The growing interest in informal and emergent features of organizations has accompanied changes both in the dominant forms of organization and prevailing academic views about how best to think about and research them. It is argued here that currently espoused dichotomous characterizations of both organizations and research approaches are over-simplified and misleading. A review of types of orga...

contemporary sociology in many ways still depends on the classical theories. the emergence of new phenomena and their increasing importance in the modern society requires new explanations. the qualitative and quantitative growth of sciences, especially humanities, in the last hundred years has made various scientific disciplines dependent on each other. this is what makes the work of contempora...

The present paper argues that a systems theory epistemology (and particularly the notion of hierarchical recursive organization) provides the critical theoretical context within which the significance of Friston's (2010a) Free Energy Principle (FEP) for both evolution and psychoanalysis is best understood. Within this perspective, the FEP occupies a particular level of the hierarchical organiza...

Novel knowledge, defined as knowledge that is not currently known to the organization, interesting, related, but indirectly connected to what the organization currently knows and therefore difficult to find, can be very beneficial to the organization. Despite the potential benefits, organizations face a number of challenges discovering novel knowledge. Tools for the discovery of highly novel kn...

A long-standing stream of organizational research suggests that our ability to theorize and reason about organizations is significantly influenced by metaphorical representations of organizations. This study contributes to this research stream by examining how different metaphors influence theory development and academic thinking about organizations. We asked scholars from UK business schools t...

Recently, engineering, artistic or cultural activities received growing interest in the literature. If we call « Design theories », the constitutional definitions of « things and/or learning about these things », those activities have in common that Design theories act there as explicit and basic organizational means. Organization theories do not define « things » or « knowledge » but « relatio...

Despite the increased salience of metaphor in organization theory, there is still very little conceptual machinery for capturing and explaining how metaphor creates and/or reorders knowledge within organization theory. Moreover, prior work on metaphor has insufficiently accounted for the context of interpreting a metaphor. Many metaphors in organization theory, including the ‘organizational ide...

Organization theory is the branch of sociology that studies organizations as distinct units in society. The organizations examined range from sole proprietorships, hospitals and community-based non-profit organizations to vast global corporations. The field’s domain includes questions of how organizations are structured, how they are linked to other organizations, and how these structures and l...

Artificial Intelligence has contributed (formal) design models and software support tools to application areas such as architecture, engineering and software design. This paper explores the effectiveness of applying design models to the area of organization (re)design. To that purpose a component-based model for (re)design of organizations is presented as a specialization of an existing generic...