Reflexive Organization and Radicalized Modernity: Revisiting the Organization–Society Nexus

Abstract

Organizations and societies have changed. Bureaucracy, as modernity’s form of organization, has transformed into a reflexive organization, coordinating the conditions of system reproduction in time–space with increased reflexivity. Simultaneously, modernity with capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization as its institutional dimensions radicalized; reflexive organizations as one of its driving forces and the reflexive organization as the new organization model. Today, reflexive organizations are the most ubiquitous and powerful agents in our societies, separating and integrating activities, practices, and occurrences in new time–space arrangements and sets of social systems together with others, fueling modernity’s dynamism and global scope and letting our societies resemble an engine without a driver, erratically running in directions we cannot foresee. To identify and understand these changes and their impact on our current world, we develop a research framework informed by Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory that upgrades social systems to the core of structuration theory and adds the reflexive mode of organization and a strategic perspective to Giddens’ theory of modernity.

Introduction

Beyond the current discourse on the vanishing of the American corporation (Davis, 2016), the plea to substitute organizing for organizations (Chia, 2003), and the diagnosis of the transformation of modernity into postmodernity (Lyotard, 1984 [1979]), ‘organizations are the most ubiquitous and powerful agents in modern societies’ (Haveman, 2022: ix). Although organizations and societies have constituted each other recursively in time and space since the French Revolution (North et al., 2009) or the unfolding of modernity (Weber, 1930 [1904–1905]), organizations and societies have changed, in particular in the last decades: organizations have become more reflexive, and societies more radicalized modern. As a medium and result of these processes, the reflexive organization has become the new model, shaping organizations’ capabilities to act and making them one of radicalized modernity’s driving forces. Thus, to understand our world today, we must appreciate organizations’ varying power and scope and their interplay with society. This article outlines a research framework to analyze the transformations toward the reflexive organization, radicalized modernity, and today’s new nexus of organization and society.

Scholars have controversially debated organizations and their societal role since modernity’s unfolding. Today, these discussions often mark developments, comparing them with Max Weber’s bureaucracy as modernity’s form of organization. Some discussants point to the continuation of bureaucratic organizations (du Gay, 2000). Others, like Robert Chia (2003), highlight entities’ dissolution and becoming fluid (Bauman, 2007) in postmodern societies (Lyotard, 1984 [1979]) and opt for replacing bureaucracy and modernity with organizing and postmodernity often applying a flat ontology (Seidl and Whittington, 2014).

We try to overcome these discussants’ opposing reflections by interpreting them as indicators for transformations of organizations and organizing into—what we like to call—the reflexive organization (Ortmann et al., 2023 [1997]), meaning organizations coordinating ‘the conditions of system reproduction’ (Giddens, 1990a: 303) in time–space with increased reflexivity, constantly examining and reforming social practices relevant to the organization ‘in the light of continually incoming information and knowledge about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 38)

Reflecting on modernity and its future(s), we will not scrutinize the lively and controversial discourse on modernity. We take a different track and concentrate on one of its formative voices: Anthony Giddens’ (1990a) radicalized modernity. We discuss some of his central provisions because we view them as beneficial for understanding our world and today’s new nexus between organization and society. We suggest using Giddens’ idea of radicalized modernity, although his idea is contested for its modernist thinking (Meštrović, 1998) or, alternatively, for deconstructing theories of modernity (Vandenberghe and Fuchs, 2019). We do so because authors see Giddens’ idea of radicalized modernity as a continuous source of inspiration (Wagner, 1994) and a fruitful background to discuss ‘multiple modernities’ (e.g. Arnason, 1989; critically Wagner, 2011) and postcolonial critiques of modernity approaches (Silla and Vaidyanathan, 2021).

Radicalized modernity already signifies that—in contrast to postmodern assumptions (Lyotard, 1984 [1979])—‘we have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalization’ (Giddens, 1990b: 51), characterized by an increased principle of reflexivity. Surprisingly for an author who coined structuration theory, Giddens offers an institutional approach to radicalized modernity lacking primary structuration theory considerations. Thus, in his idea of modernity, Giddens concentrates on modernity’s institutional social order that he composes of Karl Marx’s capitalistic, Émile Durkheim’s industrial, and Weber’s rational order. By combining these orders, he opposes the classics’ mutually exclusive characterizations of modernity’s orders and driving forces: ‘Modernity, I propose, is multidimensional on the level of institutions, and each of the elements specified by these various traditions play some part.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 12) While Giddens treats the principle of reflexivity as the guiding imperative of modernity, he is, however, neither explicit about what this principle means for the interplay of modernity’s institutions and agents nor for the organization–society nexus. Thus, it is no surprise that Giddens’ theory of modernity does not systematically consider organizations’ role in modernity’s development or how organizations transform into reflexive organizations during modernity’s radicalization.

Building on Giddens’ approach to radicalized modernity, we try to overcome these shortcomings and advance his idea systematically. To do this, we first emphasize a reflexive interplay of capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization as modernity’s institutional dimensions (thereby opposing understandings of fixed interdependencies between the institutional dimensions). Second, taking up Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, we overcome the restrictions of Giddens’ institutional modernity approach. Thus, we understand the changes toward radicalized modernity and reflexive organization as ongoing interplaying production and reproduction processes based on modernity’s reflexivity principle that incrementally started with modernity’s unfolding and gradually intensified, especially in the last decades, not least due to scientification, globalization, and digitalization processes. Whereby—complementing Giddens’ institutional approach with a structurationist strategic perspective—knowledgeable agents—and in particular (reflexive) organizations—recursively produce and reproduce these processes without controlling them, thus neglecting neither (radicalized) modernity’s more enduring nor dynamic features. Third, we propose adding the reflexive organization concept and show that we can gain explanatory power by focusing on how reflexive organizations shape the capitalistic, industrial, and rational orders as well as driving forces and modernity’s reflexivity principle today and, thus, the nexus between the reflexive organization and radicalized modernity. Furthermore, our approach decenters the prominent world polity assumptions of global all-encompassing convergence and homogenization of values and institutions (Meyer et al., 1997) and beliefs of requirements of functional differentiation of the world society (Luhmann, 2012 [1997]) without abandoning homogenization and societal differentiation altogether.

