The Organization Theorem

Abstract

In the previous chapters, four axioms have been presented and discussed that serve to achieve the overall goal of the Ψ-theory, which is to extract the essence of an organization from its actual appearance. The operation axiom tells us that the implementation independent essence of an organization is that it consists of actor roles and that the acts performed by (the subjects that fulfill) the actor roles can be divided into two kinds: production acts and coordination acts. As with the actor roles, these acts and the resulting facts are abstracted from their implementation. In addition, the distinction axiom tells us that subjects, in fulfilling actor roles, exert three basic human abilities: performa, informa, and forma. Through the distinction axiom, a substantial reduction of complexity and diversity is achieved, regarding both the coordination and the production in an organization. Moreover, at the ontological level of abstraction, which coincides with the performa ability, the number of actor roles is small, and therefore very well manageable. Lastly, the transaction axiom provides another major reduction in complexity and diversity in that it reveals universal socionomic patterns of coordination that hold for all enterprises. The question addressed in this section is how these benefits can be combined into one concise, comprehensive, coherent, and consistent notion of enterprise, such that the (white-box) model of this notion of enterprise may rightly be called an ontological model of an enterprise. The answer to the question is the organization theorem. We will state it now and discuss it later.