grgr: bureaucrazy, modernity, organizations

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 "the classical theory of bureaucratic organization (for example max weber)had 
assumed that there exists for all organizations an externally built will, whom 
they serve. this could be made plausible through hint to political domination or 
through hint to property. but when one abstracts from organizations, one will 
not find this externally formed will either. it can build itself in an effective 
way only inside of organizations, possibly inside of other organizations. the 
owner is dispossessed by the so called 'managerial revolution'. or better: he 
can only make himself effective through the form of management. obviously the 
classical theory has worked with a fiction, which, in the last analysis, is 
supposedly caused by the thought of society as a hierarchical distribution of 
ressources.   
 when one, against it, passes on to a systems-theoretical analysis of the 
important functional systems, then one can see that these are not producing 
domination but a surplus of possibilities and corresponding indefinitiness: or, 
as one also could say, future. of the system of mass media it is expected to 
communicate something new every day. science is expected to present new 
hypothesisses, and then to care about their falsification. politics is not 
limiting its future through solid purposes, which, when reached, would make 
politics useless, but it oscillates in a frame of a high number of 'values', 
whereby the support of one of these values makes the others more urgent in a 
corresponding way. economy must be able to face fluctuating money prices and 
currency relations. the system of medical treatment can count on new reports of 
illness cases day by day. the outdifferentiation of these functional systems 
implies that external criteria (like for instance status of birth, 
stratification), which could restrict the space of possibilities, are dropped. 
even art does not allow anymore that an orderer defines how a work of art should 
look. obviously in all these cases the outdifferentiation of systems, their 
operative closing and their self-referential operating lead to a surplus 
production of possibilities, which is experienced as structural uncertainty and 
directed to self-organization. even the system of law, since the middle of the 
19th century, takes itself the freedom to 'interpret' contracts with regard to 
the will of the contract concluding parties.
 organizations must be able to tune in to the thus constantly reproduced 
uncertainties. exactly for that they, as it was already said, need a 
hierarchical structure. the need for organizations in modern society can thus 
not be explained by an increase of centers of will-building, which depend on the 
carrying-out of their determination. such centers do emerge only inside of 
organizations and do not explain the need for organization. the problem, with 
which organizations find themselves confronted, is the indefinitiness of the 
future, which is constantly reproduced at a breath-taking speed, and to this 
they have to react with the ability to decide and through vertical integration 
of their own decision processes."

  (niklas luhmann: "organisation und entscheidung" [2000, posthum], pp. 415f.)

 m.o.p.a.t.: kfl