely dispensed with. Rhetoric as an assumption catalyst of proposed selections is largely dispensable because the typification of semantics by the symbolically generalized communication medium constitutes the semantic connotation space in terms of typically generalized meaning references (connotations). The symbols are generalized. The banknote presented

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for payment should (in the normal case) suffice as a conviction and motivation to buy, the good intention to educate (in the normal case) to send one’s child to school, and the apprehended sanctioning power of the law (in the normal case) not to leave the right path. The difference now is that language is a neutral medium which, by its use, does not yet prescribe a typical connection to the information communicated. While symbolically generalized communication media are supposed to establish and guarantee the unity of the system through the similarity of elements (typicality), language is neutral because it can be used anywhere as a medium. This difference between language as a neutral, multiply and polyvalently connectable medium and symbolically generalized communication media as special problem-related and thus typical media is the essential point to be noted at this point. The relation of language to symbolically generalized communication media thus lies in the difference of unspecific/specific. This is by no means congruent with the better/worse distinction, such that non-specific connectivity is somehow inferior to specific. Only, and this is the crucial point at this point, different communication functionalities result from the media. In order to function as typical communication for social functional contexts, language has to be enriched and supplemented with specific meaning (cf. Stäheli 2000, p. 154). This means that the same term can certainly be used in different functional system contexts, but whether and which conditioning performance and thus structural value it achieves there for the problem-related communications is by no means determined. The thesis is that if it is not specifically enriched and typically respecified, it is used, but its social-structural plausibility and meaning-dimensional coherence remains questionable. A high degree of generalization facilitates connectivity, but does not imply connectivity typology. To recall the example. Management spoken in an economic context is not automatically synonymous with management spoken in an educational context.36 Does the thesis that language must be typically enriched for a meaningful fit in specific system contexts also mean, by implication, that language in its unenriched normal state allows system boundaries to be transgressed? Stäheli asks: Does the normal sense of language make it possible to transcend the operational closure of systems and provide a kind of common ground for different systems? Such a – minimal commonality is suggested, for instance, in Luhmann’s idea of a multi-system event, which assumes a ‘multi-system membership’ of events. (...) Language is a typical example of a multi-system affiliation, since a word belongs to

36

The antithesis to the respecification argument is the habit argument. If a term is only used regularly long enough, it becomes a matter of course and acquires self-evident meaning. It becomes incorporated into the semantic household, so to speak.

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the social system and to all systems that use it, thus enabling the structural coupling of social and mental systems. It is only the idea of a multi-system event that makes it possible to conceive of an interdiscursivity between systems that is supposed to put together what does not actually belong together. (...) The overlapping events are the ‘material’ for structural couplings and are connected by ‘productive misreadings’, that is, they are repeated in different systems but are never observed in exactly the same way. Thus, there is no transport of meaning between systems – even the neutral normal sense does not jump the principal hurdle of the boundary of autopoietic systems. (Stäheli 2000, p. 154)

Stäheli argues that it makes no sense to assume something like an a priori normal meaning. This would be an ontological fallacy: “Only without anchoring interdiscursivity in a general basis of an ‘identical event’ or even an ‘identical word’ does the elliptical logic of citations between systems become visible” (Stäheli 2000, p. 155). It is precisely this aspect that needs to be noted here. Translations are not about transporting meaning, but about “elliptical citations”, whereby elliptical in this sense refers to the aspect of respecifying, selective, sense-differentiating, non-linear and non-trivial constitution of meaning. The meaning of a word, concept and semantics is not transported or transmitted one-to-one, but is produced contexttypically. In this way it can be understood that language is transformed from a “distribution/dissemination medium” to a “dissemination medium” and thus loses its neutrality. Instead of disseminations, language leads to dispersions of meaning (cf. Stäheli 2000, p. 160). This communication- and sense-theoretical grounding of the concept of translation determines translations as communicative meaningboundary phenomena (German: Sinngrenzphänomene). With an example from Gunther Teubner’s analyses of “codes of conduct” in relation to standards, transnationalization and global governance issues (cf. Teubner 2012), I would like to conclude this sub-chapter and use it to show how the concept of translation can be brought in as part of the connection between organizational, societal and communication theory arguments. Teubner’s argument is concerned with the self-binding and self-commitment activities and programs of corporations in the context of global legal regulatory gaps and open design spaces. It raises the question of the degree of voluntariness of self-commitments and learning processes. Teubner is skeptical here and rates the coercive aspect higher: The metaphor of ‘voluntary codes’ thus conceals anything but voluntariness. Transnational corporations enact their codes neither out of an understanding of the common good nor out of motives of corporate ethics. They only comply ‘voluntarily’ when massive learning pressures are exerted from outside. (...) It is not sufficient to describe this as if legal sanctions were replaced here by social sanctions. (...) Rather, in complicated ‘translation processes’, system boundaries are crossed, a pertubation

