Existential Management: Ontological Architecture of the Organization and the Meaning of the Organization as the Core of Integrative Stability

AbstractExistential Management is a socio-ontological framework that interprets organizations as structures of coordinated decision-making whose identity and stability depend on the continuous reproduction of the meaning of the organization over time. This White Paper presents the ontological architecture of the organization as a unity of decision-making and formulates the fundamental thesis according to which the meaning of the organization is a constitutive condition of the identity of the organization. The document develops the concept of the meaning of the organization as the ontological[1] core of identity, distinguishes its content and form, analyzes the distribution of meaning in the social consciousness of the organization, and describes the cascade of meaning as a structural flow through which the meaning of the organization becomes ontologically effective in decision-making and action. The framework also includes an ontological justification of entropic drift as an inherent tendency of collective decision-making toward fragmentation and the concept of integrative force as the dynamic capacity of the organization to maintain unity of decision-making over time. The text also clarifies the epistemological status of the framework as an ontological architecture, not an empirical explanatory theory, and differentiates Existential Management from systems theory, sensemaking theory, and institutional theory of organization. The framework is articulated through an axiomatic structure and supplemented by a diagnostic architecture of stability, which enables structural analysis of the coherence of decision-making, the distribution of meaning, the continuity of the cascade of meaning, and the trend of integrative force over time. [1] The concept of the ontological in this publication denotes that which determines the conditions of the identity, existence, and continuity of the organization as a unity of decision-making over time. It is not a legal or psychological determination of the organization, but a determination of what causes the organization to persist as one identity.