Organization systems rest on the double contingency of membership and rules.

Evidence

Organization systems are formed if it can be presumed that a decision can be made about joining and leaving the system and if rules can be developed for taking this decision. This assumption can also be formulated in connection with the problem of contingency. Organization presupposes that the role of membership in the system is contingent, i.e. that a non-member could become a member but also that members could become non-members, in other words, that there is a recruitment pool of possible members and that it is possible for members themselves to leave or be dismissed. This is one area of contingency. The other lies in the rules which constitute the role of the member and the rules which are designed to determine conduct in organizations. These rules too are defined contingently; they are positive in the sense that they are based on decisions and are, through this mode of validity, in regard to origin or their changeability, or by a comparison with systems in the environment, seen as contingent. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 781

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise definition of what makes a system an organization: contingent membership (join/leave) plus contingent rules, each positive and decision-based.
• XREF: Directly feeds Stevens’s head-butler role in Ishiguro: his membership in Darlington Hall is contingent (dismissible, leaveable) yet treated as absolute — Luhmann’s contingency framework exposes the deference mechanic.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘recruitment pool’ and rule-contingency as the lever that turns institutions into vehicles of ethical abdication — how treating contingent rules as non-contingent produces the total devotion Ishiguro dramatizes.