Performance in Organisations: An Autonomous Systems Approach

The research topic being examined in this work corresponds to performance in organisations from the perspective of Management Cybernetics. It originated from some of the limitations in the measurement and assessment of performance that are commonly encountered in functionalistic, black box, descriptions of enterprises. This approach relates to the build up of the capacity for producing ?what is desirable? in organisations. Accordingly, organisations have been considered as autonomous systems, paying attention to the exploration of the relationships and structures involved in the production of performance. The main outcomes of this work are clarifying a notion of performance based on autonomy and offering a methodology to further study this notion.