nucleation

TERM-074: organization, and which sense: relational arrangement, organizational maintenance, collective institution or organizational closure

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Properties8
StatusActive
Version2
Tagsindividuation, social-ontology, agency
Linedistributed-agency
Used byCLAIM-454 — A latent feature or mode recovered from an organization's members' activity is at most a constituent of an organizational perspective, not the perspective: a feature allocation says which members take part in which modes, and whether those modes are organized into one perspective depends on the relations of access, uptake and authority among their carriers, which the same allocation leaves open
ComplementsTERM-071 — persistence, of an organization, and which sense: state, dynamical, historical, viable and reinstatable, TERM-072 — perspective, and which sense: organizational, represented or phenomenal, TERM-086 — organizational achievement, of a specified target: its attainment or maintenance, under declared conditions, where an identifiable arrangement of relations among components makes an explanatory difference that a comparison with admissible alternatives can show, as an episode, a maintained capacity or the reproduction of what sustains that capacity
Cited as “complements” byTERM-088 — individuation, and which sense: descriptive (an inquiry can distinguish and track it), dynamical (its organization persists under specified dynamics and perturbation, with robust identity and boundaries), constitutive (its relational organization helps fix its identity and boundary), and organizational autonomy, the further achievement of contributing to the maintenance of its own constitutive constraints
Cited as “uses” byCLAIM-543 — What separates a language model's distribution over personas from a distribution over organizational perspectives is not whether the latent model is hierarchical, since a mixture or an LDA-style admixture already is, but whether some latent components condition which others are available or consequential: a model whose components are exchangeable given their weights is organizationally flat however many levels its prior has, and dependencies among components count as organization (organization as relational arrangement) only where interventions, not fit, support them

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Definition

“Organization” in this record means one of the following, and a claim should say which.

  1. Relational arrangement. A configuration of relations among distinguishable processes, components, roles or constraints, whose arrangement matters to some specified operation or outcome. Two engineering departments with the same specialists and information can differ in whether a safety engineer can stop a deployment; the difference is in their arrangement of access, authority, obligation and procedure, not in a further person above the specialists. Its boundary need not coincide with an employer, a team or a place. This is the default sense, and the sense of “organizational” in “organizational perspective” (TERM-072 sense 1): a perspective constituted through organized relations, not the perspective of a formal organization.
  2. Organizational maintenance. The activities that reproduce or change an arrangement: a school’s teaching, recruitment, certification and correction. It is a separate fact from the arrangement, because an arrangement can be maintained from outside. CLAIM-414 and CASE-126 give the construction: two systems with the same arrangement, one maintaining it through its own activity and one reset from outside, that part under one perturbation.
  3. Collective institution. A corporation, a university, an agency, a federation: an organization in the ordinary sense, with legal, institutional and social identity. Its persistence is not the persistence of any one perspective or arrangement within it. A party can stay legally continuous while its coalition and orientation change (CASE-133).
  4. Organizational closure. The technical condition of TERM-070: a set of constraints each of which depends on another in the set for its maintenance. It is a distinct, more demanding technical condition, not the top of a scale of organization: the four senses are not a hierarchy, and an institution is not a stronger case of arrangement than a maintained process. Closure is not the default, and does not follow from being organized or maintained, so that a disputed criterion of autonomy is not built into “organization” or into “perspective”. TERM-072 already declines to make self-maintenance part of sense 1 for this reason.

Senses 2 and 4 are related as general to particular: closure is one way an arrangement can be maintained, by the arrangement itself.

What it is not

  • Not unity, autonomy or central control. “Organized does not mean unified, autonomous, or centrally controlled” (the relayed proposal). An arrangement in sense 1 can contain conflicting processes, have no controller, and be maintained from outside.
  • Not an agent. An organization in any sense is a candidate for an agent only under a stated criterion of agency (TERM-044, TERM-063), and meeting none is compatible with being organized. CLAIM-418.
  • Not persistence. Whether an organization persists, and in which way, is TERM-071’s question.
  • Not will-organization. TERM-023 is a particular arrangement, the one governing which of an agent’s action-generating regimes is effective.

What would unsettle it

The term would be shown wanting if a claim needed a fifth sense, or if senses 1 and 2 could not be told apart in a case; CLAIM-414 tells them apart. Each sense should let a claim say something that could be wrong: a vocabulary flexible enough to describe every arrangement does not thereby explain any.

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