In our view, today’s organizations, societies, and organization–society nexus are continuously recursively generated, prolonged, or transformed in the interplay of reflexive organization and radicalized modernity in time and space by constellations of heterogeneous agents with different societal backgrounds, interests, and capabilities in time–space. Although, as we will outline, Giddens assigns organizations a crucial role in his modernity theory, scholars, including Giddens, have not systematically conceptualized radicalized modernity’s organization–society nexus from a structurationist view (see, however, focusing on inter-organizational networks Windeler (2001: 334–347, 2006), control Hoogenboom and Ossewaarde (2005), and information gathering McPhee (2004)). Thus, we propose complementing Giddens’ institutional analysis of radicalized modernity with a structurationist strategic view that focuses on actors’ and organizations’ practices, capabilities, and forms of coordinating collective agency under radical modernity’s principle of reflexivity.

To understand how organizations—reflexively combining and recombining elements of bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic organizing in their activities—prevail to be the ubiquitous and most potent agents of our time without being bureaucracies, we show how the reflexive mode of organization and radicalized modernity recursively constitute each other, institutionalizing the reflexive organization as radicalized modernity’s form of organization. For us, reconsidering this transformed organization–society nexus builds an essential challenge in understanding our world today. Its analysis needs a sophisticated analytical approach. In this article, we elaborate on such an approach informed by Giddens’ structuration theory. As Giddens does not assign a significant role to social systems in the social constitution, our main contribution is to continue his idea by extending the structurationist approach to the organization–society nexus with the concept of organizations as distinct social systems. In addition, we contribute a structurationist view of modernity and its developments, combining developments at the organizational and societal levels. Taking the organization–society nexus more seriously makes it possible to understand the vital role of organizations (first section) in the constitution of current collective agency in manifold contexts, being at the root of the generation, reproduction, and transformation of radicalized modern conditions that characterize our societies today (second and third sections).

Beyond the Bureaucratic Organization and Modernity? Observations and Reflections Indicating a Fundamental Shift in the Organization–Society Nexus

Recent studies and conceptual reflections in organization research indicate a fundamental shift in the organization–society nexus. We aim to explain the contours of this shift by presenting the classical nexus derived from Weber, display studies that argue for changes in the inner characteristics and external relations of recent organizations, and finally critically discuss prominent conceptual reactions to these studies fundamentally revising the organization–society nexus.

For Weber (1930 [1904–1905]; 2019 [1921]), a particular form of organization, the bureaucracy, is institutionalized as modernity’s form of organization in unfolding and establishing modernity. Thereby, Weber declares bureaucracy one of the crucial social innovations in the history of the world with a great future. Furthermore, he interrelates bureaucratization—as one of the forces of Occidental rationalizing—with modernity. Weber’s view profoundly influenced the debates on organization societies (Perrow, 1991) and approaches from rational choice (Coleman, 1990) to neo-institutionalism (Jepperson and Meyer, 2021a). It also inspired our approach. Thus, we use Weber’s concept of bureaucracy and his understanding of the organization–society nexus to define the model of reflexive organization and the new organization–society nexus in our radicalized modernity today.

Weber (2019 [1921]) constructs bureaucracy as the standardized form of the modern organization, emphasizing its essential organization by rules, regulations, and paperwork. He portrays bureaucracy as the pure type of ‘legitimate rule in a rational manner’ with ‘rationally orientated statutes’ (Weber, 2019 [1921]: 341). In passing, he addresses the relations to the environment, formulating ‘a claim to observance’ with the statutes ‘by persons who become involved in social relationships or social actions considered relevant to the organization’ (Weber, 2019 [1921]: 343). The bureaucratic order fixes via a cosmos of intentionally created and codified impersonal, abstract rules and regulations the ‘continuing rule-governed conduct of official functions’ within ‘a sphere of competence’, thus constituting ‘the principle of the administrative hierarchy’ (Weber, 2019 [1921]: 344–346). Consequently, bureaucracy rises above individuals, favoritism, and family connections, separates the person from the job, and treats individuals as interchangeable with respect to applying general rules. It concentrates on rule-based formal relations, power differences, and authority structures, articulates means-ends relationships, develops ascribed actor-hood (in the sense of sovereign accountability in legal and moral terms), and defines and marks its boundaries, purposes, and responsibilities. So, bureaucracy is fixed in time and demarked boundaries and (re-)produced via formal-rationally organizing and actors that pay attention to that order in their activities for whatever motives. For Weber, this makes bureaucracy the modern organization, which enables calculating predictable modern social orders, capitalism, and democracy.

Are organizations and their practices of organizing bureaucratic or post-bureaucratic, and are our societies modern or postmodern today? We start to motivate our thesis of a fundamental shift toward reflexive organization and a new nexus of organization and society in radicalized modernity, offering tentative observations and reflections on the characteristics of organizations and practices of organizing. These indicate that elements of bureaucratic organizing often interplay with contrasting features in organizations and—decisive—are used reflexively today in organizing occurrences, activities, and orders.

Concerning the inner characteristics of organizations, studies display that organizations, at least since some time, increasingly use intentionally and simultaneously codified orders and unwritten arrangements fixed in ad hoc discussions, meetings, and agreements. In this sense, Giddens (1990a: 138) generally notes that organizations today partially even create areas of autonomy and spontaneity instead of rigidity. More specifically, in the 1950s, the Hawthorne experiments (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1947) and studies like Joseph Bensam and Israel Grever’s (1963) on ‘Crime and Punishment in the Factory’ determined that informal rules, relations, and orders play a role in organizations supplementary to formal ones. Research on production systems in the 1980s points to the interplay of heterarchical forms of coordination, like group work, with hierarchies (Womack et al., 1990). Other scholars disclose, at the same period, the interplay of project-based temporary regulations with permanent ones (Midler, 1995; Sydow and Windeler, 2020) and the political constitution of organizations (Crozier and Friedberg, 1980 [1977]; Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). In addition, more recent studies demonstrate that organizations experiment with including personalities, emotions, and moods (Dobbin and Kalev, 2022), artifacts and technologies of all kinds and with reflexively combined forms of organizational, market-based, and network principles in coordination (Sydow et al., 2012).

Concerning the characteristics of organizations’ relations with the environment, studies since the 1970s stress that organizations increasingly not only expect others in their domain to pay attention to their statutes but, in parallel, more actively coordinate activities and occurrences with external actors and often coercively enforce their claims of compliance in global time–space arrangements (Bartley et al., 2019; Sydow and Windeler, 1998). Thus, organizations actively influence agents’ views, structures, and practices in other organizations and are influenced by sets of organizations. Moreover, these inter-organizational relations are not only guided by statutes but, for example, also by personal connections (Saxenian, 1994), coercive, normative, and mimetic isomorphisms (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) or coalition-building and alliances (Barley, 2010; Hoffman, 1999). Furthermore, organizations use multiple social systems and places for coordinating with others, from conferences to social fields often orchestrated by meta-organizations like consortia (Bromley and Meyer, 2015; Sydow et al., 2012). In addition, global teams in software production or creative work make team members actively decide to meet virtually or in presence (Sennett, 2012).

