This article deals with the notion of organized complexity which it identifies with the selection of an order seen as developing at the cross-roads of generic functions, formal role systems and technologies. While functions contribute to organized complexity by defining and constituting specific domains of action-e.g. economic, political, scientific, etc.-technologies and formal role systems serve as important means for the constitution of human interaction along predictable and recurrent lines. Technology differs, however, from formal role systems in that it attempts to detach agency from humans and embody it in material artefacts. Investigating the project of technologizing intelligence at some length, the article claims that technology currently assumes an increasingly important role in the regulation of human interaction. The technical embodiment of perception, cognition and communication patterns redefines the stratified social topology of formal organizations in ways that tend to limit the prescriptive significance which formal role systems have traditionally assumed in modernity.
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