On Organizations: Beyond Institutions and Hierarchies

In this chapter we argue that organizations emerge when members of a collective produce a closed network of recurrent interactions or relations. Interactions can be direct communications, such as everyday conversations, or indirect communications, such as when people coordinate their actions as an outcome of sharing a context or culture. A closed network, or ‘closure’, means that the collective has decision rules and mechanisms to make up their own minds about relevant issues and produce, through their actions and decisions, a whole that maintains a separate existence. We also make a clear distinction between collectives, institutions and organizations. As for organizations the focus of this book is on viable systems. These organizations have recursive structures of autonomous units within autonomous units where organizational cohesion is achieved by the willing alignment of individuals’ purposes, which recognize the synergistic advantage of their coordination. In line with the concepts introduced in Chap. 2 , control means to a large degree, enabling the self-regulation of autonomous units. In this chapter we introduce concepts to deal with recursive organizations. In the next chapter we develop this approach in full by explaining the Viable System Model, which is a model that balances autonomy and cohesion.