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cycle between legal acts, pressures of political and social power, cognitive operations of epistemic communities and economic sanctions is created. The original norm contents are drastically changed when they are ‘translated’. Into the language of expert knowledge that designs models and organizes monitoring, into the interorganizational power of political negotiations between international organizations, NGOs, and transnational corporations, into the reputation mechanisms of the public and into those of monetary incentives and sanctions – and finally into the legal language of the hard law of internal corporate codes. (Teubner 2012, p. 149 f.)

This argumentation makes the conceptual significance of the term translation in the intersection of organization, communication, and societal theory very clear; however, the fact that Teubner places it in quotation marks and thus uses it with metaphorical-heuristic reservations simultaneously makes clear the need for meaning- and communication-theoretical discussions and reassurances of this term. It is in this sense that this subchapter was intended.

3.7

(Self-)embodiments

In previous discussions of idea circulation, diffusion, standards, texts and translation, the relationship between operativity and materialities has been addressed at various levels. In the analyses of Boltanski and Chiapello and of Furusten, the focus has been on the function of text corpora, which form an idea-shaped household of meaning and resonance corpus as a condition of possibility for communicative connections. In the field of translation, the notion of idea packaging (“packaging”) and the spatial semantics or spatial metaphorics of the “wandering of ideas” in time and space were used to explain idea circulation, idea adoption, and idea implementation. Further spatial semantic references came into play through the concept of field, which addresses field positions, field relations, and field constellations of organizations in their relevant environments (organizational fields and social sectors). These analyses of organizational field positions could be complemented by communication- and distinction-theoretical motifs from the discourse on diffusion, standardization and translation, in which space-referential distinctions such as global/regional, regional/local, global/local, national/international and international/transnational are analyzed with regard to their attribution and justification function for the construction and categorization of different organizational environmental and situational positions. The last subchapter complements and concludes the topic of meaning movements and sense-making with some reflections on embodiment and design aspects of organizational materialities and artifacts, dealing

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with the relationship between embodiment and location and the relationship between identity and design. The materiality perspective leads via the concept of space to the question of the spatial dimensionality of communicative meaningoperativity, because material embodiments of meaning-relations can take on a locating and positioning function for social systems as occupations of positions in space, and in this sense function as excorporating sites of organizational operativity that contribute to typification, self-description, and social positioning.37 This brings us back at the end of the book to the basic discussion of a multidimensional concept of organization and the relationship between the perspectives of meaning and materiality. In recent years, the materiality perspective has been emphasized by both the practical turn and the spatial turn (cf. Döring 2008; Schroer 2006) in the social and cultural sciences, highlighting the connection between social practices, embodiment, artifacts, and spatial constellations. Reference phenomena of an increased materiality and spatiality perspective include globalization, the politicization of territories, the change in meaning of nation-state borders, and new forms of governmental disciplining (cf. Bröckling et al. 2000), noting the “limits of de-spatialization” (Ahrens 2001) and “irreducible materialities” (Döring and Thielmann 2008, p. 15), because even “in the network society, territoriality remains of elementary importance as one of the organizing principles of social relations. Through increased communication speeds, spaces are not erased, but become others” (Döring and Thielmann 2008, p. 15). This can be seen both in the simultaneity of global communicative networking and territorial protectionisms and in the increasing relationships that can be observed between particular and universal patterns of order: “Universality in world society can then become the very condition for the contrasting cultivation of local particularities” (Luhmann 1997, p. 931). Spatial issues are often about “control and disposal, access and exclusion, power and money” (Ellrich 2002, p. 92). Control and disposal, access and exclusion, power and money refer to social mechanisms (inclusion and exclusion) and media of influence (symbolically generalized communication media), the handling and regulation of which in modern society is primarily the responsibility of organizations. Thus, it only seems coherent that organizational studies have also discovered their interest in the materiality and space topic. Within organizational studies, after the “Bringing Society Back in” of the 1990s, there has therefore been talk for some time of “Bringing Space Back in” (Kornberger and Clegg 2004; Clegg

Cf. Drepper (2003b) on the “space of the organization”. Some ideas from this have been incorporated into this sub-chapter in a revised form.

