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Naomi Kink
Former Member
Last Name
Kink
First name
Naomi
Email
naomi.kink@unisg.ch
Phone
+41 71 224 3906
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Publication«Wer für alles offen ist, ist nicht ganz dicht»: Wie durch die Gestaltung von Grenzen organisationale Entwicklungsprozesse gelingen können. Eine qualitative Einzelfallstudie einer Schweizer NotfallstationThis dissertation begins with the question of how a pluralistic organization can succeed in building up its decision-making praxis and organizational decision-making capacity. Without collective decision practices, an expert organization will not be able to produce attractive value creation and adequately manage complexity. To answer this question, a systems theory argument (Luhmann 2000, 1999, 1984) is mobilized: Organizations rely on «limits to the expectability of actions» (Luhmann 1999: 60). Boundaries determine which expectations can be mutually assumed and create certainty of expectations. This argument is contrary to the postulate of current literature that organizations should open themselves up and dissolve their boundaries as much as possible in order to be able to endure in an ever more rapidly changing environment. From a systems theory perspective, it is not the openness of organizations that is relevant for securing their existence, but their communicative selectivity as well as the enactment and reflexive shaping of boundaries. The case of a Swiss emergency unit is used to analyze, in form of a «dense description» (Geertz 1983), how boundaries are communicatively enacted and reflexively shaped. In a transformation process lasting many years, the analyzed emergency department succeeded in building up its own decision-making capacity and dynamically stabilizing its decision-making praxis. It could be observed that organizational development took place through processes of selective opening and closing of boundaries. Relevant insights for pluralistic organizations can be derived from the empirical analysis: Boundaries and decision-making praxis are mutually constituted and must be continuously collectivized. Without stable boundaries and a collective landscape of expectations, an organization cannot build up its own decision-making praxis. Boundaries emerge as a byproduct of the structural differentiation of a system; however, they can also be enacted through self-observation and reflexivity. The analysis suggests that boundaries and their relevance to organizational problems be examined from a process- and communication-centered perspective, conceptualizing organizations as both open and closed systems. According to Rüegg-Stürm & Grand (2019) the dissertation proposes to reinterpret management as reflexive enactment practices of boundaries.Type: doctoral thesis