What is in organisation? Contents of a self-contained container

Abstract

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.