37

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and Kornberger 2006a). This is related to the influences of the aforementioned globalization and world society processes on organizations, but on the other hand also to the question of the active role of organizations as communication and decision-making agents in these processes. Against this background, research on the concept of space can be found in the history of organizational theories (cf. Chanlat 2006) and on the connection between “power and architecture” (Clegg and Kornberger 2006c; Markus 2006). A theoretical regression is to be avoided, as “Rediscovering Space” (Clegg and Kornberger 2006b, p. 9) is to be about the simultaneous comprehension of organizations as cognitive and material entities. In the context of operational conceptualizations, therefore, the recursivity between distinction-drawing operations and space forms is highlighted: “Space forms as a result of boundary setting and from what we may call distinctiondrawing operations” (Hernes et al. 2006, p. 45). This argument fits with the perspective of an “organizational epistemology” (Tsoukas) and operational theory of meaning of organizations that we have elaborated and discussed in this book. Spatial references are operationalized and structured in organizations in decisionmaking premises, program issues, personnel matters, and communication pathways. Here, they are used for organizations’ subject and task (e.g., location strategies, logistics, staff recruitment and mobility, job and communication path structure) and distinctions related to them (here/there, up/down, vertical/horizontal, steep/flat). In the case of internal structure, the relevance of spatial semantics can be seen in relation to the structure and positioning of company parts, departments and jobs, as well as the management breadth (‘span of control’) and management depth, which can be visualized in organizational charts.38 Through organigrams, organizations give themselves a map of the self, although Korzybski’s dictum that the map is not the landscape also applies in this case (cf. Korzybski 1994; Bateson 1985, p. 245 ff.; Weick 1985, p. 355 ff.), which is particularly noticeable and described in organizations as a hiatus between front stage and back stage (Goffman 1980, 1998), formal display and factual reality (Luhmann 1964; Kühl 2011), talk and action (Brunsson 1989), and formal and activity structures (Meyer and Rowan 1977). The cited concepts of breadth, depth, structure, position, vertical vs. horizontal division of labor, and superordination and subordination are spatial terms used to describe structures and processes (structure and process). 38

Position is the English term for place (cf. Achterbergh and Vriens 2009, p. 149). This very clearly emphasizes the spatial implicative connotation that (organizational) posts are positions in a relational structure (structure, field, figuration, etc.). To occupy a position means to assume and occupy a post. Hierarchy is thus always an order of jobs, positions and posts, which is obtained from subordinate and superordinate relations.

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Within organizational communication, space-referential distinctions are in use, and their combinations (schemas) as reusable and reusable plausible causal schemas (scripts) function structurally. Hierarchy can be understood in this sense as a spacereferential semantics, which functions orienting and ordering in organizations in the power-medial personnel and communication way regulation by the top/bottom distinction. Hierarchization is a way of conditioning communication paths (cf. Luhmann 2000a, p. 302 ff.), which, with the top/bottom distinction, drives asymmetrical communication that transforms uncertainty into security and stabilizes rank differences, which means that rank does not have to be re-established again and again (cf. Luhmann 2000b, p. 236 f.). Hierarchy is thus always also “situation domination” (Luhmann 1964, p. 156). The fundamental distinction, the top/bottom difference, expresses this emblematically through semantic ordering performances. The formal status system of the organizational job order becomes through the distinction between ‘above’ and ‘below’ into a vivid form and thus into a possession of experience that is as firm as it is handy. The superior is placed higher, has a higher status than the subordinate. This metaphor, borrowed from spatial thinking, happily associates a plethora of very different behavioral expectations. It relates numerous rules of conduct, which in themselves could be conceived and changed independently of one another, to a unified fundamental idea, as the expression of which they then appeared, which justifies them. It fuses at least the following moments into a homogeneous structure: 1) The notion of an order of places of relative duration. 2) The notion of a ‘distance’ between posts that precludes full commonality of worldview and information possession, thus explaining divergences and necessitating selective caution in upward or downward communication. 3) The notion of a top-down influence relationship. 4) The idea of a difference of rank in the sense of a principle of preference. In this lies at the same time 5) A point of view of the decision of conflict without dispute. 6) The idea of a differentiation of personal access and accessibility (responsiveness). These and perhaps other points of orientation are brought into a relationship of mutual stimulation and confirmation by the up/down scheme, which does not need to be justified in detail, because the image compulsion is convincing. The power of the symbol is demonstrated by the fact that it achieves something that rational argumentation would never be able to do: to make very different types of behaviour in diverse situations appear consistent and as an expression of a correct, appropriate order. (Luhmann 1964, p. 162 f.)

