Conceptual underpinnings of organizational semiotics from the pragmatist perspective

Abstract The viability of theories of contemporary organizations is assessed from pragmatic and semiotic points of view. Contemporary research on organizational semiotics has focused on the problem of how to bring the notion of information to bear on semiotic accounts of social organizations. In this paper, the theoretical and conceptual elements involved in this endeavor are analyzed. Two notions stand out: the meaning of information and the idea that organizations are sign-theoretic systems. It is argued that the social level proposed in the previous literature is superfluous over and above the semantic and pragmatic levels. There is a sense in which social constructionism is not the right pillar to support the semiotic account. The proposed conceptual changes are likely to be beneficial to the practices of real information systems design. Hence, these changes advance the applications of semiotics to economics and other social sciences that are shaped by the foundations for sociotechnological information systems.