Organizations reduce complexity by converting many contingencies into one stable structure

Evidence

Consequently, organization is a particular way of creating systems by increasing and reducing contingencies. This principle is carried into organizational systems and is formulated by means of identifying ‘jobs’ in the sense of employment positions. Each job indicates a point which links contingent programmes of conduct (= conditions for the correctness of conduct), and contingent communication relationships with, in each case, one contingent person. It is only the identity of the job which lets these different aspects emerge as contingent. At the same time, this identity, as point of reference for making connections, reduces the arbitrariness of these contingencies, since not every person and not every communication network is suited to every duty. Thus, under increasingly restrictive conditions, contingency can be specified with an increasing improbability attached to it. Thereby a more or less non-contingent construction arises from linking up elements which could all be different. In the case of a high complexity of the contingent, its relation-making and its intercontingency serve to reduce complexity. While scholasticism still held the simple as necessary and therefore claimed combination as contingency2 and thus maintained ‘Ex multis contingentibus non potest fieri unum necessarium’ (It is not possible for one necessity to emerge from many contingencies), we today would tend to deplore the cumbersomeness of organizations and the inflexibility of obsolete structures, in other words we would lament that contingency has become necessary. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 782

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines organization as a contingency-management mechanism — the job/position as the fixed point that links contingent conduct programs, persons, and communication networks.
• XREF: Connects to the stated thesis: Stevens’s head-butler role is precisely the ‘identity of the job’ reducing the contingency of person, conduct-program, and network into a fixed structure. — connects to: Selective moderation fragments one platform into many divergent versions — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 592