Through the binary schematism of the top/bottom distinction, locational specifications become ordering specifications. The top/bottom schema is used to order formal expectations, directs the drawing of organizational plans and the “rhetoric of formal situations” (Luhmann 1964, p. 163). Hierarchies thus live from spatially charged symbolizations and embodiments.

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The connection between the use of distinction, location and embodiment can be further enriched by the concept of self-description if it is not restricted to textuality, but is also related to other artifacts that can be relevant for the creation of identity and communicative self-assurance of an organization. As we have already mentioned (Sect. 2.3), texts or functional equivalents of a text can function as selfdescriptions of social systems, in which identity marking runs via indexical expressions such as “we”, “here” or proper names (cf. Luhmann 2000a, p. 417). The function of self-descriptions is to “bundle and centre the constantly accruing self-references in order to make it clear that it is always about the same ‘self’, always about a system that is identical with itself. The self-description serves the system as an ‘official commemorative culture’ that can be communicated without any problems; and ‘without any problems’ means: without regard to who perceives it, i.e. publicly” (Luhmann 2000a, p. 421 f.). The self-descriptive text can become for an organization what the body is for an individual: A consciousness has its own ‘body’ which imposes an ‘I’ on it. The ‘I’ is always where its body is (...). It always knows where it is and what place centers its perceiving and thinking. Social systems lack a similar guarantee. Where ‘are’ they? They can identify with places in space, with buildings for example (...). Social systems can leave their places without having to take their bodies (perhaps instead: their debts) with them. They can also carry out their communications outside their places, exterritorially, as it were. So what prevents them from losing themselves in the world of their subjects and not finding their way back to themselves? Or: what guarantees them the continuity of their constitutive difference of self-reference and external reference? Organizations do not have a body, but they have a text. (Luhmann 2000a, p. 422)

From the point of view of identity, bodies and texts can be understood as functionally equivalent, and self-descriptions as communicative self-locations and field position determinations. If one extends the concept of self-description by the concept of “self-symbolization”, then it becomes possible to address the functional equivalence of textual and spatial symbolizations (cf. Rehberg 2001). “Symbolicity” describes not only the “bringing to sign” of meaning content, but also a “moment of embodiment” that is reproduced. Embodiments in this sense are identity-generating embodiments of the self (cf. Rehberg 1994, p. 56 ff.).39 Artifacts, however, cannot be equated with an organization’s self-descriptions;

39 Rehberg speaks of the “spiritual atmosphere of places” (“genius loci”), which can develop an influence on ideas, feelings about life, and lifestyles. As examples Rehberg mentions sports arenas, executive offices, palaces and parliaments (cf. Rehberg 1994, p. 60). Cf. Rehfeld (1999) on the connection between strategy and spatiality.

