Organisation as Reflexive Structuration

2.1 The Dimensions of the Social and the Role of the Economy

All organisational action, we emphasise once again, plays out in all three dimensions of the social at once: A certain organisational vocabulary is used repeatedly as a set of interpretative patterns and is reproduced ipso facto as an element of the cognitive order of an organisation. The ‛laws’ of the formal organisation, the formal rules, evaluation procedures and leadership styles, but also the informal standards of what constitutes good work, for example, are applied, followed (or subverted) and thereby reproduced (or undermined) as the organisation’s order of legitimacy. The organisation of labour implies a form of domination over (the labour of) human beings and is reproduced as an authoritative resource through repeated practice. Know-how and technology permit domination over nature and matter and are reproduced as allocative resources by recurrent application. In general, organisational action implies recourse to a set of organisational patterns of interpretation and norms, organisational rules and resources derived from an organisational structure, which in this way―by application of organisational rules and resources―is recursively reproduced and in some circumstances modified in the process.

At first glance, Figure 1 seems merely to provide an unsatisfying juxtaposition of these dimensions of the social. Rather, it begs the question―and this is in many ways the most exciting question of organisational theory: How are the dimensions of cognition, legitimation and domination related? We all know, to put it mildly, that they have a bearing on each other: Our norms depend on our understanding of the world, on our patterns of interpretation and vice versa; our patterns of interpretation, concepts and definitions of situations are established with power, and they are, conversely, powerful means of exercising power. And whatever is considered legitimate depends likewise on power relations, just as, conversely, norms function as instruments of power. In this ‛horizontal’ direction, in the relationship of the dimensions of the social, we thus reckon with recursive relationships of constitution, and we indicate these relationships in Figure 2 by arrows, which set it apart from Figure 1 only in emphasising this recursive circularity once again.^[9]

Figure 2:

Recursiveness between the dimensions of the social.

How does the economy come into play in all of this?

The traditional way of understanding economy as the management of and struggle over scarce resources would be too narrow for Giddens―scarcity is better understood, following Commons (1936, 243), as institutional production itself, institutional scarcity.

A general social theory-based definition of economy must be conceived more broadly, and in Giddens (1984, 34) this is the case. He regards the inherently constitutive role of allocative resources in the reproduction of “societal totalities”, be they entire societies or organisations, as differentia specifica of the sphere of the economic. Indeed, only in modernity does this sphere experience that institutional differentiation which has become so self-evident to us. Modern economic institutions―money and credit, labour markets, product and financial markets, competition and enterprises all designate institutionalised practices that are historical to the highest degree―are marked by the dominance of the (re-)production of allocative resources. And for many organisations―enterprises, above all, of course―this might be a suitable characterisation. We can then speak of economic organisations. In the case of capitalist enterprises, practices of profitable (re-)production even dominate. We can take this as a starting point for a structurationist theory of the enterprise that gives economics its due without reducing the enterprise to pure economics. The acquisitive principle, as Gutenberg called it, is not an anthropological constant, not a psychologically but an “institutionally anchored regulative without which the system could not function” (Gutenberg 1973 [1955], 9, our translation). However, this institutional dominance by no means signifies that the other dimensions of the social are insignificant in and for economic practices. Rather, even when it comes to the rules and resources in and of economic organisations, we are dealing with that recursiveness between the dimensions of the social indicated in Figure 2. Economic practices go hand in hand with the reproduction not only of allocative and authoritative resources but also of rules of signification and legitimation. This manifests particularly clearly in the maintenance of the cognitive and normative order, which is shaped by accounting and bookkeeping systems―an order that recursively ensures that (economic) practices are recognised and evaluated as economic, or else modified (rationalised) until they roughly conform to that order (cf. Sydow et al. 1995, 33–40). The extent to which the rules for the constitution of meaning depend on the allocative and authoritative resources of an organisation and vice versa can also be shown, for example, by the fact that concepts for the organisation of production such as Taylorist mass production or lean production never concern only the production technology ‛per se’―assembly lines, computers, automation, storage areas and technology, transport technology―but always the practical handling of it. And this immediately implies questions about the domination of human beings, questions about legitimation, about fairness in dealing with human beings, for example, and about signification. (What exactly is lean production? What does group work mean? What are the rights and duties of a machine operator? And so on).

