What is at first experienced as a promise (“You will be going to school soon!”), can also turn out unfavourably (“So much homework again!”). Once upon a time one was a ruler or farmer for life. Dealing with roles, in this society, must be learned from childhood on. Where does the challenge lie? One must …
An environment’s rational attitude normally interprets the non-predictable as chaos. That which cannot be accessed through cause and effect causalities, will, correspondingly, be processed reactively. In organisations which are very rationally structured, this phenomenon is called ‘fire-fighting’. Everything which is surprising and has not been reckoned with, is seen as fire, which must be extinguished, …
The rational approach opposes innovation in a not insignificant way. Innovation, according to N. Luhmann, always alters the expectations of a system as to what is to happen. For example, Wikipedia changed expectations about how the gathering of information functioned globally, the internet how this is accessed! A new production technology changes the expectations about …
Rationality assumes that the world is unambiguous: 2+2 = 4. Mathematics is both factual (2+2 is not 4 ‘and’ 4,2) as well as social (2+2 is not 3 for one and 5 for the other), and also chronologically unambiguous (2+2 is not 3 today and 5 tomorrow). Therefore, it is the natural sciences world which …
Rational procedures set themselves (attractive) goals. This immediately leads to a contraction of perception, response-readiness and goal achievement activities. The problematic aspect here (and in this instance it is solely about this), is the fact that the environment is becoming ever more ambiguous and equivocal. If there are now goals with which a system is …
Those who proceed rationally, rely on known factors. Otherwise they would have no basis for their calculations. Familiarity presupposes a past, as the future cannot be known! This is why rational approaches are based on the past and with it, they assume that time will remain sufficiently stable and that this is meaningful, because only …
Do things occur in organisations, which were never decided, but, nevertheless, are effective? N. Luhmann (in conjunction with E. Schein) gave this phenomenon the name organisational culture. For him, this was the receptacle for everything in organisations which is intangible, not directly controllable, not directly addressable. It is effective, because there are ‘unwritten’ and ‘unspoken’ …
A central starting premise of this metatheory of change is that it does not originate from the uniqueness and order of the world, but from the necessity to make distinctions, in order to react meaningfully to the world. Stability is based upon the fact that everything refers back to itself and therefore creates entangled, paradoxical, …
You cannot desire the desires of tomorrow. Which future will seem attractive tomorrow, what needs, what options, what plans will be relevant, cannot be decided in advance or even planned for. This is what is meant by the entanglements of the future future. This time modality is also highly relevant to change processes, because humans, …
The future is usually different than you think. The future (=arriving) present differs from the present (=expected) future. This difference is fundamental to the regulation of time systems. If a system confuses its own future expectations and plans with an actually arriving future, it will be blind to what is coming and instead will see …