In addition, researchers found that organizations with various boundary conditions populate today’s organizational landscape. Beyond bureaucracies, the array includes hollow (e.g. Miles and Snow, 1986), network (e.g. Powell, 1990), project (e.g. Sahlin-Andersson and Söderholm, 2002), platform (e.g. Kirchner and Schüßler, 2019) or social field organizations (Windeler, 2021; Windeler and Jungmann, 2023).

Researchers react differently to empirical findings like the ones mentioned and the related challenges of the bureaucratic organization model. Some, like Paul du Gay (2000), emphasize the ongoing societal relevance of bureaucracies as they populate even unexpected settings (Bromley and Meyer, 2015), such as open-source software production (O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007) or creative industries (Grabher, 2004; Windeler and Sydow, 2001). Other scholars, like Gerald Davis (2016), empirically state the diminishing of established forms of organizations (like the American corporation) and diagnose changing societal roles of organizations with new forms of organizing like ‘nicification’ or ‘uberization.’ Tim Bartley et al. (2019) analyze another trend. They indicate—to some extent in contrast to the long-standing thesis of the diminishing—a transformation of organizations’ role in modern sociation. They reformulate Charles Perrow’s (1991) concept of organizational society. Looking at the design of value chains, financialization, and digital technologies, they argue that organizations do not only prevail in these transformation processes. They often enlarge their societal roles beyond particular nation-states via ‘concentration without centralization’ (Harrison, 1994). Authors in this camp of argumentation usually take the form of organization as given and explicitly attribute current organizations to an influential position in the nexus with societies but do not explicitly challenge the bureaucratic organization model.

Chia (2003) draws a different conclusion, prioritizing organizational processes instead of entities. For him, modernity and modern scientific thought refer to a ‘Parmenidean ontology of being’ (Chia, 2003: 115), ‘privileging [. .] form, being, order, stability, identity, and presence’ (Chia, 2003: 114). In contrast, he signifies postmodernity and postmodern thought as a ‘Heraclitan ontology of becoming’ and highlights ‘becoming, formlessness, flux, difference, deferral, and change’. (Chia, 2003: 114) Favoring the postmodern view, he pleads for concentrating on organizing and sees organizations and organizing as ‘intrinsically opposing’ (Chia, 2003: 131). Beyond rhetoric, he implicitly re-approaches Weber’s characterization of organizations by formulating: ‘[o]rganization [as activity] is a constructive counter-movement [to change] aimed at fixing, ordering, routinizing, and regularizing changes through human interactions so that a degree of predictability and productivity in social exchange is attainable.’ (Chia, 2003: 132) For Chia (2003: 132), organizing is a ‘‘world-making’ activity [. .] pivotal to a civilizational process.’ Thus, he implicitly reformulates the organization–society nexus as a nexus between organizing and society and diagnoses a significant shift in the organization model.

Representatives of actor-network theory are equally fundamentally critical of systemic entities. They call to focus on the interlock of physical effects in actu and opt for a flat ontology and a strong processual view in their descriptions (Latour, 2005; and for politics in organizations, Whittle and Spicer, 2008). Authors with these backgrounds de facto argue that not only organizations but also the nexus between organizations and society do not play a (noteworthy) role in our times or their explanations.

Thus, postmodernists and advocates of actor-network theory do not conceptually consider that actors recursively ‘make the (organizational) world’ by actualizing in situ given, constraining, enabling, and organizationally and societally shaped conditions in time and space they, thereby, (re-)produce (Ortmann et al., 2023 [1997]; Weick, 2001). Consequently, they are—unlike us—not interested in explaining how organizations recursively coin the conditions for the typical mode of coordination and organizing in our societies today, how the mode of organizing changed in the last decades without making the bureaucratic elements of organizing and organizations irrelevant, and how societal conditions become relevant for organizational life.

The presented tentative empirical observations and reflections suggest, on the one hand, that organizations and modes of organizing—bureaucracies and bureaucratic forms of organizing included—still play a role and have their place in our world today. On the other hand, they put forward that something has happened to organizations and the form of organizing in the last decades: they have pluralized, become more fluid, and exhibit characteristics beyond bureaucratic organizing without abandoning elements of bureaucratic organizing altogether. Furthermore, the listed observations and reflections point to and reveal changes on the societal level that seem to fit with Giddens’ overall picture of societal transformation. To sensitize for conceptualizing the illustratively evoked new nexus between organization and society, we propose an approach that differs from Weber’s view of rationalized modernity and postmodernist views but allows fruitfully integrating their contributions.

Reflexive Organizations as Specific Social Systems

Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory helps to unfold the conceptual foundations for a framework to analyze the societal constitution of reflexive organizations and the institutionalization of the reflexive organization as radicalized modernity’s new organization model. As we want to complement Giddens’ institutional theory of modernity with structurationist thoughts of societal constitution, we present some of its central notions in a concentrated fashion in the following.

We start our outline of the organizational side of the new nexus between organizations and society with a brief overview of the constitution of social systems before we characterize organizations as a social system imprinted by modernity’s principle of reflexivity. We close this section by considering what is unique about the reflexive organization compared with modern organizations.

Social Systems in the Social Constitution

Even if Giddens ascribes social systems not primary roles in the social constitution, he offers a concept of social systems. However, in his outline of the structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), he mainly concentrates on knowledgeable agents and the duality of structure. Agents are knowledgeable (Giddens, 1984: 5) as they recurrently produce and reproduce their primarily practical knowledge via the reflexive monitoring, rationalization, and motivation of ongoing processes, activities, and orders in time and space and use their generated, continued, or transformed knowledge in their actions. The duality of structure means that agents in interaction recursively constitute their activities by referring to rules of signification and legitimation and resources of domination as situationally activated structures they thereby (re-)produce (Giddens, 1984: 29).

