Abstract
Although in general we have little or no difficulty in speaking and thinking about organisations, describing the empirical reality of organisations is far from easy. Where should we look for it? How should we study it? As is true for most cultural phenomena, organisations are markedly elusive. They cannot be treated as empirical entities. What you perceive, when ‘looking’ at organisations, are artefacts (buildings, machines) and behaviour (linguistic and other). However, neither artefacts, nor behaviour are ‘organisation-like’ in themselves. What is needed, therefore, is something that relates artefacts and behaviour to create a more or less coherent whole. Such a relation is a representation, shared, at least in part, by a number of interacting actors. It is the representation that gives both artefacts and behaviour their meaning. Clearly, we take representations (‘symbols’) not only as referring to something mental activities act upon, but as a specific type of mental activity, also referred to as ‘cognition’. If anywhere, therefore, an organisation resides in the mental activities of actors.
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van Heusden, B., Jorna, R.J. (2002). Reconsidering the Standard: a Semiotic Model of Organisations. In: Liu, K., Clarke, R.J., Andersen, P.B., Stamper, R.K. (eds) Coordination and Communication Using Signs. Information and Organization Design Series, vol 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0803-8_7
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