Organizational Semiotics : a state of the art report

What is organizational semiotics? Organizational semiotics tries to understand organizations based on the use of signs, texts, documents, sign-based artefacts and communication, thereby using the results of for instance psychology, economics, and information systems science as basic disciplines. One of the aims of organizational semiotics is showing what you are doing when you are trying to understand, design or change organizations in terms of the use of for instance models and metaphors. This is done in order to liberate people from being trapped in the (unconscious) use of a specific metaphor or model type, and to make visible design space. Organizational semiotics is a branch of semiotics. Semiotics, as seen from the viewpoint of organizational semiotics, studies signs or texts or documents or signbased artefacts or perhaps memes as relatively autonomous and persistent phenomena. These texts, signs, documents are studied in their relation to their author, their reader, the world they represent, and other texts. There seems to be a triadic system (Peirce would be pleased to hear that) consisting of living creature, ecological system and sign. Psychology focuses on the living creature as a system having a mind, evolutionary biology focuses on the ecological system as a whole, and semiotics focuses on the sign. There are three fundamentally different approaches to the elementary unit of communication in semiotics, and all three have found their way now into organizational semiotics. These three approaches are based on the text, the sign and the meme as fundamental units, respectively. Organizational semiotics has found its place based on its practical applications in the field of analyzing and designing organizations, economic transactions and information systems using approaches, frameworks and methods that have been developed as alternatives to mainstream methods. Well-known methods are, for instance, linguistic analysis of communication during work, actor interaction analysis, actor task analysis, semantic analysis, norm analysis, and simulation model building.