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rather, they are externalized identity objects to which self-description communication can refer. Self-symbolization is about the symbolic embodiment of the self. This can be corroborated with the concept of externalization: “The crucial point here is to treat the role of space as an externalization reference – that is, as the address of internal operations that allow the system within the system to be treated as if there were external reference points” (Baecker 1998, p. 17). Let us illustrate this with the symbolic function of buildings and places. Typical spaces and locations are associated with organizational types, such as parliament buildings, courts, university campuses, office towers, factory halls, production plants, workshops, laboratories, department stores, ship and airports, school buildings, hospitals, barracks, prisons and server farms of the digital economy. Within the framework of the organization-typical spatial characteristics, there are then possibilities for individual specialization and refinement in order to increase one’s own perceptibility. Buildings can function as a “communicable indicator” (Luhmann 2000a, p. 423) and, as representative status symbols, express the underpinning and symbolization of views and mission statements. Site, building and spatial design can be used as a form of communication and “expressive language” (Günter 1994, p. 224). The materiality and space theme leads to the design concept via the connection of “organization and aesthetics” (Strati 1999; Linstead and Höpfl 2000), whereby it can be about the design of structures, processes, strategies, images and whole identities (cf. Baecker 2005b; Bellas 2006; Profitt and Zahn 2006; Gustafsson 2006). In recent years, the concept of design has been applied to both organizational internal environments and external environments. For the internal reference, it is concerned with questions of how organizations design their ‘inner life’ communicatively, in terms of personnel, subject matter, time and space. This can lead from the design of tasks, communication channels, personnel culture, time arrangements to spatial atmospheres (architectures, sounds, smells, visualizations, etc.). External design can be associated with the expansion and extension of organizations and types of organization into social spaces, sometimes with a strong influence on regional and local contexts (cities, metropolitan regions, peripheral regions).40 Any self-respecting company will not leave the exterior and interior design of its headquarters to chance and will pay attention not only to functionalities but also to the prevailing spirit of the times and popular fashions.41 A

40

One could think here, for example, of the power of industries to shape entire regions. A popular example of this is Silicon Valley. 41 The concept of design leads to the concept of fashion, since design opens up a field of meaning in which distinctions such as fashionable/unfashionable, modern/traditional, avant-

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hegemonic-feudal expression can be found, for example, in palaces, castles and towers, which are territorially space-occupying, spreading and aspiring. This manifests itself, for example, in the formations of office towers that reach for the sky and shape metropolitan and megacity skylines. Whoever is part of these skylines expresses market presence and economic success. Differences are marked by heights, architectural extravagances and technological innovations. In the buildings themselves, power and influence differentials are symbolized by the number and occupancy of floors and the limitation of permeability and control of internal mobilities. The expression of protectionist architecture is marked territories with clear rules of inclusion and exclusion. Not everyone is allowed to go everywhere and pass through everywhere.42 Current examples of organizational campus culture present a different picture. Particularly in the field of knowledge and technology-intensive companies, many examples of campus culture can be found in company headquarters, in which organizations present themselves as open meeting and learning contexts. The borrowing from and identification with the university knowledge and learning culture is also expressed in the imitation of the spatial and embodiment principle.43 The campus provides a simulation of the urban and the village at the same time, because the amenities of modern functional living (comforts) are combined with the spatial cohesion, familiarity and sense of belonging of collective communities. The campus as a combination of “comforts and communities” can develop into a comprehensive and sometimes self-sufficient space for communication and inclusion. The organization becomes a fully inclusive home with the dissolution of boundaries between work and private life, and the

garde/conventional and innovative/conservative are applied and prescribe preferences. And re-entries of distinctions can be observed, as in the case of trend-setting retro styles, in which old-fashioned and tradition-conscious are considered vintage and legendary and thus become highly attractive. 42 Cf. Günter (1994, p. 209 ff.) on the connection between organizational power, representational architecture and industrial aesthetics. The territorial-architectural language of expression of classical large-scale industry is the two-dimensional expansion and ecological over-forming. 43 Popular examples of campus locations and smart building design are Microsoft (Redmond Campus, Mountain View Campus), Apple (Apple Campus 2, Cupertino), Google (Googleplex, Mountain View), Facebook (Facebook Campus, Menlo Park) and Novartis (Novartis Campus, Basel). Other and rather unadorned examples from the Internet and service industries are high-bay warehouses, open-plan offices (cf. Go and Fenema 2006) and call centre locations in peripheries and structurally weak regions with good logistical links and high potential for low-skilled workers.

