A Critical Review of Autopoietic Theory and Its Applications to Living, Social, Organizational and Information Systems
A Critical Review of Autopoietic Theory and Its Applications to Living, Social, Organizational and Information Systems

Summary/Abstract: Autopoietic theory, a theory of complex, non-linear, autonomous and especially living systems, found its way from biology, through the social sciences to organization theory and information systems. It enjoys major attention from scientific audiences in lots of different disciplines. Still, there hasn't been enough effort to establish a common foundation for a new theory. There are often contradictions in the very essence of the theory which are outlined in this article. By using a more simplistic conceptualization of autopoiesis, we are trying to give guidelines for a new foundation in this area.

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