Structural Couplings of Organizational Design and Organizational Engineering

The theory of autopoiesis, which is less known to both organizational design and organizational engineering (ODE) practice, is a theory of complex, non-linear, autonomous, and especially living systems that found its way from biology through the social sciences to organization theory and information systems (Schatten and Baca, 2010). Autopoiesis, a pseudo Greek word that comes from avro (auto — self), and noir\oiç (poiesis — a “making,” the process of forming, creation, or production), was introduced by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1973 (Maturana and Varela, 1973) to label the type of phenomenon which they had identified as the definitive characteristic of living systems (Whitaker, 2001). Autopoietic, or living in contrast to alopoietic, systems are systems that produce the network of processes that produced them.