A Study On The Mutual Mechanism Between Information And Organizations

There is no suspicion about the importance of information in human organizations in the modern information era, the bilateral relationship between information and organizations has been attracting since long tine ago the attention and observation of scholars and practitioners in the field of sociology, ecomonics and management. Regarding information as a"medium"has significances in both epistemology and methodology, on this sense, a lot of achievements in the development of theory of organizations, such as Contingency Theory, New Institutionalism, Principal-agent Theory, Team Theory, etc., could all be considered as studies on the mechanism between information and organizations.The author approaches this research by following method and techanical route: First, even organization research almost inevitably involves different subjects or fields, the current majority of studies otherwise are vertically confined to a particular subject. Alternatively, this paper takes a"cross-cut"comparative observation among several fields. Second, the most basic feature of organization is its structure. The structure basically determines the way an organization obtains information, as well as communication and re-production of information within the organization. On the other hand, the environmental information distribution outside also has influence on the organization's strucrure. Besides, the structures of organizations are often relatively stable, and easy to be observed. This paper hence treat organization structure as main observation target and research stream. Finally, the author makes distinction and analysis for several important concepts such as"information","organizations","structure"and"systems", since the richness of their intensions and multi-level conception could easily cause confusions in our research.Relating organizations to information systems arised in the early decades of last century, some information economists represented by R.Radner, Stiglize etc. then have had prominent explorations from an economics perspective to the mechanism between information and organizations based on this analogue. Information systems is a broad concept, not restricted to the prevailing conception of management information systems of which the main task is to apply computer and communication technologies into the management of humen organizations. Epistemologically, all the objects including humen being themselves could be considered as information syatems.However, the popular research field"Development and Design of Information Systems"has its foundation on Information Theory and Systems Theory, its definition about"information"and"systems"hence must be consistent with, in the same conception level, what these two theories imply and their relative mathematical expressions. There are very close correlation between information systems and organization structures. On the one hand, only after having a clear understanding about the organization structure could we possibly develop a satisfactory information systems; on the other hand, the implement of information systems must make information systems properly be"embedded"into the organization structure. As computer and artificial intelligence technologies develop, the future information systems must, at least theoretically, be isomorphic to target organizations in a space of information. Therefore, from a strict sense of Information Theory and Systems Theory, the question whether organizations are identical with information systems is not negligible. There are various information (including knowledge and intelligence) in organizations: some are obtained outside, some arise inside; some exclusively owned, some shared; some explicit, some tacit. By mathematical deduction of information within the frame of Information Theory, this paper discovered a certain mode of perception of human being that there is a trade-off between the deepness and the broadness of information, which is contained in the logarithmic expression of information, we thus prove the wide-ranging application of this particular cenception. This paper also discusses the discreteness or continuity of information, the nature of Shannon entropy, K.R.Popper's three world theory, and cast some reflection on concepts such as information, knowledge and intelligence. These all supported the author's argument in this paper.It's an important part to investigate the close relationship between information and organizations along the history and main stream of development of organizations theory and researches in organization stucture. Taking concepts of organizations, organizations of operation, and bureaucracy which all are raised by Max Weber as logic starting point, this paper investigates the merging phenomena of"organizations"and"institution", the dialectical transformation process of basic structural types of big enterprise organizations, the effect of information activities and information technologies on the organization structures, and such questions. They manifested the trend and effectiveness of using information as a"medium"to study organization structures.Self-organization is another prominent phenomena in big organizations. The latest complex systems theory emphasizes the self-organization function in big systems, it implies that a latent order exists in systems. The scientific literature information systems are"pure"information systems, they are also special types of human organizations. By analysis on the similarities of three laws in biblimetrics and their corresponding scientific literature information systems, this paper discovers that self-organization information systems have hidden"layer-upon-layer"structures and a central core area which aggregating a lof of informations, the size of core area depends on the density and declinational distribution of information in that systems. Especially, a tyical scientific literature information systems could forms only after the relevant group of people have sufficient communications in a special subject or field. From a pure information aspect, scientific literature information systems demonstrate the structural features of self-organization.Any studies on the information-processing function of organizations will have to handle the dillemma between centralized and decentralized information-processing. Sociologically it reflects the contradiction between individual and society; politically democracy and centralism; ecomomically market economy and planned economy; philosophically the eternal contradiction between the particular and the general. The root of these contradictions is the limits of human cognition (like linguistic description ability, information-processing ability, etc.), and our deep analysis of information confirms these limits. So on a philosophical level, studies on human organizations and on information eventually come to the same conclusion: limits of human cognition inevitably cause the limits of human organizations. This could be the sign of the rise of a new philosophy, that is , philosophy of information.