Perhaps not coincidentally, we do not find Giddens’ central definition of social systems in his major work, The Constitution of Society (Giddens, 1984). Yet, in a later paper, Giddens (1990b: 302) fruitfully defines social systems as ‘composed of social relations and social interactions coordinated across time and space’ and specifies types of social systems, like associations and organizations, by their modes of coordinating social interactions and relations. From the structurationist perspective, socially constituted knowledgeable agents produce and reproduce social systems in time–space by referring to systemically ‘regularized social practices, sustained in encounters dispersed across time–space’ (Giddens, 1984: 83) via the duality of structure in their interactions. Arnold Windeler (2018: 90–96) adds that social systems (not only nation-states) (are institutionally expected to some extent today to) reflexively build regulatory orders around the selection of agents or modes of time–space coordination, evaluation of activities and occurrences, allocation of resources, system integration, position configuration, and border constitution. In this view—in contrast to Weber and with Giddens—the boundedness of social systems and their systemness is not given and may be realized only to some degree. Thus, the binding of activities, occurrences, and ideas and their time–space distanciation are something to be recursively produced and reproduced in time–space in sets of social systems and only in part achieved intentionally and—even in organizations—often in no way predominantly by a statute.

This understanding of social constitution via systemically coordinated activities, relations, and occurrences in time and space includes that agents are not only influenced by given institutions, structures, or orders, and social practices of social systems with different extensions in time and space. Depending on how agents (can) actualize them in interactions via rules and resources, they (collectively) (re-)produce and even institutionalize systems, possibly modified. In and through these processes, social systems are themselves potentially societally or culturally constructed as institutionalized agents (equipped with sovereign actor-hood, accountability, and standardized activities, Meyer and Jepperson, 2000) which ‘are reconceived to have capacities far beyond those envisioned in the past.’ (Jepperson and Meyer, 2021b: 128)

This structuration-theoretical-informed recursive and relational institutionalization perspective sensitizes how agents actively contribute to transforming an established form (like bureaucracy) into a new model (like the reflexive organization). Moreover, it focuses on how social systems (like organizations) are essential for coordinating and regulating a high degree of binding between activities dispersed in time and space, which is fundamental for the constitution of collective agency (general Ahrne, 1990; from a structurationist point of view Windeler, 2001: 225–228).

Considering the importance of social systems in the social constitution by assigning them a corresponding position in the social theoretical framework is reasonable. Therefore, we propose to enhance the structuration approach by attributing a more systematic status to social systems—and, thus, to organizations. Informed by structuration theory, we suggest defining the triad of knowledgeable agents, the duality of structure, and social systems as the core of a generative framework for social research today. With this extension, we pave the way for a renewed theory of radicalized modernity in which reflexive organizations are constitutive, as we will outline in the third section.

Organizations as Distinct Social Systems

Organizations, as we know them, are a modern phenomenon (Weber, 1930 [1904–1905]; 2019 [1921]), successively institutionalized as modernity’s form of coordination during modernity’s unfolding and establishing. However, as indicated, organizations and societies have gradually become more reflexive or radicalized, especially in the last decades.

Underlying this argument is the assumption that reflexivity as constitutive element of the social is also a defining element of modernity and its dynamism that incrementally developed (its modern meaning) with modernity’s unfolding and gradually intensified: ‘The reflexivity of modernity actually subverts reason, at any rate where reason is understood as the gaining of certain knowledge’. (Giddens, 1990b: 39) On this basis, Giddens (in line with Weber) contrasts the pre-modern with the modern form of knowledge production and use and qualifies modernity’s form of reflexivity:

‘In pre-modern civilizations reflexivity is still largely limited to the reinterpretation and clarification of tradition.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 37) In contrast, ‘[t]he reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 38)

Modernity’s reflexivity principle builds in its unfolding and radicalizes in its successive establishment across more and more areas of life and different contexts. In its modern form, it has become an imperative for action today, contributing to modernity’s constitution and development into radicalized modernity with all its plural expressions. Present-day agents (encouraged by the imperative) reflexively monitor, rationalize, and motivate actions, occurrences, and orders across sets of plural social systems, views, and orders dispersed in time and space. Consequently, all agents, lay persons, experts, organizations, and nation-states, for example, act (and have to act) based on complex and often widely unacknowledged conditions, producing not only intended but also unintended and unrecognized consequences of purposeful actions. The constitution of the reflexive organization as radicalized modernity’s model of organizing is a medium and result of these developments—as we outline in the following.

To capture the changes in organizational form, we need and offer—beyond the concept of recursive and relational institutionalization—a new general concept of an organization that differs fundamentally from Weber’s understanding of bureaucratic organizations. With Giddens (1990b: 303), we conceptualize an organization as a social system with a ‘high degree of reflexive coordination of the conditions of system reproduction.’ Thus, this definition of an organization reflects its modern imprinting and attributes them a distinct modern characteristic: institutionalized reflection on system reproduction. To a dominant degree, organizations, therefore, reflexively monitor, rationalize, and motivate activities, occurrences, and their domains in the relations with other agents—most organizations—they see as relevant. This institutionalized mode of organizing allows organizations (and demands from them) to coordinate the activities and events of different actors and develop specific organizational institutional and regulatory orders that exhibit characteristics beyond the bureaucracy’s statutes.

In particular, organizations (are expected to) decidedly try to intentionally form organization’s orders today, reflecting relevant orders across social systems with different extensions in time–space. Organizations often do this by setting up separate social practices for these issues, like managing, administrating, and planning or surveilling activities, occurrences, and results. In addition, organizations (are requested to) continuously update focused knowledge via reflexive monitoring, rationalizing, and motivating relevant occurrences, activities, practices, structures, and results (Giddens, 1987: 154) and use their knowledge in their activities. Often (reflecting institutional affordances), they primarily collect and arrange the information they see as critical to organizational structuration and enrich their information through external capacities (e.g. associations, think tanks, or advisors). They (have to) adjust the system conditions, activities, and occurrences by accumulating, coding, and re-provisioning their information and knowledge and using them to organize and regulate the organization. Thus, such reflexive organizational monitoring, rationalizing, and motivating are (regulatory envisioned) means to control and sustain an organization’s activities, occurrences, orders, and forms of rule to some extent.