“Rules cannot be conceptualized apart from resources, which refer to the modes whereby transformative relations are actually incorporated into the production and reproduction of social practices. Structural properties thus express forms of domination and power” (Giddens 1984, 18).

It has already been indicated above that we can further differentiate the dimension of domination into politics and economy along the lines of the distinction between authoritative and allocative resources, as long as we keep in mind that this does not mean economy in a pure sense―that is, purified of the other dimensions of the social―but refers instead to the more or less far-reaching institutional differentiation of two spheres, one of which is concerned primarily with the domination of human beings and the (re-)production of authoritative resources, and the other primarily with domination over nature and matter and the (re-)production of allocative resources. This distinction of practice is quite common also within organisations, as the―critically intended―talk of ‛political decisions’ in enterprises indicates whenever considerations of power prevail over economic concerns. We can then inquire further about the recursive relationship between these two dimensions: the use of power resources (facilities in Figure 2) may increase efficiency and/or profit, just as, conversely, economic resources increase power over human beings. And we can ask about the relationship of each, now separated into politics and economics, to the interpretative schemes and norms by means of which we define the ‘is and ought’ in organisations. We will not go into these differentiations in any more detail here, but instead conclude by pointing out―using the example of law and politics―that organisational action stands in a recursive constitutional relationship not only to organisational but also to supra-organisational structures―to the institutional environment, as we can say in the language of new institutionalism. It is constrained and enabled by the institutional environment―think of the political and legal regulation of telecommunications or TV markets, labour protection and co-determination laws and so on―and it has an impact on these supra-organisational structures (in this example, political and legal structures). The latter does not always involve strategic intent, but often enough it does―namely to influence those restricting and enabling structures. Organisations try to regulate “their” regulations, that is, the ones that affect them: regulation of regulation, recursive regulation. Ortmann and Zimmer (1998) call this “strategic institutionalisation”.

2.2 Institutions and Institutionalisation

It could be shown that this way of wielding influence (for instance, via lobbying) involves the use of communicative, normative, political and economic means and that it targets all the above-mentioned dimensions of the social: seeking to change interpretations and interpretative schemes^[10] and influence perceptions of legitimacy and norms^[11] as well as political and economic conditions. The “return of society to organisational theory” then also means addressing the enormous influence of organisations, and especially of enterprises, on the institutional―but particularly the regulatory―constitution of society as a whole. Business administration has always had a certain interest in this topic. Today, the pertinent questions of how environmental protection laws, accounting rules, capital market laws, banking regulations, anti-trust legislation and so on affect (the efficiency of) enterprises are handled predominantly by property rights theory, transaction cost theories, agency theories, political economy and public choice theory, as one can now learn from the instructive anthology Regulation and Corporate Policy [Regulierung und Unternehmenspolitik] by Sadowski, Czap, and Wächter (1996). Usually, however, it is how certain regulations operate―especially their efficiency effects―that is of interest. In business administration, the question begins with a regulation that is somehow assumed or alleged to be given in order to trace its effects on enterprises and ‛the’ economy. Influence in the opposite direction (from the enterprises to those regulations), as obvious as it is, is much more seldom discussed.^[12] From the perspective of structuration theory, however, institutions and regulations must be analysed from the outset as a―restricting and enabling―medium and as a product of action, which is to say also as a product of strategic action that calculates and seeks to influence the effects of institutionalisation processes and regulations in light of well-understood interests.

Tracing the lines of the Giddensian dimensions of the social permits us to distinguish and consider institutional orders that pervade all of society―all of its symbolic, political, economic and legal institutions―in this recursive constitutional relationship to action and, now especially, to the action of organisations as corporate actors. This ties institutions and institutional orders more closely to action, more closely to strategic action and therefore more closely to economic and other interests and thus more closely to power, conflict and politics than is often the case in neo-institutionalism. And if we follow Giddens (1984, 17) in defining institutions as those societally imposed regular practices that have the greatest distanciation in time and space within societal totalities (for details, see Ortmann, Sydow, and Türk 1997, 25–33), then perhaps this is also a sufficient response to concerns voiced, for example, by Türk (1997) and Nelson (1997): that the concept of institution is too vague to be truly fertile.

