Odpowiedzialność jednostki i organizacji
Responsibility of the Individual and of the Organization

Summary/Abstract: Organization has always accompanied human beings in their social life. The goal for which people unite into various forms of organization defines its nature, e.g.: from tribal to political (Hobbes’ state), social (Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft) or institutional-beaurocratic (Weber’s beaurocracy). The role and place of humans in the organization have changed over time, just as personal responsibility within the organization, up to the present situation when individual responsibility (moral responsibility) is ‘‘concealed’’ behind a façade of regulations, procedures and formal decrees. What is needed today is not merely transparency of the law and its principles, but perhaps above all a transparency of human interests and motives. Although positive and codified law of the organization: rational, predictable and open, replaces the old natural ‘‘laws and powers’’ (called ‘‘divine’’ or ‘‘magical’’ by some), this does not allow or justify an obliteration of individual and moral responsibility. The article deals with human propensities to ‘‘cope with’’ responsibility or its dispersion, even evasion. The author takes up the problems of legitimation, institutionalization and formal procedures, all of which are troublesome issues for scientific-cognitive discourse, involving a controversy over what counts as part of institution and what as organization. Attention is drawn to a crucial though often overlooked distinction between stability and repeatability of social behaviour (social institutions) on the one hand, and stability of social structure (social organizations) on the other. Such reflection deliberately exceeds the bounds of sociology, as it also uses the critical-normative framework of philosophy, and this ultimately justifies its final normative and social postulates.

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