Why Do Organisations Always End Up Looking the Same?
Deep down, are they different?
1. The Central Puzzle:
Despite the enormous differences between organisations in what they do, where they operate, and when they came into existence, they tend to fall into a surprisingly small number of recognisable
shapes.
This is not a trivial observation. Organisations have existed across thousands of years of human history, in every culture on earth, and across industries and sectors that have almost nothing in common. And yet the same basic shapes keep appearing. Why?
There are many philosophers and researchers with similar or opposing views. Taken together, they give us a much richer picture of how and why organisations take the forms they do than any single framework can provide on its own.
2. The Idea That Organisations Have ‘Types’
The first framework is organisational archetypes. An Archetype is a recurring pattern or template. In organisational theory, an archetype is a recurring type of organisation that keeps appearing across time and cultures.
Jung introduced the concept of archetypes as inherited patterns of thought and experience.[i] Organisations cluster into a small number of stable ‘Archetypes’, each held together by a shared set of values and beliefs.
The formal academic version of this idea was developed mainly by two researchers, Greenwood and Hinings, They argued that what makes an organisation a particular ‘type’ is not just how it is structured on paper — who reports to whom, how many departments there are — but the deeper set of beliefs and values that hold that structure in place[ii]. They called this the organisation’s interpretive scheme. Later researchers argued that archetypes are held in place not just by internal beliefs and structures but by the broader environment in which organisations operate. Organisations in the same field tend to become more and more similar over time, even without any central authority telling them to do so. They face the same regulators, hire from the same professional schools, and are judged by the same standards.
The archetype framework gives us the richest descriptive account of what stable organisational forms actually look like in practice. It tells us that these forms are not just structural arrangements but coherent combinations of structure and belief, embedded in and sustained by the broader institutional environment. Its limitation is that it tends to treat its own categories as straightforward descriptions of an external reality, without asking how those categories themselves participate in producing what they describe. This will be considered in future when discussing the Organisation Character Type assessment instrument that includes the identification of specific organisational archetypes.
3. Strange Attractors: Lessons from Chaos Theory
3.1 What Is Chaos Theory?
Most people have heard of the butterfly effect. This concept comes from chaos theory — the scientific study of complex systems that are sensitive to small changes but still produce recognisable patterns over time. The key idea is that two systems that begin in almost identical states can end up in completely different, unpredictable states after a while.
This sounds like it should produce complete randomness. But it does not. And this is where the concept of a strange attractor comes in. A strange attractor is a pattern that a complex system keeps returning to, even though it never exactly repeats itself. The system is always moving, always slightly different, but it stays within a recognisable shape.
Three things about strange attractors are particularly important when thinking about organisations:
First, the system always returns to the attractor’s territory regardless of where it starts. You can push it away, but it comes back. This is called the basin of attraction — the region of space from which the system will eventually settle into this particular pattern.
Second, the pattern is fractal which means it has a self-similar structure at different scales. If you zoom in on part of the attractor, you see the same kind of pattern repeating. This is relevant to organisations because we often see the same dynamics playing out at the level of a team, a department, and the whole organisation simultaneously.
Third, transitioning from one attractor to another requires the system to pass through a highly turbulent zone where small changes have unpredictably large effects. This is the boundary region between two basins of attraction. This period of turbulence is often seen during specific stages in the lifecycle of an organisation and specifically the transition from entrepreneurial to corporate functioning.
The archetype framework tells us that organisations tend to cluster into a small number of stable configurations. The strange attractor framework tells us why: those configurations are the attractor basins of the organisational system. Once the organisation settles into one of them, the internal dynamics keep pulling it back whenever it is disturbed, just as a marble rolling around in a bowl always returns to the bottom. This is also where culture plays a role.
An important caution: the analogy between organisations and mathematical dynamical systems is structural, not exact. We cannot write down the equations for an organisation the way Lorenz wrote down equations for the weather.[iii] The value of the analogy is in the thinking tools it provides, not in mathematical precision. Culture is a dynamic that exists amongst the members of an organisation creating a highly complex, intangible, system.
4. Eigenwerte: What Happens When Systems Observe Themselves
Cybernetics is the study of how systems regulate themselves through feedback. Think of an individual feeling cold and putting on a jacket or a thermostat switching on or off based on the temperature.
From the 1960s onwards, Heinz von Foerster developed the concept of second-order cybernetics. His key insight was that you cannot fully understand any observing system without asking what the act of observation where the observer is part of the system does to the thing being observed.