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workplace becomes a place to stay and a center of life with a feel-good ambience.44 Connectionist ideas are making their way: everything is connected to everything else, nothing is separate anymore. There are only continuities and permeabilities, social connections and social communities, unlimited possibilities and infinite expanses.45 As a theoretical insight, I would like to state here that designing and defining are interrelated and that designing structures, processes, entities and ideas also implies defining identities, situations, contexts and ideas. As strategy factors, design questions are thus not simply questions of style, but should combine perfect proportions with perfect positions. The stylization of one’s own communication address expressed in territorial design cannot only be explained by symbols of power and success, but is also related to system differentiation characteristics of modern society. As independent system types, organizations are at the same time subsystems of comprehensive systems (cf. Luhmann 2000a, p. 436; Drepper 2018, pp. 221 f., 346). With reference to the social system, organizations are structurally comparable with families and directly differentiated in segments (...). Therefore, in the case of these systems, selfdescriptions cannot be related to a social subsystem. They remain bound to a particular family (name, genealogy, often also old residence) or to a particular organization. In the society-internal environment of such a system there are then numerous other systems of the same type, while in the society-internal environment of the science system, for example, there are no other science systems with divergent truth qualifications. What are the consequences of this state of affairs for the self-description of individual organizations, which have to take into account that there are other organizations with other self-descriptions? (Luhmann 2000a, p. 436)

One consequence of this structural situation are “strategies of outdoing” (Luhmann 2000a, p. 438), which can also be expressed in building construction and design. Organizations, as sub-segments, are precisely not unique, but similar and thus

44

More precisely, it is a three-part relation: convenience (material-functional level of the technical infrastructure) – comfort (emotional level of the experiencing individual) – community (social-collective level of the communication community). 45 This sounds a bit over the top, but it refers to the current example of Facebook’s headquarters (Menlo Park campus), where everything is arranged on one level and it is a large open single office. One space for all employees, flat and simple, unfinished and constantly moving, unpretentious and ambitious at the same time. The architectural aesthetic is seen as a translation of the connectionist worldview of unlimited permeability and unrestricted mutual accessibility, networking and social exchange. The “infinite expanses” naturally allude to science fiction, whereby this association is not even too far-fetched if one looks at the design of the Apple Campus 2 in California, where the comparison with a spaceship is very close.

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interchangeable, which in particular drives identity concerns. As we have already pointed out with Boltanski and Chiapello, it is precisely the market as an institutionalized platform of second-order observation that makes it very observable who else matters in the field. The segmentary differentiation status leads to an increased level of demarcation efforts. For this reason, special emphasis is placed on the “symbolization of boundaries” (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 641) and unique stories are also so important, which are condensed into myths and mystifications of persons (e.g. about ingenious founders), because these specialize the organization through the exclusive reference to the person and his or her inimitable story. The comparative structural insight from the social theory of differentiation is thus obvious, namely that subsystems of segmentarily differentiated societies define their boundaries primarily with reference to associated people and associated territories. Personalization and spatial integration are elementary forms of border stabilization (cf. Luhmann 1997, p. 641). In my opinion, this aspect can also be applied to segments such as families and organizations, because in both cases personality and localization have an essential function. Organizations cannot do without the personalization of decisions and the attribution of decisions to decision-makers and their addressability. What does this theoretical perspective mean for the discussion about the virtual and unbounded organization, which has been thematizing the connection between digitalization, virtuality, and the drawing of boundaries for some years now? Let us visualize this by means of some current questions and argumentations. What influence does the communication-technological and information-cybernetic change have on organizations of different societal areas? Do internal processes, structures, expectations of people, audience relations and organizational boundaries need to be reconceptualized? For example, what does prosumer culture mean for the relationship between performance and audience roles? What are the implications of new audience formats (social media) and public transparency expectations for the relationship between informational openness and sufficient secrecy? How does the increase in communicative accessibility, expected willingness to share and public presence affect internal hierarchies and communication channels and call for intensified PR strategies? How can it be regulated and controlled who, when, where and how information about one’s own organization is disclosed and what are the consequences? What do product, service, industry, performance, and entire organizational comparisons lead to through ranking practices and quality discourses, and what dynamics are set in motion as a result (cf. Kette and Tacke 2017)? Are organizational stress and organizational resilience increasingly becoming a phenomenon and a problem through permanent comparison and positioning (cf. Endreß and Maurer 2015; Hoffmann 2016)? On the other hand, does the

