Structures and dynamics of autopoietic organizations

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? —William Butler Yeats, Among School Children, 1927 The closing question from Yeats’ poem Among School Children incites a paradoxical answer. It is possible to observe the particular positions and movements of an individual dancer and thereby identify the performance as a speci? c dance, while it is impossible to observe the performance of the dance devoid of the positions and movements of the dancer. Still, any other dancer may well perform the same dance, and just therefore it is possible to distinguish the particular positions and movements that constitute a speci? c dance from any individual performance. “Such remarks indicate that we are aware of two ontologically distinct entities within one perceptual phenomenon,” Gill (1975) highlights. Knowing the dancer from the dance is neither purpose nor objective of the following contemplation. Nonetheless, the paradox that it is both possible and impossible to know the dancer from the dance is intriguing enough to introduces this work’s genuine purpose and objective. 1. 1 Purpose and Objective The primary interest of this work rests with organizational knowledge and the associated concepts of organizational learning and memory, not the least because many argue that organizational knowledge is the main source of competitive advantage (e. g. , Grant, 1996; Kogut & Zander, 1992; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Nonaka, 1991, 1994; Prahalad & Hamel, 1990).