An organization’s identity lies in the non-contingent relation between contingent members and rules.

Evidence

The relationship between these two areas of variation – of joining or leaving and of rules – is thus not contingent, or is less contingent than these two areas: rules and members can be changed, but only so long as there is a concern for maintaining the ability to relate rules to members and members to rules. In this sense, one can characterize the organization mechanism in terms of the systematizing of relationships – themselves not contingent or less contingent – between contingencies. Its rationality is based on the relation-making of relations. In this, relating contingencies works self-selectively on its own possibilities, for even arbitrary selections could not be combined arbitrarily. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 781

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘relation-making of relations’ — the mechanism that relates two contingencies into a stabilizing structure — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting characterization of organizational identity and rationality.
• XREF: Explains why Stevens can abandon his own judgment: the organization’s entire point is that members relate to rules — the person becomes a placeholder (‘independently of who fills them’).
• SEED: Article angle: ‘relation-making of relations’ as the anatomy of institutional deference — when the non-contingent core (the butler role, the faceless system) persists regardless of who fills it.