White Paper 4.5 – Core Extension 1.0: Existential Management: The Question of the Life of the Organization: Schrödinger's Heuristic Bridge to the Ontological Persistence of Organizational Identity

Abstract This document philosophically and ontologically deepens Existential Management through a dialogue with Schrödinger’s question of life. It does not proceed from the assumption that physical laws can be directly applied to organizations, and it does not understand social systems as thermodynamic systems. Its starting point is the profound question that Schrödinger opened: under what conditions can an ordered form persist over time despite the tendency toward disintegration. White Paper 4.5 poses an analogous question at the level of the organization understood as an ontological unity of decision-making in the sense of White Paper 4.4. It asks how it is possible that an organization persists as a unity of decision-making, even though collective decision-making is by its nature exposed to a plurality of perspectives, divergence of interpretive frameworks, and fragmentation of lines of decision-making. The concept of entropy is not used in this text as a physical quantity of the social world, but as a heuristic background for a category proper to Existential Management – entropic drift. At the same time, the document systematically distinguishes between the biological life of an organism and the ontological persistence of the identity of the organization over time. The expression life of the organization does not designate biological life here, but the problem of the ontological persistence of the identity of the organization reproduced by meaning as a unity of decision-making over time. It is not an independent ontological category, but a heuristic designation of the problem of persistence. The answer of Existential Management consists in the categories of the meaning of the organization, integrative force, reproduction of meaning through the cascade of meaning and the distribution of meaning in the social consciousness of the organization, entropic drift, and the ontological limit of the organization’s existence. The meaning of the organization is understood in this framework as the integrative principle of identity, differentiated into content and form (White Paper 4.4, chap. 3). Integrative force is the dynamic structural capacity of the organization to reproduce the meaning of the organization as an integrative principle across decision-making situations and thereby to maintain the unity of decision-making over time. An organization persists ontologically only when its integrative force, based on the reproduction of the meaning of the organization, exceeds the effects of entropic drift over the long term. The ontological limit designates the boundary beyond which the organization loses the capacity to reproduce its meaning as the integrative principle of the unity of decision-making, and thereby loses its integrative structure and interrupts the continuity of its identity regardless of whether it still persists legally or economically. The contribution of this White Paper lies in the fact that it deepens the problem of organizational identity, as formulated by White Paper 4.4, into the problem of the persistence of identity over time. Schrödinger’s question therefore does not function here as proof of Existential Management, but as a heuristic bridge to a deeper understanding of organizational existence, stability, disintegration, and the ontological continuity of identity reproduced by the meaning of the organization.