A Systems Theory of Organizational Information

Abstract

Standing on both the Peircean pragmatism semiotics and the Churchmanian systems thinking, this paper is an empirically grounded conceptualization of the phenomena of organizational information in terms of the nature and the formulation process of information in organizations. Four organizational cases in consulting industries were conducted for field data to firmly ground the resultant emergent theory. Two research findings were gained: organizational information as system, and organizational information formulation as habit production. By the author's systems based conception, organizational information would present itself as a unity that comprises nonexclusive six aspects: structure, function, process, context, time and epistemology. From the relational perspective, organizational information would better manifest itself as a dynamically triadic process in the form of the Peircean semiosis that comprises three states of mind (i.e. surprise, doubt, and belief) and three relations, or human activities (i.e. experience, abduction, and inquiry). Further, the findings also suggest paradigmatic distinction among three common information categories (i.e. data, knowledge, information), where ‘data' was found to be monadic, ‘knowledge' dyadic, and ‘information' triadic. The author's grounded systems model of organizational information introduces a sketch of a semiotics based framework for both information and organization domains, which offers that information and organization constitute each other. The author also posits that the grounded systems model of organizational information would imply an information paradigm for, and hence, a theory native to the information systems (IS) and knowledge management (KM) field.