Yet, organizations’ orders differ from intentionally designed (institutional) scripts because agents constitute organizations’ rules and resources in and through their organizational practices. Some structures and responsibilities for system reflexivity, like surveillance, are (reflecting institutionalized standards) regularly formalized and delegated to defined sets of agents (like supervisors) or organizational entities (like departments of controlling or human relations or network advisory organizations in the case of inter-organizational networks). However, in praxis, all participants—the supervisors and the selected organizational entities included—reflexively monitor, rationalize, and motivate what is happening in and beyond an organization and shape the organization’s order to some extent. Thus, any organization develops its institutional and regulatory orders in light of internal and external affordances. But not all can use the same facilities, data, and coordinated practices, have the same capabilities and capacities to influence organizational constitution in relevant relations with others, and are systemically encouraged—although the control of processes and happenings is always far less than complete. Yet, all participants use their understanding, knowledge, and power in their activities—however limited these might be. Thus, the impact of these interventions differs with the power actors can generate and apply individually or together with others.

Therefore, our concept of an organization specifies Weber’s understanding of the bureaucratic organization. Beyond establishing order primarily through statutes, the organization takes ‘the continuing action […] to assure the execution and enforcement of orders’ (Weber, 2019 [1921]: 402; Jungmann, 2023) based on the continuous reflexive monitoring, rationalization, and motivation of occurrences, activities, and orders seen as relevant—even if bureaucratic procedures result from this reflection.

Reflexive Organizations’ Specificities

If organizations are already highly reflexive in coordinating the conditions of their system production, what is the term reflexive organization supposed to mean? What is specific about the reflexive organization becomes apparent by contrasting it with the modern bureaucratic organization model.

As there are continuities between the modern and radicalized modern (models of) organization, and neither is cut of whole cloth, contrasting the two forms of the organization too gross a fashion is misleading. However, one has to note that—in contrast to the times Weber coined his concept of bureaucracy as modernity’s form or organization—organizations today act under radical modern circumstances and organize activities and happenings in and beyond particular organizations quite differently than Weber’s (bureaucratic) modern organization model defines. Related to their respective foci and domains, up-to-date organizations’ organizing, to some degree, requires (as our tentative empirical observations in the first section suggest), for example, recursively separating and integrating activities, procedures, and occurrences in new time–space arrangements and sets of social systems with others and generating information, knowledge, and competencies about those very practices, using them together with technological achievements and expertise to revise them recurrently. In addition, organizations’ organizing today means coordinating constellations of heterogeneous actors and reflecting governmental and non-governmental regulations, innovations, and sociopolitical changes—associated, for example, with processes of migration, digitalization, and globalization, and changed lifestyles, identities, and expectations. The pluralization and new time–space distanciations of conditions and options to, for example, reflexively organize, route, and reroute flows of trade, capital, data, people, and ideas in new time-space corridors accompanying the indicated developments challenge established (forms of ‘modern (bureaucratic)’) organization, production, distribution, and consumption, and, thereby, increasingly organizations’ (and society members’) established ‘modern’ expertise and action repertoires (to organize) without making them entirely worthless. Today’s organizations (are encouraged to) recurrently develop additional capabilities and capacities and (re-)combine them with bureaucratic abilities and skills to reflexively monitor, rationalize, and reform activities, occurrences, and orders and coordinate activities in sets of relationships with others, primarily organizations in time–space.

Thus, present-day organizations, for example, (are expected to) experiment with multiple, not only formal-rational forms of coordinating and surveilling. That is to say, they (are requested to) constantly comparatively monitor, rationalize, and motivate activities, occurrences, and the results achieved in plurally institutionalized and partly actively extended time–space contexts, modes of authority (Hoogenboom and Ossewaarde, 2005) and co-created sets of (plural) social systems (Windeler, 2001). As this kind of reflexive organization is sometimes (not least due to its institutionalization) made compelling concerning its focused aspects, results, and possibilities for collaborative efforts across extended time–spaces, it is simultaneously always insufficient to some degree. In particular, it allows only some organizations to develop significant power positions in social fields and societies without achieving control—at least not entirely.

However, individuals, organizations, and national states confront themselves (and are faced in the light of sometimes all around the globe shaped ideas and social practices (Bartley et al., 2019; Sydow et al., 2012; Windeler, 2001: 334–347) with an amplified need to justify using which option, without having control over them (Wagner, 1994: 34; Windeler, 2018: 77–81). Thus, organizations recurrently must explain to their participants, stakeholders, and sometimes even the wider public why they design the activities and occurrences, use these and no other means, and evaluate them precisely this way. Even if they stick to established practices, they now have to justify this more comprehensively in light of multiplied alternative possibilities, heterogeneous views, evaluation criteria, and power constellations. Thus, for example, today, media content producers have to legitimize the continuation of the established in-house production of media content in a largely projectified and networked industry (Sydow and Windeler, 2020; Windeler and Sydow, 2001). Voluntary organizations often must deal with more short-term forms of volunteering (Hustinx and Lammertyn, 2003) and volunteering in constellations of heterogeneous social field actors (Hustinx et al., 2022). These examples indicate that bureaucratic coordination and surveillance are supplemented today with multiple reflexive forms of organizing in companies, nonprofits, administration, and other organizations.

The arsenal of formal-rational forms of (bureaucratic) organizing and structures is not lost in the processes addressed—but modified and differently used. Bureaucratic forms and practices are still in play and expand, becoming diffused all over society, making formal organizations ubiquitous (Bromley and Meyer, 2015) by, however, often (but seldom recognized) altering their form simultaneously. Thus, if organizations utilize bureaucratic forms of organizing, they are encouraged to apply them differently today—as one option in a set of others, the choice to be justified with reference to alternative options, altering their character.

Institutionalized academic research, knowledge production, and organizing practices in more global time–space arrangements normalize the organizations’ new (more reflexive) mode of organizing, making us increasingly experience them as a given today. Consistent with this, organizations applying new reflexive forms of organizing increasingly become radical reflexive and are, to some extent, compelled to become these radical-modern organizations in newly arranged time–space contexts. This familiarization paves the development for these new organizations and their mode of organizing to become ubiquitous, a global phenomenon, and institutionalized.

The (potentially transnational) extension of these new organizing practices, the use of primarily digital means of communication, information gathering or control, and the recurring renewed questioning of the relevance of established practices or forms of collaboration (like networks or social fields) prepare the way for diverse concrete expressions of reflexive organization, stabilizing its form. The interplay between various manifestations and the unity of activities’ form of reflexive organizing confront organizations with new challenges today. However, it also offers them new opportunities, even if orders, means, practices, and organizational actors are institutionalized simultaneously, creating new uncertainties and risks.

