Organisational Identity and Self-Transformation

An Autopoietic Perspective

David Seidl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351913423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

David Seidl brings together two important issues in organization and management studies in this volume: the concept and related theory of organizational identity, and autopoietic organization theory (as originally developed by Niklas Luhmann). The contribution of the book is twofold: it provides an introduction to autopoietic organization theory and it provides a new perspective on organizational identity and self-transformation. Thus the book is relevant to both organization theorists interested in new approaches to organization and to researchers of organizational identity. The themes are reflected in the structure of the book. Chapters one and two provide an introduction to Niklas Luhmann's organization theory. Based on this, chapter three develops a new concept of organizational identity. In chapters four and five a theory of organizational self-transformation (i.e. change of identity) is developed.

Chapter 1
Autopoiesis, Luhmann, Spencer Brown

If there is anything like a central intellectual fascination in this century it is probably the discovery of the observer.¹

Introduction

Under the title of ‘new systems theory’ the last decades have seen the development of a host of promising concepts, which propagate a radical departure from our current understanding of the world.² These ideas were developed in the spirit of the General Systems Theory, an explicit aim of which was to develop abstract, general concepts that were applicable to many different disciplines. Nevertheless, the concepts of new systems theory have found hardly any recognition in the wider research community. Possible reasons for this apparent negligence might be found, on the one hand, in the complexity of the ideas and thus the effort that is necessary to become acquainted with them, and on the other hand – and probably more importantly – in the ‘revolutionary’ novelty of the ideas, which made them (almost) impossible to grasp within the conventional frame of mind.³

In the social sciences, in particular, there were initially some half-hearted attempts at applying the new concepts, but when the first results proved inconsistent the efforts were soon dropped. In this respect, Luhmann’s theory of social systems constitutes an important exception. It can be understood as a rigorous and consistent application of the new concepts to the social domain.

We begin the chapter with an account of new developments in systems theory, in particular Maturana’s and Varela’s biological theory of autopoiesis. In Section 2 we will present and explain Luhmann’s theory of social systems, which can be understood as an application of the principles of autopoiesis to the social domain. In the Section 3 we will present and explain Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form, which can serve as an analytical tool for exploring the self-referential loops of autopoietic systems.

1 New Systems Theory: The Concept of Self-Referential Autopoietic Systems

a. Systems Theory as Transdisciplinary Paradigm

‘General Systems Theory’ as an area of academic research was founded by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and others in the early fifties. The aim was to create a genuinely transdisciplinary field of research.⁴ On the grounds that different academic disciplines often dealt with very similar theoretical problems, it was believed that there was scope for synergies to be exploited. The idea was to abstract the solutions found within a specific field of research to a general level in order for other disciplines to be able to re-specify and apply them to their respective fields.⁵

The common ground on which those synergies were to rest was a specific approach to the objects of research: the systems approach. It was argued that the conventional approach of explaining characteristics of an object of observation solely on the basis of an analysis of its parts lead to ‘analytical reductionism’: many objects of observation possessed properties that could not be explained on the basis of the properties of their parts. An understanding of these so-called ‘emergent’ properties required a view of the object as a whole: as a system.

In contrast to an earlier phase of systems theory, which was based on a notion of closed systems and only analysed the internal relations between parts and whole, the General Systems tradition, as formulated by Von Bertalanffy, assumed an open systems model. It replaced the conceptualisation of systems according to the difference between whole and parts with that between system and environment.⁶ This was often explained in terms of the findings in thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics the entropy of a closed system always increases. Thus, any closed system sooner or later dissolves. At the centre of the open systems model was the idea of systems transforming inputs from the environment into outputs into the environment. The system could be described as a particular input-output relation.⁷

A ‘surpassingly radical further step’⁸ within the systems tradition was taken in the seventies with the development of the concept of self-referential systems. In contrast to the open systems model, the concept of self-referential systems was not so much concerned with input-output relations as with the self-determination of the system through its own operations. The theory of self-referential systems

maintains that systems can differentiate only by self-reference, which is to say, only insofar as systems refer to themselves […] in constituting their elements and their elemental operations.⁹

One of the most important contributions to this new phase of systems theory was the theory of autopoiesis, developed by the two biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, which will be explained in the next section.¹⁰

b. Maturana’s and Varela’s Theory of Autopoiesis

The theory of autopoiesis was developed by the two Chilean cognitive biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the sixties and early seventies. They were trying to answer the question: what is life? Or: what distinguishes the living from the non-living? Their answer was: a living system reproduces itself. This self-reproduction they referred to as autopoiesis (< Greek: αυτός = ‘self’ and ποείν = ‘to make’, ‘to produce’). An autopoietic system is a system that recursively reproduces its elements through its own elements. Varela explains:

An autopoietic system is organised (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that:

1. through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produces them; and
2. constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.¹¹

Central to the concept of autopoiesis is the idea that the different components of the system interact in such a way as to produce and reproduce the components of the system. That is to say through its components the system reproduces itself. A living cell, for example, reproduces its own elements: proteins, lipids, etc. are not just imported from outside.

[O]ne, perhaps the, major function of the living cell [is] the constant re-creation of itself from within.¹²

In contrast to allopoietic systems (< Greek: άλλος = ‘other’ and ποείν = ‘to make’, ‘to produce’), the elements of autopoietic systems are not produced by something outside the system. All processes of autopoietic systems are produced by the system itself and all processes of autopoietic systems are processes of self-production. In this sense, one can say that autopoietic systems are operatively closed. There are neither elements entering the system from outside nor vice versa.

A system’s operative closure, however, does not imply a closed system model. It only implies a closure on the level of the operations in that no operations can enter or leave the system. Nevertheless, autopoietic systems are, also open systems. All autopoietic systems have contact with their environment. Living cells, for example, depend on an exchange of energy and matter without which they could not exist. The contact with the environment, however, is regulated by the autopoietic system; the system determines, when, what and through what channels energy or matter is exchanged with the environment.

This simultaneous openness and closure of the autopoietic system becomes particularly important when considering cognitive processes. For Maturana and Varela the concept of living is directly linked to the concept of cognition.

Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition.¹³

In this sense, the operations of an autopoietic system are defined as its cognitions; life and cognition are one and the same. Hence, everything that has been said about life applies to cognition: cognition is a self-referential, autopoietic process.

In light of this, we might take a further look at the relation between system and environment. The operative closure of the cognitive system means that the environment cannot produce operations in the system. Cognitions are only produced by other cognitions of the same system. The operative closure does not, however, imply a solipsistic existence of the system; on the contrary. As Maturana and Varela argue: operative closure is a precondition for interactional openness. On the level of its operations, the autopoietic system does not receive any inputs from the environment but only perturbations (or irritations), which might trigger internal operations in the system. The particular processing of the perturbations from outside is entire...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Autopoiesis, Luhmann, Spencer Brown
• Chapter 2: Organisation as Autopoietic System
• Chapter 3: Organisational Identity
• Chapter 4: The Logic of Self-Transformation
• Chapter 5: An Evolutionary Model of Self-Transformation
• Conclusion: The Distinctions of the Study
• Bibliography
• Index