Societally imposed practices―this definition, however, requires further clarification of the concept of rule it contains.

2.3 Rules, Resources and Modalities

Giddens defines rules―those of the constitution of meaning as well as those of legitimation―quite simply as generalisable procedures of practice. As “generalisable procedures applied in the enactment/reproduction of social practices” (Giddens 1984, 21), they are inherent in the actions of the actors (and subsequently in their memory)―and nowhere else. Verbally formulated rules, such as those found in legal codes or organisational instructions, job descriptions etc., that is, in the ‘blueprints’ of formal organisations, are not rules in this sense, but “codified interpretations of rules” (Giddens 1984, 21). Games in organisations, to which we will return below (see Section 2.5), are based largely on (game!) rules in the sense of practised procedures that are not codified.

What we get from all of this are some not very obvious, yet very important distinctions for which the usual terminology of organisational theory often has no equivalent:

1. a regular praxis, made up of organisational practices, in which

2. rules, understood as generalisable procedures, are inherent; these

3. can be formulated as “codified interpretations of rules” (written laws, formal organisational ‛rules’), and finally

4. beyond rules (and resources, see below), the additional structural properties of social systems that are produced, reproduced and altered by that regular praxis, but are themselves neither rules nor resources: for example, the division of labour, hierarchy, the spatiotemporal interrelatedness of interactions, or centralisation―in short, everything that is usually called structure in organisational theory but is not structure in the narrower sense of rules and resources that we have given it here.

The strange thing about rules of all kinds is that they cannot themselves govern the way they are applied and therefore, strictly speaking, it is only in this situational application that their meaning is fully decided―also and especially their meaning for what happens in organisations. This is of particular significance when it comes to formal―explicitly formulated―‛rules’ (better: codifications of rules), which traditionally play such a prominent role in organisational theory. Application, which only appears to be secondary because it is derived from the formal ‛rule’, is in reality eminently constitutive for the meaning of this ‛rule’, and the concept of informal organisation points to how this supposedly so marginal application is of the utmost importance for the functioning of any organisation, even and especially when that application consists in a deviation, an undermining―indeed, even when it consists in the violation of the formal set of ‛rules’.^[13] As Alfred Schutz (1967 [1932]) has said, in this set of ‛rules’ is a certain emptiness that needs to be (ful-)filled in and by application. This is as true for rules of constituting meaning as it is for rules of legitimation, which can only be (ful-)filled, supplemented/replaced in situational, contextual circumstances, equipped with the indices of the here and now―even as they are stripped, in concrete action, of their typicality.

Giddens’ term modalities refers to the rules and resources that are (ful-)filled in this way, deployed hic et nunc by someone with a specific biography and competency. According to this interpretation,^[14] they designate the place of mediation between action and structure (between subject and object), and therefore Giddens’ reception of Schutz is, on this reading, of some significance for the notoriously controversial question of whether Giddens succeeded in this mediation.^[15] If we have continuously cited the example of the constitution of meaning by use of interpretative schemes and the concomitant (re-)production of a cognitive order as its corresponding structural dimension, all this applies equally to the constitution of legitimacy by use of norms and the concomitant (re-)production of an order of legitimation―and to every practical intervention in the world by use of facilities (in the broadest sense) and the concomitant (re-)production of an order of domination. The latter proceeds with recourse to resources made available by an existing order of domination, and every disposition under situational circumstances implies an analogous movement from an emptiness―the somehow still empty generality of resources as means to typical but not concretely defined ends―to the fullness of the now, here and in this way, which the user only imparts to it in praxis.^[16]

As explained above, we consider it a great advantage that Giddens’ concept of structure in this way includes specific resources, especially with a view to organisations and especially enterprises. Note that this concept of resources avoids the opposition between the material and the immaterial, even if it sometimes seems otherwise:

“Some forms of allocative resources (such as raw materials, land, etc.) might seem to have a ‘real existence’ in a way which I have claimed that structural properties as a whole do not. But their ‘materiality’ does not affect the fact that such phenomena become resources, in the manner in which I apply that term here, only when incorporated within processes of structuration” (Giddens 1984, 33).

