Cognition, Redundancy, And Learning In Organizations

What exactly does it mean for something to be an 'organization'? How do we know when something is organized? What exactly is organizational learning? We attempt to attack some of these questions by turning to cybernetics and the mathematical theory of information In the work of Atlan and von Foerster we find provocative attempts to describe the processes of self-organization in terms of such variables as redundancy and information content. Using the running example of a monastery library we attempt to explicate these approaches and connect them to economic concerns.