"Autopoiesis in Organization Theory and Practice" considers the potential of autopoiesis theory to provide a new unifying framework for the study of organizations as systems and of organizational phenomena as emergent phenomena. The papers in this volume integrate open systems theory with the pioneering work of Maturana and Varela (1980, 1992) on autopoiesis in biological systems. Viewing organizations as living systems opens a powerful new perspective for describing, explaining, and even predicting organizational phenomena across the full spectrum of organizations and environments, from stable to highly dynamic. This collection of papers brings into focus both the great potential and the important challenges facing organizational thinkers in building new organization theory and deriving new principles for management practice based on autopoiesis theory. The topics include the fundamental features of autopoiesis theory, the key conceptual issues surrounding the use of autopoiesis concepts in representing and analyzing organizations as living systems, and the practical applications of autopoiesis theory in designing organizations and managing organizational processes.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2017, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in May 2017. EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises are facing in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that dealing with these challenges requires rigorous and scientific solutions, focusing on the design and engineering of enterprises. The goal of EEWC is to stimulate interaction between the different stakeholders, scientists as well as practitioners, interested in making Enterprise Engineering a reality. The 12 full papers and 4 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: formalisms; standards and laws; business processes; normalized systems and evolvability; ontologies; and organization design.

This book attempts to make sense of a new area of integrated study, namely information systems and information technology (IS/IT) and the organization. It also aims to bring this mix into the broader theme of complexity as applied to organization and management and to draw useful conclusions about how to organize and how to manage IS/IT in the knowledge era. The author argues in favour of a more action-oriented - as opposed to planning dominated - approach to information systems management. Key topics discussed include: complexity, enacted cognition and autopoiesis applied to organizations; managerial action as a foil to the prevailing managerial paradigm; managerial action and the formation of cultural knowledge contexts in organizations and an holistic approach to information systems development. The book concludes with consideration of the problems surrounding epistemology. Organizational Knowledge and Technology will be warmly welcomed by academics and researchers working in the areas of technology, management, information systems and organizational science as well as information systems managers.

As a topic, organization design is poorly understood. While it is featured in most management books as a chapter dedicated to organizational structures, it is unclear whether organization design is a one-off event or an ongoing process. Thus, it has traditionally been understood to be the same as an organizational configuration, with neat lines of communication and distribution of responsibilities following pre-set typologies. Yet what can be said to constitute organizational structure in this first half of the 21st century? The extraordinary growth of digital communications, the decreasing relevance of hierarchical bureaucracies, and the general demise of command-and-control have all but decimated the traditional notion of organizational structure. Organization design needs a theoretical revamping. Using a mix of design and social science theories and concepts, Rodrigo Magalhaes outlines a new human-centric interpretation of design, design principles, and design culture. He puts forward a paradigm where the organization, for purposes of its design, is considered to be a social actor in a permanent state of transformation, with significant repercussions for social and economic life. He also proposes a model of 'leaderful organization design', distinguished as practice-based, guided by values of democratic participation, and driven by design logics which places meaning-making and meaning-taking at the center of organizational life and can be adopted and adapted to suit different environments.