Weber’s institutionalized model of modern organization fundamentally transforms in the processes mentioned. Organizations stay formal organizations. They resemble bureaucracies in some respects but often also (have to) intentionally and strategically organize beyond statutes. Beyond modern rationalization, a constellation of different reflexively interplaying institutional dimensions (like capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization) with their paces and qualities plays a role (see the third section). Furthermore, present-day organizations, constituting themselves in sets of social systems, are less (as Weber had in mind) a tool in the hand of one ruler to execute his will and only in part produce calculable, predictable social orders. The actorhood of today’s organizations is restricted and challenged—and simultaneously enlarged—in the ensembles of relations, organizations are embedded in and actively co-create and use. As a result, organizations and orders are becoming more fluid and are more actively shaped than in Weber’s or Jepperson and Meyer’s perspectives. In contrast to postmodernists and actor-network theorists, organizations remain vital (institutionalized) agents in the social constitution. To more fully understand and explain the current relationship between organizations and society, one needs to reflect on organizations’ forms of reflexive organization in our societies today.

In transforming a modern bureaucracy into a reflexive organization, the capabilities of agents to perform also alter, opening up new possibilities and affordances to act and justify their usages. However, not all actors can increase or maintain their capacity and capabilities for action under these new conditions. This is true for laypersons, experts, nation-states, and organizations—although to different degrees. The opportunities to develop ideas and bring them to bear in reflexively co-shaped contexts of action are conditioned in manifold ways by socially generated knowledge, beliefs, practices, and constellations of interacting agents—mostly organizations—across different orders. Thus, these socially constituted conditions enable and restrict agents’ capabilities to act individually or with others, requiring specific social skills and competencies even reflexive organizations and nation-states can insufficiently mobilize and control. In addition, these developments set regulatory orders of social systems—particularly of nation-states—under immense pressure.

Reflexive Organization as a Driving Force of Radical Modernity

Let us turn to radicalized modernity and reflect on its nexus with reflexive organizations by sketching organizations as a transformative force of modernity, discussing organizations’ role in the dynamism and globalizing scope of modernity, and reflexive organizations’ capabilities and capacities to influence the run of our world today.

The Transformative Forces of Modernity

Following the classics, we—unlike Giddens, who modifies Weber’s rationalization—see capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization as modernity’s central institutional dimensions. However, we agree with Giddens’ provision of multidimensional modernity, which (compared with the mutually exclusive understanding of modernity’s institutions by the classics) fundamentally shifts the view and designs the contours of a new perspective of modernity.

We argue that agents’ continuous application and transformation of modernity’s principle of reflexivity have not only radicalized modern capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization but also constituted a reflexive relationship between modernity’s institutional dimensions and increased modernity’s principle of reflexivity. As the medium and result of these processes, organizations have evolved into the driving forces of these developments. In the last decades, for example, capitalist enterprises have increasingly reflexively constituted the capitalistic system’s investment–profit–investment cycle in extended time–space arrangements. In parallel, organizations have recursively regularized the social organization of production—and, thus, industrialization—more reflexively ‘in order to coordinate human activity, machines, and the inputs and outputs of raw materials and goods.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 56) In addition, organizations—nonprofits included (Hustinx and Lammertyn, 2003; Hustinx et al., 2022)—have reflexively experimented with rationalizations’ apparatuses of surveillance, information control, and social supervision (Giddens, 1990b: 59), proving that they are more than just an apparatus implementing externally given ends. All organizations substantially contribute to the becoming reflexive of (radical) modernity’s institutions, dynamism, and scope in time–space, although to different degrees (Windeler, 2018: 81–86). Organizations with the capabilities and capacities to use the more reflexive forms of organizing competently and powerfully need special attention—as we exemplify below—understanding and explaining our current sociation and radical modernity’s ongoing development.

The Dynamism and Globalizing Scope of Modernity

Modernity expresses, for Giddens (1990b)—following Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—already an ‘extreme dynamism and a globalizing scope’ (p. 16) that derives from an interplay of ‘the separation of time and space,’ ‘the development of disembedding mechanisms,’ and ‘the reflexive appropriation of knowledge.’ (p. 20) This dynamism and globalizing scope is further radicalized in the last decades, producing current modernity’s unstable (globalized) orders that differs substantially from pre-modern, place-based orders. Present-day organizations play a crucial role in and for these developments and the resulting unstable orders they actively co-create. The correspondence of this dynamism with the empirical observations on today’s organizational forms of ‘concentration without centralization’ (Harrison, 1994) of power by, for example, generating ‘power at a distance’ through organizing global value chains, financialization, and digital technologies (Bartley et al., 2019), is remarkable. It displays that these organizations’ different resources, positions, capabilities, and capacities in their coordinated interplay build an intriguing part of our times’ dynamism and global scope. These (and other) examples show that reflexive organizations often transform their capabilities beyond their offices or factories, thereby relying on and radicalizing the mentioned threefold dynamics of modernity and substantially augmenting their capabilities and power in new time–space arrangements.

Thus, for coordination and integration, modernity’s characteristic separation of time and space requires the development of ‘standardized’ entities like clock time and, as we will soon see, symbolic tokens (like money) and expert systems. In turn, the ‘standardized’ entities allow for new ways of ‘breaking free from the restraints of local habits and practices’ (Giddens, 1990b: 20) and integrating the cut-through connections, for example, between activities, occurrences, and particular contexts. Today, Tayloristic and Fordistic forms of work organization in concert with technological means like digitized technologies are additional examples of the reflexive interplay of disembedding and re-embedding practices (Windeler, 2018: 80).

For Giddens, organizing is the gearing mechanism for integrating time and space-separated activities and happenings, especially across dispersed but geographically situated physical settings of local and global social activity. The systematic appropriation of the past to help shape the future by reflexively producing knowledge in (social) sciences and experiences is crucial as it develops relevant information and discursive and practical knowledge for separating and integrating activities, occurrences, and time–spaces.

