Dynamics and Change in Organizations

Organizational semiotics offers a semiotic approach to the analysis and design of organizations, economic transactions and information systems. Semiotics studies signs, in the form of texts, documents, sign-based artefacts like information systems, and memes as relatively autonomous and persistent phenomena. These signs are studied in their relation to their author, their reader, the world they represent, and other signs. Well-known methods of organizational semiotics are, for instance, actor interaction analysis, actor task analysis, semantic analysis, and norm analysis. An organization is seen as a group of people that do not only share rules of language, customs, and habits, but also participate in the social construction of these rules.Organizational changes and dynamics are characterized by: problem solving within the context of bounded rationality, and propagation of adaptive patterns of behaviour in evolutionary time; communication, existing of the exchange of object signs and norm signs, leading to the perturbation of self-organizing psychic and social systems; creation and annihilation of social affordances (social constructs) and the norms attached to them; actions, for instance communicative actions, and the creation of information systems and other artefacts; and the creation, change, conversion and transfer of knowledge-based on the above. This volume is divided into parts dedicated to evolutionary and systems-theoretical approaches (one and two), behaviour-oriented approaches (two and three), and knowledge oriented approaches (five). These three parts roughly correspond to Andersen's distinction between a system-theoretical view of signs as systems, a sociological view of signs as behaviour, and a psychological view of signs as knowledge.