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What is in Organisation? Contents of a Self-Contained Container

Steffen Roth

Management Revue2025https://doi.org/10.31083/mrev39590article
AJG 2
Weight
0.37

What the paper says

The purpose of this article is to resolve the apparent opposition between the container metaphor of organisation and the idea that organisations are constituted by communication. Drawing on works by Niklas Luhmann, George Spencer Brown, and Louis Kaufman, I develop a dynamic, communicative concept of containment, or “continence”. Using this concept, I demonstrate how organisations can simultaneously be constituted by and contain communication (within their environment). I conclude that management and organisation researchers must adopt an organisational view of organisations that first abstracts from most of the contents of this self-contained container, before reloading it with diverse forms and topics of organisational communication.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.31083/mrev39590

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@article{steffen2025,
  title        = {{What is in Organisation? Contents of a Self-Contained Container}},
  author       = {Steffen Roth},
  journal      = {Management Revue},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.31083/mrev39590},
}

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What is in Organisation? Contents of a Self-Contained Container

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Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.