Structural Couplings Between Organizations and Function Systems: Looking at Standards in Health Care

The paper is concerned with the relationship between organization and society. It reinterprets Luhmann's conceptualization of the relation between decision-making organizational systems and code-based function systems in order to enable the theory to observe (historical and current) changes. The relations between organizations and function systems are described in terms of structural couplings and the couplings are set in relation to the deparadoxizations of organizations. The thesis of the paper is that the organization makes itself irritable to function systems through its deparadoxization strategies. This idea is first treated theoretically and then the paper demonstrates its productivity through an analysis of how standards in health care form structural couplings between decisions in health care organizations and function systems as they deparadoxify decisions. The analysis shows how the health care organizations seem to become irritable (and thus coupled) towards a plurality of function systems when they deparadoxify their decisions by means of standards.