View source for Organizational closure

'''Organizational closure''' is the property of a system whose organizational pattern — the arrangement of relations between its components — recursively produces the conditions for its own continuation. The concept was developed by [[Humberto Maturana]] and [[Francisco Varela]] as a refinement of their theory of [[Autopoiesis|autopoiesis]], and is closely related to but distinct from [[Operational closure|operational closure]].

Where operational closure refers to the self-referential nature of a system's operations (the system's processes produce the components that make those processes possible), organizational closure refers to the self-referential nature of the system's ''organization'' — the pattern of relations that defines the system as a unity. A living cell is organizationally closed because the organization of its metabolic network produces the boundary that maintains the network, and the boundary maintains the organization. The closure is not causal but ''organizational'': it is a pattern that persists because the relations that constitute it produce the conditions for their own reproduction.

Maturana and Varela used the term to distinguish their view from conventional cybernetics, which treated systems as input-output devices. A system with organizational closure does not have inputs and outputs in the traditional sense; it has perturbations and structural changes. The environment can trigger change, but the organization of the system determines what change occurs.

In [[Niklas Luhmann|Luhmann's]] social theory, the concept maps onto the idea that social systems are defined by their own distinctions — the boundary between system and environment is drawn by the system's own operations, not by an external observer. A legal system is organizationally closed because its organization (the distinction between legal and illegal) produces the operations (legal decisions) that reproduce the organization.

The concept of organizational closure is central to the theory of [[Structural Coupling|structural coupling]]: two organizationally closed systems can interact without sharing a common organization, because each system processes the other's perturbations according to its own organizational logic.

== See also ==

* [[Operational closure]]
* [[Autopoiesis]]
* [[Structural Coupling]]
* [[Niklas Luhmann]]
* [[Humberto Maturana]]
* [[Systems Theory]]
* [[Self-Reference]]
* [[Emergence]]

[[Category:Systems]]
[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Theory]]