Giddens (1990b) declares organizations essential for modern organizing:

Organisations (including the modern state) sometimes have the rather static, inertial quality which Weber associated with bureaucracy, but more commonly they have a dynamism that contrasts sharply with pre-modern orders. Modern organisations are able to connect the local and the global in ways which would have been unthinkable in more traditional societies and in so doing routinely affect the lives of many millions of people. (p. 20)

Especially in contexts of globalization, political and economic organizations’ capabilities to organize become clear:

‘If nation-states are the principal “actors” within the global political order, corporations are the domain agents within the world economy.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 71) ‘Business firms, especially the transnational corporation, may wield immense economic power, and have the capacity to influence political policies in their home bases and elsewhere.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 70)

For lay persons, experts, and in particular for organizations, symbolic tokens (in particular, money as a general means of exchange) and expert systems—as ‘systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise that organize large areas of the material and social environments in which we live today’ (Giddens, 1990b: 27) pluralize the options to separate and coordinate activities, occurrences and flows of trade, capital, data, people, and ideas across time and space as ‘they remove social relations from the immediacies of contexts’ and provide ‘‘guarantees’ of expectations across distanciated time–space’ (Giddens, 1990b: 28). In turn, the ways the actors—and again particularly organizations with their collectively accumulated power to organize—(are encouraged to) create and utilize symbolic tokens and expert systems with others to separate and integrate activities, occurrences, and time–spaces give the disembedding mechanisms their current form and relevance. Moreover, their form and relevance are continuously part of a reflexive organization in light of incoming information and knowledge about the possibilities and consequences of using symbolic tokens or expert systems to reproduce the respective organization. The actors, in turn, are confronted with these mechanisms and forms of generalized pieces of information and knowledge in their situated actions in the time–space they have partly actively co-created.

As no one can control the reflexively interplaying multidimensional constellation of institutions, symbolic tokens, and expert systems, in today’s often co-designed heterogeneous sets of social systems, social activities increasingly depend on trust in modernity’s institutions and disembedding mechanisms (Giddens, 1990b: 26): ‘Trust in expert systems depends neither upon a full initiation into these processes nor upon mastery of the knowledge they yield.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 29) The dependence on trust is, thereby, not only a characteristic of organizing practices today but also fuels their further development without even organizations (individually and collectively) being able to overcome the necessity to trust.

However, Giddens surprisingly does not discuss control differences and possibilities to generate and use the disembedding mechanism between individual lay persons, experts, and states or organizations, regarding, for example, their options to augment their action capabilities and power through coordinating with others. In addition, Giddens also does not reflect that knowledge, trust, and control on the personal and social system levels systematically differ and interrelate simultaneously (Sydow and Windeler, 2004). The same applies to the third and last of Giddens’ elements defining modernity’s dynamism, the reflexive appropriation of knowledge that qualifies modernity’s form of reflexivity, as outlined above.

The possibilities to control the production and reproduction of relevant information and knowledge and utilize them in action, especially in radicalized modern contexts, differ substantially not only between lay persons, experts, and states or organizations and their reflexive capabilities and capacities—individually and coordinated with others in particular. As a rule, the possibilities to control and act also distinguish between the mentioned groups of agents—for example, between organizations that can reflexively shape relevant conditions of their activities to some degree and organizations that are missing these abilities to a large extent. However, even if all current organizations constitute radicalized modern conditions, some develop significantly more power to shape our societies today. One may, for example, think of economic, political, and regulatory agencies like banks, insurers and stock exchanges, ministries, and federal financial supervisory authorities that collectively organize and regulate the exchange of credit and debt, trading, and supervision of financial services based on focused forms of knowledge appropriation to a degree (see, for example, Fligstein, 2021). In addition, some heterogeneous organizations develop new manufacturing facilities globally using sets of consortia or networks, surveillance apparatuses, and forms of knowledge appropriation to organize flexibly coordinated settings in time and space (Ferrary and Granovetter, 2009; Sydow et al., 2012; Windeler and Jungmann, 2023). Furthermore, some global political organizations knowledgeably experiment with different forms of self-regulation beyond the state (e.g. Ladeur, 2013) or networked statehood by networks of individual states, international organizations, and transnational regimes (Golia and Teubner, 2021). Furthermore, institutionalized fields of heterogeneous actors explore ways to corral national governments (Barley, 2010) and shape the political order. More generally, social fields—relevant also for the activities of nonprofit organizations (Hustinx et al., 2022)—develop into ‘societal laboratories’ (Windeler, 2021: 462) in which heterogeneous actors generate, explore, and experiment with ideas, norms, and practices about issues like digitization, migration, or climate change, justice, social inequalities or forms of lifestyle, identities, and expectations and collectively constitute views and orders, often across societal sectors and political entities like nation-states, affecting their meaning in the social constitution.

Crucial to understanding modernity and its developments is that lay persons, experts, organizations, and states (including societal totalities like the European Union) are not only shaped by but also (collectively) develop and eventually transform and use the conditions of their activities without control. The circumstances they, together with others, constitute in time–space confront them with possibilities, restraints, and affordances and simultaneously offer them opportunities. However, radicalized modernity’s constellation of institutions often binds more heterogeneous forces with their pace and qualities. They constitute multidimensional orders with plural features, signification, domination, and legitimation. Actors with different capabilities and capacities reflexively and recursively actualize given conditions in their activities. Thereby, as a collectivity, they give them their form to some extent beyond some circumstances, and the consequences of their actions remain unacknowledged and unintended in often varying time–space arrangements.

In turn, the phenomenology of modernity differs fundamentally from the world Weber projected:

Everyday experience, according to Weber, retains its colour and spontaneity, but only on the perimeter of the ‘steel-hard’ cage of bureaucratic rationality. The image has a great deal of power […]. There are many contexts of modern institutions which are marked by bureaucratic fixity. But they are far from all-pervasive, and even in the core settings of its application, namely, large-scale organisations, Weber’s characterisation of bureaucracy is inadequate. Rather than tending inevitably towards rigidity, organisations produce areas of autonomy and spontaneity-which are actually often less easy to achieve in smaller groups. (Giddens, 1990b: 138)

Where are we today if these are modernity’s institutions, driving forces, and characteristics? Giddens, as stated, points to a radicalization of modernity and not to a new postmodern social order: ‘The trajectory of social development is [not] taking us away from the institutions of modernity toward a new and distinct type of social order.’ (Giddens, 1990b: 46) Yet, postmodern society is possible without being on the horizon yet. Setting this discussion aside, we may evaluate what the forgoing provisions mean for the possibility of shaping (radical) modernity.

