An approach to formalizing organizational open systems concepts

Abstract

The view of organizations as open systems has recently received substantial attention. Under this view, an organization is a group of cooperative and competitive units working together to achieve certain individual and social goals. In this article, we propose an approach to formalize open systems concepts based on ontology, the branch of philosophy dealing with models of the world. Specifically, we propose a dual view of organizations - as wholes and as aggregates of components. This duality provides for viewing organizational units as both independently behaving components of the organization, and, in the same time, as subject to organizational constraints or laws. The laws force the components to cooperate, exchange information and coordinate their activities with other units. We conjecture that our proposed approach can provide precise formal definitions for open system concepts.