Organisations: Large Worlds or Small Worlds?

摘要

Approaches for the development of enterprise information systems based on social theories such as Habermas' theory of communicative action claim to facilitate the development of systems that support the organisational social life-world better than systems developed from a technical viewpoint. However, they will miss their target if the approach is leaning too much towards formalising repetitive and stable elements of the social patterns in an organisation, at the expense of the more informal and/or irregular events and processes. Such approaches run the danger that the open social organisational world is 'frozen' and moulded into a closed formal-rational system. This problem will be discussed in this paper as a contribution to the development of information systems for the social world of organisations.