That we first must make resources into resources, that we have to generate them in recursive loops of organisational praxis as―socially significant―resources before we can use them as such; this is an insight that is thoroughly incorporated in the resource-dependence approach of organisational research as well as in the resource-based view of strategic management, where, as one can see, it has considerable consequences for the praxis of organisation and management (on this, see Knyphausen-Aufseß 1997).

2.4 The Binding of Time and Space

In Giddens’ terminology, structures―that is, rules and resources―‛bind’ time and space.^[17] ‛Instantiated’ in situated practices, they provide the latter with temporospatial extension, institutionalisation and a globalisation that can be supplemented, replaced, offset or corrected by certain forms of localisation and regionalisation. Technologies of storage, irrigation, conservation, transport and, as of recently, especially data storage and processing as well as communication provide the enormous possibilities of time-space extension that we are confronted with today. Organisations are the medium and result of the development of precisely such technologies: They enable or promote technology development, which in turn massively accelerates the development, proliferation and power of organisations in society. With ‛storage’, Giddens―with a view to modernity―has in mind also and above all the storage of authoritative resources in memory, in the form of writing and, today, by means of computer technology; but he also has in mind the form of organisation, which considerably increases the possibilities for storage. The origin of this special nuance (Giddens 1979, 198–233) in a tradition which, from Husserl via Schutz and Heidegger to Derrida,^[18] has made the temporality and spatiality of human existence a prominent object of reflection, may have impeded―and may continue to impede―its reception in Germany. However, this will change in times when dichotomies such as global–local indicate spatially the distance and the rending tension contained therein. The small dairy cooperative in East Frisia whose dried milk is enjoyed (months or years after production?) by children in southern Africa is a standard example of what Giddens (1990, 64–65) calls “time-space distanciation”―the globalisation of modernity, a globalisation that initially occurs naturally and only later becomes an object of reflection, which is also to say an object of reflection on the structuration of global enterprises and enterprise networks.

The fact that organisation is always about spatiotemporal organisation―about production schedules, time worked and time lost, operating hours, just-in-time production, night work and overtime, cycle times, target times, set-up times, break times; and about production spaces, reworking and storage spaces, transport routes and communication channels, outsourcing, regional and global networks―requires no explanation. Modernity has given rise to enterprises that, on the one hand, have nearly disappeared from view―that are ‛hollow,’ ‛virtual’―and, on the other hand, operate worldwide; enterprises that are detached―‛disembedded’―from their local contexts and ‘re-embedded’ only via organisation, information technology and communication technology.

The close attention Giddens’ social theory pays to “time, space and regionalisation”, his concept of structure and structuration especially tailored to this and his keen eye for the fact that the concept of space-time distanciation is directly related to the theory of power (Giddens 1984, 258)―in other words, that space-time extension by way of organisation is of fundamental significance for the extension of power: this too contributes to the attraction his theory holds for research on organisational theory.

2.5 Organisational Change

Organisational change may be more or less intentional or unintentional. In the former case, we will speak of reorganisation, in the latter of evolution. ‘Evolution’ may refer to individual organisations,^[19] but above all to the genres, here populations of organisations. Of course, they are interrelated: Evolution also takes place through reorganisation, the factual consequences of which are, incidentally, never entirely intended. But evolution proceeds also by way of change that is unplanned from the outset, as well as by selection. Evolution, as we use the term, does not imply any sort of advancement, however defined.

In the case of reorganisation, the intentionality of change means that it is intended but not that it is realised as intended. In opposition to rationalist textbook versions of reorganisation, we have borrowed Levi-Strauss’ image of bricolage, tinkering: a productive action that works on an unfinished task with a limited supply of means―a tinker box (Ortmann et al. 1990, 391–395). Bounded rationality, goals that change depending on opportunities―think of the opportunities created by new technologies―and tool-like means for tasks of a type only partly defined by ends: these are the most important features of tinkering as well as of reorganisation, which makes changes to the structure of organisations, to their rules and resources, in a political process that ultimately outstrips the metaphor of the lonely tinkerer. Reorganisation is the conscious, reflexive re-structuration of ‛organisation’ as a field of action, a re-structuration that aims to change an organisation’s rules and resources while playing out in every dimension of the social as an attempt to change established structures of signification, legitimation and domination. This is subject, like all organisational action, to the recursiveness of structure. Reorganisation―as well as resistance to change―must therefore make use of the very means of power made available by the (still) given organisational structure. Disputes about restructurings are often so fierce because they regulate how power will be distributed in the future rounds of organisational games. We therefore follow Giddens as well as Crozier and Friedberg (1980 [1977]) in interpreting resistance to reorganisations not as an expression of the irrationality, stupidity and inertia of human nature but, on the contrary, as an organisationally induced phenomenon: the usually thoroughly rational behaviour^[20] of players in an established game of routine who have become comfortable and proven themselves within its structures, its game rules and distribution of resources. And now, in the face of a game of innovation that impacts on and may destroy the old game structures, and should at the very least change them, they react by deferring, putting on the brakes or resisting―not seldom, by the way, while citing reasons that are good even from an organisational point of view. This view of things deprives reorganisation processes of much of that well-ordered rationality that textbooks often attest to them, and which is frequently expressed not only in unaffected ends-means hierarchies and correspondingly ‛rational’ step sequences and phase schemes but also in the more or less unshattered belief that the results of reorganisation processes are also properly understood as the results of intentional action.

