Questions of principle are sometimes regarded as too unpractical to be important, but I suggest that that is certainly not the case in our subject. The range of phenomena that we have to deal with is so broad that, were it to be dealt with wholly at the technological or practical level, we would be defeated by the sheer quantity and complexity of it. The total range can be handled only piecemeal; among the pieces are those homomorphisms of the complex whole that we call “abstract theory” or “general principles.” They alone give the bird’s-eye view that enables us to move about in this vast field without losing our bearings. I propose, then, to attempt such a bird’s-eye survey.

The so-called rigor–relevance gap appears unbridgeable in the classical view of organization science, which is based on the physical sciences’ model. Constructivist scholars have also pointed out a certain inadequacy of this model of science for organization research, but they have not offered an explicit, alternative model of science. Responding to this lack, this paper brings together the two separate paradigmatic perspectives of constructivist epistemologies and of organizational design science, and shows how they could jointly constitute the ingredients of a constructivism-founded scientific paradigm for organization research. Further, the paper highlights that, in this constructivist view of organizational design science, knowledge can be generated and used in ways that are mutually enriching for academia and practice

The notion of mechanistic explanation is given a very specific meaning by Maturana. Does it influence research in human sciences? In this article an attempt is made to answer this question.

In Niklas Luhmann’s social theory, autopoiesis is the repeated work of human self-construction through which social and cultural forms are maintained against a background of their continuous dissolution and disappearance. Autopoiesis in this sense is the production and reproduction of the human world through which the human body constitutes and reconstitutes itself by making the raw material of the world fit the requirements of the body and its organs. Human production thus makes the world present to the human body and its parts such as we see in the examples of the supermarket which brings together the products of the world in one space for our visual and manual convenience and the domestic television set which literally brings home to us the distant happenings of the world. Human systems and institutions can thus be seen as means for making the world’s materials fit the human mind and body and for ensuring their continuous presence as meaningful forms. But, significantly, the production of presence depends on absence, disappearance and decay. Absence has to be seen as a major force in human production; it is the missing presence that haunts all human work and which helps us to understand the development of such modern production methods as mass production and information technology.

Key words: absence, autopoiesis, being, division, presence, production, relationality.

Modern organic metaphors for society have run parallel to the very idea of sociology as a science, starting with Comte and Spencer’s use of the term “social organism” (Comte, 1830–42; Spencer, 1897). These metaphors provide a self-renewing source of debate, analogies, and disanalogies. Processes of social regulation, conservation, growth, and reproduction provoke an irresistible epistemic resonance and make us lose little time in offering explanations resembling those of biological regulation, conservation, growth, and reproduction. The phenomenon has not been restricted to metaphor-hungry social scientists: the final chapter of W. B. Cannon’s The wisdom of the body (1932) is called “Relations of biological and social homeostasis.” Attempts to apply a modern theory of living organisms – the theory of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980) – to social systems are but the latest installment in this saga. Despite the appeal of the organic metaphor, there are good reasons to remain skeptical of these parallels. “Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede,” says G. K. Chesterton (1910) ironically in his essay against the medical fallacy. Doctors may disagree on the diagnosis of an illness, he says, but they know what is the state they are trying to restore: that of a healthy organism (implying, admittedly, a rather unproblematic concept of health). In social systems, a “social illness” confronts us with precisely the opposite situation: the disagreement is about what the healthy state should be.

Excerpt: Concluding that cognitive structures and instruments are unconditional or arbitrary because they are not, and cannot be derived from external boundary conditions, is mistaken, since internal boundary conditions must also be taken into account. Firstly, there are the developmental constraints of cognitive evolution itself; cognitive as well as organic evolution is subject to what has been evolved before. Cognitive evolution in our time, therefore, would find rather limited degrees of freedom. Further, cognitive instruments exert themselves in continuous co-evolution with organic instruments for meeting organically defined needs and requirements. This means that cognitive systems cannot be explained by reference to what is called their object, but only through their organic genesis. This justifies efforts made to look for a closer relationship between cognitive and organic evolution.

Excerpt: The term embodiment suggests a return to the body (or to a physical or perceivable realm) of something that was (but should not be) previously separated from it. This phenomenon can be found in a wide range of contexts; for example, abstract entities, such as computer programmes, may acquire dynamics when executed in material devices; theoretical ideas can become operative when put in relation to practical or contingent situations; or, similarly, when considered as properties of bodies (including brains), mental capacities recover a physical nature. The return we refer to has an explanatory character: it is motivated by an assumption that embodiment may throw light upon areas where disembodied explanations are unsatisfactory. Many scientific and philosophical traditions have postulated privileged realms (e.g. Platonic worlds) deprived of materiality, dynamics, interactions or praxis for explanation, but they priorise the know that in front of the know how and may thus side-step the more complex problems. This is the reason why it is important to explore a differently motivated epistemology, one able to approach phenomena in their original embodied situations. Then, a claim for embodiment would not be a demand for a restitution, but an urge to start from the beginning, from the things themselves.

In recent decades, the scientific study of complex systems (Bar-Yam 1997; Mitchell 2009) has demanded a paradigm shift in our worldviews (Gershenson et al. 2007; Heylighen et al. 2007). Traditionally, science has been reductionistic. Still, complexity occurs when components are difficult to separate, due to relevant interactions. These interactions are relevant because they generate novel informationwhich determines the future of systems. This fact has several implications (Gershenson 2013).