Organizations
Las organizaciones como sistemas complejos: coordinación lingüística, supervivencia institucional y riesgo de deriva burocrática.
Organizations are defined as networks of interactions among human beings. However, that definition is insufficient. Today, organizations are a privileged object of study—not because they are technological objects, but because of the growing economic role of their efficient management. There is a tendency to understand their complex structure, in the modern sense of “complexity.” In the initial classification of all the objects in the world, organizations occupy a somewhat strange position: although many of them are human creations, they are “made,” yet they share some of their characteristics with living beings. They also display autopoietic qualities, that is, they sometimes generate themselves and tend to perpetuate themselves.
This word can be interpreted in several ways. One of them is easy to confuse with certain uses of the word structure in the study of complex systems. Here, however, the term is used in its most usual sense: the way human beings combine with one another to agree on tasks and functions with the purpose of fulfilling a common undertaking.
Organizations are of diverse kinds, and there is a certain methodological risk in incorporating the typical objects of study of the social sciences into a theory of technology. The discussion takes place precisely where, in the midst of contemporary complexity, technology begins to merge with the most elementary aspects of human culture. Yet a neighborhood club, an army, a large corporation, and a modern state are complex, deliberate creations, founded with an explicit objective, in which human beings group together for a common purpose. The study of organizational structures and dynamics is a specific field that draws upon concepts from psychology, social psychology, linguistics, and sociology.
As human beings endowed with language, people have the characteristic of existing simultaneously in the physical-biological domain and in the symbolic domain, particularly in the linguistic domain. Organizations exist because among their members there are transactions that are almost entirely linguistic; therefore it is in that domain—the linguistic one—that it can be said that an organization “exists.”
Social organization stands at the boundary between the artificial and the natural, since the human being is a social being and social organization is immanent in the structure of the species. The human individual and society are enantiopoietic and co-evolutionary: it is evident that the complexity of present-day organizations is far greater than that of primitive hordes. Moreover, especially in recent decades, advances in communications, among other factors, have modified the size and complexity of human groupings: it can be argued that, in the process of co-evolution, individual development has lagged behind that of organizations. And perhaps that is fortunate, because enantiopoiesis in the opposite direction would probably lead to a type of massified human individual far removed from ethical ideals for humanity. Although it is not possible to establish categorically which organizations should be regarded as technological objects, in many cases they can be classified by virtue of their origin and explicit purposes. Thus a firm is usually a tool for and of production, that is, an organization created with a productive purpose or for profit. However, it would be too narrow an understanding to claim that even a private, profit-seeking firm limits its objectives to profit alone. The primary objective of every organization, beyond its manifest ends, is its own survival. At the very least, it must fulfill that objective in order to fulfill any other aim it may have: for example, profit and the payment of dividends to its owners. Nevertheless, when an organization confuses the objectives it seeks with the means it uses to achieve them, the organization, instead of being a means to an end that transcends it, becomes an end in itself, and a bureaucratic deformation takes place.