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processing of “silent” algorithms in the background generate a subcutaneous connectionist omnipresence of organizational operations? If the genesis of order through digitization, mathematization, and algorithmization protects and legitimizes organizational practices of calculating, matching, comparing, judging, and evaluating, then we may in the future not only have to deal with new forms of production of an Industry 4.0, but also with types of organizations 4.0, in which a connectionist worldview shapes the organizational outlook and thereby transports a “neo-mythical potential” (Hauser 2005, 2009, 2016) of optimized world, organization and person design, as can currently be surmised from the example of a comprehensive smart design of still predominantly digital-affine technology industries? A smart world consisting of smart organizations in which smart people do smart things with smart objects. The algorithmization of the social world makes for comprehensive smart design: smart technologies – smart places – smart data – smart thinking – smart talking – smart structures – smart people – smart collectives. Everyone and everything is clever and smart! Since the 1990s, the discourse on the virtual organization has attempted to explain the consequences and effects that arise for organizations both from worldsocietal developments such as globalization and worldwide networking and from new digital information and communication technologies (cf. Paetau 2000, 2001). Particular emphasis has been placed on the atopic and spatio-temporal disembedding of organizational activities, functions and relationships that accompany globalization and digitization. Initially, the virtualization of companies was described predominantly for organizations in the global economy as the deconstruction of “almost all constituent elements of companies” (Littmann and Jansen 2000, p. 49): We are used to thinking of companies as self-contained, integrated entities. They are physically located in office buildings and factories where their members reside and where the necessary materials, supplies and information are located. The physical location structures and the labor or corporate contractual relationships between the members of the enterprise generally define the boundaries of an enterprise. Of course, a firm constantly crosses these boundaries by operating in markets, e.g., procuring input goods, selling finished goods, raising or investing capital. But these border crossings correspond to a clear conception of inside and outside, of belonging and not belonging, of interfaces and between enterprise and markets. (...) The classic boundaries of the enterprise are beginning to blur, to change both internally and externally, and in some cases to dissolve. Deeply tiered corporate hierarchies, which primarily function according to command and obedience, are increasingly being

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replaced by decentralized, modular structures characterized by autonomy, cooperation and indirect leadership. (Picot et al. 2001, p. 2)46

Model semantics such as flexibility and mobility bundle this process in the image of flat communication channels. Rigid hierarchical levels lose their significance and rigidly coupled communication structures are replaced by loosely coupled communications (networks, groups, teams, projects). Informality and creativity are declared to be the catalysts of innovation par excellence. The virtual organizational world expresses itself spatially in alternative office architectures and aesthetics. Spatial contextual design is understood as a condition of possibility for certain atmospheres, social moods and communication styles, in which flexibility, mobility, transparency and informality are to develop into innovation drivers.47 Spatial constellations are intended to initiate and represent inner attitudes and work attitudes. Offices and employees are mobilized and set into permanent motion. Complete offices, chairs, tables and walls can be configured as needed. Lively group workspaces and quiet individual workplaces are offered at the same time. The targeted establishment of communication forums is intended to facilitate informal encounters with creativity-enhancing effects. Atmospheres can be created appropriate to the respective composition of the employees. Interactions are mediatized via ICT technologies and spatial synchronicity of those physically present with those physically absent is medially produced as needed. Against this background, the classic office appears as a spatial representation and symbol of outdated work structures, as a relic from analogue times.48 Let us briefly illustrate 46

For Türk et al., however, the process of virtualization begins much earlier and is triggered by the legal figure of the legal person: The process of ‘virtualization’ of the social concept of place or space of the organization, which began in the 19th century, continues in the formative dimension of organizations. While walls and buildings initially indicated the place of order and real subsumption also took place through spatial concentration, the concept of the ‘legal person’ already led to a solely legally defined concept of place for the attribution of expenses, revenues and responsibilities. (Türk et al. 2002, p. 263) I refer here to the documentary film “Work Hard – Play Hard” (directed by Carmen Losmann, Germany 2011), in which the program of a comprehensive design of body, mind and soul of the modern organizational man is demonstrated. 48 This is sometimes a modern archaeological task, to go in search of analogue relics. In the office world, these might be yellow stickers on office doors (“I’m at work”, “Back in a minute!”, “I’m off – forever!”), anterooms, filter coffee machines, file carts and mail distribution. In this context, Bartmann’s (2012) theoretically reflective insider literature on the 47