Even after abandoning such a picture of rational and controlled reorganisation, the rationality that is threatened in this way can rescue itself by means of ever-rationalist social Darwinist conceptions of evolution. Then it is not rational reorganisers but rather environment, selection and/or adaptation that ensure the survival of rational, perhaps even optimal, forms of organisation. We can here leave aside the critique of these ideas, as handed down from Veblen via the population ecology approach to some variants of new institutionalism, because this has been done conclusively elsewhere, for example, by Kieser (1993a) and by Nelson (1997). We would just like to point out that Giddens (1984) strongly rejects this kind of evolutionism in the social sciences as well as any theory of social transformation understood in this way. His primary reasons are twofold: (1) People do not make their history just as they please but in knowledge of this very history, as reflexive beings, and they change this history depending on their knowledge. The same, by the way, could be said of organisations (cf. Kieser 1993a, 255–256). (2) Neither ‛societies’ nor ‛organisations’ (again Kieser 1993a, 257) are fit to serve as those clearly definable basic evolutionary units that are independent of the course of history itself, but whose very evolution should be the issue at stake here. Representations of organisational change also require a completely different form and, in short, must operate with concepts such as episode, coincidence and critical threshold of change; they must reckon with contingency, necessity and chance (cf. also Giddens 1984, 244–262), which can force change into certain courses and trajectories. Path dependency (“organizational tracks”, Greenwood and Hinings 1988) is an important concept in this context because it allows us to grasp fairly well the peculiar mixture of chance (‛small events’ in the beginning) and necessity (‛lock-in’ in the further course) that brings about the ‛evolution’ of organisation in specific directions.^[21] It is not the heroes of a universal principle of efficiency―‛survival of the fittest’―who are victorious according to this account but lucky winners who could just as easily have become losers, but who now, having won, have at their disposal the means to build on their victory: to oust the others from the market permanently, to gradually ensure their own efficiency and, last but not least, to rewrite the criteria for success and history itself in such a way that their victory appears as a heroic act of efficiency: Winner takes all. It is not by chance, then, that path dependency runs like a golden thread through Nelson’s (1997) contribution.

Finally, structuration means structuredness and structuring. In principle, stability and change are on equal footing here. This is perhaps the greatest advantage of which a Giddens-inspired organisational theory can boast: that it allows us to think both the sometimes so rapid changes and the sometimes sheer despairing inertia of organisations―as well as the complication that change without stability (e.g. valid interpretative schemes and guaranteed access to resources) is not even possible (and vice versa). For both, of course, structuration theory provides only a theoretical framework within which the rigidity and conservatism of organisational structures―or indeed their changeability―become theoretically workable. It does not provide this theorisation for particular empirical cases―it cannot and does not intend to at its level of generality. Yet it renders stability, inertia, encrustation, blockage and immobility issues that can be addressed theoretically because they are deciphered as results of recursive reproduction―as results of constant movement.

2.6 Organisation and Psyche

At least since Barnard (1938) it has been clear that organisations consist of actions, not persons; this is a consensus that would not deny that persons are ‛important for organisations’ but would like to insist (a) that no organisation subsumes the whole person with all his or her activities, (b) that it is precisely their―organisational―activities that are organised and in turn (re-)produce the organisations and not, for example, the character traits of persons, their hopes, doubts, aversion to garlic, secret thoughts or vices and virtues, and (c) that all organisational activities are understood as elements of organisations (and not just productive labour, to cite an example taken from older versions of both Marxism and business administration, cf. Witt 1997).

