Systems, Decisions, and Organization: From Cybernetic Legacies to Contemporary Challenges

Since the foundational works of Chester Barnard, it has been a long-standing tradition in organizational research and sociology to conceptualize organizations as systems. Traditionally conceived either as open, closed, or rational systems, Niklas Luhmann famously radicalized this view by reconceptualizing organizations as so-called “autopoietic” systems, which are open and closed simultaneously. In Luhmann’s understanding, organizations are social systems consisting of interconnected processes of communications and decisions, which can be distinguished from an outside and are enabled and restricted by its own organizational structures. This move had lasting consequences for understanding organizing and organization as an ongoing, indeterminate, and precarious accomplishment rather than a stable structure.

This joint session revisits these cybernetic and systems-theoretical legacies to ask what they offer to contemporary organizational sociology. We invite papers engaging critically or constructively with systems-theoretical, decision-theoretical, or cybernetic approaches to organization — including but not limited to: the concept of organization and its ongoing reformulation; partial, temporary, and heterophonic forms of organizing; the paradoxes and undecidability of decision-making; and potentiality, openness, and closure as organizational conditions.

We deliberately keep this theme open to a wide range of entry points — from foundational debates in cybernetics and systems thinking, to how we conceive of decisions and organizational and social order. Contributions are welcome from across this spectrum, including contemporary questions raised by societal challenges such as algorithmization and AI, climate change, aging populations and more. Submissions can be empirical, theoretical or methodological. Scholars are invited to bring their own angle into the conversation.