The Distinctions within Organizations: Luhmann from a Cultural Perspective Wil Martens Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands Abstract. Cultural theories of organization generally focus on decipher- ing and deconstructing forms of meaning and social constructions of reality used in organizational behaviour. In line with this approach, Luhmann emphasizes the important role of distinctions and semantics for the production and orientation of organizations. However, producing organizations is, in his view, not just a matter of reality construction. It means the actual production of a specific social system using specific distinctions in recursively related communications. This paper first shows that Luhmann’s writings are helpful to identify the constitutive distinctions for organization as a specific type of social system. Relating Luhmann’s theory of organization to his theory of functionally differ- entiated society, it identifies, second, the specifying distinctions that are responsible for the specific problem orientations typical of modern orga- nizations. In a third step, it shows how the distinctions and schemes used in organizations fit into and contribute to a general functionalist culture of modernity. Key words. culture; distinction; Luhmann; organization; theory of social systems In the fields of ‘symbolic-interpretive’, ‘critical’ and ‘postmodern’ organi- zational theory, organizations are depicted as cultural phenomena. Such a cultural approach to organizations has gained increased weight in the past decades (Alvesson and Karremann, 2000). The theories indicated above take culture as a basic metaphor (Smircich, 1983); or they look at organizations as ‘texts’ and propose to read organizational actions, struc- tures and artifacts as the results and indicators of socially stabilized Volume 13(1): 83–108 ISSN 1350–5084 Copyright © 2006 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) DOI: 10.1177/1350508406059643 http://org.sagepub.com articles at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen on June 26, 2015 org.sagepub.com Downloaded from