But how then are we to grasp theoretically that―and how―persons are ‛important for organisations’―and, nota bene, vice versa? Psyche, motives, performance readiness, anxiety, likes and dislikes―that is, the needs^[22] of the acting persons, to use the concept under which economic theory subsumes all this without dealing with it―how can they feature in our social- and organisational-theoretical outline?

The fact that it does not suffice, for the more precise definitions that are required here, to imagine adding in psychoanalysis as the competent discipline, as it were―after all, psychoanalysis portrays “the individual in his or her unmistakable identity, in his or her life-situational and life-historical individuality” (Lorenzer 1976, 19, our translation)―is due to the circumstance that the object of psychoanalysis is not real interactions and object relations but the interpersonal relations that are embedded in personality or, to put it more drastically, “the inner world of fantasy scenes” (Lorenzer 1976, 24–25, our translation). Psychoanalysis is concerned with schemes of events-as-sensed (‛Erlebnisentwürfen’), not the investigation of events-as-such.^[23] Interactions, however, as an element of the social, are events. Psychoanalysis cannot immediately connect up with this. Hope for mediation is nourished only by the insight

“that the figures of experience derive genetically from real interaction, the foundational interaction forms are always the inner precipitation of interactions and, furthermore, the forms of interaction are functionally related to real interaction as drafts of behaviour and action” (Lorenzer 1976, 25, our translation).

“Interpersonal relations in personality” is thus supposed to mean:

“From the collective social structures, we get past the mediating figures of the interaction game and into the individual in the following way: The […] interplay in the mother-child dyad influences the child’s organism, calibrates its behavioural reactions; that is, it is precipitated in the child’s organism. […] Interaction is laid down as an interaction engram to then be instrumentalised as a design of behaviour. Themselves the result of interactions, these drafts of behaviour determine subsequent interactions. Genetically as well as functionally, they are related to interactions; they are specified by interactions in order to determine further interactions; but as regulated regulators, they are internal to the individual.

As internal regulators, they clearly do not belong to the observable level of interaction phenomena, rather they are building blocks of the essence of personality in its societally specified form. These drafts of behaviour embedded in the personality, which constitute the personality in its essence, have been called ‘specified interaction forms’.^[24] The specified forms of interaction are the societal relations in the concrete individual” (Lorenzer 1976, 20–21, emphases in original, our translation).

As we can see, they are the results of a recursive process of (re-)production: Emerging from interaction processes, they enter into new interactions in important ways and are fixed as interaction engrams in order to then be related, in the form of interaction designs, to action―which recursively stabilises that fixation. Lorenzer’s ‛specified interaction forms’ designate the level of mediation between action and personality structure. Thanks to Lorenzer’s reformulation of psychoanalytical concepts in terms of forms of interaction―nota bene, this somewhat misleading choice of words refers to interaction designs or patterns in individuals, not to forms of real interaction―we can offer a sketch of the individual that can be meaningfully linked to social and organisational theory, a schematic version of which looks something like Figure 3.^[25]

Figure 3:

Individual: Interaction, interaction drafts, personality structure interaction designs.

“The interaction forms [interaction designs; the authors] can only appear in interactions, be they imagined or really occurring scenes” (Lorenzer 1976, 25, our translation). The psychoanalytic achievement, however, is still the reconstruction of events-as-pereceived (‘Erlebnisrekonstruktionen’), not of events.

To speak of interaction engrams and personality structure as we do here, and as Lorenzer does in his work, is also to imply something like a cognitive structure that is not, however, central to the framework of psychoanalysis. Desires and fears on the one hand and something like reason on the other―both sides are accounted for in Giddens’ model of action, which distinguishes between three levels of consciousness in actors:

discursive consciousness

practical consciousness

unconscious motives/cognition (Giddens 1984, 7).

