Organizations deserve more attention than they have been receiving, and above all: attention in a different way.
To assert this may seem daring, given the many ways in which organizations become the subject of communications in everyday life and in the relevant sciences. But perhaps this is precisely a reason to focus more attention on organization (and we switch from the plural to the singular).
In a theoretical perspective, this is true in view of the fact that the question of the essence of organization (as is typical with essence questions, with What-Questions per se) seems to have become unproductive. But also in practical-political terms it might be important to presuppose a different understanding of organization.
Precisely because organizations (plural again!) have become so important and so indispensable for modern society, indeed for modern life, it might be important to be able to better grasp their "inherent logic". Especially when remote determination (Ferndetermination) – be it by owners or other "rulers", be it by liberal or socialist ideologies, be it by their own organized interest groups, becomes increasingly questionable, it could become important to equip organizations with a self-understanding that enables them to take Responsibility for their own cause.
There is talk of decentralization, more flexibility is demanded, for example, for the regulation of working hours or for the flattening of hierarchies or for the elimination of the dispensable. But buzzword fashions in the consulting business may also be part of the external factors already mentioned, which disregard the question, which is too complex for them, of whether it is not the individual organization that can best find out for itself how it can best manage. When "participation" is practiced, it is no longer a pathos word to show the way to become human or to treat people as human; it is about the way to achieve the best possible results.
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Luhmann, Niklas. Organisation und Entscheidung. 3. Aufl. Wiesbaden: VS Verl. für Sozialwiss, 2011, p. 7.
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If one wants to gain a relatively light-hearted picture of organizations, it is advisable to go back about 150-200 years. As a starting point, one can then recognize an understanding of organization that is not clearly demarcated from concepts such as Order or Organism and which, in this vagueness, can be assigned without hesitation to modern developments in state and economy. Organization is the execution of rule or the execution of production – in either case a phenomenon of relevance to society as a whole. Heinrich Stephani, for example, demands in his Grundriß der Staatserziehungswissenschaft that the educational system "receive an appropriate organization extending through the entire state. Without organization, "despite all good will, nothing beneficial can be expected, because, according to an eternal law of nature, every force needs organs for its effectiveness, through which it can express itself expediently. Accordingly, organization is conceived in its unity by a scheme of reason and its progress is measured by the extent to which it achieves an ideal . In modern terms: organization is not differentiated against society and social functional areas and is not understood as a system of its own type, not as a "bureaucracy".
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LUHMANN, Niklas, 1981. Soziologische Aufklärung 3. Online. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. [Accessed 23 July 2022]. ISBN 978-3-531-11394-4, p. 335–389.