Identity of and identification with organisations – exemplified by providers of continuing education

Abstract

The way you look at the world determines how it represents itself. Choosing a differentiated theoretical approach originating in systems theory, you use the basic distinction system/environment and observe organizations as formalized social systems which communicate decisions and operate separately from their environment in an autopoietically closed and recursive manner. From this perspective, people belong to the organizational environment. They are conceptualized as psychic systems that are structurally coupled with social systems. That is, both types of systems operate without any overlap by realizing their respective autopoieses through the concatenation of thoughts or communication, while making their structural capacities mutually available. The questions raised in this paper are: How do organizations create their respective identities? How is the relationship between the organization and the individuals to be defined? And how do organizations succeed in getting the employed individuals to identify with them? An answer to these questions is attempted using empirical data from a research project on the identity and functional logic of training organizations.