The Runaway World of Today’s Modernity. Riding the Juggernaut

Reflexive organizing in radical modernity resembles an ‘ongoing reflexive process of exploration and experimentation under conditions of uncertainty […] that are given, yet also actively co-created.’ (Windeler, 2018: 97) Thereby, actors explore and experiment with designing processes, practices, and conditions that comprise context-specific, to some extent, reflexively shaped institutionalized constellations of capitalistic, industrial, and rational orders. The constellations of orders offer agents (and confront them with) ensembles of heterogeneous rules of signification, legitimation, and domination resources they often do not control—at least not entirely. Typically, agents focus on structurally and institutionally shaped options of some power they have to trust to some extent concerning their adequacy, correctness, and ascribed characteristics and capabilities. They have to trustfully use them to separate and integrate activities, occurrences, and time–spaces, to generate, develop or transform disembedding mechanisms, and possibilities to re-embed activities, occurrences, and time–spaces based on a continually renewed collective appropriation of knowledge—with all its unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences in time–space. However, understanding social activities fundamentally rests on combining expertise and trust in radicalized modernity.

Thus, no individual or collective can steer or control societal development in radicalized modernity. That is to say, ‘There is no one driver.’ But where does modernity lead? Weber foresaw a ‘steel hard cage of bondage,’ and Marx a shattering but tamable modernity. Giddens transforms both ideas by projecting modernity as a juggernaut running ‘erratically in directions we cannot foresee.’ The juggernaut is

a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder. The juggernaut crushes those who resist it, and while it sometimes seems to have a steady path, there are times when it veers away erratically in directions we cannot foresee. The ride is by no means wholly unpleasant or unrewarding; it can often be exhilarating and charged with hopeful anticipation. But, so long as the institutions of modernity endure, we shall never be able to control completely either the path or the pace of the journey. In turn, we shall never be able to feel entirely secure, because the terrain across which it runs is fraught with risks of high consequence. Feelings of ontological security and existential anxiety will coexist in ambivalence. (Giddens, 1990b: 139)

Without going into the details of this imagery, we argue that today’s world still resembles a juggernaut. Nevertheless, to understand our world today, it is of decisive help to differentiate actors’ capabilities and capacities to influence the run of today’s world and focus on reflexive organizations and the forms they organize their activities, especially with others. We agree with Giddens that we ‘as human beings can collectively drive and control the runaway engine to some extent,’ that the engine ‘threatens to run out of our control and rend itself asunder,’ and is running ‘erratically in directions we cannot foresee.’ However, not all human beings and agents have the same capabilities and capacities to influence the run of processes to some extent and are equally affected. Not all can, for example, mobilize the same (amount of) resources and have access to relevant systems and places of influence. Yet again, in his theory of modernity, Giddens does not focus on this and what consequences and possibilities are affiliated with this kind of (ascribed and expected) activities for collective actors like organizations and coordinating activities with others in time–space.

In our view, it is, once again, necessary and helpful to differentiate between lay persons, experts, states, and reflexive (political, economic, juridical, and cultural) organizations. Based on our previous considerations, we reiterate: Modernity’s runaway engine already has no one driver or integrated machinery and does not head—in contrast to Marx and Weber—to a predictable and controllable end. Yet, reflexive organizations, via their forms of reflexive organizing, constitute themselves (and are constituted) as radical modernity’s most ubiquitous and powerful agents that, more than any other actors, can collectively drive the development along the sometimes steady path that potentially veers away erratically in directions we cannot foresee to some extent, however limited their reach, ability, and the risks and dangers may be. Consequently, organizations in their current forms need specific attention when formulating an up-to-date theory of modernity.

Discrepancies Between the Empirical Evidence and Conceptual Considerations. A Conclusion

There are astonishing discrepancies between the empirical and experience-saturated evidence of organizations’ role and form in today’s society and its conceptual considerations on the organization–society nexus. Organizations increasingly populate all spheres of life and continuously impact our world, making formal organizations the most ubiquitous and influential agents of our time (Bromley and Meyer, 2015; Haveman, 2022; North et al., 2009; Weber, 1930 [1904–1905]). Conceptually, organizations are often inadequately considered modern bureaucracies or mere sites of pluralized organizing.

As shown in second and third sections, Giddens, for example, offers conceptual provisions of social systems and organizations. However, he attributes them only a subordinate role in his structuration theory and his theory of modernity. Thus, we proposed to advance social systems to the core of structuration theory and suggested improving the concept of radicalized modernity by including reflexive organizations. Similarly, most organization scholars and social theorists do not adequately reflect on organizations’ forms. Postmodernists and advocates of actor-network theory do not consider organizations and their specificities—as highlighted in the first section—noteworthy in analyzing today’s world. They ignore that they conceptually lose sight of the contextually given conditions of the processes they bring to the fore. Other researchers like Bartley et al. (2019), Jepperson and Meyer (2021a) and many others take organizations simply as givens—missing their form and transformations, not least by becoming more reflexive.

Furthermore, the increasing prevalence of formal organizations and the ongoing use of bureaucratic organizing should not obscure the insight that organizations and society have substantially changed in recent decades and profoundly altered the organization-society nexus compared to the ideas Weber or Perrow had in mind. Although bureaucracy is no longer the dominant organizational model of our time, this does not immediately mean organizations lose their importance; the organization-society nexus transforms into one between organizing and society; and the nexus loses its explanatory role, as postmodernists and actor-network theorists assume. On the contrary, today, reflexive organizations with their new form of organizing powerfully shape radicalized modernity’s highly uncertain and dynamic world of global scope, its structures of power and domination, and its reflexviely interplaying modern institutions. Thereby, the transformations of organizations and societies in the last decades did not develop new kinds of institutions that substantially changed the form of sociation, as the discourse of postmodernity implies. For example, societies and organizations did not disconnect from capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization but radicalized these institutional features in their interplay, not least with the help of reflexive organizations.

Today, organizations collectively build radicalized modernity’s conditions and constitute reflexive organizations as one of its relevant driving forces. Yet, not all agents—lay persons, experts, states, and for-profit, nonprofit, or other organizations—can develop the necessary capabilities and capacities to augment or maintain their acting abilities under these conditions and have the same chance to escape or mitigate its consequences. However, modernity’s juggernaut not only threatens to crush those who resist it, as Giddens (quoted above) writes, or are not able to cope with these developments adequately. The ride of radical modernity’s juggernaut is by no means wholly unpleasant or unrewarding,’ often even ‘exhilarating, charged with hopeful anticipation,’ and disastrous simultaneously because ‘the terrain across which it runs is fraught with risks of high consequence.’

Focusing on the nexus between reflexive organization and radicalized modernity can significantly augment our understanding of the world today and the explanatory power of sociology. While we presented some conceptual considerations in this regard, we hope we could make it plausible that the frame outlined allows us to understand today’s radicalized modernity better, especially which role reflexive organizations play in its constitution in time–space.