The Company Lunch with Muriel de Fabregues, Jacques Rojot, Catherine Voynnet-Fourboul
AOM 2016 August 5-9, Theme: Making Organizations Meaningful – 76th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management
Abstract
The paper uses Luhmann’s autopoeietic, operationally closed social systems theory at the level of organizations, to make sense of and explain a peculiar practice we observed taking place in a large multinational company. Lunch, in that organization, stands out as an extremely important event and the procedures governing its conduct, while neither formal nor laid down in writing, are highly regulated and idiosyncratic. It constitutes an important part of manager’s daily agenda. In the process, we attempt to present a methodology using Luhmann’s theory for the purpose of organizational analysis.
Niklas Luhmann, autopoietic social systems, operational closure, organizations as systems, Lunch
