Multiple Systems in the Meso Domain: A Study in Organizational Cognition

In their book The Theory of Social Organizing, (Secchi et al., Organizational cognition: The theory of social organizing. Taylor & Francis, 2022) present a view of organizational cognition as it structures around meso domains. The meso is separate but intertwined with a micro (personal, individual) and a macro (structural) dimension. It is where social interactions allow for “social organizing” to arise. If we take this conceptualization seriously, it becomes immediately apparent that the structuration of the meso domain cannot be singular, but it requires multiple mechanisms to be in place at once. In this chapter, we argue that cognition can be framed as a system which integrates multiple domains, whose boundaries are plastic, and which is temporarily observable while leaving latent traces. In describing the above, this chapter then uses the example of the IOP 2.1.2 Model—an agent-based computational simulation—to explore what kind of systemic interdependencies exist among different meso domains.