It also considers both “reflexive monitoring” and “rationalisation” (in the sense of commonsensical justification) as well as the “motivation of action”:

“I distinguish the reflexive monitoring and rationalization of action from its motivation. If reasons refer to the grounds of action, motives refer to the wants which prompt it. However, motivation is not as directly bound up with the continuity of action as are its reflexive monitoring or rationalisation. Motivation refers to potential for action rather than to the mode in which action is chronically carried on by the agent. […] For the most part motives supply overall plans or programmes―‘projects’, in Schutz’s term―within which a range of conduct is enacted. Much of our day-to-day conduct is not directly motivated” (Giddens 1984, 6).

With the help of Lorenzer, we can understand this more precisely, that is, in terms of recursiveness and structuration theory: as the relationship between an interaction engram (‛motives supply overall plans or programmes’), which refers only indirectly to interaction scenes, and specified interaction designs, which refer to them directly.

But we need psychological access not only to desires, fears and motives but also to cognition, including its unconscious parts.

For a combination of cognitive psychology and symbolic interactionism, which are linked to Jakob and Thure von Uexküll’s recursively constructed models of the ‛function circle’ and the ‛situation circle’, we have taken hints from the instructive work of Brauner (1994). With its structuration-theoretical design―recursiveness of interaction and cognitive structure (cognitive maps, mental models)―Brauner’s dynamic, circular model of interaction represents a cognitive-psychological elaboration of the basic idea we would like to present here. Connections to Anthony Giddens’ concept of action are unmistakable, especially the proximity of “mental control of action” [mentale Handlungskontrolle] (Brauner 1994, 103–105) to Giddens’ ‘reflexive monitoring of action’. Brauner’s model makes clear―and it is no coincidence that it shares this with Giddens’ actor model―that we produce and change our individual cognitive maps of the world in iterative and recursive loops of practice―that is, in the practical application and reflection of these cognitive maps. Both therefore offer possible links to the most promising approaches of cognitive psychology that are not rationalistically pre-occupied, such as Neisser’s perceptual cycle and its reworking by Karl Weick, both fine examples of thinking in terms of recursivity―in this case between perceiving and acting (Neisser 1979; Weick 1985 [1969], 223–226; cf. also Conrad and Sydow 1984, 73–92). Neisser’s perceptual schemata are the results of a perceptual learning that enter into new acts of perception as active, information-seeking (individual) structures and are thereby recursively reproduced and possibly modified. Connections to questions of organisational learning are obvious and Weick elaborates them. We include not only Lorenzer’s interaction designs but also these Neisserian cognitive structures in the personality structure of acting persons, and we are now prepared to connect these two descriptions of social and individual structuration. We will then see that the place of mediation between the individual and society―or organisation―is interaction ^[26] (Figure 4).

Figure 4:

Individual and society: structuration and mediation.

Every interaction is simultaneously individual and social action and the perception of events and event-as-such, the putting-into-action of interaction designs and the occurring of social praxis in the medium of social structures. That every interaction is both at the same time does not imply that both are the same thing; nor does the fact that each is something very different imply that they are not related in a comprehensible and specifiable way. On the contrary, there is no “specific form of interaction” in Lorenzer’s sense that can be realised in interaction wholly outside the medium of social structures, nor any social practice that is not somehow the realisation of individual drafts of interaction.

Furthermore, every interaction implies, on the side of social structures, (re-)production and institutionalisation (including modification) and, on the side of the individual, socialisation and internalisation, although we cannot reckon a priori with successful or even mutually harmonious processes of socialisation/internalisation on the one hand or of reproduction/institutionalisation on the other. (And if they do ‛succeed’ in the sense of achieving mutual correspondence, then we certainly do not have to like the result, as the case of Barnard’s organisational personality makes clear. In Barnard’s classic example of a switchboard operator at the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, its conformity went quite far. She specifically chose a subordinate position in an outlying district because from there she could watch her sick mother’s house while she worked. When the house caught fire one day, she stayed at her post and watched while the house burned down, showing, in Barnard’s words, “extraordinary ‘moral courage’” and “high responsibility” regarding the organisational norm of uninterrupted readiness to serve Barnard 1938, 269, Barnard left a footnote: Her mother was rescued).

Interactions, these central sites of mediation between the individual and society (or organisation), are therefore not to be characterised merely as agencies of socialisation (Lorenzer 1976, 44) but always simultaneously, with a view to society, as sites of (re-)production of social structures and institutions.^[27]