Most students have heard of the Hawthorne studies done by George Elton Mayo at the Western Electric Company in the 1920s and 30s.[iv] The most famous finding from the studies — that productivity improved regardless of whether lighting levels rose or fell, seemingly in response to being observed — is the point at which second-order cybernetics has most direct purchase. Mayo interpreted this as evidence of worker psychology and informal social dynamics, but a second-order reading goes further. The research team was not observing a stable system from outside it. Their presence, their measurement instruments, their selection of variables, and their ongoing attention all became inputs into the system itself. The workers were not simply reacting to being watched in some naive behaviourist sense; they were recursively incorporating the observation into their own self-understanding and behaviour. The system was, in Foerster’s terms, observing the observers observing it.
At this point, the categories are no longer just describing something that exists independently of them. They are participating in producing the very thing they describe.
4.1 What Is an Eigenwert?
Von Foerster’s argument is that what we take to be stable features of the world are often, at least in part, eigenvalues (from German for ‘own value’ or ‘characteristic value’) — stable outputs produced by the recursive (self-repeating) operations of observing systems. The archetypes that organisational researchers keep finding may be partly real features of the organisational world and partly eigenvalues of the research process itself.
4.2 Convergences and Differences Across Frameworks
All three frameworks discussed so far — archetypes, strange attractors, and Eigenwerte — are trying to explain the same basic observation: that stable, recurring forms keep appearing in the organisational world. But they explain this from different angles and with different implications.
The archetype framework says: these stable forms exist in organisations, and we can discover them through careful research. It is primarily a framework for describing the world as it is.
The strange attractor framework says: these stable forms are generated by the internal dynamics of complex systems, and they have mathematical properties we can study — attractor basins, turbulent boundaries, fractal structure. It is primarily a framework for understanding the mechanisms behind what we observe.
The Eigenwerte framework says: the stable forms we observe are always partly a product of the way we observe them. We cannot separate the discovery of archetypes from the contribution that the process of discovery makes to producing those archetypes. It is primarily a framework for questioning how we know what we think we know.
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann developed a highly sophisticated theory that attempts to hold all of these together[v]. His concept of structural coupling describes how two complex systems — say, an organisation and the research community studying it — can develop stable, mutually influencing relationships without either one directly controlling the other. The archetypes that researchers identify are real patterns in how organisations operate; and they are also shaped by the observing practices of the research community; and the two are coupled together in ways that make it very difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. Here one also sees the mutualality of culture and strategy.
5. Putting It All Together: A Synthesis
5.1 A Practical Summary
Stripped of the academic language, the combined argument of these three frameworks can be stated fairly simply:
Organisations do tend to settle into recognisable forms, and those forms are genuinely stable — held in place by internal dynamics that resist change. This is real and understanding it is useful. But often the forms we recognise are partly a product of the categories we use to look for them — categories developed by particular researchers in particular contexts, which have been so widely adopted that they now shape how organisations think about themselves.
What does become clear is that large scale, strategic organisational transformation is much harder than books suggest. It is not as simple as a planning session ending in a turnaround strategy. It requires moving the whole system from one attractor basin to another, crossing a zone of real turbulence in the process — not just changing the values poster on the wall or putting everyone through a training programme. And the people most affected by organisational forms, including those who are marginalised or excluded by the dominant types, have often been invisible in both the research and the practice of organisational design.
5.2 Von Foerster’s Ethical Conclusion
Heinz von Foerster drew an ethical conclusion from all of this that is worth ending on. If the way we observe and describe the world participates in producing the world — if our categories are not just descriptions but interventions — then those who wield those categories bear a responsibility that purely descriptive science tends to obscure.
Applied to organisations, this means that researchers, consultants, and managers who deploy frameworks for understanding organisational culture and structure should ask not just ‘is this description accurate?’. It should include ‘does the use of this framework open up possibilities or close them down? Does it empower people or constrain them? Does it make the organisation more capable of becoming different things, or does it lock it more firmly into a particular form?’
[i] Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works, vol. 9i (London: Routledge, 1959).
[ii] R. Greenwood and C. R. Hinings, “Organizational Design Types, Tracks, and the Dynamics of Strategic Change,” Organization Studies 9, no. 3 (1988): 293–316 and R. Greenwood and C. R. Hinings, “Understanding Strategic Change: The Contribution of Archetypes,” Academy of Management Journal 36, no. 5 (1993): 1052–81.
[iii] E. N. Lorenz, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20, no. 2 (1963): 130–41.
[iv] Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
[v] Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz Jr. and D. Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), originally published 1984.
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