Post #3851399

Fair warning: this one gets philosophical. Someone once told me that OST is structuralism, and that we should embrace poststructuralism instead. It was a serious objection from a thoughtful person. Because if OST were structuralism, the criticism would be right. Structuralism holds that meaning and behaviour are determined by underlying structures, fixed and universal, operating independently of context. That is exactly what organisations do not need: another universal template to impose. The confusion is understandable. The design principles sound like structural prescriptions. DP1 produces bureaucracy. DP2 produces self-managing groups. It sounds like a binary choice between two fixed forms, one wrong and one right. Stephen Pepper, in World Hypotheses (1942), identified four ways of understanding the world, each grounded in a different root metaphor. Mechanism sees the world as a machine: reducible to parts, predictable, deterministic. Structuralism belongs to mechanism's family: there is a correct architecture, find it, impose it, and the system will work. Merrelyn Emery placed OST in a different category: contextualism, where the root metaphor is the event in context. Nothing can be understood apart from the situation it is embedded in. Nothing can be copied, because you cannot reproduce the full context that gave it meaning. DP1 and DP2 are not structures. They are genotypical principles: descriptions of where responsibility for control and coordination is located. The phenotypical expression of either principle is unlimited. A DP2 group in a hospital looks nothing like a DP2 group in a software company or on a fishing vessel. What they share is not form but principle. The group designs its own organisation, in its own context, for its own work. (1/2)