ORGANISATIONAL IDENTITY AND SELF-TRANSFORMATION Organisational Identity and Self-Transformation An Autopoietic Perspective DAVID SEIDL Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © David Seidl 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. David Seidl has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Organisational identity and self-tranformation : an autopoietic perspective 1. Group identity 2. Identity (Psychology) 3. Organisational sociology 4. Social structure 5. Autopoiesis I. Title 302.4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2005929780 ISBN 9780754644583 (hbk) Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Foreword by Robert Cooper ix Preface xiii Chapter 1: Autopoiesis, Luhmann, Spencer Brown 1 Introduction 1 1. New Systems Theory: The Concept of Self-Referential Autopoietic Systems 2 2. Luhmann’s Theory of Autopoietic Social Systems 7 3. A Theory of Observation: Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form 24 4. The Laws of Form and the Theory of Social Systems 32 Chapter 2: Organisation as Autopoietic System 35 Introduction 35 1. Organisation and Decision 36 2. Organisation and Society 45 3. Organisation and Interaction 53 4. Organisational Culture 59 5. Summary 64 Chapter 3: Organisational Identity 67 Introduction 67 1. Concepts of Organisational Identity in the Literature 67 2. Organisational Identity in the Context of Autopoiesis 75 3. Forms of Self-Description 91 4. Multiple Self-Descriptions 100 5. Summary 104 vi Organisational Identity and Self-Transformation Chapter 4: The Logic of Self-Transformation 107 Introduction 107 1. Self-Transformation and the Concept of Change 107 2. The Decision to Change the Self-Description 113 3. Paradox and the Risk of Paralysis 123 4. Loose Coupling, Episode and Interactionally Framed Decision Processes 128 5. Summary 137 Chapter 5: An Evolutionary Model of Self-Transformation 139 Introduction 139 1. Luhmann’s General Theory of Evolution 139 2. Variation and the Interactionally Framed Decision Process 143 3. Selection and the Differentiation between Organisation and Interactionally Framed Decision Process 149 4. Re-Stabilisation 154 5. Summary 159 Conclusion: The Distinctions of the Study 161 Bibliography 165 Index 185 List of Figures 1.1 Types of autopoietic systems 8 1.2 The logical structure of the statement ‘This statement is false’ 30 1.3 The tunnel connecting marked and unmarked state 31 2.1 The form of decision in the fact dimension 37 2.2 The form of decision in the time dimension 38 2.3 The relation of meaning, society and communication 49 2.4 The relation of meaning, society, organisation and concrete decision 50 2.5 Organisational culture as part of the societal communication possibilities 62 3.1 The relationship between substantive, reflective and corporate identity 74 3.2 The interplay between operative and integrative functions 85 3.3 The relationship between self-description, image and reputation 88 3.4 Self-description as simple distinction 92 3.5 Self-description as double distinction 92 4.1 The possibilities of the system 110 4.2 Change as a shift between available and unavailable possibilities 111 4.3 The form of the decision on a new self-description 112 4.4 The decision to change the self-description as an oscillation between alternative self-descriptions 116 4.5 The oscillation between alternative self-descriptions as a situation in which (logically) all possibilities become available 118 4.6 The meaning of a self-descriptive text 120 4.7 Stabilisation of meaning of a self-descriptive text through secondary texts 120 4.8 Decision situation with alternative meanings of a self-description 122 Acknowledgements I would like to thank everybody who supported me on my journey through the jungle of distinctions and self-referential loops. I am particularly grateful to Dirk Baecker, Andrew Brown, Geoff Hodgson, André Kieserling and most of all, John Hendry, who did not become tired discussing paradoxes with me. I am also indebted to Suzanne Leão-Grötsinger, Nicola Prinz and Artemis Gause for type- setting and editing the manuscript. D.S. Stanford Spring, 2005 Foreword Humanity mirrors and reproduces itself through the work of its systems. We may normally think of the systems through which we live and work as providers of structures that direct our thinking and actions or as producers of products that satisfy our needs and cater to our interests, but they perform another, and perhaps more radical, human service: they create and recreate the forms and appearances that constitute the immediate reality of our world. Without the constant work of reproduction and repetition by our systems, the human world would dissolve and disappear and so would its human habitants since we can only know and maintain ourselves as reflections of the objects and structures that serve as props for our daily living. The supermarket has to refill its empty shelves each night in order to ensure its continuation the following day, the newspaper must reassemble the news of the world on a daily basis in order to ensure its repeated publication, and the television station must animate the television screen with the continuous presentation of audio-visual images. The empty supermarket, the newspaper that does not appear, the lifeless television screen simply illustrate the existential shock that would accompany the disappearance of the constitutive forms and meanings of the human world. The constant work of human systems is thus radically focussed on saving the appearances of the human world. In this interpretation, the objects that support us in the daily work of living are not just instrumental tools to facilitate the tasks of existence or to extend our powers. They are also, and perhaps more significantly, the means for mirroring the human image through projections and extensions of itself into the environment. In this way, the human system talks back to its users to assure them that they are living in a human world. In saving the appearances, the system also saves its human users and reminds them that they are habitants of a human world. A basic strategy in saving human appearances is the fitting together of the human body and its environment so that the human organs and senses, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, can conveniently fit the various spaces into which the body projects itself: the chair is made to accommodate the shape of the body and its tiredness, the book can be held in the hand and within range of the eyes, the telephone connects directly with the ear. Such examples underline the significance of the immediate and continuous presence of the specific contents of the human world as well as their presentability and hence their ready readability. Body and environment are thus organically intertwined. When this organic intertwining breaks down, the meaningful objects and structures of the world dissolve and disappear. Seen from this perspective, human systems are structured connections or organisations of bodily organs and senses with the supportive objects of their environments. Organisations thus can be meaningfully understood as extensions of human organs and senses. This is an old idea which has been lost in the modern stress on organisations as instrumental systems. We see it in the medieval idea of