Introduction

Abstract

The topic of this book is the dynamics and change in organizations. An organization, as discussed in the workshop, can be characterized as a group of people, a culture, which not only shares rules of language, custom, and habit, but also participates in the social construction of these rules (Baranauskas, this volume). A central topic of discussion has been the concept of norms. Norms can be seen as social constructs that drive, coordinate, and control our actions inside an organization (Baranauskas, this volume). Norm analysis takes a central place in the methods of the Stamper school of organizational semiotics, in this book also characterized as information field based organizational semiotics (Stamper, 1973; Liu, 2000). In the discussion about what it means that an organization changes, what the cause of these changes is, and how we can describe the dynamics of organizations, a variety of answers has been given in the workshop, namely:

• 1. Problem solving within the context of bounded rationality, and propagation of adaptive patterns of behaviour in evolutionary time.

• 2. Communication, consisting of the exchange of object signs and norm signs, leading to the perturbation of self-organizing psychic and social systems.

• 3. Creation and annihilation of social affordances (social constructs) and the norms attached to them.

• 4. Actions, for instance (1) communicative actions, and (2) the design/ creation / change of information systems and other artefacts.

• 5. Creation, change, conversion and transfer of knowledge.