Special Issue of Management Decision (Emerald) on

Programmes in management and organisation. Observed with social systems theory

Guest Editors:
Steffen Roth, Excelia Business School, France; University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, roths@excelia-group.com

Augusto Sales, Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration, Brazil; Yale University, United States of America, augusto.sales@fgv.br 

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/01/2026

The issue is inspired by and linked to the 2025 Luhmann Conference on “Programmes. Observed with social systems theory”, which will be held at the University of Cambridge, UK. The conference explores how organisations rely on decision programmes—conditional and purposive structures that guide their decisions—in order to navigate an increasingly complex societal environment shaped by multiple, often conflicting functional systems such as economy, politics, science, and law.

Drawing on Luhmann’s distinction between function and performance, this special issue aims to reorient management thinking away from the assumption that decisions are autonomous acts of will, and toward an understanding of how decisions are programmed: how they depend on and are related to routinised structures, past choices, functional logics, and the processing of external expectations within autopoietically closed systems of decision communication.

The articles in this issue will engage with the idea that modern organisations are not simply reactive entities or purposive machines, but autonomous systems that process environmental demands selectively. Especially welcome are contributions that:

• Analyse how organisations use decision programmes to filter, defer, integrate, or resist competing demands
• Explore how multifunctional organisations (e.g. universities, public agencies, hybrid firms) manage programmes across different function systems
• Reframe the role of strategy, governance, compliance, or innovation as communicatively programmed rather than actor-driven
• Apply systems-theoretical concepts (e.g. decision premises, structural coupling, operational closure) to empirical or theoretical problems in management and organisation studies.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodological papers that examine the programmability of management decisions across diverse organisational contexts.
While this special issue is linked to the Luhmann Conference 2025 in Cambridge, participation in the conference is neither a requirement for submission nor a guarantee of publication in the issue.

The full Call for Papers is available on the Management Decision website here.

References

• Aal, E. B. (2022). The significance of Luhmann’s theory on organisations for project governance. Project Leadership and Society, 3, 100070.
• Aal, E. B. (2025). ‘The end user takes the final decision’ AI and Decision–Communication in Organisations. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 42(2), 455-476.
• Roth S. (2023), Digital transformation of management and organization theories. A research programme, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 451-459.
• Roth S. (2024), Truth tables, true distinctions. Paradoxes of the source code of science, Systemic Practice and Action Research, Vol. 37 No. 3, pp. 261-267.
• Roth S. and Sales A. (in press), Multifunctional organisation. A systems-theoretical concept and its practical implications, Kybernetes, DOI: 10.1108/K-05-2025-1387.
• Roth S., Schwede P., Valentinov V., Pérez-Valls M., and Kaivo-oja J. (2020), Harnessing big data for a multifunctional theory of the firm, European Management Journal, Vol. 38 No. 1, pp. 54-61.
• Roth S., Valentinov V., Heidingsfelder M., and Pérez-Valls M. (2020), CSR beyond Economy and Society. A post-capitalist approach, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 165 No. 3, pp. 411-423.
• Sales A., Mansur J., Valentinov V., and Roth S. (2025), Willing unwillingness. A Luhmannian perspective on followership and leadership in organizations, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 42 No. 2, pp. 563-573
• Sales A., Roth S., Grothe-Hammer M., and Azambuja R. (2022), From play to pay: A multifunctional approach to the role of culture in post-merger integration. Management Decision, Vol. 60 No. 7, pp. 1922-1946.
• Valentinov, V. (2022), System or process? A meta-theoretical reflection on the nature of the firm, Systemic Practice and Action Research, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 1-14.