Security organisations are increasingly expected to ‘open up’ through participation, transparency, and public engagement. Yet such initiatives rarely lead to a straightforward expansion of inclusion. Instead, they often generate new forms of selectivity and control. How can this coexistence of opening and closure be explained? This article argues that opening and closure are not opposing dynamics but rather mutually constitutive features of organisational life. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, it conceptualises security organisations as operationally closed decision systems that relate to their environment through selective structural couplings. Opening, from this perspective, does not reduce organisational boundaries but instead reconfigures the conditions under which external expectations become decision-relevant. The argument is developed through a longitudinal case study of the German Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS), based on archival research and semi-structured interviews. Tracing its development from the 1970s to the present, the analysis shows that expanding engagement – through interministerial integration, inclusion of non-state actors, spatial relocation, and public communication – was consistently stabilised through structured selectivity. Participation remained mediated through elite-oriented formats, while increased visibility generated new forms of boundary control. The article thus explains why opening initiatives tend to produce more differentiated – rather than diminished – forms of closure.

In criticizing the World Bank’s recommendations for China’s private law reform, Gunther Teubner suggested “polycontextural law” as the best direction for developing the Chinese legal system. This model, according to Teubner, can reconnect sources of law to multiple autonomous social fields and reflect historical–cultural diversity. However, this Article argues that by proposing polycontextural law, Teubner implicitly privileges private law as the “linkage institutions” that can be used to deconstruct the traditional political–legal paradigm of the “[k]ing’s two bodies,” and he undermines the role of public law in redressing the unequal “irritation capacity” of different social subsystems and in founding the framework for greater responsiveness to social needs. In this respect, the polycontextural law model has not sufficiently comprehended the risks of “social exclusion” and “dejuridification” in a transitional society such as China, where the legal system, instead of evolving through recursive operations, is prone to being co-opted by power and money through their dominant media of influence.

This paper examines, from a management accounting perspective, the efficacy of the dominant ‘restricted’ funding structure in the international development NGO sector in terms of overall sector effectiveness, and whether it is the most appropriate means of funding NGOs. The objective is to encourage theoretical debate around the tensions highlighted between external accountability for funding and overall value-for-money delivered by individual development NGOs and the wider international development sector. From unique access to three internationally recognised major NGOs, our case studies reveal management accounting as broadly homogenous, with some nuanced distinctions both within and between the cases; but the scope of management accounting emerges as relatively limited. This is despite the NGOs utilising complex accounting software, employing qualified accounting staff, and having a large annual income. Using the broad principles of systems theory to frame our approach, this paper suggests that due to the ‘restricted’ nature of funding awarded to NGOs by institutional donors, accounting is dominated by external accountability reporting to the detriment of management accounting. These relatively novel data on management accounting practices at international development NGOs help illustrate how, potentially, NGOs are missing opportunities to utilise, or even improve, value-for-money in terms of how various program themes, geographic areas or time periods are delivering better or worse discernible impact for the money spent.

The capability of organizations to respond to unexpected events has been investigated from different theoretical angles: organizational learning, improvisation, ambidexterity, resilience, to name but a few. These concepts, however, hardly ever refer to structural characteristics. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, based on systems and organizational learning theory, it will theoretically link the characteristics of organizational structure with organizational responses to unexpected external jolts, thus contributing to better understand the reactions of organizations to the unexpected. Second, it will empirically illustrate the relation of organizational structure with organizational responses by investigating how Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Austria reacted to the unexpected inflow of refugees from Central Europe. In 2015, CSOs accepted a wide range of responsibilities and worked together with government entities to provide shelter, catering, and transport for almost one million refugees. Based on participant observations during operation, in-depth interviews (2015 and 2016) and focus groups with decision-makers (2017), we will sketch three longitudinal case studies of organizations with very different structures, concentrating on the processes and operations they developed during the crisis. Our findings show that their responses are closely related to their structure, specifically to the flexibility and the stability of structural elements. Remarkable changes took place in all organizations investigated. Initial responses and first structural changes occurred mainly where the structure already allowed for flexibility. Yet in the long run, the adaptations also impacted the stable structural elements.

The notion that democracy is a system is ever present in democratic theory. However, what it means to think systemically about democracy (as opposed to what it means for a political system to be democratic) is under-elaborated. This article sets out a meta-level framework for thinking systemically about democracy, built upon seven conceptual building blocks, which we term (1) functions, (2) norms, (3) practices, (4) actors, (5) arenas, (6) levels, and (7) interactions. This enables us to systematically structure the debate on democratic systems, highlighting the commonalities and differences between systems approaches, their omissions, and the key questions that remain to be answered. It also enables us to push the debate forward both by demonstrating how a full consideration of all seven building blocks would address issues with existing approaches and by introducing new conceptual clarifications within those building blocks.

Mainstream enterprises function by alleviating the cognitive burdens on their members and hence generating an insensitivity to all those complex environmental factors, in which they critically depend. By focusing on the political, institutional dynamics, the present article dwells on the questions of: How can social enterprises regain the embeddedness to the political, institutional environment and how can this process quest the dominant, institutional closure? To address these questions, the article introduces a synergy between new institutionalism and systems theory, both macro-sociological approaches that can compensate for each other’s deficiencies. In this context, the hybrid concept of institutional entrepreneurship describes the institutionalization of new organizational forms via the embeddedness of the institutional logics that underpin them. An in-depth qualitative research of the OTELO social enterprise and of its institutional framework of Mühlviertel was conducted. Empirical evidence shows that social entrepreneurship can regain the institutionally sustainability by becoming embedded to the fields of legitimacy, politics and discourse, and through this process dispute the broader institutional closeness.

In this contribution we ask how Přibáň’s theoretical choices shape the capacity of ‘European constitutional imaginaries’ to account for the ever more necessary work of recognition and redistribution within European society. While ‘European constitutional imaginaries’ reveal the intricate ideologies at play within European law and politics, as well as their power in motivating dominant currents of European political life, the project remains limited in that it accepts essential tenets of functional differentiation in society, obscuring the conditions of possibility for the formation of differentiated systems. Put differently, ‘European constitutional imaginaries’, both as forms of life and analytic concepts, have difficulty in conceiving the frontiers of imaginaries, their beginning and end, their formation and transformation—and in so doing, risk naturalizing their initial differentiation as a priori excluded from political contestation.

The Rejoinder offers a first response to the reviews of The Redress of Law, published in this issue of ELO, and further pursues certain lines of theoretical inquiry in engagement with the reviewers’ suggestions and objections.

This Article discusses Emilios Christodoulidis’s The Redress of Law as a major contribution to contemporary critical constitutional theory, with a focus on its relationship with other lines of critical thought; with systems theory and societal constitutionalism; and with legal pluralism and the global constitutionalism discourses. It argues that the most valuable contribution of The Redress of Law lies in its capacity to innovate current theoretical discourses, too often closed in on their conceptual assumptions, in turn modelled on liberal political theory.