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the connection between organizational typology and spatial typology using the example of the classic office. The locality of the office is of elementary importance for bureaucracy, for administration is characterized in the Weberian sense by three elementary components, the Kontor or office, record keeping, and the command. The locality of the Kontor enables addressability, writtenness enables protocolability, and hierarchy enables controllability (cf. Baecker 1993, p. 82). Offices, Paris writes, are “rule made of stone”: While archaic charisma and traditional autocracy, such as the absolutist monarch, seek the magnificent façade and opulent pomp, indeed power serves pomp rather than the pomp of power (...), rational or legal rule, despite all the trappings of authority, stages itself primarily as the realization of practicality, procedural fidelity and functionality. Not ornament and waste, but efficiency and organization are the message of the buildings. (Paris 2001, p. 715 f.)

The office is the architectural realization of a certain principle of work and organization, the Individual work in separate offices. The sequential dissection of work, the definition of clear responsibilities, the primacy of writing and hierarchical control, all these functional features of bureaucracy are also reflected in a characteristic spatial structure into which people fit and which happens to them as an unalterable prerequisite and factual condition of everyday life. (Paris 2001, p. 717)49

Let us conclude the presentations theoretically. The understanding of the organization as a delimited entity depends crucially on the concept of organization on which it is based. Only if spatiality is held to be constitutive of the unity and boundary of an organization and is not understood as one dimension of meaning among others, then non-spatiality can be held to be a syndrome of dissolution and delimitation. It remains to be assumed that organizations cannot do without their self-location and transformation of bureaucracy and office in the age of modern managerialism and new control doctrines reads very instructive and illustrative. Here we also find a striking counter-slogan to positive psychology and creativity euphoria: “Burnout. Creativity makes you sick” (Bartmann 2012, p. 244 ff.) Thus the “praise of routine” (Luhmann 1971b) is rehabilitated and almost becomes a health prophylactic program. 49 Paris (2001) analyzes the influences of spatial configuration on structures, functions and interactions and how space takes on different meanings in different work sequences and interaction situations. The corridor becomes an indicator of different sequences of everyday working life. Sometimes it functions as a waiting room, sometimes as a communication space, sometimes as a passageway and sometimes as an exit, depending on whether the meaning relates to audience or performance roles.

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external addressability, because communicative addressability means localizability and identifiability. It can sometimes be assumed that the more network-like the conditions become, the more intensive the efforts to form an identifiable address will be. No organization will be able to completely dispense with creating specific places and spaces. This is true not only for the audience-oriented organizations of education, social welfare, medicine, and the administration of the political system, in which persons in performance and audience roles encounter each other spatially. Interactions in organizations need places: Classrooms, offices, open-plan offices for call centre agents and factory floors for (neo)Taylorists, hospital rooms and operating theatres, lecture halls and seminar rooms, fire stations, police stations, barracks, courtrooms, parliaments etc. With interactions, the body also comes into organizational play, and with it space, even when copresence is generated medially through communication media, as in telephone and video conferencing. Bodies are in at some place in some space. It is about the organizationally conditioned placement of bodies, networking of consciousnesses, and production of person presences and opportunities for interaction. When communication “depends on interaction, spatial dependency becomes more important. (...) However, interaction-dependency always also means: space-dependency” (Luhmann 2000b, p. 263). Space “retains its significance as a substrate of interaction despite all its achievements” (Luhmann 1975a, p. 60). However, this already applies not only to human interactions but also, to an increased extent, to human-machine and machine-machine interactions, because organizations are no longer just contexts “where people meet” but where computers and robots stand and walk and conditions of space and materiality are relevant contextual variables for digital operations. This can be illustrated by the, perhaps somewhat exotic sounding, example of climate factors for server farms. The point here is the importance of geothermics, because machines also need appropriate climatic conditions in order to function optimally. For example, Iceland is considered a popular location for huge energy-intensive server farmers in the digital economy, because “money can be made from hot air” here. The optimal location variables come from the combination of cold air, hot springs and cheap electricity. That the “feel-good atmosphere for computers” motif is somewhat reminiscent of the beginning and arguments of the human relations movement closes this book on an unexpectedly thoughtful note.

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